Toward a Situationist Perspective on Regulation

Tobin Project Program Officer and Situationist friend, John Cisternino, has an important new co-edited book, titled “New Perspectives on Regulation.”  Here’s the abstract.

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New regulation shouldn’t rely on old ideas. Since the 1960s, influential research on government failure helped to drive the movement for deregulation and privatization. Yet even as this branch of research was flourishing, very different ideas were sprouting in the social sciences with profound implications for our understanding of human behavior and the role of government. Some of these ideas, particularly from the field of behavioral economics, have begun to enter into discussions of regulatory purpose, design, and implementation. The process is far from complete, and many other exciting new lines of research – on everything from social cooperation to co-regulation – have hardly been incorporated at all. It is imperative that lawmakers and their constituents be able to draw on the very latest academic work in thinking anew about the role of government. This is the purpose of this book: to make the newest and most important research accessible to a broad audience.

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The book contains several relatively situationist chapters, including the following (which you can download below):

1. The Case for Behaviorally Informed Regulation PDF
   Michael S. Barr, Professor of Law, University of Michigan; Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics, Harvard University; Eldar Shafir, Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Princeton University
2. From Greenspan’s Despair to Obama’s Hope: The Scientific Basis of Cooperation as Principles of Regulation PDF
   Yochai Benkler, Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard University

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To read more about the book and to download individual chapters or the entire book, click here.

For a sample of related Situationist posts, see “Conference on the Free Market Mindset,” “Hanson’s Chair Lecture on Situationism,” “Behavioral Economics and Policy,” “Do You Implicitly Prefer Markets or Regulation?,” “The Illusion of Wall Street Reform,” “Situationism’s Improving Situation,” “The Situation of the Mortgage Crisis,” and “Innovative Policy: Zoning for Health.”