Comment by mshron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mshron | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

1) I think Lessig makes a fair case that we should broaden our notion of corruption. Congress folk spend 30-70% of their time raising money. Roughly half of congress goes in to lobbying after their terms end, with an average pay hike of about 14x. You think that doesn't "corrupt" their loyalties? Okay, it's not Dhaka. But I don't live in Bangladesh, I live in America, and I have different expectations for one than the other. I don't buy your claim that calling grossly perverse incentives corruption somehow lumps Washington in with Moscow.

2) Most of what the government does is not big issues, it's small ones that actually have the biggest effect on our lives. How should airlines, financial firms, telecommunications, etc., be regulated? Most people have very vague ideas about what they want, and are strongly swayed by poll wording. Organizations being regulated, however, have very strong ideas about what should and shouldn't happen. In theory, they should be one voice of many; in practice, we get regulatory capture.

> I think Lessig makes a fair case that we should broaden our notion of corruption.

Broadening can also imply diluting.

> Roughly half of congress goes in to lobbying after their terms end, with an average pay hike of about 14x. You think that doesn't "corrupt" their loyalties?

So let's make their salaries $2.5 million per year. It'd be a drop in the bucket.

> How should airlines, financial firms, telecommunications, etc., be regulated?

I bet you couldn't even get people on Hacker News to agree to answers to those questions.

> Organizations being regulated, however, have very strong ideas about what should and shouldn't happen.

The organizations being regulated are also the only ones who have any idea what is going on. Regulatory capture is the inescapable result of a basic problem: people who aren't in, e.g. the finance industry don't understand how it works, so the only people who can regulate it are the people who go through the revolving door. No amount of "taking money out of elections" is going to change that. (Isn't the battle cry here that people who don't understand the tech sector shouldn't be legislating on it?")

If you're opposed to regulatory capture, then you need to get rid of regulatory agencies. But even here on Hacker News I don't imagine you'd get overwhelming consensus in favor of that sort of action (it'd devolve into some fundamentally philosophical debate).

    The organizations being regulated are also the only
    ones who have any idea what is going on.

Oil companies are the only organizations that have any idea about global warming?

> If you're opposed to regulatory capture, then you need to get rid of regulatory agencies.

This presumes that the unregulated results will be better. This may be the case, but doesn't automatically follow. An alternative is to watch carefully and object loudly when you see problems, ideally with structural supports to check agendas and realign incentives. Of course there will still be failures; they may or may not be worse or more frequent than in the deregulated case - I would expect this to vary substantially by field and particular systems involved.

> This presumes that the unregulated results will be better.

I'm not saying it would be better, I'm saying that if the goal is to get rid of regulatory capture (and that's your only goal), you need to get rid of the regulatory apparatus.

If you do have regulation, you need to accept that capture is a characteristic of it and design around that. It's engineering. If you use a particular type of metal for a pipe, it has advantages and disadvantages and you have to design around them. Just wishing for the perfect pipe doesn't get you anywhere.

Sounds like we very much agree, then: it's a practical question of governmental engineering.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com