2023-11-04
30 分钟This is planet money from NPR.
Last week, I had a chance to sit down with Lena Khan.
Hey.
Hey, I'm Lena.
Hey, Alexi.
Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
And.
Okay, Alexi, I have to say this was super exciting cause Lena Khan is the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, which, among other things, regulates how big companies can get in the US.
Okay, so just to start, I have to ask, when you were a kid, I was monopoly your favorite board game?
No, I think it was probably like snakes and ladders.
Nevertheless, Lena is now helping set the rules for the real life game of monopoly playing out across the american economy.
As FTC chair, she is one of the country's top antitrust cops, policing companies as they vie for bigger and bigger slices of any given market.
Now, for a long time, antitrust was kind of this sleepy policy backwater.
The prevailing theory of how to police monopoly had basically been to let the market sort it out on its own, unless you could prove that consumers were clearly getting harmed.
But a few years ago, in 2017, Lena Khan rocketed into the national conversation with a simple but radical argument, which is that we had been doing everything wrong and that by now it was exacting this hidden toll on our everyday lives.
Monopoly power and consolidation can make the difference between whether you have to drive 5 miles to go to the hospital or whether you're driving 50 miles to go to the hospital can be the difference between whether you're paying $4 for eggs or $10 for eggs.
It can make the difference between whether you can quit your job and have opportunities with a rival firm or whether you're in fact, just stuck working for a company, even if they're docking your wages or worsening your working conditions.
And so there are just very real material consequences of how we do antitrust.
In other words, the stakes are a lot bigger than a board game.