We don't have a succinct term that captures the real risks of over-regulation (see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). I recommend the term "metarisk" to describe the risks that come from being too risk averse. As in: you are too focused on the risk and don't understand the metarisk you are creating.
More generally, the public and journalists only seem to have the intellectual capacity for first-order thinking, not second-order (not speaking of individuals, per se, just the emergent dynamics).
I would love to see an experiment that creates an agency that regulates other agencies, which has the following mandate: require all agencies to demonstrate that the all proposed regulations and regulatory enforcement has an outcome that is optimally beneficial for society. The agency would have the power to fire employees of other agencies and to disband and reconstitute entire agencies.
Don't get hung up on defining optimality, the metaregulators' real job is just to have the regulators think twice before letting their block-everything reflex kick in.
More generally, the public and journalists only seem to have the intellectual capacity for first-order thinking, not second-order (not speaking of individuals, per se, just the emergent dynamics).
I would love to see an experiment that creates an agency that regulates other agencies, which has the following mandate: require all agencies to demonstrate that the all proposed regulations and regulatory enforcement has an outcome that is optimally beneficial for society. The agency would have the power to fire employees of other agencies and to disband and reconstitute entire agencies.
Don't get hung up on defining optimality, the metaregulators' real job is just to have the regulators think twice before letting their block-everything reflex kick in.