Jonathan Tepper

Fascinating compendium of everything a layman needs to know about how corporations are seeking market power; the impact of monopoly and oligopoly on raised prices, growing inequality, economically forsaken towns and declining innovation; and how the US government allows this to go on. Big corporations don't like having to compete on price and quality, preferring to capture market share by collusion, cartels, mergers, integration, self-dealing, lobbying for favorable regulations and such, and only an informed citizenry and activist government will be able to balance social values and the preservation of economic opportunities against their lust for size and power.… (more)

Overall I liked this book because it tries to present the main issues with current day capitalism which are: a) monopolies and b) excessive regulations from the government with the goal of benefiting certain corporations. It's written in a really approachable manner full of data so everyone can at least get an understanding why modern day capitalism is malfunctioning. In the end of each chapter there is a summary with the main points making it easier to distill the chapter in a few bullet points. Some of my complaints are: a) I could not immediately identify the take-away messages from some of the plots and b) for certain chapters a subset of the summary points were a bit tangential to what I thought was the main point of the chapter.… (more)