Overfitted Models and Overly Complicated Regulation...

Governments are always legislating the last crisis (whether economic or security related).  I would argue that one of the reasons that they persist in doing this is that they always seem to craft overly complicated and excessively precise legislation.  This legislation seems to focus on patching specific "holes" in the existing regulation regime that were identified ex post as that the "causes" of the crisis.

As a result of the high levels of complexity and precision, such legislation is likely to be brittle/fragile and will likely result in unintended consequences.  In a sense, such legislation suffers from problems similar to those of an over-fitted statistical model.  A good model will capture key drivers of the underlying process while allowing for some (perhaps even significant variation) between the estimated and observed values.   Because it has captured key drivers of the underlying process, a good model will be very robust when used to predict future values.  An over-fitted model, on the other hand, will be crafted to fit the historical data with very high precision, but because of this high level of historical precision the model can be very brittle when used to predict future values.  Instead of capturing key drivers of the underlying process, an over-fitted model simply reproduces the historical data with high accuracy...who knows what it might produce when used to predict future values.

How does this relate to government legislation/regulation? Good legislation/regulation should capture in broad strokes the key factors associated with a crisis or socio-economic process that the government legislation is designed to target.  Now clearly this is easier said than done as what actually constitutes a "key factor" in the real world of politics is just as debatable as what constitutes a "key driver" in the real world of economic modeling. 

Nonetheless, I think it would be useful if more people new the difference between an over-fitted model and a good model...