The humbugs of the anti-regulatory movement.(myths of absurdly expensive environmental regulation)(cost-per-life)

Cornell Law Review, January, 2002 by Ackerman, Frank; Heinzerling, Lisa

It is so hard to get beyond cynicism these days. Even a symposium devoted to this goal has, as reflected in the articles by Professors Cynthia Farina, Jeffrey Rachlinski, and Mark Seidenfeld, succeeded primarily in suggesting that regulators are not so much selfish as they are obtuse, stubborn, and sometimes downright dumb. Undoubtedly this is true some of the time. But Farina, Rachlinski, and Seidenfeld want to convince us that it is true enough of the time to warrant quite large-scale solutions. In this Comment, we take issue with this pessimistic assessment of regulatory behavior by discrediting the most prominent empirical demonstrations of this gloomy account.

These empirical studies have focused in particular on environmental regulation. Critics of...

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