Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
I often imagine civilization as a human body, extraordinarily complex, interconnected, host to lots of bacteria. Trying to deliberately modify the body to fix things you don't like is only good in a very narrow set of actions, or else you risk rippling and confusing side effects.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
I view regulations very much like medications for the body, except with a fraction of the attention paid to side effects. Yes, some might work, but how much are you disrupting the rest of the system in invisible ways that might manifest in deadly symptoms in a decade?
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
We live in an overmedicated system, under an accumulating pile of regulations meant to fix our ails, but most of the ails that are being fixed are just side effects of prior regulations. But when a new symptom pops up, we demand another quick fix - simple to understand, direct.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Imagine how different it would be if we treated lawmaking like medicine; we ran regulatory trials in the smallest possible locations first, we studied those trials, we gradually expanded, and we actively looked for ripple effects and denied regulations that cause too many!
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Neil
@neilgaynor
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
FWIW, this is very much what policy analysis in academic economics research does and it regularly reaches pro-regulatory prescriptions. The effective regulations rarely get implemented because they often target the problem with a pecuniary mechanism (eg a carbon tax).
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Neil
@neilgaynor
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Energy regulations beyond just emissions are useful too. Power generation has massive economies of scale and high entry costs, so absent regulations, firms tend to form monopolies that aren’t easily disrupted.