A series of short blogs in which members of the Regulatory Policy Institute Research Group highlight a particular insight, idea or perspective that is salient to some or other aspect of regulatory policy.
Entrepreneurship is something of a ‘ghost in the machine’ so far as most economic theorising is concerned. It’s widely mentioned and tends to be encouraged by politicians, but detailed analysis of the concept is largely missing from standard economics. So, we ask: what is its nature, why is it important, and what (very briefly) might be done to encourage it?
A quick web-search for the meaning of the word elegant yields the following (from Oxford languages): Adjective : (1) graceful and stylish in appearance or manner; (2) (of a scientific…
Alongside the Prisoners Dilemma, study of the Ultimatum Game (UG) and its variants is a rich source of experimental observations on human attitudes and conduct which are, or at least…
Slogans can provide politicians with useful ways of signalling policy objectives. The “tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime” slogan used by New Labour is a case…
The human brain has evolved over eons into a hemispheric structure, allowing a lateralisation of attention to our surroundings. The right-hemisphere (RH) ‘presences’ the world like a radar; a broad,…
The Tao Te Ching is an ancient classic of Chinese Daoism whose authorship is conventionally attributed to a certain Lao Tzu. It contains advice on how to be a Sage, a person with sagacity. Significant sections are clearly directed at leaders in governance.
‘No battle plan survives contact with the enemy’ was a sentiment expressed by Field Marshall von Moltke (the Elder), who knew a thing or two about military strategy. A transposition…
As set out in To ‘see’, or not to ‘see’: that is the question. Moving on from a half-brained system of economic governance - (rpiresearchgroup.org), the half-brained governance thesis (“H-BGT”) is suggestive of a wide range of relevancies to areas of public policy where development thinking seems to be struggling. One such is the question of whether regulatory and competition policy decisions by designated agencies should be subject to review on their merits, as administrative decisions, not just on their conformity with acceptable procedures.
Net migration flows (about the regulation of which members of the RPI have been writing since 2017) are again a hot topic in political debate. In this latest blog, the Insights team briefly sketches out a potential, alternative way of looking at the issues: a different ‘gestalt’, based on a tradeable right to residency, which does not need to rely heavily on enforcement by coerced deportations (difficult in practice) or creating ‘hostile social environments’. Rather, it simultaneously seeks to make unlawful immigration more financially expensive and emigration of residents more financially rewarding, in each case relative to the status quo. Even in a bare bones form, it could give government three immediate ‘control variables’: the total number of rights available, the level of financial penalty for unlawful immigration, and the level of the bid-ask spread in the purchase or sale of the relevant right.
We have written before about the need for effortful and holistic thinking in the context of global decarbonisation, and about the perils of disconnecting local actions from global outcomes by retreat into a ‘net-zero in one country’ mindset. In this RPI Insights blog we highlight the dangers of partial thinking associated with indulgence of the false prophet of universal technology solution(s), blindness to potential ‘concentration risk’ and the resulting creation of systemic vulnerabilities, inadequate thinking around the physical resilience of energy infrastructure in the face of a changing climate, and reluctance to acknowledge either the regional realpolitik of the energy transition or the implicit policy tensions, uncertainties, and trade-offs around how it unfolds.