Does America Have a Monopoly Problem?

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In the mid-20th century, big companies like GM and Xerox used to be relatively popular with the public.

Now, big business is much likelier to draw skepticism, if not outright hostility.

But in the Trump administration, corporations might be progressives' best hopes for advancing their policy agenda on issues from immigration to LGBTQ rights.

So, is big business good,

evil,

or just business?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic, and with me in person in New York

are my esteemed co-hosts, Alex Wagner.

Hello, Alex.

Hi, Matt.

So nice to see your handsome face.

Nice to see your lovely face in person.

Okay, no crosstalk.

jeff jeffrey goldberg editor-in-chief of oh i think fun just left the room i just

we have a lot to talk about it is we got a lot to talk about here always a pleasure to sit down with you is it really it is no it is it really you balance out you balance out my sunniness and earnestness with a a healthy layer of grump also joining us today is derek thompson senior editor at the atlantic thank you matt it's such a pleasure to be here it's so delightful to have you.

Oh, my God.

You too, Jeff.

You too, Jeff.

You too, Jeff.

Your

curmudgeonliness is not going to dampen

my ear-to-ear smile.

In the April 2018 issue of The Atlantic, we published a provocative, perhaps counterintuitive argument from Robert Atkinson and Michael Lynn asking the question, is big business really that bad?

Atkinson and Lynn remind us that in the 50s, Americans used to love big business.

One 1950 poll found that 60% of Americans had a favorable opinion of large businesses.

More than 70% had a favorable view of GM.

Fast forward to today, however, and Atkinson and Lynn describe a very different picture.

Only 21% of respondents to a 2017 Gallup poll, they write, said they have a great deal or even quite a lot of confidence in big business.

Derek, you have written about the concentration of power in a few corporations in different sectors before.

And what do you think of the argument that actually

the case against monopolies and big business has been overblown and that we should look to corporations for playing a positive role in American society, as they once were perceived as doing?

Yeah, so first I'm going to summarize their argument as best I can, and then I'm going to explain why I think it's a bit of point missing.

So their argument, big companies create more jobs.

Yes.

Big companies pay higher wages.

Yep.

Big companies offer more benefits.

Yes.

And they employ a higher share of women and minorities.

Yes to all of this.

Yes to all of it.

That said,

I think they wanted to make this piece about a hyperbolic fear about the growth of monopolies in America.

And I don't think they did an effective job of convincing me of why I should stop worrying.

In fact, there's a lot of research that seems to suggest that the growth of monopolies in America is bad for wages, is bad for productivity, bad for entrepreneurship.

And we should be worried about some of these companies getting too big.

Big is good, but you also don't want them to get too big.

And so

they quote at the beginning of this piece, that line from 1952: what's good for General Motors is good for America.

And I thought, you know, I wonder if that's true.

So I googled the phrase, is what's good for General Motors good for America?

And I came across an extremely conveniently titled paper called, Is What's Good for General Motors Good for America?

And I'm reading that from the abstract.

Big business turnover correlates with rising income, productivity, faster capital accumulation, consistent with Schumpeter's creative destruction.

So in English, that means that when a bunch of huge businesses dominates forever, that's bad.

That's stagnation.

That's a smelly, still pond.

But when a bunch of large companies declines and another bunch of large companies emerges, that's mojo.

That's dynamism.

That's exactly what we should want.

So I suppose, in fitting together their well-argued, to an extent, piece with the way that I feel about monopolies in America, yes, we should want businesses to be able to get big, but policies that just keep the big businesses big, that's just a policy to keep zombies around forever.

Aaron Ross Powell, one of the things that I noticed about the argument made in the magazine is that it sort of ignores,

there's almost an intangible that's an important aspect of of small business creation in America, and that is that small businesses are necessarily more nimble, more reflective of their communities, and more reactive, more responsive to their consumers.

There's a lot of big versus small arguments that are made, and I sort of took issue with that generally.

But if we're going to go along those lines of argument, I thought they missed the point that small businesses, especially in this day and age where Americans want localized, tailored product and salespeople and

infrastructure generally.

Small business is actually really well built for that kind of consumer interaction, if you will.

Aaron Ross Powell, to directly answer your question, Alex, I guess I would say there's lots of wonderful things that small companies do.

Small companies tend to make more special products, and sometimes people love that.

Small companies tend to give character to their neighborhoods, and lots of people want to live in neighborhoods with character that just aren't another sort of Orwellian Amazon bookstore.

And it should be said that we are living in an era where there's enormous market concentration across the economy.

In a column that I wrote in 2016 about the dangers of monopolies, I sort of imagined walking through town as an average person and thinking, how long does it take you to interact with something that isn't a monopoly?

If you browse the internet, that internet is sold through a local monopoly.

If you want to go buy some food, superstores such as Walmart owns a quarter of the grocery market and Amazon's has

a growing stake in it as well.

Let's say you feel sick to your stomach, you ate too many Brussels sprouts that you bought it at Walmart or Whole Foods.

You go to a pharmacy and three companies control 99% of that market.

If you're stressed because you're getting stressed out about monopolies and you want to sort of relax with e-books or music or beer, two companies control more than half of sales in all of those three markets.

And if you want to get away from it all, and say take a plane to do so, well, tough luck for you because four companies control 80% of domestic flight seats.

So we are living in a period where there is enormous market concentration, and there are also other economic mysteries.

Why are wages so slow to grow?

Why is productivity so slow?

Why does entrepreneurship seem to be declining?

And there is a great body of research tying these two stories together, the rise of monopolies on the one hand and all of these economic ills on the other.

And I just think we need to take that research that's emerging very seriously.

There is an emotional argument in all of this, right?

And I think what's ignored when you talk about the small business argument is the fact that small businesses help people find their own humanity, I think, in a town.

And one of the things when you talk about our increasingly isolated American public is there's not a sense of sort of shared community.

And one of the things about small businesses is they make you feel like you are part of a tighter fabric.

And that seems really important.

It's an intangible that's often sort of thrown aside when we talk about just the economics.

Can I ask you a question?

Can I interrogate you about your shopping habits?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

But I mean, how often do you not go on Amazon to buy something because you want to support a local store that is inconveniently located and charges you more money?

I will tell you that I am a promiscuous user of Amazon Prime.

You're known, by the way, you're known as a promiscuous user of Amazon Prime.

These are very loaded terms, but I'm going to use them anyway.

And I am also, I make a real effort to support local businesses because I live in a part of Manhattan where the local corridor of shops has been basically gutted because of higher rents.

And it's, it's like decimated the stores.

Replaced by national chains or replaced by national stores?

Well, what happened was there were local stores that then got replaced because of higher rents by chain stores.

But the chain stores, I mean, people weren't coming to this part of Manhattan to shop at stores that they could shop at anywhere else.

And so they didn't have a base of consumers and have shuttered.

And what was once a sort of thriving mini main street is gone.

I think when you see that around you, it sort of, it's made me sort of redouble my efforts.

I will sort of ask myself, do I need to buy this from Amazon or can I buy it locally?

And that is the sort of dichotomy I think that the American consumer often finds herself in.

Aaron Ross Powell, Amazon is a really interesting case study, in part because the way you might answer the question, is big business good or evil?

Depends in part on whether you're emphasizing customers, emphasizing employees, or emphasizing entrepreneurs and founders.

Amazon scrambles that set of relationships up quite a bit.

Part of what Amazon's done has been to draw together a large set of customers, bring onto their platform a fairly large set of small business owners that now theoretically have access to a new customer base through Amazon,

but also become a supplier of their own in product category after product category, using their, one might argue, monopolistic power to diminish the power of those founders and entrepreneurs.

Derek, having studied the dynamics of that company in particular, is Amazon looked at from any of those three perspectives,

is Amazon net good for expanding the range of customers that these small businesses have access to?

Or is it net evil for threatening all these potential entrepreneurs?

I like the loaded moralistic terms here.

Weighing all of the good and all of the evil is a solomonic task to which I don't think that I'm accustomed to right now.

Just said, that is

asking you a question.

Don't dodge it.

Able or accustomed?

That's a very good point.

Oh, very, very good.

I would say this.

Amazon is unbelievably cheap.

Amazon is unbelievably efficient.

But cheapness and efficiency have hidden costs.

We see this most clearly.

You mean the murder of our collective soul?

Not only the murder of our collective soul, which is continuing apace, but also the cost on people.

You know, a lot of Senior.

That's what I mean.

Oh, indeed.

Yes.

No, no, I mean, I mean, like, I mean, we're ruining humanity.

Efficiency is the enemy of...

Of humanity.

Well, it could be.

In some cases.

It's the enemy of idiosyncrasy.

It's the enemy of independence.

The enemy of

autonomy, self-autonomy.

You know, like the autonomy of the self, interaction.

Yeah, it's the enemy of everything.

Efficiency is not a moral value.

I might need you to unpack that one for me, Jenny.

No, I'm happy to unpack.

Efficiency is a moral value.

Although it does benefit, I mean, well, go.

Sorry.

No, no, you may not be bad.

I think it's a fascinating point.

I mean, look, what's interesting is, first, the degree to which this point connects so explicitly to what we're talking about, because U.S.

policy toward monopolies really changed in the 1970s when Robert Bork, the man whose surname became a verb, argued that the government was fetishizing competition and just leveling the playing field to help small businesses for the benefit of poorly run companies.

So he was making a god out of efficiency.

And in many ways, we are now living in a world in which we're seeing the costs of this.

When it comes to

the fact that it wasn't Bork who first initiated this, I mean,

this is an argument Brandeis was having against the Fords of the era.

Sure, it was just Bork's the antitrust paradox that was a really, really

good.

It's antitrust argument.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, this is not an argument that he came up up with, but it was he was rooted in.

I'm just here to defend Robert Bork.

Oh, good.

The grump defends the Bork.

But in many ways, you know, when you think about sort of the benefits of efficiency for a consumer today, on the one hand, you know, not having to spend all of this time buying toilet paper increases freedom, obviously, because it means you can spend more time with your kids.

It means you can spend more time doing what you love, with your husband, with your wife.

It saves time for you.

And what could be more beneficial to autonomy than having an efficient consumer experience so that you can reserve all this time to take care of your kids and work on art and stuff like that?

On the other hand, what are the costs of Amazon and the costs of Walmart and the costs of some of the most efficient companies?

Well, often it means making people work in really horrific conditions in warehouses.

Often it means paying people nothing at Walmart and relying on government food stamps just to help people who you employ get over the poverty line.

So this is a really intricate balancing act.

And I don't think that it's as simple, not that it's being suggested, it's not as simple as efficiency is good or bad.

We should hope the companies become more efficient, but it also behooves us to make sure that we pass laws to make sure that efficiency isn't essentially taking advantage of workers' lives.

Part of the argument against monopolies has dovetailed with the sort of political partisanship around

even in 2012 when Mitt Romney said corporations are people too, right?

The sort of corporate defense was seen as a plank of the Republican Party.

I want to talk about what's happening right now because this is a week in which Larry Kudlow has been appointed the National Economic Council advisor.

And also the president has blocked a potential corporate merger and is moving forward with steel and aluminum tariffs.

The strain of populism that would seem to be protectionist and anti-corporate has now infected the Republican Party.

Do you think that that changes the way we've been debating the role of corporations in American public life?

Trump scrambles left-right so dramatically on the issue of trade, really on so many issues, because he just can't see institutions.

He can't see ideologies.

He's institution-blind.

He just has instincts.

And what appears to be his oldest and most carefully kept instinct is this feeling that trade is a zero-sum war and we have been losing it and we need to win it.

And that certain corporations are bad and certain corporations are good.

And that's a very interesting corporate stance.

Yes, it is.

Well, I mean, on the issue of, so first on the issue of nationalism versus globalism, I think we had a long period in his first year of the presidency where he was essentially being run roughshod over by Paul Ryan and by his more globalist, more free market advisors.

But very recently, I think he's taken this really, really hard stance on tariffs and now again on

mergers with Qualcomm to essentially say, no, I'm going to reassert these nationalist tendencies that are very closely held.

Which is interesting, by the way, open parenthetical, it's interesting that he did not do the infrastructure spending, which Democrats would have loved, by the way, and which were in his instinct.

That was what he wanted to do, precisely because of Paul Ryan.

I mean, so now we're seeing the Paul Ryan-free Trump for good and bad.

Is that fair to say?

I think it is fair to say.

I mean, in working on my own sort of, you know, universal theory of Trump, for a long time, my theory was Trump is extremely powerful if the action he wants to take can be done with a smartphone where the only apps are texting and Twitter.

He is very, very effective at using Twitter to turn public opinion on the NFL, on the FBI, on trade.

He's very effective at firing people on Twitter and through text.

He fired Comey basically all on his own.

He fired Tillerson basically all on his own.

You only need a smartphone to be able to do what he did.

Tariffs scramble this universal theory, though.

He needed a bit of a White House infrastructure around him in order to get this through.

And he happens to be surrounded by Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, his economic advisor, who lent institutional support there.

So to my mind,

It's one of the first times that he's really accomplished something that the party didn't want him to do, that required more than just a Twitter app.

But Jeff, do you think that that changes?

I mean, we've talked about Elizabeth Warren as being the sort of archenemy of corporate America, right?

Because of her public statements.

But now that you have a president who has so much power with the base, who has single-handedly basically changed his party's position on big trade issues and the way we think of corporations and whether they should have the leeway to have big fancy mergers.

Do you think that changes the debate we have about corporations being people too?

Pass.

And also, do we need to distinguish between the party heads and the Trump faithful?

I guess I just wonder if populism is here to stay.

The faithful are populists.

I mean,

what we know, obviously, is that the party that the Republican leadership thought it was leading, they were not leading.

They have a populist base.

Donald Trump is a genius and figured that out and

brought them to his version of the Republican Party.

So, yes, I think populism is here to stay.

And if I were running a Fortune 100 company, I would be extremely concerned about perception that I'm an oligarch, which of course is ironic because Donald Trump

trades on it.

Well, there's a certain sort of oligarch that he likes, but they tend to be located

there.

But yes, but I think the populism is here to say.

I mean, this whole debate is so topsy-turvy because we're not.

Donald Trump's analysis of what is good and bad in the economy is not rooted in the way, say, a reporter like Derek Thompson would analyze this stuff, which is, say, with a set of facts

and data.

So everything is topsy-turvy.

I totally understand

why

Donald Trump could be Brandeisian.

Is that a word?

Yeah, it is now.

Sure, grump is a word.

Brandeisianism.

Brandeisian grump.

Because instinctually, Brandeisianism

is emotionally satisfying.

Can you just define Brandeisianism as you're using it?

Brandeisian, Brandeisianism, the fear of monopoly, the fear of concentrated power in the hands of a few.

Justice Brandeis, that was what he was, among other things, known for.

The curse of bigness was his operative phrase in this regard.

But again, it's very hard to apply sort of Trumpian ideology

or take it and refract it through a Brandeisian template because Brandeisianism has a coherence to it that Trumpism doesn't.

It doesn't.

I mean, I'll try.

I'll try to square Trumpism and Brandeisianism.

The really interesting thing about what Brandeis said is not only that bigness is bad at the corporate level because it's anti-competitive, he also said that when companies get really, really big, their economic power tends to equate with political power.

And allowing companies to have too much power over the political process is really dangerous.

I know where he's going to go.

I can see the future.

I don't.

Oh, no, no, no.

Actually, even I don't know where I'm going to go with this.

No, no, I know.

So, what's interesting to me about the Republican Party is that, in many ways, the Ryan Mitch McConnell wing of the Republican Party, which heretofore has dominated conservative economic thinking, is extremely corporatist.

It is corporate libertarian.

It is corporate lobbyist groups and the Koch brothers.

Corporate tax cuts.

And the corporate tax cuts, which we just saw.

It is, in fact, a policy that is overwhelmingly popular among companies, but not popular, in fact, among people.

The corporate tax cut was hideously unpopular as it was moving through Congress in November and December.

And so the irony is that Trump finds himself as in many ways a semi-Brandeisian figurehead of a party that

represents the opposite of what Brandeis was thinking about.

I want to just say in defense of Justice Brandeis, who couldn't be with us today, that it's not fair to one of the great men of American thought, one of the great leaders of

obviously a great judicial leader, but a great thinker.

One of the great grumps.

Well, he was pretty grumpy.

He was like, you're getting too big.

Stop growing.

But it's not fair to equate him or to refract his elegant and complicated thinking through the prism of someone who actually isn't thinking about this.

I was just, as Derek was talking, I was thinking to myself, Donald Trump isn't opposed to bigness.

He's not for bigness or against bigness.

What Donald Trump is for is Donald Trump.

And so he would be a huge advocate of

Apple, for instance, the largest company we have right now in terms of market cap.

If Tim Cook, its leader, sucked up to him.

I mean, there's no

consistent.

Trying to overlay ideology here.

The ideology is: if you're nice to me, I'll be nice to you.

Can I just say my intention wasn't to get at how do you square Brandeis and Trump?

It was more just

which is impossible, but it's more just populism, which was very clearly defined in terms of one set of politics, now exists on both sides of the spectrum.

And as we talk about corporations, I wonder how

that shapes our thinking and attitudes towards large corporations, given the fact that there is now real energy on both sides of the political aisle to curb

the size and the power of corporations.

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There's been a strong argument that the Trump administration's biggest influence on the corporate sector has actually been what it's been doing behind the scenes on the regulatory environment.

That the actions that the agencies have taken over the past year to winnow out regulations, some of which had been hard fought for years,

has changed dramatically some sectors largely out of public view.

There's a way in which Trump's stated policy perspectives as driven by his texts and tweets draw all of the attention and focus while what's actually happening elsewhere in the administration is where the most significant action is.

And part of the catalyst for that action, for the regulatory action, has been a case by, among others, a set of business leaders that some might call monopolists, that the regulatory environment has been very unfavorable to competition, that where we need to be looking is not...

the concentration of power in monopolies, but in the constraints on competition put in place by regulation.

To look at another sector that's gotten heavily concentrated, banking, an argument is often made that the biggest constraints on competition are not that it is currently limited, that the Wells Fargo's and

J.P.

Morgan Chases of the world are crowding out new competitors, but that governmental power, that regulatory power, that the limits on what it takes to start a new bank are preventing entrepreneurs from entering the sector.

Derek, are entrepreneurs having a hard time building businesses in America right now?

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, the entrepreneurship rate has been declining in the U.S.

pretty much since the 1970s.

And to a lot of economists, it's a huge mystery.

And that's masked a little bit by the success of Apple's and Intel's and Microsoft.

Right.

Yeah, you're talking about superstar firms, superstar firms that

we can all list the names of, but essentially account for what, like, you know, 0.01% of any group of companies that are started in a given year.

There's lots of reasons given.

Some of it could be regulatory burdens, some of it could be credentialization,

some of it could be the fact that in lots of ways the U.S.

is just sort of less dynamic, seems to have less mojo than it used to.

People move around less.

There seems to be a bit of a kind of national stasis that's set in over the last few decades.

And so all this sort of feeds together.

You might need more immigrants.

Indeed, we might need more immigrants.

I don't know immigrants start companies.

Just putting it out there.

Or no more immigrants.

But also, research and development funding has been cut as well, right?

That about that.

That surface innovation and invention.

Right.

So there's all sorts of reasons why entrepreneurship has declined.

And essentially, you know, if I were a king in this particular sector, I would want to make it easier to start companies and harder to get really, really big.

So I would want to essentially lower the floor, but then also like lower the ceiling, right?

Make it easier for there to be lots of competition at the start, but also make sure that there are clear laws in banking, let's say, even in retail and other sectors, to essentially say, once you've reached a certain level, we don't want you getting that much bigger.

We don't want you making a bunch of mergers that are going to turn you into this permanent monopoly.

We're going to give you a little bit of scrutiny.

That's interesting, in part because, you know, 10 years ago, the phrase that

dominated American punditry for most of a year was too big to fail.

And I think one of the looking at that era, the moment of the Great Recession, Recession, the mortgage crisis, and the crisis in banking that fell out of it, I always wondered, is too big to succeed almost the bigger danger in the long run?

And too big to succeed here would mean what exactly?

That once you have a company that attains such massive scale that essentially it is a sector.

Oh, too big for others to succeed.

Yes, absolutely.

And too big to sustain its own

success in the long run.

And then everything's taken care of.

Yeah.

It'll fall on itself.

But in the way that it falls, if it takes over an entire sector, as we saw in banking, it can take a lot with it.

I think to summarize,

to summarize my understanding of the market power research, it would say that too big to succeed would mean that companies can get too big in their particular sector for little entrepreneurs, little guppy fish to succeed in that particular sector because they could essentially destroy them by lowering prices in one particular sector.

if you're Amazon right and there's a little competitor in in you know whatever socks that they could just drop their prices on socks to like you know five cents a sock and put this company out of business you don't necessarily want a sec a a situation like that because it's extremely anti-competitive and it's really bad for entrepreneurship in that particular area so that that's really I suppose where too big to succeed where it would what it would mean in this in this case is there an example of a good corporation to your mind Derek a good large corporation Yeah, I mean, right.

I'm not saying there isn't a good corporation, but with all these parameters in mind, is there a corporation that has either self-policed or is policed enough that it doesn't overly dominate the industry, that has responsible wage practices and hiring practices?

Does it exist?

I'm sure it exists.

And I don't know what that is.

It's such a funny question because, I mean, it depends on what you want a corporation to do.

If you want them to pay their workers a decent wage and make a product that we need or that people like, how much more do we want from them in a kind of way?

Not to be a capitalist tool here, but

what are we demanding of

these corporations except making

it?

Look,

when I think about Ben and Jerry's, I think about a company that makes absolutely delicious ice cream and also happens to have a political stance that is more or less in line with my proclivities.

And so I like both.

Isn't it owned by Unilever now, actually?

They were bought, but they actually maintained a certain amount of autonomy within the

mind.

In my dreams, they had full autonomy of my dreams.

That chunky monkey tastes good, though, don't it?

And so

that would be a case.

I think also, if you go back historically, like the prototypical example of a large corporation doing good was probably Henry Ford, right?

Turn of the 20th century.

Ford saying, I want my cars, the cars that we make, to be affordable to the employees who are making them.

And I'm going to structure my company and the compensation within it to make that possible.

I'm going to aim to bring prices down on cars through efficiency to make cars widely affordable.

And I'm going to aim to bring pay up and labor standards up in my industry to make it so that my workers can afford them.

That was sort of the model of a good company.

And he was prevented from having a monopoly on the car building industry.

Yeah, he was.

But then, you know, with all these older companies, I guess the way that I'm thinking about the question is, is there a company where I can't think of an obvious objection to it, wherein I know a lot about that company?

So, with something like Apple, I think Apple's a fantastic company.

I have so many, I'm looking at one Apple product here, and I'm looking at another Apple product over here.

At the same time, I think some of the news that's come out about their manufacturing factories in China are pretty disturbing.

When I look at a company like Amazon, I might be even more promiscuous than Alex when it comes to my Amazon purchases.

Well, think of a

Derek is the Stormy Daniels of Amazon purchases.

I'll take that.

And by the way, I say that with absolute respect for

Termy Daniels.

I say that with great respect for one of the more noble people in the Trump drama right now.

That's true.

She is noble.

All right.

But

I don't know if it's possible to complete that thought, but that I use Amazon all the time.

But at the same time, I am disturbed by the news that I read from Alana Samuels about the conditions in their warehouses.

So, you know, I am not anti-corporations at all.

But of course, it's difficult to think about a company with billions and billions of dollars in revenue with operations all over the world where there isn't some practice where I say you know what I wish you did better there there's a complete counter argument which is that in a moment when the federal government may be pointed towards limiting the rights of of American citizens may be pointed more in an authoritarian direction that that the executive branch is tilting that way that corporations actually and their power and their political power honestly form an effective counterweight to authoritarian tendencies or over-regulatory tendencies elsewhere in government.

And I'm curious how you think about that.

We spoke to the author Adam Winkler, who wrote an interesting history in the Atlantic about how corporations became, judicially, people.

Here's what Adam said.

The story of corporations in politics and corporations and their constitutional rights are complicated stories.

In terms of our attitude towards business and politics, on the one hand, we celebrate companies like Dick Sporting Goods or Delta for taking on a political stand against the NRA.

But that same political power of business gives us the Trump tax bill that provides many more financial benefits to big corporations than it does to ordinary individuals.

When business and corporations get involved in politics, one may like the results today, disagree with the results tomorrow, but the corporations will always be doing it to protect their brands and to pursue profit.

So we should always be skeptical.

I think part of the story, too, is that just like our thinking about business and politics is nuanced, thinking about the civil rights of corporations is nuanced, that corporations have used these rights to gain ever more power.

At the same time, corporations have been innovators and first movers, helping to breathe life into some of our most important individual rights, like the freedom of the press.

So corporations play a complicated role both in our Constitution and in our politics.

We're having this argument about whether corporations are people and sort of embedded in that is: can corporations be good, right?

And I think in this particular moment, when we see a government that's either gridlocked or atrophied or is running roughshod over certain constitutional rights or seen to be actively working against some of the interests of the people of the United States, corporations are increasingly under a lot more pressure to be socially responsible, to be reactive.

And they are seen as in some ways a check on the power of the U.S.

government.

Well, what's so interesting there, Alex, and I would love to hear Derek on this, is the fact that corporations and their leaders are filling a vacuum in social discourse that had been filled in previous generations by clergy, by university presidents,

by other institutions.

It's amazing the degree to which we expect that role to be filled now by leaders of for-profit, publicly traded companies that have responsibilities to their shareholders, not to the common wheel.

And is that a good or a bad thing?

I don't think it's a good thing.

I mean, I'm not, I'm not, it's great when they do something that's good, right?

But it's not, it's not their actual responsibility.

And it's the, it's the falling away of other forces, of other balancing non-profit-oriented institutions and individuals.

Think about university presidents.

Think about how, look, we know this from 50, 60 years ago in the Atlantic.

We would run pieces, arguments all the time by university presidents.

Now university presidents are, if anything, beholden to corporate leaders for their fundraising.

They're not independent entities that are

making policy and making recommendations about how to be a better place.

Jeff, as it concerns that central argument of the goodness of corporations, setting aside the factors that have forced corporations to be socially responsive, is it a sign of their inherent goodness or humanity that they are taking a stance?

I think it's just a vacuum that they're filling.

I think I'm with Jeff here.

I think it's a little bit like imagine a forest where all of the tallest trees are cut down, and so this tree below turns out to be the tallest one left in the forest.

Like that tallest tree now is the corporate world, and all the other trees that were cut down are the other institutions that have lost so much trust in the last 50 years, such that we have to turn to corporations now to be essentially social activists.

And we do now.

I mean, not only with the protests around the NRA, where you saw online activists...

activists and these students petitioning companies to to drop their sponsorships with the NRA believing essentially that there is no point in petitioning government because government never acts after mass shootings.

You also the fact that the triumph of Dick's Sporting Goods over the United States Congress.

Yeah, but in many ways, in many ways, companies are more democratic than democratic governance now.

They're more responsive than

every week is a political primary for them.

So they don't have the option to allow consumers to turn against them and risk losing all of their money.

They have to act immediately.

And a lot of their customers tend to be left of center.

A A lot of their current employees for large companies tend to be left of center.

A lot of their future employees for recruiting also tend to be left of center.

And so you do have, I think, this pressure on companies to manage a very tricky balancing act, where on the one hand, they are obviously in favor of corporate tax cuts, in favor of the Republican economic policy, but on the other hand, have to signal that they are terrifically to the left of the Republican Party on social issues.

Aaron Ross Powell, that's also

business.

I know that we're saying it's because they're the tallest tree

or that they're the institution that's left.

It is, if you look at the numbers, it is good business for corporations to be socially responsible.

They tend to be rewarded by consumers overwhelmingly urban, left of center, have more money, spend more money.

It ends up benefiting the bottom line.

You heard it here first, folks.

Shareholder value is the new civic participation coming from Alex Wagner to theatlantic.com to how to take near you.

And with that, we're going to turn the conversation to our closing segment, Keepers.

What have you heard, watched, read, listened to, experienced recently that you do not want to forget?

Derek Thompson, our guest of honor, I'm going to start with you.

So I decided this year that I wanted to read more books of essays, and I bought Martin Amos's book of essays called The Rub of Time.

And I've never read Martin Amos.

I just heard that he was a voicey writer.

And it is one of just the most like

brilliantly articulate books and just makes me despair as a writer at some of the phrases that he turns up.

At one point, he describes Sylvester Stallone's face as a lethal trapezium of organ meat, which is just disgusting and also

completely perfect if you spend any more than two seconds looking at Sylvester Stallone's face.

On Trump's conman talents, he says that Trump has a quote, a crocodilian nose for vulnerability.

And that's just a beautiful way, I think, to encapsulate not only his ability to prey on the vulnerable on things like Trump University, but also to prey on a vulnerable party in order to become its president.

It's a really great book.

It's a fun read, and I recommend it.

Excellent.

Thank you for that, Derek.

Alex Wagner, what do you want to keep?

I have started taking notes by hand.

It's shocking.

It's true.

And it has, I think, resulted in better writing.

Your own hand or someone else?

No, because I have a manual.

Awesome.

No, I just realized that my brain, while pretty slow, was moving a little bit faster than my hands in terms of typing.

So I started outlining stories by hand on paper, and it's been awesome.

I can only write for like half an hour before my hand feels like it's going to fall off because my muscles have atrophied so much, but I recommend it.

Try handwriting.

That's your hot tip from Alex Wagner.

Awesome.

I have a very specific use of my handwritten notebook and this very specific way to do it that is now fairly like plugged into the way I think.

And I find that the two, the connection, the mind-brain, hand-brain connection is quite useful.

Jeffrey Goldberg, what would you like to not forget?

Martin Amos.

I'd like to not forget Martin Amos.

You too.

Matt Labasch in the Weekly Standard, one of my favorite writers of Weekly Standard, writing about,

for whatever reason, writing writing about a conversation I had with Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amos right before Hitchens died.

And I was just looking at this as

Derek was talking about it.

We were talking about agnosticism and atheism.

Just listen to Martin Amos

talk.

It's just the most beautiful thing.

He's arguing with Hitch about atheism.

It's cramped and irrational to say that there is no God and premature because we are pathetically ignorant of the universe.

We know hardly anything about it.

We don't know what 86% of it consists of.

We don't understand galaxy formation.

We're a dozen Einsteins at least from even a rudimentary understanding of where we are.

I mean, the fact that the universe is more intelligent than us seems like a proof of something to me.

That is that we're over our heads.

So to say that there is no God, and then he trailed off, but it was an amazing moment when Martin Amos just sort of photobombed a conversation I was having with Hitch and then sort of complicated, as Matt Leibush has, complicated the conversation about atheism.

And I just want to second Derek's endorsement of reading and listening to Martin Amos whenever possible.

Whoop, whoop, Martin Amos.

Whoop, whoop.

This is the Martin Amos themed podcast.

Whoop, whoop.

That's a sound of the air horn.

Alex, Alex, work on your handwriting.

Just go work on your handwriting.

I love not only being in the studio with you, but when you just always make it fun.

I'll bring the air horn next time.

Yeah, we should have a Martin Amos-themed air horn.

We learned this week that the actress Clairefoy, who we have discussed on previous episodes

abusively on Radio Atlantic, who played Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown.

We learned this week that

she's history's greatest monster.

What did we learn?

We learned that Claire Foy was paid less than her co-star.

Oh, shit.

Matt Smith.

Knock me over with a feather.

Prince Philip on the show.

A reversal of real life.

If you have ever seen The crown and you have not yet heard this news, your jaw is probably dropping at this very moment because the crown clairfoy is everything

on the crown.

And the reason that I mention this as my keeper and the reason that I don't want to forget it is we've got the Bechtel test.

We've got a standard as shorthand for films that feature only dialogue from women that relates to the subject of men.

The Bechtel test, famously, is the yardstick applied to a movie that asks whether the movie features any scenes where two women discuss something other than a man.

If yes, then the movie passes the Bechtel test.

If no, then it fails the Bechtel test.

I think we need a similar yardstick that we can be armed with, that we, the viewers, we, the customers of cinema and television, can be armed with as we go into our theaters, as we stream our things on Netflix, that lets us know beforehand, are the women in this movie playing the substantial roles who are driving most of the plot and action, are they being paid the same as their male counterparts on screen?

That's information that increasingly looking ahead.

I want to know before I patronize a film.

Can I ask you a question, though?

Is the actor who played Prince Philip, is he more famous and more skilled?

No way.

No, I'm just asking.

I have no way of skilled.

He's not.

No, no, I'm saying, like, is there another explanation for this?

The thing is, yeah, sure.

There are probably a thousand but the same thing is true for halt and catch fire the two female co-stars who made the show good

whose ultimate presence at the center of the ensemble finally made the show good it was discovered uh late in that show's run that they were also being paid less gonna get an argument for me that Claire Foy should get a billion like sure you can explain these things away by them

stars yeah I don't know sure you can explain these things away by the situational dynamics of any given show or movie but the the pattern holds I think you rarely hear these things going in the opposite side.

You should put them in the credits.

Anyway, someone named salary.

No, Claire Foy.

Let's just say Claire Foy

in every credit.

Somebody named the Bechtel test for pay equality.

That's all I'm asking for.

Hashtag RailTalk.

The Thompson test.

Thompson test.

Hashtag take the fun out of going to the movies.

I want to call it the FOI test.

All right.

All right.

The FOI test.

With that.

Thanks for letting me get heated for a moment.

And thank you very much.

No better time.

For a fun conversation.

You're going to be a part of the show about trying to wrap it up and get out of this

about corporate power.

Derek Thompson, thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

Jeff and Alex, it is such a pleasure to be with you in person.

Thanks, guys.

Let's do it again.

Let us do it again soon.

Battle Do It for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau and Diana Douglas.

Thanks to our colleague Derek Thompson for joining us, to Jillian White for always being smart.

And thanks as always to the inimitable John Batiste for his galactic adaptation of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

I got a special ask for you this week.

What is your keeper?

What do you not want to forget?

Leave us a voicemail at 202-266-7600 with your answer and your contact information.

Again, that's 202-266-7600.

Check us out at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

Catch the show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, do rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

But most importantly, thank you for listening.

May whatever shareholder value you produce be in line with your values.

We'll see you next week.