Announcing Balsa Research
What are the most important policy changes America should make and how can we make them happen?
If we do not address the deep dysfunctions of our government and its policies, we put our democracy and entire civilization at risk. People whose lives are getting worse, who have no hope and cannot envision a future, inevitably turn to authoritarianism. A focus on telling people how terrible and fascist Donald Trump is did not work well in 2016 or 2020 and is not the best way to keep him out of the White House in 2024. It will not help us prosper and overcome political differences. Even if he is kept out in 2024, either we turn things around or things will keep getting worse.
My new project, together with Moshe Looks and Alyssa Vance, is to chart paths forward to improve federal policy, and lay groundwork to implement those improvements. That means taking into account political feasibility. It means getting the proposals and messaging into the hands of candidates. It means commissioning academic studies quantifying costs and benefits and advance drafting of legislative language.
Consider the pandemic. Our government’s actions these past two years not only failed to make the pandemic better, they often actively made the pandemic worse while spending trillions. Our response to a potential next pandemic, monkeypox, was similarly botched.
Some of my most read posts point out clear cases where the government makes things worse, like car seat mandates so bad they serve as contraception, a law that makes it impossible to maintain modern ports in working order for basically no reason, and rules against container stacking that did major damage to our supply chains.
A few years ago I would have left such tasks to ‘the adults in the room.’ There are no such adults. Someone has to, and no one else will. If you tell me someone is already on the case and Doing the Thing, this means little. The situation is not ‘handled.’ Elites have lost all credibility.
I also believe that almost all existing organizations nominally dedicated to such purposes face poor incentive structures due to how they are funded and garner attention, and are not testing the hypothesis that the problem could be solved. I will test that hypothesis.
There is far more hope for improvement than almost anyone realizes. Lobbying when done right is remarkably cheap and effective. Secret congress can be productive. Many marginal improvements are highly valuable, with no substantial downsides and compounding benefits.
Low-hanging improvement is often as simple as not restricting supply and not subsidizing demand. A sample: Reforming NEPA, the NRC, zoning and the FDA including a right to try for drugs, pandemic preparedness, repealing protectionist policies (Jones Act, Dredge Act, ‘made in America’, etc), ending qualified immunity and civil forfeiture, legalizing marijuana, avoiding 100%+ marginal tax rates, increasing high-skill immigration, fixing student loans, and NGDP level targeting by the Federal Reserve. The civil service and procurement urgently need reform.
Campaigns bleed tons of value all the time, leaving large room for improvement. Big mistakes made the difference in 2016, almost did in 2020 and are likely again in the future.
We need your help - growing the team, engineering new software, analyzing policy space, finding experts, making connections, commissioning academic studies, drafting laws, writing up results, refining messaging, ultimately lobbying and working with campaigns, and of course raising money.
If you are interested in hearing more please get in touch at hello@balsaresearch.com and start the subject line with the most relevant category: policy (include what area if applicable), tech, media, networking, lobbying, campaigning or money, and then tell us about yourself and what interests you, or fill out this Google Doc.
I think you and I have nearly identical policy preferences and I applaud your initiative to actually do something to make the (political) world a better place.
That said, on to the criticisms!
1.) Your mandate is insanely broad.
New policy ideas, AND drafting legislation, AND conducting research on the effects of policies, AND polling/focus groups, AND campaign management software, AND beyond-state-of-the-art algorithmic marketing?
There's a huge risk of being spread too thin here.
You're inevitably going to narrow your focus once you start work; the only question is whether you do so strategically and deliberately, or allow it to happen by chance. The latter will make your org much more boring in the long run.
2.) You are assuming things are easy, rather than assuming you have opposition.
Any policy objective that seems "obviously" good to you and me, but has not yet been done, is probably being blocked by someone who doesn't want it to happen.
This isn't a reason to sit back and do nothing, but it is something you really, really need to understand.
We do not lack rational, coherent, efficient, beneficial policies because nobody is proposing any. We lack such policies because they are *selected against* by public choice incentives.
Yes, ALSO, nobody is proposing, drafting, and advocating for the Legislative Agenda From Utopia, and you could fill that gap. But I don't imagine for a second that this is the hard part. The hard part is that the Legislative Agenda From Utopia will probably get warped or defeated by the actual legislature. (And the Executive Agenda From Utopia will probably get warped or defeated by the actual executive branch.)
3.) You absolutely must learn to see the world through someone else's eyes.
As a writer, you can lay out your own worldview and build an audience among those who find it worth reading. You can be quite successful even if most people bounce off and think you're an idiot. And you never really have to ask "what do things look like from the perspective of the people who think I'm an idiot?" because those people were never going to be subscribers/readers/fans anyway.
As a political strategist this is no longer the case. You need to win over majorities or critical masses or specific people who are not at all selected for compatibility. I think that does require being able to inhabit the perspective of people who don't share your values, beliefs, frameworks, etc.
You would need to radically break down and rebuild how you read and listen and what you expect other people are thinking. Think of it as a big philosophical/spiritual/psychological transition of the same order as "becoming an atheist" or "going from introverted to extroverted"; it's not impossible, but most people don't do it, and even fewer people do it after age 30.
As a DC resident, I would like to strongly footstomp the proposition that a shockingly large percentage of issues here are radically understaffed relative to what an Actually Serious Civilization would do. I would therefore strongly suggest that you do more of a breadth-first search for bets where you can win relatively quickly and build up a track record, rather than purely prioritize by impact. There's a lot of impact to go around, but much of it takes a while.
A secondary suggestion for what that track record should be measured in: there are DC groups that care about keeping score publicly, and those that care about convincing their funders and other political insiders that they scored the point but don't care about convincing anyone else. Counterintuitively, the latter groups (if they can honestly score their own work) are often more impactful In This Town as they can cheaply give away public score points in order to close deals.
(Of course, "assume honest scoring" is a big load-bearing assumption, but one I suspect you'd be more likely to be able to achieve than most and one where you might not immediately see yourself as Better Than The Replacement Policy Nonprofit, but where you almost certainly are.)