In the morning, I shower right after I wake up. I choose from a number of products to clean myself, yet they are made by just two companies: Unilever and Johnson & Johnson. I brush my teeth with a toothbrush and toothpaste made by Procter & Gamble but sold under the separate brands Oral-B and Crest. Before I eat breakfast, because I have Type 1 diabetes, I take insulin, a drug that, because of pharmaceutical consolidation and anticompetitive patent hoarding allowed to run amok, cost about $20 for a vial in 1996 but now costs $275. Lunch isn’t any better. The peanut butter for my sandwich almost certainly comes from one of three companies; same with the jelly. We all have “choices,” but do we really get to choose?
Once you put on your “monopoly decoder ring,” David Dayen writes in his new book Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power, you start to see how this power influences every part of our lives. There’s a baby formula monopoly: Three companies—Abbott Laboratories (which makes Similac), Reckitt Benckiser (which makes Enfamil), and Nestlé—control about 95 percent of the US market. It even follows us after our deaths: Service Corporation International keeps buying up funeral homes and now earns more than $1 out of every $5 in profit from funeral services, and two companies, Hillenbrand and Matthews, make 82 percent of the country’s coffins and caskets.
Some monopolies have become so obvious that everyone can spot them. If you want to fly anywhere in the United States, you basically have four choices, all of which offer increasingly bad service. If you want cable and Internet, you usually have only one or two high-cost options and no power to fight back when the company tells you a technician will be coming anywhere between 8 am and 8 pm to set it up. If you want to search for information or buy something on the Internet, there’s one choice for each that dominates all the rest: Google and Amazon.
But monopolies crop up in all sorts of unexpected places. Match Group, the parent company that owns Match.com, also owns OkCupid, Tinder, and Hinge. Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company empire of billionaire Warren Buffett, owns brands as diverse as Duracell, Dairy Queen, Benjamin Moore, and Fruit of the Loom. The coffee brands Caribou, Peet’s, Intelligentsia, and Stumptown are all owned or partly controlled by the European firm JAB.
Our country is saturated with monopolies, but some might ask, does it matter? As Dayen shows, monopolies make it harder for workers to wield power when there are fewer and fewer employers to choose from. They make the economy less dynamic and innovative. They make society less equal, and by amassing so many resources, they are able to amass power to protect those resources. Monopolies are even a threat to our very democracy, drowning out the voices of the people.
Worries about monopolies date as far back as AD 483. At the beginning of his book, Dayen quotes Emperor Zeno decreeing, “No one may presume to exercise a monopoly of any kind.” Going as far back as the railroad barons of the 19th century, Americans have worried about the ill effects of economic consolidation. Theodore Roosevelt famously took them on as a populist trustbuster. The Granger farmers’ movement and Progressive era activists fought monopolies.
Dayen mentions much of this history, but his aim is not simply to recount it or engage in the contemporary debates over the ways monopolies warp our economy and our society; instead, he wants to spark a modern movement through real, human stories. Corporate concentration and antitrust regulation can sound like dry issues. Dayen seeks to remind us of the very real consequences they have in our everyday lives.
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