Barry Lynn

Barry C. Lynn is an American economic scholar and director of the Open Markets Institute, widely credited with reviving structuralist antitrust thinking in the 21st century. His 2005 book The End of Liberty and subsequent work on corporate concentration demonstrated that American industry had undergone a radical consolidation across sectors — from agriculture to retail to media — producing supply chains so fragile that single-point failures could cascade across the entire economy. Lynn's research provided the empirical foundation for the Neo-Brandeisian movement's claim that concentration was not merely an efficiency outcome but a systemic threat to economic resilience and democratic governance.

Lynn's contribution is not merely descriptive. He showed that the Chicago School's efficiency framework was not just theoretically wrong but empirically contradicted by the structure of American industry itself. The question is whether structural remedies can be designed that do not replicate the inefficiencies they seek to correct.