The Price of Efficiency : A Review of Elizabeth Popp Berman's Thinking Like an Economist

Elizabeth Popp Berman’s new book, Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy (Princeton Univ. Press 2022), sheds substantial light on the role institutions have played in reorienting debates about public policy—including antitrust policy—toward concerns about economic efficiency rather than equality. Professor Berman considers the evolution of U.S. public policy through time and across policy areas. Her historical perspective suggests that the rise of efficiency considerations in antitrust beginning in the 1950s was due as much to the work of good-government liberals associated with Harvard as to the work of their more conservative, limited-government counterparts at Chicago. She also shows that efficiency considerations influenced multiple policy areas—not just antitrust—suggesting that the rise of the consumer welfare standard in antitrust reflected factors other than developments in antitrust legal and economic doctrine. Perhaps most importantly, she enlightens our understanding of the evolution of antitrust by showing how institutions helped establish, perpetuate, and entrench the consumer welfare standard in antitrust. Thinking Like an Economist reminds us that antitrust reformers seeking to replace the consumer welfare standard face a substantial challenge in overcoming its decades-long institutionalization in courts, agencies, and academia