trucks—heavy-duty machines used only for a shrinking set of tasks. Farhad Manjoo, “Steve Jobs Was Right: Smartphones and Tablets Killed the P.C.,” New York Times, November 13, 2019.
35. McCullough (2018, pp. 196–207).
36. Isaacson (2011, pp. 332–57).
37. Isaacson (2011, p. 361).
38. McCullough (2018, pp. 208–16).
39. Isaacson (2011, pp. 465–74); McCullough (2018, pp. 304–20). 40. Evans and Schmalensee (2016, p. 189).
41. Bresnahan, Greenstein, and Henderson (2012).
42. Greenstein (2015, pp. 371–91); McCullough (2018, pp. 227–37).
43. Greenstein (2015, p. 583). As in print newspapers and magazines—but unlike on radio
and television, where ads interrupt and supplant content—ads placed on the edges of search pages can be easily skipped, and thus impose at worst negligible cognitive costs on the reader even if the reader doesn’t value the ads (Anderson and Gabzewicz 2006, p. 586).
44. McCullough (2018, pp. 234–35).
45. In the pandemic year of 2020, some 30 million Chromebooks shipped, roughly 10 percent of the PC market. Maria Armental, “PC Sales Notch Strongest Growth in a Decade,” Wall Street Journal, January 11, 2021.
46. Baldwin (2021); Pon, Seppälä, and Kenney (2014).
47. Android is open source, so firms can create their own “forked” versions. But those that do so are banished from the world of Google Play Android. Because of government restrictions on the use of Google apps in China, major noncompliant forks have emerged there. Amazon
668 Notes to Epilogue
has also created a fork of Android for its Kindle e-readers and tablets. Google is increasingly moving functionality out of the standard OS and into the apps themselves, over which it has greater control (Baldwin 2021).
48. Nick Wingfield, “A $7 Billion Charge at Microsoft Leads to Its Largest Loss Ever,” New York Times, July 21, 2015.
49. Baldwin (2021, p. 4).
50. Langlois and Garzarelli (2008).
51. McCullough (2018, pp. 247–58).
52. Evans (2012, pp. 1226–31); McCullough (2018, pp. 258–64).
53. Akerlof (1970).
54. Milgrom, North, and Weingast (1990).
55. Evans, Hagiu, and Schmalensee (2008, pp. 124–25). Google Play also vets app developers.
But because system openness is part of Android’s competitive model, it reportedly vets develop- ers less rigorously than does Apple.
56. Evans and Schmalensee (2016, pp. 146–48); McCullough (2018, pp. 265–93). 57. Evans (2012, p. 1230).
58. McCullough (2018, pp. 217–21).
59. Lehr (2019).
60. Waldfogel (2017).
61. Joshua P. Friedlander, “Year-end 2020 RIAA Revenue Statistics,” Recording Industry Association of America, https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2020-Year-End -Music-Industry-Revenue-Report.pdf (accessed September 18, 2021).
62. This account of Airbnb and Uber follows Stone (2017).
63. In San Francisco, medallions are not tradeable, causing long queues for medallions akin to those for rent-controlled apartments (Stone 2017, p. 41).
64. Tullock (1975). It is also an illustration of Harold Demsetz’s point that barriers to entry are always property rights never market structures (Demsetz 1982). In this case the market is perfectly competitive—it has many small powerless participants—yet there is an inefficiently low level of industry output resulting from what is clearly a barrier to entry.
65. Holcombe (2019).
66. Brian M. Rosenthal, “‘They Were Conned’: How Reckless Loans Devastated a Genera- tion of Taxi Drivers,” New York Times, May 19, 2019. See also Winnie Hu, “Taxi Medallions, Once a Safe Investment, Now Drag Owners into Debt,” New York Times, September 10, 2017.
67. Josh Barro, “Under Pressure from Uber, Taxi Medallion Prices Are Plummeting,” New York Times, November 27, 2014.
68. Downs (1957). Schumpeter (1950, p. 261) recognized this even earlier. The voter, he ar- gued, is a “member of an unworkable committee, the committee of the whole nation, and this is why he expends less disciplined effort on mastering a political problem than he expends on a game of bridge.”
69. Stone (2017, pp. 311–15).
70. Cohen et al. (2016).
71. Preetika Rana, “Uber Says First Adjusted Profit Possible This Quarter,” Wall Street Jour-
nal, September 21, 2021. In March 2022, Uber reached an agreement to list all New York City taxis on its app, and both Uber and Lyft are moving to include taxis in other cities as well.
Notes to Epilogue 669
Preetika Rana, “Uber Reaches Deal to List All New York City Taxis on Its App,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2022.
72. Bronnenberg and Huang (2021). 73. Goolsbee and Klenow (2018). 74. Brynjolfsson et al. (2019).
75. Nordhaus (2004).
76. In 2015, Google created an M-form corporation called Alphabet to separate its lucrative existing businesses from its more speculative bets. In 2021, Facebook made a similar move, creat- ing Meta Platforms, Inc., which separated its existing businesses from a project to create a new platform based around virtual reality. Laura Forman and Dan Gallagher, “Facebook’s Four New Letters Won’t Spell Alphabet,” Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2021. I will continue to refer to these firms as Google and Facebook.
77. If the Saudi state oil company is excluded, these were also the largest in the world. The market caps subsequently went higher, inflated both by the real shift toward Internet businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic and by the extremely low interest rates the Fed has (once again) marshalled to fight the economic effects of the pandemic (Kroen, Liu, Mian and Sufi 2021).
78. Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin (2009).
79. Lahoti, Jayadev, and Reddy (2015, Figure 2).
80. Milanovic (2016, Figure 1.1).
81. Piketty and Saez (2014). Today, however, the incomes of the richest Americans come far
more from salaries and business income, and far less from capital income, than in the original Gilded Age (Atkinson, Piketty and Saez 2011).
82. Garfinkel and Smeeding (2015).
83. Elwell, Corinth, and Burkhauser (2021, Table 4.1).
84. In announcing the War on Poverty, Lyndon Johnson asserted in 1964 that 20 percent of
the American population was in poverty. By the absolute standard that implies, only 1.6 percent of Americans are now in poverty (Burkhauser, Corinth, Elwell, and Larrimore 2021).
85. Corinth, Meyer and Wu (2022).
