Monopolized, by David Dayen

How monopolies are making your life, and everyone's lives, worse.

Gah, what I can say. It's a great book! Well written, highly informative but also breezy, lots of little case studies, great narrative.

Also, it's impossible to write a book like this without making it super depressing. It just... is super depressing.

Dayen basically chugs through a long line of examples/industries where corporate power has fucked up life for normal people in infuriating ways. [hopefully I will come back to this review later and insert some fun examples with details here, but if you're reading this I haven't. A couple that stick in the mind are

• the horrific conditions that chicken-farmers live under, where three massive conglomerates buy all the eggs... and the three conglomerates have divided up the country so that each farmer only has 1 conglomerate they can sell to. The conglomerates dictate everything about how the chickens are raised and farmed, but the farmers don't know how much money they'll get until the day they sell the eggs, and then they get paid as little as possible
• the defence-industrial complex, where a monopolist sells parts below cost to the likes of Boeing for military planes, and then once the planes are in government hands they charge exhorbitant costs for replacement parts, knowing the government employees aren't properly incentivised (or even able) to negotiate
• the cable internet monopolies who go to court to prevent municipalities from providing high-speed local internet, despite not providing internet for those places themselves. Eventually the government sometimes bribes them to provide internet to the rural areas, but they make up dumb limited definitions of "provide", so they can take the government money and still not provide service. Sometimes there are literal high-speed cables running under people's houses which those people are not allowed to access because the cable companies go to court about it.

Another memorable thing about this book: the constant references to Warren Buffet as America's monopolist-in-chief. It's always been intriguing to me that Buffet has created (bought?) this reputation as America's Grandpa, the harmless friendly face of wealth, etc;  Dayen's take is basically that Buffet is a master monopolist and responsible for (some share of) the various monopolistic miseries in your life.

I most appreciated this book in relation to Lea Ypi's excellent book Free, which I'd just read – it's a marxist political theorist who grew up in Albania under communism, and who talks about how both communists and capitalists propagandize the populations about how they're so much free-er than the others, but within each system it's hard to realise/notice the ways in which you're un-free. And Monopolized was a great illustration of the ways we're un-free under capitalism, in ways that we usually fail to understand. I left the book feeling like market concentration is one of the most important issues in our society today, but my goodness is it hard to read/think about for long periods of time, it just feels like its insoluble and that the powerful will just keep fucking everyone else over, and it's hard to see what we'll do about it.