This is the best summary I could come up with:

One of BIG’s first issues in 2019 was on Boeing, specifically how this once jewel of engineering prowess turned into a monopoly in the late 1990s, and destroyed its own capacity to build civilian aircraft in the process.

The story I told was well-known - in 2013 Boeing became a business school case study in the disastrous risk involved in offshoring - but had not yet been connected to the antitrust revival that I was chronicling.

But I found this note from an aerospace engineer written 21 years ago, titled ‘The Downfall of a Great American Airplane Company - An Insider’s Perspective‘, quite compelling, since the author accurately predicted what was to come.

I’ve been going over Glassdoor employee reviews of Boeing, and reading Reddit message boards, and one consensus seems to be that, like a lot of monopolies focused purely on shareholder returns, it’s a highly bureaucratic place where it can be difficult to get anything useful done.

Boeing sends a lot of staff into government, but the firm itself has multiple ex-high level political officials on its board, from the former chief of Naval operations John M. Richardson to the Former Inspector General of the U.S. Air Force Stayce D. Harris.

The Federal government has in the past nationalized railroads, the telephone company, various aerospace producers, and electric utilities, and it wouldn’t be uncommon throughout most of American history for it to step in here.

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