Sure, but is this actually a high order blocker? I'd argue that it's not even a first order effect. The problem here is not that we don't have enough insurance capacity; the problem is that we don't have enough ventilators. And it turns out, actually building those things to spec is hard. Intellectual property and regulatory capture are bad things to be reduced, IMO, but they're only part of our current equation.
The moneyed classes of America don't like redundancy and they don't like long term investments. Since they hold such a huge chunk of wealth compared to the rest of America, their preferences (which I might note, Marc represents professionally) make these decisions long before patent troll lawsuits or building inspectors can rain on any parade.
> Point being, why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts to interpret what adheres to the spirit of it? With the barriers of entry gone, I think we'd see a renewed vitality to many ossified sectors.
Litigation is the most costly way to settle these things. Your idea would require even more startup capital per small business to overcome the legal obstacles you seemed eager to abolish.
The claim about ventilators was one of the first dodgy claims I noticed but really the entire first part of the article is a pack of lies. Andreessen says:
"We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents"
This isn't amazing. The amount of testing being performed has scaled exponentially over the space of just a few months, from a standing start. In fact there's a lot of evidence that the supposedly exponential growth of the virus was really due to an exponential growth in testing, when positives are viewed as a proportion of overall tests done. It's not an indictment of "the West" that materials run out after such a vast acceleration - if anything I'm amazed it didn't happen earlier!
"We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds"
All three are in plentiful supply. Even in localised hotspots like New York problems are limited to a handful of hospitals.
I've been reading about the near deserted state of most hospitals for over a week now. I don't understand where Marc is getting his information from if he isn't aware of this.
"We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine — despite, again, years of advance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses"
Vaccines can't be created for a virus that doesn't exist yet regardless of how many vague warnings there are, so this isn't remarkable: it's inevitable. As for therapies, that's what ventilators and CPAP are.
"then we may not have the manufacturing factories required to scale their production"
Given the data appearing in a flood of new papers, showing that the virus is not dangerous enough to warrant current policy, no unusual rates of manufacturing scale-up will be required.
"it took scientists 5 years to get regulatory testing approval for the new Ebola vaccine after that scourge’s 2014 outbreak, at the cost of many lives"
I'm actually on Marc's side on this one, in that I suspect current FDA approval processes are overkill. But this claim is also nonsense. FDA allows fast-track approval bypass for cases where someone is going to die without treatment anyway, and Ebola disappeared after 2014 - according to CDC the next time it was spotted was Zaire in 2018 with a grand total of 8 cases. That's not even close to "many lives".
"A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most."
Tax credits, quantitative easing, loan subsidies. The government has many ways to distribute money to people.
"At least therapies and vaccines are hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard"
In fact making medical masks is hard. It requires special materials and machines, the supply of which can't be rapidly scaled up.
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-factories-cant-keep-up-d...
Headline is literally "Factories are scrambling to make 20 times more face masks a day to keep up with demand amid coronavirus outbreak, but the masks are surprisingly difficult and expensive to make"
As for money, transferring money is easy. Figuring out the right amounts and the right people to send it to, without creating an explosion of fraud and waste - that's not so easy.
For reference, Q-tips come in packages of 500 for about $5 at your local pharmacy. They sell around 20 billion per year. Test swabs are somewhat more special and individually wrapped, but 4 million shouldn't cost a lot.
I especially want to take issue with this falsehood:
> All three are in plentiful supply. Even in localised hotspots like New York problems are limited to a handful of hospitals.
ICU beds are definitely in short supply. It doesn't matter if a bed exists in another state, folks who need ICU beds aren't usually fit to travel. That's part of why their care is intensive.
But also, only large hospitals have significant ICU capacity. So saying it's only limited to hospitals that have ICU capacity seems very disingenuous to me. It's like saying, "There is no shortage of ICU beds at local clinics." That's true, because no one expects substantial ICU capacity at local clinics. If they had it, it'd be welcome right now.
> I've been reading about the near deserted state of most hospitals for over a week now. I don't understand where Marc is getting his information from if he isn't aware of this.
Where are you reading this? I have relatives in healthcare in NY. They do not relate your story to me.
> Vaccines can't be created for a virus that doesn't exist yet regardless of how many vague warnings there are, so this isn't remarkable: it's inevitable. As for therapies, that's what ventilators and CPAP are.
Who would CPAP machines be for? Why bring them up?
> Given the data appearing in a flood of new papers, showing that the virus is not dangerous enough to warrant current policy, no unusual rates of manufacturing scale-up will be required.
The medical literature is in fact saying the opposite. But now I'm morbidly fascinated what the "reopen the economy" and "it's just the flu" crowd are circulating as "scientific literature."
> Tax credits, quantitative easing, loan subsidies. The government has many ways to distribute money to people.
None of which are actually effective in the face of historic unemployment.
> In fact making medical masks is hard. It requires special materials and machines, the supply of which can't be rapidly scaled up.
Making masks which reduce individual aerosol dispersal is easy. N95 masks are harder. We definitely could scale them up rapidly if we wanted to. This is the territory where things like IP law do matter and do cost lives.
Re: Ventilators in New York.
New York doesn't have a ventilator shortage and never did. It had a predicted shortage based on bad simulations, but never a real one. In fact it's now sending ventilators elsewhere:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-ve...
"On April 2, Cuomo predicted the state would run out of ventilators in six days “at the current burn rate.” But on April 6, Cuomo noted, “We’re ok, and we have some in reserve.” Now New York appears to have passed the apex. Deaths, a lagging indicator, crested at 799 on April 9 and hit 606 on April 16, the lowest figure since April 6. Hospitalizations are also declining, and on April 16 also hit their lowest level since April 6. Cuomo today has so many ventilators he is giving them away: On April 15, he said he was sending 100 of them to Michigan and 50 to Maryland. On April 16, he announced he was sending 100 to New Jersey."
I'm morbidly fascinated by what you're reading that has led you to this belief.
Re: ICU beds: I was talking about the world generally rather than New York specifically. For example in New Jersey on April 8th only 3 hospitals were load balancing to others:
https://twitter.com/alexberenson/status/1247920918640410624?...
In New York city (vs state) the field hospitals that were built have hardly been being used.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/04/16/coronav...
"the field hospital constructed inside the massive Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Hudson Yards, had 340 patients as of Tuesday afternoon ... The facility has a maximum capacity of 2,500 hospital beds. As of Tuesday afternoon, the Javits Center hospital had treated about 700 patients"
Even on April 1st, the New York Post visited an ICU and found it was only handling double the normal case load, well within capacity (13 patients normally, 26 then):
https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/a-look-inside-an-nyc-hospital-...
Certainly there are cases where single hospitals ran out of space and started load balancing onto nearby hospitals. But, that happens during normal times too.
Where are you reading this? [empty hospitals]
The essay isn't only about New York, it's trying to generalise not only to America but the whole western world. And across the world hospitals are laying off staff due to underload:
https://news.google.com/search?q=hospital%20furlough&hl=en-U...
Who would CPAP machines be for? Why bring them up?
CPAP - the pressure type, not the sleep machines - is now a common therapy for treating COVID-19. For example the British Prime Minister wasn't put on a ventilator but rather given only CPAP (basically, a mask connected to the hospital oxygen supply). This is because there's a growing belief in the medical world that ventilators can cause more harm than good for COVID patients.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/928156
None of which are actually effective in the face of historic unemployment.
That's not a rebuttal. Systems to distribute money exist. The idea they've never been built, as the essay argues, isn't right.
If you want to argue they aren't designed for sustaining a world under house arrest, by all means do so, but no country on earth has created schemes specifically for that.
Making masks which reduce individual aerosol dispersal is easy. N95 masks are harder
Andreessen was talking about medical-grade masks designed to protect doctors from patients, not ad-hoc home made things. And for those masks the point stands: it's hard to make them but he says it's easy.
As for medical literature, go read the links to papers and studies here:
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
There are many links to papers, comments and articles by doctors and other specialists who are arguing that the virus is clearly not as deadly as feared. For example, the serology survey that's in the first link under the April 18th update was discussed here on HN just recently.
That's good news, by the way! Don't you hope they're right? My experience is that some people posting on HN don't actually want to study what people bringing good news are saying.
Thank you for the effort, but I don't believe there is much more to say on the subject.
You were wrong about what you claimed. That certainly needed to be acknowledged given your responses here.
The parent answered your false claim, with what Cuomo said and what is actual fact: NY does not have ventilator shortages.
Politico: "New York sending 100 ventilators to New Jersey"
https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2020/0...
ABC Grand Rapids: "New York, California send Michigan ventilators for coronavirus relief"
https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/new-y...
ABC Baltimore: "New York sending 50 ventilators to Maryland"
> "In our hour of need, other states stepped up to help us. We promised we would do the same," Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on Twitter Wednesday.
https://www.wmar2news.com/news/state/new-york-sending-50-ven...
My response here was mostly dismissive because the poster above is clearly trying to downplay the crisis for reasons I can only speculate on. After taking a lot of time to read through the poster's previous links, I'm quite frustrated with how much time I wasted on disingenuous garbage links.
But yes, I lumped Seattle (which briefly did have a ventilator shortage) in with New York on ventilators. This is pretty much the only thing I was wrong about and I'll take this opportunity to own up. But I won't engage earnestly with the previous poster any further.
That's an incendiary claim, so please let me provide an example. Here's point 4 on the overview:
> The age and risk profile of deaths thus essentially corresponds to normal mortality. Up to 60% of all Covid19-related deaths have occurred in particularly vulnerable nursing homes.
"Nursing homes" is highlighted and links to an article talking about mortality in nursing homes and long term care facilities. It is both cautious about its claims (pointing out data is not very good yet) an doesn't make the point that nursing homes are in fact the fatality concentration point. It's not clear how we'd draw a larger conclusion from this.
Another example, next point:
> Many media reports of young and healthy people dying from Covid19 have proven to be false upon closer inspection. Many of these people either (did not)[1] die from Covid19 or they in fact had (serious preconditions)[2] (such as undiagnosed leukaemia).
Firstly, I'm not sure anyone has disputed that young people are much less likely to die of the virus. But there are two links in this point, one to a Daily Mail article about how a coroner is waiting for a toxicology report before ruling the cause of death is COVID-19. This is probably the right call, but an infant testing positive for COVID-19 appears to have died over respiratory distress. It's difficult to just shrug and go, "Oh well that's SIDS not the virus even though the nature of the death is identical."
Really, these points read like someone with an agenda trying to make a lot of cites for legitimacy. But there isn't a lot of evidence of a larger pattern here, just a lot of data which is then presented in a leading way to facilitate a narrative.
Another example of this:
> The often shown exponential curves of “corona cases” are (misleading)[3], since the number of tests also increases exponentially. In most countries, the ratio of positive tests to total tests either remains constant between (5% to 25%)[4] or increases rather slowly.
This is another really misleading bullet point. Looking at [4], we see indeed that the over-time ratio of tests has remained at an average of 25% positive by country (this is of course averaged, hotspots see totally different numbers). But the author has previously pointed out that testing administration has risen exponentially, so this is a constant proportion of an exponential population. If we decline to extrapolate from this, the author cannot make their point. But if we do, we see an exponential growth in COVID-19 cases.
I see more examples but I won't further belabor the point. This resource is written by someone with an agenda they want to execute on. It doesn't appear to be someone honestly engaging in inquiry and arriving at a data-driven conclusion.
[0]: https://ltccovid.org/2020/04/12/mortality-associated-with-co...
[1]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8193487/Coroner-ref...
[2]: https://sports.yahoo.com/spanish-football-coach-francisco-ga...
[3]: https://multipolar-magazin.de/artikel/coronavirus-irrefuhrun...
[4]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200415203945/https://mobile.tw...
The post you're replying to did not use those as sources. They were criticizing the website for using those sources (and including them here for reference). Look at the locations of [1] thru [4] in their comment: they're all in the body of quotes.
As I understand it FDA didn't approve Pandemrix, while EU regulators did give it fast track appeal.
Pandemrix causes narcolepsy in 1 in 60,000 people who take it. (so, for the entire US that's about 5000 with a life long debilitating illness that requires constant care.) The risk is very low, but it's there and we need to be careful about exposing a population of hundreds of millions to these risks just because we have an ideological opposition to any form of government regulation.
I also wonder what kind of study found such a tiny effect size. 1 in 60,000 would require a staggeringly powerful study to successfully link it to Pandremix.
Not saying you're wrong about any of that, and I suppose I could go research these questions myself. But based solely on what you wrote I don't think there's any way to tell if that decision was good or bad.
This class denigrating language does nothing to elevate the discussion and it is absolutely false (in the sense that it is only a "truth" within your worldview and the worldview of others who share it), and it is false in the sense that it doesn't accurately describe the behaviors of individuals in the "moneyed class".
The "moneyed classes" as you call it if anything have more redundancy and longer term investments that most other classes. It is incredibly rare for anyone in the "moneyed classes" to not have a balanced portfolio of investments that add in fiscal redundancy in case one investment goes bad. The portfolios are also balanced insofar as balancing short term and long term growth depending on their investment horizon.
The problems you've identified have far more to do with a coordination problem than the vices of individuals.
The "moneyed class" is not one coordinated hive mind mass that all conspire with one another to avoid redundancy and eschew long term investments.
The "moneyed class" like the "unmoneyed class" are all individual actors each acting in their own self interest and trying to figure out an optimal solution given limited imperfect information and handicapped by many cognitive biases.
Any system that is going to solve the issue of redundancy and long term investments needs to acknowledge the reality of limited imperfective information and cognitive biases and the impact these have on human reasoning and the subsequent actions of individuals.
Fast courts would be a huge benefit to society.
For easily-understood fields undergoing well-scrutinized legal code changes it's (presumably) likely that legal drafting issues can be caught and fixed early.
Conversely, in software projects (even open source ones) where the users and authors are few and/or fail to pay attention to mistakes and errors, it could take years to report and fix issues.
All that said, in the presence of a mindful, careful and effective engineering team with responsive users, it does seem that software - or at least software processes like source control, code review and the democratized ability to contribute code changes - has an evolutionary advantage.
(TL;DR: yes, "law is code". And $10M of fresh funding says law should be open-source code, to be precise. Hackers wanted.)
Background: the "Rules as Code" movement is bringing software engineering practices to the drafting of law. https://govinsider.asia/inclusive-gov/four-things-you-should...
The premise: the judiciary is one source of authority; the legislature is another. If we treat contracts and laws as executable programs and specifications, we want to find bugs at compile time, because handling exceptions at run-time is called "going to court".
How do we find bugs at compile time? Static analysis. Formal methods. Formal verification methodologies (Lamport's TLA+, MIT's Alloy) applied to contracts and laws make it possible to SAT-solve for loopholes ("sploits") that violate LTL/CTL specifications. Once law is code you can go full white-hat/black-hat. Automate the fuzzing. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin...
Maybe we don't always want "law as code" ... for, say, criminal law. Judicial discretion is important. Human judgement matters. Though if an overworked public defender can only spare two hours out of the hundred you deserve, the robolawyer starts to sound more attractive. What if we send Watson to law school? If you're hunting for a way to stay out of jail, wouldn't you want Deep Blue and AlphaGo to help you find it? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-def...
There are plenty of black-and-white areas where the rules don't invite human interpretation: mostly things to do with finances -- like how DoNotPay.com can help apply for unemployment. Even in those domains, there are deep, deep pockets lobbying against the kinds of freedom (as in speech, and as in beer) that "law as code" promises. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
But, you ask, what about the knowledge acquisition bottleneck? Ah, yes, the AI Winter. Ontologies (SUMO, OWL, UFO-L), visual modeling notations (BPMN, DMN), and a new generation of tools (Flora-2, Protégé) take a new whack at that problem without going anywhere near machine learning and neural nets, which typically lack the nuance you need when every comma counts. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180723-the-commas-tha...
Spring is coming. The vision for computable law, as laid out by Michael Genesereth at Stanford's CodeX Center, is for software that does for legal reasoning what the spreadsheet does for quantitative reasoning. (Who's Michael Genesereth? You've heard of Russell & Norvig's textbook on AI. He was Stuart Russell's Ph.D advisor.) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1165485.1165517
Is there any money in this? Hell, yes. In the US, DoNotPay is running a pitch-perfect Christensen disruption playbook. Outside the US, the EU has issued a half-million-euro tender for exactly the Rules As Code thing mentioned above: machine-readable-and-executable regulations. See section 1.4.2 of the PDF at https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/document/document-old-versi...
Oh, and as of last month, Singapore has just thrown $10M behind a project to turn the "law as code" vision into open source software that you can clone off Github.
I've been researching computational law since 2015, and a picture of the future legal tech stack is coming together in my head: open-source, open-standards, laws and contracts drafted in a domain-specific language from the start; libraries of clauses, linters and interpreters and unit testers and theorem provers built into the IDE, that find bugs in contracts in real time as you edit; compilers to English and other languages; model-driven architectures that flow from the specification to the app.
Once that legal stack is downloadable and accessible to the geeks of the world, then, as Joshua Browder would say, DoNotPay a law firm thousands of dollars just to copy and paste a Word doc out of their library. The law firm is not the customer -- as Atrium proved, expensively.
To help move this stack out of my head and into Github, the SG government is funding the development of open-source software targeted to real-world use cases, for drafting rules and contracts in a DSL. They've approved a grant for my small team (hi, Alexis! <3) to hire people to make it happen. https://www.thetechnolawgist.com/2020/03/31/legalese-singapo...
(Why Singapore? Fun fact: it's the only country in the world whose prime minister has degrees in mathematics and computer science.) https://twitter.com/leehsienloong/status/595166789660647426?...
If you're in a position to move to Singapore (whenever air travel reboots) ... and have skills in obscure but powerful technologies (or want to gain those skills) ... and want to help design a language that could be the basis for the next iteration of the legal industry ... we're hiring: https://computational.law/hiring
The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words.
So, we will have be on our guard. The hope is that if the rules are open and machine-readable, we will be able to counter with software that sides with the user and helps to mount the sort of response that in the past was only available to corporations with very deep pockets.
One intriguing approach is to submit test cases: concrete scenarios, or traces of events, that should result in certain desired outcomes. A diverse range of people in different circumstances could be collected in a comprehensive test suite. If the contract/law passes the test suite, you're good! You can imagine two legislators from different parties with different constituents and concerns, each bringing their set of test cases; and when the negotiated compromise passes enough tests, they proceed, without ever actually reading the text of the bill, lol.
Not necessarily, you risk the same sort of problems suffered by naïve statisticians who over-fit their data with ever more complicated models. This leads to erratic behaviour in real life and severe lack of predictability outside the range already covered by the data.
You need to run some kind of sensitivity analysis as well because the components used in the implementation (policemen, lawyers, auditors, traffic wardens, etc.) are not all of perfect quality. Think of an audio amplifier design, it looks wonderful on paper and works perfectly in the simulator. But fails spectacularly when built of real world components because each component is not quite exactly as specified. A sensitivity analysis can discover this by, for example, running the simulation multiple times with each component varied according to its expected quality (say +/- 10% for resistors, +/- 30 percent for transistor gain, etc.)
The only solution is mostly forbid government regulation except for critical things, of which "sale of cabbage" and ten of thousands others now currently regulated are not.
In order to do that within a Democracy, you have to dispel the unconscious notion (that a lot of modern voters have), that the government is a father/mother figure that has unlimited resources, can't make mistakes, and its operated by saints with the "common good" in mind 24/7.
What you propose of robo-lawyers and law as code sounds as the script for a futuristic Kafka's "The Process" as an episode of Black Mirror.
I’m not sure it is always great.
Studies show racism[1] and hunger[2] and can impact sentencing judgments.
> When bugs are discovered in law, they can be retroactively corrected.
How is that different than software?
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/apr/11/judges-lenient-b...
The troubling part is that at some point, we need to tackle electoral reform. Even if we tackle the legal system and provide effective legal access to everyone, we’ll still be a long ways from tackling mass disillusionment. Hell, in lots of cases, disillusionment and/or disenfranchisement are logical results of history!
Anyways, good comment!
Also, just as a matter of how the US legal system works, the presumption is that someone is innocent until challenged, whether by the state or by a private party. A prospective business could not file a petition with a court asking if their conduct was legal or not, since it's not really a controversy. But businesses will always do loads of due diligence with lawyers beforehand, who should help identify areas of legal risk.
Is it being lazy or rather having tons of work that needs to be done too?
Airbnb and Uber built products that were in a legal gray area. Lawmakers are still catching up to them.
I'm glad they took on a legal gray area because cabs had completely used regulatory capture to get away with being a terrible service to the public.
On top of that, cabs were awful in some cities in some places around the world. They worked well enough in others. Over here (Kraków area, Poland), we had private point-to-point transport companies that managed to change the law through a proper court process, like civilized people do.
What's rotten and antisocial about providing cheap, reliable transportation ?
The people who want the service are not necessarily the same as the people who are affected by the externalities of the service.
Everyone loves having AirBnb available to expand selection in NYC when they visit, but how many New Yorkers who aren’t AirBnb hosts love having tons of short term rentals in their building?
Market innovation: "Should it be done?"
Regulatory innovation: "May it be done?"
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200402/13055544225/dc-co...
[1] https://www.epa.gov/uic/class-vi-guidance-documents
[2] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-provides-answers-and-a-safe....
If the thesis is "institutions are important for prosperity", it is kind of obvious. But the book does little to explain exactly what kind of institutions.
Very often regulation starts lean, then inevitably some assholes take advantage of it to their profit, so the regulation becomes more and more specific and complex. Rinse and repeat.
It starts at individual level. In France, health insurance providers started reimbursing eyewear, with a rule "one pair of glasses each 2 years". Now everyone buys new glasses every 2 years, sharp, because "I'm paying for it", even if they don't really need new glasses. Stuff like this make insurance price go up for everyone as a result, which incentivizes you even more to be an abuser. The rules are now more strict about the how much is reimbursed, because people obviously go for most expensive Gucci frames allowed.
We have a publicly paid health system in Norway, but we still have: * Copays until you reach €200 * No dental coverage for routine operations (only major surgeries) * No eyewear coverage (I assume if you have some eye illness requiring surgery or similar it will be covered)
Seems to work fine, and that France should change what insurance does cover
What if we had a github for laws and required that anybody who worked on a law use their real name and if they were paid by a company they had to list how much?
Financial regulation is mostly about stopping people from selling dodgy investment schemes that are some variant of Ponzi.
Health and Safety regulation is mostly about stopping people from doing stupid things that might kill them.
FDA is about stopping Snake Oil salesmen. And y'know, making sure the drugs we're sold don't make us worse.
You can see it coming in the Cryptocurrency world - people lose money on stupid bets and then feel that someone else should have done something to stop this. Someone being the regulatory agencies.
So what would a solid set of regulations for crypto look like? What process would you devise that would result in a set of rules that prevented most of the crooks from profiting from their crookedness, while allowing honest folks to make some money investing in crypto?
I've heard from a friend of mine who used to work for Deloitte (or similar kind of company) that on practical level, lawmaking often happens in those private consulting/lawyer's offices - it's not like a MPs sits down and write stuff down themselves. So the git commit would say "John Smith the lawyer" which tells you nothing.
There's probably also so many patches and reverts and rewrites going on that history would be really bloated. Or if you want nice history, you lose all those important nuances you wanted in first place ("who exactly put this comma here which changes the whole meaning?").
It would also probably horrendously slow down the law making process. (which might actually be a good thing in many scenarios!)
I agree with your overall point, but you have the regulatory differences between the US and Europe exactly backwards. Europe (excluding England somewhat) has a statutory legal system. Things are either legal or illegal according to laws that have largely been written down ahead of time that anyone can go read and figure out.
In the US we have a common law system where much of our law is written by the courts in response to specific cases where judges interpret the general principles described in the "simpler laws" you speak of.
In practice this means that, under many circumstances, things move a lot slower in the US because of the time and expense of litigation (and even the threat of litigation). This is one of the reasons that it's harder to build things in the US. Our public transportation systems (trains, subways, etc) cost on the order of 5-10x more than similar ones in Europe. Our different legal systems is one of the big reasons why.
The parent was saying the US approach instead define what a harmful chemical is after the fact. Leaving companies to need "insurance"/a cost benefit wager before something is built. Otherwise they could be screwed later after litigation.
IMO, I can see both sides but preferably I would want simpler laws from political processes which are then refined into explicit interpretations by subject matter expert strong government institutions. But we have lobbying/revolving door government employees and trashy textualists in the US so it doesn't work out that way...
A federal 3 letter agency unilaterally writes detailed regulations, that are for practical purposes law.
One problem is that the regulatory agency gets captured by the industry, which means the regulation ends up being a way for the established industries and companies to make competition unfeasible.
It's really tough to find lots of people who can do all that for not much money / acclaim potential.
> We need good regulation, not less
The result of the research is that that is, in general impossible. Sure, some regulators do good work for some period. But the general forces and incentives in play push quite strongly towards the regulator being captured.
The better working alternatives are laws, where disputes or guilt are decided by courts. Since there is no regulator to capture in this scenario, things work pretty well. Of course, lawmakers can also be captured, but that's harder.
One fascinating* thing with the field of economics is that so m any thinks their opinion is worth as much as the expertise of professional in the field.
You routinely hear people confidently claim the economics field is wrong about things they've studied for decades or centuries, because of simple arguments that are all thoroughly accounted for in the beginner literature.
* or "infuriating", if you are an economist :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natura....
A place that needs to dispose a certain volume of X with concentration >Y then pays a sort of a mixologist to dilute X to a concentration <=Y before dumping it all anyway (unless it would be less expensive and more practical to react X away).
But yes, the local GDPR laws do seem to be intentionally underspecified, like you said.
What incentives do lawmakers have to make laws simpler?
(Not that they are accessible now... but it could be worse.)
Scalia argues in his opinion that the court is increasingly creating policy rather than serving as a neutral arbiter.
“Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court,” he writes.
“This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/246249-sca...
People in one part of the country go to the courts, and force their will/values on the rest of the country. Activists across the political spectrum do it.
Clearly the electoral college and legislature is not setup properly to reflect the will of the people at this point in time, so we have a better chance of it happening from 9 Supreme Court judges.
These things aren't hard they're just blocked by years of propaganda by incumbents.
Edit: forgot ranked choice voting
Obviously since I can't elect members of the House of Representatives from other districts, I could totally approve of my congressperson and senator and it still not be my fault for the other guys in power.
Hence giant military fighter jet contracts that span multiple congressmen’s districts around the country, and while being terrible for the future of the country, is untouchable politically as not a single person will vote against their economic interests.
Several years ago I signed up to follow 3 politicians I cared about using this site https://www.govtrack.us/. Give it a try, and I think you'll see the deluge of laws, bills, and opinions is too much for a mere mortal mind with a 9-5.
I think this is why we talk about congresspersons' army of staffers and interns. You would not want a single person trying to deal with the complexity of all this information they need to have an informed opinion on in order to vote for/against.
Don't know if it's political rhetoric or even viable.
It's precisely because of the Wests (and like Marc says it really is the West) failure to respond to this crisis. It's the excess of inclusivity that leads to short term, ballot box decision making in response to crises, and it is the short term, market logic that leads to loss of autonomy and neglect of long term goals that Marc talks about in the piece.
It's the politication of a healhcare / virological crisis that renders responses ineffective. When the American president gins up armed protesters during a pandemic that is the direct result of the inclusivity praised in the book. It's crisis response turned into a media spectacle and an election campaign.
Efffective resopnse to the crisis was visible in East Asian countries in which 'elites' can govern without constant interference, and that's not a glorification of China, but also of democratic countries like Taiwan, or so-so democratic countries like Singapore. What they all have in common is that decisions are made by leadership which can act with the necessary degree of autonomy.
No, what they have in common is that they've been through this experience before with SARS, learned from it and setup procedures so they could act faster next time.
I really wouldnt give much praise to the great governing elite that failed to prevent this in the first place, despite scientists telling them about it a long time ago.
Not to mention that diseases can break out everywhere, making the response to a pandemic significantly more important than trying to shift blame for what is essentially a game of chance.
How many diseases originated in India?
It's not. SARS is from China.
>not to mention that diseases can break out everywhere
>essentially a game of chance
It's 100% preventable. Just cut contact with wildlife that spreads these viruses.
I'm only correcting the fallacy of praising any goverment that fails to address the root causes of these problems.
That's not true. Swine flu came from Mexico and MERS, as the name implies, started in the Middle East
Swine flu has been around for much longer, at least for 100 years.
The first outbreak of SARS-CoV was identified in Foshan, Guangdong, China, in November 2002.
Thats almost 20 years ago.
Also Swine Infulenza does not originate from Mexico.
I understand there might be some broken things in your nation's systems. Still, the fact you're able to discuss them here or work towards changing them through legal methods, shows the US is far off on the right track of constitutional rule and pluralism.
It used to be very expensive to travel between US cities because a govt agency (forget the name, maybe the board of air travel?) set the who what how could fly planes from a to b, and at what price. Think mad men times, panAm, etc.
That agency was eliminated circa 1980 by some stroke of luck and perfect alingment of planets. Ticket prices plummeted and this opened flying to the poor.
That was also the last time a US regulatory agency was disbanded.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/10/justices-to-review-consti...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/us/supreme-court-consumer...
The US might have the former, but when Europeans refer to a lack of regulation in the US they mean the latter.
Yeah, there are a ton of regulations If you want to bring a new drug to market. That makes it super expensive to do.
But in exchange we get pharmaceuticals that work, are reasonable safe, and are based solid data.
I think the difficulty involved in spinning up an insurance company probably has literally nothing to do with those 6000 pages of documentation, but if I suspected otherwise, it would seem like what is actually on those pages is a lot more relevant than how many of them there are.
The problem here is growing complexity, which governments doesn't recognize as a problem for some reason. There should be some institution in the government body, which primary goal would be to reduce complexity of governance.
Earlier this year Lambda School (an online school where you watch videos and learn things) got fined $75k by a California regulator for the crime of teaching without a license. One single state license application required "2177 pages and weighed 25 pounds," and they're having to do this for many states.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20555351 [2] https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1153450365712388096
Witness what is happening today: I have not heard from any health insurance company requesting a bailout (unlike most companies). State regulators are a pain in the neck, are conservative but - in your interest - they control how the insurance company uses their capital (you grow too fast = you must add more equity, a bit like working capital), and how you invest your money (they restrict the amount of equity you invest in). All in the interest of the consumers.
Think for a second: if the balance sheet of your health insurance company looked like the balance sheet of Softbank’s vision fund? Would you like to hear “we are sorry, we’ll have to stop your cancer treatment, we are out of money”.
Health insurance companies are regulated at both the State and Federal level. The goal is to make sure that they are fair and will pay the claims when you need that down the road. Like everything in financial services (your savings, your retirement fund, your health for you and your family) this is not the place for fly by night startups. While it is visually appealing to see a better UI, you hear startups "disrupting this dinosaur industry" but very few of them succeeded. And maybe it would be nice, but smart investors (after say series B or C) realize that the returns are not that great and the company requires a massive amount of equity, in fact locked in low risk investments/stable bonds.
Sure, you can target a very young workforce and ignore the sick, the old, the crippled, those overweight or whatever else there is. And you can make money within the startup ecosystem, when everybody works out, eats well, and is super healthy.
But it is simply illegal and my advice for you is to buy insurance from an old, stodgy company. Maybe a mutual company? I don't care if wework is out of money, I can always find space somewhere else. When you have cancer, or when you child is disabled, you don’t want to deal with insurance regulators who have seized the assets of your shiny new health insurance company startup.
There is no room for mistakes when it comes to your health and your savings.
Disclaimer: I have Kaiser, I never use them, but I am sure they will be there when needed.
My humble opinion: the health care system in the US is totally screwed up and nobody wants to recognize that (except those paying maybe, and I am not even sure of that because they are conned into thinking "that we have the greatest healthcare system in the world").
Everybody is trying to pull the blanket their way. It is obscenely too expensive with little results (worse results than Europe and 4x the price). This is pathetic and a total failure.
Go medicare at scale, and for everybody? But the government does not know how to control the costs on medicare either.
Then religious beliefs get in the way: if 75-85% of the cost of insurance is wasted in the last year of your life, you understand why they keep you artificially alive so everybody can milk the system: never ending MRI's, super expensive drugs, etc...Hospitals, doctors, medical devices providers, everybody feeds on the system, and blame the lame insurance companies/costco of the healthcare world.
This is sad because so many people do not have the means to pay for that, few have access to the type of healthcare engineers have access though work.
Insurance companies have out-sized bargaining power and will only pay a fraction of the list-price for a procedure.
Doctor's know this, so prices inflate to the point where the negotiated price is in line with what they'll actually do it for.
Everyone who is not insured or not covered for that procedure ends up paying massively inflated costs.
AND you have not looked into the arcane world of pharmacy bids company. Stick your nose into their billing, you are guaranteed a 20% discount (Oh, sorry we discovered several mistakes). But this is boring stuff for 2020 startups who "want to disrupt the industry".
Now you wonder why the Democrats are pushing TONIGHT last minute negotiations in DC to add another $250B in stimulus money. We'll sign ONLY if you carve out, say $50-100 Billions or additional money for...HOSPITALS!
You get it now?
Why would anyone give up control once they had acquired it?
These facilities aren't that economically beneficial. Capital investors aren't, as PMA implies, stupid: they don't build because there isn't much money in it.
Politicians bend over backwards all the time. Massive subsidies are the problem, not lack of interest.
The reason people go elsewhere is to play regulatory arbitrage. To avoid the inspections, the pollution rules, and the long term environmental costs. The Bay area is filled with Superfund sites. Same for the Puget Sound, Boston Harbor, and the Hudson. No one should eat too many fish...because worlrdwide Mercury levels are high.
I'm now going to make a couple of broad generalizations. Note, that I'm aware they do not apply to every person, or even state in the US, or member nation of the EU.
However having lived in both for a number of years, I do have some personal insight.
Europe and Europeans are a cohesive society where the ideal is a flat society without too many outliers. Standing out from the field is not promoted. And career aspirations are about attaining a work life balance and produce meaningful work. The overall societal system works, offers many opportunities for education and entrepreneurship, but within a well lit path. Europe is a fast moving train.
As a result, people look for ways to succeed within the system.
The US is a "land of opportunity" in all the best, and all the insidious ways that this implies. People are looking to separate themselves from the pack, to be "insanely great" in some way or another, and see society and laws as just impediments to that goal. The US is a rocket powered supercar.
As a result, people look for ways to succeed in spite of the system.
This is why both the US needs a common law system (because the population would never tolerate a restrictive "write everything down" statutory system because would consider it overly restrictive to their liberty), and also why it fails. Because people and corporations abuse the common law system to violate the spirit of the law as much as possible to succeed and thrive in the short term. So half the country is constantly tries to create more regulations and the other half is trying to tear down existing ones.
This is why in the US the most innovative companies and people can succeed on a 5-10 year timeline, and so the biggest public companies in the world are there, but why Europe is much better at building 20-50 year projects and so have better infrastructure. (I'm ignoring China completely here because China is better than both at everything now, but is also an authoritarian dictatorship, so it's even harder to compare that apple to the other oranges).
Ultimately my point is that the EU raises a certain type of person and attracts a certain type of immigrant, and the US another.
I'm Canadian, so I frankly think both extremes are distasteful. I find the US a post-apocalyptic every-man-for-himself dystopia. And I find the EU a restrictive stifling nanny-state. Canada is just right for me.
But I appreciate that the world has both extremes.
Europeans don't live in a cohesive society. Italians, Germans, Swedes live in a cohesive society in their small california-sized countries.
But they all have more in common with each other than Europeans, and vice versa.
E.g. only Danish people can get Danish social security
This will _never_ happen. The vast majority of people are too intellectually challenged to see the benefit of simplicity. The earlier someone understand this fundamental fact about the vast majority of people, the earlier they can probably channelize efforts in the right direction ( what ever that might be), rather than hopelessly toil to make laws simpler. Democracy=tyranny of the masses.
Because regulation in the US is rarely the problem.
We have a US mask manufacturer sitting outside Dallas who never went 24/7 in production because NOBODY WOULD PAY HIM.
Billionaires shouting "Hey, we'll pay for preproduction on vaccines" because they know they won't have to deliver isn't helpful.
Handing a small business $10 million so he can go full tilt would be helpful. But then these billionaires would have to cough up actual CASH.
Those rules and regulatory frameworks exist for a reason, and with something like health insurance you don’t see better outcomes in states with lower regulatory burden.
Same with the financial burdens that companies cry about. Enron, GlobalCrossing, etc all demonstrated that corporate governance required the federal stick to behave.
Anderseen’s article is pretty lame with respect to why we can’t do things. We can and we have. The difference is now that you have executive leadership that is batshit crazy people have taken over the government. That happened because of the absence of regulation that gives extremists like Alex Jones, who were relegated to public access cable and weird newsletters in the 1980s access to the public at large.
Taking off what rails remain isn’t a strategy for success.
It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks of things like regulatory capture."
However if we actually look at the pages of that book from 2012, the authors never use the US, or any present day "Western" country, as an example of one that had or has extractive instutitions. Instead they cite examples such as Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, Chad, Cameroon, Liberia, Egypt, North Korea, Nepal, or Haiti.
According to the authors, the US currently has inclusive institutions and uses the example of the software industry as a success story to support this argument. This industry is in fact the blog post author's area of focus as a former programmer turned venture capitalist.
To quote from the book:
(Note the bit about fraud. The US had serious problems with fraud 100 years ago, and still does. Consider that is why the SEC exists. Many would argue it has very limited powers of enforcement to deal with modern-day fraud.)
"Bill Gates, like other legendary figures in the information technology industry (such as Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos), had immense talent and ambition. But he ultimately responded to incentives. The schooling system in the United States enabled Gates and others like him to acquire a unique set of skills to complement their talents. The economic institutions in the United States enabled these men to start companies with ease, without facing insurmountable barriers. Those institutions also made the financing of their projects feasible. The U.S. labor markets enabled them to hire qualified personnel, and the relatively competitive market environment enabled them to expand their companies and market their products. These entrepreneurs were confident from the beginning that their dream projects could be implemented: they trusted the institutions and the rule of law that these generated and they did not worry about the security of their property rights. Finally, the political institutions ensured stability and continuity. For one thing, they made sure that there was no risk of a dictator taking power and changing the rules of the game, expropriating their wealth, imprisoning them, or threatening their lives and livelihoods. They also made sure that no particular interest in society could warp the government in an economically disastrous direction, because political power was both limited and distributed sufficiently broadly that a set of economic institutions that created the incentives for prosperity could emerge. Secure property rights, the law, public services, and the freedom to contract and exchange all rely on the state, the institution with the coercive capacity to impose order, prevent theft and fraud, and enforce contracts between private parties. To function well, society also needs other public services: roads and a transport network so that goods can be transported; a public infrastructure so that economic activity can flourish; and some type of basic regulation to prevent fraud and malfeasance.
Though many of these public services can be provided by markets and private citizens, the degree of coordination necessary to do so on a large scale often eludes all but a central authority. The state is thus inexorably intertwined with economic institutions, as the enforcer of law and order, private property, and contracts, and often as a key provider of public services. Inclusive economic institutions need and use the state."
The US approach to business does have its flaws. However the book "Why Nations Fail" does not address them. To the authors, the US is a nation that "succeeded", and continues to succeed, by having inclusive institutions, not one that "failed" or is failing today.
A book like "Why Nations Fail", and there are many others like it, arguably encourages readers to view the US, irrespective of its flaws, as the shining example of what a country could/should aspire to become. There are no present-day comparisons of the US with Western Europe in books of this type. Such books are arguably part of the reason for certain institutional problems that will forever remain unfixed in the US, e.g. regulatory capture and complexity, because books like these have themes that support the idea that America's "solutions" are not just different but better than all the others.
This book really has no relation to any criticism of US institutions. If anything, it supports the idea that the US has the best formula for creating a rich country, i.e., a country where "anyone can be rich". They compare how Bill Gates became wealthy versus how Carlos Slim became wealthy.
From a presentatation given by the authors:
Acemoglu Robinson (Harvard) Why Nations Fail June 6, 2011 8 / 36
Main Concepts Inclusive and Extractive Institutions
Towards a Theory of Institutions
Extractive economic institutions: Lack of law and order. Insecure property rights; entry barriers and regulations preventing functioning of markets and creating a nonlevel playing field.
Extractive political institutions -- in the limit of absolutism: Political institutions concentrating power in the hands of a few, without constraints, checks and balances or rule of law.
Inclusive economic institutions: Secure property rights, law and order, markets and state support (public services and regulation) for markets; open to relatively free entry of new businesses; uphold contracts; access to education and opportunity for the great majority of citizens.
Inclusive political institutions: Political institutions allowing broad participation pluralism and placing constraints and checks on politicians; rule of law (closely related to pluralism).
But also some degree of political centralization for the states to be able to selectively enforce law and order.
Acemoglu Robinson (Harvard) Why Nations Fail June 6, 2011 36 / 36
Why Nations have and Do Fail
Because they have extractive political and economic institutions.
These are difficult to change though they can be successfully challenged and altered during critical junctures.
The roots of modern world inequality lie in the emergence of inclusive institutions in Britain and the fruits of this - the industrial revolution - spread to those parts of the world that had similar institutions (settler colonies) or quickly developed them (Western Europe).
Other parts of the world languished with extractive institutions which have persisted over time and thus remain poor today.
It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks of things like regulatory capture. I heard a few years back that a US health insurance startup had to provide on the order of 6000 pages of documentation to be approved. No wonder that there hadn't been another provider for twenty years or so. It seems like some things are hard to build mostly because some people want it that way.
I can't help but think that there's a fundamental flaw in the American regulatory approach. From the European perspective, the US is sometimes viewed as some time of free market haven, but in practice it often turns out that the regulatory burden is much higher. The framework imposed on financial markets by the SEC and related authorities is on a whole different level in the US, and with higher complexity you a also get a larger surface area for special interests to make their mark.
Point being, why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts to interpret what adheres to the spirit of it? With the barriers of entry gone, I think we'd see a renewed vitality to many ossified sectors.