The last forty years have seen a transformation in American business. Three major airlines dominate the skies. About ten pharmaceutical companies make up the lion’s share of the industry. Three major companies constitute the seed and pesticide industry. And 70 percent of beer is sold to one of two conglomerates. Scholars have shown that this wave of consolidation has depressed wages, increased inequality, and arrested small business formation. The decline in competition is so plain that even centrist organizations like The Economist and the Brookings Institution have called for a reinvigoration of antitrust enforcement.



Antitrust law today is, however, very narrowly construed. The currently reigning paradigm originated in the 1970s with Robert Bork—the same Bork whom the Senate would later block from the Supreme Court. Bork’s book The Antitrust Paradox argued that the only goal of the antitrust laws was consumer welfare. This eagle-eyed focus was not only economically efficient, Bork and his followers pointed out, but easy for courts to administer, because consumer welfare could be measured in terms of prices: If prices are going down, the system is working. To abandon this standard, former FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright, a Republican, has said, “would be a monumental shift,” and “a dangerous one.”

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu Columbia Global Reports, 154 pp., $14.99

Wright’s comments were largely directed at the insurgent neo-Brandeisian school of antitrust—a group of scholars, activists, lawyers, and economists who want to rethink the current approach. The neo-Brandeisians (whom Wright derisively calls the “hipster antitrust movement”) believe that the antitrust laws were written not solely to deal with consumer welfare or purely for economic purposes, but also to ensure competitive markets, break up vast and powerful private entities, and, in the process, preserve democracy. When economic power is concentrated, it destroys not only economic freedom but also political freedom, as the wealthy and powerful use their resources to capture the government and rig it in their favor.

In the midst of this debate over the future of antitrust comes Tim Wu’s The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. In this concise and accessible history, Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, takes us from the great merger movement of the late nineteenth century to the antitrust legislation and prosecutions in the Progressive Era to “peak antitrust” in the mid-twentieth century. He judiciously describes how the “Chicago School” of antitrust, with its narrow focus on consumer welfare, came to dominate antitrust law and ushered in our new era of monopoly capitalism. As he briskly narrates the origins and evolution of antitrust law in America, he makes the case that the narrow economic approach is a betrayal of its purposes and historic understanding. The central goals of antitrust law and policy, he argues, have always included preserving the conditions for democracy.

Whether it was Senator John Sherman, author of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, Theodore Roosevelt in his trust-busting prosecutions of Standard Oil and J.P. Morgan’s railroad trust, or Woodrow Wilson, who created the Federal Trade Commission in 1914, the founders of antitrust law saw its work as both political and economic. No problem “is more threatening than the inequality of condition, of wealth, and opportunity,” Sherman said in the debates leading to his eponymous bill. “If the concerted powers of this combination,” he continued, “are entrusted to a single man, it is a kingly prerogative, inconsistent with our form of government.”