ABSTRACT
This chapter considers not the whole of microeconomics but only a small part of the recent literature closely related to public policy debates on the issue of the adequacy of antitrust enforcement in the United States. The prestige and influence within the economics profession of the Chicago School is sufficiently great that no clear boundaries can be drawn separating “Chicagoans” from industrial organization economists generally. The optimal degree of centralization of control of society has been, of course, a predominant public policy issue in United States (US) society at least since the American Revolution. The pendulum has continued to swing. In the 1920s and 1930s it swung back toward the “bigness is not badness” view not only among economists, but also in public policy. The recent contributions to industrial organization literature by Chicago School economists seem to the author to reflect implicitly a rejection of Simons’s egalitarian political philosophy.
