The Bigness Complex confronts head-on the myth that organizational giantism leads to economic efficiency and well-being in the modern age. On the contrary, it demonstrates how bigness undermines our economic productivity and progress, endangers our democratic freedoms, and exacerbates our economic problems and challenges.

This new edition has a thoroughly updated variety of issues, examples, and new developments, including government bailouts of the airline industry; regulation of biotechnology; the fiasco of recent electricity deregulation; and mergers and consolidations in oil, radio, and grocery retailing. The analysis is framed in the timeless context of American distrust of concentrations of power. The authors show how both the left and the right fail to address the central problem of power in formulating their diagnoses and recommendations. The book concludes with an alternative public philosophy as a viable guidepost for public policy toward business in a free-enterprise democracy.

The late Walter Adams was President and Distinguished Professor of Economics at

Michigan State University. James W. Brock is the Moeckel Professor of Economics at

Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Adams and Brock have also co-authored The

Tobacco Wars, The Structure of American Industry, Antitrust Economics on

Trial, Adam Smith Goes to Moscow, and Dangerous Pursuits: Mergers and

Acquisitions in the Age of Wall Street.