
The Curse of Bigness
Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (Columbia Global Reports)
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $13.50
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Marc Cashman
-
By:
-
Tim Wu
About this listen
From the man who coined the term "net neutrality", author of The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, comes a warning about the dangers of excessive corporate and industrial concentration for our economic and political future.
We live in an age of extreme corporate concentration, in which global industries are controlled by just a few giant firms - big banks, big pharma, and big tech, just to name a few. But concern over what Louis Brandeis called the "curse of bigness" can no longer remain the province of specialist lawyers and economists, for it has spilled over into policy and politics, even threatening democracy itself. History suggests that tolerance of inequality and failing to control excessive corporate power may prompt the rise of populism, nationalism, extremist politicians, and fascist regimes. In short, as Wu warns, we are in grave danger of repeating the signature errors of the 20th century.
In The Curse of Bigness, Columbia Professor Tim Wu tells of how figures like Brandeis and Theodore Roosevelt first confronted the democratic threats posed by the great trusts of the Gilded Age - but the lessons of the Progressive Era were forgotten in the last 40 years. He calls for recovering the lost tenets of the trust-busting age as part of a broader revival of American progressive ideas as we confront the fallout of persistent and extreme economic inequality.
©2018 Tim Wu (P)2018 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
-
The Attention Merchants
- The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
- By: Tim Wu
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials, and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the "attention merchants", contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions, but the end result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention.
-
-
It's Been Sold
- By Mr. Ess on 10-24-16
By: Tim Wu
-
The Master Switch
- The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
- By: Tim Wu
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Could history repeat itself, with one giant entity taking control of American information? Most consider the Internet Age to be a moment of unprecedented freedom in communications and culture. But as Tim Wu shows, each major new medium, from telephone to cable, arrived on a similar wave of idealistic optimism only to become, eventually, the object of industrial consolidation profoundly affecting how Americans communicate.
-
-
Great Read
- By Roy on 11-12-10
By: Tim Wu
-
Antitrust
- Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age
- By: Amy Klobuchar
- Narrated by: Nan McNamara, Amy Klobuchar
- Length: 14 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Antitrust enforcement is one of the most pressing issues facing America today - and Amy Klobuchar, the widely respected senior senator from Minnesota, is leading the charge. This fascinating history of the antitrust movement shows us what led to the present moment and offers achievable solutions to prevent monopolies, promote business competition, and encourage innovation.
-
-
Not Just Monopolies But Progressive Politics Too
- By J.B. on 05-01-21
By: Amy Klobuchar
-
Going Infinite
- The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
- By: Michael Lewis
- Narrated by: Michael Lewis
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world’s youngest billionaire and crypto’s Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side?
-
-
really expected more rigor from Michael Lewis
- By Wowhello on 10-04-23
By: Michael Lewis
-
Competition and Antitrust Law
- A Very Short Introduction
- By: Ariel Ezrachi
- Narrated by: Mike Lenz
- Length: 4 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Competition is responsible for much of the prosperity around us. Competitive markets deliver lower prices, better quality, abundance of choice, and increased innovation. But while competition benefits the consumers, it can prove challenging to producers and sellers, who need to constantly improve to stay in business. As a result, sellers may sometimes look for ways to dampen the competitive process.
-
-
Extremely Satisfied
- By Luc on 03-14-22
By: Ariel Ezrachi
-
The Coming Wave
- AI, Power, and Our Future
- By: Mustafa Suleyman, Michael Bhaskar - contributor
- Narrated by: Mustafa Suleyman
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.
-
-
Click bait
- By Buyer on 09-11-23
By: Mustafa Suleyman, and others
-
The Attention Merchants
- The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
- By: Tim Wu
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials, and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the "attention merchants", contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions, but the end result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention.
-
-
It's Been Sold
- By Mr. Ess on 10-24-16
By: Tim Wu
-
The Master Switch
- The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
- By: Tim Wu
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Could history repeat itself, with one giant entity taking control of American information? Most consider the Internet Age to be a moment of unprecedented freedom in communications and culture. But as Tim Wu shows, each major new medium, from telephone to cable, arrived on a similar wave of idealistic optimism only to become, eventually, the object of industrial consolidation profoundly affecting how Americans communicate.
-
-
Great Read
- By Roy on 11-12-10
By: Tim Wu
-
Antitrust
- Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age
- By: Amy Klobuchar
- Narrated by: Nan McNamara, Amy Klobuchar
- Length: 14 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Antitrust enforcement is one of the most pressing issues facing America today - and Amy Klobuchar, the widely respected senior senator from Minnesota, is leading the charge. This fascinating history of the antitrust movement shows us what led to the present moment and offers achievable solutions to prevent monopolies, promote business competition, and encourage innovation.
-
-
Not Just Monopolies But Progressive Politics Too
- By J.B. on 05-01-21
By: Amy Klobuchar
-
Going Infinite
- The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
- By: Michael Lewis
- Narrated by: Michael Lewis
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world’s youngest billionaire and crypto’s Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side?
-
-
really expected more rigor from Michael Lewis
- By Wowhello on 10-04-23
By: Michael Lewis
-
Competition and Antitrust Law
- A Very Short Introduction
- By: Ariel Ezrachi
- Narrated by: Mike Lenz
- Length: 4 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Competition is responsible for much of the prosperity around us. Competitive markets deliver lower prices, better quality, abundance of choice, and increased innovation. But while competition benefits the consumers, it can prove challenging to producers and sellers, who need to constantly improve to stay in business. As a result, sellers may sometimes look for ways to dampen the competitive process.
-
-
Extremely Satisfied
- By Luc on 03-14-22
By: Ariel Ezrachi
-
The Coming Wave
- AI, Power, and Our Future
- By: Mustafa Suleyman, Michael Bhaskar - contributor
- Narrated by: Mustafa Suleyman
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.
-
-
Click bait
- By Buyer on 09-11-23
By: Mustafa Suleyman, and others
-
Chip War
- The Quest to Dominate the World's Most Critical Technology
- By: Chris Miller
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
You may be surprised to learn that microchips are the new oil—the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything—from missiles to microwaves—runs on chips, including cars, smartphones, the stock market, even the electric grid. Until recently, America designed and built the fastest chips and maintained its lead as the #1 superpower, but America’s edge is in danger of slipping, undermined by players in Taiwan, Korea, and Europe taking over manufacturing.
-
-
Great history, but could poor narration
- By Lily Wong on 10-26-22
By: Chris Miller
-
Goliath
- The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy
- By: Matt Stoller
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 20 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A startling look at how concentrated financial power and consumerism transformed American politics, resulting in the emergence of populism and authoritarianism, the fall of the Democratic Party - while also providing the steps needed to create a new democracy.
-
-
The Fall of American Populist Economics
- By Charlie Morton on 02-26-20
By: Matt Stoller
-
Doppelganger
- A Trip into the Mirror World
- By: Naomi Klein
- Narrated by: Naomi Klein
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who.
-
-
Elite Psychobabble
- By A Reviewer on 09-30-23
By: Naomi Klein
-
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
- The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
- By: Shoshana Zuboff
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 24 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the 21st century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.
-
-
Book Editors failed to trim the word count
- By Todd B on 07-14-19
By: Shoshana Zuboff
-
Blood in the Machine
- The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
- By: Brian Merchant
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 15 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods. The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines—on punishment of death—and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees.
-
-
The bias of the author can not be understated
- By Donald Campo on 11-17-23
By: Brian Merchant
-
Number Go Up
- Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
- By: Zeke Faux
- Narrated by: Dan Bittner
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it, and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked—but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named “digital asset”? As he observed this frenzy, investigative reporter Zeke Faux had a nagging question: Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? What started as curiosity—with a dash of FOMO—would morph into a two-year globe-spanning quest.
-
-
Phenomenal story
- By Michael on 10-05-23
By: Zeke Faux
-
Weapons of Math Destruction
- How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
- By: Cathy O'Neil
- Narrated by: Cathy O'Neil
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.
-
-
More are US social problems that WMD
- By Laurent Bourgault-Roy on 01-08-17
By: Cathy O'Neil
-
Extremely Online
- The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet
- By: Taylor Lorenz
- Narrated by: Emily Tremaine, Taylor Lorenz
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For over a decade, Taylor Lorenz has been the authority on internet culture, documenting its far-reaching effects on all corners of our lives. Her reporting is serious yet entertaining and illuminates deep truths about ourselves and the lives we create online. In her debut book, Extremely Online, she reveals how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating whole new sectors of the economy. Lorenz shows this phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive changes in modern capitalism.
-
-
A good historical “textbook.”
- By Janet Katz on 07-01-24
By: Taylor Lorenz
-
Liar's Poker
- Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
- By: Michael Lewis
- Narrated by: Michael Lewis
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1986, before Michael Lewis became the best-selling author of The Big Short, Moneyball, and Flash Boys, he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from callow trainee to New York- and London-based bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush. Liar’s Poker is the culmination of those heady, frenzied years - a behind-the-scenes look at a unique and turbulent time in American business.
-
-
Finally!
- By Anonymous User on 02-08-22
By: Michael Lewis
-
The Shallows
- What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
- By: Nicholas Carr
- Narrated by: Richard Powers
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Weaving insights from philosophy, neuroscience, and history into a rich narrative, The Shallows explains how the internet is rerouting our neural pathways, replacing the subtle mind of the book reader with the distracted mind of the screen watcher. A gripping story of human transformation played out against a backdrop of technological upheaval, The Shallows will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.
-
-
It is not consistant, so it is frustrating.
- By Adam Shields on 08-03-12
By: Nicholas Carr
-
The Great Reversal
- How America Gave Up on Free Markets
- By: Thomas Philippon
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why are cellphone plans so much more expensive in the United States than in Europe? It seems a simple question. But the search for an answer took Thomas Philippon on an unexpected journey through some of the most complex and hotly debated issues in modern economics. Ultimately, he reached a surprising conclusion: American markets, once a model for the world, are giving up on healthy competition.
-
-
Eye-opening, but better as a book - a must-READ
- By Ash on 11-29-19
By: Thomas Philippon
-
Your Face Belongs to Us
- A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
- By: Kashmir Hill
- Narrated by: Kashmir Hill
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person’s online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed.
-
-
Entertaining but should be a 10 page article
- By Anonymous User on 12-11-24
By: Kashmir Hill
What listeners say about The Curse of Bigness
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Amazon Customer
- 04-29-19
Essential Info for Preserving Democracy
Extremely informative and actionable information about the threat and management of monopoly and the gradual subversion of anti-trust law.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Michelle P
- 09-21-20
Trust busting for the 21st Century
great primer on trust busting from the 1890s - 2010s. Prof Wu provides a foundation to re-imagine the current economic and political situation existing in much of the world. May his thoughts reach those who can take the power back
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Lily Silvester Wood
- 01-02-19
Interesting and informative
I tend to agree that the best government is the least government, but the arguments Wu presents here, while not without bias, are certainly worthy of consideration. I am glad I listened.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Fear and Loathing DC
- 06-02-20
Incredible and concise
The book covers a lot of ground, does so persuasively, and doesnt feel like he leaves huge gaps, and does so in an incredibly short amount of time. A must read.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Student
- 12-23-20
Shallow and pointless
Not original. The first chapter was interesting, but afterwards the book was shallow. I want my money back.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!