… is from page 48 of Lionel Lord Robbins‘s 1976 book, Political Economy: Past and Present (original emphases):
The practically important quality of a competitive situation is not that there shall be a large number of actual suppliers, but rather that, if any actual supplier is doing particularly well, there is a reasonable possibility of other potential suppliers coming in an competing away the abnormal profits. And this is much more likely in a world of many-product firms, where starting up supplies may involve quite minor switches of organisation, than in a regime of more specialised units where an increase of supply may involve large capital outlays before this can begin.
DBx: Industrial and commercial arrangements, and contracting practices, that best promote economic growth and improvements in the standard of living must be discovered through an actual and on-going competitive process – a process in which firms compete not merely by cutting prices but by experimenting with all manner of peaceful ways of increasing the attractiveness of their outputs to buyers in ways that also increase the profits of the successful innovators. The notion that genius economists, bureaucrats, or judges can divine these arrangements and practices in the abstract is no less absurd than is the notion that a genius professor of English can predict in detail, while sitting at his or her desk, what will be the great novels and poems that will be written over the next decade.
