Tyler’s précis of the missing chapter of The Great Stagnation:

I also favor reduced liability standards for major new innovations. Take the various plans for robot-driven cars. They will kill some people, as do human-driven cars. We run the risk of having the status quo so locked into place, so grandfathered, and so implicitly favored by the realities of regulation and lawsuits, that such an idea might never get off the ground. That in turn affects the incentives of innovators ex ante.

This, of course, relates to Michael Mandel’s call for countercyclical regulatory policy.

In a related vein, I’m very drawn to Eugene Volokh’s call for a right to medical self-defense:

Part III argues that the right of medical self-defense offers extra support for the Abigail Alliance panel’s controversial holding. Part IV contends that the right makes the organ sales ban presumptively improper and unconstitutional as applied to organs that are needed to protect people’s lives; some concerns about organ transactions may justify regulation of organ markets, but not outright prohibition of such markets.
Part IV also argues that, while this presumption of impropriety and unconstitutionality is rebuttable, it should take much to rebut it. Recognizing medical self-defense as a constitutional or moral right means the government should need a very good reason to substantially burden that right, and any restrictions that do burden it should be as narrow as possible.

The idea was described in a short piece by Christopher Shea:

In 2006, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2 to 1 that the terminally ill ought to be able to buy drugs that have passed Phase 1 F.D.A. testing (of three phases). One judge in the majority was a staunch conservative, the other a Clinton appointee. The full Court of Appeals, however, set aside the panel decision and then, in August, ruled 8 to 2 against the plaintiff, the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs. The court agreed with the F.D.A.’s arguments that the government has a strong interest in protecting even the terminally ill from brutal side effects and a premature death, and that only the full testing regimen can do that. The court also stressed that the states’ efforts to regulate drugs dated to 1736 and observed that the Supreme Court had rejected a “medical necessity” argument in the case of medical marijuana. And it wondered where the right to self-defense would end — could a dying patient force a drug company to hand over drugs? In a vigorous dissent, Justice Douglas Ginsburg said it was “startling” that the court failed to give the right to self-defense its due.
Volokh continues to hold that both the common law and the Constitution support a right to obtain the best available medicine, despite the risks. In his view, a terminal cancer patient is in precisely the same situation as a home-intrusion victim or, you might add, a victim of a rampaging bear, both of whom are exempted from certain legal prohibitions. (You don’t have to check endangered-species regulations before knifing or shooting the bear.) “Medical self-defense is not an analogy,” Volokh says. “It is self-defense.”

The main reason I like medical self-defense, as you can imagine, is that it would loosen the stranglehold the FDA now has on drug discovery.