The half-life of policy rationales: How new technology affects old policy issues
The half-life of policy rationales: How new technology affects old policy issues
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政策原理的半衰期：新技术如何影响旧政策问题
DOI：
10.1007/s12130-002-1007-z
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发表时间：
2002
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
D. Klein
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
F. Foldvary;D. Klein
随着技术的进步，任何公共政策的合理性都在消失。正在为高速公路、停车场、海洋养殖和汽车排放开发新的检测和计量技术，使产权解决方案变得可行。信息变得更加容易获取和用户友好，这表明私营部门可以更好地处理质量和安全问题，从而削弱了消费者保护的理由。至于公用事业，生产和提供电力、水、邮政和电话服务的新方式消除了控制和政府提供的旧的自然垄断原理。大多数市场失灵的论点都归结为市场机制被交易成本阻碍的说法。但技术降低了交易成本，并使政府干预的旧理由变得越来越过时。除了削减交易成本之外，技术进步还加速了经济变革并增加了活动之间的联系。即使我们对当前安排及其缺点的最佳理解，它也会带来根本性的混乱。因此，通过使经济体系变得更加复杂，监管者可以有意义地了解并有益地操纵该体系的观念变得越来越不可信。技术为政策及其合理性设定了所谓的智力半衰期。
The justification for any public policies are dissolving as technology advances. New detection and metering technologies are being developed for highways, parking, marine farming, and auto emissions, making property-rights solutions viable. Information becomes more accessible and user-friendly, suggesting that quality and safety are better handled by the private sector, undercutting consumer-protection rationales. As for public utilities, new means of producing and delivering electricity, water, postal, and telephone services dissolve the old natural-monopoly rationales for control and governmental provision. Most market-failure arguments boil down to claims about market mechanisms being blocked by transaction costs. But technology has trimmed transaction costs and made the old rationales for government intervention increasingly obsolete. Besides trimming transaction costs, technological advancements accelerates economic change and multiplies the connections between activities. It brings fundamental upsets to even our best understandings of current arrangements and their shortcomings. Thus, by making the economic system ever more complex, it makes the notion that regultors can meaningfully know and beneficially manipulate the system ever less credible. Technology sets what may be called an intellectual half-life on policies and their justification.