1. Philip K. Howard has several complaints about the legal environment in the United States.
My favorite failure is civil service — designed to be “the merit system,” it instead makes it illegal to judge anyone based on merit.
He writes,
Law should be radically simplified into goals and governing principles, like the Constitution, and leave to accountable humans the responsibility to achieve those goals fairly and sensibly.
I received a lot of pushback on my last post on principles-based regulation. But I still think that it is a promising idea, and evidently so does Howard.
2. Jonathan Rauch argues that apprenticeships are a neglected way to improve human capital. Of course, affluent kids already have a very broad apprenticeship program. Except to maintain class distinctions, their program is called internships.
The literature is not very supportive of claims that simple changes in policy would improve productivity and real incomes. For every common argument about a simple policy change that would increase the productivity of land, labor, capital, and everything else that matters I have found compelling contrary or at least complicating evidence.
TANSTAAFL.
Posts on this topic by other writers are coming.
Do internships really serve the same function as apprenticeships?
I’ve always thought that apprenticeships were mainly to give you experience in a specific skill or craft, like auto repair or welding … whereas apprenticeships (a) give you a taste of what a work environment is like, (b) teach you “soft” skills like getting along with others in the workplace, and (c) let the employer figure out whether you’re worth hiring.
Since internships, apprenticeships, education and all that are signaling, I wonder if their main purpose is to limit employer liability. Thus, a simple rule change would be to delineate when an employer is liable for the behavior of an employee.