Comment by setgree
7 months ago
An insightful comment on this from an American context, but about basically the same problem [0]
> Read the regs and you can absolutely see how complying with them to allow for banana peeling could become prohibitively costly. But the debate of whether they are pro-fruit or anti-fruit misses the point. If daycares end up serving bags of chips instead of bananas, that’s the impact they’ve had. Maybe you could blame all sorts of folks for misinterpreting the regs, or applying them too strictly, or maybe you couldn’t. It doesn’t matter. This happens all the time in government, where policy makers and policy enforcers insist that the negative effects of the words they write don’t matter because that’s not how they intended them.
> I’m sorry, but they do matter. In fact, the impact – separate from the intent – is all that really matters.
[0] https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/stop-telling-constituents-the...
That's an excellent article. Another quote I found especially relevant:
>Every step that law takes down the enormous hierarchy of bureaucracy, the incentives for the public servants who operationalize it is to take a more literal, less flexible interpretation. By the time the daycare worker interacts with it, the effect of the law is often at odds with lawmakers’ intent.
Put another way, everyone in the chain is incentivized to be very risk averse when faced with a vague regulation, and this risk aversion can compound to reach absurd places.