Matt Stoller

I really enjoyed this book. It had a lot of really interesting information in it. It also was well researched. It takes a single political/economic issue (Monopolies) and traces it through 100 years of American history leading up to the the 2008 Financial Crisis. Whatever bias this writer holds was quite visable and easily discernable (dont worry, you wont be inadvertently indoctrinated). But Stoller does make a convincing case for breaking them up. I did not finish the book because it is just too long. I got just over halfway and felt less interested in picking it up. I may come back to it in the future.… (mais)

This is a tricky book for me to review, as I fundamentally agree with Stoller about the evil of corporate monopolies, but his historical interpretation does not sit well with me.

Stoller chooses to interpret anti-monopolism as an oversimplified battle between populists and elitists. In his telling, elitists, on the left as well as the right, are the enemy. He contrasts antimonopolists with planners, with elitists. And this leads him to gloss over those aspects of populism which are not in keeping with his telling, to idealize the New Deal era and the 1950s. He paints a glossy picture of Jeffersonian democracy, of small business and family farms. The heroes are plucky New Dealers and fans of Roosevelt and Brandeis; the enemies are not just right wingers, but establishment figures like Richard Hofstadter and John Kenneth Galbraith. I'm familiar with Hofstadter's writings, and I don't think Stoller represents them completely fairly. Stoller's telling often lacks complexity--the ways in which both populism and elitist technocracy can be a double edged sword.

There's a lot I enjoyed--there's a clear historical case that antimonopoly action is effective and that the US government has retreated from its duty. But Stoller doesn't do the best job of placing it in historical perspective.… (mais)

How the progressive case against monopoly was eliminated from liberal politics. It wasn’t corruption in the conventional sense, but rather ideological constraints such that technocrats thought they had to reward bigness and neglect unions and small businesses in order for the polity as a whole to grow. Stoller describes it as “a joint attack on populism by the left and the right by people who, for their own reasons, distrusted the messiness and vibrancy of democracy.” Even bipartisan consensus on the brilliance of Hamilton reflected this embrace of rule by elite technocrats. “The bailouts from 2008 to 2010 were not intended to stop a depression, they were intended to stop a New Deal. And so they did.” Stoller is now, unsurprisingly, writing about monopolies in the present day—his newsletter is quite illuminating.… (mais)