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Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

By this do you mean that doctors are changing their minds, and since doctors do things like run advisory boards at the FDA, that causes the FDA to behave less restrictively?

In other words, why would the FDA bother to go with any flow? On the view of some economists, bureaucrats should never deregulate because there's no incentive for them to, and mere cultural pressure shouldn't really be an incentive.

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> On the view of some economists, bureaucrats should never deregulate because there’s no incentive for them to

Well, so economists models of things outside their notional specialty aren’t any more connected to reality than those inside. That’s…to be expected, I guess.

Economists model incentive structures, I'd expect them to actually model things that aren't traditional economics quite well.

IF there actually is a consensus by economists that bureaucrats won't regulate well then I'd believe them

Traditional economists model traditional economic incentives. Behavioral economists try to understand all the gaps in traditional economic models such as why people don't steal as much as they can when there is 0% chance of getting caught or why people who choose In-and-Out when given an option between McDonalds and In-and-Out suddenly choose McDonalds when just asked to pick a restaurant for lunch.

Humans are motivated by emotional incentives at least as much as economic incentives, and humans also have cognitive and memory constraints that aren't considered by traditional economists.

All of which is to say that while there may not be an economic incentive for government regulators to de-regulate, that conclusion fails to consider that many government regulators actually have an emotional desire to feel like they are doing good in the world and that emotional incentive can sometimes be stronger than the traditional economic incentive to keep regulations in place.

Cultural pressure means political pressure and eventually that works its way through the system. It may be blunt and slow, but it gets there eventually.

I'm realizing that you can always spin a story either way. If regulation is restrictionist, you talk about the ratchet and the overriding aversion of the regulator to being blamed for anything. If regulation is lax and ineffective, you talk about the revolving door with industry and the reluctance of regulators to piss off companies they could later get lucrative consulting jobs at.

There is always a stock story available to explain whatever we currently don't like, but who knows what the facts are.

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