and focused on a specific issue. A special interest group can pressure legislators to enact public policies that

do not benefit society as a whole. Imagine an environmental rule to reduce air pollution that will cost 10 large

companies $8 million each, for a total cost of $80 million. The social benefits from enacting this rule provide

an average benefit of $10 for every person in the United States, for a total of about $3 trillion. Even though the

benefits are far higher than the costs for society as a whole, the 10 companies are likely to lobby much more

fiercely to avoid $8 million in costs than the average person is to argue for $10 worth of benefits.

As this example suggests, we can relate the problem of special interests in politics to an issue we raised in

Environmental Protection and Negative Externalities about economic policy with respect to negative

externalities and pollution—the problem called regulatory capture (which we defined in Monopoly and
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