The Corporation and the Twentieth Century

56. Evans and Schmalensee (2016, pp. 146–48); McCullough (2018, pp. 265–93). 57. Evans (2012, p. 1230).

58. McCullough (2018, pp. 217–21).

59. Lehr (2019).

60. Waldfogel (2017).

61. Joshua P. Friedlander, “Year-end 2020 RIAA Revenue Statistics,” Recording Industry Association of America, https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2020-Year-End -Music-Industry-Revenue-Report.pdf (accessed September 18, 2021).

62. This account of Airbnb and Uber follows Stone (2017).

63. In San Francisco, medallions are not tradeable, causing long queues for medallions akin to those for rent-controlled apartments (Stone 2017, p. 41).

64. Tullock (1975). It is also an illustration of Harold Demsetz’s point that barriers to entry are always property rights never market structures (Demsetz 1982). In this case the market is perfectly competitive—it has many small powerless participants—yet there is an inefficiently low level of industry output resulting from what is clearly a barrier to entry.

65. Holcombe (2019).

66. Brian M. Rosenthal, “‘They Were Conned’: How Reckless Loans Devastated a Genera- tion of Taxi Drivers,” New York Times, May 19, 2019. See also Winnie Hu, “Taxi Medallions, Once a Safe Investment, Now Drag Owners into Debt,” New York Times, September 10, 2017.

67. Josh Barro, “Under Pressure from Uber, Taxi Medallion Prices Are Plummeting,” New York Times, November 27, 2014.

68. Downs (1957). Schumpeter (1950, p. 261) recognized this even earlier. The voter, he ar- gued, is a “member of an unworkable committee, the committee of the whole nation, and this is why he expends less disciplined effort on mastering a political problem than he expends on a game of bridge.”

69. Stone (2017, pp. 311–15).

70. Cohen et al. (2016).

71. Preetika Rana, “Uber Says First Adjusted Profit Possible This Quarter,” Wall Street Jour-

nal, September 21, 2021. In March 2022, Uber reached an agreement to list all New York City taxis on its app, and both Uber and Lyft are moving to include taxis in other cities as well.

Notes to Epilogue 669

Preetika Rana, “Uber Reaches Deal to List All New York City Taxis on Its App,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2022.

72. Bronnenberg and Huang (2021). 73. Goolsbee and Klenow (2018). 74. Brynjolfsson et al. (2019).

75. Nordhaus (2004).

76. In 2015, Google created an M-form corporation called Alphabet to separate its lucrative existing businesses from its more speculative bets. In 2021, Facebook made a similar move, creat- ing Meta Platforms, Inc., which separated its existing businesses from a project to create a new platform based around virtual reality. Laura Forman and Dan Gallagher, “Facebook’s Four New Letters Won’t Spell Alphabet,” Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2021. I will continue to refer to these firms as Google and Facebook.

77. If the Saudi state oil company is excluded, these were also the largest in the world. The market caps subsequently went higher, inflated both by the real shift toward Internet businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic and by the extremely low interest rates the Fed has (once again) marshalled to fight the economic effects of the pandemic (Kroen, Liu, Mian and Sufi 2021).

78. Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin (2009).

79. Lahoti, Jayadev, and Reddy (2015, Figure 2).

80. Milanovic (2016, Figure 1.1).

81. Piketty and Saez (2014). Today, however, the incomes of the richest Americans come far

more from salaries and business income, and far less from capital income, than in the original Gilded Age (Atkinson, Piketty and Saez 2011).

82. Garfinkel and Smeeding (2015).

83. Elwell, Corinth, and Burkhauser (2021, Table 4.1).

84. In announcing the War on Poverty, Lyndon Johnson asserted in 1964 that 20 percent of

the American population was in poverty. By the absolute standard that implies, only 1.6 percent of Americans are now in poverty (Burkhauser, Corinth, Elwell, and Larrimore 2021).

85. Corinth, Meyer and Wu (2022).

86. Sacerdote (2017).

87. Case and Deaton (2020). It is now understood that the spike in opioid-related deaths

resulted not from increased despair but from the development of Oxycontin, originally—and wrongly—believed to be impervious to abuse (Cutler and Glaeser 2021). In a perfect storm of public-private dysfunction, the drug was hyperactively marketed, wildly over prescribed, and often subsidized by health plans. When control began to be imposed on Oxycontin, many now- addicted users turned to the illegal market, mainly for heroin. In this respect, the opioid epidemic resembles other overdose spikes touched off by technological change in drugs of abuse, including the crack-cocaine epidemic.

88. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, All Employees, Manufacturing, FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP (accessed October 2, 2021).

89. Vollrath (2020).

90. Autor et al. (2013).

91. Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2021).

92. Acemoglu et al. (2016, pp. S144-S145). Even while trade with China was decreasing