One way we usually associate with government intervention or government activity is the
regulation of monopolies.
And we think of legislation like the Sherman Antitrust Act as a way that we control the
growth of monopoly, market power, and the ability of firms to come to dominate one industry.
The history of this kind of regulation teaches us a lot about the economic processes that
drive innovation and economic activity and whether or not regulation in these natural
monopoly situations actually provides value and makes consumers better off.
Take for example the electricity industry.
By the 1890s it’s really starting to grow, especially in large cities like New York and
Chicago.
Initially they were very rivalrous.
A lot of firms entered the market to provide electric service in larger cities and competed
against each other.
The kinds of innovations that happened in this industry were on a big scale: large generators,
lots of long wires connecting large generators, in places like Niagara Falls to cities like
New York.
That changed the cost structure of the industry.
It changed the cost structure of the industry in a way that the electric company that owned
this generator, their fixed cost was very, very high for building these big generators,
but then their cost for serving an additional customer was really, really, really low.
And so that meant that their average cost per unit of electricity they sold and their
average cost per customer really fell and fell over the course of serving a large number
of customers.
In economics we call this economies of scale, and this economies of scale in the big technologies
and industries like electricity really make it challenging to have rivalrous competition.
In Chicago, for example, in the late 1890s there were about a dozen different firms providing
electric service in the Chicago market, but, as they competed against each other they competed
so much that they were lowering their prices, lowering their prices, lowering their prices
until price would go so low that they couldn’t actually pay all of the fixed costs that they
had incurred to build the generators in the first place.
Not all of the companies could stay in the market.
That process, over time, led to the consolidation of the electricity industry in cities like
New York and Chicago into one large firm.
That firm could, as a monopoly in that market, charge a high price to consumers.
That was very much a part of the kind of public-interest motivation of regulation, this progressive
era suspicion of large corporate activity, suspicion of large companies, and also the
progressive era belief in the ability of government regulation to stand in for competition and
correct the imperfections that they saw.
There is also a more kind of public-choice motivation, looking at the incentives and
the interests of both policymakers and the industry.
They have an incentive to embrace regulation, because regulation constructs a legal entry
barrier and says in a particular geographic territory, you will be the only firm allowed
to provide retail electricity service to the people living in this area, and no one else
is allowed to do that.
In return for government protection of your monopoly power, we will regulate the profits
that you earn on your assets, and in that process regulate the prices you can charge
to consumers.
And we’re going to shoot for trying to keep those prices at around average cost per unit
of output to try to keep prices as low as are sustainable in the long run but still
consistent with the firm investing in assets, entering a return on their assets.
That’s the regulatory compromise, and that’s one reason why industry actually embraced
regulation in electricity.
One of the presumptions on which regulation is built in this industry is one of stability,
that we have a static environment.
And so, this is the cost structure in this industry, boom.
This is what kinds of assets firms are going to build, boom.
And so we can figure all that out and back out what the right profits are and what the
prices are.
The information required to get that right is, I would argue, unknowable.
They just think, okay here’s this demand for electricity and we have to meet this demand.
But now, especially with air conditioning, we see demand fluctuating dramatically over
the course of the day.
And yet we pay this fixed average retail price that gives us as individual consumers no incentive
to change our consumption even at 5:00 when it’s 95 degrees out on an August afternoon.
I would argue that today—here we are early in the 21st century—that now is when we’re
really seeing the cost of regulation in terms of how it stifles innovation.
I attribute this to a misunderstanding in the late 19th and early 20th century about
what competitive processes actually entail and what drives them and what they create.
And that’s where we are now is trying to deal with the fact that the regulatory system
of the past century doesn’t address, hasn’t adapted to, hasn’t evolved along with the
ways we use electricity, the new ways we may generate electricity, including renewables.
It hasn’t evolved to take into account the growth of digital technologies that we can
use to basically program and monitor our own electricity use and respond automatically
to price changes.
And so I think that where we are now is on the brink of recognizing the costs of regulation.
We’ve focused so long on the benefits to consumers of having these low, stable, fixed
prices and universal service.
But now these low, stable, fixed prices are leading to a lot of electricity consumption
in peak hours when it’s really expensive to provide it for us.
And also the environmental concerns: it’s generating a lot of emissions in the process.
So those are the 21st century challenges.