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Comment by DMac87 | Hacker News Reader

How so? I understand that doing research on regulation is by its nature political, but that doesn't mean 'ideology driven'. For instance, you may argue from this data that Obama is the most-regulating president in history. Or, as some researchers have done, you may argue that regulation hasn't killed dynamism (see work by Goldschlag and Tabarrok). Data is data, what you do with it may be ideological or not...

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Choosing what kind of data to expose or research can be political. Simply releasing data on the # of regulations is helpful for only certain kinds of discussions:

* Who pushed or repealed the most regulations

* Who regulated what

* Correlating # of regulations to market performance

These are not bad discussions to have but has the consequence of shifting the discussion further away from "what makes a good regulation?" towards "how much regulation is too much?".

Data is data but it isn't all the data. What we choose to look at frames the political discussion.

A strategy for an executive to control the output of outside consultants is to sponsor a project and provide a filtered list of information sources. So long as the consultants only receive the appropriate data, their conclusions are predetermined. Internally, this creates the illusion of objectivity.

I think the ideology is pretty obvious, in that all of their content seems to argue against regulation (and so does their mission statement). I actually have no problem with that – it's a valid point of view.

I feel more strongly about the "cargo-cult" aspect of it. By being university-affiliated and by using quantitative methods they create the illusion of scientific objectivity. But what they're creating may be data, it's (possibly) not information.

Their main claim seems to be that counting the number of "shalls" and "musts" in regulations is a better standard than just the number of regulations. I believe the added utility is marginal and doesn't justify calling this 'science'.

One example: they use their method to show that the financial industry was more regulated in 2008 than in the era of Glass–Steagall. But I'd say that not all "musts" and "shalls" are created equal: "Investments banks shall be separated from commercial banking" is simply not comparable in its impact to "Credit Card offers must state effective APR". But the two would be counted with equal weight in their analysis.

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