We are very excited to present to you our new design for ProMarket. In addition to our usual mix of articles based on academic research and commentaries by guest contributors, our new layout offers teaching support materials and reading lists to help scholars and readers navigate our rich, diverse array of content.
Welcome to the new ProMarket. The Stigler Center launched ProMarket on March 12, 2016. It was originally conceived as a political economy blog, with the aim of promoting discussion of issues that—at the time—received little to no attention in traditional media: namely, the myriad ways in which special interests can subvert competition.
Upon launching ProMarket, the Stigler Center’s faculty director, Luigi Zingales, wrote:
“What ensures that markets are indeed competitive? While a competitive market system ends up benefitting everyone, nobody benefits enough to spend resources to lobby for it. Business has very powerful lobbies; competitive markets do not. The diffuse constituency which is in favor of competitive markets has few incentives to mobilize in its defense.”
This, Zingales wrote, was the goal of ProMarket: to gather and disseminate information on the nature and costs of subversion of competition, and to do so in a nonpartisan way that adheres to the economic principle that competition enhances welfare.
Over the past four years, this is exactly what ProMarket has done. Since our launch, we have published over 900 articles by more than 450 contributors: economists, Nobel laureates, legal scholars, industry experts, political scientists, historians, policymakers (past and present), and journalists.
Throughout its run, ProMarket has retained its mix of cutting-edge academic research—by the Stigler Center and others—and insightful commentary, along with long-form interviews with scholars and thinkers from a variety of disciplines.
As the dominance of digital platforms entered the forefront of the political debate worldwide, we explored the implications of their power for both markets and democracy, featuring some of the most prominent thinkers on these issues and highlighting the pioneering work done by the Stigler Center itself, particularly its annual Antitrust and Competition Conference and, more recently, its Report on Digital Platforms. And with articles on such issues as inequality, globalization, and populism, we’ve done our best to promote vigorous, fact-based public debate so crucial for democracies and well-functioning market economies.
It is our every intention to keep doing so. But four years into its run, ProMarket has grown and expanded to such an extent that we feel using the term “blog” to describe it would be inaccurate. Similarly, its previous format was too limited to properly reflect the depth and scope of the resources it offers to scholars, policymakers, and anyone interested in the relationship between the economy and the state.
And so, with this in mind, we are very excited to present to you our new design for ProMarket. In addition to our usual mix of articles based on academic research and commentaries by guest contributors, our new layout offers teaching support materials and reading lists to help scholars and readers navigate our rich, diverse array of content. We hope you like it!
