Bylund begins by saying that regulation that doesn't work isn't interesting and that we should instead focus on the kind that does change how the market works.
This was an interesting statement, and one that I did not necessarily gather in my own personal reading of these chapters. Bylund spent quite a bit of time talking about the “regulations that don’t work.” He calls these ineffective regulations. These are the regulations that fail to actually alter human behavior. He goes into detail on different ways in which regulations might be ineffective. For example, it could be that it is not measurable enough, which would make a regulation really easy to get around. I think this is a topic you could spend a bit more time looking into incase you missed that idea.
I really liked your section titled “Rules”. I think you did a really good job summarizing Bylund’s ideas surrounding the different economical effects of disasters and regulations. I too found this section very interesting when reading the material for myself. I think that Bylund did a really good idea at explaining how rules can destroy not just one market, but many rippling markets. I also really liked when Bylund talked about the economic bounce back after a disaster. In the book, he used the example of war. If a town was devastated during a war, then there was a large economic boom afterwards, does this mean that the war was good, and that we should go to war more often for economic growth? No. Of course this isn’t the case. Bylund uses a similar train of thought when using the example of the shoekeeper and the broken window. I think this is a really large part of the chapter that you missed out on covering.
I think it would have been valuable for you to spend a little bit more time talking about Bylund’s reflection on Bastiat’s idea of the ripple effect. The example that I mentioned just above about the shoe keeper and the broken window is Bastiat’s main idea in explaining the ripple effect, and this is where he made the distinction between the seen and the unseen. This really helped me personally understand the ripple effect, and I think it could have been really good to review that idea in detail a little bit more.
Another thing that Bylund covers at the end of chapter seven is prohibition. This was something that I did not see covered in your essay. What Bylund says about prohibition is that this is regulation on an extreme level. It removed the aspect of giving entrepreneurs choices like we saw in Bylund’s example of the five nail makers who faced regulations. I think the way you talked about rules earlier in your essay, you could have added a little bit about prohibition and how that is the extreme level of regulation, and its effectiveness.
Overall, I think you could have been more thorough in your analysis of Bylund’s chapters 5 and 7, but I think you did a good job on an overall broad fly over. Your organization and formatting is well done, however you are missing in text citations and proper citation of your direct quotes.