Marshall Steinbaum

Seven friends of the blog offer their initial reactions to the FTC's recent policy statement on unfair methods of competition.

In charting economists’ pernicious influence on public policy, Beth Popp Berman contrasts an "economic style," which focuses on efficiency, choice, and competition, with an alternative approach that favors equality, stability, and democratic participation. But that framing is not faithful to the actual debates that took place, out of which the economic style achieved its dominance, because it gives no account of the alternative economic views and theories that were displaced.

In the fight to regulate the gig economy, unions, workers, and their allies have only fought half the battle: they have tried to defend the definition of employment against technology-enabled erosion. Antitrust prohibitions against vertical restraints, which prevent firms from exercising control in the absence of an employment relationship, offer a complementary strategy to address the threat posed to workers by the gig economy.

This post, an exchange between Andrew Hart, Marshall Steinbaum, and Daniel Markovits, continues their debate from our March 2020 series discussing The Meritocracy Trap.

Marshall Steinbaum and Andrew Hart argue that Professor Markovits' The Meritocracy Trap omits capitalists from the story in part by relying too heavily on the flawed theory of human capital.