New Perspectives on Regulation

Product Description New research in the social sciences has yielded insights with important (but, as yet, largely unrecognized) implications for the government's role in the economy. This new research holds the promise of enabling creative solutions to pressing problems. As the financial crisis unfolds and the global recession continues, the need to share these ideas beyond academia to inform policymaking and public debate has grown ever more urgent. To meet this need a group of the best cutting edge scholars in the social sciences, including Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz, wrote New Perspectives on Regulation to provide a broad sketch of the most promising research in their fields pertaining to regulation, identify guiding principles for policymakers, and animate these principles with concrete policy proposals, all while keeping academic language and footnotes to a minimum.

The perspectives shared in this book hold the promise of transforming the way we use government to solve problems. As America faces an era of great challenges and great possibilities, it's imperative that we use the best new ideas to overcome our problems and achieve our goals.

From the Back Cover 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 the study of government failure was flourishing, some 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 nudge their way into discussions of regulatory purpose, design, and implementation. Yet even here, 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. Now that many lawmakers and their constituents have apparently concluded that the earlier focus on government failure went too far, it is imperative that they be able to draw on the very latest academic work in thinking anew about the role of government. This, at root, is the purpose of this book: to make the newest and most important research accessible to a broad audience.