Bert Foer, President of the American Antitrust Institute, makes your holiday gift shopping easier — and
may improve your understanding of policy issues involving markets, competition, and corporate structure
— with a holiday book review posted today that covers the following books:
- The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
- The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What To Make of It Charles E. Lindblom
- Antitrust Law (second edition) Richard A. Posner
- Global Political Economy Understanding the International Economic Order Robert Gilpin
Walter Adams and James W. Brock Stanford
Foer sets up the review with this introduction:
“Markets and governments have been with us throughout history, but our notions of how these two
featured instruments of civilization should interact are constantly changing. Five recent books throw
light on current thinking about the nature of firms and markets and the appropriate role for government,
particularly with respect to government’s paradoxical antitrust role as the middle way protector of
competition, the principal alternative to a heavy-handed regime of economic regulation or its opposite,
laissez faire capitalism. The microeconomic paradigm known as the Chicago School (or what Joseph
Stiglitz in the international context calls “the Washington Consensus”) has controlled federal antitrust
policy since the election of Ronald Reagan. The paradigm is flawed, but its successor has not yet
congealed.”
at the market
with all his might
firefly flits
ISSA, translated by D. Lanoue