It is not often that a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist gives the keynote speech at a competition policy conference. But last week in Washington, I introduced PEN America president Ayad Akhtar before he gave the lunchtime address at a conference on monopoly policy sponsored by the Open Markets Institute.
The pairing wasn’t as random as it might seem. The narrator of Akhtar’s most recent book, Homeland Elegies, is a Pakistani immigrant whose family came to what they believed to be the land of opportunity, only to realise that America had turned, over time, into a country in which hyper-individualism had collided with the money culture. The result? A society in which it is easier to protect shareholder rights than civil rights.
The novel, read in book clubs across America, contains not only lengthy excursions into antitrust jurisprudence, but also critiques of financialisation and healthcare for profit. It also examines all the ways in which “protecting the consumer’s right to the ‘lowest price’ as a first principle has operated as the legitimising discourse of the takeover of the political process by big (and ever bigger) business”, as Akhtar put it. “In other words, our political order — by which I don’t just mean legislative — is increasingly defined by corporate thinking and interest.”