
RegData: A database quantifying federal regulation by industry over time - vezzy-fnord
http://regdata.org/
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hyperpape
I had to read a lot of OSHA regulations for my last job, and now I'm a
programmer. I recommend mentally substituting "lines of code" throughout this
piece.

There are lots of regulations that could be streamlined, and there also plenty
that should exist but don't. But knowing that there are X thousand regulations
isn't the most useful information you could have.

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jrcii
By industry! I assume that means we've gotten to the bottom of this
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023043198045763896...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304319804576389601079728920)

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matt4077
This seems to be highly ideology driven, with a bit of cargo-cult science
thrown in the mix.

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DMac87
How so? I understand that doing research on regulation is by its nature
political, but that doesn't mean 'ideology driven'. For instance, you may
argue from this data that Obama is the most-regulating president in history.
Or, as some researchers have done, you may argue that regulation hasn't killed
dynamism (see work by Goldschlag and Tabarrok). Data is data, what you do with
it may be ideological or not...

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zbyte64
Choosing what kind of data to expose or research can be political. Simply
releasing data on the # of regulations is helpful for only certain kinds of
discussions:

* Who pushed or repealed the most regulations

* Who regulated what

* Correlating # of regulations to market performance

These are not bad discussions to have but has the consequence of shifting the
discussion further away from "what makes a good regulation?" towards "how much
regulation is too much?".

Data is data but it isn't all the data. What we choose to look at frames the
political discussion.

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msellout
A strategy for an executive to control the output of outside consultants is to
sponsor a project and provide a filtered list of information sources. So long
as the consultants only receive the appropriate data, their conclusions are
predetermined. Internally, this creates the illusion of objectivity.

