Title: The imitation economy: How AT&T ’s contestability doctrine transformed the neoliberal project
Researcher: Dr Caroline Colton, PhD (awarded 2021) [thesis available at: https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/handle/10453/152838]
Supervisors: Dr. Jeremy Walker, Dr. Jon Marshall and Professor Thomas Faunce (ANU)
Abstract
Contestable market theory is an economic theory invented by economists at AT&T Bell Labs in the 1970s, whose core claim was that the possible threat of competition was equivalent to actual competition as a mechanism for ensuring that even unregulated monopolies behaved competitively. The contestability doctrine became one of the bases used to justify and advocate for the corporate takeover of public utilities, infrastructure and government services and functions by transnational monopolies and oligopolies, in Australia and elsewhere. In this presentation I focus on the requisite conditions for the development of contestable market theory and its absorption into neoclassical economic orthodoxy from the 1970s. I argue that even before the economists devised contestability theory, the neoliberal movement had already created an intellectual and legal edifice in the United States that would support the re-emergence of monopoly power. Here I focus my attention on the intellectual work undertaken by neoliberal scholars including Hayek at the Chicago schools of law and economics in the late 1940s and 1950s. Work done here effected a shift in the US antitrust regime from one focused on economic structuralism and the containment of monopoly power to one focused on ‘market efficiency’ and ‘consumer welfare’. Hayek, although not generally recognised as having much interest in the question of monopolies, was calculated in his support of enterprise monopolies substituting in large part for the traditional functions of government. My work discusses how a global political landscape came to accept the contradictions between a neoliberal philosophy that publicly espouses competition, free markets and the fulfilment of individuals’ life plans, whilst at the same time enabling the consolidation of monopoly power.
Meet the researcher
Caroline’s background is in medical sociology, information management research and consultancy. During her PhD candidature, her initial interest in neoliberal policies impacting health care broadened to include the neoliberal law and economics movement and platform capitalism. Since completing her PhD in 2021 Caroline has been transforming her dissertation into a book and writing journal articles. Her research interests include the interface between neoliberalism and monopoly capitalism, the growth of corpocracy in Australia, health sector privatisation and urban wilding. She is interested in research projects wholly funded by socially-constituted institutions free of corporate sponsorship, influence and interests.
Journal articles
Colton, Caroline. (2017). "Contestability 'Theory', Its Links with Australia's Competition Policy, and Recent International Trade and Investment Agreements" Australian Journal of International Affairs, 71 (3):315-334.
Colton, Caroline. 2015. “Professional Misconduct: The Case of the Medical Board of Australia v Tausif (Occupational Discipline)”. Journal of Law and Medicine, 22(3): 534-544.
Colton, Caroline & Thomas Faunce. 2014. “The Health Legislation Amendment Act 2013 (Qld) and Queensland’s Health Assets Privatisation Dispute”. Journal of Law and Medicine, 22(1): 54-64.
Colton, Caroline & Thomas Faunce. 2014. “Commissions of Audit in Australia: Health System Privatisation Directives and Civil Conscription Protections”. Journal of Law and Medicine, 21(3): 561-571.
Colton, Caroline. 2014 “The Sum of All Our Fears: Transnational Corporations and the Crisis of Convergence in Australia”. DISSENT, 43: 33-34.
Contact: caroline.k.colton@alumni.uts.edu.au
Website: www.carolinecolton.com.au