Why Excess Regulation?

Our world consists of many coupled evolving systems, including systems of competing species, nations, political parties, firms, cultures, charities, and even academics. These systems vary in many ways, but a key difference is in their adaption power - how fast can each one search to find and adopt more adaptive alternatives.If the strength of influence between such systems were symmetric, then systems with stronger adaption power would tend to tame and drive the weaker ones. This would promote overall adaption of our total system, and we’d want to increase the influence of strong systems over weak.However, in our world today we often see governance and regulatory systems, which are weak adapters, having big and asymmetric influence over strong adapters like capitalism, with the reverse influence being much weaker. In fact, we often actively suppress reverse influence as illicit “corruption” or “conspiracies”.In general, having weak adaptation systems tame and drive strong ones seems…