What Should We Be Worried About?

CAPTURE

CHARLES SEIFE

Professor of journalism, NYU; former staff writer, Science; author, Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception

On April 5, 2010, deep in the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, a spark ignited a huge explosion that rumbled through the tunnels and killed twenty-nine miners—the worst mining disaster in the United States in forty years. Two weeks later, the Deepwater Horizon, a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, went up in flames, killing eleven workers and creating the biggest oil spill in history. Though these two disasters seem completely unrelated, they had the same underlying cause: capture.

Federal agencies that regulate industry are supposed to prevent such disasters. Agencies like the Mine Safety and Health Administration (which sets the rules for mines) and the Minerals Management Service (which set the rules for offshore drilling) are supposed to constrain businesses—and to act as watchdogs—to force everyone to play by the rules. That’s the ideal, anyhow. The reality is a bit messier. More often than not, the agencies are reluctant to enforce the regulations they create. When a business gets caught breaking the rules, the regulatory agencies tend to impose penalties amounting to no more than a slap on the wrist. Companies like Massey Energy (which ran Upper Big Branch) and BP (which ran the Deepwater Horizon) flout the rules, and when disaster strikes, everybody wonders why regulators failed to take action despite numerous warning signs and repeated violations of regulations.

In the 1970s, economists, led by future Nobel laureate George Stigler, began to realize that this was the rule, not the exception. Over time, regulatory agencies are systematically drained of their ability to check the power of industry. Even more striking, they’re gradually drawn into the orbit of the businesses they’re charged with regulating. Instead of acting in the public interest, the regulators wind up as tools of the industry they’re supposed to keep watch over. This process, known as “regulatory capture,” turns regulators from watchdogs into lapdogs.

You don’t have to look far to see regulatory capture in action. Securities and Exchange Commission officials are often accused of ignoring warnings about fraud, stifling investigations, even helping miscreants avoid paying big fines or going to jail. Look at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s enforcement reports to see how capable it is of preventing energy companies from violating nuclear power plant safety rules again and again. Regulatory capture isn’t limited to the U.S. What caused the Fukushima disaster? Ultimately it was a “breakdown of the regulatory system” caused by “reversal of the positions between the regulator and the regulated,” at least according to a report prepared by the Japanese parliament. The regulator had become the regulated.

Regulatory capture is just a small part of the story. In my own profession, journalism, we like to think of ourselves as watchdogs, fierce defenders of the public good. But we, too, are being captured by the industries we’re supposed to keep watch on. There’s journalistic capture just as there’s regulatory capture. It’s most marked in fields such as tech reporting, business reporting, White House reporting—fields where you’re afraid of losing access to your subjects, where you depend on the industry to feed you stories, where your advertising revenue comes from the very people you’re supposed to critique. In all of these fields, you can find numerous reporters who are functionally controlled by the people they’re supposed to keep watch over. Even on my own beat (especially on my own beat!), science reporting, we’re captured. The elaborate system of embargoes and privileged press releases set up by scientific journals and scientific agencies ensures that we report not just what they want but how and when they want it. We’ve unwittingly shifted our allegiance from the public we’re supposed to serve to the people we’re supposed to investigate.

Capture is a bigger threat than even Stigler first realized. Any profession that depends to some degree on objectivity and whose work affects the fortunes of a group of people with power and money is subject to capture. Science, a field in which objectivity is paramount, is far from immune. There’s evidence that medical researchers who take money from industry tend see the natural world in a more positive light: In their experiments, drugs seem to work better, patients seem to survive longer, and side effects seem less dangerous. Yet few scientists, even those taking tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from drug companies or medical-device manufacturers, think they serve any master but Truth with a capital T. That’s what worries me the most about capture: You never know when you’re a captive.