Regulation and public service work best in scenarios where the processes and data are well established and accessible.
For example transport via train / cars etc. is rather well understood and most efficient when regulated well and collaboratively/publicly owned and ran because of that. Individual competing actors only create chaos and inefficiencies in comparison. Most clear headed observers would agree to this, just by looking at current and historical examples.
But the logistics and production of relatively new goods and services still need to figure out their place. This is where a deregulated, free market makes sense as long as certain baseline requirements are met (protection of workers, consumers, the environment etc.)
A field that would be very controversial to socialize would be food production. On one hand privatized food production is wasteful and even literally toxic and a lot of countries see food production as a matter of national security, so they subsidize it. Also the logistics and needs of the consumers are well understood. But on the other hand almost nobody seems to think that it would be a good idea to put it into public hands.
Sometimes, even as a consumer, this is desired, for ex when new drugs are coming to market. Sometimes, as you point out, it’s stifling.
Government is also inefficient by design. Imagine the gov’t pivoting to different laws every week - it would be completely unsustainable and would drive people crazy.
To answer your question, “regulation engineering” probably doesn’t exist because it’s designed to be slow.
I don't understand this argument. The goal is not to be intrinsically "slow", but to be suitably "careful". If you can be as careful as needed, but execute that careful process in such a way that no time is wasted, that's a win. The two are separate questions.
To put it differently: high-security systems programmers don't move their fingers more slowly on the keyboards because "going slow is better". They put checks in place, and they take as much time as is needed to do things right, but padding that time just for the sake of "slowness" helps nobody.
> Government is also inefficient by design. Imagine the gov’t pivoting to different laws every week - it would be completely unsustainable and would drive people crazy.
Speed of change has nothing to do with efficiency of implementation. I'm talking about writing laws that are efficient for companies to deal with, not streamlining the law-passing process so that legislators themselves are unburdened. It's a totally separate thing.
> inefficiency can be a feature...for big companies because it creates a slow and expensive hurdle for smaller competitors
This is true, and could be part of the reason this problem hasn't been addressed. But corporate lobbyists are just one of the many forces influencing legislation, and formalizing ideas around "efficient regulation" would only shed even more light on bad-faith attempts at making laws less efficient for the purpose of moat-building.
"Being careful" doesn't necessarily lead to slowness directly, but making the carefulness verifiable (and making that verification, by an external stakeholder, mandatory) usually does.
This approach (regulation and inspection by a government agency) is generally how society makes actors internalize otherwise external costs, but there are other variations such as government codes and standards.
Fine-grained mandatory process specification is usually the least desirable route to safety, but that's often what companies end up asking for in return for giving them a pass when the process inevitably fails to prevent a bad outcome with a large blast-radius.
However, in some specific circumstances where you don't have another means, directly enforcing slowness in some way may be your best option for at least limiting the damage caused by a failure, even if it doesn't reduce the chances of an error (though sometimes it does that too). Vehicle speed limits are one example, rate-limits on transactions (or comments) are another. In other circumstances, requiring speed (eg. monitoring with a fast response time, quick deployment of a fix) may be the right choice for limiting the damage a failure can cause.
The goal of a regulation, like a project constraint, is to enforce some outcome. This is often a good thing. However, not all implementations of the "code" of that regulation are going to be equal. There's a huge gap between the desired outcome and the way it's articulated as law; there's a ton of wiggle-room there. And that can make a huge difference in how burdensome a regulation is to actually adhere to. And that can have a huge economic impact.
The left talks about how important regulations are, and the right talks about how inefficient they are, and both of these things can be true at the same time.
What would it look like to ask ourselves how regulations could be "refactored" to achieve the same goal in a more efficient way? Maybe the assumption is that too much political capitol would be required to actually put such changes into action. Though, we should at least be asking ourselves this question when drafting new law.
Why isn't there a whole field around "regulation engineering" (not actually suggesting this name, but it gets my point across), including best-practices, case-studies, etc?