Competition is Killing Us: How Big Business is Harming Our Society and Planet

"As you can tell from the title, it’s quite clear what this author’s view is. Michelle Meagher is quite interesting; she’s not an economist, she was originally a competition lawyer. She says that she started off thinking that competition was something that worked for the social good. She came to review her attitude after some decades working as a competition lawyer. She gave up her job and turned to thinking more critically about competition. She doesn’t think much of the way competition policy currently operates and she’s got a lot of suggestions. She divides her book into two, the first half of the book describing what’s going wrong and then the second half of the book offering some suggestions as to how to fix it. Her suggestions are a little wider and broader, and a bit different from the other people that are on the list of books. It’s a good question. I don’t know whether it’s because she’s a lawyer or because she’s not an economist but she’s very much of the view that we need to move away from focusing on profit maximization as a model for firm behaviour. She thinks that we should move instead towards stakeholder value. So instead of maximizing profits, we should encourage firms to have a much wider set of interest groups they’re looking after. An implication of this is that firms should be concerned about acting in a socially responsible manner. She is critical of the Milton Friedman argument that firms should just maximize profits. She points to things like pollution , inequality , pay, workers conditions, and she argues that the boards of companies should be constructed on something like the German model where you have worker representatives and a wider range of interest groups represented in making the decisions of the firm. The other books don’t really go into that. She thinks we need to make firms act in a socially responsible manner. Most of the other books are just saying that we should increase the effectiveness of antitrust policy, whereas she’s arguing the need to change the model for firm behaviour. She also argues that competition policy shouldn’t just focus narrowly on prices, but should also address many different dimensions of welfare. Yes. Some economists have started to argue we should consider income inequality, sustainability, and other things, as a goal of antitrust policy. So she’s not completely alone. But she goes a little bit further than most economists."