The notion of ‘fairness’ is widely referenced in public policymaking and enforcement, but with no settled meaning. What we see is incoherent application of the notion across economic contexts, a form of policy disorder with which we are well familiar. Moreover, the disorder (‘entropy’) appears to be increasing over time.
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…
Prof. John Muellbauer has recently shown that the regulatory wedge in the UK between house prices and the construction cost of new homes is currently at the highest level of the period covered by his data, and the highest in the G7.
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.
Why do similar mistakes appear to be repeated over and over again in the conduct of economic policy? Why does there appear to be so little error-learning/learning-from-experience in this domain of human activity? Why does knowledge and the application of knowledge in these matters appear not to progress cumulatively in the manner of the physical sciences? In this major Essay in Regulation, Harold Hutchinson and George Yarrow seek to outline some answers, building on insights from brain science. The first picture in the Essay, from the clinical work of Dr Iain McGilchrist, suffices to signal a ‘now for something completely different’ moment.
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.