1/3/2024 0 Comments Oligopoly klepto plutocracyThe press confuses oligopoly and monopoly with some regularity. For example, while drugstores seem to offer unlimited choices in toothpaste, just two firms, Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive, control more than eighty per cent of the market (including seemingly independent brands like Tom’s of Maine). He found that dominance by two or three firms “is not the exception in the United States, but increasingly the rule.” Consumers, easily misled by product labelling, often don’t even notice that products like sunglasses, pet food, or numerous others come from just a few giants. Consider Barry Lynn’s 2011 book, “Cornered,” which carefully detailed the rising concentration and consolidation of nearly every American industry since the nineteen-eighties. This blind spot is of particular significance during an age when oligopolies, not monopolies, rule. There is, in short, a major blind spot in our nation’s oversight of private power, one that affects both consumers and competition. To state the obvious, when companies act in parallel, the consumer is in the same position as if he were dealing with just one big firm. But when three or four firms pursue identical practices, we say that the market is “competitive” and everything is fine. For our scrutiny and regulation of monopolists is well established-just ask Microsoft or the old AT&T. If a monopolist did what the wireless carriers did as a group, neither the public nor government would stand for it.
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