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Who regulates the regulators? We need to go beyond review-and-approval

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Re: Who regulates the regulators? We need to go beyond review-and-approval

#81
Even as the article states, the problem is the risk-aversion of private actors to regulation. I can assure you, the scientists are happy to have the administrators handle regulatory affairs. To get approvals, administrators do the comparative analysis to show that a similar risk was accepted with similar constraints.

The real problem is the advantage this gives to repeat players. Then innovators have to sell out to the majors before market validation, so there's been little significant change in the identity of the key players, even though there have been huge (finance-driven) changes in organizational and market structures (with wider profit margins).

It also amplifies first-mover advantage. Not only do first movers capture customers, they set the regulatory standards others have to beat. If they are a key technology (like Illumina's NGS short-read sequencing), it's a perfect set-up for the monopoly to tie sale of one product to another (e.g., the one-time hardware to ongoing reagents or software services). This is amplified by the privacy of the regulatory submissions.

How can it be changed? It can't. Big pharma is a trillion-dollar golden egg is a nest of the FDA's making, and no rational humanistic discourse or broad-based health-care financing issues are going to dislodge those investments.

The best we can hope for is to keep the profiteering reasonably discreet. By being somewhat unpredictable, the FDA gives each administration leverage to extract some concessions for each generation.

Re: Who regulates the regulators? We need to go beyond review-and-approval

#82
post #7
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The regulator can still set legal penalties high enough to stop any innovation, if they want to. A liability model has a couple of advantages despite this: 1. The regulator has some slack to not set penalties insanely high. As long as they're seen enforcing those penalties against someone periodically, and as long as the penalties sound like a big number to the general public, they can look like Stern Serious Regul…

The liability model has a big downside, though. Because sometimes people in charge are idiots, they ignore common sense and make risks. So they possibly get burned only when accident happens, which costs human health and lives. Regulation is intended to prevent human harm by setting and enforcing a safety standard.

> Because sometimes people in charge are idiots, they ignore common sense

This ignores that regulators are also people, with the same traits, but with no vested interest in making anything work.

Re: Who regulates the regulators? We need to go beyond review-and-approval

#83
post #69
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're left with things like plane crashes, which have to be minimized even if they're already rare. I know we're all trying to be moderate here, but I'm not very good at that: 1) It is irrational. The cost-benefits of aircraft safety make no sense. Planes are held to a standard that we don't hold buses and trains to. We should strive to make rational decisions as a matter of policy. 2) There is no reason to think…

Thank you. We are nowhere close to the Pareto-efficient frontier for risk reduction. We could be safer, while sacrificing much less prosperity for that safety, if things were structured better. (The optimal number of plane crashes is not zero, as the saying goes, and it’s probably more than we have now.)

Optimal by what measure? I don't know the saying.

Re: Who regulates the regulators? We need to go beyond review-and-approval

#84
post #11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The liability model has a big downside, though. Because sometimes people in charge are idiots, they ignore common sense and make risks. So they possibly get burned only when accident happens, which costs human health and lives. Regulation is intended to prevent human harm by setting and enforcing a safety standard.

The usual hack for dealing with this is to require liability insurance. The insurer has incentives to set premiums at a level that reflect risk, along with reasonable contract conditions -- e.g. "Put guards on all your rotary saws, and yes we will be sending inspectors in to make sure they're being used properly." (How is this different from an ordinary procedural regulator? Because the insurance market has competiti…

Why would they check that the guards are in place when they can reject the claim after an accident happens because the guard wasn't in place?

Who regulates the insurers?

Re: Who regulates the regulators? We need to go beyond review-and-approval

#85
post #3

I think the core problem is the incentives of the regulators. Groups like the FDA are democratic institutions, but if their only goal is to have the approval of national politicians, the feedback they get is either negative if there's a bad product released, or neutral if there is no terrible product released. The FDA must have done something right - what have they done right? We don't even know. Their incentives are…

Reminds me about the overnight pizza issue. I.e. the USDA claims pizza that's 2 hours old will kill you despite people eating old pizza all the time and probably no documented significant negative consequences.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26635856

Re: Who regulates the regulators? We need to go beyond review-and-approval

#86
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're left with things like plane crashes, which have to be minimized even if they're already rare. I know we're all trying to be moderate here, but I'm not very good at that: 1) It is irrational. The cost-benefits of aircraft safety make no sense. Planes are held to a standard that we don't hold buses and trains to. We should strive to make rational decisions as a matter of policy. 2) There is no reason to think…

I think it's worth keeping in mind that the Asian growth has often occurred due to their governments placing little value on human life and/or wellbeing. I'm not sure that's something that the US should aspire to emulate. I'm not sure of a good way to have a middle ground between excessive regulation and devaluing human wellbeing. In that case, I'd rather that we err on the side of excessive regulation; especially si…

> especially since there are already powerful financial interests advocating for the other side.

There aren't actually powerful interests advocating for reduced safety. What they want is increased profits.

One way to do that is by eliminating safety measures to save costs, but liability for harm already removes that financial incentive because the cost of the liability should be greater than the cost of the mitigation in any case where the mitigation is cost effective.

Another way to increase profits is to impose "safety regulations" on smaller competitors so they go out of business and larger incumbents can raise prices. Powerful financial interests do not oppose this, they promote it.

Re: Who regulates the regulators? We need to go beyond review-and-approval

#87
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're left with things like plane crashes, which have to be minimized even if they're already rare. I know we're all trying to be moderate here, but I'm not very good at that: 1) It is irrational. The cost-benefits of aircraft safety make no sense. Planes are held to a standard that we don't hold buses and trains to. We should strive to make rational decisions as a matter of policy. 2) There is no reason to think…

I think it's worth keeping in mind that the Asian growth has often occurred due to their governments placing little value on human life and/or wellbeing. I'm not sure that's something that the US should aspire to emulate. I'm not sure of a good way to have a middle ground between excessive regulation and devaluing human wellbeing. In that case, I'd rather that we err on the side of excessive regulation; especially si…

1)

We were talking about aircraft a moment ago. Are low-status people known for their frequent flying? There are a lot of places where the problem clearly has nothing to do with valuing people - skilled workers aren't exactly treated like dirt, but they're often the ones that regulation cripples. I personally want to see nuclear scientists and engineers allowed to drop their standards to only 2-5x safer than current practice by other energy providers so that we can open up an economic boom in clean energy but obviously that ain't happening. Crippling safety standards continue to be the order of the day.

2)

We're living through the greatest expansion of living standards in the history of humanity. There has never been anything comparable to what has been happening over the last 70 years in Asia. Such an unprecedented rapid improvement that the English language doesn't have the words required to describe it.

There is something there that the US should aspire to emulate. I don't think we know what [0], but more effort should be going in to figuring that part out. If it was placing little value on human life then the US should do that, the results justify putting emotions aside.

How much is this "placing value on human life" worth anyway? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tent_cities_in_the_Uni... paints a grim picture of how useful all this valuing is to the people on the ground. There is a force in politics that doesn't believe poor people have the capacity to improve themselves if given small economic opportunities. This blinding ignorance is leaving people worse off. In practice, 4% real growth in the economy would do much more for everyone than complaining that pro-growth policies seem kinda mean. Why should people care that they seem kinda mean? They work.

[0] I heard a cute theory that Maoism decimated the bureaucracy so much that it couldn't control China's economy.

Re: Who regulates the regulators? We need to go beyond review-and-approval

#88
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. We are nowhere close to the Pareto-efficient frontier for risk reduction. We could be safer, while sacrificing much less prosperity for that safety, if things were structured better. (The optimal number of plane crashes is not zero, as the saying goes, and it’s probably more than we have now.)

Optimal by what measure? I don't know the saying.

You multiply the cost of prevention by the risk of a crash and see if it exceeds the cost of a crash.

Some plane crashes can be prevented with a $0.30 warning light. Preventing those plane crashes is optimal.

Some plane crashes can only be prevented by permanently grounding all planes, because they'll be caused by a confluence of improbable events. Trying to mitigate every implausible circumstance that could potentially lead to a crash is not optimal, even when some of them proceed to actually happen.

Re: Who regulates the regulators? We need to go beyond review-and-approval

#89
Some real Plato Guardians vibe from all this. Maybe AI will someday in fact be the objective guardians we need (say, if all parties verify the code is objective ex ante). I think men are too prone to corruption and bias for truly bias-free human regulators to exist.
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