So I finished another paper draft today and wanted to commemorate the moment but am not quite ready to post this one to SocArXiv.
This paper is a rethink of an older draft on the rise of economics in antitrust policy that I’ve never quite figured out the angle on.
Lots of U.S. policy domains underwent some kind of free-market turn circa 1980: tax cuts, deregulation, social welfare cuts. In one sense, the narrowing of antitrust can be seen as just another example.
But those other policy domains saw a partial reversal of the initial turn: Reagan’s tax cuts were followed by tax hikes. Regulatory rollbacks were followed by new waves of regulation. And so on.
In antitrust, by contrast, the dramatic reduction in enforcement that was starting by the late 1970s basically just lasted.
Yes, there have been changes, but as many within the antitrust community have pointed out, the dominant theme of the last four decades has been continuity, not change.
I suggest that thinking about antitrust in terms of “expert capture” is useful for understanding this stability in antitrust.
James Kwak and others have pointed out that regulatory domains can experience cultural capture, in which regulators are beholden to the regulated not because of material interests, but because they’ve come to understand the public interest in ways favorable to the regulated.
Expert capture, I suggest, is when a community of experts whose approach has elective affinities with the interests of the regulated is able to establish epistemic dominance in a policy domain.
I’ve never quite known how to talk about the rise of economics in antitrust as it relates to the interests of big business. Because on the one hand, clearly big business supported the expansion of economics, especially Chicago economics.
On the other, I think it’s just wrong to reduce economists’ interest in centering efficiency and moving away from the “bad old days” of antitrust to some kind of role serving as handmaidens to capital.
The idea of expert capture tries to thread this needle. Economists (and their fellow-travelers in law) had independent intellectual reasons to center efficiency and the consumer welfare standard.
The rise of economics in antitrust advanced the intellectual and professional interests of those invested in a particular academic approach. But it also advanced the interests of big business, which offered various kinds of support.
Because the consumer welfare standard, and economic analysis as the means for thinking about how to achieve it, was so thoroughly institutionalized, the space for legitimate policy debate was narrowed considerably.
Just as in policy domains that saw the free-market turn of 1980 partially reversed, there was post-1980 pushback against the dramatic reduction in antitrust enforcement.
But after the 1970s, centering efficiency had become the only way to make legitimate claims about antitrust. Arguments about corporate power broadly defined, or the civic role of small business, were now beyond the pale.
And that left a very narrow space for debate. Certainly there were still a range of positions on what antitrust should look like from within the consumer welfare framework.
But the range was not very wide. Much narrower than it had been in previous decades. And for the most part—much more than in other domains that saw a similar political turn around 1980—policy stayed the same.
I have hesitated with the term “expert capture” because it's too simple to say that antitrust economists are simply in the bag for big business. And obviously there are economists currently making arguments that big business finds very uncomfortable.
But I think it’s the right way to talk about it—that the experts provide a framework for how to think about policy, but a lot of the resilience of that framework comes from its alignment with deep-pocketed interests.
Anyway, that’s the gist. Happy to share by email request and at some point I’ll make a version public.
