59 min listen
James Bessen, "The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation" (Yale UP, 2022)
James Bessen, "The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation" (Yale UP, 2022)
ratings:
Length:
45 minutes
Released:
Sep 29, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
In The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation (Yale UP, 2022), James Bessen explores the idea of how software can actually slow innovation. He makes the case that big companies in one industry after another have built "complex" software systems for managing their sales, marketing, operations and product offerings that are essentially moats against competitors. This mastery of software by major corporations, he argues, helps explain the "myth of disruptive innovation", rising economic concentration, increasing inequality and slowing innovation.
James Bessen, an economist and technologist, serves as Executive Director of the Technology & Policy Research Initiative at Boston University School of Law. He has also been a successful innovator and CEO of a software company. His profile in the New York Times is here.
Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo
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James Bessen, an economist and technologist, serves as Executive Director of the Technology & Policy Research Initiative at Boston University School of Law. He has also been a successful innovator and CEO of a software company. His profile in the New York Times is here.
Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Released:
Sep 29, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Joyce Appleby, “The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism” (Norton, 2010): Today everybody wants to be a capitalist, even Chinese communists. It would be easy to think, then, that capitalism is “natural,” that there is a little profit-seeker in each one of us just waiting to pop out. by New Books in Economic and Business History