Three articles for future reference'

50 Years Ago an Economist Worried About Unchecked Corporate Power. Here’s What His Theory Got Wrong This is about John Kenneth Galbraith's 'The New Industrial State' :
"The implication of all this was clear: The ordinary American’s say in the economy was being hijacked by modern marketing, and their say in the democracy was being supplanted by large corporate needs.

It is a good theory. To be sure, it is built on a few assumptions that could easily be disputed. But the theory itself holds together. Unlike much of modern economics, it’s wonderfully simple to understand, and has sweeping implications. And I am sure some will have read to this point and wonder whether it didn’t actually all come true. The answer is that it didn’t, and let me explain why."

Noah Smith on The market power story:

"So, there's this story going around the econosphere, which says that the economy is being throttled by market power. I've sort of bought into this story. It certainly seems to be getting a lot of attention from top economists. Autor, Dorn, Katz, Patterson and van Reenen have blamed industrial concentration for the fall in labor's share of income. Now there's a new paper out by De Loecker and Eeckhout blaming monopoly power for much more than that - lower wages, lower labor force participation, slower migration, and slow GDP growth. The paper is getting plenty of attention.

That's a big set of allegations. Everyone knows that the U.S. economy has been looking anemic since the turn of the century, and now a growing chorus of papers by well-respected people is claiming that we've found the culprit. Monopoly power could potentially become Public Enemy #1 for economists, the way taxes and unions were in the 70s, and antitrust could become the new silver bullet policy.

With those kind of stakes, it was inevitable that pushback and skepticism would rev up - after all, you don't just let a big theory like that go unchallenged. "

Chris Dillow on A new capital? :

"What does capital do in the digital economy? This is the question posed by Phil in an important post. He says:

Capital is proving itself surplus to the requirements of social production and is therefore assuming ever more parasitical, rentier forms…How long can these parasitic relations last? When will Uber drivers call time on the very visible deductions made from their fares and replace the app with a cooperative effort? Is the time coming when Silicon Valley can no longer ponce off ad revenues generated from other people's content? 

I certainly agree that a feature of modern capital is parasitism. Perhaps the most egregious examples of this are not so much social media firms using the free content provided by its users to generate ad revenue for themselves but the way in which bookies and doorstep lenders (the latter with mixed success) use their low cost of capital to exploit the desperate.

However, I’m not so sure that labour can yet be as autonomous as Phil claims."

Perhaps at some stage, one has to think about all these together.