Transcript
A (0:00)
Welcome to this edition of the Car Seat. Today's visitor on the Car seat is Frank Vibert, senior visiting Fellow in the Government Department here at lse. Frank has written widely on regulatory agencies, non majoritarian institutions, as well as recently a book on the new regulatory space. Frank, today we're talking about regulatory agencies, which we discussed at a recent car workshop, and so on. And why were regulatory agencies such an attractive policy tool in the past?
B (0:30)
Well, first of all, I think everybody recognized that the world of policymaking had become very complicated and there was a need to mobilize expert views and evidence from natural sciences and social sciences. And on the whole, politicians are a pretty ignorant bunch and so it was sensible to look to expert bodies to mobilize this kind of knowledge. The there's another problem with politics, and that is the term horizon of politicians is very short. There's a problem here today, maybe Greece, there's a problem here tomorrow, could be Iran, the problem the next day could be China. But for certain types of problems you just need continuity of attention and expert bodies can provide that. And I think there's also an issue of trust. Nobody trusts a politician. They don't necessarily trust experts either. But between the two evils, you might go for an expert. For example, this month there was a release of some results of a field trial of some GM wheat which had been modified to be resistant to aphids. The expert body, the research station which looked at the trials, said they showed the wheat had been a failure. Poor politicians, on the other hand, are very reluctant to admit failure. So it's in that kind of area that expert bodies seem to have an advantage, even if we don't trust experts very much.
A (2:01)
Regulatory agencies spread all over the place, across sectors, across countries. Sometimes one wonders, why do we need a regulatory body, separate layer where timing, consistency and expertise might not matter. At the same time, we also have sort of regulatory areas which have clearly run into trouble and so on. I mean, what would you say? Why is that? Is it too naive to only believe in experts and timing, consistency?
B (2:29)
Well, I think one of the reasons for going with expert bodies was that people lost confidence simply in muddling through and that that kind of muddling through culture was expressed here by the sort of view that Whitehall knows best and once you depart from that, you move into the world of expert agencies. Perhaps there was some naivety about how great an improvement expert bodies could bring. And certainly we see every day there are ambiguities of context, of uncertainties about impact which nobody can really assess, including the expert bodies. The one which is on the agenda at the moment is should central banks like the U.S. fed or the bank of England raise interest rates? They don't quite know how to assess the current state of the economy in either case, nor do they quite know the impact of rising interest rates when they come. So this shows the limitations of expert bodies, but nevertheless they're better than the alternatives.