Goliath
A startling look at how concentrated financial power and consumerism transformed American politics, resulting in the emergence of populism and authoritarianism, the fall of the Democratic Party—while also providing the steps needed to create a new democracy. Americans once had a coherent and clear understanding of political tyranny, one crafted by Thomas Jefferson and updated for the industrial age by Louis Brandeis. A concentration of power, whether in the hands of a military dictator or a JP Morgan, was understood as autocratic and dangerous to individual liberty and democracy. This idea stretched back to the country’s founding. In the 1930s, people observed that the Great Depression was caused by financial concentration in the hands of a few whose misuse of their power induced a financial collapse. They drew on this tradition to craft the New Deal. In Goliath, Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today’s bitter recriminations and panic represent more than just fear of the future, they reflect a basic confusion about what is happening and the historical backstory that brought us to this moment.
Stats for nerds
14recommend
31mentions
22people
2019–2026years
61% recommend39% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- While there is a large public appetite for breaking up monopolies, it really does seem that antitrust policy has sadly become something of a bygone era.
A decent authority on the subject is Matt Stoller's book Goliath [1], which lays out the history of US monopolies and how they formed the bedrock for these modern tech companies. Their strategic dominance is no mistake. He argues that our era of monopoly power goes back to the resentment of New Deal reform, which began percolating in the economics department of University of Chicago in the 1960s and, in the 70s, entered public policy.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Goliath-100-Year-Between-Monopoly-Dem...
- If you are interested in a book length version of this argument, I'd recommend Goliath by Matt Stoller: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/...
- Youtube generates tens of billions of dollars in revenue per year, for a company that generates hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue per year.
If you're skeptical about how/if massive corporations are able to leverage their market power and monopolization to generate monstrous profits and force through very anti-consumer features, I'd encourage you to read Goliath from Matt Stoller: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/...
- I highly recommend the work of Matt Stoller in this regard (1), in particular his book Goliath (2) that goes over the history of monopoly fights over the past century and laid out how we got to where we have today (hint: eerily similar to the 1920s but not as bad)
1. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/
2. https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/goliath-how-monopolies-secretl...
- >back when America enforced antitrust legislation on its own companies
A great book about that era is "Goliath" by Matt Stoller.
- Both! The history is covered extensively and well in Matt Stoller's book Goliath, and ongoing on his substack[0].
The TL;DR version is that the MS case affected things, but so do a shifting emphasis in Congress.
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