New Brandeis movement

In, you know, the Northeast, there were cabs.

Anyway, so this guy, Brian Colacci, who's an economist, he's a neo-Brandeisian guy, he says, he's speaking, I think, actually quite specifically about the experience of people living in the outer boroughs of New York City.

But he says, we called a phone number and a Dominican man would answer and send someone who made a living wage in a town car to pick us up.

And...

I mean, the reason...

I think that one reason why the neo-Brandeisian people, you know, led as always by Matt Stoller, but backed up more judiciously by Lena Kahn and others, were...

The people on the left, who are most vocally skeptical of this safety push, is that...

They see it as, you know, the line that they're giving is that there is already an antitrust safe harbor for product safety collaboration, right? So if like Delta and American want to like share information about Aviation is probably actually not a good example of this because it's so regulated in the other level.

There's this disagreement on the left.

We were talking about the

antitrust people and the neo-Brandeisians just before.

And they, Bernie and them, clearly disagree, right? Like, Matt Stoller is saying we shouldn't panic about existential risk from AI, and Bernie Sanders is saying we, in fact, should panic about existential risk from AI.

One way to think about that is not just maybe a weak correlation, neo-Harvard sort of thing between structure and performance, but the emergence of new reform approaches, especially on the left of center to antitrust, but not just taking different economic views.

But in some ways, critiquing the consumer welfare standard and economic welfare standard in favor of a more political approach to antitrust.

And I'm talking specifically about the neo-Brandeisians, who, of course, by now we're all very familiar with.

Maybe talk a little bit about what your critique of the Chicago school was.

How do you think it differs from what we're seeing today with these new neo-Brandeisians? Just the idea that having small firms is good for democracy.

So it's a political defense of market structure.

And that's a very different critique of the Chicago school than what you put forward.

More intervention is going to reduce inequality.

Some courts interpret it broadly, and others say that Section 5 cases deserve closer scrutiny the further they deviate from the types of practices and conducts that are traditional Section 1 or Section 2 violations.

So as you can imagine, there is a political take on this.

And so for folks variously called anti-monopolist, neo-Brandeisians, or a few years ago, hipsters, which by the way, are all the same people, they think that Section 5 gets at a lot more things than the Sherman Act.

And in 2022, the FTC released a statement of policy regarding the scope of the FTC Act.

Can you explain some of the things that were in that statement, Emily?

You know, the Europeans have become such good students, in a way, of the economic-based approach to antitrust that even when the United States under Joe Biden shifted sharply against the Chicago School thinking, the EU is seen as digging in its heels and kind of resisting this.

There was a so-called neo-Brandeisian movement under the Biden administration.

Now, neo-Brandeisian is a movement that derives its identity from Louis Brandeis, who was an American lawyer who was on the US Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939.

Brandeis was a leading figure in the antitrust movement at the turn of the 20th century during the trust busting years, and he was a great thinker on how sheer size of economic actors ends up corrupting democracy.

So it's against this background of how Europe has become sort of highly permissive towards corporate power that we have in the United States, uh, a kind of revolt against it.

But we've had sort of nothing like a neo-Brandeisian movement on the scale of what we've seen in the United States.

That's a little bit what you, Nick, are trying to address.

Yeah, I-- it was really interesting what, what happened then, and, and personally very interesting for me because I'd, I had started setting up this NGO, the Balance Economy Project.