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Page 121
in which I have no special competence. In consequence, this chapter is limited to a fairly cursory survey of some of the broader issues: the extent of monopoly, sources of monopoly, appropriate government policy, and the social responsibility of business and labor.
The Extent of Monopoly
There are three important areas of monopoly requiring separate consideration: monopoly in industry, monopoly in labor, and governmentally produced monopoly.
1. Monopoly in Industry The most important fact about enterprise monopoly is its relative unimportance from the point of view of the economy as a whole. There are some four million separate operating enterprises in the United States; some four hundred thousand new ones are born each year; a somewhat smaller number die each year. Nearly one fifth of the working population is self-employed. In almost any industry that one can mention, there are giants and pygmies side by side.
Beyond these general impressions, it is difficult to cite a satisfactory objective measure of the extent of monopoly and of competition. The main reason is one already noted: these concepts as used in economic theory are ideal constructs designed to analyze particular problems rather than to describe existing situations. As a result, there can be no clear-cut determination of whether a particular enterprise or industry is to be regarded as monopolistic or as competitive. The difficulty of assigning precise meanings to such terms leads to much misunderstanding. The same word is used to refer to different things, depending on the background of experience in terms of which the state of competition is judged. Perhaps the most striking example is the extent to which an American student will describe as monopolistic, arrangements that a European would regard as highly competitive. As a result, Europeans interpreting American literature and discussion in terms of the meaning attached to the terms competition and monopoly in Europe tend to believe that there is a much greater degree of monopoly in the United States than in fact exists.
A number of studies, particularly by G. Warren Nutter and

 
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