Matt Stoller | |
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 Stoller in 2008 | |
| Born | February 8, 1978 London, England |
| Education | Harvard University (BA) |
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Matthew Stoller (born February 8, 1978) [1] is an American political commentator and author. He is the research director of the American Economic Liberties Project. [2] He writes the Substack newsletter BIG.
Stoller was born in London and grew up in Miami, Florida, with his brother Nicholas Stoller, a filmmaker. [3] [4] His mother, Phyllis, is a travel tour operator, and his father, Eric C. Stoller, is a bank executive. [5]
Stoller is Jewish. [6] He attended St. Paul's School and then graduated with a BA in history from Harvard College. [7] [8]
After college, Stoller worked at a software startup in Massachusetts. During this time he started blogging about politics in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War. He sided with Democratic war hawks in supporting the invasion. After the basis of the war was shown to be rooted in false premises and those who promoted it would face no consequences, he grew depressed and felt that he had "endorsed mass murder". [7] In 2008, he started working as a member of the staff of congressman Alan Grayson. He pulled some policy ideas from blogs. Grayson lost reelection. [7] [9]
Stoller was a producer for The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC. [10] Stoller then moved to Los Angeles to work as a writer and actor for the first season of the television series Brand X with Russell Brand . [10] He acted as Brand's sidekick, bringing up subjects which were then remarked upon by Brand. [11]
Starting in 2015, Stoller was a Senior Policy Advisor and Budget Analyst for the Senate Budget Committee. [10] [12]
In 2016, Stoller began working for Open Markets, a group embedded in the think tank New America. [7] At Open Markets, he "researched the history of the relationship between concentrated financial power and the Democratic party in the 20th century". [13] In 2017, Open Markets posted a statement in support of a 4 billion Euro fine given by European regulators to Google and extolling American officials to do similarly. The group was asked to leave New America shortly afterwards. [7] In 2020, Stoller and some other members of Open Markets created their own organization, the American Economic Liberties Project. The organization is nonpartisan and does not take corporate money. [7]
In 2019, Stoller published the book Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, a history of United States economic policy. [14] It begins with the rise of anti-monopoly policy, including the 1916 appointment of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, then regulation and antitrust action under the New Deal, to the anti-regulation economists of the Chicago School, the dismantlement of antitrust and financial regulations which have resulted in the business monopolies seen today. [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] The book was described by Politico as the "foundational historical text for a movement coming to be known as the New Brandeisian School". [7] The movement takes inspiration from Louis Brandeis who was a prominent anti-monopolist. [20] [21] Brandeis believed that antitrust action should prevent any one company from maintaining too much power over the economy because monopolies were harmful to innovation, business vitality, and the welfare of workers. [22] [23]
To help promote his book and ideas, Stoller started a Substack titled Big. As of 2023, it has around 85,000 subscribers. [7]
Stoller is an anti-monopolist. Much of his work centers around advocating for the breakup of large companies. With his work centered around direct action and not politics, he has made allies with members of both parties. He has supported Josh Hawley who, during his time as Missouri Attorney General, was the first state attorney general to sue Google based on antitrust law. [7] In a profile of Stoller, Politico described his "dogmatic" belief that the goal of breaking up monopolies is "so central and so urgent that nearly any other cause or political relationship should be sacrificed in service of it". [7]
A monopoly, as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular thing. This contrasts with a monopsony which relates to a single entity's control of a market to purchase a good or service, and with oligopoly and duopoly which consists of a few sellers dominating a market. Monopolies are thus characterised by a lack of economic competition to produce the good or service, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller's marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit. The verb monopolise or monopolize refers to the process by which a company gains the ability to raise prices or exclude competitors. In economics, a monopoly is a single seller. In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with a decrease in social surplus. Although monopolies may be big businesses, size is not a characteristic of a monopoly. A small business may still have the power to raise prices in a small industry.
A plutocracy or plutarchy is a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income. The first known use of the term in English dates from 1631. Unlike most political systems, plutocracy is not rooted in any established political philosophy.
In the United States, antitrust law is a collection of mostly federal laws that regulate the conduct and organization of businesses in order to promote competition and prevent unjustified monopolies. The three main U.S. antitrust statutes are the Sherman Act of 1890, the Clayton Act of 1914, and the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. These acts serve three major functions. First, Section 1 of the Sherman Act prohibits price fixing and the operation of cartels, and prohibits other collusive practices that unreasonably restrain trade. Second, Section 7 of the Clayton Act restricts the mergers and acquisitions of organizations that may substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly. Third, Section 2 of the Sherman Act prohibits monopolization.
In theories of competition in economics, a barrier to entry, or an economic barrier to entry, is a fixed cost that must be incurred by a new entrant, regardless of production or sales activities, into a market that incumbents do not have or have not had to incur. Because barriers to entry protect incumbent firms and restrict competition in a market, they can contribute to distortionary prices and are therefore most important when discussing antitrust policy. Barriers to entry often cause or aid the existence of monopolies and oligopolies, or give companies market power. Barriers of entry also have an importance in industries. First of all it is important to identify that some exist naturally, such as brand loyalty. Governments can also create barriers to entry to meet consumer protection laws, protecting the public. In other cases it can also be due to inherent scarcity of public resources needed to enter a market.
In economics and business ethics, a coercive monopoly is a firm that is able to raise prices and make production decisions without the risk that competition will arise to draw away their customers. A coercive monopoly is not merely a sole supplier of a particular kind of good or service, but it is a monopoly where there is no opportunity to compete with it through means such as price competition, technological or product innovation, or marketing; entry into the field is closed. As a coercive monopoly is securely shielded from the possibility of competition, it is able to make pricing and production decisions with the assurance that no competition will arise. It is a case of a non-contestable market. A coercive monopoly has very few incentives to keep prices low and may deliberately price gouge consumers by curtailing production.
Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies. Competition law is implemented through public and private enforcement. It is also known as antitrust law, anti-monopoly law, and trade practices law; the act of pushing for antitrust measures or attacking monopolistic companies is commonly known as trust busting.
In economics, market power refers to the ability of a firm to influence the price at which it sells a product or service by manipulating either the supply or demand of the product or service to increase economic profit. In other words, market power occurs if a firm does not face a perfectly elastic demand curve and can set its price (P) above marginal cost (MC) without losing revenue. This indicates that the magnitude of market power is associated with the gap between P and MC at a firm's profit maximising level of output. The size of the gap, which encapsulates the firm's level of market dominance, is determined by the residual demand curve's form. A steeper reverse demand indicates higher earnings and more dominance in the market. Such propensities contradict perfectly competitive markets, where market participants have no market power, P = MC and firms earn zero economic profit. Market participants in perfectly competitive markets are consequently referred to as 'price takers', whereas market participants that exhibit market power are referred to as 'price makers' or 'price setters'.
Aaron Director was a Russian-born American economist and academic who played a central role in the development of law and economics and the Chicago school of economics. Director was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and, together with his brother-in-law, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, influenced a number of jurists, including Robert Bork, Richard Posner, Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Edward Hastings Chamberlin was an American economist. He was born in La Conner, Washington, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
George Ward Stocking Sr. was an American economist, who was one of the pioneers of industrial organization and an early writer on international cartels.
Varsity Brands, Inc. is an American apparel company owned by Bain Capital. It is primarily focused on academic apparel and memorabilia, with its operations split among three major subsidiaries, including Herff Jones—a manufacturer of products such as class rings, graduation caps and gowns, and yearbooks; Varsity Spirit—which produces apparel and competitions in cheerleading; and BSN Sports, a distributor of sports uniforms and equipment.
Donald Frank Turner was an American antitrust attorney, economist, legal scholar and educator who spent most of his career teaching at Harvard Law School. He was also Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division from 1965 to 1968.
Eastman Kodak Co. v. Image Technical Servs., Inc., 504 U.S. 451 (1992), is a 1992 Supreme Court decision in which the Court held that even though an equipment manufacturer lacked significant market power in the primary market for its equipment—copier-duplicators and other imaging equipment—nonetheless, it could have sufficient market power in the secondary aftermarket for repair parts to be liable under the antitrust laws for its exclusionary conduct in the aftermarket. The reason was that it was possible that, once customers were committed to the particular brand by having purchased a unit, they were "locked in" and no longer had any realistic alternative to turn to for repair parts.
Joe Staten Bain was an American economist associated with the University of California, Berkeley. Bain was designated a Distinguished Fellow by the American Economic Association in 1982. An accompanying statement referred to him as "the undisputed father of modern Industrial Organization Economics."
Lina M. Khan is a British-born American legal scholar serving as chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) since 2021. She is also an associate professor of law at Columbia Law School.
The New Brandeis or neo-Brandeis movement is an antitrust academic and political movement in the United States which argues that excessively centralized private power is dangerous for economical, political and social reasons. Initially called hipster antitrust by its detractors, as also referred to as the "Columbia school" or "Neo-Progressive antitrust," the movement advocates that United States antitrust law return to a broader concern with private power and its negative effects on market competition, income inequality, consumer rights, unemployment, and wage growth.
Jonathan Seth Kanter is an American antitrust attorney who has served as assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division since November 16, 2021. Prior to this, Kanter worked as an antitrust attorney at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and in private practice.
Mordecai Kurz is an economist whose research work has covered a variety of problems in economic theory and policy. He has written extensively on growth theory, game theory, the formation of beliefs, and the effect of market power on inequality and growth, and he has worked on various policy projects. He contributed to the design of minimum income guarantee experiments in Seattle and Denver from 1971 to 1975, and in Manitoba in 1974. He also served as a special economic advisor to President Carter’s Commission on Pension Policy in 1979.
United States v. Google LLC is an ongoing federal antitrust case brought by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) against Google LLC on October 20, 2020. The suit alleges that Google has violated the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 by illegally monopolizing the search engine and search advertising markets, most notably on Android devices.
Michelle Meagher is a British lawyer, author and campaigner. Meagher is advocating for an overhaul of competition policy away from the Chicago School antitrust consumer-centered paradigm.
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