Meta - rules

Meta-rules, or rules for making rules, affect the costs of innovation and thus the pace of economic growth. Pro-active adaptation of rules to a changing economic environment through explicit, well-designed meta-rules makes economic growth quicker, less painful, and more certain than through re-active adaption through crisis or through chancebased adaptation through evolution. Acknowledgments This work was supported by the Division of Asset Building and Community Development of the Ford Foundation. I thankful for help from Dan Connolly, Claudio Gonzalez-Vega, Ian Sheldon, and Michael Sherraden. Author’s Note Mark Schreiner is Research Director at the Center for Social Development, Washington University in St. Louis. He studies ways for public policy to help the poor build assets.