I agree with Tyler, that the FTC ban on non-competes is overly broad and not tailored to fields where the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. Additionally, the FTC’s authority to enact this rule, rather than Congress, is questionable.
Nevertheless, I don’t think banning non-competes is without merit. The reason is not the standard Twitter-econ view that non-competes are bad for workers. Indeed, some non-competes, so-called “gardening leave”, pay the worker during the non-compete period. Sounds pretty good! More generally, non-competes are just one item in the wage bargain like hours, health and pension benefits. As a result, the FTC is quite wrong to think that banning non-competes will raise wages–the most immediate effect will be to reduce wages. Indeed, more workers will be willing to work at lower wages precisely to the extent that non-competes were a burden. Can’t have it both ways. Instead of being bad for workers, my skepticism about non-competes is that they are bad for industry.
The problem with non-competes is that every firm wants non-competes on the workers it fires but no firm wants non-competes on the workers it hires. However, firms only control the terms on which they hire workers so it’s possible for each firm acting in its self-interest to create a situation which is in the interests of none. Or, to put it differently, firms may approve of the decision to ban non-competes because it’s a package deal, firms can’t restrict their own former employees but they gain the ability to recruit freely from competitors.
More generally, worker mobility often carries externalities. As I wrote earlier, ideas are in heads and if you don’t move the heads, often the ideas don’t move either. The innovation that results from mobility is a public good. Non-competes are a type of intellectual property, call it intellect property. Once again, firms want to lock up their intellectual property but they also want to use ideas from other firms. Firms only control the former decision not the latter so IP in general has a prisoner’s dilemma issue which is one reason IP in the US is too strong (see the Tabarrok Curve) and non-competes are part of that package. Ultimately, if the innovation effects are important, wages could rise but those effects would be for more or less all workers not specifically for those with non-competes.
Governments aren’t good at the fine details of optimizing IP so perhaps a heavy-handed approach is the best we can expect. Non-competes also aren’t a huge issue for most firms, even firms that use them, so given the above I am willing to give the experiment a try.
