Daniel Carpenter: belief

Transcript context

…Isn’t that the case where the state and local governments are so restrictive? You cannot really get a new nuclear power plant built today. That limits the supply. That’s the one-way street we were talking about earlier. It’s just harder and harder to access what seems to be a pretty good solution for a lot of climate change problems. I think that’s right, but let’s keep in mind that that restriction of supply raises the price in some equilibrium sense for those who supply nuclear power. You’re right that it’s state and local governments. It’s a certain degree of NIMBYism on nuclear power plants. But I would also suggest that it’s not like you have a really robust coalition pushing for stronger, or shall I say, more laissez-faire attitudes on whether to build more nuclear power plants or not. Let me just flip it by one . . . for the moment, probably the least captured agency . . . I wouldn’t say the least. An agency that is newer and less captured would probably be the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That’s not to say that I believe in every decision it makes. I do think there’s something to the way an agency gets set up when it’s new — assuming it’s set up in a certain way, it’s got certain kind of staffers, it’s got merit service protection, things like that — that it is less likely to be captured. This is, at some level, a difference between the early political science theories of capture and the Stiglerian theory. I’m about to participate in a 50th anniversary — it’s another podcast with Luigi Zingales on the 50th anniversary of Stigler’s theory of economic regulation. His theory was really much more about legislative design and in much of the ways that you and I have been talking about. But before him, there were two political scientists who were thinking in similar but not identical terms. One was my late colleague, Sam Huntington, who actually wrote in the ICC, and the other was Marver Bernstein. Marver Bernstein, who was at one point dean of the Woodrow Wilson School — he talked about the life cycle of agencies. Capture wasn’t something that was designed de novo into an agency. It was something that evolved in an agency that wasn’t originally captured but became so. I’m not saying that’s a better model necessarily, but clearly, sometimes that happens when capture by design does not. If your least-captured agency is a very new agency, doesn’t that make you out to be a lot more sympathetic to the capture theory than your published work might make it sound?…

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