In the mail: Thom Lambert (University of Missouri School of Law), “How to Regulate: A Guide for Policymakers” from Cambridge, with blurbs from Cass Sunstein and the Hon. Doug Ginsburg. [Amazon, more] Summary:
Markets sometimes fail. But so do regulatory efforts to correct market failures. Sometimes regulations reach too far, condemning good activities as well as bad, and sometimes they don’t reach far enough, allowing bad behavior to persist. In this highly instructive book, Thomas A. Lambert explains the pitfalls of both extremes while offering readers a manual of effective regulation, showing how the best regulation maximizes social welfare and minimizes social costs. Working like a physician, Lambert demonstrates how regulators should diagnose the underlying disease and identify its symptoms, potential remedies for it, and their side effects before selecting the regulation that offers the greatest net benefit. This book should be read by policymakers, students, and anyone else interested in understanding how the best regulations are crafted and why they work.
In January, Thom wrote more about the book at Truth on the Market, including an introduction and a followup on externalities.
2 Comments
“Working like a physician, Lambert demonstrates how regulators should diagnose the underlying disease and identify its symptoms, potential remedies for it, and their side effects before selecting the regulation that offers the greatest net benefit.”
This presumes without evidence that regulators and/or political level policy makers in government are more interested in genuinely fixing problems than they are in creating new problems that will require yet more government intervention to fix.
if all the problems were fixed, why would we need congress? Maybe that’s why they aren’t named progress…