Pre-Order The Big Fix now!
Hi everyone,
It has been a while since my last post (how has 6 months gone by?), but I've been working hard on a new project that I'm excited to share with you!
As many of you know, I'm Canadian-American (I got my US citizenship around this time last year 🇺🇸), and have worked on anti-monopoly policy across both jurisdictions. In June of last year, the Director of McGill University's Max Bell Public Policy School (Chris Ragan), got in touch asking if I'd consider co-authoring a book on Canadian competition issues. The school had received an endowment to pick an author every year to write a book and do a series of lectures on a significant economic issue for Canada's future. The first lecturer was Andrew Leach, a notable climate professor and economist, who wrote: Between Doom and Denial: Facing Facts About Climate Change.
They wanted the second book to be about competition! While there are many fabulous books on monopolies and corporate power in the US, no real comparisons exist in Canada. So I was intrigued for a number of reasons. 1) My proposed co-author was Vass Bednar, a powerhouse of knowledge and puns, and a prolific public policy "provocateur" in Canada. We had worked together in the past, and I knew our forces combined could make writing a book in less than 1 year (mostly off the side of our desks) actually feasible! 2) Montreal is the best, and any excuse to go more often and eat all the yummy food, and 3) this felt like an opportunity to give back to my home country and contribute in a small way to the momentum of this policy area. It was also a chance to update, in writing, the thinking that gave rise to Jonathan Tepper's and my 2018 book, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition (a Financial Times best book that year).
Long story short, our book is here and available for pre-order (out everywhere, October 15)! I realize that most of my readers are likely not Canadian. But we hope that the trends and issues raised in this book are widely applicable to other jurisdictions. Here are a few chapter titles, to give you a flavor:
• Generative AI's Monopoly Problem
• Kings of Capital (detailing the rise of private equity + disappearing IPOs)
• Corporate Kayfabe–The Illusion of Rivalry (Note: kayfabe is a cool wrestling term, look it up!)
• Add to Cart—Trust (this chapter deals with deceptive marketing, the rise of counterfeit products, and deceptive tactics like shrinkflation)
We are also incredibly proud and grateful to have received amazing endorsements from prominent authors, economists, policy makers across the political spectrum, former CEOs, and many more. Here are just a few:
“Denise and Vass provide an insightful and highly readable array of contemporary stories that illuminate why you should care about competition policy.”
– Jim Balsillie, founder and chair of the Centre for International Governance Innovation and former co-CEO of Blackberry / RIM
"Required reading for Canadian policymakers, CEOs, and anybody else who wants to understand how our economy works, and what we need to do to improve our quality of life in the twenty-first century.”
– Benjamin Bergen, president of the Council of Canadian Innovators
“An essential primer to the most important economic issue facing Canadians and the world: will our lives be shaped by democratically accountable lawmakers sitting in open parliaments, or by corporate executives sitting in smoke-filled rooms?”
– Cory Doctorow, author of The Internet Con and How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism
“Hearn and Bednar provide in plain English for the non-specialized reader a com- prehensive overview of the ways in which lack of competitive pressure in markets deprives consumers of the opportunity to purchase the best goods and services at the best price. Most importantly the authors explain lucidly why policy to address the growing ‘everythingness’ of dominant companies will require a comprehensive effort of national, provincial, and local authorities that regulate market conduct and information provision. They argue forcefully that the promotion of competition and the fostering of innovation is a whole of government effort which requires continuing effort to reduce barriers to trade internationally and within Canada.”
– David Dodge, former governor of the Bank of Canada and deputy minister of Finance
“Canada sets an example in so many ways—but not when it comes to its tolerance of monopoly and high prices. This fascinating volume explains all the tricks of the trade and how and why Canada must do better.”
– Tim Wu, former special assistant to President Biden for Technology and Competition Policy, and architect of Biden’s executive order on promoting competition in the American economy
“I dare you to find two better narrators to guide you through the big economic issues of the day and—yay!—their solutions. Smart and sassy, readable and relatable, Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar hit it out of the park with The Big Fix.”
– Armine Yalnizyan, economist and Atkinson fellow on the Future of Work
Pre-Order The Big Fix now!
Historically, Canada has had one of the weakest competition policy regimes of any global north jurisdiction. Our law included significant loopholes that made it nearly impossible to go after market abuses. For this reason, Canada's Competition Bureau (the equivalent of the US's DOJ Antitrust Division or Federal Trade Commission) has NEVER successfully blocked a merger. But this is changing. In the last year and a half, the Canadian government has passed three significant rounds of legislative updates to our law to strengthen it and give the Bureau more firepower. Most significantly, these legislative updates were passed unanimously through Parliament – a remarkable sign of cross-party alignment on market power and competition issues.
Our book aims to build on this momentum, and demonstrate how Canada can now enshrine the values of open, fair markets across many different Ministries and policy areas.
We called the book The Big Fix for three reasons. The first is that companies increasingly use tactics to avoid competition and to create the illusion of rivalry, manipulating, if not fixing, markets in their favor. And in many industries, this illusion leads people to under-appreciate the magnitude of the problem. It’s the Big Fix of our time, and it affects us every day in large and small ways.
The second reason is that the typical prescription of “more competition” doesn’t work in a number of instances, as we’ll explain. Competition can be both pro-social and anti-social, and competition law represents decades of conversations about defining the boundaries of fair and unfair competition. While more competition is important, it doesn’t always solve power imbalances in the economy that skew the odds in favour of the largest companies. We need a truly Big Fix if we are going to tackle one of the central issues of our era, which leads to our third reason for the title. The Big Fix that we propose is holistic: it doesn’t tinker at the margins or settle for small wins. If we’re going to properly fix our markets so that they work for all Canadians, it’s going to take all of us, and a whole-of-government approach.
The book is officially out October 15, 2024 (pre-Order The Big Fix), and we'll be doing a series of lectures across Canada, so please mark your calendars (more events & details coming soon)!:
• Vancouver – October 15 @ UBC Robson Square
• Montreal – October 24 @ location TBC
• Toronto – October 29 @ TIFF Lightbox
• Ottawa – November 13 @ Perfect Books (invite-only)
Other stuff I've been up to that might be of interest to folks:
• I spoke with the incredible, iconoclastic economist Steve Keen back in May. You can watch the replay on YouTube.
• For the competition nerds here, I co-authored and released a paper through the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law on how the FTC and DOJ could revise their competitor collaboration guidelines to better meet today's market realities.
And for folks following my antitrust + sustainability work at Columbia, I've had the opportunity to speak at a number of events this year, including speaking with the Colorado Attorney General, Phil Weiser, on these issues as well as various global institutional investors and their clients. I keynoted the SHARE Investor Summit in Vancouver, Canada, spoke at the Oxford Antitrust Enforcer's Symposium in June, and spoke at the American Bar Association Spring Meeting in DC.
If you have questions, or if my Columbia colleagues and I can be helpful on issues related to ESG, sustainability, and antitrust, please be in touch.