Sam Peltzman on Regulation

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2006

⏱️ 54 minutes

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Summary

Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago talks about his views on safety, regulation, unintended consequences and the political economy of bad regulation. The focus is on his pioneering studies of automobile safety and FDA pharmaceutical regulation and the perverse incentives that even good intentions can produce.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk brought to you by the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:03.8	I'm your host Russ Roberts of Georgia Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:09.5	My guest today is Sam Peltzman, the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Economics
0:15.0	at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business.
0:18.0	He's one of the most creative economists of our time known for his careful and empirical studies
0:22.6	of the actual impact of regulation.
0:24.8	He's also a pretty good basketball player.
0:26.7	Sam, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:28.3	Thank you, but my basketball career ended when my knees blew out a few years ago.
0:33.3	It happens to the best of us.
0:36.3	Mine ended when I didn't get any taller than five foot six and a half.
0:42.3	Sam, I want to talk about the research you've done in particular in the air regulation.
0:47.3	And I wanted to start with on the issue of automobile safety.
0:51.3	You wrote an incredibly influential piece back.
0:54.3	It was published in 1975 in the Journal of Political Economy, the effects of automobile safety regulation
1:00.3	that made an enormous splash in the academic and real world
1:05.3	because of the claims that it made about the effects of safety regulation.
1:10.3	Tell us what you found.
1:12.3	Well, you have to distinguish what I found then from the idea that came out of that piece
1:19.3	and which is, I think, given it actually a durability that amazes me every week.
1:26.3	I get stuff in my email about another application of the basic idea.
1:31.3	The basic idea, first of all, let's back up.
	...

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