
Why US corporations are hoarding cash and not investing (Paul Krugman) - ScottBurson
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/opinion/robber-baron-recessions.html
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ScottBurson
This longer piece, linked to in the Krugman column, is also very interesting:
[http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1003.lynn-
lon...](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1003.lynn-longman.html)

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ScottBurson
Here's a quote from it:

 _In dozens of cases between 1945 and 1981, antitrust officials forced large
companies like AT &T, RCA, IBM, GE, and Xerox to make available, for free, the
technologies they had developed in-house or gathered through acquisition. Over
the thirty-seven years this policy was in place, American entrepreneurs gained
access to tens of thousands of ideas—some patented, some not—including the
technologies at the heart of the semiconductor. The effect was transformative.
In Inventing the Electronic Century, the industrial historian Alfred D.
Chandler Jr. argued that the explosive growth of Silicon Valley in subsequent
decades was largely set in motion by these policies and the "middle-level
bureaucrats" in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division who enforced them
in the field._

