Time & Perspective Quote by William Vickrey

The chill in Vickrey's phrasing is the point: a blueprint for turning the messy politics of profits into something that can be priced, traded, and quietly made to look inevitable. "Initial entitlements" sounds like administrative housekeeping, but it smuggles in a radical premise: markup, the ability to charge above cost, is not just an outcome of competition. It can be treated as a policy-granted right, allocated and then disciplined by markets.

The key move is the basing of those rights on "past performance". That is technocratic language for path dependence: incumbents start ahead, and the system blesses that advantage as data-driven merit. It offers stability to firms and predictability to regulators, while laundering the moral controversy of who deserves profit into an apparently neutral historical metric. The transferability clause is the ideological glue. If you can sell the entitlement, the state can claim it isn't choosing winners; it's just creating a market and letting efficiency do the sorting. Rent becomes an asset class.

Context matters. Vickrey, a Nobel-winning economist associated with smart pricing and market design, often tried to harness markets to solve allocation problems governments handled poorly. Here, he extends that instinct to markups: treat them like tradable permits, akin to later cap-and-trade logic, but aimed at market power rather than pollution. The subtext is both pragmatic and unsettling: if firms will extract markups anyway, better to formalize, quantify, and potentially redistribute them. It reads like an attempt to regulate capitalism using capitalism's own favorite tool: a market in permission slips.