YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Carpenter

lines on the record: 80
first: 2021-05-05
most recent: 2021-05-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Asking whether I know whether the policy would be better or worse is a tougher call, but it might operate in some unpredictable ways. So nuclear power regulation, you might get Stephen Pinker-like voices. He's a person who Harvard scholar who wrote kind of a pro-nuclear power op-ed in the New York Times recently. You might get some other voices at the table, less voices less organized, particularly if you embedded them in. And there are some, there's a great chapter in our book, Preventing Regulatory Capture by Daniel Schwartz, who's shown that at least an insurance regulation in Minnesota, that Minnesota has been able to do this, whether it's made folks better off or worse off, that's much harder to tell. But I would argue, in fact, that if you proactively embed voices, interests that wouldn't otherwise be represented, that you'll actually open up the conversation. My guess, if I had to think, would be”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's go back to your original question, though, Tyler, because your original question was about procedure. And to me, I guess I'd like to see open access. So I'm not saying, I'm not by any means saying, hey, we need to get rid of these meetings. I do think we need to embed consumer and non-industry perspectives more. And what that might mean is inducing rule writers to more regularly meet with advisory committees, consumer, labor, other groups, folks like the group at Better Markets, you know, Americans for financial reform, things like that. I'm not saying I agree with all of these folks, but I do think that right now all of our attention on notice and comment rulemaking and for that matter, cost benefit analysis as concomitant to it, misses the fact that there are people who are close observers of this space and now a very empirically sophisticated observer in this space.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not so much the final rule because that comes much later, but the first, and he totaled up, I think, $40 to $70 billion of positive abnormal return.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, JP Morgan, Golden Sachs City, law firms representing those companies like Sullivan Cromwell, and associations representing those companies get into a whole question about why the hybrid representation in another, but that was one thing. So pre-rulemmaking, pre-proposed rulemaking, earliest agenda setting meetings are dominated by industrial interests. The second, and this was an asset pricing study by Professor Liebgober, who's now at UCSD, showed that the banks that met though with the Fed, and he only looked at the Fed, and then he used a very small window for when the proposed rules were announced, and they witnessed and enjoyed a statistically significant and financially significant continual abnormal positive return on their stocks the moment the proposed rule was announced.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is something I'm actually working on a bit right now. Let me say two things. The first is there's a paper that your audience should check out by my student Brian Liebgober. He's a collaborator of mine too. And what he did excuse the digression, but I think it's a very important paper. So if you look at the Volcker rule, for instance, it was a multi-agency rule issued under Dodd-Frank long before the comments rolled in, there were a set of hundreds of meetings with the agency that happened even before the notice of proposed rulemaking. And essentially the architecture that we have at the administrative procedures act doesn't regulate those meetings at all. And a legal scholar named Kimberly Krabiek, I believe she's at Duke or she was when she wrote the article, noticed that the vast majority of these meetings, and I just go to the article, but I'm going to say 90% were with either large bank holding companies. So not, you know, the smaller regional banks, fifth third, things like that.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Existing empirical studies, and this goes back generations, and I'm indicting a set of things in political science as well as economics, suffer from the usual omitted variable bias problems. And some of them, I think, were making the wrong inferences from the evidence that exists, such as noticing, for instance, that in certain kinds of patterns of regulatory decision making, larger and older firms did better, enjoyed, say, quicker or more favorable decisions than did smaller and newer firms. And as I wrote in a, it was a mathematical essay published almost 20 years ago, that can be true even when the underlying regulator or the regulator in question has zero implicit or explicit preference over the kind of firm it's regulating. It has everything to do with kind of not even risk avoidance, but uncertainty avoidance.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you have to remember my published work in the book with David Moss suggests that capture, the problem with capture is it's too sexy a term. David and I wrote during the midst of the financial crisis when every time somebody didn't like the decision of a regulatory agency, a pundit, an academic, the term capture would be thrown around. And you can think that an agency is doing a good job, a bad job, efficient, non-efficient, and capture can be, potentially orthogonal to that. That's the first thing I would say. The second, and we really got hit, I'd arguably say more from the left than from the right on this, is we actually argued it's kind of hard to prove capture. You know, you have to have a counterfactual of what an agency that wouldn't be captured would in the same situation keterus paribus be doing. And a lot of the”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He talked about the life cycle of agencies. And so capture wasn't something that was designed kind of, you know, de novo into an agency. It was something that evolved in an agency that wasn't originally captured but became so. I'm not saying that's a better model necessarily, but clearly sometimes that happens when capture by design does not.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something to the way an agency gets set up that when it's new, assuming it's set up in a certain way, it's got certain kind of staffers, it's got merit service protection, things like that, that it is less likely to be captured. And this is at some level a difference between the early political science theories of capture and the Stiglarian theory. Stigler, I'm about to participate in a 50th anniversary. It's another podcast with Luigi Zengalis on the 50th anniversary of Stigler's theory of economic regulation. His theory was really much more about legislative design and much of the ways that you and I have been talking about. But before him, there were two political scientists who were thinking in similar but not identical terms. One was my late colleague Sam Huntington, who actually wrote on the ICC, and the other was Marvor Bernstein. And Marvor Bernstein, who was at one point dean of the Woodrow Wilson School,”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's right, but let's keep in mind that that restriction of supply raises the price in some equilibrium sense for those who supply nuclear power. And so it's not that I think, I think you're right that it's state and local governments. It's a certain degree of nimbyism on nuclear power plants. But I would also suggest that there's not like you have a really robust coalition pushing for stronger or shall I say more laissez-faire attitudes on whether to build more nuclear power plants or not. Let me just flip it by one, I would say for the moment, probably the least captured agency, and I wouldn't say the least, an agency that is newer and less captured would probably be the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That's not to say that I believe in every decision it makes. I do think”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, good question. So, I don't have a rank ordering for you from which I can draw the top and the bottom. I think Knowing some people who've been involved in the space and seeing also what's gone on worldwide, I would say one agency that has been captured or plausibly captured would be the nuclear regulatory commission. And I think there's a complicated story there, the story in France where they also have nuclear regulation is that so many of the folks who work at that agency come through the country's formidable technical schools and they're trained in a certain kind of way that leads them to be much more likely to see nuclear power as a good thing. For what it's worth, I happen to be a believer in nuclear power as part of a bundle of non-carbon based energy sources. That said, I think it's very plausible that due to kind of professional training, things like that,”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Except, of course, now let's talk about some of those very rural areas that we just mentioned a few minutes ago that are depopulating. It would be interesting. I don't know the answer to this question, to see whether there's more freedom to build in areas like that. My guess is where you're going to see less freedom to build if you want to use that metaphor is in precisely the kinds of places on the coasts and maybe in certain aspects of the southeast places that are driven in part by racial and ethnic discrimination, but also by wealth discrimination that are going to crack down much more heavily upon new building, especially new residential building.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think this gets to some of the differences between an economist and a political scientist. I see what you're talking about as a kind of regulation, although to me, I see it much more as kind of housing policy. And I think there are folks who say, well, let's try to construct a unified theory that puts the EPA installing smokestack scrubbers, mergers and acquisitions regulation, zoning regulations, because it's called a regulation, and say some set of price constraints and puts them into a unified theory. I think the point that you're talking to right now, whether it's kind of, I think there's a development in local level valuation of housing in American culture that is leading many governments, I agree, to crack down on building. It happens in my own town to make building new construction harder. And I could see that as ratcheting one way.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depending on which part of the FDA you want to look at, even in medicines approval and things like that, we've seen some deregulation.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that narrative is pretty easily falsified in the United States as well as some other countries, definitely as a one-way ratchet. I mean, if we want to talk about pure monotonicity, take into account first that the degree to which we see price regulation, which was exactly what the Chicago school and other capture theorists were so concerned about so long ago, we've seen a whole range of areas where the government regulates prices far less governments, I should say, regulate prices far less. We see far less regulation of antitrust M&A than we used to. I actually think that's a problem. And I'm happy to say I think that case against price regulation, especially micro level regulation of prices, is generally a strong one. The case against price regulation. We've seen a fair degree of deregulation in environmental spaces. And I would argue”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Platform for the U.S. postal system. I think basic privacy restrictions have to be guaranteed. I also think, actually in some respects, I think we need to know a fair amount about what postal workers do without, say, calling for Amazon-like tracking. But if we think that postal workers are misplacing ballots or not providing birth controls or something like that, then, you know, we should probably have some way of picking up on that kind of nefarious behavior.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. Well, there's, you know, there's a whole set of things that they don't since the Griswold decision and since the kind of First Amendment decisions. They don't keep as much records of kind of what goes through the mail. They can't prohibit things like pornography, contraception. Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by itself. I would start with the idea that I think basic privacy restrictions, which governed the postal system as much through norm as by law in the 19th century and early 20th century, should govern the system. So, you know, it's a crime. If I were to walk past your mailbox and open your letter, I'm committing a federal crime. But there are also norms that seals were not to be broken, things like that. So I do think whichever way the postal service goes, and it's quite possible that you could imagine an electronic”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I don't think that's going to be, at least not until we get different models. I don't think that's going to be a viable model for express scripts. I mean, ExpressScripts uses the pulse system for good reason. They don't use Federal Express.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agreed. I think there's all sorts of reasons to think that depopulation of some rural areas might be potentially a good thing. But I also think that there are ways to do that. We certainly have, you know, lots of those pressures right now. And there are also, I think, ways to do that that still, I mean, the concern I have is that, you know, you're cutting off a vast number. I mean, tens of millions of people from a part of their culture, again, that they still use.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not doing Mobel, you know, we're not doing truly privatized. I think basically you would accentuate the bicoastal concentration of culture, wealth, talent, and economic innovation in the United States.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a much more universalized cultural dialogue. I don't want to say singular cultural dialogue. Pluralism was there, but a much more globalized dialogue. That said, I think the other thing they saw in the Postal Service, and this is something that Theodore Roosevelt saw in the Postal Service. There's a big part of our economy as well as our society that depends upon it. And Roosevelt before and after he made these very controversial moves to cover in, as it said, thousands of postmaster positions under the merit system actually received a lot of support from shipping industries and sort of medium-sized, smaller size retailers.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it was seen as both the exemplar of what a potentially open access public service could be in a way that nobody had really thought about any other function of the federal government being so universal. I mean, even consider the army, which we would today say is, okay, how can you define a state without its military and its army? But as we know, not really until the progressive era was the United States Army unified and the Civil War was fought through militias. Any number of other services were, of course, decentralized to the state level, sometimes to the local. And so progressives saw at one moment in the postal service, well, here's actually something that the national government can do, and it can provide this platform, this platform for a democratic republic, open deliberation, markets.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A grave concern, and for what it's worth, at some level, yes, we're there with the internet now and at some level it's replaced the post office. But as I recently argued in the Boston Review, not entirely, there are still a large number of magazines, newspaper subscriptions, for that matter now, pharmacy activities and others that rely heavily upon the postal system and probably will for the foreseeable future.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, look, there are whole sorts of folks you could talk to about net neutrality and its value. I would say that our political culture in the history of the United States and much of our economy and much of our education system presumed an open access, I mean minimal cost for sending letters with all these cross-subsidies. So the letters subsidize the newspapers, which was crucial because the newspapers kind of created a much more informed society. It was a platform for advertising, things like that. So I don't want to go, I don't want to make a simplistic mapping from that to say net neutrality because there are a whole bunch of other issues involved there. But I do think the degree to which providers can close off access or make access to this large externality much more costly is”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of having an independent civil service, one that cannot be used by a party or a leader who verges on authoritarian energies, while at the same time avoiding some of the problems that one sees in the worst case of public employee union abuses, such as we see in some police departments.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teachers unions and other public employees unions at the federal level I actually think the federal employee unions are pretty weak and part of that is just basic political science just about nowhere other than a few Western states and you know I guess you'd probably say parts of Virginia now are federal employee unions politically strong enough to make a difference in the kind of electoral calculations of a congressional majority So I don't know that we've reached an optimum there. I do think termination at some level should be easier for basic non-performance. I do think using career incentives among a whole bunch of positions in the civil service should be easier to do. But I would say at the federal level, you've got a situation where, again, I'm not going to say optimum. If anything, I believe the last presidential administration showed us the value.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think we're anywhere near an actual optimum. I think it's worth pointing out, by the way, that the federal civil service, which we're talking about here, is quite different from the state and local level civil service. One of the things that merit reform did is it got rid of one form of politics by reducing the link between partisanship, party organization, and appointment at the middle and lowest levels. But it introduced another. It accentuated and facilitated the growth of employee public employee labor unions. And I have a mixed judgment on those. I don't think you can have a conversation about policing like we're having in this country right now without calling into question the value of some of those unions and the degree to which they protect their members from egregious actions. Obviously, there's a huge literature there as well.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some recent politics regarding the FDA. Surely the leaders of an administrative agency, executive branch or so-called independent commission are appointed by the president. That's an Article 2 power. They should continue to be appointed by the president. It's all of the other folks, communications undersecretaries and so forth that I think I'm not sure about the added value of those appointments. And I think we would do better by restricting their number.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, good question. I think I would begin by saying that I'm not sure we need examinations, which by the way still exist in many areas of the civil service that we should have perhaps minimum criteria, but the criteria should not be reduced to, say, a four-year college degree. I do believe that the Pendleton Act created the basis for the decline of patronage and it took a while. The Pendleton Act depended heavily upon presidential enforcement. And it was actually Theodore Roosevelt two decades after the act, more than two decades after the act, who really implemented the pivotal administrative decisions there. But I would say if we were trying to do this today, I would actually reduce the number of political appointees at the top levels of the civil service. It's actually relevant to”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversations with Tyler.com.”
2021-05-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Carpenter on Smart Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source