In the News

First came the explosions. Then the funerals. Then the calls for reform. Five years ago, it was the Texas City explosion that killed 15 workers and cast the spotlight on the Chemical Safety Board, the chronically underfunded agency assigned to oversee worker safety at American refineries.

“It’s as though the nation is walking into a casino and spinning the roulette wheel every day,” says Michael Liver­more, a government regulation specialist and executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University law school. “It’s only a matter of time before we’re going to come up with snake eyes and have another disaster.”

On today’s podcast, we talk to two economists, both named Scott. Scott Holladay argues this is one market, where maybe the government should get involved, and protect “net neutrality.”

Net neutrality is one of those issues that a small number of people care passionately about. For everyone else, it’s either a big mystery or a big bore. Net neutrality is about using regulation to require open and equal access to the Internet. Huge sums of money could be at stake in the outcome.

Michael Livermore talked about the National Flood Insurance Program, how the program works, and its costs and benefits. Pres. Obama signed an extension to the program, allowing people with properties in flood areas to transact sales on those properties.

A quartet of economists has written FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski with a shout-out for his “third way” Title II reclassification of broadband, in part because they say it would help preserve what is currently a de facto network neutrality regime in which most service providers “do not currently engage in prioritization or price discrimination tactics that would be restricted under the proposed rules.”

WASHINGTON, July 9, 2010 – Four economists argued in a letter to the FCC sent Wednesday that the question before the agency was “not whether to impose network neutrality, but whether to eliminate it.” They responded to a letter also sent to the FCC that was drafted by 74 Democratic lawmakers who said the FCC’s plan to impose new regulations on the internet would violate a standing bipartisan consensus about leaving the internet unregulated.

Environmentalists have long-held that the program amounts today to a subsidized destruction of America’s floodplains for the benefit of beachfront vacationers and wealthy homeowners (Rosie O’Donnell, Matt Damon, I’m looking at you). A recent report by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity backs up these arguments.

A report titled “Free to Invest: The Economic Benefits of Net Neutrality” from the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law concludes “While opponents of net neutrality are correct that it may have some downsides—including decreased investment incentives for ISPs and potential impacts on technological development—the government has tools at its disposal to mitigate these downsides. Moreover, the benefits of net neutrality, especially maintaining investment incentives for the development of new content, are very high.”

A study released in January by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law suggested net neutrality rules would preserve the investments of Web content producers such as newspapers and bloggers.