As an antitrust lawyer I got into the guts of real companies. I noticed that the microeconomics analysis had to include fancy Greek, but that the decision makers were basically paying lip service to it.
Great economists would paint a merger in a certain way with Greek as the centerpiece.
With both sides lining up top-notch experts, fancy economics debates would become a wash. By and large—I can’t for sure say this is true about every case.
Commissioners and federal judges don’t want to look stupid. Neither do I.
Their records and opinions end up making the Greek look like it was important. And it was—to the effortful process that preceded the decision. But from my point of view the Greek didn’t influence belief.
The Greek didn’t matter because it didn’t tell people how these businesses—sometimes close competitors—were actually working.
Markets are people making deals and building relationships. Markets are the way they are for reasons, sometimes conscious ones.
It is funny that economics is the rational study of something that, even at the level of a single business, is messy. Extremely messy.
Every organization I’ve ever been a part of, government and private sector, large and small, profitable and unprofitable, is chaotic.
It is exactly in this chaos that a real economist should sit. Speculating. Observing. Comparing. Predicting.
And failing.
Because not only do economists fail at understanding and predicting macroeconomic outcomes, businesspeople are almost as bad with their own businesses.
People, and markets, are extremely unpredictable. But there is a logic to money, to bills, to real exchanges of value, and all the things that make up economics.
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