Senior Fellow in Technology & Innovation at the R Street Institute in Washington, DC. Formerly a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, President of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Director of Telecommunications Studies at the Cato Institute, and a Fellow in Economic Policy at the Heritage Foundation.
As the COVID-19 crisis intensified, policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels started suspending or rescinding laws and regulations that hindered sensible, speedy responses to the pandemic. These “rule departures” raised many questions. Were the paused rules undermining public health and welfare even before the crisis? Even if the rules were well intentioned or once possibly served a compelling interest, had they grown unnecessary or counterproductive? If so, why did they persist? How will the suspended rules be dealt with after the crisis? Are there other rules on the books that might transform from merely unnecessary to actively harmful in future crises?
Once the COVID-19 crisis subsides, there is likely to be considerable momentum to review the rules that have slowed down the response. If policymakers felt the need to abandon these rules during the current crisis, those same rules should probably be permanently repealed or at least comprehensively reformed to allow for more flexible responses in the future.
Accordingly, when the pandemic subsides, policymakers at the federal and state levels should create “Fresh Start Initiatives” that would comprehensively review all suspended rules and then outline sunsetting or reform options for them. To this end, we propose an approach based on the successful experience of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission.
Read the entire paper here to see how it would work. This is our chance to finally do some much-needed spring cleaning for the regulatory state.
To commemorate its 40th anniversary, the Mercatus Center asked its scholars to share the books that have been most influential or formative in the development of their analytical approach and worldview. Head over to the Mercatus website to check out my complete write-up of my Top 5 picks for books that influenced my thinking on innovation policy progress studies. But here is a quick summary:
#1) Samuel C. Florman – “The Existential Pleasures of Engineering” (1976). His book surveys “antitechnologists” operating in several academic fields & then proceeds to utterly demolish their claims with remarkable rigor and wit.
#2) Aaron Wildavsky – “Searching for Safety” (1988). The most trenchant indictment of the “precautionary principle” ever penned. His book helped to reshape the way risk analysts would think about regulatory trade-offs going forward.
#3) Thomas Sowell – “A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles” (1987). It’s like the Rosetta Stone of political theory; the key to deciphering why people think the way they do about human nature, economics, and politics.
#4) Virginia Postrel – “The Future and Its Enemies” (1998). Postrel reconceptualized the debate over progress as not Left vs. Right but rather dynamism— “a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition”—versus the stasis mentality. More true now than ever before.
#5) Calestous Juma – “Innovation and Its Enemies” (2016). A magisterial history of earlier battles over progress. Juma reminds us of the continued importance of “oiling the wheels of novelty” to constantly replenish the well of important ideas and innovations.
The future needs friends because the enemies of innovative dynamism are voluminous and vociferous. It is a lesson we must never forget. Thanks to these five authors and their books, we never will.
In a new essay in The Dallas Morning News (“Licensing restrictions for health care workers need to be flexible to fight coronavirus“), Trace Mitchell and I discuss recent efforts to reform occupational licensing restrictions for health care workers to help fight the coronavirus. Trace and I have writtenextensively about the need for licensing flexibility over the past couple of years, but it is needed now more than ever. Luckily, some positive reforms are now underway.
We highlight efforts in states like Massachusetts and Texas to reform their occupational licensing rules in response to the crisis, as well as federal reforms aimed at allowing reciprocity across state lines. We conclude by noting that:
It should not take a crisis of this magnitude for policymakers to reconsider the way we prevent fully qualified medical professionals from going where they are most needed. But that moment is now upon us. More leaders would be wise to conduct a comprehensive review of regulatory burdens that hinder sensible, speedy responses to the coronavirus crisis.
If nothing else, the relaxation of these rules should give us a better feel for how necessary strict licensing requirements truly are. Chances are, we will learn just how costly the regulations have been all along.
I was pleased to see the American Psychological Association’s new statement slowly reversing course on misguided past statements about video games and acts of real-world violence. As Kyle Orland reports in Ars Technica, the APA has clarified its earlier statement on this relationship between watching video game depictions of violence and actual youth behavior. The APA’s old statement said that evidence “confirms [the] link between playing violent video games and aggression.” But the APA has come around and now says that, “there is insufficient scientific evidence to support a causal link between violent video games and violent behavior.” More specifically, the APA says:
The following resolution should not be misinterpreted or misused by attributing violence, such as mass shootings, to violent video game use. Violence is a complex social problem that likely stems from many factors that warrant attention from researchers, policy makers and the public. Attributing violence to violent video gaming is not scientifically sound and draws attention away from other factors.
This is a welcome change of course because the APA’s earlier statements were being used by politicians and media activists who favored censorship of video games. Hopefully that will no longer happen.
“Monkey see, monkey do” theories of media exposure leading
to acts of real-world violence have long been among the most outrageously
flawed theories in the fields of psychology and media studies. All the evidence points the opposite way, as I documented a decade
ago in a variety of studies. (For a summary, see my 2010 essay, “More
on Monkey See-Monkey Do Theories about Media Violence & Real-World Crime.”)
In fact, there might even be something to the “cathartic
effect hypothesis,” or the idea first articulated by Aristotle
(“katharsis”) that watching dramatic portrayals of violence could
lead to “the proper purgation of these emotions.” (See my 2010 essay on
this, “Video
Games, Media Violence & the Cathartic Effect Hypothesis.”)
Of course, this doesn’t mean that endless exposure to video
game or TV and movie violence is a good thing. Prudence and good parenting are
still essential. Some limits are smart. But the idea that a kid playing or
watching violent act will automatically become violent themselves was always nonsense.
It’s time we put that theory to rest. Thanks to the new APA statement, we are
one step closer.
The race for artificial intelligence (AI) supremacy is on with governments across the globe looking to take the lead in the next great technological revolution. As they did before during the internet era, the US and Europe are once again squaring off with competing policy frameworks.
It seems the EU basically wants to have its cake and eat it too by marrying up an ambitious industrial policy with a precautionary regulatory regime. We’ve seen this show before. Europe is doubling down on the same policy regime it used for the internet and digital commerce. It did not work out well for the continent then, and there are reasons to think it will backfire on them again for AI technologies. Continue reading →
Congress has become a less important player in the field of technology policy. Why did that happen, and what are the ramifications for technological governance efforts going forward?
I’ve spent almost 30 years covering technology policy. There was a time in my life when I spent almost all my time as a policy analyst preoccupied with developments in the federal legislative arena. I lived in the trenches of Capitol Hill and interacted with lawmakers and their staff morning, noon, and night.
In recent years, however, I have spent very little time focused on the Legislative Branch because it has effectively become a non-actor on technology policy. It is not that congressional lawmakers stopped caring about tech policy. Interest actually remains quite high—perhaps higher than ever before. Congress also continues to introduce lots of bills, host plenty of hearings, and issue mountains of press releases related to tech policy issues.
Nonetheless, all that interest and activity has not really translated into much important legislation. Continue reading →
This week, the Trump Administration proposed a new policy framework for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that attempts to balance the need for continued innovation with a set of principles to address concerns about new AI services and applications. This represents an important moment in the history of emerging technology governance as it creates a policy vision for AI that is generally consistent with earlier innovation governance frameworks established by previous administrations.
Generally speaking, the Trump governance vision for AI encourages regulatory humility and patience in the face of an uncertain technological future. However, the framework also endorses a combination of “hard” and “soft” law mechanisms to address policy concerns that have already been raised about developing or predicted AI innovations.
AI promises to revolutionize almost every sector of the economy and can potentially benefit our lives in numerous ways. But AI applications also raise a number of policy concerns, specifically regarding safety or fairness. On the safety front, for example, some are concerned about the AI systems that control drones, driverless cars, robots, and other autonomous systems. When it comes to fairness considerations, critics worry about “bias” in algorithmic systems that could deny people jobs, loans, or health care, among other things.
These concerns deserve serious consideration and some level of policy guidance or else the public may never come to trust AI systems, especially if the worst of those fears materialize as AI technologies spread. But how policy is formulated and imposed matters profoundly. A heavy-handed, top-down regulatory regime could undermine AI’s potential to improve lives and strengthen the economy. Accordingly, a flexible governance framework is needed and the administration’s new guidelines for AI regulation do a reasonably good job striking that balance. Continue reading →
The spread of “sanctuary cities”—local governments that resist federal laws or regulations in some fashion, and typically for strongly-held moral reasons—is one of the most interesting and controversial governance developments of recent decades. Unfortunately, the concept receives only a selective defense from people when it fits their narrow political objectives, such as sanctuary movements for immigration and gun rights.
But there is broader case to be made for sanctuaries in many different contexts as a way to encourage experiments in alternative governance models and just let people live lives of their choosing. The concept faces many challenges in practice, however, and I remain skeptical that sanctuary cities will ever scale up and become a widespread governance phenomenon. There’s just too much for federal officials to lose and they likely will crush any particular sanctuary movement that gains serious steam.
Sanctuary Cities as Political Civil Disobedience
First, let’s think about what local officials are really doing when they declare themselves a sanctuary. (Because they can be formed by city, county, or state governments, I will just use “sanctuaries” as a shorthand throughout this essay.)
Academics use the term “rule departure” when referencing “deliberate failures, often for conscientious reasons, to discharge the duties of one’s office.” [Joel Feinberg, “Civil Disobedience in the Modern World,” in Humanities in Society, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1979, p 37.] In this sense, sanctuary cities could be viewed as a type of collective civil disobedience by public officials because these governance arrangements are typically defended on moral grounds and represent an active form of resistance to policies imposed by higher-ups. Continue reading →
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Congress has become a less important player in the field of technology policy. Why did that happen, and what are the ramifications for technological governance efforts going forward?
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.