The big picture

摘要

A BIG PROBLEM when attempting to tell if competition has weakened is that experts have stopped trying to answer the question. In the 1930s industrial economists viewed an uncompetitive industry as one in which a few firms had a large share of output and prices were high or quality low. Roll forward 80 years and competition regulators take refuge behind legal definitions of types of misconduct, such as price-fixing. If you ask them whether economy-wide dynamism has ebbed, they often insist that there are no analytical concepts or satisfactory data that allow that question to be answered, rather like medieval geographers who refuse to consider any evidence that the world is round unless it is written by members of the church in ecclesiastical Latin.