A final hot take on today’s digital competition policy conference in Brussels – just for fun. I promise some more serious thoughts on policy implications will come later. Some genuinely interesting issues were debated by some serious Nobel-prize winning type people. Meanwhile…..

BEWARE THE PLASTIC MARXISTS!

A small but worrying minority of today’s panel contributors – who no doubt thought they were tapping into genuine popular concerns about freedom, equality, power and democracy – managed to succeed in spouting what might be unkindly called superficial Marxist nonsense. You might have guessed from some of my earlier posts: I wasn’t keen.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve read Marx, and he is a top drawer philosopher and economist. A serious thinker. The same cannot be said of anyone who thinks talking about “the dominance of such-and-such in our contemporary narratives” is making a useful contribution to the competition policy debate. They could do with consuming a copy of Orwell’s Politics and the English Language – and not spending time painting pictures of irrational proletariat consumer slaves who need to be saved from themselves by a benign State.

Why did I spend the day decrying these people in such strong terms? It’s because they invariably want to to skip straight to the part where they get to impose swinging interventions into the digital economy, without getting their hands dirty with the difficult thinking about the various costs and benefits involved in designing optimal policy interventions. No, no – why do that tricky stuff, when you can instead talk about how customers are trapped inside a “gilded cage” because the digital services they are receive are so convenient (yuck!), so innovative (the bastards!), so high quality (how dare they!).

There are serious problems to be solved, and serious issues to be debated. They need to be debated by serious people. 

Thank heavens for Jean Tirole.