The Corporation and the Twentieth Century

manufacturing jobs in the US, it was actually increasing the total number of jobs, many of them

670 Notes to Epilogue

in services, both preformed at home and exported (Feenstra and Sasahara 2018). Between the end of the financial crisis and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the negative effects of Chinese trade on manufacturing jobs in the US disappeared, and manufacturing jobs began to increase steadily ( Jakubik and Stolzenburg 2020).

93. Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003); Autor (2013). Although abandoned until recently by labor economists, the task approach remained central to economic historians of technology. Ames and Rosenberg (1965) is an underappreciated gem that repays attention even today.

94. Langlois (2003a).

95. Goldin and Katz (2009).

96. Acemoglu and Autor (2012, p. 440).

97. This is implied in the very idea of comparative advantage. There is evidence that even

with advances in artificial intelligence, humans and machines will remain complementary. In activities like medical diagnosis and even chess, humans and computers working together outperform either humans by themselves or computers by themselves. (Agrawal, Gans, and Goldfarb 2018, p. 65; Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014, pp. 189–90). The complementarity, and the advantage, appear to come from the division of labor within the team: machines can do the parts that require high-speed rule following and humans can do the parts that require judgment.

98. Acemoglu and Autor (2012); Autor (2013, p. 189). 99. Piketty (2020, pp. 807–18).

100. Abramowitz (2018).

101. Autor et al. (2020).

102. Mutz (2018).

103. Fukuyama (2018, p. 89).

104. Tabellini (2020).

105. Bisceglia (2021). Just as online music downloads eroded the concept of the “album.” 106. Derek Thompson, “The Print Apocalypse and How to Survive It,” The Atlantic, Novem-

ber 3, 2016.

107. Pew Research Center, Newspapers Fact Sheet, June 29, 2021, https://www.pewresearch

.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/.

108. Ben Smith, “Why the Success of The New York Times May Be Bad News for Journalism,”

New York Times, March 1, 2020.

109. As economic theory would predict (Anderson and Gabzewicz 2006, p. 596).

110. One widely cited source defines populism as “a thin-centered ideology that considers

society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volunté générale (general will) of the people” (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017, p. 6).

111. Hawley (2021); Klobuchar (2021).

112. It is of course characteristic of populism to lionize a powerful figure who fights uncon- strained for the true interests of the people and rough-rides over the vested interests (and over political norms and standards). The two senators do disagree about Woodrow Wilson, however. Wilson gets Klobuchar’s (somewhat tepid) endorsement because of his Brandeisian influences, whereas Hawley sees Wilson as the progenitor of rule by a professionalized elite of experts. As we saw, they are both right.

Notes to Epilogue 671

113. Klobuchar (2021, p. 175).

114. Hawley (2021, p. 5).

115. The index of Hawley’s book contains no entry for Microsoft. Unsurprisingly, he substi-

tutes Twitter as a target.

116. Epic Games, maker of a popular game that runs as an iPhone app, sued because Apple

would not allow it to use its own payment system for in-app purchases (and thus bypass the cut that Apple takes from such payments). The court found largely in Apple’s favor, but both firms are appealing. (Tim Higgins, “Apple Filing Notice of Appeal in Epic Antitrust Case, Looks to Stay In-App Injunction,” Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2021.) Although large firms like Epic would earn rents by using their own payment systems, small developers actually benefit from the one-stop shopping of the Apple payment system and would arguably be harmed by a policy that required Apple to permit the use of other payment systems (Kim 2021). Both Apple and Google have cut in half the fees they charge to small developers, who account for the vast major- ity of all apps in their app stores. (Tripp Mickle and Sarah E. Needleman, “Google to Cut Com- mission It Charges App Developers,” Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2021.)

117. This is much to the chagrin of Facebook, whose advertising relies importantly on data from tracking the Facebook iPhone app. The beneficiary of the new policy has been Google, whose ad revenues depend less on app tracking. Patience Haggin, “Why Apple’s Privacy Changes Hurt Snap and Facebook but Benefited Google,” Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2021.

118. Sam Schechner, “EU Charges Apple with App Store Antitrust Violations in Spotify Case,” Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2021. The Commission also brought self-preferencing charges against Google when European shopping sites complained. Sam Schechner, “Google Loses Appeal of $2.8 Billion EU Shopping-Ads Fine,” Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2021.