Daniel Carpenter: belief

Transcript context

…Citizens’ groups mostly don’t want nuclear power. Homeowners organize. Try to build a nuclear power plant in Fairfax County — you have zero chance. Asking whether the policy would be better or worse is a tougher call, but it might operate in some unpredictable ways. Nuclear power regulation — you might get Steven Pinker-like voices. He’s a Harvard scholar who wrote a pro–nuclear power op-ed in the New York Times recently. You might get some other voices at the table. Less voices, less organized, particularly if you embedded them in. There’s a great chapter in our book, Preventing Regulatory Capture, by Daniel Schwartz, who’s shown that, at least in insurance regulation in Minnesota, that Minnesota has been able to do this. Whether it’s made folks better off or worse off — that’s much harder to tell, but I would argue, in fact, that if you proactively embed voices — interests that wouldn’t otherwise be represented — that you’ll actually open up the conversation. My guess, if I had to think, would be the folks in Fairfax County, the NIMBY folks, the anti-nuclear-power folks, they’re already pretty well represented in this process. Is the impact of FOIA laws overrated or underrated?…

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