How to reverse the vetocracy

Since publishing some work earlier this year about vetocracy, I have been thinking about how we might be able to reverse the trends. Here are some ideas.

• Refactoring / reform
  • We need to go fast, as Patrick Collison says. How can we accomplish that? Perhaps there are lessons to be learned with Japan’s housing policy. 
  • The Institute for Justice says we need to make permitting cheaper, faster, and simpler.
  • Refactoring is a technique for restructuring an existing body of computer code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. Could this be done for regulations? It seems as though this has already been done with the Uniform Law Commission. More research is needed on this organization and the notion of restatements of the law. 
  • “Fast Space” by Steven Kwast
  • HHS worked with ESPER, an Austin based company, to come up with the reform part of the AI agenda under Trump. 
• Time limits / shotclocks
  • The Federal Communications Commission applied to the shot clock idea “to approval of personal wireless facilities, thereby turning timeframes for municipal review and approval or disapproval of applications to deploy wireless facilities into a possible federal claim, if not met.”
  • The Prescription Drug User Fee Acts (PDUFA) “mandated FDA performance goals in reviewing and acting on drug applications within specified time periods, in return for levying fees on drug manufacturers' submissions.” One paper found that “PDUFA raised the private surplus of producers, and thus innovative returns, by about \$7 to \$11 billion.”
• Create exemptions / exclusions
  • A categorical exclusion (CE) is a class of actions that a Federal agency has determined, after review by CEQ, do not individually or cumulatively have a significant effect on the human environment and for which, therefore, neither an environmental assessment nor an environmental impact statement is normally required. The use of categorical exclusions can reduce paperwork and save time and resources. On the topic of NEPA categorical exemptions, see Eli’s post here.
  • Expand one exception area into another like the OTARD rules at the FCC.
  • Are regulatory sandboxes their own category or a kind of exemption? 
• Make rights alienable
  • Why not just buy someone out? 
  • See Trebilcock’s Dealing with Losers: The Political Economy of Policy Transitions
  • NYC has air rights. See this post, this post. 
• Other areas to research
  • Switzerland is an interesting counterexample, as they seem to thrive on vetocracy. see Martin Sustrik’s article on LessWrong.
  • How do we deal with blackmail when introducing Coasean options?