This is a good article about the costly unintended consequences of well-meaning regulations. The author seems to think, however, that this can be resolved by hiring more educated economists, but I seriously doubt it.
My takeaway from the article is that the author completely missed the point, which is that centralised bureaucracy and decision making can be very harmful.
Why are we reliant on an economist to pick up on this irrigation issue? You at least need people from industry to be consulted before regulations like this. Lucky that this particular person noticed the problem, but there probably shouldn't be a lawyer, a scientist and an economist making centralised farming regulations.
I definitely understand that centralized bureaucracy and decision making can be very harmful. I also know that the lack of centralized bureaucracy and decision making can also be very harmful, for example by killing tens of thousands of people with trans fats (or air pollution, or communicable diseases, etc.) We are playing an unavoidable game for very high stakes, where inaction can be as lethal as action.
The typical cycle is that something obviously bad happens to an identifiable victim that can be traced to lack of regulation, then congress and/or the courts force regulation, and then the regulation causes a lot of invisible harm that may or may not be greater than the harm it prevents. My job is to try to make these inevitable regulations do more good than harm.
There would have been a public notice and comment period before the rule went final. But industry often fails to notice things, and quite often, when industry asks for standards to be lowered, consumer groups reflexively insist that they remain as proposed. The outcome ends up being based mainly on politics, which is why getting the proposal right matters.
>Why are we reliant on an economist to pick up on this irrigation issue? You at least need people from industry to be consulted before regulations like this.
It's naive to think that effective, efficient regulation can happen without consulting the people actually affected. It's also naive to think those people should be the ones making regulations.
Even beyond the inherent problem with industries regulating themselves, they are just not capable of doing so in many cases, especially farming. What does a farmer know about public health, or water-borne pathogens, or heavy metals? Farmers know what makes plants grow or not. They don't know how those plants affect the people that eat them.
Plus, says who that irrigating with drinkable water is even a bad idea? It's the most accessible standard. Drinking water is everywhere. It's literally the most unscientific reasoning possible that manure is dirty, therefor water can be dirty too. Self righteous, pretentious stories like this are everywhere, where the clever, down to earth common guy stumps all the big brains. The fact is that the people who study the effects of an industry are in a far better position to assess regulation.
Yes- a producer will be able to say that a regulation may be burdensome. They will definitely not be the best person to know if it's warranted or not.
When irrigation water is put directly on produce that will soon be consumed raw, it will transmit pathogens and should be drinking-water standard. This was not disputed, and was in the final rule.
However, if the water will go through manure before being absorbed by the the plant's roots, it is very wasteful to first purify it to drinking-water standard. Drinking-quality water is not everywhere in the quantities needed for irrigation, it requires expensive filtration and processing. Everyone saw the logic of this when it was pointed out, nobody was 'stumped'.
The central problem with regulators is you need people who know what they're regulating, meaning industry insiders. But then you have conflicts of interest.
Centralized economic planning never works well, anyway, regardless of how many trained economists are at the helm.
Regulations will always have costly unintended consequences, and this will never be fully resolved. But the damage can be mitigated and things can be made more efficient by having numerate big-picture thinkers involved early in the process. Many economists do manage to make things better.
In theory, people from any discipline can be numerate big-picture thinkers. But in practice, most hard scientists tend to have a very narrow-minded focus on optimizing the the thing they study most, and ignoring everything else. Lawyers are usually pretty good at trying to think about the big picture and all the people affected, but they are rarely sufficiently numerate to properly analyze and compare things.
