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I could be wrong, this is just guessing, but I strongly suspect the social benefits of banning noncompetes are much higher than the social benefits of allowing them. Thinking first in the case of high human capital occupations, no noncompetes allows employees to freely move on to better-paying (and thus more productive) occupations, take knowledge with them, and start their own companies. These are the exact things that are critical to the existence of competitive markets - being able to choose a job that pays better and start new companies in niches that would be profitable is exactly what pushes prices down to efficient levels. And 'a new startup' is such a risky thing to do that having a noncompete hanging over your head could disrupt a lot of innovation. California, notably, has banned noncompetes for a long time, and also contains Silicon Valley. Some argue that was important to SV's growth - idk.
"On the other hand - an absence of non-compete distorts incentives for training, trade secrets, and customer sharing". In the specific case of programmers, I don't see noncompetes significantly reducing the extent to which people are trained. In the course of doing your job, you need to learn about what you're doing and what the rest of the company is doing, and you learn by doing. "Trade secrets" - having a high quality team and existing features and customers is more than enough moat to be profitable for a while, and anything more than that (compare to, like, stronger software IP) would, intuitively, reduce surplus by reducing competition. And empirically, tech seem to innovate a ton despite the existing California noncompete bans. "Customer sharing" - for most jobs, this isn't a big issue. It is for some - and for those, you could imagine a noncompete ban that carved those out - but even then, isn't 'an employee taking customers with them' the exact kind of thing that enables those customers to switch to a better product?
At a high level, the issue is that, despite the theory that anything that two parties agree to will be beneficial to both of them and efficient, rational agents and all - in practice employers have tremendous power in negotiations with employees for a whole host of reasons, and can use this power to insert clauses like noncompetes that employees just accept because 'everyone does that'. This is (one of) the reasons why there's a lot of regulation around the employer-employee relationship.
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