A valuable briefing on an underappreciated business problem, but it could use a bit of Roosevelt’s hard-nosed attitude.
Should Amazon and Google be broken up like Standard Oil? Yes, argues legal scholar Wu (Columbia Law School; The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, 2016, etc.), but breaking up is hard to do.
The problem is a decadeslong warping of antitrust law, which the author details in this half history, half polemic book. The title comes from a phrase coined by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who agitated against Gilded Age monopolists like John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. Together with President Theodore Roosevelt, who put enforcement muscle behind the Sherman Act, they persuasively argued that monopolistic practices are inefficient, stifle innovation as well as competition, and court abusive practices against workers. (Think of AT&T, Wu suggests, a longtime state-sanctioned monopoly whose breakup cleared the way for the mainstream internet.) For much of the 20th century, Brandeis' view was accepted regulatory practice, until the arrival in the 1960s of Robert Bork, who, as a federal judge, prescribed an exceedingly narrow interpretation of the Sherman Act: So long as consumer prices didn’t rise, no conglomerate qualified as a monopoly, regardless of market share. The Borkian argument, however far afield from Sherman’s intent, is now gospel, Wu writes, rendering Security and Exchange Commission antitrust regulators toothless. This has allowed Google to bloat with buyouts—though, as Wu points out, it was a beneficiary of antitrust enforcement against Microsoft—developing unchecked acquisitive instincts that have eliminated competitors, with Facebook and Amazon following its lead. The author convincingly draws parallels between the new “tech trusts” and the Gilded Age titans, but one wishes for more fire in the argument: Wu’s background about Brandeis is important, but the modern implications could be better woven into his narrative. As it is, his strongest cases for breaking up Google are tucked into dry concluding policy prescriptions.
A valuable briefing on an underappreciated business problem, but it could use a bit of Roosevelt’s hard-nosed attitude.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997454-6-5
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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