[Fede_V]

I've said it in the past, but I'm going to repeat myself: if anyone is willing to defend Pai's actions, would you like to do a friendly bet (proceeds to to a GiveWell charity) that as soon as he is legally allowed too he will be given a sinecure at Verizon/Comcast or an RNC friendly lobby shop?

[genericone]

Your bet will prove correct because he will be blacklisted, in a political sense, by other small businesses in that sector. Those small/medium sized businesses could not survive the shitstorm that would follow him. Only a company the size of verizon and comcast could absorb that kind of publicity without suffering from the social media outrage that would predictably ensue.

After his time in the FCC, if he doesn't continue working in government, he needs to work in the private sector, the only private sector business that he could even possibly work in after this, is Verizon/Comcast/ATT/GenericBigCorp, companies which would have some need/desire for his experiences and contacts in the government.

Whether or not you defend his actions, working anywhere else is untenable now...

[slg]

I am in no way defending Pai, but I generally disagree with the idea that a regulator working in the industry before or after they are done serving publicly is definitive proof of corruption (which you seem to be implying).

That isn't to say that the revolving door nature of these regulators and private industry can't or even doesn't lead to corruption, but what are the alternatives? The regulators should obviously be experts in the industry they regulate. If you forbid anyone high up at the FCC from ever working in the communications industry, what experts are left? You would basically limiting these jobs so they can only be done by academics, which would introduce its own set of problems.

[tomdell]

A high-level representative of any industry is going to have personal connections in that industry and personal reasons for not wanting to regulate the industry as it should be regulated in the best interest of the people.

I don't see any benefit to someone in charge of regulating the communications industry having ever worked in communications. An intelligent person - and not necessarily an academic - a lawyer would be capable, for instance - with no personal connections to people high up in the industry is immensely preferable and has much less potential for corruption.

[jcranmer]

> I don't see any benefit to someone in charge of regulating the communications industry having ever worked in communications.

If you replace "communications" with "construction", you're advocating that the people regulating building codes should have absolutely no prior experience actually building things, and I imagine that is not a stance you would take. Why then is communication so different from construction?

The point of regulatory agencies is to take the aspirational goals of laws passed by the legislature and turn them into concrete, executable frameworks. This means you need people who are far more experienced on how companies are going to react to changes in regulation than the people who write the laws. Without personal experience, people are going to have rely a lot more on the corporate lobbying to make sense of what's going on, and they're going to have less basis to understand intentional misdirection in corporate responses.

[slg]

I think you are downplaying the complexities of these regulatory jobs if you think they can be adequately done by any intelligent person regardless of their knowledge of the industry. That admittedly may be less important for the FCC compared to other agencies, but would you be comfortable if the head of the FDA was a lawyer rather than a doctor or scientist?

[darawk]

To be totally fair here, I think you'd probably have to establish a base rate of this. I'd bet that virtually all prior FCC commissioners end up with a gig like that, regardless of how they regulated the industry. It should be an easy question to answer though.

EDIT: It seems many of them go to this place: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/ (source: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/314248-fcc-chair-to-ta...). Not sure what to make of that.

[glup]

I’ve noticed that the Aspen Institute is a sink for these sort of individuals across a number of fields. So far as I can tell, it functions as a sort of a bullpen for talent at the political / economic interface for a number of large corporations. It certainly isn’t mission-driven or benevolent.

[throw2016]

Revolving doors lead to corruption. Study after study have shown this. [1] The recent patent examiners study by the national bureau of economics research again confirms this. [2]

There is no basis to advocate status quo by setting up false choices and appeals to expertise in the face of overwhelming evidence.

The impact in the financial industry, telecom, pharma and literally any segment shows incredibly damaging consequences. This is simply too high a cost to pay for some people's feelings of how the world should work versus how it actually does.

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/fda-s-revolving-door-...

[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w24638.pdf

[dopamean]

This is not an interesting bet at all. Isn't that exactly what many people leaving government do?

[wahern]

Not only that, it's what people entering government plan to do.

I had a conversation with a lead researcher at a pharmaceutical company (also a friend) where she discussed her plans to work at the FDA for a few years and then return to private industry. She was very explicit about her reasoning: companies pay a premium for researchers with FDA experience because such people are more adept at navigating funding and approval processes.

When I asked whether she considered that she would be participating in a corrupting (if not corrupt) process, she simply waved the notion away--this is how it works and what you need to do to advance your career. This person leans very liberal from a social and political perspective.

This is where we're at as a society. The machinery of the administrative state is consuming everything in its path. I'm not anti-government or anti-regulation. But the centralization of power is extremely problematic; not just conceptually, but literally.

Once upon a time the Federal government had an explicit (if informal) policy of placing administrative offices across the country. This was, I believe, largely a matter of sharing the employment opportunities across the states. But it also had the effect of disincentivizing government work for highly ambitious people. (Moving to D.C. is far easier to justify than moving to Oklahoma City.) These administrative offices are increasingly centralized geographically around D.C. This has attracted industry. The phenomenon is one example of many that has promoted corrupting processes such as the revolving door between regulators and industry.

On the bright side, it means there are very concrete countermeasures that we could begin instituting. For example, instate an explicit, formal policy of locating administrative agencies--especially executive offices--far outside the Beltway. Yes, this will be costly in terms of administrative efficiency. But safeguarding democratic institutions is costly; if we're not prepared to pay the price then we deserve what we get.

[presscast]

This makes it worse, not better.

[grandmczeb]

How do you define sinecure? I’m not a fan of Pai, but it’s hard for me to tell what you’re trying to prove.

[ddingus]

Even odds.