Lecture by Mordecai Kurz

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.