Why Lina Khan Hates Economics

December 11, 2023

For a long time, I have heard from senior people who have worked closely with Lina Khan in the Federal Trade Commission that she hates economics. As a discipline. As a restraint on her mission.

This distaste for economics shows up in FTC complaints, in which the economic reasoning – just review the FTC’s current case against Amazon – is expressed in simple, liberal arts terms that are highly debatable. You’d never know that the Chair of the FTC has 80 economists to draw upon in her shop. I suspect that Lina Khan hates economics for the same reason I hated math in college. It limits you to those damned facts and necessary proofs! So much better to sip sherry and discuss Benjamin Disraeli’s Crystal Palace speech with the dean. Hard to get that wrong.

Now comes along Mark Jamison of AEI and the University of Florida’s Warrenton College of Business to delve into the particulars in a must-read National Review piece about FTC and the Department of Justice antitrust division. He asks: “How could two agencies that were once at the forefront of developing clear economic standards and rigorous analysis for merger reviews falter so rapidly?”

Falter how? Jamison cites an open letter from 17 former FTC and DOJ chief economists asking for a separate set of principles in those agencies’ new Merger Guidelines. This points to a concerning trend in the Biden Administration – “a belief that economics is largely irrelevant, justifying its marginalization.”

Jamison concludes: “Khan places politics at the forefront of antitrust … She contends that there are no market forces shaping the economy; instead, in ‘New Brandeisian’ thought, the ‘political economy is structured only through law and policy.’ For Khan, antitrust is about political power, and she deems the historical role of economics as harmful.”

That Khan believes that the economy rests on law and policy and not markets validates the judgment of former Commissioner Christine Wilson – the roots of progressive antitrust are to be traced back not to Blackstone or Brandeis, but to Karl Marx.