As we’ve pointed out before, it’s the time taken by bureaucracy that matters more than the actual decisions:
Adobe is ditching its planned $20 billion takeover of Figma, the app design business, after the deal’s future was thrown into doubt by UK and European competition watchdogs, which said they were minded to block it.
Maybe the block is the right decision, maybe it isn’t. We’d not even pretend to enough knowledge of the sector to know. But we would insist that the actual problem is here:
It (Adobe) will now pay Figma a $1 billion break-up fee, as set out in the agreement they made when the tie-up was agreed 15 months ago.
As we have indeed said before:
This productivity increase - it comes from either doing new things, or doing old things in new ways. As above, this has historically been 80% of total growth. The speed of GDP growth is the speed at which we do those new things or things the new way. This is also the same, in concept, as the speed of productivity growth.
So, now we’ve a bureaucracy taking 15 months to even decide whether they might have a concern about someone suggesting a new arrangement for doing something or other.
Sure, that new thing might be bad. Might be good too. But at some rate of bureaucratic cogitation the time spent to think through it causes as much damage to economic and productivity growth as simply allowing a bad thing to happen.
We’re not getting richer precisely and exactly because we’ve a bureaucracy deciding how we should be getting richer.
The answer is obvious - simply abolish the Competition and Markets Authority. Replace it, perhaps, with something efficient, that doesn’t, by definition, make us poorer. Or a coin toss, likely to do less harm.
Or, perhaps to revive that old joke about why’s there only one Monopolies Commission, we should ponder whether the correct number of CMAs is none or three. The multiplicity would provide the competition leading to thumbs being extracted and decisions reached in less than geological time.#
We’re ideologically opposed to an economy in which the main question about anything new is “May we?”. But if that is the way that it’s going to be can we at least start employing people who can make up their minds in, say, a week?