This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 3rd,

24. I'm Caleb Brown.

Federal regulation is difficult to measure,

and state-level regulation is no easier.

The new index aims to give policy makers a better sense of where states stand relative to

one another.

Patrick McLaughlin directs policy analytics at the Mercata Center.

We spoke in Phoenix about the new index based on their reg data project.

This is a big question, getting at how regulated estate is and you know we've got all these

weird measures of regulation that we see and in various places be it pages of the Federal Register which is blunt and

admittedly even by the people who gather this information that is not the best

measure it's not a great measure even if it's the best one we got.

It's not great because a one-line regulation can do a lot of damage and pages upon pages of regulation

could do relatively little sometimes.

So when you get at this question of how regulated states are,

where do you begin?

The same as at the federal level, we tried to improve how we measure regulation as a starting point.

You're exactly right, counting pages was crude and you can count it in the federal register and that's more of like how many new regulations are being made.

You can count it in the Code of Federal Regulations, that's more of the stock.

But over 10 years ago now, we developed reg data and the idea here was we can use some machine learning

algorithms, some natural language processing approaches to pull apart the text of

regulations and instead of counting pages can we count things like the number of

...