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The Regulatory Craft: Controlling Risks, Solving Problems, and Managing Compliance. By Malcolm K. Sparrow. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000. 346p. $20.95 paper.
Regulation has never been popular in the public mind; like death and taxes, it is regarded-at best-as an unpleasant inevitability. Calls for deregulation hearken back at least to the Nixon administration, and the theme of reducing the alleged burdens of regulation have become a kind of bipartisan mantra, advanced by every American president in the latter third of the twentieth century. Scholars have not been appreciably kinder. Criticism oscillates between the charge of regulatory capture and the accompanying danger of pliant regulators falling into the clutches of their clientele, and the more recent-and virtually opposite-concern with regulatory unreasonableness and the tendency of governmental agencies to enforce regulations in a mechanistic and irrationally aggressive manner.
In this pervasive environment of what my students would term "dissing" regulation, Regulatory Craft seems an extraordinary anomaly. Malcolm Sparrow presents a positive, almost affectionate, portrayal of regulation and the beleaguered administrators charged with its implementation. He entertains no doubts about the continuing need for command and control forms of social policy, and he does not apologize for its coercive elements or its assumption that bad guys will always be with us. The raging debate over the need for less coercive, market-based alternatives to regulation is conspicuous by its absence in these pages.
The author directs his attention to the administrators who implement regulatory programs. Scholars are notably absent from Sparrow's description of his intended audience. Yet, academic students of regulation and public policy will find much to like in this book. It is a refreshing antidote to recent "pop" public administration, especially the more extreme manifestations of the reinventing government movement, which applied customer satisfaction as a standard of governmental excellence, willy-nilly, to a range of activities for which it was inappropriate at best. (My favorite example of this pathology is Sparrow's discussion of the effort to "reinvent" the customs service, which included a wrenching and debilitating debate over whether smugglers should be considered among...