The aim of Building Better Regulators is to bring regulators out of the shadows. How they work, their strengths, weaknesses and limitations, are too important to be so badly understood. What choices are regulators making (often implicitly)? What balances are they trying to strike? What problems must they learn to live with? How should we respond to regulatory failures? These questions should be debated far more transparently. There are no free wins and even in a favourable environment there are always trade-offs.

But we're not living in a favourable environment for regulators, quite the opposite. The US, UK and EU are all looking to deregulate. The growth of crypto assets and especially AI challenges many of the core assumptions regulators rely on. Other regulatory questions, from water and the environment to social media, are more controversial than ever before. Meanwhile, the trade-offs themselves, which have too often been obscured or misrepresented, are now being denied 

Regulators can and should be better than they are, but how do they get there? Lyndon Nelson and Gavin Stewart have spent decades wrestling with this challenge.  Their answers start with being honest about the real gaps between what regulators are asked to deliver and what is possible. Rarely can those gaps be completely closed, but there are paths to follow, steps to take, that can start to bridge the gaps.