The limits of technocracy in competition policy

For reasons I needn’t go into, I spent much of today reading The Anti-trust Paradigm: Restoring a Competitive Economy by Jonathan Baker. It’s a very lawyerly in style and US-focused book. With that caveat, it’s actually a good overview of the current debate about competition policy, and the Chicago School versus neo-structuralist (aka ‘hipster’) clash going on in the US at the moment. One of its strengths is that it’s pretty even-handed. Although the book argues for sticking with an economics-based anti-trust policy, focused on consumer welfare, it also argues that the Chicago School goes too far beyond this with its set of presumptions (for instance, that vertical mergers are basically always fine, or that false positives preventing mergers that are not anti-competitive are far more costly than false negatives that let anti-competitive mergers go ahead).

The book sets the scene with the evidence on increasing concentration in US markets, and the adverse implications decreasingly vigorous competition has for the economy. What I particularly like about the book though is that it sets competition policy in its political context, making the case for a technocratic approach – to avoid the dangers of political capture and cronyism – but within the boundaries of a broader political settlement. Baker argues that for much of the post-war period, US anti-trust policy was shaped by the consensus about the form of American capitalism, delivering widely shared benefits including through the welfare system. Never explicit, this nevertheless set the climate for the decisions made by regulators and judges. He portrays the crumbling of this settlement, the growth of market power across the economy, as the backdrop for the decreasing consensus about anti-trust policy. In this situation, technocratic enforcement cannot function.

There is a section on digital markets, which I was interested in of course; it essentially briefly sums up the state of debate in a growing literature. And a final chapter advocating a more forceful American anti-trust policy (the US gets compared unfavourably to Europe) but one that abandons the cul-de-sac of the pure Chicago School. Although the application of anti-trust policy in America has diverged considerably from Europe, despite being underpinned by the same economic analysis, this is a useful book to understand the present US debate – and also why its conclusions are not very relevant to this side of the Atlantic.

41VXxLuHKSL._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_[easyazon_link identifier=”B07NT7KT36″ locale=”UK” tag=”enlighteconom-21″]The Antitrust Paradigm: Restoring a Competitive Economy[/easyazon_link]

 

Interdisciplinary reading

Recently I’ve attended a couple of interdisciplinary events and it’s interesting to see which books are cited by groups of natural scientists, computer scientists, social scientists and humanities scholars when they’re in conversation with each other. Here’s what I noted:

The poems of William Blake

The Poetry and Music of Science by Tom McLeish

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How to Grow a Human, forthcoming by Philip Ball

[easyazon_link identifier=”022665480X” locale=”UK” tag=”enlighteconom-21″]How to Grow a Human: Adventures in How We Are Made and Who We Are[/easyazon_link]

41Ou7JDC+GL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_A Question of Trust by Onora O’Neill

The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener517qXMsSvJL._SX316_BO1,204,203,200_[easyazon_link identifier=”B06XCY5JCK” locale=”UK” tag=”enlighteconom-21″]The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society[/easyazon_link]

Engineering Rules forthcoming by JoAnne Yates and Craig Murphy

Calling Bullshit, forthcoming by Jevin West

Human Compatible, forthcoming from Stuart Russell

71CZkaKJjPL._AC_UL436_[easyazon_link identifier=”0241335205″ locale=”UK” tag=”enlighteconom-21″]Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control[/easyazon_link]

Digital arrivals and deaths of despair

There’s definitely a digital theme in the new crop of books arriving at Enlightenment Towers – the left hand mini-pile here.

IMG_0292On my recent trip to Washington (for a fascinating National Academies/Royal Society discussion on international co-operation on AI, culminating in this public symposium) I read the pile on the right.

The Economics of Artificial Intelligence is a terrific collection, edited by Ajay Agarwal, Josh Gans and Avi Goldfarb. It has sections on AI as a general purpose technology, jobs and inequality, regulation and the implications of machine learning for economics. The cast list of contributors is stellar. It’s far from the last word but a must-read as a starting point.

61bIH+8Vs2L._AC_UL872_QL65_[easyazon_link identifier=”022661333X” locale=”UK” tag=”enlighteconom-21″]The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: An Agenda (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report)[/easyazon_link]

Tom McLeish’s The Poetry and Music of Science is a persuasive comparison between creativity in the arts and in the sciences, exploring the parallels between the creative process in music, poetry, art and fiction and the discovery process in the natural sciences. Well, I was persuaded. 51wNUley1XL._SX351_BO1,204,203,200_

[easyazon_link identifier=”0198797990″ locale=”UK” tag=”enlighteconom-21″]The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art[/easyazon_link]

Matthew Desmond’s Evicted is a distressing piece of reportorial sociology (Pullitzer-winning), detailing through a handful of specific individuals in Milwaukee the reality of the human crisis and housing crisis in America. The book describes the knot of poverty, drugs, ill-health, appalling housing conditions, impossible for any individual to escape. I was shocked on my recent trip to San Francisco to see the desperate condition of its large numbers of homeless people, literally worse than I have seen anywhere in the world. The conditions described in Evicted are intolerable. I recently heard Angus Deaton talk about his and Anne Case’s work on the ‘deaths of despair’ in the US (and some foreshadowing of a similar if less pronounced pattern in UK data). Given the extreme social inequality in the US, its political disintegration is not surprising. The new Deaton Review here in the UK into inequality may uncover ominous similarities, and it would be good to know how other OECD countries compare/contrast.

41qhBahSGLL._SX323_BO1,204,203,200_[easyazon_link identifier=”0141983310″ locale=”UK” tag=”enlighteconom-21″]Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City[/easyazon_link]

Houses for the people

I’m way behind in posting about what I’ve been reading, not least because I’m mid-prrofreading my next book (Market, State and People: Economics for Public Policy, out in early 2020 from Princeton University Press, since you all ask….). One of the recent reads was John Boughton’s Municipal Dreams: The rise and fall of council housing. It’s a particularly timely book as the UK is in the midst of its most severe housing crisis since the post-war years when the populaiton was growing and much of the already poor quality housing stock in cities had been damaged or destroyed. The context is different now of course, but there is nevertheless significant excess demand and huge generational injustice – not to mention that the UK housing market serves a special role of macroeconomic dysfunction.

The book is more or less chronological, telling the story of housing provision at increasing scale by local authorities from the late 19th century to the Thatcher government and then the sale of housing and turn to housing associations as (partial) replacements for council provision. It covers the debate about the architecture of big estates – the controversies about brutalist 1960s tower blocks, the role of that architecture and the giant estates in emerging social problems. Above all, it highlights a key conflict of purpose: was council housing housing for all, or housing for those most in need? If the latter, as governments increasingly came to consider, then perhaps the emergence of “problem” estates was about the wider economic problems rather than the estates or their inhabitants.

The book advocates a return to housing provision at scale by local authorities, although it doesn’t get into policy design. I agree this will be needed. People are less and less able to work in the cities where economic activity of highest value is increasingly concentrating – agglomeration effects seem to be accelerating (see David Autor’s ASSA talk on this). The UK is hobbling its future productivity and ensuring the macroeconomy remains vulnerable to instabilty from house prices. The private market has no incentive to fix the problem as housbuilders and incumbent owners do not want price growth to halt. The state will have to step in & local authorities should be allowed once again to build homes at scale, borrowing against future rents to do so if need be.

Anyway, terrific book, really enjoyed it.

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How to write

I’ve been on my travels so have a stack of things to post about, but it will have to wait until I’ve waded through the backlog of emails. Meanwhile, though, I polished off Deirdre McCloskey’s Economical Writing: Thirty-five rules for clear and persuasive prose. You don’t have to be an economist to benefit from the book, but it will certainly help many economists – we are not famed for clarity and elegance of expression. I’m a big fan of McCloskey’s writing, although she is something of an acquired taste. But, importantly, she is always a model of clarity.

The book has, as it indicates, a series of short chapters/rules, all good advice. (It’s an update and expanded version of earlier books, with additions on presentations and charts, though advice about the latter is mainly ‘read Edward Tufte’s books’.) It refers to other works and classic advice from authors such as Orwell and Twain. I loved the latter’s: “Eschew surplusage.”

The section that had me cheering was Number 4, being clear. I have long believed that there is nothing in economics that can’t be explained clearly in words; it isn’t string theory after all. “Bad writing makes slow reading,” McCloskey writes. Your reader has to stop and puzzle over what on earth you mean. She quotes Quintilian: “One ought to take care to write not merely so that the reader can understand, but so that he canot possibly misunderstand.” This is harder than it sounds. As the author of several books, I’ve learned that many readers take out of a book whatever thoughts they took into it. Still, what else is worth aiming for if you want to communicate your ideas?

Highly recommended for all who write as part of their work or for pleasure. Pretty much everybody?

[easyazon_link identifier=”022644807X” locale=”UK” tag=”enlighteconom-21″]Economical Writing, Third Edition: Thirty-Five Rules for Clear and Persuasive Prose (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)[/easyazon_link]41d9kBQGVVL._SX321_BO1,204,203,200_