In Fleites v. MindGeek—currently before the U.S. District Court for the District of Central California, Southern Division—plaintiffs seek to hold MindGeek subsidiary PornHub liable for alleged instances of human trafficking under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA). Writing for the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE), we have filed a motion for leave to submit an amicus brief regarding whether it is valid to treat co-defendant Visa Inc. as a proper party under principles of collateral liability.
The proposed brief draws on our previous work on the law & economics of collateral liability, and argues that holding Visa liable as a participant under RICO or TVPRA would amount to stretching collateral liability far beyond what is reasonable. Such a move, we posit, would “generate a massive amount of social cost that would outweigh the potential deterrent or compensatory gains sought.”
Collateral liability can make sense when intermediaries are in a position to effectively monitor and control potential harms. That is, it can be appropriate to apply collateral liability to parties who are what is often referred to as a “least cost avoider.” As we write:
In some circumstances it is indeed proper to hold third parties liable even though they are not primary actors directly implicated in wrongdoing. Most significantly, such liability may be appropriate when a collateral actor stands in a relationship to the wrongdoing (or wrongdoers or victims) such that the threat of liability can incentivize it to take action (or refrain from taking action) to prevent or mitigate the wrongdoing. That is to say, collateral liability may be appropriate when the third party has a significant enough degree of control over the primary actors such that its actions can cause them to reduce the risk of harm at reasonable cost. Importantly, however, such liability is appropriate only when direct deterrence is insufficient and/or the third party can prevent harm at lower cost or more effectively than direct enforcement… From an economic perspective, liability should be imposed upon the party or parties best positioned to deter the harms in question, such that the costs of enforcement do not exceed the social gains realized.
The law of negligence under the common law, as well as contributory infringement under copyright law, both help illustrate this principle. Under the common law, collateral actors have a duty in only limited circumstances, when the harms are “reasonably foreseeable” and the actor has special access to particularized information about the victims or the perpetrators, as well as a special ability to control harmful conditions. Under copyright law, collateral liability is similarly limited to circumstances where collateral actors are best positioned to prevent the harm, and the benefits of holding such actors liable exceed the harms.
Neither of these conditions are true in Fleites v. MindGeek: Visa is not the type of collateral actor that has any access to specialized information or the ability to control actual bad actors. Visa, as a card-payment network, simply processes payments. The only tool at the disposal of Visa is a giant sledgehammer: it can foreclose all transactions to particular sites that run over its network. There is no dispute that the vast majority of content hosted on sites like MindGeek is lawful, however awful one may believe pornography to be. Holding card networks liable here would create incentives to avoid processing payments for such sites altogether in order to avoid legal consequences.
The potential costs of the theory of liability asserted here stretch far beyond Visa or this particular case. The plaintiffs’ theory would hold anyone liable who provides services that “allow[] the alleged principal actors to continue to do business.” This would mean that Federal Express, for example, would be liable for continuing to deliver packages to MindGeek’s address or that a waste-management company could be liable for providing custodial services to the building where MindGeek has an office.
According to the plaintiffs, even the mere existence of a newspaper article alleging a company is doing something illegal is sufficient to find that professionals who have provided services to that company “participate” in a conspiracy. This would have ripple effects for professionals from many other industries—from accountants to bankers to insurance—who all would see significantly increased risk of liability.
Earlier this year, the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) hosted a conference with the Oxford Union on the themes of innovation, competition, and economic growth with some of our favorite scholars. Though attendance at the event itself was reserved for Oxford Union members, videos from that day are now available for everyone to watch.
Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan on demographics and growth
Charles Goodhart, of Goodhart’s Law fame, and Manoj Pradhan discussed the relationship between demographics and growth, and argued that an aging global population could mean higher inflation and interest rates sooner than many imagine.
Catherine Tucker on privacy and innovation — is there a trade-off?
Catherine Tucker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discussed the costs and benefits of privacy regulation with ICLE’s Sam Bowman, and considered whether we face a trade-off between privacy and innovation online and in the fight against COVID-19.
Don Rosenberg on the political and economic challenges facing a global tech company in 2021
Qualcomm’s General Counsel Don Rosenberg, formerly of Apple and IBM, discussed the political and economic challenges facing a global tech company in 2021, as well as dealing with China while working in one of the most strategically vital industries in the world.
David Teece on the dynamic capabilities framework
David Teece explained the dynamic capabilities framework, a way of understanding business strategy and behavior in an uncertain world.
Vernon Smith in conversation with Shruti Rajagopalan on what we still have to learn from Adam Smith
Nobel laureate Vernon Smith discussed the enduring insights of Adam Smith with the Mercatus Center’s Shruti Rajagopalan.
Samantha Hoffman, Robert Atkinson and Jennifer Huddleston on American and Chinese approaches to tech policy in the 2020s
The final panel, with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s President Robert Atkinson, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Samantha Hoffman, and the American Action Forum’s Jennifer Huddleston, discussed the role that tech policy in the U.S. and China plays in the geopolitics of the 2020s.
With the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many have already noted her impact on the law as an advocate for gender equality and women’s rights, her importance as a role model for women, and her civility. Indeed, a key piece of her legacy is that she was a jurist in the classic sense of the word: she believed in using coherent legal reasoning to reach a result. And that meant Justice Ginsburg’s decisions sometimes cut against partisan political expectations.
This is clearly demonstrated in our little corner of the law: RBG frequently voted in the majority on antitrust cases in a manner that—to populist leftwing observers—would be surprising. Moreover, she authored an important case on price discrimination that likewise cuts against the expectation of populist antitrust critics and demonstrates her nuanced jurisprudence.
RBG’s record on the Court shows a respect for the evolving nature of antitrust law
In the absence of written opinions of her own, it is difficult to discern what was actually in Justice Ginsburg’s mind as she encountered antitrust issues. But, her voting record represents at least a willingness to approach antitrust in an apolitical manner.
Over the last several decades, Justice Ginsburg joined the Supreme Court majority in many cases dealing with a wide variety of antitrust issues, including the duty to deal doctrine, vertical restraints, joint ventures, and mergers. In many of these cases, RBG aligned herself with judgments of the type that the antitrust populists criticize.
The following are major consumer welfare standard cases that helped shape the current state of antitrust law in which she joined the majority or issued a concurrence:
Verizon Commc’ns Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis Trinko, LLP, 540 U.S. 398 (2004) (unanimous opinion heightening the standard for finding a duty to deal)
Pacific Bell Tel. Co v. linkLine Commc’ns, Inc., 555 U.S. 438 (2009) (Justice Ginsburg joined the concurrence finding there was no “price squeeze” but suggesting the predatory pricing claim should be remanded)
Weyerhaeuser Co. v. Ross-Simmons Hardwood Lumber Co., Inc., 549 U.S. 312 (2007) (unanimous opinion finding predatory buying claims are still subject to the dangerous probability of recoupment test from Brooke Group)
Apple, Inc. v. Robert Pepper, 139 S.Ct. 1514 (2019) (part of majority written by Justice Kavanaugh finding that iPhone owners were direct purchasers under Illinois Brick that may sue Apple for alleged monopolization)
State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U.S. 3 (1997) (unanimous opinion overturning per se treatment of vertical maximum price fixing under Albrecht and applying rule of reason standard)
Texaco Inc. v. Dagher, 547 U.S. 1 (2006) (unanimous opinion finding it is not per se illegal under §1 of the Sherman Act for a lawful, economically integrated joint venture to set the prices at which it sells its products)
Illinois Tool Works Inc. v. Independent Ink, Inc., 547 U.S. 28 (2006) (unanimous opinion finding a patent does not necessarily confer market power upon the patentee, in all cases involving a tying arrangement, the plaintiff must prove that the defendant has market power in the tying product)
U.S. v. Baker Hughes, Inc., 908 F. 2d 981 (D.C. Cir. 1990) (unanimous opinion written by then-Judge Clarence Thomas while both were on the D.C. Circuit of Appeals finding against the government’s argument that the defendant in a Section 7 merger challenge can rebut a prima facie case only by a clear showing that entry into the market by competitors would be quick and effective)
Even where she joined the dissent in antitrust cases, she did so within the ambit of the consumer welfare standard. Thus, while she was part of the dissent in cases like Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., 551 U.S. 877 (2007), Bell Atlantic Corp v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), and Ohio v. American Express Co., 138 S.Ct. 2274 (2018), she still left a legacy of supporting modern antitrust jurisprudence. In those cases, RBG simply had a different vision for how best to optimize consumer welfare.
Justice Ginsburg’s Volvo Opinion
The 2006 decision Volvo Trucks North America, Inc. v. Reeder-Simco GMC, Inc. was one of the few antitrust decisions authored by RBG and shows her appreciation for the consumer welfare standard. In particular, Justice Ginsburg affirmed the notion that antitrust law is designed to protect competition not competitors—a lesson that, as of late, needs to be refreshed.
Volvo, a 7-2 decision, dealt with the Robinson-Patman Act’s prohibition on price discimination. Reeder-Simco, a retail car dealer that sold Volvos, alleged that Volvo Inc. was violating the Robinson-Patman Act by selling cars to them at different prices than to other Volvo dealers.
The Robinson-Patman Act is frequently cited by antitrust populists as a way to return antitrust law to its former glory. A main argument of Lina Khan’s Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox was that the Chicago School had distorted the law on vertical restraints generally, and price discrimination in particular. One source of this distortion in Khan’s opinion has been the Supreme Court’s mishandling of the Robinson-Patman Act.
Yet, in Volvo we see Justice Ginsburg wrestling with the Robinson-Patman Act in a way to give effect to the law as written, which may run counter to some of the contemporary populist impulse to revise the Court’s interpretation of antitrust laws. Justice Ginsburg, citing Brown & Williamson, first noted that:
Mindful of the purposes of the Act and of the antitrust laws generally, we have explained that Robinson-Patman does not “ban all price differences charged to different purchasers of commodities of like grade and quality.”
Instead, the Robinson-Patman Act was aimed at a particular class of harms that Congress believed existed when large chain-stores were able to exert something like monopsony buying power. Moreover, Justice Ginsburg noted, the Act “proscribes ‘price discrimination only to the extent that it threatens to injure competition’[.]”
Under the Act, plaintiffs needed to demonstrate evidence of Volvo Inc. systematically treating plaintiffs as “disfavored” purchasers as against another set of “favored” purchasers. Instead, all plaintiffs could produce was anecdotal and inconsistent evidence of Volvo Inc. disfavoring them. Thus, the plaintiffs— and theoretically other similarly situated Volvo dealers— were in fact harmed in a sense by Volvo Inc. Yet, Justice Ginsburg was unwilling to rewrite the Act on Congress’s behalf to incorporate new harms later discovered (a fact which would not earn her accolades in populist circles these days).
Instead, Justice Ginsburg wrote that:
Interbrand competition, our opinions affirm, is the “primary concern of antitrust law.”… The Robinson-Patman Act signals no large departure from that main concern. Even if the Act’s text could be construed in the manner urged by [plaintiffs], we would resist interpretation geared more to the protection of existing competitors than to the stimulation of competition. In the case before us, there is no evidence that any favored purchaser possesses market power, the allegedly favored purchasers are dealers with little resemblance to large independent department stores or chain operations, and the supplier’s selective price discounting fosters competition among suppliers of different brands… By declining to extend Robinson-Patman’s governance to such cases, we continue to construe the Act “consistently with broader policies of the antitrust laws.” Brooke Group, 509 U.S., at 220… (cautioning against Robinson-Patman constructions that “extend beyond the prohibitions of the Act and, in doing so, help give rise to a price uniformity and rigidity in open conflict with the purposes of other antitrust legislation”).
Thus, interested in the soundness of her jurisprudence in the face of a well-developed body of antitrust law, Justice Ginsburg chose to continue to develop that body of law rather than engage in judicial policymaking in favor of a sympathetic plaintiff.
It must surely be tempting for a justice on the Court to adopt less principled approaches to the law in any given case, and it is equally as impressive that Justice Ginsburg consistently stuck to her principles. We can only hope her successor takes note of Justice Ginsburg’s example.
One of the great scholars of law & economics turns 90 years old today. In his long and distinguished career, Thomas Sowell has written over 40 books and countless opinion columns. He has been a professor of economics and a long-time Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He received a National Humanities Medal in 2002 for a lifetime of scholarship, which has only continued since then. His ability to look at issues with an international perspective, using the analytical tools of economics to better understand institutions, is an inspiration to us at the International Center for Law & Economics.
Here, almost as a blog post festschrift as a long-time reader of his works, I want to briefly write about how Sowell’s voluminous writings on visions, law, race, and economics could be the basis for a positive agenda to achieve a greater measure of racial justice in the United States.
The Importance of Visions
One of the most important aspects of Sowell’s work is his ability to distill wide-ranging issues into debates involving different mental models, or a “Conflict of Visions.” He calls one vision the “tragic” or “constrained” vision, which sees all humans as inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and fundamentally self-interested even at their best. The other vision is the “utopian” or “unconstrained” vision, which sees human limitations as artifacts of social arrangements and cultures, and that there are some capable by virtue of superior knowledge and morality that can redesign society to create a better world.
An implication of the constrained vision is that the difference in knowledge and virtue between the best and the worst in society is actually quite small. As a result, no one person or group of people can be trusted with redesigning institutions which have spontaneously evolved. The best we can hope for is institutions that reasonably deter bad conduct and allow people the freedom to solve their own problems.
An important implication of the unconstrained vision, on the other hand, is that there are some who because of superior enlightenment, which Sowell calls the “Vision of the Anointed,” can redesign institutions to fundamentally change human nature, which is seen as malleable. Institutions are far more often seen as the result of deliberate human design and choice, and that failures to change them to be more just or equal is a result of immorality or lack of will.
The importance of visions to how we view things like justice and institutions makes all the difference. In the constrained view, institutions like language, culture, and even much of the law result from the “spontaneous ordering” that is the result of human action but not of human design. Limited government, markets, and tradition are all important in helping individuals coordinate action. Markets work because self-interested individuals benefit when they serve others. There are no solutions to difficult societal problems, including racism, only trade-offs.
But in the unconstrained view, limits on government power are seen as impediments to public-spirited experts creating a better society. Markets, traditions, and cultures are to be redesigned from the top down by those who are forward-looking, relying on their articulated reason. There is a belief that solutions could be imposed if only there is sufficient political will and the right people in charge. When it comes to an issue like racism, those who are sufficiently “woke” should be in charge of redesigning institutions to provide for a solution to things like systemic racism.
For Sowell, what he calls “traditional justice” is achieved by processes that hold people accountable for harms to others. Its focus is on flesh-and-blood human beings, not abstractions like all men or blacks versus whites. Differences in outcomes are not just or unjust, by this point of view, what is important is that the processes are just. These processes should focus on institutional incentives of participants. Reforms should be careful not to upset important incentive structures which have evolved over time as the best way for limited human beings to coordinate behavior.
The “Quest for Cosmic Justice,” on the other hand, flows from the unconstrained vision. Cosmic justice sees disparities between abstract groups, like whites and blacks, as unjust and in need of correction. If results from impartial processes like markets or law result in disparities, those with an unconstrained vision often see those processes as themselves racist. The conclusion is that the law should intervene to create better outcomes. This presumes considerable knowledge and morality on behalf of those who are in charge of the interventions.
For Sowell, a large part of his research project has been showing that those with the unconstrained vision often harm those they are proclaiming the intention to help in their quest for cosmic justice.
A Constrained Vision of Racial Justice
Sowell has written quite a lot on race, culture, intellectuals, economics, and public policy. One of the main thrusts of his argument about race is that attempts at cosmic justice often harm living flesh-and-blood individuals in the name of intertemporal abstractions like “social justice” for black Americans. Sowell nowhere denies that racism is an important component of understanding the history of black Americans. But his constant challenge is that racism can’t be the only variable which explains disparities. Sowell points to the importance of culture and education in building human capital to be successful in market economies. Without taking those other variables into account, there is no way to determine the extent that racism is the cause of disparities.
This has important implications for achieving racial justice today. When it comes to policies pursued in the name of racial justice, Sowell has argued that many programs often harm not only members of disfavored groups, but the members of the favored groups.
For instance, Sowell has argued that affirmative action actually harms not only flesh-and-blood white and Asian-Americans who are passed over, but also harms those African-Americans who are “mismatched” in their educational endeavors and end up failing or dropping out of schools when they could have been much better served by attending schools where they would have been very successful. Another example Sowell often points to is minimum wage legislation, which is often justified in the name of helping the downtrodden, but has the effect of harming low-skilled workers by increasing unemployment, most especially young African-American males.
Any attempts at achieving racial justice, in terms of correcting historical injustices, must take into account how changes in processes could actually end up hurting flesh-and-blood human beings, especially when those harmed are black Americans.
A Positive Agenda for Policy Reform
In Sowell’s constrained vision, a large part of the equation for African-American improvement is going to be cultural change. However, white Americans should not think that this means they have no responsibility in working towards racial justice. A positive agenda must take into consideration real harms experienced by African-Americans due to government action (and inaction). Thus, traditional justice demands institutional reforms, and in some cases, recompense.
The policy part of this equation outlined below is motivated by traditional justice concerns that hold people accountable under the rule of law for violations of constitutional rights and promotes institutional reforms to more properly align incentives.
What follows below are policy proposals aimed at achieving a greater degree of racial justice for black Americans, but fundamentally informed by the constrained vision and traditional justice concerns outlined by Sowell. Most of these proposals are not on issues Sowell has written a lot on. In fact, some proposals may actually not be something he would support, but are—in my opinion—consistent with the constrained vision and traditional justice.
Reparations for Historical Rights Violations
Sowell once wrote this in regards to reparations for black Americans:
Nevertheless, it remains painfully clear that those people who were torn from their homes in Africa in centuries past and forcibly brought across the Atlantic in chains suffered not only horribly, but unjustly. Were they and their captors still alive, the reparations and retribution owed would be staggering. Time and death, however, cheat us of such opportunities for justice, however galling that may be. We can, of course, create new injustices among our flesh-and-blood contemporaries for the sake of symbolic expiation, so that the son or daughter of a black doctor or executive can get into an elite college ahead of the son or daughter of a white factory worker or farmer, but only believers in the vision of cosmic justice are likely to take moral solace from that. We can only make our choices among alternatives actually available, and rectifying the past is not one of those options.
In other words, if the victims and perpetrators of injustice are no longer alive, it is not just to hold entire members of respective races accountable for crimes which they did not commit. However, this would presumably leave open the possibility of applying traditional justice concepts in those cases where death has not cheated us.
For instance, there are still black Americans alive who suffered from Jim Crow, as well as children and family members of those lynched. While it is too little, too late, it seems consistent with traditional justice to still seek out and prosecute criminally perpetrators who committed heinous acts but a few generations ago against still living victims. This is not unprecedented. Old Nazis are still prosecuted for crimes against Jews. A similar thing could be done in the United States.
Similarly, civil rights lawsuits for the damages caused by Jim Crow could be another way to recompense those who were harmed. Alternatively, it could be done by legislation. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was passed under President Reagan and gave living Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II some limited reparations. A similar system could be set up for living victims of Jim Crow.
Statutes of limitations may need to be changed to facilitate these criminal prosecutions and civil rights lawsuits, but it is quite clearly consistent with the idea of holding flesh-and-blood persons accountable for their unlawful actions.
Holding flesh-and-blood perpetrators accountable for rights violations should not be confused with the cosmic justice idea—that Sowell consistently decries—that says intertemporal abstractions can be held accountable for crimes. In other words, this is not holding “whites” accountable for all historical injustices to “blacks.” This is specifically giving redress to victims and deterring future bad conduct.
End Qualified Immunity
Another way to promote racial justice consistent with the constrained vision is to end one of the Warren Court’s egregious examples of judicial activism: qualified immunity. Qualified immunity is nowhere mentioned in the statute for civil rights, 42 USC § 1983. As Sowell argues in his writings, judges in the constrained vision are supposed to declare what the law is, not what they believe it should be, unlike those in the unconstrained vision who—according to Sowell— believe they have the right to amend the laws through judicial edict. The introduction of qualified immunity into the law by the activist Warren Court should be overturned.
In a civil rights lawsuit, the goal is to make the victim (or their families) of a rights violation whole by monetary damages. From a legal perspective, this is necessary to give the victim justice. From an economic perspective this is necessary to deter future bad conduct and properly align ex ante incentives going forward. Under a well-functioning system, juries would, after hearing all the evidence, make a decision about whether constitutional rights were violated and the extent of damages. A functioning system of settlements would result as a common law develops determining what counts as reasonable or unreasonable uses of force. This doesn’t mean plaintiffs always win, either. Officers may be determined to be acting reasonably under the circumstances once all the evidence is presented to a jury.
However, one of the greatest obstacles to holding police officers accountable in misconduct cases is the doctrine of qualified immunity… courts have widely expanded its scope to the point that qualified immunity is now protecting officers even when their conduct violates the law, as long as the officers weren’t on clear notice from specific judicial precedent that what they did was illegal when they did it… This standard has predictably led to a situation where officer misconduct which judges and juries would likely find egregious never makes it to court. The Cato Institute’s website Unlawful Shield details many cases where federal courts found an officer’s conduct was illegal yet nonetheless protected by qualified immunity.
Immunity of this nature has profound consequences on the incentive structure facing police officers. Police officers, as well as the departments that employ them, are insufficiently accountable when gross misconduct does not get past a motion to dismiss for qualified immunity… The result is to encourage police officers to take insufficient care when making the choice about the level of force to use.
Those with a constrained vision focus on processes and incentives. In this case, it is police officers who have insufficient incentives to take reasonable care when they receive qualified immunity for their conduct.
End the Drug War
While not something he has written a lot on, Sowell has argued for the decriminalization of drugs, comparing the War on Drugs to the earlier attempts at Prohibition of alcohol. This is consistent with the constrained vision, which cares about the institutional incentives created by law.
Interestingly, work by Michelle Alexander in the second chapter of The New Jim Crow is largely consistent with Sowell’s point of view. There she argued the institutional incentives of police departments were systematically changed when the drug war was ramped up.
Alexander asks a question which is right in line with the constrained vision:
[I]t is fair to wonder why the police would choose to arrest such an astonishing percentage of the American public for minor drug crimes. The fact that police are legally allowed to engage in a wholesale roundup of nonviolent drug offenders does not answer the question why they would choose to do so, particularly when most police departments have far more serious crimes to prevent and solve. Why would police prioritize drug-law enforcement? Drug use and abuse is nothing new; in fact, it was on the decline, not on the rise, when the War on Drugs began.
Alexander locates the impetus for ramping up the drug war in federal subsidies:
In 1988, at the behest of the Reagan administration, Congress revised the program that provides federal aid to law enforcement, renaming it the Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Program after a New York City police officer who was shot to death while guarding the home of a drug-case witness. The Byrne program was designed to encourage every federal grant recipient to help fight the War on Drugs. Millions of dollars in federal aid have been offered to state and local law enforcement agencies willing to wage the war. By the late 1990s, the overwhelming majority of state and local police forces in the country had availed themselves of the newly available resources and added a significant military component to buttress their drug-war operations.
On top of that, police departments were benefited by civil asset forfeiture:
As if the free military equipment, training, and cash grants were not enough, the Reagan administration provided law enforcement with yet another financial incentive to devote extraordinary resources to drug law enforcement, rather than more serious crimes: state and local law enforcement agencies were granted the authority to keep, for their own use, the vast majority of cash and assets they seize when waging the drug war. This dramatic change in policy gave state and local police an enormous stake in the War on Drugs—not in its success, but in its perpetual existence. Suddenly, police departments were capable of increasing the size of their budgets, quite substantially, simply by taking the cash, cars, and homes of people suspected of drug use or sales. Because those who were targeted were typically poor or of moderate means, they often lacked the resources to hire an attorney or pay the considerable court costs. As a result, most people who had their cash or property seized did not challenge the government’s action, especially because the government could retaliate by filing criminal charges—baseless or not.
As Alexander notes, black Americans (and other minorities) were largely targeted in this ramped up War on Drugs, noting the drug war’s effects have been to disproportionately imprison black Americans even though drug usage and sales are relatively similar across races. Police officers have incredible discretion in determining who to investigate and bring charges against. When it comes to the drug war, this discretion is magnified because the activity is largely consensual, meaning officers can’t rely on victims to come to them to start an investigation. Alexander finds the reason the criminal justice system has targeted black Americans is because of implicit bias in police officers, prosecutors, and judges, which mirrors the bias shown in media coverage and in larger white American society.
Anyone inspired by Sowell would need to determine whether this is because of racism or some other variable. It is important to note here that Sowell never denies that racism exists or is a real problem in American society. But he does challenge us to determine whether this alone is the cause of disparities. Here, Alexander makes a strong case that it is implicit racism that causes the disparities in enforcement of the War on Drugs. A race-neutral explanation could be as follows, even though it still suggests ending the War on Drugs: the enforcement costs against those unable to afford to challenge the system are lower. And black Americans are disproportionately represented among the poor in this country. As will be discussed below in the section on reforming indigent criminal defense, most prosecutions are initiated against defendants who can’t afford a lawyer. The result could be racially disparate even without a racist motivation.
Regardless of whether racism is the variable that explains the disparate impact of the War on Drugs, it should be ended. This may be an area where traditional and cosmic justice concerns can be united in an effort to reform the criminal justice system.
Reform Indigent Criminal Defense
A related aspect of how the criminal justice system has created a real barrier for far too many black Americans is the often poor quality of indigent criminal defense. Indigent defense is a large part of criminal defense in this country since a very high number of criminal prosecutions are initiated against those who are often too poor to afford a lawyer (roughly 80%). Since black Americans are disproportionately represented among the indigent and those in the criminal justice system, it should be no surprise that black Americans are disproportionately represented by public defenders in this country.
According to the constrained vision, it is important to look at the institutional incentives of public defenders. Considering the extremely high societal costs of false convictions, it is important to get these incentives right.
David Friedman and Stephen Schulhofer’s seminal article exploring the law & economics of indigent criminal defense highlighted the conflict of interest inherent in government choosing who represents criminal defendants when the government is in charge of prosecuting. They analyzed each of the models used in the United States for indigent defense from an economic point of view and found each wanting. On top of that, there is also a calculation problem inherent in government-run public defender’s offices whereby defendants may be systematically deprived of viable defense strategies because of a lack of price signals.
An interesting alternative proposed by Friedman and Schulhofer is a voucher system. This is similar to the voucher system Sowell has often touted for education. The idea would be that indigent criminal defendants get to pick the lawyer of their choosing that is part of the voucher program. The government would subsidize the provision of indigent defense, in this model, but would not actually pick the lawyer or run the public defender organization. Incentives would be more closely aligned between the defendant and counsel.
Conclusion
While much more could be said consistent with the constrained vision that could help flesh-and-blood black Americans, including abolishing occupational licensing, ending wage controls, promoting school choice, and ending counterproductive welfare policies, this is enough for now. Racial justice demands holding rights violators accountable and making victims whole. Racial justice also means reforming institutions to make sure incentives are right to deter conduct which harms black Americans. However, the growing desire to do something to promote racial justice in this country should not fall into the trap of cosmic justice thinking, which often ends up hurting flesh-and-blood people of all races in the present in the name of intertemporal abstractions.
Happy 90th birthday to one of the greatest law & economics scholars ever, Dr. Thomas Sowell.
Yet another sad story was caught on camera this week showing a group of police officers killing an unarmed African-American man named George Floyd. While the officers were fired from the police department, there is still much uncertainty about what will happen next to hold those officers accountable as a legal matter.
A well-functioning legal system should protect the constitutional rights of American citizens to be free of unreasonable force from police officers, while also allowing police officers the ability to do their jobs safely and well. In theory, civil rights lawsuits are supposed to strike that balance.
In a civil rights lawsuit, the goal is to make the victim (or their families) of a rights violation whole by monetary damages. From a legal perspective, this is necessary to give the victim justice. From an economic perspective this is necessary to deter future bad conduct and properly align ex ante incentives going forward. Under a well-functioning system, juries would, after hearing all the evidence, make a decision about whether constitutional rights were violated and the extent of damages. A functioning system of settlements would result as a common law develops determining what counts as reasonable or unreasonable uses of force. This doesn’t mean plaintiffs always win, either. Officers may be determined to be acting reasonably under the circumstances once all the evidence is presented to a jury.
However, one of the greatest obstacles to holding police officers accountable in misconduct cases is the doctrine of qualified immunity. Qualified immunity started as a mechanism to protect officers from suit when they acted in “good faith.” Over time, though, the doctrine has evolved away from a subjective test based upon the actor’s good faith to an objective test based upon notice in judicial precedent. As a result, courts have widely expanded its scope to the point that qualified immunity is now protecting officers even when their conduct violates the law, as long as the officers weren’t on clear notice from specific judicial precedent that what they did was illegal when they did it. In the words of the Supreme Court, qualified immunity protects “all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.”
This standard has predictably led to a situation where officer misconduct which judges and juries would likely find egregious never makes it to court. The Cato Institute’s website Unlawful Shield details many cases where federal courts found an officer’s conduct was illegal yet nonetheless protected by qualified immunity.
Immunity of this nature has profound consequences on the incentive structure facing police officers. Police officers, as well as the departments that employ them, are insufficiently accountable when gross misconduct does not get past a motion to dismiss for qualified immunity. On top of that, the regular practice of governments is to indemnify officers even when there is a settlement or a judgment. The result is to encourage police officers to take insufficient care when making the choice about the level of force to use.
Economics 101 makes a clear prediction: When unreasonable uses of force are not held accountable, you get more unreasonable uses of force. Unfortunately, the news continues to illustrate the accuracy of this prediction.
In the wake of the launch of Facebook’s content oversight board, Republican Senator Josh Hawley and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, among others, have taken to Twitter to levy criticisms at the firm and, in the process, demonstrate just how far the Right has strayed from its first principles around free speech and private property. For his part, Commissioner Carr’s thread makes the case that the members of the board are highly partisan and mostly left-wing and can’t be trusted with the responsibility of oversight. While Senator Hawley took the approach that the Board’s very existence is just further evidence of the need to break Facebook up.
Both Hawley and Carr have been lauded in rightwing circles, but in reality their positions contradict conservative notions of the free speech and private property protections given by the First Amendment.
I have noted in severalplaces before that there is a conflict of visions when it comes to whether the First Amendment protects a negative or positive conception of free speech. For those unfamiliar with the distinction: it comes from philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who identified negative liberty as freedom from external interference, and positive liberty as freedom to do something, including having the power and resources necessary to do that thing. Discussions of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech often elide over this distinction.
With respect to speech, the negative conception of liberty recognizes that individual property owners can control what is said on their property, for example. To force property owners to allow speakers/speech on their property that they don’t desire would actually be a violation of their liberty — what the Supreme Court calls “compelled speech.” The First Amendment, consistent with this view, generally protects speech from government interference (with very few, narrow exceptions), while allowing private regulation of speech (again, with very few, narrow exceptions).
Commissioner Carr’s complaint and Senator Hawley’s antitrust approach of breaking up Facebook has much more in common with the views traditionally held by left-wing Democrats on the need for the government to regulate private actors in order to promote speech interests. Originalists and law & economics scholars, on the other hand, have consistently taken the opposite point of view that the First Amendment protects against government infringement of speech interests, including protecting the right to editorial discretion. While there is clearly a conflict of visions in First Amendment jurisprudence, the conservative (and, in my view, correct) point of view should not be jettisoned by Republicans to achieve short-term political gains.
The First Amendment restricts government action, not private action
The First Amendment, by its very text, only applies to government action: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” This applies to the “State[s]” through the Fourteenth Amendment. There is extreme difficulty in finding any textual hook to say the First Amendment protects against private action, like that of Facebook.
Originalists have consistently agreed. Most recently, in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, Justice Kavanaugh—on behalf of the conservative bloc and the Court—wrote:
Ratified in 1791, the First Amendment provides in relevant part that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” Ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment makes the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause applicable against the States: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . . .” §1. The text and original meaning of those Amendments, as well as this Court’s longstanding precedents, establish that the Free Speech Clause prohibits only governmental abridgment of speech. The Free Speech Clause does not prohibit private abridgment of speech… In accord with the text and structure of the Constitution, this Court’s state-action doctrine distinguishes the government from individuals and private entities. By enforcing that constitutional boundary between the governmental and the private, the state-action doctrine protects a robust sphere of individual liberty. (Emphasis added).
This was true at the adoption of the First Amendment and remains true today in a high-tech world. Federal district courts have consistently dismissed First Amendment lawsuits against Facebook on the grounds there is no state action.
For instance, in Nyawba v. Facebook, the plaintiff initiated a civil rights lawsuit against Facebook for restricting his use of the platform. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas dismissed the case, noting
Because the First Amendment governs only governmental restrictions on speech, Nyabwa has not stated a cause of action against FaceBook… Like his free speech claims, Nyabwa’s claims for violation of his right of association and violation of his due process rights are claims that may be vindicated against governmental actors pursuant to § 1983, but not a private entity such as FaceBook.
Similarly, in Young v. Facebook, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California rejected a claim that Facebook violated the First Amendment by deactivating the plaintiff’s Facebook page. The court declined to subject Facebook to the First Amendment analysis, stating that “because Young has not alleged any action under color of state law, she fails to state a claim under § 1983.”
The First Amendment restricts antitrust actions against Facebook, not Facebook’s editorial discretion over its platform
Far from restricting Facebook, the First Amendment actually restricts government actions aimed at platforms like Facebook when they engage in editorial discretion by moderating content. If an antitrust plaintiff was to act on the impulse to “break up” Facebook because of alleged political bias in its editorial discretion, the lawsuit would be running headlong into the First Amendment’s protections.
There is no basis for concluding online platforms do not have editorial discretion under the law. In fact, the position of Facebook here is very similar to the newspaper in Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, in which the Supreme Court considered a state law giving candidates for public office a right to reply in newspapers to editorials written about them. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the statute, finding it furthered the “broad societal interest in the free flow of information to the public.” The U.S. Supreme Court, despite noting the level of concentration in the newspaper industry, nonetheless reversed. The Court explicitly found the newspaper had a First Amendment right to editorial discretion:
The choice of material to go into a newspaper, and the decisions made as to limitations on the size and content of the paper, and treatment of public issues and public officials — whether fair or unfair — constitute the exercise of editorial control and judgment. It has yet to be demonstrated how governmental regulation of this crucial process can be exercised consistent with First Amendment guarantees of a free press as they have evolved to this time.
Online platforms have the same First Amendment protections for editorial discretion. For instance, in both Search King v. Google and Langdon v. Google, two different federal district courts ruled Google’s search results are subject to First Amendment protections, both citing Tornillo.
In Zhang v. Baidu.com, another district court went so far as to grant a Chinese search engine the right to editorial discretion in limiting access to democracy movements in China. The court found that the search engine “inevitably make[s] editorial judgments about what information (or kinds of information) to include in the results and how and where to display that information.” Much like the search engine in Zhang, Facebook is clearly making editorial judgments about what information shows up in newsfeed and where to display it.
None of this changes because the generally applicable law is antitrust rather than some other form of regulation. For instance, in Tornillo, the Supreme Court took pains to distinguish the case from an earlier antitrust case against newspapers, Associated Press v. United States, which found that there was no broad exemption from antitrust under the First Amendment.
The Court foresaw the problems relating to government-enforced access as early as its decision in Associated Press v. United States, supra. There it carefully contrasted the private “compulsion to print” called for by the Association’s bylaws with the provisions of the District Court decree against appellants which “does not compel AP or its members to permit publication of anything which their `reason’ tells them should not be published.”
In other words, the Tornillo and Associated Press establish the government may not compel speech through regulation, including an antitrust remedy.
Once it is conceded that there is a speech interest here, the government must justify the use of antitrust law to compel Facebook to display the speech of users in the newsfeeds of others under the strict scrutiny test of the First Amendment. In other words, the use of antitrust law must be narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest. Even taking for granted that there may be a compelling government interest in facilitating a free and open platform (which is by no means certain), it is clear that this would not be narrowly tailored action.
First, “breaking up” Facebook is clearly overbroad as compared to the goal of promoting free speech on the platform. There is no need to break it up just because it has an Oversight Board that engages in editorial responsibilities. There are many less restrictive means, including market competition, which has greatly expanded consumer choice for communications and connections. Second, antitrust does not even really have a remedy for free speech issues complained of here, as it would require courts to engage in long-term oversight and engage in compelled speech foreclosed by Associated Press.
Note that this makes good sense from a law & economics perspective. Platforms like Facebook should be free to regulate the speech on their platforms as they see fit and consumers are free to decide which platforms they wish to use based upon that information. While there are certainly network effects to social media, the plethora of options currently available with low switching costs suggests that there is no basis for antitrust action against Facebook because consumers are unable to speak. In other words, the least restrictive means test of the First Amendment is best fulfilled by market competition in this case.
If there were a basis for antitrust intervention against Facebook, either through merger review or as a standalone monopoly claim, the underlying issue would be harm to competition. While this would have implications for speech concerns (which may be incorporated into an analysis through quality-adjusted price), it is inconceivable how an antitrust remedy could be formed on speech issues consistent with the First Amendment.
Conclusion
Despite now well-worn complaints by so-called conservatives in and out of the government about the baneful influence of Facebook and other Big Tech companies, the First Amendment forecloses government actions to violate the editorial discretion of these companies. Even if Commissioner Carr is right, this latest call for antitrust enforcement against Facebook by Senator Hawley should be rejected for principled conservative reasons.
John Maynard Keynes wrote in his famous General Theorythat “[t]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
This is true even of those who wish to criticize the effect of economic thinking on society. In his new book, The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society, New York Times economics reporter Binyamin Appelbaum aims to show that economists have had a detrimental effect on public policy. But the central irony of the Economists’ Hour is that in criticizing the influence of economists over policy, Appelbaum engages in a great deal of economic speculation himself. Appelbaum would discard the opinions of economists in favor of “the lessons of history,” but all he is left with is unsupported economic reasoning.
Much of The Economists’ Hour is about the history of ideas. To his credit, Appelbaum does a fair job describing Anglo-American economic thought post-New Deal until the start of the 21st century. Part I mainly focuses on macroeconomics, detailing the demise of the Keynesian consensus and the rise of the monetarists and supply-siders. If the author were not so cynical about the influence of economists, he might have represented these changes in dominant economic paradigms as an example of how science progresses over time.
Interestingly, Appelbaum often makes the case that the insights of economists have been incredibly beneficial. For instance, in the opening chapter, he describes how Milton Friedman (one of the main protagonists/antagonists of the book, depending on your point of view) and a band of economists (including Martin Anderson and Walter Oi) fought the military establishment and ended the draft. For that, I’m sure most of us born in the past fifty years would be thankful. One suspects that group includes Appelbaum, though he tries to find objections, claiming for example that “by making war more efficient and more remote from the lives of most Americans, the end of the draft may also have made war more likely.”
Appelbaum also notes positively that economists, most prominently Alfred Kahn in the United States, led the charge in a largely beneficial deregulation of the airline and trucking industries in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Yet, overall, it is clear that Appelbaum believes the “outsized” influence of economists over policymaking itself fails the cost-benefit analysis. Appelbaum focuses on the costs of listening too much to economists on antitrust law, trade and development, interest rates and currency, the use of cost-benefit analysis in regulation, and the deregulation of the financial services industry. He sees the deregulation of airlines and trucking as the height of the economists’ hour, and its close with the financial crisis of the late-2000s. His thesis is that (his interpretation of) economists’ notions of efficiency, their (alleged) lack of concern about distributional effects, and their (alleged) myopia has harmed society as their influence over policy has grown.
In his chapter on antitrust, for instance, Appelbaum admits that even though “[w]e live in a new era of giant corporations… there is little evidence consumers are suffering.” Appelbaum argues instead that lax antitrust enforcement has resulted in market concentration harmful to workers, democracy, and innovation. In order to make those arguments, he uncritically cites the work of economists and non-economist legal scholars that make economic claims. A closer inspection of each of these (economic) arguments suggests there is more to the story.
First, recent research questions the narrative that increasing market concentration has resulted in harm to consumers, workers, or society. In their recent paper, “The Industrial Revolution in Services,” Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg of Princeton University argue that increasing concentration is primarily due to technological innovation in services, retail, and wholesale sectors. While there has been greater concentration at the national level, this has been accompanied by increased competition locally as national chains expanded to more local markets. Of note, employment has increased in the sectors where national concentration is rising.
The rise in national industry concentration in the US between 1977 and 2013 is driven by a new industrial revolution in three broad non-traded sectors: services, retail, and wholesale. Sectors where national concentration is rising have increased their share of employment, and the expansion is entirely driven by the number of local markets served by firms. Firm employment per market has either increased slightly at the MSA level, or decreased substantially at the county or establishment levels. In industries with increasing concentration, the expansion into more markets is more pronounced for the top 10% firms, but is present for the bottom 90% as well. These trends have not been accompanied by economy-wide concentration. Top U.S. firms are increasingly specialized in sectors with rising industry concentration, but their aggregate employment share has remained roughly stable. We argue that these facts are consistent with the availability of a new set of fixed-cost technologies that enable adopters to produce at lower marginal costs in all markets. We present a simple model of firm size and market entry to describe the menu of new technologies and trace its implications.
In other words, any increase in concentration has been sector-specific and primarily due to more efficient national firms expanding into local markets. This has been associated with lower prices for consumers and more employment opportunities for workers in those sectors.
Appelbaum also looks to Lina Khan’s law journal article, which attacks Amazon for allegedly engaging in predatory pricing, as an example of a new group of young scholars coming to the conclusion that there is a need for more antitrust scrutiny. But, as ICLE scholars Alec Stapp and Kristian Stout have pointed out, there is very little evidence Amazon is actually engaging in predatory pricing. Khan’s article is a challenge to the consensus on how to think about predatory pricing and consumer welfare, but her underlying economic theory is premised on Amazon having such a long time horizon that they can lose money on retail for decades (even though it has been profitable for some time), on the theory that someday down the line they can raise prices after they have run all retail competition out.
Second, Appelbaum argues that mergers and acquisitions in the technology sector, especially acquisitions by Google and Facebook of potential rivals, has decreased innovation. Appelbaum’s belief is that innovation is spurred when government forces dominant players “to make room” for future competition. Here he draws in part on claims by some economists that dominant firms sometimes engage in “killer acquisitions” — acquiring nascent competitors in order to reduce competition, to the detriment of consumer welfare. But a simple model of how that results in reduced competition must be balanced by a recognition that many companies, especially technology startups, are incentivized to innovate in part by the possibility that they will be bought out. As noted by the authors of the leading study on the welfare effects of alleged “killer acquisitions”,
“it is possible that the presence of an acquisition channel also has a positive effect on welfare if the prospect of entrepreneurial exit through acquisition (by an incumbent) spurs ex-ante innovation …. Whereas in our model entrepreneurs are born with a project and thus do not have to exert effort to come up with an idea, it is plausible that the prospect of later acquisition may motivate the origination of entrepreneurial ideas in the first place… If, on the other hand, killer acquisitions do increase ex-ante innovation, this potential welfare gain will have to be weighed against the ex-post efficiency loss due to reduced competition. Whether the former positive or the latter negative effect dominates will depend on the elasticity of the entrepreneur’s innovation response.”
This analysis suggests that a case-by-case review is necessary if antitrust plaintiffs can show evidence that harm to consumers is likely to occur due to a merger.. But shifting the burden to merging entities, as Applebaum seems to suggest, will come with its own costs. In other words, more economics is needed to understand this area, not less.
Third, Appelbaum’s few concrete examples of harm to consumers resulting from “lax antitrust enforcement” in the United States come from airline mergers and telecommunications. In both cases, he sees the increased attention from competition authorities in Europe compared to the U.S. at the explanation for better outcomes. Neither is a clear example of harm to consumers, nor can be used to show superior antitrust frameworks in Europe versus the United States.
In the case of airline mergers, Appelbaum argues the gains from deregulation of the industry have been largely given away due to poor antitrust enforcement and prices stopped falling, leading to a situation where “[f]or the first time since the dawn of aviation, it is generally cheaper to fly in Europe than in the United States.” This is hard to square with the data.
While the concentration and profits story fits the antitrust populist narrative, other observations run contrary to [this] conclusion. For example, airline prices, as measured by price indexes, show that changes in U.S. and EU airline prices have fairly closely tracked each other until 2014, when U.S. prices began dropping. Sure, airlines have instituted baggage fees, but the CPI includes taxes, fuel surcharges, airport, security, and baggage fees. It’s not obvious that U.S. consumers are worse off in the so-called era of rising concentration.
Our main conclusion is simple: The recent legacy carrier mergers have been associated with pro-competitive outcomes. We find that, on average across all three mergers combined, nonstop overlap routes (on which both merging parties were present pre-merger) experienced statistically significant output increases and statistically insignificant nominal fare decreases relative to non-overlap routes. This pattern also holds when we study each of the three mergers individually. We find that nonstop overlap routes experienced statistically significant output and capacity increases following all three legacy airline mergers, with statistically significant nominal fare decreases following Delta/Northwest and American/USAirways mergers, and statistically insignificant nominal fare decreases following the United/Continental merger…
One implication of our findings is that any fare increases that have been observed since the mergers were very unlikely to have been caused by the mergers. In particular, our results demonstrate pro-competitive output expansions on nonstop overlap routes indicating reductions in quality-adjusted fares and a lack of significant anti-competitive effects on connecting overlaps. Hence ,our results demonstrate consumer welfare gains on overlap routes, without even taking credit for the large benefits on non-overlap routes (due to new online service, improved service networks at airports, fleet reallocation, etc.). While some of our results indicate that passengers on non-overlap routes also benefited from the mergers, we leave the complete exploration of such network effects for future research.
In other words, neither part of Applebaum’s proposition, that Europe has cheaper fares and that concentration has led to worse outcomes for consumers in the United States, appears to be true. Perhaps the influence of economists over antitrust law in the United States has not been so bad after all.
Appelbaum also touts the lower prices for broadband in Europe as an example of better competition policy over telecommunications in Europe versus the United States. While prices are lower on average in Europe for broadband, this obfuscates distribution of prices depending on speed tiers. UPenn Professor Christopher Yoo’s 2014 study titled U.S. vs. European Broadband Deployment: What Do the Data Say? found:
U.S. broadband was cheaper than European broadband for all speed tiers below 12 Mbps. U.S. broadband was more expensive for higher speed tiers, although the higher cost was justified in no small part by the fact that U.S. Internet users on average consumed 50% more bandwidth than their European counterparts.
Population density also helps explain differences between Europe and the United States. The closer people are together, the easier it is to build out infrastructure like broadband Internet. The United States is considerably more rural than most European countries. As a result, consideration of prices and speed need to be adjusted to reflect those differences. For instance, the FCC’s 2018 International Broadband Data Report shows a move in position from 23rd to 14th for the United States compared to 28 (mostly European) other countries once population density and income are taken into consideration for fixed broadband prices (Model 1 to Model 2). The United States climbs even further to 6th out of the 29 countries studied if data usage is included and 7th if quality (i.e. websites available in language) is taken into consideration (Model 4).
Country
Model 1
Model 2
Model 3
Model 4
Price
Rank
Price
Rank
Price
Rank
Price
Rank
Australia
$78.30
28
$82.81
27
$102.63
26
$84.45
23
Austria
$48.04
17
$60.59
15
$73.17
11
$74.02
17
Belgium
$46.82
16
$66.62
21
$75.29
13
$81.09
22
Canada
$69.66
27
$74.99
25
$92.73
24
$76.57
19
Chile
$33.42
8
$73.60
23
$83.81
20
$88.97
25
Czech Republic
$26.83
3
$49.18
6
$69.91
9
$60.49
6
Denmark
$43.46
14
$52.27
8
$69.37
8
$63.85
8
Estonia
$30.65
6
$56.91
12
$81.68
19
$69.06
12
Finland
$35.00
9
$37.95
1
$57.49
2
$51.61
1
France
$30.12
5
$44.04
4
$61.96
4
$54.25
3
Germany
$36.00
12
$53.62
10
$75.09
12
$66.06
11
Greece
$35.38
10
$64.51
19
$80.72
17
$78.66
21
Iceland
$65.78
25
$73.96
24
$94.85
25
$90.39
26
Ireland
$56.79
22
$62.37
16
$76.46
14
$64.83
9
Italy
$29.62
4
$48.00
5
$68.80
7
$59.00
5
Japan
$40.12
13
$53.58
9
$81.47
18
$72.12
15
Latvia
$20.29
1
$42.78
3
$63.05
5
$52.20
2
Luxembourg
$56.32
21
$54.32
11
$76.83
15
$72.51
16
Mexico
$35.58
11
$91.29
29
$120.40
29
$109.64
29
Netherlands
$44.39
15
$63.89
18
$89.51
21
$77.88
20
New Zealand
$59.51
24
$81.42
26
$90.55
22
$76.25
18
Norway
$88.41
29
$71.77
22
$103.98
27
$96.95
27
Portugal
$30.82
7
$58.27
13
$72.83
10
$71.15
14
South Korea
$25.45
2
$42.07
2
$52.01
1
$56.28
4
Spain
$54.95
20
$87.69
28
$115.51
28
$106.53
28
Sweden
$52.48
19
$52.16
7
$61.08
3
$70.41
13
Switzerland
$66.88
26
$65.01
20
$91.15
23
$84.46
24
United Kingdom
$50.77
18
$63.75
17
$79.88
16
$65.44
10
United States
$58.00
23
$59.84
14
$64.75
6
$62.94
7
Average
$46.55
$61.70
$80.24
$73.73
Model 1: Unadjusted for demographics and content quality
Model 2: Adjusted for demographics but not content quality
Model 3: Adjusted for demographics and data usage
Model 4: Adjusted for demographics and content quality
Furthermore, investment and buildout are other important indicators of how well the United States is doing compared to Europe. Appelbaum fails to consider all of these factors when comparing the European model of telecommunications to the United States’. Yoo’s conclusion is an appropriate response:
The increasing availability of high-quality data has the promise to effect a sea change in broadband policy. Debates that previously relied primarily on anecdotal evidence and personal assertions of visions for the future can increasingly take place on a firmer empirical footing.
In particular, these data can resolve the question whether the U.S. is running behind Europe in the broadband race or vice versa. The U.S. and European mapping studies are clear and definitive: These data indicate that the U.S. is ahead of Europe in terms of the availability of Next Generation Access (NGA) networks. The U.S. advantage is even starker in terms of rural NGA coverage and with respect to key technologies such as FTTP and LTE.
Empirical analysis, both in terms of top-level statistics and in terms of eight country case studies, also sheds light into the key policy debate between facilities-based competition and service-based competition. The evidence again is fairly definitive, confirming that facilities-based competition is more effective in terms of driving broadband investment than service-based competition.
In other words, Appelbaum relies on bad data to come to his conclusion that listening to economists has been wrong for American telecommunications policy. Perhaps it is his economic assumptions that need to be questioned.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, in antitrust, environmental regulation, and other areas he reviewed, Appelbaum does not believe economic efficiency should be the primary concern anyway. For instance, he repeats the common historical argument that the purpose of the Sherman Act was to protect small businesses from bigger, and often more efficient, competitors.
So applying economic analysis to Appelbaum’s claims may itself be an illustration of caring too much about economic models instead of learning “the lessons of history.” But Appelbaum inescapably assumes economic models of its own. And these models appear less grounded in empirical data than those of the economists he derides. There’s no escaping mental models to understand the world. It is just a question of whether we are willing to change our mind if a better way of understanding the world presents itself. As Keynes is purported to have said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
For all the criticism of economists, there at least appears to be a willingness among them to change their minds, as illustrated by the increasing appreciation for anti-inflationary monetary policy among macroeconomists described in TheEconomists’ Hour. The question which remains is whether Appelbaum and other critics of the economic way of thinking are as willing to reconsider their strongly held views when they conflict with the evidence.
Henry Manne was a great man, and a great father. He was, for me as for many others, one of the most important intellectual influences in my life. I will miss him dearly.
Following is his official obituary. RIP, dad.
Henry Girard Manne died on January 17, 2015 at the age of 86. A towering figure in legal education, Manne was one of the founders of the Law and Economics movement, the 20th century’s most important and influential legal academic discipline.
Manne is survived by his wife, Bobbie Manne; his children, Emily and Geoffrey Manne; two grandchildren, Annabelle and Lily Manne; and two nephews, Neal and Burton Manne. He was preceded in death by his parents, Geoffrey and Eva Manne, and his brother, Richard Manne.
Henry Manne was born on May 10, 1928, in New Orleans. The son of merchant parents, he was raised in Memphis, Tennessee. He attended Central High School in Memphis, and graduated with a BA in economics from Vanderbilt University in 1950. Manne received a JD from the University of Chicago in 1952, and a doctorate in law (SJD) from Yale University in 1966. He also held honorary degrees from Seattle University, Universidad Francesco Marroquin in Guatemala and George Mason University.
Following law school Manne served in the Air Force JAG Corps, stationed at Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois and McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. He practiced law briefly in Chicago before beginning his teaching career at St. Louis University in 1956. In subsequent years he also taught at the University of Wisconsin, George Washington University, the University of Rochester, Stanford University, the University of Miami, Emory University, George Mason University, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University.
Throughout his career Henry Manne ’s writings originated, developed or anticipated an extraordinary range of ideas and themes that have animated the past forty years of law and economics scholarship. For his work, Manne was named a Life Member of the American Law and Economics Association and, along with Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase, and federal appeals court judges Richard Posner and Guido Calabresi, one of the four Founders of Law and Economics.
In the 1950s and 60s Manne pioneered the application of economic principles to the study of corporations and corporate law, authoring seminal articles that transformed the field. His article, “Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control,” published in 1965, is credited with opening the field of corporate law to economic analysis and with anticipating what has come to be known as the Efficient Market Hypothesis (for which economist Eugene Fama was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2013). Manne’s 1966 book, Insider Trading and the Stock Market was the first scholarly work to challenge the logic of insider trading laws, and remains the most influential book on the subject today.
In 1968 Manne moved to the University of Rochester with the aim of starting a new law school. Manne anticipated many of the current criticisms that have been aimed at legal education in recent years, and proposed a law school that would provide rigorous training in the economic analysis of law as well as specialized training in specific areas of law that would prepare graduates for practice immediately out of law school. Manne’s proposal for a new law school, however, drew the ire of incumbent law schools in upstate New York, which lobbied against accreditation of the new program.
While at Rochester, in 1971, Manne created the “Economics Institute for Law Professors,” in which, for the first time, law professors were offered intensive instruction in microeconomics with the aim of incorporating economics into legal analysis and theory. The Economics Institute was later moved to the University of Miami when Manne founded the Law &Economics Center there in 1974. While at Miami, Manne also began the John M. Olin Fellows Program in Law and Economics, which provided generous scholarships for professional economists to earn a law degree. That program (and its subsequent iterations) has gone on to produce dozens of professors of law and economics, as well as leading lawyers and influential government officials.
The creation of the Law & Economics Center (which subsequently moved to Emory University and then to George Mason Law School, where it continues today), was one of the foundational events in the Law and Economics Movement. Of particular importance to the development of US jurisprudence, its offerings were expanded to include economics courses for federal judges. At its peak a third of the federal bench and four members of the Supreme Court had attended at least one of its programs, and every major law school in the country today counts at least one law and economics scholar among its faculty. Nearly every legal field has been influenced by its scholarship and teaching.
When Manne became Dean of George Mason Law School in Arlington, Virginia, in 1986, he finally had the opportunity to implement the ideas he had originally developed at Rochester. Manne’s move to George Mason united him with economist James Buchanan, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1986 for his path-breaking work in the field of Public Choice economics, and turned George Mason University into a global leader in law and economics. His tenure as dean of George Mason, where he served as dean until 1997 and George Mason University Foundation Professor until 1999, transformed legal education by integrating a rigorous economic curriculum into the law school, and he remade George Mason Law School into one of the most important law schools in the country. The school’s Henry G. Manne Moot Court Competition for Law & Economics and the Henry G. Manne Program in Law and Economics Studies are named for him.
Manne was celebrated for his independence of mind and respect for sound reasoning and intellectual rigor, instead of academic pedigree. Soon after he left Rochester to start the Law and Economics Center, he received a call from Yale faculty member Ralph Winter (who later became a celebrated judge on the United States Court of Appeals) offering Manne a faculty position. As he recounted in an interview several years later, Manne told Winter, “Ralph, you’re two weeks and five years too late.” When Winter asked Manne what he meant, Manne responded, “Well, two weeks ago, I agreed that I would start this new center on law and economics.” When Winter asked, “And five years?” Manne responded, “And you’re five years too late for me to give a damn.”
The academic establishment’s slow and skeptical response to the ideas of law and economics eventually persuaded Manne that reform of legal education was unlikely to come from within the established order and that it would be necessary to challenge the established order from without. Upon assuming the helm at George Mason, Dean Manne immediately drew to the school faculty members laboring at less-celebrated law schools whom Manne had identified through his economics training seminars for law professors, including several alumni of his Olin Fellows programs. Today the law school is recognized as one of the world’s leading centers of law and economics.
Throughout his career, Manne was an outspoken champion of free markets and liberty. His intellectual heroes and intellectual peers were classical liberal economists like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Mises, Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, and these scholars deeply influenced his thinking. As economist Donald Boudreax said of Dean Manne, “I think what Henry saw in Alchian – and what Henry’s own admirers saw in Henry – was the reality that each unfailingly understood that competition in human affairs is an intrepid force…”
In his teaching, his academic writing, his frequent op-eds and essays, and his work with organizations like the Cato Institute, the Liberty Fund, the Institute for Humane Studies, and the Mont Pelerin Society, among others, Manne advocated tirelessly for a clearer understanding of the power of markets and competition and the importance of limited government and economically sensible regulation.
After leaving George Mason in 1999, Manne remained an active scholar and commenter on public affairs as a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal. He continued to provide novel insights on corporate law, securities law, and the reform of legal education. Following his retirement Manne became a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ave Maria Law School in Naples, Florida. The Liberty Fund, of Indianapolis, Indiana, recently published The Collected Works of Henry G. Manne in three volumes.
For some, perhaps more than for all of his intellectual accomplishments Manne will be remembered as a generous bon vivant who reveled in the company of family and friends. He was an avid golfer (who never scheduled a conference far from a top-notch golf course), a curious traveler, a student of culture, a passionate eater (especially of ice cream and Peruvian rotisserie chicken from El Pollo Rico restaurant in Arlington, Virginia), and a gregarious debater (who rarely suffered fools gladly). As economist Peter Klein aptly remarked: “He was a charming companion and correspondent — clever, witty, erudite, and a great social and cultural critic, especially of the strange world of academia, where he plied his trade for five decades but always as a slight outsider.”
Scholar, intellectual leader, champion of individual liberty and free markets, and builder of a great law school—Manne’s influence on law and legal education in the Twentieth Century may be unrivaled. Today, the institutions he built and the intellectual movement he led continue to thrive and to draw sustenance from his intellect and imagination.
There will be a memorial service at George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia on Friday, February 13, at 4:00 pm. In lieu of flowers the family requests that donations be made in his honor to the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University School of Law, 3301 Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA 22201 or online at http://www.masonlec.org.
As it begins its hundredth year, the FTC is increasingly becoming the Federal Technology Commission. The agency’s role in regulating data security, privacy, the Internet of Things, high-tech antitrust and patents, among other things, has once again brought to the forefront the question of the agency’s discretion and the sources of the limits on its power.Please join us this Monday, December 16th, for a half-day conference launching the year-long “FTC: Technology & Reform Project,” which will assess both process and substance at the FTC and recommend concrete reforms to help ensure that the FTC continues to make consumers better off.
FTC Commissioner Josh Wright will give a keynote luncheon address titled, “The Need for Limits on Agency Discretion and the Case for Section 5 UMC Guidelines.” Project members will discuss the themes raised in our inaugural report and how they might inform some of the most pressing issues of FTC process and substance confronting the FTC, Congress and the courts. The afternoon will conclude with a Fireside Chat with former FTC Chairmen Tim Muris and Bill Kovacic, followed by a cocktail reception.
Full Agenda:
Lunch and Keynote Address (12:00-1:00)
FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright
Introduction to the Project and the “Questions & Frameworks” Report (1:00-1:15)
Panel 2: Section 5 and the Future of the FTC (2:45-4:00)
Paul Rubin (Emory University Law and Economics | Former Director of Advertising Economics, BE)
James Cooper (GMU Law | Former Acting Director, OPP)
Gus Hurwitz (University of Nebraska Law)
Berin Szoka (TechFreedom) (moderator)
A Fireside Chat with Former FTC Chairmen (4:15-5:30)
Tim Muris (Former FTC Chairman | George Mason University) & Bill Kovacic (Former FTC Chairman | George Washington University)
Reception (5:30-6:30)
Our conference is a “widely-attended event.” Registration is $75 but free for nonprofit, media and government attendees. Space is limited, so RSVP today!
Working Group Members:
Howard Beales
Terry Calvani
James Cooper
Jeffrey Eisenach
Gus Hurwitz
Thom Lambert
Tad Lipsky
Geoffrey Manne
Timothy Muris
Paul Rubin
Joanna Shepherd-Bailey
Joe Sims
Berin Szoka
Sasha Volokh
Todd Zywicki
Earlier this month, Representatives Peter DeFazio and Jason Chaffetz picked up the gauntlet from President Obama’s comments on February 14 at a Google-sponsored Internet Q&A on Google+ that “our efforts at patent reform only went about halfway to where we need to go” and that he would like “to see if we can build some additional consensus on smarter patent laws.” So, Reps. DeFazio and Chaffetz introduced on March 1 the Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act, which creates a “losing plaintiff patent-owner pays” litigation system for a single type of patent owner—patent licensing companies that purchase and license patents in the marketplace (and who sue infringers when infringers refuse their requests to license). To Google, to Representative DeFazio, and to others, these patent licensing companies are “patent trolls” who are destroyers of all things good—and the SHIELD Act will save us all from these dastardly “trolls” (is a troll anything but dastardly?).
As I and other scholars have pointed out, the “patent troll” moniker is really just a rhetorical epithet that lacks even an agreed-upon definition. The term is used loosely enough that it sometimes covers and sometimes excludes universities, Thomas Edison, Elias Howe (the inventor of the lockstitch in 1843), Charles Goodyear (the inventor of vulcanized rubber in 1839), and even companies like IBM. How can we be expected to have a reasonable discussion about patent policy when our basic terms of public discourse shift in meaning from blog to blog, article to article, speaker to speaker? The same is true of the new term, “Patent Assertion Entities,” which sounds more neutral, but has the same problem in that it also lacks any objective definition or usage.
Setting aside this basic problem of terminology for the moment, the SHIELD Act is anything but a “smarter patent law” (to quote President Obama). Some patent scholars, like Michael Risch, have begun to point out some of the serious problems with the SHIELD Act, such as its selectively discriminatory treatment of certain types of patent-owners. Moreover, as Professor Risch ably identifies, this legislation was so cleverly drafted to cover only a limited set of a specific type of patent-owner that it ended up being too clever. Unlike the previous version introduced last year, the 2013 SHIELD Act does not even apply to the flavor-of-the-day outrage over patent licensing companies—the owner of the podcast patent. (Although you wouldn’t know this if you read the supporters of the SHIELD Act like the EFF who falsely claim that this law will stop patent-owners like the podcast patent-owning company.)
There are many things wrong with the SHIELD Act, but one thing that I want to highlight here is that it based on a falsehood: the oft-repeated claim that two Boston University researchers have proven in a study that “patent troll suits cost American technology companies over $29 billion in 2011 alone.” This is what Rep. DeFazio said when he introduced the SHIELD Act on March 1. This claim was repeated yesterday by House Members during a hearing on “Abusive Patent Litigation.” The claim that patent licensing companies cost American tech companies $29 billion in a single year (2011) has become gospel since this study, The Direct Costs from NPE Disputes, was released last summer on the Internet. (Another name of patent licensing companies is “Non Practicing Entity” or “NPE.”) A Google search of “patent troll 29 billion” produces 191,000 hits. A Google search of “NPE 29 billion” produces 605,000 hits. Such is the making of conventional wisdom.
The problem with conventional wisdom is that it is usually incorrect, and the study that produced the claim of “$29 billion imposed by patent trolls” is no different. The $29 billion cost study is deeply and fundamentally flawed, as explained by two noted professors, David Schwartz and Jay Kesan, who are also highly regarded for their empirical and economic work in patent law. In their essay, Analyzing the Role of Non-Practicing Entities in the Patent System, also released late last summer, they detailed at great length serious methodological and substantive flaws in The Direct Costs from NPE Disputes. Unfortunately, the Schwartz and Kesan essay has gone virtually unnoticed in the patent policy debates, while the $29 billion cost claim has through repetition become truth.
In the hope that at least a few more people might discover the Schwartz and Kesan essay, I will briefly summarize some of their concerns about the study that produced the $29 billion cost figure. This is not merely an academic exercise. Since Rep. DeFazio explicitly relied on the $29 billion cost claim to justify the SHIELD Act, and he and others keep repeating it, it’s important to know if it is true, because it’s being used to drive proposed legislation in the real world. If patent legislation is supposed to secure innovation, then it behooves us to know if this legislation is based on actual facts. Yet, as Schwartz and Kesan explain in their essay, the $29 billion cost claim is based on a study that is fundamentally flawed in both substance and methodology.
In terms of its methodological flaws, the study supporting the $29 billion cost claim employs an incredibly broad definition of “patent troll” that covers almost every person, corporation or university that sues someone for infringing a patent that it is not currently being used to manufacture a product at that moment. While the meaning of the “patent troll” epithet shifts depending on the commentator, reporter, blogger, or scholar who is using it, one would be extremely hard pressed to find anyone embracing this expansive usage in patent scholarship or similar commentary today.
There are several reasons why the extremely broad definition of “NPE” or “patent troll” in the study is unusual even compared to uses of this term in other commentary or studies. First, and most absurdly, this definition, by necessity, includes every universityin the world that sues someone for infringing one of its patents, as universities don’t manufacture goods. Second, it includes every individual and start-up company who plans to manufacture a patented invention, but is forced to sue an infringer-competitor who thwarted these business plans by its infringing sales in the marketplace. Third, it includes commercial firms throughout the wide-ranging innovation industries—from high tech to biotech to traditional manufacturing—that have at least one patent among a portfolio of thousands that is not being used at the moment to manufacture a product because it may be “well outside the area in which they make products” and yet they sue infringers of this patent (the quoted language is from the study). So, according to this study, every manufacturer becomes an “NPE” or “patent troll” if it strays too far from what somebody subjectively defines as its rightful “area” of manufacturing. What company is not branded an “NPE” or “patent troll” under this definition, or will necessarily become one in the future given inevitable changes in one’s business plans or commercial activities? This is particularly true for every person or company whose only current opportunity to reap the benefit of their patented invention is to license the technology or to litigate against the infringers who refuse license offers.
So, when almost every possible patent-owning person, university, or corporation is defined as a “NPE” or “patent troll,” why are we surprised that a study that employs this virtually boundless definition concludes that they create $29 billion in litigation costs per year? The only thing surprising is that the number isn’t even higher!
There are many other methodological flaws in the $29 billion cost study, such as its explicit assumption that patent litigation costs are “too high” without providing any comparative baseline for this conclusion. What are the costs in other areas of litigation, such as standard commercial litigation, tort claims, or disputes over complex regulations? We are not told. What are the historical costs of patent litigation? We are not told. On what basis then can we conclude that $29 billion is “too high” or even “too low”? We’re supposed to be impressed by a number that exists in a vacuum and that lacks any empirical context by which to evaluate it.
The $29 billion cost study also assumes that all litigation transaction costs are deadweight losses, which would mean that the entire U.S. court system is a deadweight loss according to the terms of this study. Every lawsuit, whether a contract, tort, property, regulatory or constitutional dispute is, according to the assumption of the $29 billion cost study, a deadweight loss. The entire U.S. court system is an inefficient cost imposed on everyone who uses it. Really? That’s an assumption that reduces itself to absurdity—it’s a self-imposed reductio ad absurdum!
In addition to the methodological problems, there are also serious concerns about the trustworthiness and quality of the actual data used to reach the $29 billion claim in the study. All studies rely on data, and in this case, the $29 billion study used data from a secret survey done by RPX of its customers. For those who don’t know, RPX’s business model is to defend companies against these so-called “patent trolls.” So, a company whose business model is predicated on hyping the threat of “patent trolls” does a secret survey of its paying customers, and it is now known that RPX informed its customers in the survey that their answers would be used to lobby for changes in the patent laws.
As every reputable economist or statistician will tell you, such conditions encourage exaggeration and bias in a data sample by motivating participation among those who support changes to the patent law. Such a problem even has a formal name in economic studies: self-selection bias. But one doesn’t need to be an economist or statistician to be able to see the problems in relying on the RPX data to conclude that NPEs cost $29 billion per year. As the classic adage goes, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
Even worse, as I noted above, the RPX survey was confidential. RPX has continued to invoke “client confidences” in refusing to disclose its actual customer survey or the resulting data, which means that the data underlying the $29 billion claim is completely unknown and unverifiable for anyone who reads the study. Don’t worry, the researchers have told us in a footnote in the study, they looked at the data and confirmed it is good. Again, it doesn’t take economic or statistical training to know that something is not right here. Another classic cliché comes to mind at this point: “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.”
In fact, keeping data secret in a published study violates well-established and longstanding norms in all scientific research that data should always be made available for testing and verification by third parties. No peer-reviewed medical or scientific journal would publish a study based on a secret data set in which the researchers have told us that we should simply trust them that the data is accurate. Its use of secret data probably explains why the $29 billion study has not yet appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, and, if economics has any claim to being an actual science, this study never will. If a study does not meet basic scientific standards for verifying data, then why are Reps. DeFazio and Chaffetz relying on it to propose national legislation that directly impacts the patent system and future innovation? If heads-in-the-clouds academics would know to reject such a study as based on unverifiable, likely biased claptrap, then why are our elected officials embracing it to create real-world legal rules?
And, to continue our running theme of classic clichés, there’s the rub. The more one looks at the actual legal requirements of the SHIELD Act, the more, in the words of Professor Risch, one is left “scratching one’s head” in bewilderment. The more one looks at the supporting studies and arguments in favor of the SHIELD Act, the more one is left, in the words of Professor Risch, “scratching one’s head.” The more and more one thinks about the SHIELD Act, the more one realizes what it is—legislation that has been crafted at the behest of the politically powerful (such as an Internet company who can get the President to do a special appearance on its own social media website) to have the government eliminate a smaller, publicly reviled, and less politically-connected group.
In short, people may have legitimate complaints about the ways in which the court system in the U.S. generally has problems. Commentators and Congresspersons could even consider revising the general legal rules governing patent ligtiation for all plaintiffs and defendants to make the ligitation system work better or more efficiently (by some established metric). Professor Risch has done exactly this in a recent Wired op-ed. But it’s time to call a spade a spade: the SHIELD Act is a classic example of rent-seeking, discriminatory legislation.
Truth on the Market and the International Center for Law & Economics are delighted (if a bit saddened) to announce that President Obama intends to nominate Joshua Wright, Research Director and Member of the Board of Directors of ICLE and Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law, to be the next Commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission.
Josh holds economics and law degrees from UCLA, and he is one of only a small handful of young antitrust scholars in the legal academy to hold both a PhD in economics as well as a JD. If confirmed, he will also be only the fourth economist to serve as FTC Commissioner (following Jim Miller, George Douglas and Dennis Yao) and the first JD/PhD.
Josh’s scholarship and approach to antitrust are firmly grounded in the UCLA economics tradition, exemplified by the members of Josh’s dissertation committee — Armen Alchian, Harold Demsetz & Benjamin Klein.
For my part, I couldn’t be happier with Josh’s nomination. Josh’s “error cost” approach to antitrust and consumer protection law will be a tremendous asset to the Commission. His work is rigorous, empirically grounded, and ever-mindful of the complexities of the institutional settings in which businesses act and in which regulators enforce. I am honored to have co-authored several articles with Josh, and, like many of the readers of this blog, I have learned an incredible amount about antitrust law and economics from my interactions with him. The Commissioners and staff at the FTC will surely similarly profit from his time there.
Truth on the Market and the International Center for Law & Economics are delighted (if a bit saddened) to announce that President Obama intends to nominate Joshua Wright, Research Director and Member of the Board of Directors of ICLE and Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law, to be the next Commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission.
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