Monopolized

David Dayen, editor of The American Prospect, reports on market concentration across the American economy from the perspective of the people affected by it. Each chapter takes a sector and follows individuals: a farmer dealing with a single buyer, a pharmacist squeezed by pharmacy benefit managers, a small airline passenger in a hub city, a bookseller, a hospital patient, a musician, a prisoner charged for phone calls.

The analytical argument runs alongside the reporting. Dayen holds that the consumer welfare standard adopted in American antitrust after the 1970s, which asks only whether prices to consumers rise, permits concentration that harms suppliers, workers and the quality of goods. He argues that monopsony power over suppliers and over labour is largely unaddressed by current doctrine, that vertical integration allows firms to disadvantage competitors who depend on them, and that concentration in intermediary positions, such as pharmacy benefit managers and payment processors, extracts value invisibly.

The book is advocacy journalism and argues one side. Dayen gives little weight to efficiency arguments for scale, and he attributes to concentration outcomes that have other plausible causes. The reporting itself is specific and checkable, and the chapters on agricultural contracting, on pharmacy benefit managers and on hospital consolidation are the strongest. It belongs to the new antitrust movement whose arguments have since shaped enforcement policy in the United States and Europe.