{"id":322987,"date":"2025-11-30T21:11:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T21:11:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/322987\/"},"modified":"2025-11-30T21:11:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T21:11:11","slug":"why-the-economy-has-that-weird-feeling-of-something-you-like-getting-worse-one-of-americas-top-legal-theorists-on-the-age-of-extraction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/322987\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the economy has that ‘weird feeling of something you like getting worse’: One of America’s top legal theorists on ‘the age of extraction’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tim Wu, the influential Columbia Law School professor<\/a> who previously served in the Biden administration, is back with a message: Modern American capitalism has devolved into a system defined by the accumulation of market power and \u201cextraction,\u201d generating a profound sense of \u201ceconomic resentment\u201d across the nation. <\/p>\n

Speaking to Fortune upon the release of his newest book, The Age of Extraction<\/a>, Wu connected the current political volatility to a widespread feeling that \u201cour system is not fair.\u201d He suggests this pervasive anger stems from individuals feeling \u201cout-powered, as opposed to out-competed,\u201d which creates far more resentment than losing in a fair fight.<\/p>\n

Wu defines the core problem as a shift in business goals: moving away from building \u201ca good product that people want to buy because it\u2019s good,\u201d toward models seeking to \u201cfind power over someone and suck as much as you can out of them.\u201d Wu agreed his take has many similarities to recent writings<\/a> from his old friend, Cory Doctorow<\/a>; even though Doctorow\u2019s argument is mainly about tech, he acknowledged they share much of the same DNA. \u201cI think that that is kind of an economy-wide problem. Everything kind of just creeps. It\u2019s that weird feeling of something you like becoming worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chalking it up to a \u201clack of discipline,\u201d Wu said too many companies let things drift in the modern age of extraction. Strong competitors, legal enforcement, and a company\u2019s employees can all stress a sense of discipline, he said, \u201cbut none of those are very strong right now in so many markets \u2026a lack of discipline lets firms get away with making their products and services worse.\u201d Zooming out a bit further, this trend challenges the fundamental idea of American progress, especially in the tech industry, which is supposed to be the \u201cinvention industry\u201d constantly driving improvement.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy understanding of America is that it\u2019s the place where things are supposed to get better,\u201d Wu said. Living in an age when so many things are getting worse instead \u201ccuts at the core of the idea of America, but also the tech industry [idea] of progress,\u201d he argued\u2014but he does see an unlikely solution.<\/p>\n

As a sports fan, Wu said there\u2019s a clear example of a market structure that has discipline, where things are not in fact getting worse, where things are not extracted. It\u2019s a good product that people want to buy because it\u2019s good: the National Football League. He said the NFL illustrates the importance of fair rules, with \u201caggressive rebalancing,\u201d achieved through mechanisms such as the market cap, the draft, and adjusted schedules. <\/p>\n

How the NFL could fix the economy<\/p>\n

While the NFL is still competitive and meritocratic, it ensures that even the worst team \u201chas some chance to get a great quarterback\u201d and become competitive again, like the Kansas City Chiefs, who have enjoyed historic success with their franchise players Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce. Teams from smaller markets like Kansas City routinely dominating those from larger markets, like New York, would be unthinkable in \u201cjust an economic game,\u201d Wu argued. In contrast, Wu points to Major League Baseball, which has been \u201cdistorted by out of control spending.\u201d This results in an \u201cabsurd\u201d mismatch of resources, where smaller teams are crippled by resource deficits, rather than poor play. (The big-market Los Angeles Dodgers, with the biggest payroll in baseball history<\/a>, just celebrated their second-straight World Series win.)<\/p>\n

The NFL\u2019s success serves as a model for how the U.S. economy should function. \u201cI\u2019m not a socialist,\u201d Wu told Fortune. \u201cIn some ways, I\u2019m here to try to not destroy capitalism, but return it to what it can be.\u201d In his new book, Wu writes about the \u201cextractors\u201d and the \u201cextracted\u201d in language that sounds similar to the K-shaped economy dominating headlines in 2025, a shorthand for an economy where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. \u201cI think it is closely linked,\u201d Wu said, adding it wasn\u2019t his intention to directly link them in his book.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we have moved in the direction of an economy where the focus of business models is the accumulation of market power and then extraction, which, by definition, almost by basic microeconomics is going to result in a lot of [upward] wealth redistribution.\u201d Wu added that he thinks many of the industries that used to provide a middle class or even upper middle class lifestyle \u201care being driven down in favor of a couple industries that have outsized returns,\u201d including concentrated middlemen, certain parts of finance, and tech platforms.<\/p>\n

If Americans love the NFL so much on their TV every Sunday, he argued, why not apply the same principles from the league to how we structure our society? After all, Wu points out, he\u2019s been right about some things before, to society\u2019s benefit.<\/p>\n

Net neutrality and attention<\/p>\n

A distinguished professor at Columbia University who The New York Times<\/a> described as \u201can architect of Biden\u2019s antitrust policy,\u201d Wu has not one but several big ideas to his credit. One is \u201cnet neutrality<\/a>,\u201d the concept authored by Wu over 20 years ago that internet service providers must be agnostic about what content flows through them. This was a clear victory, as the law is still on the books. Another is about \u201cthe attention economy,\u201d a thesis<\/a> and book (The Attention Merchants<\/a>) that Wu released roughly 10 years ago, sounding the alarm on how attention was turning into a commodity in the internet age and was increasingly exploited.<\/p>\n

Wu said he wants to be humble, but genuinely believes he was right about the attention economy a decade ago. \u201cMaybe it was sort of obvious,\u201d he said, but the resource of human attention becoming scarcer and more valuable and \u201ccompanies are very sophisticated at essentially harvesting this resource from us at a very low price.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a parent (his kids are 9 and 12), Wu said he notices \u201cpeople are much more sensitive\u201d about their children using attention-economy products and believes there has been a counter-movement to reclaim attention. He notes large language models are becoming popular in a very similar way and there\u2019s no advertising on them for now, so \u201cit\u2019s not like the problem has gone away and it\u2019s not as if we are able to get away from our phones. I just think it\u2019s better recognized.\u201d<\/p>\n

A dance with politics and the \u2018beer wars\u2019<\/p>\n

In his conversation with Fortune, Wu reflected on his time in the Biden White House, saying it was \u201can important and great experience,\u201d but he wishes they were able to do more on children\u2019s privacy issues as he believes 99% of Americans would support legislation in this area. Yet, it was \u201cimpossible to get a vote on anything, any issue\u201d when he worked in the White House. Congress \u201cdoesn\u2019t want to let things get to a vote,\u201d he said, attributing much of the gridlock to the fact that \u201cinfluence of big tech over politics has just gotten so strong.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked if he has any interest in working in government again, perhaps along his longtime friend Lina Khan<\/a> in Zohran Mamdani\u2019s mayoralty in New York, Wu only said he\u2019s \u201cvery supportive of the new mayor.\u201d He said he could get involved in politics in some fashion again, but is \u201cmuch more in a family mode\u201d these days. Wu has a perhaps surprisingly long history in public service, having worked in antitrust enforcement\u00a0at the Federal Trade Commission as well as working on competition policy for the National Economic Council during\u00a0the Obama administration. In 2014, Wu was a Democratic primary candidate for lieutenant governor of New York, where he first met Khan.<\/p>\n

Wu did get involved in some intra-left economics squabbles recently, as he took Khan\u2019s side of the debate on plans to reduce the price of hot dogs and beers at New York City sports stadiums. The \u201cbeer wars<\/a>\u201d erupted on Twitter<\/a>, with Wu and Khan on the side in favor of cutting prices, and Matt Yglesias and Jason Furman on the more centrist side, arguing for letting the free market set prices. Wu said it was a \u201cstrange battle\u201d and said there seems to be a tension on the left around economics that he doesn\u2019t fully understand, adding that he has worked productively alongside Furman in the past. In general, he said he thinks \u201cour politics is very angry, partially because of economic resentment \u2026 it gets expressed in strange ways and goes in all kinds of directions.\u201d Tying it back to his new book, he believes that in general, \u201cwe let things go a little too far\u201d and we \u201cjust kind of lost touch with the tradition of broad-based wealth that was the American way.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked about the uproar among the New York business community about Mamdani and the term \u201cdemocratic socialism,\u201d Wu said it has become a bit of an \u201cumbrella\u201d term, because \u201ca real socialist believes that all the means of production should be owned by the state\u201d and Mamdani\u2019s democratic socialists aren\u2019t exactly advocating that. He said maybe some on the left would like more direct ownership of public things, but it\u2019s more a mixture of that same \u201cwe\u2019ve gone too far\u201d feeling. Wu added that he personally feels most affiliated with Louis Brandeis, a judicial figure from the Progressive Movement who was influential in developing modern antitrust law and the \u201cright to privacy\u201d concept.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want to talk about America drifting towards something more like Communism, it is more in this idea of real, very active state involvement\u201d that you see in the Trump administration, which has, for instance, taken stakes in major U.S. companies such as Intel<\/a>. \u201cThat\u2019s actually more like socialism\u201d and what you see in a \u201ccommand economy,\u201d Wu said. He compared it to Stalinism or fascism under Mussolini, \u201cneither of which are the most flattering labels, I realize.\u201d It\u2019s also, of course, similar to Chinese Communism, Wu said.<\/p>\n

Wu said he hopes this doesn\u2019t come to pass. There could be an America where the idea of doing business is extraction\u2014trying to find power over someone and sucking out as much as possible\u2014and another, better way. \u201cI think we can do better. I\u2019m a big believer, frankly, in business. I think we need a return to like this idea you can reap what you sow, that your investments will get you somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tim Wu, the influential Columbia Law School professor who previously served in the Biden administration, is back with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":322988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[35858,223,28,101,2005,10766],"class_list":["post-322987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-antitrust","tag-books","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-york","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/322988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}