It is not often that a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist gives the keynote speech at a competition policy conference. But last week in Washington, I introduced PEN America president Ayad Akhtar before he gave the lunchtime address at a conference on monopoly policy sponsored by the Open Markets Institute.

The pairing wasn’t as random as it might seem. The narrator of Akhtar’s most recent book, Homeland Elegies, is a Pakistani immigrant whose family came to what they believed to be the land of opportunity, only to realise that America had turned, over time, into a country in which hyper-individualism had collided with the money culture. The result? A society in which it is easier to protect shareholder rights than civil rights.

Financial Times