Previously I described regulation as a regressive tax. It may not kill jobs per se, but it certainly shifts them towards people with university degrees, largely at the expense of those without. I’m beginning to rethink that position; I’m increasingly worried that many types of regulation are actually leading to a net loss of jobs. There remains a paucity of empirical evidence on this subject. Today I’m going to present a (I believe convincing) model of how regulations could kill jobs, but I’d like to remind everyone that models are less important than evidence and should only be the focus of discussion in situations like this, where the evidence is genuinely sparse.
Let’s assume that regulation has no first order effect on jobs. All jobs lost through regulation (and make no mistake, there will be lost jobs) are offset by different jobs in regulatory compliance or the jobs created when the compliance people spend the money they make, etc., on to infinity. So far, this is all fine and dandy.
Talking to members of the local start-up community, I reckon that many small sized hardware start-ups spend the equivalent of an engineer’s salary on regulatory compliance yearly. Instead of a hypothetical engineer (or marketer, or salesperson, etc.), they’re providing a salary to a lawyer, or a technician at the FCC, or some other mid-level bureaucrat.
No matter how well this person does their job, they aren’t creating anything of value. There’s no chance that they’ll come up with or contribute to a revolutionary new product that drives a lot of economic growth and ends up creating dozens, hundreds, or (in very rare cases) thousands of jobs. An engineer could.
There’s obviously many ways that even successful start-ups with all the engineers they need can fail to create jobs on net. They could disrupt an established industry in a way that causes layoffs at the existing participants (although it’s probably fallacious to believe that this will cause net job losses either, given the lump of labour fallacy). Also, something like 60% of start-ups fail. In the case of failure, money from wealthy investors is transferred to other people and I doubt most people care if the beneficiaries are engineers or in compliance.
But discounting all that, I think what this boils down to is: when you’re paying an engineer, there’s a chance that the engineer will invent something that increases productivity and drives productivity growth (leading to cheaper prices and maybe even new industries previously thought impossible). When you pay someone in sales or marketing, you get a chance to get your product in front of customers and see it really take off. When you’re paying for regulatory compliance, you get an often-useless stamp of approval, or have to make expensive changes because some rent-seeking corporation got spurious requirements written into the regulation.
Or the regulatory agency catches a fatal flaw and averts a catastrophe. I’m not saying that never happens. Just that I think it’s much rarer than many people might believe. Seeing the grinding wheels of regulation firsthand has cured me of all my youthful idealistic approval for it. Sometimes consumers need to be protected from out of control profit-seeking, sure. But once you’ve been forced to actually do some regulatory compliance, you start to understand just how much regulation exists to prevent established companies from having to compete against new entrants. This makes everything more expensive and everyone but a few well-connected shareholders worse off.
Regulations has real trade-offs; there are definite goods, but also definite downsides. And now I think the downsides are even worse than I first predicted.