1. While there are many writings on risk regulation, few recognize the true complexities and unique nature of high-stakes risks. For more on the complications of regulating such risks, including the danger of regulating to “statistical” levels, see Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (Princeton University Press, 1999), by Charles Perrow.
2. The “capture” of regulation by powerful special interests (essentially, those regulated) has long been an issue in the study of modern business regulation. See, for example, Social Responsibility and the Business Predicament: Studies in the Regulation of Economic Activity, edited by James W. McKie for The Brookings Institution (1974). The impact of vested interests on retarding environmental regulations, for example, is explored in Douglas Booth’s “Economic Growth and the Limits of Environmental Regulation: A Social Economic Analysis”, published in the Review of Social Economy (Winter, 1995).
3. On the wider conception of social and economic planning for complex social and economic systems, from a modern perspective, see Franco Archibugi’s Planning Theory: From the Political Debate to the Methodological Reconstruction (Springer, 2008). Archibugi introduces a general theory of planning for progress, which he refers to as planology.
4. For more on the ideas and applications of centralized economic planning, see Alternative Approaches to Economic Planning (St. Martin’s, 1981), by Martin Cave and Paul Hare.
5. A seminal reference on the distinction between regulation and planning in the social/economic sphere is K. William Kapp’s “Economic Regulation and Economic Planning: A Theoretical Classification of Different Types of Economic Control”, American Economic Review (December 1939)