The Market Power of Technology : Understanding the Second Gilded Age

Since the 1980s, the United States has regressed to a level of economic inequality not seen since the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, technological innovation has transformed society, and a core priority of public policy has been promoting innovation. What is the relationship between economic inequality and technological change? Mordecai Kurz develops a comprehensive integrated theory of the dynamics of market power and income inequality. He shows that technological innovations are not simply sources of growth and progress: they sow the seeds of market power. In a free market economy with intellectual property rights, firms' control over technology enables them to expand, attain monopoly power, and earn exorbitant profits. Competition among innovators does not eliminate market power because technological competition is different from standard competition; it results in only one or two winners. Kurz provides a pioneering analysis grounded on quantifying technological market power and its effects on inequality, innovation, and economic growth. He outlines what causes market power to rise and fall and details its macroeconomic and distributional consequences. Kurz demonstrates that technological market power tends to rise, increasing inequality of income and wealth. Unchecked inequality threatens the foundations of democracy: public policy is the only counterbalancing force that can restrain corporate power, attain more egalitarian distribution of wealth, and make democracy compatible with capitalism. Presenting a new paradigm for understanding today's vast inequalities, this book offers detailed proposals to redress them by restricting corporate mergers and acquisitions, reforming patent law, improving the balance of power in the labor market, increasing taxation, promoting upward mobility, and stabilizing the middle class. "The reader may benefit from my explanation of the key turning points in my own thinking, during the six years of research. Ever since my graduate studies at Yale, the quest for a better understanding of the process of economic growth has been an important part of my research. Much of the work on economic growth in the post war period was conducted under the assumption of perfect competition. Paul Romer was among those who demonstrated that one cannot study economic growth and technological innovations within the framework of a competitive model of an economy. This observation led him to concentrate on the effects of R&D and intentional inventions on the rate of growth, but my conclusion was different. It led me to the first, central, theme of this book: it follows from the observation that once technological inventions are introduced, firms with different technological knowledge have different market positions and the vision of small, equal opportunity, firms is not applicable"-- Provided by publisher