Saturday, October 23, 2010

Five Ways Regulators Think Wrong

Here's one of the five.....

"Affect heuristic'" is a fancy name for a pretty obvious concept, namely that we discount the drawbacks of things we are emotionally in favor of. For example, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill certainly killed about 1,300 birds, maybe a few more. Wind turbines in America kill between 75,000 and 275,000 birds every year, generally of rarer species, such as eagles. Yet wind companies receive neither the enforcement, nor the opprobrium, that oil companies do.

~Matt Ridley in today's WSJ column "Studying the Biases of Bureaucrats"

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