There’s a famous Churchill quote: “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” That applies to regulation as well. In the … - Kenneth Arrow

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There’s a famous Churchill quote: “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” That applies to regulation as well. In the late 1800s, we had a natural monopoly: railroads. The government created a regulatory enterprise – the Interstate Commerce Commission – and of course it was captured. But it still made a difference.
I think we just have to accept that capture does occur, but it’s limited. The Federal Trade Commission, for example, is a pretty active body. Monopolies have been broken up. The AT&T telephone monopoly was broken up in 1982 – Stigler was still writing about regulatory capture then. AT&T was a classic monopoly, but a pretty benevolent one. It delivered good service – rates were too high, but not by that much. It didn’t necessarily pass on value to the consumers, but Bell Labs were a source of great innovative function. Nevertheless, it was broken up by antitrust measures, brought on by government.
So there is regulatory capture, but it is by no means complete. Regulations do play a role.
One example of non-regulatory capture fighting against effective regulation was during the run-up to the 2008 crash, when several officials argued for CDOs to be regulated, which means they would have had to meet certain requirements of transparency. This was not accepted. I’m not saying the crash could have been avoided if that happened, but that would have made a big difference.

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About Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Joseph Arrow (August 23, 1921 – February 21, 2017) was an American economist, who was Professor Emeritus of Economics in Stanford, and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972.

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Birth Name: Kenneth Joseph Arrow
Alternative Names: Kenneth J. Arrow Ken Arrow
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Additional quotes by Kenneth Arrow

There is also one particularly needed elaboration of the model (which is not to say that it doesn't cry out for elaboration in many other directions). This is the relation between college filtering and on-the-job filtering. Once an employee has been hired, the employer can gradually draw on more directly obtained information to determine his productivity. However, this filtering may be costly. To the extent that the employer does filter and does so accurately, the Value of the college filter is reduced. The employer pays the average product of a group with given educational achievement only during the period before his own filter has become effective. Conversely, however, an increase in the college population will mean (and has meant) a depreciation in the quality of non-college students (this is not necessarily the same as a decrease in the quality of college students).

Multiple discoveries are in fact very common in science and for much the same reason. Developments in related fields with different motivation help one to understand a difficult problem better. Since these developments are public knowledge, many scholars can take advantage of them. It is pleasant to the ego to be first or among the first with a new discovery. However, in this case at least, the evidence is clear that the development of general equilibrium theory would have gone on quite as it did without me.

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