Take his native Italy, where, he has argued, personal connections-not merit or competition-determine who wins in the marketplace. He believes investigative journalism is a major reason why American capitalism has historically been so successful compared to the “crony capitalist” systems that prevail elsewhere. Why invest in the next generation of muckraking? Because, in Zingales’ view, capitalism depends on it. For the reporters who participate, it’s a taste of the business school experience and a crash course in economic theory: they audit classes, meet scholars, and attend special events. In 2017, he launched the Stigler Center Journalists in Residence program. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State. Journalists and business school professors may seem like strange bedfellows, but not to Zingales, the faculty director of the George J. (Rockefeller, who referred to Tarbell as “Miss Tar Barrel,” became the nation’s first billionaire and spent the later years of his life giving away much of his fortune, including funds to found the University of Chicago.) In 1911, the Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of Standard Oil into 34 individual companies. Rockefeller pioneered market domination by undercutting prices across all areas of the oil business and buying up his competitors.įor a cohort of eight journalists on campus at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business last spring, Tarbell’s two-year, 19-article exposé on Standard Oil-widely considered to be the birth of investigative journalism-served as both inspiration and how-to guide.Ĭredited with exposing the deleterious effects of monopolies on society, as well as inspiring government efforts to counter them, Tarbell’s muckraking series “created the political demand for intervention,” Chicago Booth economist Luigi Zingales explained in an episode of his podcast Capitalisn’t. By 1880, his Standard Oil Company controlled about 90 percent of the oil produced in the United States, including its transport, refining and marketing. “At the very heyday of this confidence,” Tarbell went on, “a big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future.” But the days of bustling competition did not last. In the span of just 12 years, those once quiet Pennsylvania hills were overrun with hardy young entrepreneurs seeking to make their fortunes from a new product: petroleum. “One of the busiest corners of the globe at the opening of the year 1872 was a strip of Northwestern Pennsylvania, not over fifty miles long,” journalist Ida Tarbell wrote in 1902.

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