Good article. There are 3 observations I'd add:
-I think we underestimate the impact of the cultural assumption that anything the government does will be 10x as expensive, take 10x as long and then not work properly, with nobody ever being held accountable, but lots of people having been paid along the way.
Of all the ambitious, smart people I know, a single one has said he even believes it's a good thing to work for the government. And he doesn't do it because he thinks the experience would be so miserable compared to working in tech.
-Most people don't seem to understand that regulations don't just add up, but compound.
It's not that each individual, well-intentioned regulation is bad (though some are), it's that many regulations intersect and create edge cases.
And when there's regulation/paperwork at every point, it starts to look like an insurmountable barrier. This is true with entrepreneurship in Europe. People aren't against a specific regulation, the perception is that whatever you want to do, you'll have to ask permission from someone, somewhere, fill out 5 pages of paperwork and wait 3 months before you get to talk to a notary and finally change your business' mailing address (real example from Germany)
-It's hard to make a rational case for this because humans are wired to weigh danger more heavily than upside.
We don't have counterfactuals (the cafe that didn't open because of zoning laws, the parks that were never built, etc.)
Even when politicians admit this problem, they then proclaim they want more housing, innovation or whatever, but getting rid of a regulation has some amount of risk.
So then they try to find the "free lunch": a solution that has none of the downside, but all of the upside.
That free lunch doesn't exist and the resulting solution only gets even more complex.
-I think we underestimate the impact of the cultural assumption that anything the government does will be 10x as expensive, take 10x as long and then not work properly, with nobody ever being held accountable, but lots of people having been paid along the way.
Of all the ambitious, smart people I know, a single one has said he even believes it's a good thing to work for the government. And he doesn't do it because he thinks the experience would be so miserable compared to working in tech.
-Most people don't seem to understand that regulations don't just add up, but compound.
It's not that each individual, well-intentioned regulation is bad (though some are), it's that many regulations intersect and create edge cases.
And when there's regulation/paperwork at every point, it starts to look like an insurmountable barrier. This is true with entrepreneurship in Europe. People aren't against a specific regulation, the perception is that whatever you want to do, you'll have to ask permission from someone, somewhere, fill out 5 pages of paperwork and wait 3 months before you get to talk to a notary and finally change your business' mailing address (real example from Germany)
-It's hard to make a rational case for this because humans are wired to weigh danger more heavily than upside.
We don't have counterfactuals (the cafe that didn't open because of zoning laws, the parks that were never built, etc.)
Even when politicians admit this problem, they then proclaim they want more housing, innovation or whatever, but getting rid of a regulation has some amount of risk.
So then they try to find the "free lunch": a solution that has none of the downside, but all of the upside.
That free lunch doesn't exist and the resulting solution only gets even more complex.