Decades after free marketeers gained an effective monopoly over the field of antitrust law, there is a new race to rethink this critical tool of economic governance. With a growing list of socioeconomic and political problems being attributed to the power of Big Business, the debate is as timely as it is controversial.
LONDON – Fifteen years ago, Herbert Hovenkamp of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Wharton School of Business, perhaps the most revered scholar in the field of US competition law, wrote that, “today we enjoy more consensus about the goals of the antitrust laws than at any time in the last half-century.” The supposed common objective of antitrust law (competition law in the European context) was straightforward: to maximize consumer welfare, measured in economic terms.
Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi, Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us from Citizen Kings to Market Servants, Harper Business, 2020.
Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness: How Corporate Giants Came to Rule the World, Atlantic Books, 2020.
LONDON – Fifteen years ago, Herbert Hovenkamp of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Wharton School of Business, perhaps the most revered scholar in the field of US competition law, wrote that, “today we enjoy more consensus about the goals of the antitrust laws than at any time in the last half-century.” The supposed common objective of antitrust law (competition law in the European context) was straightforward: to maximize consumer welfare, measured in economic terms.