Crandall, Gruenspecht, Keeler, and Lave's Regulating the Automobile
评论了Crandall等人关于美国联邦汽车设计规制（排放、燃油经济性和安全）的著作，指出合规成本曾占新车价格10%以上，并质疑规制的成本效益与实施效率。
* Roger Smith, GM's chairman, called automobiles the newest regulated industry. He was referring not to the capturable ministrations of a single agency, but rather to the cumulative effects of disparate Federal regulatory initiatives over the 1960s and 1970s. Although some Federal initiatives have helped the industry (the Chrysler financial bailout and restrictions on Japanese imports), it is easy to be sympathetic to the industry view. Regulation of auto emissions and safety has had dramatic effects on automobile design. Although they have rarely been binding, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations threatened to lower automobile manufacturers' profitability during any period with cheap fuel. And another attempted fuel-saver, the Federal requirement of 55-mile-per-hour speed limits, has lowered the value of automobiles in use. Over the period in which these regulations were put into place, the domestic industry has seen its demand shifting rapidly back and forth between large and small cars and its overall market share declining as imports rose. The regulations, by contributing to the uncertainty and uncontrollability of the period, seemed to Detroit ill-timed at best and costly and without benefits at worst. In Regulating the Automobile, Crandall, Gruenspecht, Keeler, and Lave attempt a definitive treatment of a subset of these new Federal regulations. They focus on what might be called the auto-design regulations; emissions control, CAFE, and safety standards.1 An implicit conclusion of the book is that the regulatory problem is important-at the peak, compliance costs for all three types amounted to more than 10% of the price of a new car. (See Figure 2-2, p. 17.) The explicit conclusions that current or planned standards in all three areas are not cost-beneficial and that the regulations have been poorly thought out and inefficiently implemented are an indictment of the regulatory record. The approach throughout is classical: the role of government regulation is to pursue the public interest, while the role of scholars of regulation is to assess whether that goal is achieved, not why it is being missed. The conclusions, the approach, and the topics considered might suggest that this is an autumnal book; a great deal has previously been written on these topics. Some controversy remains, however, and the book opens some interesting new ground. This review will first take up the substantive areas of emissions, fuel economy, and safety and then turn to the book's general points about the process of regulation.