"The perfectly competitive market is more like the Atkins diet than a frictionless plane. The Atkins diet, one may recall, is the one that recommends eating only fat and protein—scrambled eggs, steak, bacon—but cutting out all carbohydrates. It works by tricking the body into thinking that it’s starving, thereby prompting it to start breaking down and consuming its fat reserves. But in order for this to work, you have to really trick your body, and that means absolutely no carbohydrates. People who follow a 100% Atkins diet can in fact lose a lot of weight. But one cannot infer from this that following a 99% Atkins diet—eating a lot of fat and protein and just a tiny bit of carbohydrates—will lead to almost as much weight loss. On contrary, it’s a recipe for putting on massive amounts of weight. In fact, “almost” following the Atkins diet is far worse than not dieting at all."
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Chap. 3 : The Frictionless Plane Fallacy: Why more competition is not always better
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Joseph Heath
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