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Comment by raziel2p | Hacker News Reader

A simple answer may be that capitalism used to be more regulated than before. Not in all areas/industries, but overall - and if not in theory, at least in practice. Maybe the art of lobbyism, legal work, and public relations has gotten more advanced, for example, or company profits have become large enough that they can blatantly break laws and just pay the fine.

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I’d extend that to say “regulated” in both the legal and broader social senses - not just comparing government regulation before and after the Reagan/Thatcher era but also things like connection to places: smaller businesses are more likely to be run by someone who feels some responsibility to look after their community and workers, which certainly wasn’t perfect but still better than what happens with huge multinationals whose senior leadership probably isn’t even in the same time zone and certainly aren’t worried about going to church/the country club with people who will ask them why they’re polluting so much or decided to lay off a bunch of people right before Christmas.

I don’t want to oversell that kind of thing as a factor but I really think there’s a cost to scale when a business reaches the point of impersonality where you don’t even know or have much concept of the existence of the people affected by your decisions.

I agree with you, but it's also worth noting that Boeing is one of the "too big to fail" industries tightly coupled to the government. It's too valuable to the DoD to let fail.

There are several industries (microchips have recently become one) where finance has figured out the normal rules around competition don't matter. Boeing can capture the upside and there is virtually zero risk of bankruptcy or being nationalized from mistakes.

The federal register (sum of all US federal regulations) is orders of magnitudes larger than it was 40 years ago.

I don't think a quantity argument is interesting (there is definitely more regulations). Possibly there is a quality argument to made: Due to the regulator capture process (large corporations have seized control of the federal government), the effectiveness of regulations have decreased a lot while the volume has increased. This also serves as a barrier to entry for competition, while also profits for compliance.

This is not what I meant to imply either. More laws can lead to less regulation, if the added laws are full of loopholes that can be abused. Definitely agree with you on the quality/quantity argument: Simplifying laws and regulations should be more on the political agenda IMO.

I think it is pretty clear that regulation or at least effectiveness of such must have peaked in relatively recent past. Going back century or two certainly had capitalistic practises, but also much lesser regulations in many places like food or safety of products.

Now interesting question is when did the effectiveness or regulation peak?

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