Barry C. Lynn

For the religious activist, see: Barry W. Lynn.

Barry C. Lynn is an American journalist and writer. He is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C., where he directs the Markets, Enterprise, and Resiliency Initiative. He has written extensively on globalization, economics, and politics for such publications ranging from The Financial Times and Forbes to Mother Jones and the Harvard Business Review.^[1]

Biography

Lynn was born in Miami, and is a graduate of Columbia University. He has been a reporter for the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse and worked as a correspondent in Peru, Venezuela, and the Caribbean. Prior to joining New America in 2001, he was the executive editor of Global Business, a monthly magazine targeted at the managers of multi-national enterprises.^[1] He has also worked in factories, construction, landscaping, retail, furniture moving, and as a truck driver. He lives in Washington with his wife and two sons.

Work

Lynn has written extensively on the risks of unfettered globalization and industrial interdependence. In End of the Line he examines how a deeply interconnected global industrial system undermines safety and freedom. His work shows how the relentless quest for efficiency, and practices like outsourcing to a single factory and “just-in-time” production, create an increasingly fragile system, where one isolated shock can crash entire industries. His thesis prefigured later attention given to supply chain disruptions, most recently prompted by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and floods in Thailand.

Lynn’s work also focuses on the effects of extreme concentration of political economic power. In Cornered he documents how radical consolidation has birthed present day monopolies that dominate and control virtually every major industry in America. Through reporting the experience of people and small businesses, he argues that these new monopolies are squelching innovation, degrading product quality and safety, and destabilizing vital industrial and financial systems. His work shows how from the American Revolution to the Second New Deal, Americans have traditionally resisted concentration of power and understood that its distribution is critical for freedom and democracy. He argues that the US must revive its antitrust laws to recover real open markets, resilient systems, and liberty.

Publications

Books

• End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation (2005) ISBN 0-385-51024-1
• Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (2010) ISBN 0-470-18638-0

Articles

• "The fragility that threatens the world's industrial systems" Financial Times, October 15, 2005
• "Wake up to the old-fashioned power of the new oligopolies" Financial Times, February 14, 2006
• "Save globalisation from radical global utopians" Financial Times, May 29, 2006
• "Breaking the chain: The antitrust case against Wal-Mart" Harper's Magazine, July 2006
• "Rules That Wilt the Free Market in British Groceries" Financial Times, April 5, 2007
• "How Detroit Went Bottom-Up" The American Prospect, September 19, 2009
• "Corporate giants have too much power" CNN, February 16, 2010
• "Let's Put Mom and Pop Back in Business" Washington Post, February 21, 2010
• "Who Broke America's Jobs Machine?" (co-authored with Phillip Longman) Washington Monthly, March/April 2010
• "The Real Enemy of Unions" Washington Monthly, May/June 2011
• "No Free Parking for Monopoly Players: Time to Revive Anti-Trust Law" The Nation, June 8, 2011

External links

• Publications of Barry Lynn
• U.S. News & World Report review of End of the Line August, 2005
• Wall Street Journal review of Cornered, March 2, 2010
• Irish Independent review of Cornered, March 20, 2010
• Barry Lynn on the global chain reaction triggered by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan

References