I recently read an article on the Guardian newspaper website that covered two particular interests of mine: beer and in a round about way red tape. Pubs in the United Kingdom are required by law to serve beer either in pint or half-pint measures. This means that you can order a pint anywhere in the country and you will get a glass containing exactly the same number of milliliters of beer (473.176473 of them to be precise).
The British government has just announced a plan to allow pubs to serve beer in glasses that hold two-thirds of a pint. Apart from eroding a grand old British tradition (The first legislation requiring beer to be served in pints dates back to 1698), this measure aims to "nudge" Britons away from their binge drinking habits. The argument is that smaller measures will mean that people will drink less. However, the editor of the Guardian has suggested that at the heart of the problem of binge drinking is the fact that "Brits have an unfortunate tendency to pour strong foreign lagers – Stella, even Leffe – into a pint jar for which they were not intended, and to get poisonously pie-eyed in the process."
So how does this link to red tape? In a regulatory sense, rules that are put in place to deal with particular problems that don't address the root cause of the problem are often identified as problems in red tape reduction processes. In the case of the pint, it is not the size of the glass that seems to be the problem but rather the alcohol content of what goes in it. This type of regulation usually leads to all sorts of outcomes but rarely does it result in any meaningful change.
The British government has just announced a plan to allow pubs to serve beer in glasses that hold two-thirds of a pint. Apart from eroding a grand old British tradition (The first legislation requiring beer to be served in pints dates back to 1698), this measure aims to "nudge" Britons away from their binge drinking habits. The argument is that smaller measures will mean that people will drink less. However, the editor of the Guardian has suggested that at the heart of the problem of binge drinking is the fact that "Brits have an unfortunate tendency to pour strong foreign lagers – Stella, even Leffe – into a pint jar for which they were not intended, and to get poisonously pie-eyed in the process."
So how does this link to red tape? In a regulatory sense, rules that are put in place to deal with particular problems that don't address the root cause of the problem are often identified as problems in red tape reduction processes. In the case of the pint, it is not the size of the glass that seems to be the problem but rather the alcohol content of what goes in it. This type of regulation usually leads to all sorts of outcomes but rarely does it result in any meaningful change.
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