Discussion
"If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They'd sit in their studies and say to themselves, 'What would I do if I were a horse?'" -Ely Devons
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https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/07/hotels-california#the-eagles-were-optimists
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Half a century ago, a group of lavishly financed economists from the University of Chicago (the "neoliberals") convinced governments all over the world to completely upend the way they treated monopolies. Up until then, the purpose of competition enforcement was to reduce corporate power, with the understanding that once a corporation became more powerful than the government, it would be impossible to force it to follow *any* rules:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/
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But for the "Chicago Boys," monopolies were evidence of *efficiency*. When you encounter a company in the wild that has acquired a commanding market share, your first assumption should be that it has taken over its sector by being better than anyone else - you should not assume that the company cheated its way to glory.
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After all, if a company with a large market share was cheating - say, if it was increasing its profit margins by reducing quality or jacking up prices - then smaller companies would rush into the market to poach its dissatisfied customers.
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Thus, all competition enforcement was reduced to an empty syllogism: monopolies are the result of excellence and any less-than-excellent monopolist will have its advantage "competed away." Therefore, any monopolist you encounter in the wild is *definitionally* not a bad monopolist, otherwise it would already have disappeared.
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To quote another economist joke:
> Two economists are walking down the street when one notices a $20 bill on the sidewalk. "It's not a real $20 bill," the other declares. "If it were a real $20 bill, someone would have picked it up off the sidewalk already."
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Half a century later, our entire economy is dominated by monopolies, duopolies and cartels, who boast of *gigantic* margins, whose products are palpably worsening at an accelerating clip, and yet there is no sign of the "new market entrants" who should be flooding into the market to "compete away" those amazing margins. It turns out that asking "What would I do if I were a horse?" does not yield a series of accurate predictions about horses.
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Things have changed. Today, the University of Chicago's Stigler Center harbors a cluster of influential economists who largely or entirely repudiate the orthodoxy of the Chicago Boys.
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The Center hosts an annual, rather radical conference on antitrust; runs an excellent heterodox podcast (Capitalisn't); its house organ, Promarket.org, regularly hosts work that torches the received wisdom of High Chicago Neoclassicism; and the school's researchers publish papers that dare to actually "go and look at horses."
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A recent horse-looking excursion has yielded some distressing, alarming, and thoroughly documented equine facts. In a new Stigler paper, "Rising Customer Durability, Falling Business Dynamism," UC's Li Azinovic-Yang, Ava E Speros and Christopher R Stewart and Stanford's John D Kepler report on some clever research into how a monopolist could raise prices, lower quality, anger its customers, and *still* dominate its market:
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/research/stigler/pdfs/workingpapers/387_customer.pdf
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