I was only interested in regulatory capture, so I only read point number 4. I saw some evidence that regulatory capture is increasing, but no support for your statement that this increase is exponential.
Yes, good point—I have not modelled this with actual data. There are some other ways of how corporations influence the political process e.g. through think tank funding as well (https://www.necir.org/investigations/think-tank-viz/).
I meant that lobbying spend seems to be not increasing linearly with inflation or GDP, but lobbying spending becoming a bigger and bigger share of GDP.
Evidence about this from my citations:
“Lobbying by banks increased in absolute terms over most of this time period, rising from a trough of $36.3 million in 1999 to a peak of $88.2 million in 2014. When scaled by the industry valueadded (i.e., gross domestic product-by-industry), this pattern remains largely unchanged (see Figure 2).”
“Google, Amazon, and Facebook all spent record amounts last year lobbying the US government
They spent a combined $48 million — up 13 percent from 2017″
I was only interested in regulatory capture, so I only read point number 4. I saw some evidence that regulatory capture is increasing, but no support for your statement that this increase is exponential.
Yes, good point—I have not modelled this with actual data. There are some other ways of how corporations influence the political process e.g. through think tank funding as well (https://www.necir.org/investigations/think-tank-viz/).
I meant that lobbying spend seems to be not increasing linearly with inflation or GDP, but lobbying spending becoming a bigger and bigger share of GDP.
Evidence about this from my citations:
“Lobbying by banks increased in absolute terms over most of this time period, rising from a trough of $36.3 million in 1999 to a peak of $88.2 million in 2014. When scaled by the industry valueadded (i.e., gross domestic product-by-industry), this pattern remains largely unchanged (see Figure 2).”
“Google, Amazon, and Facebook all spent record amounts last year lobbying the US government
They spent a combined $48 million — up 13 percent from 2017″
also see this graph:
https://lobbyfacts.eu/charts-graphs
if you were to smooth it and perhaps squint your eyes a bit you might see a something hyperlinear / exponential there instead of a linear trend.
But see this graph which paints a different picture:
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/
I’ll revisit this claim in the next version of the paper.