Winston: Economic evidence shows antitrust actions rarely improve consumer welfare
Dr. Cliff Winston · Ep 87: Dr. Cliff Winston — Deregulate Lawyers, Deregulate Airlines & Let Markets Correct Themselves · Joe Lonsdale · May 2, 2024 · at 15:11
Brookings Institution economist Dr. Cliff Winston discusses his academic review of the empirical literature on FTC and DOJ antitrust enforcement efficacy.
0:00 / 0:19exact quote · 19.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I went through all the evidence that economists had accumulated. I said, you know, where, where have they done well? You know, monopolization cases, collusion cases, merger cases. Where is there anything strong that shows, yes, consumer welfare, Has improved. ... And I found very little.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Dr. Cliff Winston
Winston: Practicing law should require zero mandatory licensing or credentials
“The legal profession can be free to provide credentialing all they want, but my sense is, you don't, you shouldn't have to have anything to be a lawyer. Compete on your own”
Winston: Occupational licensing only creates barriers, raises prices, and limits services
“So all occupational licensing is doing is putting up entry barriers to new suppliers, raising prices, and limiting service because, you know, there are not as many people around.”
Winston: Economics focuses on market failures while ignoring government failures
“So the theoretical instincts is that were that the action is really in market failures and very little attention Was given the government failures. And so as things go on, people think, yeah, market failure is a problem. They never stepped back and said, well,…”
Winston: Government anti-poverty programs succeed only at unnecessarily high costs
“Poverty has declined, and some of government policies have certainly contributed to that, but it's so expensive to do that, and oftentimes there's, you know, multiple policies, you know, to address poverty as opposed to something that's more streamlined, more …”
Winston: Retrospective assessments are not part of government policymaking agendas
“There's a sort of, you know, checklist of things that you want to go through, but obviously this is not what government does, because you can have failure along at any of these points, and more often than not, we just go ahead with things, and there's never be…”
Winston: Economists lack systematic evidence explaining why government interventions fail
“Is we really don't even know systematically why government fails. Oh, we can speculate about many things, but trying to find some hard evidence is this is why government fails. We have a theory. We test it. It applies to many things. We don't have that.”