A new class of monopolists has arisen and a second gilded age is upon us. So argues Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, in The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.
In the brief and breezy volume, Wu aims to remind his readers of the United States's robust anti-monopoly tradition, and attempts to recover and update the nation's antitrust laws, which he argues are the classic antidote to bigness.
He does so by invoking the rhetoric and actions of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, and the political economic insights of Louis D. Brandeis. A former Supreme Court justice, Brandeis is known primarily as a staunch defender of civil liberties. Yet Wu believes that his most important contributions to American life have tragically been forgotten.
“What Brandeis really cared about,” Wu writes, “was the economic conditions under which life is lived, and the effects of the economy on one's character and on the nation's soul.”
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