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It doesn’t seem very useful to talk about “regulation” as some sort of singular entity. When you talk about the positive results of deregulation, that’s all ec

It doesn’t seem very useful to talk about “regulation” as some sort of singular entity. When you talk about the positive results of deregulation, that’s all economic regulation. Freight being run on regulated routes with regulated prices was protecting various groups’ economic interests. Usually at the implicit expense of the economic interests of everyone else. Safety regulations are a completely different beast. Safety regulations in aviation have increased massively over this same timeframe, and the result has been an even more massive increase in safety. Crashes went from routine to unheard of despite a huge increase in activity. Cars have seen a similar increase in safety regulations and in actual safety, although the safety gains have been more modest and seem to have stalled out in the last five years or so. That doesn’t mean safety regulation is necessarily good or that deregulation couldn’t be helpful sometimes. But the actual track record in recent decades is completely contrary to this idea of decreasing regulation providing better results. We’re fixating on one instance of failure because it looks like a canary in the coal mine indicating a threat to the safest mode of travel ever devised.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> Safety regulations are a completely different beast. Only they're not. If you impose a billion dollars in fixed regulatory burden then you can no longer have sub-billion dollar companies. But lack of competition erodes everything -- even the safety rules, because bigger companies are more capable of capturing regulators. Any regulation which is the direct cause of a lack of effective competition is doing more harm than good. > That doesn’t mean safety regulation is necessarily good or that deregulation couldn’t be helpful sometimes. But the actual track record in recent decades is completely contrary to this idea of decreasing regulation providing better results. That's kind of the point. The entire frame of "regulation bad / deregulation bad" is a farce. What you actually need is regulation that maximizes the ratio of benefits to regulatory burdens. That means removing burdensome and ineffective regulations and having efficient and effective ones. But evaluating regulatory efficiency and effectiveness is dry and non-partisan. Framing it as "we need more regulation" is failing before you even begin. This 737 MAX debacle is a case in point. It came about because Boeing was trying to avoid the high costs of recertification, so they didn't change things that could have made the plane safer because changing them would have required recertification. So we have "safety regulations" negatively impacting safety by making it move expensive to improve safety than not. That's not a case of needing more overall regulation or less overall regulation, it's a case of needing to replace worse rules with better rules. The ideal outcome is that the net regulatory burden becomes lower and as a result it becomes less expensive to make changes that improve safety.
- mikeash 7y ago
  In theory, all regulations need to be carefully considered and walk a fine line in order to do more good than harm. But I was replying to a pair of comments talking about the practical history of regulations over the past few decades. That history diverges wildly for the two types of regulation. Economic regulation was massively lightened, resulting in huge benefits. At the same time, safety regulations for airplanes and cars were massively increased, also resulting in huge benefits. So, yes, the whole point is that “regulations good/bad/anything” is nonsense, as the recent history of economic and safety regulations illustrates.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    What I'm getting at is that the types of regulation don't really have anything to do with it. It's not that all safety regulation is good and all economic regulation is bad (though if you wanted someone to disprove "all economic regulation is bad" you might be in for a wait). You can screw up safety regulations just as bad if you're not careful. It's also difficult to evaluate these things based on statistical trends, because it's easy to pass a safety regulation that e.g. mandates a specific safety method, and then you get an immediate safety improvement by making that state of the art method universal, but as time passes that ossified requirement becomes stale and prevents newer, better methods from replacing it. And all you see in the numbers is the improvement from the original mandate spreading through the installed base over time, not the comparison to what would have happened when something even better was invented a year later but was prohibited by the rule from being deployed. (As evidence for this, the original 737 was introduced prior to the moon landing.) It's also problematic to look only at the one target. If we improve aircraft safety per mile but only by making aircraft more expensive (or destroying competition, which does the same thing), that makes flying less competitive against alternatives that are much more dangerous, like driving. So you can get a safety improvement on paper even though the result is more people are killed. That doesn't mean you can't make a rule that actually improves safety, but it's harder than it seems to get it right.
    - mikeash 7y ago
      Sure. I’m just saying that the actual history of the past few decades in the US shows a stark contrast with these two types of regulations in terms of how they worked and the consequences they had. Regarding measures that appear to improve safety but are actually a net loss because it encourages driving instead, the FAA does evaluate regulations this way. For example, this is why infants aren’t required to be in a child seat and are allowed to just be held by a parent. They determined that this requirement would cause more families to drive due to the extra cost, and the result would be a net loss of life.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> Safety regulations are a completely different beast. Only they're not. If you impose a billion dollars in fixed regulatory burden then you can no longer have sub-billion dollar companies. But lack of competition erodes everything -- even the safety rules, because bigger companies are more capable of capturing regulators. Any regulation which is the direct cause of a lack of effective competition is doing more harm than good. > That doesn’t mean safety regulation is necessarily good or that deregulation couldn’t be helpful sometimes. But the actual track record in recent decades is completely contrary to this idea of decreasing regulation providing better results. That's kind of the point. The entire frame of "regulation bad / deregulation bad" is a farce. What you actually need is regulation that maximizes the ratio of benefits to regulatory burdens. That means removing burdensome and ineffective regulations and having efficient and effective ones. But evaluating regulatory efficiency and effectiveness is dry and non-partisan. Framing it as "we need more regulation" is failing before you even begin. This 737 MAX debacle is a case in point. It came about because Boeing was trying to avoid the high costs of recertification, so they didn't change things that could have made the plane safer because changing them would have required recertification. So we have "safety regulations" negatively impacting safety by making it move expensive to improve safety than not. That's not a case of needing more overall regulation or less overall regulation, it's a case of needing to replace worse rules with better rules. The ideal outcome is that the net regulatory burden becomes lower and as a result it becomes less expensive to make changes that improve safety.

mikeash 7y ago
In theory, all regulations need to be carefully considered and walk a fine line in order to do more good than harm. But I was replying to a pair of comments talking about the practical history of regulations over the past few decades. That history diverges wildly for the two types of regulation. Economic regulation was massively lightened, resulting in huge benefits. At the same time, safety regulations for airplanes and cars were massively increased, also resulting in huge benefits. So, yes, the whole point is that “regulations good/bad/anything” is nonsense, as the recent history of economic and safety regulations illustrates.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  What I'm getting at is that the types of regulation don't really have anything to do with it. It's not that all safety regulation is good and all economic regulation is bad (though if you wanted someone to disprove "all economic regulation is bad" you might be in for a wait). You can screw up safety regulations just as bad if you're not careful. It's also difficult to evaluate these things based on statistical trends, because it's easy to pass a safety regulation that e.g. mandates a specific safety method, and then you get an immediate safety improvement by making that state of the art method universal, but as time passes that ossified requirement becomes stale and prevents newer, better methods from replacing it. And all you see in the numbers is the improvement from the original mandate spreading through the installed base over time, not the comparison to what would have happened when something even better was invented a year later but was prohibited by the rule from being deployed. (As evidence for this, the original 737 was introduced prior to the moon landing.) It's also problematic to look only at the one target. If we improve aircraft safety per mile but only by making aircraft more expensive (or destroying competition, which does the same thing), that makes flying less competitive against alternatives that are much more dangerous, like driving. So you can get a safety improvement on paper even though the result is more people are killed. That doesn't mean you can't make a rule that actually improves safety, but it's harder than it seems to get it right.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    Sure. I’m just saying that the actual history of the past few decades in the US shows a stark contrast with these two types of regulations in terms of how they worked and the consequences they had. Regarding measures that appear to improve safety but are actually a net loss because it encourages driving instead, the FAA does evaluate regulations this way. For example, this is why infants aren’t required to be in a child seat and are allowed to just be held by a parent. They determined that this requirement would cause more families to drive due to the extra cost, and the result would be a net loss of life.