Lecture by Mordecai Kurz: “Technology-Based Market Power”

Program

14:00 – Welcome by Gabriel Zucman, Director of the PSE Stone Center on Global Wealth Dynamics and the EU Tax Observatory

14:00-14:40 – Lecture by Mordecai Kurz (Stanford University)

14:40-14:50 – Comment by Thomas Piketty, Co-director the World Inequality Lab

14:50-15:00 – Q&A with the audience

Overview

The lecture will be based on Mordecai Kurz’s latest book The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age (Columbia University Press, 2023), where he argues that since the 1980s, the United States has regressed to levels of economic inequality not seen since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. Kurz provides a pioneering analysis that quantifies technological market power and its impacts on inequality, innovation, and economic growth. The book also offers detailed proposals to address these inequalities, including restricting corporate mergers and acquisitions, reforming patent law, balancing power in the labor market, increasing taxation, promoting upward mobility, and stabilizing the middle class.

Mordecai Kurz

Mordecai Kurz is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Stanford University. His previous books include Public Investment, the Rate of Return, and Optimal Fiscal Policy (with Kenneth J. Arrow, 1970) and Endogenous Economic Fluctuations: Studies in the Theory of Rational Beliefs (1997), and he has published widely across many fields of economic theory.

Read more

• “How Capitalism Became a Threat to Democracy“, Project Syndicate, March 15, 2024
• “Market Power Is Permanent, and Technological Competition Does Not Remove It“, Project Syndicate, December 1, 2023