Category: Monopolization

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Inframarginalism Monopolization Regulation

Confusing Scarcity with Monopoly: 1803 Edition

Proposed regulations would read New York’s law against price gouging to police gouging by small firms less strictly than gouging by big firms. I’ve argued that this confuses scarcity with monopoly.

Price gouging is the exploitation of natural scarcity to charge higher prices. Monopoly is the creation of artificial scarcity in order to charge higher prices. Big firms have the power to create artificial scarcity. But all firms can equally take advantage of natural scarcity to rip the public off. So there’s no good reason to apply a more lenient price gouging standard to small firms.

It turns out that New York Attorney General Letitia James is not the first person to get the distinction between natural and artificial scarcity wrong.

Hapsburg Austria did too.

According to a book by David J. Gerber, an 1803 statute invalidated cartel agreements “to prevent merchants from profiting from shortages caused by the Napoleonic wars, particularly in necessities such as food” (p. 53).

The law’s authors don’t seem to have reflected that the point of a cartel is to agree on output reductions and thereby to create an artificial shortage. If the Napoleonic wars have created the shortage for you, then you don’t need to form a cartel to create one.

You just raise prices.

An anti-cartel law is therefore not going to be effective at keeping prices down in wartime. Or anytime prices are driven up by natural scarcity.

It is an amazing but true fact that antimonopoly policy won’t solve every economic problem. But it does seem to have the notable property of enabling us to remake every economic mistake.

Categories
Inframarginalism Monopolization Regulation

The Counterproductive Antimonopolism in New York’s Proposed Price Gouging Rules

In the modern age, we have trouble taking ideas seriously. We prefer to think in terms of dumb mechanism. We need oil for energy. It is in limited supply. Therefore we fight over it. Therefore we have conflict in the Middle East, which has a lot of oil. We apply this sort of economic logic to everything.

The view that ideas determine social behavior seems, by contrast, wishy washy. Does anyone need an idea in the way he needs energy and hence oil to live? Why would two groups that are otherwise well fed and well clothed fight over a figment of the mind?

To the extent that we credit ideas with power, we do so only by seeing them as snare and delusion—weapons in our quest for physical resources. Ideas are spin. They are the Viceroy butterfly’s colors, which mimic those of the bitter-tasting Monarch, warding off predators. Ideas are psyops, nothing more.

The ancients didn’t have this problem. Ideas, for them, were quite obviously everything, which is why people got worked up about religious dogma, as when the greens and the blues came to blows over the question whether Jesus was mostly human or mostly god. (We still do occasionally get violent over religion today, but we see that as a shame and a throwback.)

As I have argued before, the irony of our modern disdain for the power of ideas is that one of our greatest modern inventions—the computer—is an object lesson in the importance of ideas relative to physical mechanisms. No one questions the importance of software. No one questions its influence over the behavior of our machines.

And yet we are somehow certain that our own software—ideas—is mere epiphenomenon.

Antimonopolism as Mere Idea

So it is that when I point out to progressives that antimonopolism is bad for the movement because it leads, ultimately, to a vindication of the justice of the free market, I am told not to worry because antimonopolism is just good progressive psyops. Yes, I am told, free markets are themselves engines of inequality, but being an antimonopolist isn’t the same thing as being a free marketer.

Instead, I am told, antimonopolism is a way of affirming that business interests are the enemy. It’s a way of marshaling support for government intervention. And that is all. Once progressives have ridden a wave of antimonopoly sentiment into power, I am told, they will be free to achieve progressive goals however they want, and that may or may not include more markets and more competition.

This view of antimonopoly as psyops has been most on display in progressive calls to use antitrust to fight inflation. So far as I know, a century of progressive economics had never taken the position that inflation is caused by monopolization or that antitrust might be a useful remedy.

Keynes, for example, thought inflation’s flip side—deflation—had little to do with market structure. He thought Roosevelt’s first New Deal, which was about using cartelization of markets to fight deflation, was a mistake. He invented macroeconomics because microeconomics—tinkering with market structure—was a dead end. It stands to reason that, if he thought deflation wasn’t a problem of market structure, he didn’t think inflation was either.

Progressive economists no doubt understand that the link between inflation and monopolization is tenuous at best. And yet here, for example, was Paul Krugman writing a year ago when this debate was flaring:

Give Biden and his people a break on their antitrust crusade. It won’t do any harm. It won’t get in the way of the big stuff, which is mostly outside Biden’s control in any case. At worst, administration officials will be using inflation as an excuse to do things they should be doing in any case. And they might even have a marginal impact on inflation itself.

Paul Krugman, Why Are Progressives Hating on Antitrust?, N.Y. Times (Jan. 18, 2022).

In other words, arguing that inflation is an antitrust problem is good psyops, allowing progressives to leverage concern about inflation to achieve an unrelated agenda.

Well, there are costs to this kind of instrumental use of ideas—costs that arise because, at the end of the day, ideas aren’t just weapons for striking the other side. They are the software that governs the behavior of those who harbor them. If you hold onto ideas when they’re no good, you are going to do the wrong thing.

When you run bad software, the computer does bad things.

The New York Price Gouging Regulations

The peril of harboring bad ideas is reflected in the rather peculiar interpretation of New York’s new price gouging law proposed by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

The law itself is a good one. It prohibits “unconscionably excessive” pricing during any “abnormal disruption” of a market for a good or service that is “vital and necessary for the . . . welfare of consumers”.

The language is capacious enough to allow New York to institute generalized price controls to reign in supply-chain-driven inflation, including today’s inflation. After all, a supply chain disruption is an “abnormal” disruption. And all goods are, by definition, necessary to the “welfare of consumers.”

But only if the Attorney General interprets the law that way. And here is where the power of bad ideas rears its head.

As the Attorney General acknowledges, half a dozen states—including such conservative climes as Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana—consider any increase in the price of covered necessities during a time of emergency to be presumptive price gouging. The price of gas can go up by a penny or ten dollars—either way, the burden is on the seller to prove that it is not price gouging.

The New York Attorney General decided, however, to take a different tack. Instead of applying the presumption to any amount of price increase by any firm, the Attorney General decided to apply it only to any amount of price increase by firms having either a 30% market share or competing in a market with five or fewer “significant competitors.” In all other cases, only a price increase in excess of 10% will trigger the presumption of price gouging.

That’s right, New York’s price gouging presumption is actually going to be narrower than Mississippi’s, because it only applies to big firms.

What gives?

Answer: bad software.

Whether they genuinely believe in antimonopolism, or think it is mere psyops, progressives have antimonopolism on the brain. Every economic problem appears to them to be a problem of monopoly. And every solution appears to them again to be a solution to a monopoly problem.

They do not see a statute that prohibits the charging of high prices as an opportunity to redistribute wealth in areas of economic life that antimonopoly policy cannot touch. Instead, they see it as an invitation to extend antimonopoly ideology into new areas.

In their minds, making such a connection actually broadens the statute, by tying it to what they are sure is the root cause of all economic injustice.

Except it isn’t. And they end up narrowing the statute instead.

So they take a statute that could be interpreted presumptively to ban all above-cost pricing attributable to supply chain disruption and use it instead presumptively to ban only above-cost pricing by big firms.

Price Gouging Is about Scarcity, Not Monopoly (and Yes, Those Are Two Different Things)

The pity of using a market concentration requirement to limit a great price gouging law is that price gouging really has zilch do to with monopoly.

Price gouging is, instead, about scarcity. Or one might say that monopoly is about artificial scarcity whereas price gouging is about the exploitation of natural scarcity.

We fear the monopolist because, in the absence of competition, the monopolist can restrict output and raise price without losing market share.

By contrast, we hate price gouging because it involves taking advantage of an involuntary restriction in supply.

When demand for food spikes before a hurricane, the public knows that supermarkets don’t have the inventory to meet demand. But the public also knows that the supermarkets originally expected to sell the inventory that they do have at normal prices. Those eggs were already on the shelves before the impending hurricane was announced. When the supermarkets raise prices, it is therefore obvious to the public that the surcharge is pure profit. That’s what makes the public mad and gives rise to price gouging laws. The manufacturing of a voluntary shortage plays no role here. No one thinks the supermarket is holding back eggs—or choosing not to order more.

Monopoly is famine while grain rots in silos. Price gouging is your neighbor demanding your house in exchange for a slice of bread—after lightning striking the silos.

That’s why price gouging statutes kick into gear only during an emergency—or, as in the case of New York’s law, during a period of “abnormal disruption” of markets. A monopolist’s decision voluntarily to restrict output and jack up prices is plenty evil, but one thing it isn’t is the sort of supply chain disruption that triggers a price gouging statute.

Confusing Scarcity with Monopoly

So what is a market concentration requirement doing in regulations implementing a price gouging statute?

The Attorney General relies on a passage in the price gouging law that identifies “an exercise of unfair leverage” as a factor in determining whether a firms has engaged in price gouging. But the phrase “unfair leverage” could just as easily refer to (natural) scarcity power as it could to monopoly power.

The Attorney General’s comments shed more light on her rationale. They explain that “firms in concentrated markets pose a special risk of price gouging because they can use their pricing power in conjunction with an abnormal market disruption to unfairly raise prices.”

This seems to articulate a category mistake. She has confused scarcity power with monopoly power.

The pricing power upon which price gouging is based is scarcity power. It is the power that arises because an act of god has eliminated part of the supply that would otherwise exist in the market. The pricing power enjoyed by “firms in concentrated markets” is not (natural) scarcity power. It’s monopoly power (artificial scarcity)—the power voluntarily to restrict supply.

A firm in a concentrated market can use its monopoly power whenever it wants, including during an “abnormal market disruption.” But whenever the firm chooses to use it, the firm isn’t using (natural) scarcity power to raise prices. It’s using monopoly power to raise prices.

If, thanks to the abnormal market disruption, the firm is able to raise prices higher than the firm otherwise might, then that extra increment is price gouging due to (natural) scarcity power. But any price increase that the firm would be able to bring about without the aid of the market disruption is due to an artificial restriction in supply and remains an exercise of monopoly power.

So it makes little sense to say that firms with monopoly power pose a “special risk” during periods of market disruption because they can use their monopoly power “in conjunction” with their scarcity power to raise prices. Firms with monopoly power pose the same risk that all firms pose during periods of disruption: the risk that they will use the additional power conferred on them by disruption-triggered scarcity further to raise prices.

If we worry that (natural) scarcity is going to tempt a monopolist to raise prices we should be equally worried that it will tempt a non-monopolist to raise prices: (natural) scarcity gives both firms the exact same kind of power—the power to exploit scarcity to raise prices.

Non-Monopoly Price Gougers Probably Do More Harm

Indeed, one would expect that the harm that a firm that lacks monopoly power can do by exploiting scarcity would generally be greater than the harm that a monopolist can do by exploiting (natural) scarcity because, before the disruption, the monopolist will already have artificially restricted output to try to raise prices to the most profitable extent.

If a monopolist has already artificially restricted supply to the most profitable extent, any additional involuntary restriction caused by the disruption may be unprofitable for the monopolist and the monopolist may, therefore, choose not to exploit it by raising prices further.

As some have long suggested, the first increase in price above costs is always the most harmful to consumers, precisely because when price equals cost, output is at a maximum and consumers reap the greatest benefit from production. They therefore have the most to lose. Subsequent price increases play out over progressively lower sales volumes, inflicting smaller and smaller amounts of harm.

But what kind of firms are induced by an abnormal market disruption to make a first increase in price above costs?

Answer: non-monopolists.

Firms in hypercompetitive markets start out with prices at or near costs before an abnormal market disruption gives them power to price gouge.

Monopolists facing abnormal disruptions have already raised their prices above costs long ago, when they first acquired their monopoly position. To the extent that they increase prices due to a market disruption, that will be far from the first increase in their prices above costs.

Disruptions Operate at the Level of Markets, Not Individual Firms, So Price Gouging Is Not Worse In Concentrated Markets

The Attorney General seems to think that because a monopolist has a large market share relative to a non-monopolist, any price increase by the monopolist will tend to cause more harm because it will apply to a higher volume of sales. She writes that large firms “have an outsized role in price setting.”

This is the sort of mistake that comes from thinking in terms of firms instead of markets.

A market disruption does not enable price gouging by striking a single firm. If a single firm’s output is restricted but no restriction is placed on the market as a whole, other firms in the market will bring more inventory to market to offset the loss of the firm’s output and no firm will have the opportunity to raise prices.

Instead, a market disruption enables price gouging by striking the entire market. If the output of the market as a whole is restricted, then restrictions on the output of some firms won’t be made up by increased sales by other firms. As a result—and this is key—all firms in the market, and not just the firms that have suffered a restriction in output, will be able to raise prices.

That’s because the higher prices are a rationing mechanism: they allocate the restricted market supply to the consumers who have the highest willingness to pay for it.

If any firm in the market doesn’t raise prices, consumers will all try to buy from that one firm. But because there isn’t enough supply in the market to satisfy them all, that one firm won’t have enough to satisfy them all either. The firm will sell the same volume as the firm would have sold at the higher prices. But the firm will earn less profit. So the firm will prefer to just charge the higher prices.

That’s why only market-level disruptions enable price gouging.

What this means is that a supply disruption that is concentrated in a large firm doesn’t affect more consumers than a supply disruption that hits smaller firms instead. Regardless where the disruption is felt, all prices, charged by all firms in the market, rise—so long, that is, as the disruption is a market-level event in the sense that other participants in the market are unable instantaneously to make up for the reduction in the firm’s supply.

And, as I pointed out above, in markets with large numbers of small, hypercompetitive firms, those price increases are likely to be more harmful precisely because prices are likely to start out lower than in concentrated markets.

One must, therefore, scratch one’s head at the Attorney General’s further observation that “the profit maximizing choice for a smaller competitor in an industry with [a larger] seller will often be to match the larger company’s price,” as if that establishes that price gouging is more severe in markets that have larger competitors.

When industry supply is restricted, the profit maximizing choice for a smaller competitor will be to raise price to match smaller competitors’ price increases, as well. All firms, regardless of size, will find it profit-maximizing to raise price in order to ration the industry’s limited output.

The point of a rule against price gouging is to prevent the market from using high prices to ration access to goods in short supply. The rule effectively requires the market to ration based on the principle of first-come-first-served instead.

Price gouging enforcers target only a small subset of firms in any given market for enforcement. But the goal of the a rule against price gouging is not, ultimately, to regulate the conduct of individual firms but rather to get the market price down to cost. Enforcement against individual firms is meant to have a deterrent effect on the pricing behavior of all firms in the market.

While targeting the biggest firms for enforcement might send a stronger warning to the market than targeting a smaller firm, prosecutors do not need a regulation making it easier to bring cases against big firms in order to pursue such a strategy. Indeed, such a regulation makes it harder for them to bring cases in markets in which there are no big firms.

Does Plenty Really Make Firms More Likely to Collude?

The Attorney General’s theory seems to be that market disruptions enhance monopoly power, enabling a monopoly to leverage scarcity to increase prices in response to a market disruption to a greater extent than could a non-monopolist.

The Attorney General seems to have in mind that market disruptions facilitate collusion. “[I]t may be easier for big actors to coordinate price hikes during an inflationary period, even without direct communication,” she writes.

One would, of course, expect that firms in concentrated markets that are prone to tacit collusion would be able to raise prices after a market disruption. The disruption by definition reduces the amount of output in the industry in the short term, as discussed above.

That allows the firms in the market to raise prices. But such price increases are due to the increased scarcity of output, not to the collusion.

In order for the collusion to be responsible for the price increase, output would have to fall further. The firms would need to engage in collusion that enables them voluntarily to restrict supply above and beyond both the involuntary restrictions created by the market disruption and any voluntary restrictions that the firms were capable of impose absent the disruption.

Presumably the argument is that the impetus to raise prices independently that is created by the supply disruption puts firms in the frame of mind required for them further to restrict supply and raise prices in tacit collusion with other firms.

That’s a pretty slim psychological reed upon which to hang a theory of harm. And one can easily imagine alternative psychologies.

Plenty tends to make us self-involved and egomaniacal. Hardship, if not too great, makes us generous and cooperative. It would seem to follow that the profit opportunities created by a market disruption should undermine cooperation between firms, rather than promote it.

I don’t know if this story is any more likely to be true than the one that the Attorney General seems to favor. The point is that psychological arguments of this sort do not provide a strong basis for carving out special treatment for large firms under a price gouging rule.

More Confusion of Scarcity with Monopoly

The only other argument the Attorney General makes for special treatment reprises the Attorney General’s confusion of scarcity and monopoly power.

The Attorney General argues that

the risk of firms taking advantage of an abnormal disruption may be greater where certain market characteristics reduce the likelihood of new entry—for example, where supply chains are disrupted or key inputs are scarce or where high concentration makes investment less attractive in a particular market. . . . Incumbents are insulated from the credible threat of new competition to discipline prices during abnormal market disruptions.

The Attorney General seems not to understand what a “disruption” is. It is, well, a disruption. Supply is destroyed. Or, equivalently, it is insufficient to meet a surging demand. By definition, there can be no entry. If there were entry by other firms into the market, then supply would not be insufficient anymore!

It follows that the extent to which before the disruption the market is already protected against entry due to the deterrent effect created by high concentration is irrelevant.

If such a deterrent existed before the disruption, and firms took advantage of it, then output would already have been artificially restricted in advance of the disruption. The disruption may destroy additional supply, and firms may raise prices in response, but that destruction won’t be due to market concentration but instead to the disruption.

To be sure, if the market were less concentrated and there were no concommitant entry deterrent, then prices in the market would be lower over the period of the disruption. And, moreover, the extent of the price increase created by the disruption might be different—either greater or lesser depending on the shape of the demand curve.

But that increase would still be attributable to scarcity and not to monopoly. And the ability of firms to enter the market to eliminate the scarcity would be controlled by the nature of the disruption and not any deterrent power wielded by incumbent firms.

The disruption destroys production that already existed notwithstanding the incumbents’ monopoly power. It follows that this output could not otherwise have been precluded through incumbent firms’ deterrent power—otherwise it would not have been there to be destroyed by the disruption.

Anyway, Small Amounts of Harm Are Small Amounts of Harm, Whether the Perpetrator Could Do More Harm or Not

But suppose the Attorney General were right that monopolists cause more harm through price gouging. Would it make sense to treat any price increase by a monopolist as presumptively unlawful but only increases by non-monopolists in excess of 10% as presumptively unlawful?

Of course not.

That’s like saying that it should be battery if a semi bends your fender but it should not be battery if a Prius bends your fender.

Harm is harm whether it’s inflicted by someone who could have done you a lot more harm or by someone who could only have done you a little more harm. A 5% increase in price above cost is a harm to consumers, whether that 5% markup is charged by a firm that could have, under some circumstances, charged you $100 more or only a dollar more.

A Lesson in the Perils of Antimonopolism

Antimonopoly framing may appeal to progressives because they are pushing back against two generations of market fetishism in economics. The framing lets progressives assert that markets aren’t free without having to go to the trouble of rejecting markets in the abstract.

That might feel like a powerful move.

First, it’s true: there’s a lot of monopolization in the economy.

Second, it means progressives don’t need to get into theoretical battles about the virtue of markets in the abstract.

But because antimonopolism sidesteps the theoretical problem of the market, it’s a compromise, not a power play. And a bad play at that.

In order to score points on means antimonopolists concede ends. To curry support for government intervention in business they concede that the end of intervention should be (truly) free markets.

But progressives have known for more than a century that the free market is the problem, not just in practice but in its abstract, idealized form. There’s no guarantee that really, truly, perfectly competitive markets will distribute wealth fairly. Instead, they arbitrarily distribute wealth to those who happen to own relatively productive resources or who happen to place a relatively high value on what they consume.

As David Ricardo pointed out, if you happen to own land having relatively good soil, you will earn a profit, because the price of agricultural produce needs to be high enough to cover the higher cost of tilling less fertile land. Your costs—including any reward needed to induce you to make your land more fertile—are lower, so you will generate revenues in excess of costs. That excess isn’t necessary to keep you in the market or to fertilize your soil. It’s a pure distribution of wealth based on the arbitrary fact that someone else in the market doesn’t have costs as low as your own.

Indeed, as Thomas Piketty has pointed out, the source of the explosion of inequality in recent decades has nothing to do with “market imperfection[s]” like monopolization. It has to do with markets.

There’s no way to divorce the gains progressives make on the means from the losses they suffer on the ends. If you succeed at convincing Americans that every market is monopolized, then Americans’ response is going to be: deconcentrate markets.

It’s not going to be to use every means available, including tax and transfer and price regulation, to redistribute wealth.

But, more importantly in the context of the New York price gouging law, the habit of proving market concentration in order to appease conservative priors regarding the benefits of markets can take on a life of its own.

It makes progressives forget that market concentration is far from the only source of inequality. And they end up casting aside or hamstringing policies aimed at those other sources.

That’s what may have happened here.

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization Philoeconomica

The Twice-Anti Monopoly Progressive

Keynes was no antimonopolist.

One of the most interesting and unnoticed developments of recent decades has been the tendency of big enterprise to socialise itself. A point arrives in the growth of a big institution – particularly a big railway or big public utility enterprise, but also a big bank or a big insurance company – at which the owners of the capital, i.e. its shareholders, are almost entirely dissociated from the management, with the result that the direct personal interest of the latter in the making of great profit becomes quite secondary. When this stage is reached, the general stability and reputation of the institution are the more considered by the management than the maximum of profit for the shareholders. The shareholders must be satisfied by conventionally adequate dividends; but once this is secured, the direct interest of the management often consists in avoiding criticism from the public and from the customers of the concern. This is particularly the case if their great size or semi-monopolistic position renders them conspicuous in the public eye and vulnerable to public attack. The extreme instance, perhaps, of this tendency in the case of an institution, theoretically the unrestricted property of private persons, is the Bank of England. It is almost true to say that there is no class of persons in the kingdom of whom the Governor of the Bank of England thinks less when he decides on his policy than of his shareholders. Their rights, in excess of their conventional dividend, have already sunk to the neighbourhood of zero. But the same thing is partly true of many other big institutions. They are, as time goes on, socialising themselves.

John Maynard Keynes, The end of laissez-faire (1926).

In Robert Skidelsky’s great three-volume intellectual biography of Keynes, there is but a single reference to antitrust—an entreaty by Felix Frankfurter that Keynes should lend some support to the antitrust project.

Keynes opposed the early New Deal’s state-sponsored cartels because they restricted output when the economy required more investment. But, like many in the early 20th century, Keynes viewed monopoly as an inevitable and possibly salutary adjunct to industrial progress.

Indeed, Skidelsky suggests that Keynes found debates over market structure—including self-righteous antimonopolism—dumb.

Writes Skidelsky:

Keynes used to come away from Manchester with feelings of ‘intense pessimism’, provoked by the short-sighted individualism of the Capulets and Montagues, . . . the sermonising of those who wanted to put the industry through the wringer, the ingrained dislike of any suggestion of monopoly.

Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1937 262-63 (1995).

(This post originally appeared as a Twitter thread.)

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization Regulation Tax

Wealth and Happiness

In a new paper, Glick, Lozada, and Bush have done both antimonopolism and the antitrust academy a service by making the first real attempt to put the movement in direct conversation with contemporary antitrust method.

GLB have a simple message: welfare economics long ago stopped using willingness to pay to measure consumer welfare, and antitrust should too.

What is more, welfare economics today pursues an eclectic set of approaches to measuring welfare. Some of them suggest that the dispersal of economic power and the availability of small businesses can make people happy.

It follows, argue GLB, that it is entirely consistent with contemporary welfare economics to take these things into account in evaluating mergers or prosecuting monopolies.

The Social Welfare Function

GLB start with the problem that welfare economists faced at the beginning of the 20th century: how to compare the value that different people—say a producer and a consumer—obtain from a transaction in the absence of some universal measure of value.

If the producer gets a profit of $2 and the consumer pays $5 for a bag of apples, did the transaction confer the same amount of value on the two? Are $2 worth the same to the producer as a-bag-of-apples-for-$5 is worth to the consumer?

If there were some universal measure of happiness—denominated in, say, “utils”—then we could answer that question.

We would look up the consumer’s change in pleasure associated with swapping $5 for apples and compare it to the producer’s change in pleasure associated with making a $2 profit. If the former were 50 utils and the latter 30 utils, then we could say that the transaction did not confer the same benefit on both parties.

Pareto

Economists eventually decided that they would not be able to find a universal metric of happiness. But they hoped that they might be able to glean some information about happiness from the behavior of economic actors.

The first approach that they hit upon was the pareto criterion. It said: the only bad transactions are those into which the parties do not enter voluntarily, because those must make at least one party worse off (the party who would not voluntarily enter into the transaction).

Any transaction the parties do enter into voluntarily is, in contrast, good, because they wouldn’t be willing to enter into it unless the transaction made neither worse off.

It followed that voluntary transactions could be treated as welfare improving—or at least not welfare reducing. The parties were signalling, through their willingness to enter into them, that the transactions were at least not undesirable.

If the producer and consumer voluntarily transact in apples at $5, then welfare could be said not to have been reduced and indeed potentially to have increased. That was the pareto criterion.

It helped welfare economics a bit. But it also failed to answer an important question: what about people who are affected by a transaction but who are not entering into it themselves?

If, for example, two producers merge, and, as a result of the merger, they are able to charge a higher price, consumers are affected. But consumers have no choice over whether the merger takes place.

The pareto criterion tells us that the merger does not make the merging parties worse off. But it tells us nothing about whether the merger makes consumers worse off.

Some way of comparing the costs of the transaction to consumers with the benefits to the merging producers is needed, but the pareto criterion cannot provide it.

Willingness to Pay and Potential Pareto

The solution proposed by some economists in the early 20th century was to use willingness to pay as a measure of happiness.

The idea was that if a consumer would be willing to pay $10 for an apple, then that would be a measure of the pleasure the consumer would get from consuming the apple. By noting that a person should be willing to pay cash for cash on a dollar-for-dollar basis, one could proceed to do with dollars what economists had originally hoped to do with utils.

To return to our example of an apple purchased for $5, if the consumer were in fact willing to pay $10 for the apple, then the value to the consumer of the transaction would be the $10 the consumer would be willing to pay less the $5 price that the consumer actually paid for it.

And the value of the transaction to the producer would be the producer’s $2 profit. It would then follow that the consumer did better than the producer in the transaction because the consumer generated a “surplus” of $5 whereas the producer generated a profit (“producer’s surplus”) of only $2.

This willingness-to-pay approach made it possible to evaluate a merger of producers.

If producers were to merge and drive the price up to $7, then the producers (who, if their costs are as before, would now make a $4 profit) would end up better off than the consumers (who would now enjoy a surplus of $10 less $7, or $3). The merger would reduce the welfare of the consumer by $3.

If antitrust were to adhere to a consumer welfare standard—the rule that mergers that reduce consumer surplus are to be rejected—then this merger would fail the test and be rejected.

As GLB note, the willingness to pay concept made it possible to consider tradeoffs as well.

The merger might, for example, also reduce the costs of production of the merged firms from $3 to $0.50, thereby increasing the merging firms’ profits on the transaction from $4 to $6.50.

If one were to view the goal of the antitrust laws as the maximization of total welfare—meaning the maximization of the combined surplus of producers and consumers, however that surplus may be distributed between them—this cost reduction would justify the merger. It would expand the sum of producer and consumer surplus from $7 ($2 for the producers and $5 for the consumer) to $9.50 ($6.50 for the producers and $3 for the consumer).

Moreover, the merger might even be said to satisfy the consumer welfare standard if one were to adhere to the peculiar sophistry that any increase in total welfare should count as an increase in consumer welfare because the increase in total welfare could be redistributed to consumers.

Because the merged producers could be forced to pay the $2.50 increase in total welfare to the consumer, leaving the consumer with $5.50, which is more than the $5 he would have without the merger, the deal could, according to this peculiar sophistry, be classified as consumer welfare enhancing.

At least in potential. And if such a transfer were made, then the consumer and the producers alike would welcome the deal (the producers would be left with $4, which is more than the $3 in profit earned without the deal). Hence GLB refer to this as the “potential pareto criterion”. It is also called the Kaldor-Hicks efficiency criterion.

Wealth Effects

Economists should have, and, indeed, did, realize from the start that willingness to pay was a doomed approach because a person’s willingness to pay changes with his budget.

Between People

Two people who would be willing to pay the same amount for an apple if they had the same wealth would likely be willing to pay vastly different amounts if one were poor and the other rich. The rich person might be willing to pay much more for the apple than would a cash-strapped poor person.

One can avoid this problem by supposing that the poor man is willing to pay less for an apple because he in fact would derive less pleasure from it. He might have to deny his child meat in order to be able to afford the apple, and that might ruin his meal.

But viewing actual pleasure as perfectly consonant with willingness to pay amounts to shoehorning subjective feelings into budget constraints.

It is just as likely that the poor man who did make such a substitution would feel a great deal of guilty pleasure. His rational faculties might enable him to forego that pleasure and give his child meat. But that does not mean that his pleasure centers would not be the worse for it. They would be.

If wealth effects matter, however, then one cannot compare producer and consumer surpluses—or indeed the surpluses generated by any two people.

One cannot say, for example, that a merger that decreases cost by $2.50 is on net a good thing if it results in a price increase of only $2 because $2.50 is more than $2, so the total amount of pleasure generated by the economy has gone up. For if the producers are rich but the consumer poor, then the $2 cost to the consumer might inflict more pain on him than the $2.50 increase in profits for the producers.

Redistribution of those $2.50 in benefits to the consumer is now required for efficiency and not just to achieve distributive justice. If efficiency is about increasing the total amount of happiness generated by the economy, and those $2.50 make the consumer happier than the producers, then efficiency requires that the $2.50 go to the consumer.

If the only implication of wealth effects were that redistribution from rich to poor is required for efficiency, then wealth effects would not be particularly problematic for progressives.

But very often a policy change not only creates a benefit and raises a price, as in our merger example, but also inflicts an economic cost in the sense of precluding some production—or aspect thereof—that consumers value.

The merger might, for example, not only reduce apple production costs by $2.50 but also lead to slightly less tasty apples. Perhaps the merger saves on costs by enabling the sale of an orchard that produced particularly tasty apples but was also relatively costly to maintain.

If the consumer’s maximum willingness to pay falls by $2 because the apple is less tasty, then the willingness to pay measure suggests that the merger should go ahead. The benefits in terms of a reduction in costs of $2.50 exceed the costs in terms of a reduction in the value of the apple to consumers of $2. There is a net gain of $0.50.

To be sure, if the price again rises to $7 as a result of the merger, consumers find themselves even worse off than before. Their surplus falls to $1 (a maximum willingness to pay of $8 less a price of $7).

But the merging producers can, at least in theory, make up for this by transferring $2 to the consumer to offset the price increase and by transferring at least $2 of the cost reduction they enjoy as well, ensuring that the consumer ends up with at least the $5.00 in surplus the consumer would have enjoyed without the deal.

And the producers, who initially enjoyed an increase in profits of $5.50 ($2.50 in cost reductions plus $2.00 from the increase in price) end up better off so long as they do not pay more than $5.50 to the consumer.

So all parties can, in theory, end up better off.

That’s because the benefits created by the merger exceed the costs by $0.50. Once one uses transfers to correct for the resulting price increase and to compensate the consumer for his loss, which is smaller than the producers’ gains, there is necessarily some net gain left over that producers and consumer can divide up, leaving them all better off.

The potential pareto criterion is satisfied and, if the transfers are actually made, so is the consumer welfare standard.

If wealth effects matter, however, then one cannot reliably compare the $2.50 benefit in terms of production cost savings to the $2 loss associated with the reduced tastiness of the apple. If the consumer is poor, then the consumer may place a dollar value on the reduction in tastiness of the apple that is far below the actual loss of pleasure the consumer would suffer in consuming a less tasty apple.

If there were utils and we could compare the value of the production cost savings to the producers to the reduction in the consumer’s happiness associated with the less tasty apple, we might find that the producers’ gain is 100 utils and the consumer’s loss is 1000 utils, resulting in a net reduction in happiness due to the merger.

Wealth effects prevent the consumer from registering his dissatisfaction in terms of willingness to pay, however, and so the merger appears to offer a net gain when in fact it does not.

It follows that the producers will never be able fully to compensate the consumer for the loss without incurring a loss themselves, and so according to the potential pareto criterion the merger should be blocked.

If we nevertheless treat willingness to pay as a measure of welfare, however, the deal will appear to be welfare increasing and the deal will go through, reducing overall happiness.

Wealth effects cause willingness to pay to lead to bad policymaking.

Within People

Wealth effects also undermine the commensurability of values with respect to the same person.

To see why, let’s go back to the example in which the merger raises prices but doesn’t reduce the tastiness of apples.

If unwinding the merger would reduce the price of an apple from $7 to $5, it is clear that the consumer becomes $2 richer. He saves $2, which he can now spend on other things.

In order for willingness to pay to be a useful proxy for welfare, one would, then, like to be able to say that the consumer is made just as well off by the price reduction as he would have been had he been given $2 in cash in lieu of the price increase.

But if willingness to pay depends on wealth, we cannot say that a $2 cash payment would leave the consumer in the same position as the consumer would be had price fallen by $2.

If a consumer cares more for apples the richer that he is, then the consumer will prefer a $2 cut in the price of apples to a $2 cash payment. Given his stronger preference for apples, the consumer might want to plow the $2 savings on apples into buying more apples, and that money would buy more apples at the lower apple price than would a $2 cash payment used to purchase more apples at the higher price.

It follows that the consumer would require a cash payment in excess of $2 in order to be made as happy as he would be if the price of apples were reduced by $2.

Similarly, we might ask whether taxing away $2 from the consumer when prices are low would leave the consumer just as happy as the consumer would be were he to experience a $2 price increase.

Again the answer would be “no.”

When the price of apples increases, it is clear that the consumer becomes poorer; his wealth buys him less. If the consumer’s taste for apples decreases with poverty, however, then the consumer will prefer a $2 increase in the price of apples to having $2 of cash taxed away from him.

Because he prefers other things to apples as he becomes poorer, the consumer will place a higher value on cash, which he can use to buy things other than apples, than he places on the price of apples.

But if a tax of $2 makes him less happy than he would be under an increase in the price of apples of $2, then a tax of less than $2 is equivalent, from his perspective, to an increase in the price of apples of $2.

So, overall, we have the peculiar result that a $2 price reduction is equivalent to a cash payment of more than $2 but a $2 price increase is equivalent to a cash reduction of less than $2.

Commensurability would, of course, require that all these things be equal.

And so we see that wealth effects not only prevent us from saying that a $2 gain to the producers creates the same amount of pleasure as a $2 gain to a consumer, but also that a $2 gain to the consumer via a price reduction creates the same amount of pleasure as a $2 cash payment. And the same can be said of losses.

GLB don’t acknowledge that between- and within-person incommensurability both stem from the same problem of wealth effects. But they do a good job of discussing both.

They also spend considerable time refuting the arguments of mainstream economists that within-person incommensurability is small and can be ignored.

But even if it were small, and indeed, even if wealth effects were not a problem for commensurability between persons either, willingness to pay would remain a highly problematic measure of value.

There is no basis for supposing that, just because two people having the same wealth level are willing to pay the same amount for a particular good, they will get the same level of pleasure from it.

Indeed, it is possible that two people who place the same relative values on all goods, and so are willing to pay the exact same amount for each good, might experience very different levels of pleasure from consuming them.

One person might take almost no pleasure from any good. Another might be sent into fits of ecstasy by the smallest purchase.

So long as the relative pleasure conferred by each good vis a vis the other goods is the same for both people, each will be willing to pay the same amount for each good. They will divide their budgets between goods in exactly the same way despite deriving very different levels of pleasure from them.

The Return to the Social Welfare Function

As GLB relate, welfare economists responded to these limitations by giving up on what might be called the overall “revealed value” approach to measuring welfare embodied in the pareto criterion and potential pareto (i.e., willingness-to-pay-based) criterion.

These criteria took a common revealed value approach because they both tried to read value from the actions of economic agents.

Whether a transaction satisfied the pareto criterion could be determined by checking to see whether the parties entered into it voluntarily. If they did, then it followed that neither party was made worse off.

And if a consumer purchased an apple at $10 but not at $11, one could infer that the maximum the consumer was willing to pay for apples was $10 and use that number to determine by how much the consumer could be compensated, pursuant to the potential pareto criterion, for the loss of an apple.

Under both approaches, economic agents were assumed to reveal the pleasure they take in goods via their actions, enabling economists to identify changes in welfare associated with various policies without needing direct access to the pleasure centers in consumers’ brains in order to make those determinations.

With the demise of willingness to pay, welfare economists would no longer try to find a way to read the pleasure and pain of consumers through their economic behavior.

Instead, they would return to the direct approach that they had abandoned more than fifty years before; they would try to measure happiness directly.

They took a variety of approaches to this problem. They would ask people if they are happy or not in various situations; they would study health indicators such as longevity, freedom from disease, and so on, in various situations; they would consult psychologists and neurologists.

Based on the results of these inquiries, they would identify the material circumstances most likely to be conducive to happiness and recommend economic policies (such as antitrust cases) that produce those circumstances.

Medical inquiry might determine, for example, that spinach is good for consumers. Welfare economists would then respond by ranking policy choices that lead to more spinach consumption higher than those that lead to less.

This was a departure from the willingness to pay approach, according to which welfare economists would have given spinach consumption the ranking implied by the dollar value that consumers revealed themselves to be willing to pay for spinach relative to what they would pay for other things.

Now other branches of science, and not revealed preference, determined the ranking.

This takes us up to the present state of welfare economics.

And for GLB, this completes the argument for taking political power and small businesses into account in doing antitrust.

According to GLB, one can no longer argue that, because consumers are manifestly willing to pay high prices charged by dominant firms, consumers like big firms and like the influence they have over politics.

Consumers’ willingness to pay is no reliable measure of the pleasure they get from buying the products of politically influential, small-business-destroying monopolists.

Instead, as already mentioned, GLB point to studies that suggest that consumers are happier in democratic environments free of concentrations of economic power. And that consumers are happier when they have access to small businesses.

It follows, argue GLB, that it is perfectly reasonable, per current practice in welfare economics, to argue that mergers that increase consumer surplus in the willingness-to-pay sense nevertheless make consumers unhappy, and should therefore be targeted for antitrust enforcement.

The Willingness to Pay Measure Is about Choice, Not Happiness

GLB’s paper presents a powerful rejoinder to any antitruster who might have been under the misapprehension that willingness to pay is a good measure of happiness. There are surely some out there.

But I suspect that the paper will not win too many converts, because what attracts people to willingness to pay is not that it is a good measure of happiness, but instead that it is the best way of doing justice to consumer choice that we have.

Welfare economics embodies a tension felt throughout the modern human rights project regarding who decides what happiness means.

Do we study human beings as if they were complex robots, figure out what makes these machines happiest, and impose those conditions on them? Or do we let the machines decide what makes them happiest?

GLB tell the story of welfare economics as if the field has always been interested only in the first option: to figure out what makes people happy and then impose those conditions upon their economic lives.

Under this assumption, GLB’s conclusion follows immediately from the arc of welfare economics. Willingness to pay is not a good measure. Others must be found.

But, as GLB acknowledge, economists have known almost from the inception of the willingness to pay approach in the 1940s that it was unsound. Why hasn’t the field moved on?

GLB chalk it up to “zombie economics.”

The real reason is that many people want to preserve a space in which consumers can vote for what they want through their purchase decisions.

That is, these people don’t view economics as a descriptive science but rather as a democratic project. It is the project of empowering consumers to vote on the character and magnitude of production through their purchase decisions.

The willingness to pay measure is ultimately built upon such a foundation, because willingness to pay is measured by observing the prices at which consumers do and do not buy.

The measure is highly imperfect, even incoherent, but it is the only way economics knows to recommend policy changes that account for the votes consumers have cast in markets. It honors their choices.

Happiness surveys, public health information, and the like are based on consumer input, but they are not based on purchase decisions—they are not based on circumstances in which consumers are forced to put their money where their mouths are.

Of course, the question whether consumers should take direction from experts regarding what to buy, or make those choices themselves, has already been resolved in favor of consumer choice.

Neither GLB nor anyone else will be able to impose purchases on consumers unless consumers vote to elect political leaders who take the GLB approach.

If antitrust enforcers decide to follow GLB’s paper, but consumers don’t like it, consumers can always vote political leaders into office who will sack those enforcers or give them new legislative commands to follow.

The premise of the economic project of enabling consumers to vote through their purchase decisions is, however, that the electoral process is defective.

The assumption is that, at least with respect to industrial production, consumers are better able to choose by voting through purchase decisions than by voting for elected representatives to direct production.

That is the subject of public choice theory. It is the view that, at least with respect to some matters, markets are more democratic than democracy.

People who hold this view won’t be swayed by GLB. In their view, markets are most likely to maximize happiness if they are structured to read it in consumers’ purchase decisions, not if they are structured by consumers’ elected representatives to achieve happiness according to any other measure.

Ultimately, the battle in antitrust over the consumer welfare standard, is, like all battles over regulation, a battle over the legitimacy of the electoral process.

And yet progressives have spent remarkably little time contesting the public choice view of the electoral process and government regulation as inherently vulnerable to capture.

I suspect that is in part because many progressives share the public choice intuition.

Indeed, distrust of government seems to be one of the major reasons for which some progressives have focused in recent years on strengthening antitrust instead of pursuing the projects that earlier generations of progressives thought were more likely to be effective, such as price regulation and taxation.

Even an antitrust that imposes an external standard of happiness on markets instead of trying to read a standard from consumer purchase decisions pays a certain amount of respect to those purchase decisions. It is oriented toward preserving markets and empowering consumer choice within them.

In contrast, taxation and price regulation are relatively indifferent to those goals. They represent a pure privileging of choice via the electoral process over choice via markets.

And to many people from both left and right operating in an essentially anti-statist culture, that’s scary.

The irony, then, may be that the worldview required to overturn the consumer welfare standard in antitrust is undermined by progressives’ own attraction to antitrust as a vehicle for progressive change.

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization World

Does It or Doesn’t It?

An important part of the Chicago Revolution in antitrust was the argument that no monopoly is forever. Eventually, someone will innovate and offer a superior product that the monopolist cannot match. And, just like that, the monopolist will be history.

Microsoft’s lock on operating systems looked assured in 1998 when the Justice Department tried to break the company up. But that remedy was never ultimately imposed. And in the end it didn’t matter. For, less than ten years later, smartphones arrived, and now most people do most of their computing on operating systems not made by Microsoft.

It seems to follow that antitrust action is a waste of time.

So interesting, then, to hear all the talk of late about how, despite its best efforts, China won’t be able to catch up with the West in chip production.

Not for decades.

Maybe never.

We are told that chip production relies upon an entire ecosystem of designers and suppliers. That experience matters. And so on.

But if that’s right, then the view that no monopoly is forever must be wrong—or at least not absolutely true in all cases. If the Western chip fabs have a near-permanent lock on the market, then it can’t be the case that we can always rely on markets to erode monopoly power. It can’t both be true that China can never catch up with the West on chips and that no position of market dominance is forever.

So which is it?

I suspect that those who think China can never catch up are wrong.

It may well be the case that the learning curve on chip production is such that a latecomer will never be able to catch up with a first mover absent technology transfer. But the argument about the impermanence of monopoly power has never been that newcomers will one day master the incumbent’s technology. It has always been that newcomers will one day introduce a completely different technology that carries out the same tasks as the old technology, only ten times better.

To this day, Microsoft continues to dominate the market for PC operating systems. What eroded Microsoft’s power was the introduction of a different technology—smartphones—that required a different kind of operating system. Microsoft didn’t start out with a lead in mobile operating systems, and, in the event, Microsoft lost the race.

So the question about whether China can overcome her lack of cutting edge chip supply and find a way to go head to head with the West as computing revolutionizes everything from military equipment to passenger vehicles is really the question whether China can come up with different technologies that do computing better—not just more semiconductors.

I don’t know the answer to that question. But it is perhaps useful to note that while China is not a leader in the design and production of conventional chips, China is a leader in quantum computing—which promises vastly greater processing speeds—and in artificial intelligence.

Indeed, it is worth asking whether TikTok’s success at challenging both Google’s dominance in search and Facebook’s dominance in social media doesn’t contain a lesson. At the same time that at least some Americans were quaking in their boots regarding these American tech giants’ size—and calling for antitrust enforcement—TikTok was quietly applying superior artificial intelligence to revolutionize the core functionality of both companies. TikTok is a Chinese company.

The view that technological advance always ultimately erodes dominant positions is perhaps most closely associated with Joseph Schumpeter, who called this process “creative destruction.”

The question, then, is whether the West should worry that creative destruction will erode its dominant positions.

If the Chicago School of antitrust is right, the answer is “yes.”

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization

Antitrust Preemption

The best way to regulate the tech giants is to tax the immense scarcity rents they generate. Instead of doing that, the Biden Administration has gone all-in on antitrust action, which can’t touch those scarcity rents, even if antitrust action does succeed at making tech markets more competitive, which is unlikely.

When I make this point, people tell me: “don’t worry! Taxation and antitrust action aren’t mutually exclusive. The Biden Administration is also pro-tax.”

Well, is it?

The Canadians are planning on taxing the tech giants, and instead of rushing to complement this sound policy, by imposing our own tax, the Biden Administration is threatening to retaliate if they don’t scupper their plans.

An administration, like everything else, has a budget constraint, denominated in attention as well as dollars. If it is going all-in on one thing, it’s not going all-in on another.

And to go all-in on one policy, an administration may need to reject others in order to maintain the coherence of the one it favors, which seems to be happening here. The Biden Administration is complaining that it’s unfair for Canada to single out American tech companies for taxation, something that would have less bite if America were singling them out itself.

So, please don’t tell me that yes, you agree that antitrust probably can move the needle only very slightly, if at all, but why not try it anyway?

If you’re trying it, you’re not trying the stuff that actually works.

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization

Some Goliath

I do not understand Paul Krugman here:

Yes, there’s a profit-maximizing price, but the cost to a business of charging somewhat less than its profit-maximizing price is small, because lower margins would be offset by increased sales. (To be formal about it, the losses caused by deviating from the optimal price are second-order.) This wiggle room means that corporate pricing may be strongly influenced by intangible considerations, like fear of alienating buyers. . . . Given this reality, it’s not foolish to suggest that some corporations have seen widespread inflation as an opportunity to jack up prices by more than their costs have increased without experiencing the usual backlash.

Paul Krugman, Do Democrats Have a Technocrat Problem?, N.Y. Times (Feb. 22, 2022).

I agree that corporations don’t have to worry about experiencing the usual backlash. Because they are experiencing way, way more than the usual backlash, and not just from consumers, as shown in the poll to which Krugman cites, but also from, you know, The White House.

I mean, if you asked me what the worst time ever would be to jack up prices, I would say that it’s in the middle of a global pandemic in which any price increase is going to be viewed by a surly public as price gouging.

But I guess that’s just me.

There’s something else I don’t get about this argument.

Monopoly power is the power over price that comes from artificial scarcity; it comes from firms voluntarily holding something back. But firms are producing and selling more than ever before, at least if the amount of stuff transiting through ports is any measure. Savannah, for example, was recently operating 50% above pre-pandemic levels.

How can firms be holding something back while increasing their output by anywhere near that order of magnitude?

It’s possible that they could go even further but purposefully aren’t. But we have almost no true monopolies in this country in the sense of single firms alone serving entire markets. The meatpacking market that is so concerning the Biden Administration is concentrated, but it still has four large players.

How does a group of three or four firms ramping up output to meet surging demand still manage to hold something back, especially when the true extent of demand is unknown (as it always is) and holding back by too much while other firms continue to increase supply is a recipe for a catastrophic loss of market share?

The answer is: by actually coordinating output directly with each other—forming a cartel—just as we often see firms that are trying to reduce output in response to declining demand meet to try to manage the reductions in a mutually profitable way.

But no one seems to be alleging that American industry is cartelizing. Antimonopolists want to break up large firms, not bust cartels.

It’s much more likely that the price increases are what they appear to be: driven by scarcity.

I’m also a bit confused about this:

And perhaps an even more important point, cracking down on excessive industrial concentration and market power would help reduce inflation, regardless of the role market power played in causing inflation in the first place. As an old line puts it, you don’t have to refill a flat tire through the hole.

Antitrust cases last a long time. The Department of Justice sued AT&T in 1974. The company was broken up in 1982. If inflation is still 7% in 2030, it will have become structural, and only another Saturday Night Massacre will save us.

There are plenty of good reasons to want to eliminate monopoly pricing, and industrial deconcentration is one way to do that. But reducing inflation isn’t one of those reasons. I’m all for faster antitrust enforcement, but the reality is that the courts and inflation move at very different speeds.

And that’s before we even consider that antitrust action is a one-time fix. You can only deconcentrate the economy once. But inflation is a perennial problem. Once all those antitrust cases have gotten prices down ten years from now, antitrust won’t have anything to offer in combating the next inflation, either.

Even if Krugman is right about market power and the current inflation, what being right here gets progressives is almost nothing. Here’s how Krugman puts it:

Nobody sensible would argue that opportunistic exploitation of market power is the main factor behind recent inflation. But contrary to what some people might want you to believe, economic theory by no means rules out the possibility that it may be a factor.

It cannot be ruled out that monopoly is a factor in inflation? The progressive movement I signed up for pursues policies that it knows make a difference. Like taxing the rich. Not stuff that “can’t be ruled out as being a factor.”

And Krugman is usually all about the big stuff. So why not one, but two columns now trying to defend the possibility that monopoly might matter albeit not as much as other things?

Sadly, I think that’s because antimonopolism has eaten the progressive mind over the past few years.

It’s no longer mere policy serving as a means to an end.

It’s now ideology. An end in itself.

Progressives know that Goliath must be slain, and they are going to insist on it, no matter what, even if the most that can be proven about Goliath is that he can’t be ruled out as a secondary cause of the economic problems we care about.

Some Goliath.

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization

Progressive Cologne

So here’s my suggestion: Give Biden and his people a break on their antitrust crusade. It won’t do any harm. It won’t get in the way of the big stuff, which is mostly outside Biden’s control in any case. At worst, administration officials will be using inflation as an excuse to do things they should be doing in any case. And they might even have a marginal impact on inflation itself.

Paul Krugman, Why Are Progressives Hating on Antitrust?, N.Y. Times (Jan. 18, 2022).

It probably won’t work, so let’s do it?

We need to do it for other reasons, so let’s do it for the wrong reason?

There’s a word for this: Obsession.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the piece, Krugman dismisses price controls, which are one remedy that would actually solve a few problems in the highly efficient (and hence unwise-to-break-up) industries, like meatpacking, to which he’d like to take the antitrust axe. (Not even price controls would, however, help with inflation.)

Krugman did write the introduction for a recent edition of the General Theory, but he diverges from his teacher on antitrust.

Keynes famously thought inflation, or the lack thereof, had nothing to do with competition, monopoly or any other microeconomic phenomenon, which is why he disdained both the N.R.A. and Thurman Arnold. Instead, he invented a whole new branch of economics—macroeconomics—to explain it.

But if there’s no intellectual foundation for progressive antimonopolism, why does it so appeal? As Krugman’s evocation, elsewhere in the piece, of J.F.K. talking tough to the steel industry suggests, it’s a macho thing—progressives thumping their chests at corporate America.

If that sounds a bit savage, there’s a cologne for that, too.

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization

Victor Hugo: Pro-Trust

[T]he prosperity of [the town] M. sur M. vanished with [its mayor and leading business owner] M. Madeleine; . . . lacking him, there actually was a soul lacking. After this fall, there took place at M. sur M. that egotistical division of great existences which have fallen, that fatal dismemberment of flourishing things which is accomplished every day, obscurely, in the human community, and which history has noted only once, because it occurred after the death of Alexander. Lieutenants are crowned kings; superintendents improvise manufacturers out of themselves. Envious rivalries arose. M. Madeleine’s vast workshops were shut; his buildings fell to ruin, his workmen were scattered. Some of them quitted the country, others abandoned the trade. Thenceforth, everything was done on a small scale, instead of on a grand scale; for lucre instead of the general good. There was no longer a centre; everywhere there was competition and animosity. M. Madeleine had reigned over all and directed all. No sooner had he fallen, than each pulled things to himself; the spirit of combat succeeded to the spirit of organization, bitterness to cordiality, hatred of one another to the benevolence of the founder towards all; the threads which M. Madeleine had set were tangled and broken, the methods were adulterated, the products were debased, confidence was killed; the market diminished, for lack of orders; salaries were reduced, the workshops stood still, bankruptcy arrived. And then there was nothing more for the poor. All had vanished.

Les Miserables
Categories
Antitrust Monopolization

Yet Another Amazon Antitrust Paradox

Amazon paradoxes are proliferating. Here’s another: to the extent that Amazon is engaged in anticompetitive conduct, it is the conduct of opening its website to third-party sellers, not, as Amazon critics hold, the conduct of failing to be even more welcoming to those third-party sellers.

As the Times’ David Streitfeld, who has perhaps done more than anyone else to advance the notion that Amazon is unreasonably severe with third-party sellers, seems slowly to be realizing, Amazon’s third-party sellers are, well, a problem. They sell junk. They sell defective products. They fool their customers. And then they disappear.

As the Wall Street Journal alerted us more than two years ago now: Amazon’s open door policy with respect to third-party sellers, which sellers constitute more than 50% of sales on Amazon.com, has caused Amazon effectively to “cede control of its site,” badly degrading the shopping experience.

Which begs the question: why? Why would Amazon let this happen? The answers is: “dreams of monopoly.”

Every other retailer in the world seems to understand that one of the biggest pieces of value retail can deliver to consumers is: curation. The retailer does the hard work of sifting through the junk and the fakes and the defectives to find the good stuff, so that consumers don’t have to do that themselves. Why do you shop at Trader Joe’s instead of your local supermarket? Because you know that if Trader Joe’s is selling it, it’s probably not only of reasonable quality, but likely tastes great too. That’s the value of curation.

But, as Streitfeld correctly notes, Amazon has all but given up on it. Anyone can list products on Amazon. And the company makes almost no effort to flag the best products for you. Ever since that Journal article, the public has known that “Amazon’s Choice” is just an empty label slapped on a piece of third-party seller junk by an algorithm parsing sales trends. No one at Amazon can vouch for the underlying product’s quality, usefulness, or safety.

You might have hoped, as I once did, that at least the products Amazon itself sells under its own brand names, like Amazon Basics, are competently curated. But those, too, have turned out to be no more than the outputs of sloppy and stupid algorithms. The programs troll Amazon’s site for popular third-party products and flag them to Amazon product teams, which then contact the original equipment manufacturer in China, slap on an Amazon Basics logo, and bring the rebranded product back to market. The result is that the Amazon-branded products can blow up in your face, just like the stuff sold by third-party sellers.

What would cause Amazon intentionally to forego delivering curation value to its customers and so risk alienating them from its website? The answer must be that Amazon gets something that it thinks is even more valuable in return for running this risk.

That thing is scale.

By opening its doors to third-party sellers, Amazon was able to bring much of the commercial internet onto its website, ensuring that if a consumer wanted to find something, he didn’t need to search the Internet, he just needed to search Amazon.com. And that in turn ensured that most consumers would do their online shopping on Amazon. And that in turn ensured that if you wanted to sell something online, you wanted to do it as a third-party seller on Amazon. And so on. In econ speak, opening the door to third-party sellers created massive “network effects” for Amazon, effects that make Amazon.com essential for both buyers and sellers.

Curation would destroy that because curation is costly. Algorithms aren’t good enough to curate effectively, as the piles of fakes, defectives, and junk on Amazon.com today shows. So if Amazon were to take curation seriously the company would need to pay people to do it. And even Amazon can only afford so many people. So Amazon would only be able to curate so many products. Which means that Amazon would not be able to offer everything on its website anymore. Which would mean that everyone would no longer shop on Amazon. Which would mean that fewer third parties would need to list their products on Amazon. And so on. Amazon would be better. But it would also be smaller.

And Amazon would face more competition, because now Amazon’s advantage wouldn’t be its network—the fact that Amazon carries everything and so everyone shops there—but rather the quality of its curation. There can only be one retailer that carries everything and at which everyone shops. But there are lots of retailers that curate—and compete on curation.

So, Amazon’s open-door policy toward third-party sellers, and the danger and frustration to which that exposes its customers, is anticompetitive. At least in the sense that it is meant to extract Amazon from the fierce competition based on curation that confronts most retailers, and to put Amazon instead in the unique position of being flea market to the Internet.

Amazon clearly believes that the benefits it gets from avoiding having to compete on curation outweigh the costs to the company of forcing its customers to wade through oceans of junky, fake, or defective products on its website. How could Amazon not, when imposing those costs on consumers makes Amazon indispensable, and hence immune to any consequences associated with alienating those consumers?

Well, not completely immune. There are still other retailers out there. And the more toxic Amazon’s site becomes—the more it really does come to resemble a flea market—the more willing consumers will be to put up with the cost and inconvenience of shopping elsewhere. I personally no longer buy books from Amazon because I hate dodging fakes on its site—buying elsewhere costs more, and sometimes I have to wait weeks longer for my books to arrive. But I’m happier.

The key for Amazon is finding a way to engage in just enough curation to prevent consumers from leaving in droves, but not so much that sellers abandon the platform and it ceases to become indispensable to consumers.

The irony here is that the anti-Amazon zealots, in fighting, under the banner of “self-preferencing,” every attempt by Amazon to impose order on third-party sellers or to curate by promoting its own brands, are effectively pushing Amazon to retain its monopoly position by continuing to welcome the entire commercial Internet onto its website.

Amazon critics: If you really want to make Amazon small, and quickly, help Amazon to engage in more self-preferencing. Ask Amazon to sell only its own branded products on the site, kicking all third-party sellers off. Or ask it to discriminate more heavily against some third-party sellers in favor of others, until Amazon.com becomes like every other retailer: offering a relatively small selection of products that Amazon believes consumers will like the most.

It should be clear that Amazon’s policy of being a flea market, instead of a normal, curating, retailer, is anticompetitive. But just because something is anticompetitive—in the sense that it harms competitors and hence competition—doesn’t make it bad, or an antitrust violation, unless the conduct also harms consumers. So, does it?

The answer must be no. Because, as I have said, Amazon is not completely immune to consumer dissatisfaction. You can find almost everything sold on Amazon elsewhere; it just takes more time and expense to get it. So Amazon today presents the following choice to consumers, who can shop elsewhere: Speed or safety; A low price or the genuine article; One stop shopping or purchases free from defects. And consumers so far have chosen the former, which suggests that they prefer it.

Antitrust cannot eliminate the tradeoff that seems to exist here between scale and quality. But consumers can decide which they prefer. If Amazon doesn’t do something about its site, if it doesn’t strike a better balance between scale and quality, if the junk and the fakes and the defectives continue, consumers will rebel. They will learn that the extra time and expense required to secure curation is worth it. And Amazon will go down; or change to save itself.

I for one don’t plan on buying any more books from Amazon anytime soon.