The story of the US economy over the past 40 years has been one of rapid technological change, growing corporate monopoly power, and deepening despair for a rising share of workers. There will be no happy ending unless the US radically changes its approach to managing the impact of innovation.
STANFORD – Have we entered a new Gilded Age, in which tech monopolies wield enormous political and economic power in the same way that Standard Oil did at the end of the nineteenth century? The scale of wealth being produced for a select few, along with the mounting despair of workers who are left behind by technology-driven economic change, certainly suggests that growing monopoly power is strangling parts of our economy. But the monopolies of the Gilded Age were very different corporate creatures from the technology driven monopolies that have arisen in recent decades.
STANFORD – Have we entered a new Gilded Age, in which tech monopolies wield enormous political and economic power in the same way that Standard Oil did at the end of the nineteenth century? The scale of wealth being produced for a select few, along with the mounting despair of workers who are left behind by technology-driven economic change, certainly suggests that growing monopoly power is strangling parts of our economy. But the monopolies of the Gilded Age were very different corporate creatures from the technology driven monopolies that have arisen in recent decades.