Against all expectations, competition is less and less fierce in the United States where the lobbying of large groups is very effective in creating situational rents.

Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft

No, competition is not a machine for crushing employees but a powerful mechanism for producing well-being and purchasing power. No, competition is not the law of the jungle or retaliation, and its virtues can only unfold if it is supervised by powerful and independent regulators. No, the United States has nothing to teach Europe about competition. On the contrary, for twenty years, it is the Old Continent that has put in place the most effective and proactive policies, while America has gradually allowed the monopolies to regain the hair of the beast. 


It will be difficult to find this winter more effective than Thomas Philippon's book in boosting the morale of those disappointed with the market, public action, and European construction.  


The consumers? They are undoubtedly better treated in Europe than in the United States. For twenty years, their purchasing power has increased more, in particular, because inflation has been much lower, and competition is not for nothing. A telephone and Internet bill thus costs two times less today in France than across the Atlantic.  


Except that twenty years ago, the situation was the opposite... It is almost like a novelist that Thomas Philippon, professor of economics at New York University, where he holds the Max L chair of finance Heine, tells us about this historic shift: how in the United States, regulators, intransigent for centuries, gradually let their guard down, assailed in particular by increasingly powerful and efficient lobbies and allowed monopolies to settle in many sectors, well beyond technologies and the Internet. And how, Europe, lagging behind for decades, became the champion of free markets, applying the rules that the United States was just abandoning.  


Competition, a growth factor

For the benefit of its consumers... but not only. Because there is no need, as is so often done, to oppose the consumer and the employee. If competition promotes purchasing power, it also promotes employment, investment and innovation, and the reduction of inequalities. With an efficiency that goes so far as to surprise the author himself: when you compare two countries, it is always in the one where the competition is the keenest that you live the best. Even more robust: in no sector, no country, and at no time has competition harmed innovation.

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