The Literati Celebrate as AAI Wins National Book Prize: Antitrust Transition Report Takes Non-Fiction Category

4/1/2009

 The American Antitrust Institute won the National Book Award for non-fiction with The Next Antitrust Agenda, its transition report on competition policy. Accepting the award, Editor-in-Chief Albert A. Foer spoke of “the dark journey that antitrust activists in this country have been on” since the coronation in Washington of the Chicago School.  He described the latter as “a group of perennial contenders for the fiction award whose single-minded pursuit of the great white whale they call Economic Man has finally run aground.”

“Progressive Antitrust has emerged from the valley of the shadow of death,” he said.

The publisher acknowledged that it was unusual for a print-on-demand book to gain national literary recognition, “especially when sales can be counted on two hands, make that one hand if we exclude Foer’s family and the AAI’s directors.”  The primary distributor, an Internet bookseller, commented only that when the AAI posted its report on its own website, it smelled a free-rider problem.

The Next Antitrust Agenda was perhaps the most unusual of the evening’s nominated books in that it was in the only category - non-fiction treatment of competition policy - that had only a single nominee.  

A close reading of The Next Antitrust Agenda text reveals soaring metaphors, breath-taking irony, and a remarkable ability to manipulate data to support a point.  As described in a review in The New Republic, “One can hardly tell that this was written by a committee, so moving is the prose. The most telling precedent is probably the King James Version of the Bible.”

The awards dinner changed its venue this year to the grand Greek revival ballroom at Cipriani Wall Street, a building that formerly housed both the New York Stock Exchange and the headquarters of the National City Bank.  “Pretty soon all banks will be restaurants,” joked one celebrant.  The otherwise dismal mood of the evening was established by the master of ceremonies, Robert Bork, who invoked the spirit of Thomas Malthus in a discourse he titled “In praise of free markets: how price signals will provide food for the hungry.”  Bork described the award to the AAI as “paradoxical.”

The American Antitrust Institute is an independent non-profit research, education, and advocacy organization.  Its annual April 1 pronouncements should generally be taken with a grain of salt.