Barry C. Lynn: All Publications, Events and Press

POSTPONED: The Monopolist Assault on Entrepreneurs

Communications — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:15:00 -0400

A New America Event
05/29/2008 - 3:15pm

This event has been postponed until further notice. We apologize for any inconvenience.

The yeoman tradition—in which the small property owner and the entrepreneur represent an American ideal—inspired many of the nation’s founders, Thomas Jefferson most notably. Yet today, deregulation and a lax interpretation of anti-trust law make it increasingly difficult for small businesses to even access local markets. Mega chains may be ruthlessly efficient in driving down prices, but their near-monopoly positions create tremendous barriers to entry and competition for the modern day yeoman. Meanwhile, corporate conglomeration in a range of fields limits career choices, opportunities and wages even among the professional classes.

Senior fellows Phil Longman, author of the recent New America white paper Yeoman’s Return: Small Scale Ownership and the Next Progressive Era, and Barry C. Lynn, author of Breaking the Chain: The Antitrust Case Against Wal-Mart (Harper's, July 2006), will provide an insightful look at the evolving fate of the iconic “self-made man” and discuss how the principles of the Democratic-Republican party, 200 years after it first came to dominate American politics, offer a roadmap for restoration of a true opportunity society.

America's Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony

Communications — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:00:00 -0400

A New America Event
03/12/2008 - 3:00pm

With the United States and China, who will rule whom? That's the central question of In the Jaws of the Dragon by Tokyo-based journalist and writer Eamonn Fingleton. His own answer is sobering. As American leaders fixate on the Middle East, China quietly consolidates both its geostrategic vision and its economic and military power. What is at stake is far more important than manufacturing jobs or the transparency of Sovereign Wealth Funds. It is a matter of which nation will control the global system America built, and the nations integrated into that system.

Fingleton has lived and worked in Asia since the mid 1980s, and he has covered international economics and business since the 1970s. The American ruling elite, he says, does not understand China, nor the nature of the Chinese government. Most members of the elite continue to believe - a la Tom Friedman - that liberal trade will liberalize China. But Fingleton writes that what is taking place is the exact opposite. "Globalization" has merely given Beijing the financial and institutional tools to get what it wants from America, when it wants.

Over the years, Fingleton has repeatedly proven a prescient observer of international economic trends. In the late 1980s he predicted the crash of the Japanese banking system and stock market. In the late 1990s he predicted the crash of the high-technology boom, and the subsequent shift of real power back to those who control production and supply. His articles have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Harvard Business Review, among others. In the Jaws of the Dragon is Fingleton's fourth major book on trans-Pacific industrial and trading relationships.

Join the New America Foundation and Eamonn Fingleton for a provocative and disturbing look at America's economic and political relationship with China, followed by a Q&A session moderated by Barry C. Lynn.

Trade Imbalance

Communications — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 07:15:00 -0400

A New America Event
10/05/2007 - 12:15pm

In the coming months, the U.S. Congress will vote up or down on trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, Peru, and Korea. These elected officials will not examine these agreements solely on their commercial or foreign policy benefits to the American people. They will also weigh whether or not each agreement advances particular human rights abroad. However, these Representatives proceed with little information about how trade agreements, and even trade per se, affect human rights at home or abroad. Although scholars, policymakers, and activists have long debated this relationship, in truth we know very little about it.

In the recently published book, Trade Imbalance, authors Susan Ariel Aaronson and Jamie M. Zimmerman shed much needed light on this complex issue. They use stories about frogs, chocolate, culture, tires and other topics to provide readers with new insights into the relationship between trade and human rights. They include the first study of how South Africa, Brazil, the United States, and the European Union struggle to coordinate trade and human rights objectives. They also look at how human rights issues are seeping into the WTO. Finally, Aaronson and Zimmerman also suggest ways in which policymakers can right the balance between their trade and human rights goals.

Susan Ariel Aaronson is Research Associate Professor at the George Washington University Graduate School of Business and the Elliott School of International Affairs. Jamie M. Zimmerman is Associate Director of the Global Assets Project, a joint venture of the Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation and the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. Previously, Aaronson and Zimmerman were colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise – Washington Center. Aaronson was Senior Fellow and Director of Globalization Studies, where Jamie Zimmerman was Associate Director.

Join the New America Foundation and the Financial Times for an engaging discussion on the role of human rights in trade policy. Following the presentation, FT correspondent Eoin Callan will lead a robust Q&A session.

Praise for Trade Imbalance

"Economists generally assert that negotiations over trade and human rights should be kept separate. But as Aaronson and Zimmerman demonstrate, governments haven't heeded that advice. Instead, states have used trade policy as a way of advancing such goals as labor rights, the abolition of slavery, and access to medicines. This book will force scholars to reconsider the fundamental question of why it is that countries pursue bilateral and multilateral trade agreements in the first place."
--Ethan B. Kapstein, Paul Dubrule Professor of Sustainable Development, INSEAD

"Anyone interested in the trade and human rights linkage will find this book to be a valuable resource."
-- Steve Charnovitz, George Washington University, School of Law

The Next Catastrophe

Communications — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 07:15:00 -0400

A New America Event
06/06/2007 - 12:15pm

Is America ready for the next September 11 or Hurricane Katrina? Is our nation really safer now than it was when Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center towers? Have the billions of dollars we spent on Homeland Security prepared our industrial and financial systems for real shocks? Have we even managed to identify what the real threats to our society actually are?

Charles Perrow is one of America’s preeminent experts on disasters and disaster preparedness, and his deeply disturbing answer to these questions is a resounding NO. In his new book, The Next Catastrophe, Perrow details how our politicians routinely transform human disasters into opportunities for profiteering and politicking. According to Perrow, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Yale, even the most well-meaning of efforts tend to result in wasteful and counterproductive bureaucracies rather than in deep reform of vulnerable and fragile systems. Ultimately, Perrow concludes that the most important tactic to significantly reduce the dangers we face is to reduce the size of our most vulnerable targets, and to reorganize our industrial and energy systems to make them more redundant and resilient.

The Next Catastrophe is the latest in a long line of books in which Perrow has examined how humans manage complex and tightly linked systems. These include the seminal work Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, and Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism. Perrow has worked as a consultant with the U.S. military, the White House, and the nuclear-power industry.

Join New America Foundation and Charles Perrow for a provocative, disturbing, but also hopeful look at how Americans perceive, prepare for, and respond to risk, followed by a Q&A session moderated by Barry C. Lynn.

New Statesman Cites Barry Lynn on Free Market, Grocery Sector

Communications — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 18:21:00 -0400

New America in the News:

Groceries were always the best illustration of the merits of free markets. How ridiculous it would be if we decided collectively - by annual ballot, say, or by entrusting the decision to some Whitehall bureaucrat - which fruits and vegetables the shops should stock and in what quantities. A system whereby competing retailers offer individual consumers a daily choice is obviously better. Yet we are close to driving the free market out of the grocery sector...

For example, as the all-party parliamentary group for small shops pointed out in a report last year (High Street Britain: 2015), retail is usually a good sector in which to start up your own business because the entry barriers are very low. Many budding entrepreneurs have used retail as a stepping stone to other sectors. An important form of self-help and enterprise is therefore disappearing. So is a source of innovation. Supermarkets now sell some organic food but I doubt they would have done so without the example of independent retailers.

Most notoriously, the supermarkets screw their suppliers. We sometimes forget that choice matters (or ought to matter) as much to us when we are selling as when we are buying. In the US, wrote Barry Lynn of the New America Foundation in Harper's Magazine last year, Wal-Mart doesn't just dictate price to its suppliers. It also dictates how they package their products, how they transport them and gather and process information about them. At a snap of a supermarket's fingers, a farmer may have to switch from one variety of cabbage to another. And where a supermarket has local dominance, anyone with retail skills to sell has to accept its wages and working conditions or do without a job...

For the complete article, please visit the New Statesman website.

To read Barry Lynn's article in Harper's, please click here.

Rules That Wilt the Free Market in British Groceries

Articles — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 18:27:00 -0400

Perhaps it is time to erect a new stone next to Adam Smith’s grave in Canongate Kirk, Edinburgh. Not to commemorate Smith, whose greatest monument is his masterwork, The Wealth of Nations. Rather, to mark the demise of the insitution Smith did so much to promote - the free market.

If you did not notice the free market’s passing, you were not alone. No television newscasts bemoaned the fact. The notice was hidden deep in a Competition Commission report on monopolisation of the grocery market by companies such as Tesco and Wal-Mart subsidiary Asda. The inquiry does not wrap up until… more

Why Economists Can't See the Economy

Articles — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 22:16:00 -0400

"The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to avoid being deceived by economists."-- Joan Robinson, Cambridge University

On page one of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith illustrates the central principle of his economics with an example taken from, in his words, a "very trifling manufacture": the making of pins. Smith goes to some effort to describe the process. "One man draws out the wire," he writes, "another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the… more

End of the Line

Communications — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 06:00:00 -0500

A New America Event
11/29/2006 - 12:00pm

At this California event, Barry Lynn, a New America Foundation senior fellow, discussed his ground-breaking book, End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation.

We are used to thinking about the effects of globalization and outsourcing in terms of winners and losers: how these trends harm certain classes of American workers or benefit consumers. Lynn goes beyond the stereotypical debate about whether this economic revolution is good or bad to expose the dangerous underside of our new global economic order in End of the Line.

At the event, Lynn explained how today’s economic system is a global industrial commons that is extremely fragile, and increasingly so. The real question Americans need to ask today is whether this production system is safe. Is it structured so we can count on it to provide us, given almost any foreseeable natural or political disaster, with the food and clothing and medicine we need to live? End of the Line makes clear that right now the answer is no. It is perhaps the single most devastating indictment of laissez faire economics in a generation, based on factual evidence gathered by one of the few reporters who understands the ways today’s global corporations really work.

Breaking the Chain

adminn — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 23:26:00 -0400

There is an undeniable beauty to laissez-faire theory, with its promise that by struggling against one another, by grasping and elbowing and shouting and shoving, we create efficiency and satisfaction and progress for all. This concept has shaped, at the most fundamental levels, how we understand and engineer our basic freedoms -- economic, political, and moral. Until recently, however, most politicians and economists accepted that freedom within the marketplace had to be limited, at least to some degree, by rules designed to ensure general economic and social outcomes. From Adam Smith onward, almost all the great preachers of laissez-faire… more

Risk, Ahoy!

Articles — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 16:20:02 -0400

It's so easy to forget the close calls. I was reminded of this while reading an article in a recent issue of The New Yorker, which looked back at one of the more terrifying international crises of recent years -- the near war between India and Pakistan in 2002. That event marked the first time since the Cold War that two nations threatened to launch nuclear weapons at one another, and to this day it's not clear either country has developed a realistic plan about how to manage their weapons responsibly. Even so, this danger is almost entirely ignored by… more

Globalisation Must be Saved from the Radical Global Utopians

Articles — Tue, 30 May 2006 16:20:01 -0400

Now may hardly seem the time to imagine a more global future, let alone do so with optimism. Most of us are hard pressed just to maintain the illusion that the present system is not breaking down, to deny with conviction what everyone knows -- that the grand trade liberalisation project is, at best, on life support.

It is only natural to think conservatively, even defensively, when witnessing the collapse of an empire. Few outside the US doubt that America's free-trade system, constructed with such care in the decades after the war, is crumbling fast. The proximate cause is… more

What Should USTech's Sourcing Strategy Be?

Articles — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Greg should consider himself lucky. The cozy relationship between USTech and TaiSource was speeding toward a crisis even before he hired Morris. But thanks to what he learned from that questionable decision, Greg now has an opportunity to fix USTech's sourcing strategy before disaster strikes.

USTech and TaiSource have become so interdependent that USTech must establish either a more formal alliance with the supplier or a more strictly defined arm's-length relationship. Given the distrust on both sides, the only real option is the latter. Greg can now choose to diversify USTech's ODM relationships; source directly in China and Taiwan,… more

Wake Up to the Old-Fashioned Power of the New Oligopolies

Articles — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

What will it take to wake us up to the ever-tightening grip of oligopolies over ever more of our global marketplaces? Even though their power increasingly warps our production systems, and our free market system, alarms are rare and fleeting.

The collapse of an overly consolidated US flu vaccine system two years ago did not set off any bells. Nor did the revelation, by experts studying the potential impact of an avian flu pandemic on commerce, of deep fragilities in our hyper-rationalised medical and food supply systems. The mega-merger of Procter & Gamble and Gillette last… more

The Fragility that Threatens the World's Industrial Systems

Articles — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Time and again, human beings have learned to build buffers into complex systems. We design compartments into our ships, circuit breakers into our electrical networks and minimum reserve requirements for our banks. Yet since the cold war era, we have done the exact opposite with our industrial system. Rather than conceive market-friendly methods to distribute risk and dampen shocks, we devoted ourselves to eliminating the bulkheads that have traditionally existed between nations and between companies. To evoke a more raw analogy, in our production system, we bulldozed all the levees flat.

As a result, we now live in a world… more

End of the Line

adminn — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 05:00:00 -0400

Selected reviews of End of the Line are featured below:

Publishers Weekly

Tuesday, August 16, 2005 The problem with globalized outsourcing, former Global Business executive editor Lynn warns, is that "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere," as when a 2003 earthquake in Taiwan halted semiconductor manufacturing for a week, negatively affecting American electronics firms. National security, he argues, is jeopardized by this "hyperspecialized and hyper-rigid production system" as well; for Lynn, until the NAFTA-izing Bill Clinton came along, our trade policy had been for two centuries designed to prevent such potential catastrophes. Lynn has a knack for… more

The Trade Row Over Aircraft is Missing the Point

Articles — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

The long-festering spat between Boeing and Airbus has been dumped back onto the World Trade Organisation in a fight that promises to be expensive, some say foolish. A more apt description might be "dangerously anachronistic". The twin revolutions of globalisation and outsourcing have so altered the business of manufacturing jetliners that the coming clash in Geneva is unlikely to benefit either company -- or, for that matter, citizens on either side of the Atlantic.

If the fight sounds familiar, it is because it has been going on for a long time. And both Brussels and Washington are still relying on… more

Is America Facing a Technology Innovation Crisis?

Communications — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 19:00:00 -0500

A New America Event
11/13/2003 - 12:11pm

According to Forrester Research, nearly 4,000 white-collar jobs are leaving the U.S. a week for low-cost locales. McKinsey & Co. forecast the U.S., Europe, and Japan combined lose 600,000 of these jobs a year. In the late 1990s, science and engineering accounted for 5% of U.S. undergraduate degrees; in China, they accounted for 73%. Intel Chairman Andy Grove recently posed the question, "Do we have the national will to take productive action? When the problem becomes obvious, it will be too late."

This roundtable explores whether the technolgy industry is at an innovation crossroads. Does offshore outsourcing pose a long-term threat to U.S. security? To industry's ability to innovate? What is the appropriate role of government? Should it strive merely for a level global playing field or go further?

Hydrogen's Dirty Secret

Articles — Thu, 01 May 2003 00:00:00 -0400

When President Bush unveiled his plans for a hydrogen-powered car in his State of the Union address in January, he proposed $1.2 billion in spending to develop a revolutionary automobile that will be "pollution-free." The new vehicle, he declared, will rely on "a simple chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen" to power a car "producing only water, not exhaust fumes." Within 20 years, the president vowed, fuel-cell cars will "make our air significantly cleaner, and our country much less dependent on foreign sources of oil."

By launching an ambitious program to develop what he calls the "Freedom Car," Bush seemed determined… more

Chaos and Constitution

Articles — Sat, 01 Feb 2003 00:00:00 -0500

You can buy a plastic-bound copy of the Venezuelan Constitution for 60 cents, a leather-clad copy for $3, a coffee-table edition for $5. Not that you really need a copy of your own, since someone standing near you on the subway in Caracas will have one in his pocket. Or you can always listen to one of the ongoing debates at a downtown park. "Look at this article," someone will shout, and a half dozen people will flip through the constitution's 35,000 words and 350 articles to find the pertinent passage. "Yes," someone else will cry out. "But this one… more

Trading With a Low-Wage Tiger

Articles — Sat, 01 Feb 2003 00:00:00 -0500

When Robert Mao describes the fantastic manufacturing opportunities his company sees in China, he speaks with mixed feelings. "For the first time in the modern era," he marvels, "we have an inexhaustible reservoir of good, trainable labor." But Mao, who as president and CEO of Nortel Networks China has worked in the region for 20 years, also worries about what that means for China's neighbors. For the foreseeable future, he says, almost all new investment by Nortel suppliers will go to China and not to other Asian countries. So, too, he expects, will most major investments by other global manufacturers.… more

Barry C. Lynn: All Publications, Events and Press

POSTPONED: The Monopolist Assault on Entrepreneurs

**This event has been postponed until further notice. We apologize for any inconvenience.**

America's Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony

Trade Imbalance

Praise for Trade Imbalance

The Next Catastrophe

New Statesman Cites Barry Lynn on Free Market, Grocery Sector

Rules That Wilt the Free Market in British Groceries

Why Economists Can't See the Economy

End of the Line

Breaking the Chain

Risk, Ahoy!

Globalisation Must be Saved from the Radical Global Utopians

What Should USTech's Sourcing Strategy Be?

Wake Up to the Old-Fashioned Power of the New Oligopolies

The Fragility that Threatens the World's Industrial Systems

End of the Line

The Trade Row Over Aircraft is Missing the Point

Is America Facing a Technology Innovation Crisis?

Hydrogen's Dirty Secret

Chaos and Constitution

Trading With a Low-Wage Tiger

This event has been postponed until further notice. We apologize for any inconvenience.