FROM CHOICE TO WELFARE: THE CONCEPT OF THE CONSUMER IN THE CHICAGO SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

This article examines the role of the consumer in the writings on regulation launched by the Chicago school from the 1930s to the 1980s. It shows how Chicago school scholars used the concept of the consumer to shape and justify their calls for deregulation, as they continually claimed to offer market solutions that protect and benefit the consumer. The focus is on how the scholars at issue executed a shift from choice to welfare in their consumer concept as they began more decisively to embrace deregulation in the postwar period. From initially having described consumers as individual agents, capable of ensuring democracy and freedom in modern society by expressing their choices on a partly regulated market, they began to portray consumers as a coherent, homogeneous and predictable mass, acting on a deregulated market and serving merely as a tool of so-called consumer welfare, understood as economic efficiency and aggregate wealth.