Paul Romer: recommendation

Transcript context

…Say your business tests you. They tell you you don’t have it. It turns out you do have it. You infect your spouse. Should there be a liability waiver to encourage this testing? You know, for vaccines, we created a special compensation mechanism so that, instead of litigating, somebody who’s harmed by taking a vaccine — because there’s a small fraction of the population that has a negative side effect — there’s a separate compensation mechanism. I think there are many reasons to think that our judicial system is an ineffective way to address a harm or to provide insurance. And it slows down many important things that we need to do. But I’d be more in favor of a broader look at ways to improve the functioning of the judicial system, rather than just do a . . . Actually, I don’t have a strong view on this. It may be that to move quickly, we want to have a special patch related to what firms do with test information. But I don’t think we should stop there. We really should be asking, how can we tune the judicial system to make it work better? Could it be that litigation is the ultimate reason why America is so slow in testing? That any big push for anything — someone can raise their hand and object. Someone could sue. “Well, this violates The Health Insurance Privacy Act (HIPAA).” I’m not even sure it does, but you would need a ruling. Someone sues on disabilities regulation. “Oh, I need to have this app. I can’t read it.” Someone sues about masks. “Well, I can’t do lip reading.” The actual solution — something we’re far from — and that’s to clear away all this emphasis on litigation in American policy. And economists have been mostly right about that, too. Or not?…

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