Steven C. Salop writes that the Biden administration oversaw a paradigm shift in antitrust, but it was the full adoption of the ideas of the Post-Chicago school, whose intellectual influence has countered Chicago since the 1980s, rather than the empowerment of the Anti-Monopoly or Neo-Brandeisian school of thought. This latter school of thought played an important role by motivating increased enforcement and corralling political support, even if it did not lead to cases that could not have be...| ProMarket
Daniel Francis reviews the evolutionary and revolutionary dimensions of the Biden administration’s antitrust work, and argues that these two projects have been in deep tension. He concludes that the administration’s evolutionary work within the welfarist paradigm has generated some important successes, but that the revolutionary effort to restore a pre-welfarist vision of antitrust has failed on its own terms — and, in failing, has left welfarism all the stronger.| ProMarket
Tim Brennan finds the new shift in antitrust thought and enforcement connected to the Neo-Brandeisian movement to be flawed for the most part. However, he writes that a reinvigorated focus on tacit collusion, which some have blamed on the rise of prices for groceries and apartment rents, may deserve consideration and further study.| ProMarket
Eleanor Fox writes that the paradigm shift in United States antitrust is not best understood as an embrace of neo-Brandeisian anti-bigness ideas but rather a rejection of neoliberal principles that have prevented effective antitrust regulation for decades. The shift encompasses the concerns and efforts of centrists, progressives, and neo-Brandeisians.| ProMarket
John W. Mayo reviews whether or not the articulated principles and priorities of the Neo-Brandeisian movement in antitrust scholarship and enforcement represent a “paradigm shift,” per the philosophy of Thomas Kuhn. Mayo finds that the Neo-Brandeisian discourse is best understood as situated within the continuum of the current antitrust paradigm, and that many of its efforts to substantiate its distinctive ideas have failed to properly ground them in empiricism or repudiate existing studies.| ProMarket
A key distinction in economic viewpoints that goes oft-unnoticed is between pro-business and pro-market. A good bellwether to where someone stands on the pro-business/market continuum is his/her stance on antitrust policy: pro-business usually favors incumbents, while pro-market calls for aggressive antitrust enforcement to facilitate competition. “I would not dispute that even a monopoly-ridden market would be preferable to any economic system trying to operate without any kind of a market...| ProMarket
An outlet for insiders to speak freely (as they remain anonymous to the reader) on what they perceive as problematic practices in their own industry – with an emphasis on how the industry tweaks the rules of the game and captures regulation. “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which ...| ProMarket
