Ellig's Lasting Views on the Regulatory Process.

• Author: O'Rielly, Michael

Jerry Ellig on Dynamic Competition and Rational Regulation: Selected Articles and Commentary

Edited by Susan E. Dudley and Patrick A. McLaughlin

434 pp.; Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2021

Public policy outcomes that necessitate regulatory rulemaking are inevitably time-consuming, tedious, messy, and often adversarial. Those individuals who can bring light and order to improving the regulatory process deserve respect and acknowledgement; those who do so repeatedly and show a path for future policymakers are modern-day craftsmen.

Then there is the rarefied air of master craftsmen, which aptly describes the late Jerry Ellig. His posthumous book, Jerry Ellig on Dynamic Competition and Rational Regulation, highlights the range of issues he worked on in his career as a scholar and government economist.

Cost-benefit analysis / Ellig's research focused on regulatory impact analysis, regulation of network industries, and the performance of management in government. With the aid of his academic colleagues, this collection of published works wonderfully amplifies his approach to the statutory mandates for regulatory procedures, including the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA). What the book could never do is sufficiently capture the good-natured and happy-warrior attitude with which he pursued his vision for regulatory enlightenment.

Ellig and I briefly worked together at the Federal Communications Commission when he served as its chief economist. While my very public goal was to codify many of the foundational principles that he and I agreed upon, I surmised that he saw the value of improving the overall system for rulemaking so that it applied a more rigorous CBA. 1 appreciated the view, which I think Ellig espoused, that a lot more good can be done if the focus is on improving the process rather than using temporary political advantage to generate short-term policy victories. In the end, the FCC approved a more rigorous CBA regime that should not only improve rulemakings but help set a standard that can be used by other agencies. While the improvement was less than I had hoped for, the fact that Ellig was engaged helped convince me that a partial improvement is still an improvement, and that it did not preclude further advancements down the road.

Greater efficiency and rationality / This book's selected scholarship is both refreshing and sober. The opening piece is Ellig's 2015 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland...