Tim Wu at The Chicago Humanities Festival

We live in an "oligopoly age" in which many industries are controlled by just a few firms—big banks, big pharma, big tech.

Bigness has concentrated not just economic but also political power in too few hands. It has become too much of a drain on the nation's economy, and too far a deviation from the type of open capitalism that has, at times, created broad-based wealth and promised a sense of opportunity to every generation. There is a good reason to believe that we once again face “The Curse of Bigness," in the phrase used by Justice Louis Brandeis, to describe the challenges confronting the United States a century ago.

In The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, Columbia law professor Tim Wu tells the story of what went wrong, and calls for recovering the lost tenets of trustbusters as part of a broader revival of American progressive ideas in a new age of extreme economic inequality. Join us as we celebrate the launch of The Curse of Bigness with the author. A short discussion will be followed by a Q&A and book signing. For further information on the project: Twitter: @ColumbiaGR Facebook: Columbia Global Reports