Automated Regulatory Enforcement.

• Author: Van Doren, Peter

"Man vs. Machine: Technological Promise and Political Limits of Automated Regulation Enforcement," by Oliver Browne, Ludovica Gazze, Michael Greenstone, and Olga Rostapshova. NBER Working Paper no. 30816, January 2023.

There are many laws and rules on the books, and some of them are rarely enforced. My favorite example is speed limits on interstate highways. On 1-270 in suburban Maryland, where I live, the posted limit is 55 miles per hour. If you actually traveled that slowly, you would risk being rear-ended or at least having headlights flashed in your rearview mirror.

Strict laws with limited enforcement might be described as optimal hypocrisy. The laws or regulations satisfy the demands of activists. The lack of enforcement is harder to observe, which allows for the strict laws to not impinge on the behavior of more-numerous voters with more-moderate preferences.

Fresno, CA has outdoor watering restrictions. Since the mid-1990s, Fresno has restricted summer outdoor watering to three nights per week. To detect violations of these restrictions, Fresno had five part-time water cops who issued 3,113 fines in 2016. Violations were rampant because of lack of enforcement: 68 percent of households violated the restrictions at least once in the summer of 2016, but only 0.4 percent of violations were sanctioned. Sounds like speed limits on 1-270.

What if enforcement were...