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Comment by wahern | Hacker News Reader

Using this database of regulation metadata,

the articles starts out saying that the California Code of Regulations "contains more than 21 million words". Which made me curious: how many words for Texas' code? Answer: 15 million.

  $ grep '^[[:digit:]]' admincode_california_metadata.csv | cut -d, -f5 | tr '\n' '+' | (cat; printf "0\n") | bc
  21172868

  $ grep '^[[:digit:]]' admincode_texas.csv | cut -d, -f7 | tr '\n' '+' | (cat; printf "0\n") | bc
  14929400

I'm not trying to make a political point, was just genuinely curious.

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I think the most important issue in modern governance that nobody ever talks about is the tendency for the number of laws and the size of the legal code to monotonically grow towards infinity

I’ve heard of the idea of baking expiation into any given law. Useful laws get renewed, useless ones get expunged.

The article mentions that Rhode Island did that wholesale: "The Democratic-dominated Rhode Island government recently eliminated more than 30% of its rule volume by setting an expiration date for its entire regulatory code, forcing state agencies to start fresh."

I just learned that they did that to their state constitution as well a few years ago!

That's handy for frequent regime change!

Ah, good point. If you believe a particular regulation is useful and necessary now, why wouldn't you also believe it would be so in the future? You may not be in power to conditionally renew it. And from a pragmatic political perspective, sunsetting smells like compromise; the political base and interest groups generally frown on compromise. All of which may explain why sunsetting isn't as common as one would think, even if most legislators share the sentiments expressed in this thread (and I would presume that they do).

Idaho just completely reset all it's regulations.

https://fee.org/articles/idaho-repealed-its-entire-regulator...

It's historically been hard to do because there's a tendency to just automatically extend the sunsets when they arrive. Though a couple of other replies to your comment have a couple of nice examples.

Apparently beginning in the 1970s there was a nationwide movement to sunset state agencies. A choice quote from a Texas legislator in 1994:

> [I] never saw so many alligator shoes and $600 suits as when some agency is up for sunset review.

Source: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Is+the+sun+setting+on+the+Tex...

That suggests a more general downside from sunsetting--it increases opportunities for lobbying. Worse, it benefits long-term preparation and strategy, which will favor monied interest groups and lobbyists especially. Which is similar to the downsides of term limits, which effectively shifts power to those behind the scenes--e.g. political operators, party bosses--rather than to the electorate. If you make serving in an office a literal revolving door, you empower those positioned to line people up at the door. Likewise, if you make lawmaking a process of continually rehashing old compromises, you empower those playing the long game.

You could just make congressmen run a mile for each page of legislation they vote to pass :P

That sounds dangerous to me. If the lawmakers overlook an important one (say, the law against deadly assault) for even a few days, it could be bad.

I assume these are regulations and not the criminal code. I think those are two different things.

You surely meant "expiration". Expiation is something else :)

I think that's mostly just cynicism. If you actually chart document lengths, you are far more likely to see logarithmic growth or something asymptotically approaching a (finite) value.

More importantly: this is both to be expected and rather benign. It's expected because regulation simply grows with the complexity of society, which is increasing at a similar or even larger pace. Most of our wealth is due to specialisation and research. And with the benefits of, say, flying cars, comes the need to establish rules.

It's also benign because almost nothing of it will ever concern you, or any other specific individual. You can fly your car without knowing the crash test procedures for it. They are relevant only if you are building flying cars. In that case, you do have to familiarise yourself with the rules, but that is a task of the same magnitude as it was with existing regulation for (regular) cars, which no longer concern you.

Logarithmic growth monotonically increases to infinity, no?

And I would be highly skeptical that it would ever approach a finite value, I mean, why would it? What is the incentive for politicians to just stop making laws once they reach a certain threshold?

Here is a quick chart I found with google that indicates, at least as the American federal govt is concerned, the growth is essentially linear: https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/za...

Next step: programatically determine which state has more "regulation" based on text analysis.

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