Charting the Reform Path

Abstract

Sharon Block’s and Benjamin H. Harris’ edited volume of policy-oriented essays, _Inequality and the Labor Market: The Case for Greater Competition_, is a valuable contribution to the developing conversation about competition and labor markets. At the broadest level, the volume evokes, but does not resolve, a choice between two distinct and ultimately incompatible possibilities: on one hand, restoring the outcomes that would obtain in a competitive labor market, and on the other (articulated more faintly and implicitly) exposing the 'myth' of this very goal, which in turn would imply the need to construct an entirely new normative benchmark. In the debate about antitrust and labor markets more broadly, when researchers identify an outcome that would obtain in a more competitive market, they are often actually describing the outcome that would obtain in a hypothetical market constructed by a different, preferred set of coordination mechanisms. This does not mean that real-world business competition, channeled appropriately, cannot improve outcomes for workers and the public; quite the opposite. But it does mean that a particular, stylized ideal of a competitive market may be less than useful as a benchmark for law and for well-functioning labor markets, and that a more direct encounter with the normative criteria that ultimately matter to us is required.