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So here's my beef with yesterday's ABA Spring Meeting Chairman's showcase in DC. Overall I enjoyed the ABA Spring meeting, which is always fun. I particularly enjoyed Rebecca Slaughter's courageous defense of the FTC and its structure. But I wasn't too happy with the showcase, meant to be the big event of the day. The topic was whether antitrust has been doing the economics wrong, which is a good topic and one that has been sharply debated over the last decade in a very useful conversation. I was interested to see what would be said. Unfortunately the panel was deeply unrepresentative of the broader debate. It featured Nicolas Petit, arguing that dynamic considerations should yield less merger enforcement and create new defenses in merger cases. Neil Chilson of the Abundance institute who took what is in fact a very traditional position: that things are so complicated that government should rarely (i.e. almost never) act (in his case, because firm boundaries are unknowable). And Koren Wong-Ervin, who was there to argue a doctrinal, not economic theory: that there should be a strong causation requirement in every Section 2 case (a "but for" requirement). Her theory would also yield less enforcement and weaker antitrust. On the other side, as it were, was Diana Moss, former head of AAI (now at the "progressive policy institute") and the self-described pro-enforcement figure on the panel. She argued in her summation that the static Chicago-Harvard approach dominant for much of the last 40 years has been generally pretty much okay but we should return to the consumer welfare standard. And she said that AT&T and Time Warner had strong efficiencies at the time that justified their merger even if things didn't work out as they'd planned (AT&T lost billions in the acquisition). There was no serious critique of the static Chicago-inspired model. That was the pro-enforcement side of the debate. To say these views are unrepresentative of the current critiques of Chicago/Harvard antitrust economics is an understatement. It misses even the 90s post-Chicago critiques, the points made by pro-enforcement economists like Fiona Scott-Morton, Nancy Rose, Jon Baker or Carl Shapiro, not to mention the much sharper critiques of Eric Posner, Ioana Marianescu, Scott Hemphill or others, on topic like the neglect of labor markets, neglect of direct measurements of market power, failure to understood the relationship between competition and innovation (another dynamic concern), the treatment of nascent competitors, killer acquisitions -- you name it. Obviously not every panel can or should represent every viewpoint. But the ABA Spring Meeting sometimes has been criticized for catering too much to the defense bar or big business. This panel -- the "showcase" which everyone is meant to attend -- had the unfortunate effect of living up to that stereotype. The ABA antitrust section can and should do better.