Planners attempt to imitate reality through regulatory law.  You could call it modelling reality.

Private sector businesses make all sorts of models for controlling their businesses.  These models accept data, they associate data elements through defined relationships, they produce performance metrics for their businesses, and they attempt to predict, at least for the near term, future business requirements for the firms.

Public sector modelling in regulatory law aspires to reach the standards of modelling success seen in the private sector.  But regulators aren’t private sector operators.  They don’t run the businesses that their regulatory models attempt to control.  They don’t have a survival motivation to make a correct model. [Read more…]