Slippery Slope June: Cost-Lowering Slippery Slopes, the Costs of Uncertainty, and Learning Curves
[This month, I’m serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope; in last week’s posts, I laid out some examples, definitions, and general observations, and turned to a specific kind of slippery slope mechanism—cost-lowering slippery slopes. This week, I’ll elaborate on that, and shift to some other mechanisms.]
The example in Friday’s post involves the cost of tangible items: cameras. But another cost of any new project is the cost of learning how to implement it properly, and the related risk that it will be implemented badly.
People are often skeptical of new proposals (from Social Security privatization to education reform) on these very grounds. Broad change B—for instance, an across-the-board school choice program—might thus be opposed by a coalition of (1) people who oppose it in principle (for instance, because they don’t want tax money going to religious education or because they want to maintain the primacy of government-run schools), and (2) those who might support it in theory but suspect that it would be badly implemented in practice. This lineup is similar to wh
Article from Reason.com
