I agree with the spirit of your comment, but there are a couple of technical problems with it. For one thing, the total number of pages does sometimes decrease. (See the last plot in this document.) Total pages isn’t a perfect measure of regulatory burden, but many other measures have the problem of counting repeals as new regulations. (See the same source for a discussion about what counts as a “rule”.) Also, most regulations are drafted by executive agencies, not legislatures—especially at the federal level.
Re: “the total number of pages does sometimes decrease”, it’s not clear to me that that’s the case. These plots show “number of pages published annually”, after all. And even if that number is an imperfect proxy for the regulatory burden of that year, what we actually care about is in any case not the regulatory burden of a year, but the cumulative regulatory burden. That cannot possibly have stayed flat for 2000~2012, right? So that can’t be what the final plot in the pdf is saying.
I took another look at my source, and I think you’re right. The subject of the plot, the Federal Register (FR), lists changes to the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). It also suffers from the other problem that I identified (repeals counting as new rules).
For anyone who’s curious, here’s a nice overview of measures of regulatory burden.
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but there are a couple of technical problems with it. For one thing, the total number of pages does sometimes decrease. (See the last plot in this document.) Total pages isn’t a perfect measure of regulatory burden, but many other measures have the problem of counting repeals as new regulations. (See the same source for a discussion about what counts as a “rule”.) Also, most regulations are drafted by executive agencies, not legislatures—especially at the federal level.
I appreciate the link and the caveats!
Re: “the total number of pages does sometimes decrease”, it’s not clear to me that that’s the case. These plots show “number of pages published annually”, after all. And even if that number is an imperfect proxy for the regulatory burden of that year, what we actually care about is in any case not the regulatory burden of a year, but the cumulative regulatory burden. That cannot possibly have stayed flat for 2000~2012, right? So that can’t be what the final plot in the pdf is saying.
I took another look at my source, and I think you’re right. The subject of the plot, the Federal Register (FR), lists changes to the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). It also suffers from the other problem that I identified (repeals counting as new rules).
For anyone who’s curious, here’s a nice overview of measures of regulatory burden.