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by willyg123 2020 days ago
Matt Stoller has published dozens of whiny posts about supposed monopolies. Yet, he has yet to once mention the "consumer welfare standard" [1] because it would blow the thesis apart in every single post.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amattstoller.substack....

2 comments

He mentions it all the time. The index to his book has 11 references to the "consumer rights movement". A central premise of his book is that the "Watergate babies" shifted antitrust law from a focus on democratic control of corporate power to so-called "consumer rights".
Also, looking at antitrust purely through a price lens is extremely narrow, and practically unintelligible in most big-ticket modern examples.

In the netscape-msft case, prices didn't even exist. They don't exist or aren't central in a whole lot of modern businesses. How do you analyze FB in terms of the CWS model? It's like trying to examine the health of a rose bush by taking its temperature.

It's a pretty good example of intellectual failure in economics, compounded by legislative/industry agendas. Defining reality using a model rather than the other way around. The model is good at measuring market power of something like a centralized buyer of agricultural commodities. The more unlike an agricultural cartel the industry, the lower the "evidence" for monopoly.

An excellent backgrounder on how the shift to an exclusive focus on "consumer welfare" came to be, watch or listen to "This is Neoibeeralism":

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLATIVW2S3zKMbVlnAHAPR0sHZ...

Bork's tedious tome on antitrust was birthed directly from Aaron Director's Antitrust Project at the University of Chicago. (Bork credits Director fatuously in his introductin.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Director