The End of Power Read Online Free

and small ones cannot get a foothold—all of these are situations where the barriers to power are high, at least for now. But some citadels can be stormed—either because their defenses are not as strong as they seem, because they are unprepared for new types of attackers, or, for that matter, because the treasures they protected have lost value in the first place. In such instances the trade routes now bypass them, and they are no longer of interest to marauding armies.
    For example, the founders of Google did not set out to erode the dominance of the New York Times or other powerful media companies, but that is in fact what they accomplished. Insurgents who use improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan, or bands of Somali pirates who use rickety boats and AK-47s to hijack large ships in the Gulf of Aden, are circumventing the barriers that ensured the dominance of technologically sophisticated armies and navies. The result has been not so much a shift in the power of such armies and navies as a challenge to the very nature of that power.
    Barriers to power can differentiate situations that look similar on the surface. A small group of firms might be able to control most of the market share in a particular industry because only they possess the required resources, an attractive product, or a unique technology. Alternatively, they might have successfully lobbied or paid off politicians to create rules and regulations that make it harder, or impossible, for rivals to enter the market. Proprietary technology, access to resources, regulatory protections, and a corrupt insider connection are four very different kinds of advantage. Obviously, power shifts occur when the control of certain scarce resources becomes more critical to competition in a given market, substitutes are found that make it less of a barrier for others, or a new technology makes it easier for many other competitors to enter the market.
    While such shifts represent a well-known idea in the world of business, this idea has been less frequently applied to politics and to rivalries between nation-states, churches, or philanthropists. Consider, for example, aparliamentary system in which a number of small parties have seats and may be involved in forming a governing coalition. Is there a threshold, as in Germany, such that a party needs to have earned 5 percent of the total national vote to be represented in parliament at all? Is there instead a rule whereby a party must score a minimum proportion of the vote in several different regions? Or look at the competition among top universities. Is accreditation difficult, or do employers and graduate schools no longer care as much about the accreditation of the schools whose graduates they recruit?
    Barriers to power might take the form of rules and regulations that prove easy or hard to rewrite or circumvent. They might take the form of costs—of key assets, resources, labor, marketing—that increase or go down. They might take the form of access to growth opportunities—new customers, workers, capital sources, religious believers. The details will vary by field. But as a rule of thumb, the more numerous and stringent the regulations, the higher the costs of replicating the incumbents’ advantages; and the more restricted or rare the key assets, the higher the barriers that prevent new players from gaining a toehold, let alone forging a sustained advantage for themselves.
T HE B LUEPRINT : E XPLAINING M ARKET P OWER
    The concept of barriers to power is rooted in economics. Specifically, I have adapted the idea of barriers to entry —an analytic construct that economists use to understand the distribution, behavior, and prospects of firms in an industry—and applied it to the distribution of power. It is fair to expand the concept this way: after all, the idea of barriers to entry is used in economics to explain a particular kind of power —market power.
    As we know, the ideal state