Is Overconsolidation a Threat to Democracy?

Last week, in part one of this series, we heard about the long and strange history of eyeglasses.

Neil HANDLEY: What we often see in early art are representations of the devil wearing spectacles.

And we learned how today, the $150 billion eyewear industry has one dominant player, a French-Italian conglomerate called EssilorLuxottica:

Ryan McDEVITT: They have full control over prices, and that’s just a license to mint money for them. 

We also heard how challengers, like Warby Parker, are trying to change the economics of the industry.

Neil BLUMENTHAL: When we had this idea to sell eyewear for a fraction of the cost, people loved that idea. 

Today on Freakonomics Radio, in part two of our series, we learn about the massive rise of myopia, the even-more massive rise of China as an eyeglass market, and what an eye doctor knows that you don’t know:

Harvey MOSCOT: I always tell people, you don’t compromise on parachutes or eyeglasses.

Oh yeah, one more thing: we ask whether intense consolidation in an industry like eyewear can be a threat to democracy itself.

Tim WU: If people feel that a tiny group of consolidated industries and their beneficiaries make all the money, it tends to create a lot of widespread anger.

The surprising economics of the eyeglass industry, part two, beginning now.

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Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia. He has also been, in both the Obama and Biden administrations, an advocate of stronger antitrust legislation. Wu argues that too many industries have just one or two dominant players, which can push up prices. This would include the eyeglass industry.

WU: It has to compare itself with other obscene margin-takers, like the pharmaceutical drug industry.  

The specific target of Wu’s criticism here is EssilorLuxottica, which controls a massive portion of the global industry, from eyeglass retailers to optical labs, from luxury partnerships to vision insurance.

WU: Some of the worst abuses of market power are in medical industries, where you can’t really go without the thing. You need glasses, right? If you want to see things that are far away. There is something particularly offensive when you take advantage of an essential need that people have.

DUBNER: To be fair, I’m extremely grateful to the whole history of science of eye care. Because if I were born in an era before eyeglasses, I would have been, like, Viking food. They would have chopped me up to feed to the horses or something. I would have been useless! So, if I have to pay $1,000 for a pair of glasses that let me see really well, I don’t love it, but I am grateful. I guess the story I’ve always told myself is, just think of all that technology that has gone into that.  

WU: Yeah, if Luxottica employed a team of crack scientists who had invented eyeglasses five years ago, I would be singing their praises and saying, “Wow, look, these guys invented this thing, we’ll give them a break.” I don’t know who invented the idea of a prism — but certainly they didn’t. That’s like giving American Airlines credit for inventing the airplane. They’re the one who’s throwing you in the middle seat and charging you for overhead baggage. They’re not the Wright brothers. I think you got the wrong guys.

One thing about the airline industry: their product has gotten cheaper. Adjusted for inflation, airline tickets have fallen by at least a third over the past 40 years. As for eyeglasses: there are some inexpensive ones out there — Zenni Optical sells glasses online for an average of $44 a pair; glasses at Warby Parker start at $95. But the industry average is around $350. What’s driving these prices? Let’s talk to someone who knows the details.

Harvey MOSCOT: A regular single-vision lens can start at $150. 

That is Harvey Moscot. He is an optometrist, and the fourth generation of his family to run the MOSCOT eyeglass chain, which started in New York.

Harvey MOSCOT: An eyeball-fixer upper, I like to consider myself. I worked in the family business my whole life, summers for beer money. So I was always introduced and exposed to the optical business. 

Zachary MOSCOT: When you grow up in a family business, it’s what all of the generations talk about at dinner. It’s a part of your culture. 

And that’s Zachary Moscot, Harvey’s son. He is the firm’s chief design officer. That covers the design of their glasses — as well as the MOSCOT shops, which have some distinctive touches.

Zachary MOSCOT: Walking into a MOSCOT shop, it’s like walking into my grandmother’s living room. I don’t know if I can re-create the smell, but it certainly — 

DUBNER: Would you want to recreate the smell?

Zachary MOSCOT: I’m not going to answer that, but it’s certainly a warm feeling. There’s knickknacks, there’s random items at the the cashier, a little bunny rabbit holding a business card. Things that were collected by my grandfather when he would bring it home, and my grandmother said, “That’s not staying here, bring it back to the shop!” And that became the esthetic of our brand.

Harvey MOSCOT: The story starts out in 1899, when my great-grandfather, Hyman, who I’m named after, Harvey, came to America. The classic story of coming to America to pursue your dreams, and escape oppression in Eastern Europe at the time. He was an optician from the old country, and set up his wares on the Lower East Side, Orchard Street, and sold ready-made glasses from a pushcart. And then his son Sol was born in America in 1910, and Sol was pretty entrepreneurial, and they set up a brick and mortar shop. And we sat on the corner of Orchard and Delancey for 78 years. My dad followed his father into the business as an optician. They took their craft seriously. They loved opticianry and they loved taking care of clientele and customers.  

The MOSCOT esthetic today is old-world New York with a dash of nouveau cool.

Zachary MOSCOT: We are at the — I would say, the lower end of the high-end segment. We’re really positioned as a fashion brand that, of course, offers medical functions and the expertise of opticians. But, you know, we’re really positioning ourselves in the luxury-brands side of things.

The names of the frames at MOSCOT are memorable: the Boychik, the Frankie, the Nebb. Their best-selling frame, worn by David Beckham and Johnny Depp and Rashida Jones, is called the Lemtosh. I asked where that name came from.

Zachary MOSCOT: It was actually a made-up family word, kind of like a Yiddish slang that they would use when picking on one another.

Harvey MOSCOT: “You’re such a lemtosh.”

Zachary MOSCOT: “Stop being a lemtosh.”

Harvey MOSCOT: We never take ourselves too seriously, Stephen, and we like to have fun. And these were just words that were used in the family that I heard growing up.

DUBNER: So what is it about the Lemtosh that makes it universally appropriate or so widely appropriate, at least? Can you describe whether it’s the shape, the textures, the way it sits — just what is it about that frame?

Zachary MOSCOT: It’s the perfect balance of square and round. It is not perfectly round. It is not perfectly square. Because of that shape, it inadvertently fits super well on different types of noses — or, as we call in the industry, bridges. 

DUBNER: What are you wearing right now, Harvey? I mean, glasses-wise. 

Harvey MOSCOT: I am wearing my Lemtosh in a champagne color, which we call flesh. 

The fact is, while speaking to the Moscots, I too was wearing a pair of Lemtosh frames. I’ve been a MOSCOT customer for a few years now, and that’s one reason I wanted to hear from them. I started buying my glasses at MOSCOT not because of how the frames look — although I do like them. I wound up there because the glasses I was getting at other places just didn’t work very well. The lenses, I mean — they were a little imprecise, or had too small of a sweet spot; they scratched too easily. I now told Harvey Moscot my eyeglass history, and asked him to walk me through the pricing.

Harvey MOSCOT: I don’t want to get too technical, but —

DUBNER: No, I want the technical!

Harvey MOSCOT: Well, we have to start with, are you wearing progressives?

DUBNER: I am, yes.

Harvey MOSCOT: And is your prescription over a minus-four?

DUBNER: Yes.

Harvey MOSCOT: Sounds like you’re pretty nearsighted. Highly myopic prescriptions with high astigmatic corrections, a lot of competitors have trouble with these more complex prescriptions that we take pride in providing, and we’re comfortable doing, and our licensed personnel understand. Do you have prism? 

DUBNER: Yes. So once I get into that fairly complicated lens — and also, let’s say I want my lens to be nice and thin because I don’t want it to look like I’m looking through the bottom of a Coke bottle, what does that lens cost? 

Harvey MOSCOT: You can add $100, $200 for higher indexes, which is just increased density of the material that makes the lens thinner. You check all the boxes for a very complicated patient and customer that MOSCOT loves to serve. So you’re probably upwards of $1,000. 

DUBNER: Yes, I am, yup. And now, what would you say to someone who hears this and maybe who doesn’t wear glasses yet, who might once they hit 40 or whatnot, and say, “A thousand dollars for a pair of glasses? Come on, that’s absurd.”

Harvey MOSCOT: Well, usually before 40, you don’t need progressive, so it won’t be that expensive. But if you’re over 40, I would say, “You have two eyes. You want the best possible vision you can get. Vision is a precious sense. You don’t compromise on parachutes or eyeglasses.”

The MOSCOT brand has been growing, especially over the past decade. They have more than two dozen shops around the world — many in the U.S. but also in Japan, South Korea, and spread around Europe. Compared to EssilorLuxottica, they are a minnow. And for a long time, they didn’t even make their own lenses.

Harvey MOSCOT: It was the one piece of the puzzle that we hadn’t solved. I personally had done everything in the optical business, from opticianry, optometry, to working with frames, but we would purchase our lenses from various lens vendors, the Essilors of the world. 

DUBNER: In what form were they? Are they purchased finished, essentially? Or are they kind of like a hockey puck that you grind down? 

Harvey MOSCOT: They’re called finished blanks. You can buy lenses finished, and then you just edge them locally in your lab, which means cutting them to the frame, proper size, and all of that. 

DUBNER: The degree of magnification is already set, you’re saying? 

Harvey MOSCOT: Yeah, the prescription is ground by surfacing equipment that grinds into the surface of the lens, the front and back surface, so that the prescription is accurate. 

But a couple years ago, MOSCOT took a page out of EssilorLuxottica’s playbook by incorporating a bit of vertical integration. Instead of buying lenses from a supplier, MOSCOT started to make their own.

Harvey MOSCOT: It was something that we wanted to migrate to, and focus on, and learn about. 

DUBNER: How come?

Harvey MOSCOT: Because at the end of the day, prices were rising. Costs continue to rise. We don’t sacrifice on quality, and we would never, for example, buy less expensive screws or wire templates. I think it speaks to the fact that we’re control freaks, and not being able to control certain aspects of what you do was bothersome to me. Relying on others to do your work is always problematic for us. So now we surface our own lenses, we don’t have to buy them from the Essilors of the world. And we actually grind the prescription in and control it. But it wasn’t about profit. It was more about service levels in our shops, and controlling the quality of the lenses that we were producing, understanding how they were made, modifying them in a way that would optimize vision for our customers. 

DUBNER: So you opened this lab just a few years ago, and this is on Long Island, correct? 

Harvey MOSCOT: Correct. Yes. We started it from scratch. I’m very gray as a result of it.  

DUBNER: So, you’re investing in your lens operation. You’re investing in expanding around the world, couple dozen shops. Have you taken any outside money, or is this all MOSCOT reinvestment? 

Harvey MOSCOT: The latter. Credit facilities from banks, and our own money. 

DUBNER: I don’t want to sound like your Depression-era great-grandfather, but does it keep you up at night sometimes? 

Harvey MOSCOT: Sure. We expand the brand thoughtfully. We do things for the right reasons, not just for hitting targets and numbers. So that’s why it’s taken us 109 years to have 27 shops.

I told Harvey Moscot about the complaints that Tim Wu had raised: that eyeglass firms didn’t invent eyeglass technology any more than American Airlines invented the airplane. And that technologies usually get cheaper over time. So why aren’t eyeglasses getting cheaper?

Harvey MOSCOT: The eyewear business requires licensed personnel on the retail level. It’s a unique specialty retail industry. So, licensed opticians are licensed by state. You need to be licensed in order to open an optical shop in New York, California, most of the states. Doctors of Optometry are the vision specialists that provide prescriptions along with eye health exams. So the cost structures are very different. Doctors aren’t making what a Gap employee’s making selling apparel. So when you combine all these costs and laboratory costs and specialized skill costs, it’s very different. And to just apply that to like a straight retail profit analysis would be a little bit inaccurate.

DUBNER: So you think Tim Wu is misunderstanding the complexity of the industry a little bit? 

Harvey MOSCOT: Most people do. 

I went back to the eyeglass-industry analyst we heard from in the first part of this series, Cédric Rossi, who works for a European investment bank. He is an expert in EssilorLuxottica but also knows a great deal about Warby Parker and every other eyewear brand I could name. I asked Rossi if he’s familiar with MOSCOT. 

Cedric ROSSI: Yeah, a little bit. It’s starting to expand in Europe. It was a brand that was almost nonexistent outside New York, if I’m correct. 

DUBNER: Yes, you’re right.

ROSSI: Even in the U.S., actually, it was not very well known until now. The owners are starting to realize that there is some opportunities not only in the U.S. but also internationally. MOSCOT is a very interesting brand to differentiate yourself from competition. And that’s why I think optical retailers in Europe are offering MOSCOT into the stores to attract new customers that are used to buying Ray-Ban and Oakley for years and years and now they also want to discover new brands. 

DUBNER: If you were MOSCOT and you’re trying to take a relatively small New York retro-fashion brand that’s not inexpensive, where would you look to expand, particularly in the next five or 10 years? 

ROSSI: When you are a U.S. brand, the obvious international markets are the Anglo-Saxon markets. It’s very convenient to start with the U.K., Australia, New Zealand. The consumer behavior is pretty much similar to what you are having in the U.S. And then Europe is also a market which is quite relevant for MOSCOT, also because people are highly attracted by fashion. Then in Asia. But it’s a tough market, because you have a lot of intermediaries. Sometimes in Japan, to exist, you need to be distributed by department store chains. In South Korea, same story.

DUBNER: Why is that? Why can’t I have a standalone eyeglass store there? 

ROSSI: That’s how the market is structured. 

DUBNER: Is it because of the medical component, or no? 

ROSSI: No, no, no, no, even for luxury companies, when they started to expand in Japan or in South Korea in the ‘80s, they were distributed into department store chains. Because it was really hard to just have a freestanding store in a very popular street. 

DUBNER: Is that because South Korea and Japan, let’s say, want to constrain foreign direct investment? They don’t want firms to come in and basically manage the real estate? They want to keep the real estate management more local for taxes and ownership and so on? 

ROSSI: That could be part of the answer. But the other reason is that department store chains own a big chunk of the fashion market. And so if you want to address a new market, it’s more convenient to be distributed into department stores because you rely on the distribution that is already well established.

Rossi says that everyone in the eyeglass industry is looking to Asia-Pacific for the next big growth spurt. He says the most attractive target — especially to a global giant like EssilorLuxottica — is China.

ROSSI: China is only 4 to 5 percent of Essilor sales. As a comparison, China already accounts for more than 20 or 25 percent of some luxury groups, like Hermès or Moncler, for instance. In the optical industry, it’s quite difficult to penetrate in emerging markets because to exist you need to have ophthalmologists and opticians.

DUBNER: So does EssilorLuxottica or any other eyewear manufacturer actually fund the education or the business practices of optometrists in these countries? 

ROSSI: Exactly.

DUBNER: They do? Ah.

ROSSI: Exactly. EssilorLuxottica opened a few schools to train opticians. Because they know that if they want to develop their business in those countries, they also need to help the local governments create, from scratch, the eyewear market. And so that’s why the Chinese government was highly supportive to the initiatives implemented by EssilorLuxottica at that time, is because, you know, the welfare state does not exist in China. And so if they have some Western companies helping to create the local eyewear market, they were highly supportive to these initiatives. 

DUBNER: Does EssilorLuxottica see that as a cost center or a profit center? They’re charging tuition or are they subsidizing? Or somewhere in the middle?

ROSSI: I would say it’s even more than that, it’s an investment for the long-term growth.

That makes sense, doesn’t it — that EssilorLuxottica would be willing to invest in schools to train Chinese opticians? Because the Chinese eyeglass market is growing fast and it’s growing differently. Coming up:

LIU: In China, I do see the commercial side moving too quickly.

A new treatment for myopia is big business in China right now. And EssilorLuxottica has positioned itself, once again, to take advantage.

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Maria Liu is a professor and researcher in the optometry school at the University of California, Berkeley. She, like me and many, many, many other people, has myopia — also known as nearsightedness.

LIU: I’m fully convinced, at least for my own nearsightedness, this is heavily driven by my early introduction of pretty intense academic stress.

And just how intense was her academic stress?

LIU: I skipped two years in primary school, one year in middle school, and one year in high school.

Liu grew up in China, and was diagnosed with myopia at age 13. She got a medical degree in ophthalmology, and practiced there for several years before moving to the U.S., where she acquired several more degrees: a doctor of optometry, an M.B.A., a master’s in public health, and a Ph.D. For many years, Liu says, myopia was thought to be a purely genetic condition. But she was of the school that thought otherwise, that it can also be driven by environmental factors, like long stretches of reading or other close-up work, or too much time focused on screens, or not getting enough sunlight. Here’s one piece of evidence in her argument that genetics aren’t the only driver: she is the only nearsighted person in her family. Here’s another piece of evidence: the rate of myopia, around the world, has been going bonkers over the past few decades.

LIU: We know for any common condition, if you see a drastic change in the disease prevalence, this cannot be explained by the human genetic mutation, because human genetic makeup simply do not mutate at this rate. 

In the U.S., 42 percent of the population has myopia; in the 1970s, the rate was just 25 percent. Several countries in Asia — including China, Singapore, and Japan — have myopia rates of 80 to 90 percent. In Seoul, South Korea, 96.5 percent of 19-year-old men have myopia.

LIU: Not only we’re seeing a very rapid increase in the overall prevalence, we’re also seeing a rapid change in terms of the age of onset. We’re seeing kids started developing myopia at a younger and younger age. This is very concerning because the earlier the age of onset, the faster the progression.

As infants, our eyeballs grow to a round shape. Myopia occurs when the eyeball elongates past the round shape, to more of an oval. The environmental argument says that this elongation is the eye’s way of adapting to the demand of focusing on something close to your face. A book, maybe — or, perhaps more likely, a smartphone or a computer screen. It is now estimated that 30 percent of the global population has myopia, and researchers expect that number to hit 50 percent by 2050. Maria Liu thought that something should be done about that. So, at Berkeley, she started the Myopia Control Clinic.

LIU: When I was trying to start the clinic back in 2013, our previous clinical director was not very convinced that, number one, myopia is even controllable, and number two, a commercial potential for this type of service. So I volunteered my Sundays to get the clinic started just to really show that, yes, we have a huge demand for this kind of service. And yes, this is evidence-based practice, not some voodoo.

And it isn’t just a matter of seeing better. Myopia, left untreated, can lead to a variety of severe eye conditions. There are treatments to help slow the progression of myopia, including eye drops, contact lenses, and surgery. But there is a newer, perhaps more promising treatment.

LIU: The use of the novel spectacles. 

The novel spectacle is a pair of glasses designed to slow the elongation of the eyeball. The lens includes thousands of micro-dots that diffuse the light that hits the eye.

LIU: Novel spectacles will become in the future, in my personal opinion, the first-line treatment globally for progressive myopia. Unfortunately, this is the type of treatment that has not been approved by U.S. F.D.A. So we don’t have such treatment available in our clinic yet. But in China, novel spectacles based on those micro-lens technology are becoming the first-line defense for myopia control. 

And the Chinese market for novel spectacles is booming. Liu sees this first-hand in her practice in California.

LIU: Not only Chinese families going back to China and getting those glasses, but many families fly to Canada. Canada offers a couple of those devices or designs already. I’ve had multiple patient families flying to Canada specifically just to get those glasses. 

But Liu is concerned that some of these novel spectacles won’t do what people are hoping they’ll do.

LIU: To my knowledge, there are over 200 different designs of those novel spectacles, specifically for myopia control. Out of these 200-plus designs, there are about 10 percent of them that actually underwent any sort of clinical testing. In China, I do see the commercial side is moving too quickly. But in the rest of the world, all of these major players are playing a vital role in advancing the research side for us to better understand and better manage myopia. 

One of those major players helping advance the research is, as you may have guessed, EssilorLuxottica.

LIU: They’re one of the major manufacturers that invested a lot in clinical testing. The sample size, the rigorousness of the clinical study designs, are very, very different. We’ve seen some designs being tested with a sample size of 30. But Essilor has pretty good clinical data, not only in terms of the years of observation, but also the diversity of the children being recruited for the study. 

As an investment for EssilorLuxottica, this makes a lot of sense. The management of myopia is already big business, and will be getting much bigger.

LIU: This is going to be the next major wave in either revenue- boosting or profit-boosting. The retail price range for novel spectacles can be anywhere from a couple of hundred dollars up to 1,500 U.S. dollars.  

EssilorLuxottica’s model is called the Stellest.

LIU: Because of their upfront investment in R&D and clinical testing, Essilor Stellest definitely is on the higher price range. 

There’s another design, in the U.S., that’s currently making its way through the F.D.A.’s approval process. It’s called a Diffusion Optics Technology lens, or DOT. It’s a joint venture between the American firm CooperVision and EssilorLuxottica.

LIU: Interestingly, the two designs — the Stellest versus the DOT design — are based on very different design principles. And so they are not just a copycat of one another. So it’s good to see novel spectacle industry offering designs based on different principles, so that in case a patient is a non-responder to one design, we may be able to try a totally different design rather than trying another copycat. 

And how does Liu feel about the relatively high cost of novel spectacles?

LIU: So the question is, do I see a high price of these novel spectacles justifiable? I would say yes and no. The yes part is, to manage pediatric myopia, even just simply with glasses, it takes a lot more chair time for the practitioners to explain why we’re prescribing those devices, how frequent we need to see your child back. And, there are a lot more auxiliary testing that’s required to accurately evaluate the safety and the efficacy of their treatment. In the U.S, we’re able to charge more for the service fee. But in China, there is no way that doctors can charge for their chair time. So, all of the time they spend in patient and parent education, in making sure these devices are properly used, are built into the overall cost of the lenses. In China market, a lot of the manufacturers are still very profit-driven. It’s not evidence-based, and it’s causing confusion more than helping the advancement. 

And how about the U.S. market?

LIU: We’ve had patients asking for novel spectacles on a daily basis. So it’s whoever is doing the most heavy lifting, being the first product approved in the U.S. market, certainly deserve to have the momentum, at least for the first two or three years.

And a lot of that heavy lifting has been done by EssilorLuxottica.

LIU: I really respect their effort in trying to help on the more basic research side, and not just something that’s immediately translatable to a commercial profit. 

And so, on balance, Maria Liu believes that EssilorLuxottica is a force for good in the fight against myopia, using the billions of dollars they earn selling Prada- and Chanel-branded glasses, by selling Ray-Bans and Oakleys, to invest in new optical treatments. But again, we are living through an era of capitalism where consolidation is the norm; so is it a problem that one player in the eyeglass industry has so much global leverage? Tim Wu says: yes, and not just for the reasons you may think. That’s coming up.

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As we’ve noted throughout this series, the French-Italian eyewear firm EssilorLuxottica has a dominant position in the global industry. Just last week, they bought the streetwear brand Supreme, which doesn’t even make eyeglasses — at least not yet. They were also reported to be in talks with Meta, the parent company of Facebook, that would have the software giant taking on a minority stake in EssilorLuxottica. Those two firms have already partnered on a pair of Ray-Ban smart glasses, Ray-Ban being a property that EssilorLuxottica bought in 1999 and turned into the biggest eyewear brand in the world. So: EssilorLuxottica is very big, and getting bigger. This is the kind of thing that makes Tim Wu nervous. He is the Columbia University legal scholar who has spent time in two presidential administrations. In 2018, he published a book called The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. I went back to Wu for a final word.

DUBNER: So you argue that corporate or industrial concentration can lead to a variety of bad outcomes, but especially bad political outcomes, including extreme nationalism, even fascism. Give me an example of what you mean by that. 

WU: I think the real road to serfdom often goes through unmanaged aggregations of private power. And what I mean by that is, if you have no active anti-monopoly policy, if people feel that a tiny group of consolidated industries and their beneficiaries make all the money, it tends to create a lot of widespread anger, particularly if there’s an economic crash. I think our best example is the 1930s, where there was a ton of anger, obviously, after the crash of the world’s economies. Countries weathered it in different ways. But, you know, most famously in Germany, this widespread economic discontent fed into the hands of a certain leader who I don’t always like to mention. But obviously, the Nazi Party rose during that period on the backs of it. I think you see this across history, these aggregations of economic wealth and power, big crashes leading to the rise of a populist. We’ve had, obviously, a taste of that ourselves, over the last 10 years or so. So, I don’t think we’re entirely exempt from these tendencies. 

DUBNER: You write that “excessive concentration of economic power will breed anti-democratic political pressures.” I could understand you saying they “could breed” those pressures, but “will breed”? Do you really feel there is an inevitable connection between that kind of economic concentration and bad political outcomes? 

WU: I think it depends on the critical question of how the democratic government deals with the inequality and inequities. “Will” might be a strong word in that sentence, which I predict is from my introduction. But I think the more nuanced view is, if there’s a democratic failure, if people feel that they haven’t done anything, or worse, are facilitating unfairness in the economy, then the demand rises for the strong man who can really do what the people want. I studied the messaging of all these figures who come to power, it’s always like, “You have this democracy, but they don’t really serve you. You need someone who has a direct line to the people, and that’s me.” I read a lot of Hugo Chavez’s speeches. I’ve read the speeches of our former president, or heard them. I’ve read the speeches in the 1930s. It is basically the same — usually coupled with some identity politics and other sweeteners.

DUBNER: I mean, the American situation is not as drastic as Weimar Germany certainly — at least not yet. And hopefully never will be. But we have already been seeing the impact of consolidation, in the form of corporate capture or crony capitalism, whatever you want to call it, over the past 20 or 30 years. It strikes me that this has had a pretty significant cost for American society.

WU: Yeah, I think it is a significant cost. And it may ultimately be measured in the threat to democracy, but also measured in the economic well-being of many people. If you spend any time near Congress, you realize that they will never really take a stand against a powerful industry. I mean, in the last 20 years, you can count on the fingers of one hand the times they’ve done something that industry really doesn’t like. And that was, you know, including after a major economic crash. I agree, we’re not obviously where the 1930s are, but in some ways we’re a more stable country. Other countries are already flipped. I mean, I don’t know what Hungary is going to be like, or many other countries all across Central America. But, you know, if you haven’t noticed, authoritarianism, dictatorship is on the rise. And I think it’s almost always put on the back of, “Well, the democracy failed.” But yes, it’s a huge cost to the American situation to have corporate control of government.

DUBNER: Do you think that the eyeglass industry is important enough to worry about consolidation posing an actual danger to democracy?

WU: I wouldn’t put it that way. I’d put it in combination with a lot of other frustrations that people feel. The eyeglass industry is a somewhat small but potent symbol of what happens when you allow corporate consolidation to get out of control. Obviously, it’s not the largest industry in the country and it’s not Google or Amazon. But it is literally in your face or on your face. It’s kind of a test case of an industry which has been allowed to buy most of its competitors. Luxottica has been allowed to vertically integrate itself, both in the manufacture of lenses and in retail and also insurance, and therefore, find itself in a market position where it can regularly charge margins that would make even Apple Computers jealous. 

What do you think of Tim Wu’s argument, that the kind of dominance exercised by EssilorLuxottica is a threat to democracy? Or what do you think about anything else you heard in this series? I’d love to hear from you; our email is radio@freakonomics.com.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levey. Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Aboagye Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmin Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Julie Kanfer, Lyric Bowditch, Neal Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilley, Theo Jacobs, and Zack Lapinski; special thanks this week to Jon Schnaars and Ellen Frankman. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; our composer is Luis Guerra.