Holy Cross Professor Quoted in The New York Times on Antitrust Lessons From the Gilded Age

For decades, antitrust focused on the welfare of the consumer, but with rising fear over the influence of Big Tech companies, regulators are now trying to reverse years of conventional doctrine.

“There’s an old saying about how history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes, and we’re definitely in a rhyming mode,” Ed O’Donnell, associate professor of history at Holy Cross, told The New York Times in a recent interview.

O’Donnell, who specializes in 19th century U.S. urban history and is the author of “Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age,” believes a parallel can be made between The Gilded Age and the present day when it comes to antitrust concerns.

Similar to today, back in the 1890s “the rising fear of the day was that honest, hardworking people are being screwed and the system is rigged,” said O’Donnell. “Our worries about our technological future are sending us back to solutions in our industrial past.”

To read the full article, go to NYTimes.com.