A New Creed on Regulation

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 2 unpacks the core tenets of the neoliberal perspective on regulation. It charts the rise of an intellectual wave in the 1970s and 1980s, marked by figures like Stigler, Peltzman, Buchanan, Tullock, Krueger, Niskanen, and others, that was critical of direct and substantive governmental regulation. It then traces how this anti-statist viewpoint was further fortified in the 1990s by breakthroughs in financial economics and the growing allure of the New Public Management approach to governance. The chapter highlights the transformative role economists have played in molding the contours of the American regulatory state. The chapter also lends a better understanding to the principles guiding the US government’s regulatory approach to a financializing economy.