If the true odds were 2% that we would get one of those effects or something similar in magnitude, and otherwise nothing happens except we get data on what doesn't work, that seems pretty great. I don't know that it would be the best possible thing to be doing, but it would be worth doing.
As for Sci-Hub or alternative vaccine distribution, well, some of you should do one thing, and some of you should do the other.
In terms of taking into account feasibility, one does need to worry about letting oneself become too constrained and unambitious, to be sure. Yet not actually planning to cut the enemy, and simply figuring out some abstract first-best solutions, to me is actually much less intellectually interesting rather than more interesting, because you would have abstracted away the hard part of the problem.
The fact that effective people with actual solutions believe that getting involved government is a fool's game that cannot possibly produce results is part of the immune system that the (current) government has evolved to keep those people away from politics, thereby reducing competition - and most importantly, stopping people who value tangible results from bringing that pesky trait into the political arena. Yes, it is likely that this specific effort may not work, in the same way that prototype #47 of the light bulb didn't work.
The reason that everything is politics is vacuous content-free PR symbolism is because that is way easier to manage by pols and bureaucrats into things that make them look good - if you have to produce concrete results to keep your job then maybe you might not, and then what?
Look at Trump. The guy has no idea what he's talking about from a policy perspective, but his campaign/takeover of the R party is absolutely ideas-based. He stood up and screamed about something he thought was bad: "immigrants destroying our country", provided a solution: "build a giant wall!!!", and a branding campaign that convinced people to associate that problem->solution with himself: "make america great again."
Just replace "bad thing" with "a compelling way to describe the aggregate harm of those bad policies", replace solution with "a pithy description of a policy package that would actually solve them", and the branding campaign with something more persuasive than what Donald Trump, noted non-genius, came up with. And obviously, since he didn't build much a wall, replace "build content free support for Donald Trump without caring about actual wall results" with "use that publicity to focus solely on associating actual results with getting votes". Is this naive and impractical? Probably! But if Donald Trump - whose largest failure (if you're a person who supported him) is mostly not actually accomplishing any of the actual things he promised, indicating perhaps a skill at branding but not governing, or ironically, deal-making - can do it, then surely there are a few talented people on The Internet who could figure out how to do it.
I'll back them at 19:1. (So, expressing <95% on your claim.)
Details: I'll send you $20. If, within fifteen years, (1) "any policy change similarly good to..." has happened and (2) a reasonable retelling of the story would have to include the thing that is started by these three here, then you pay me [$400, adjusted for change in the S&P500 from now until then].
How about decreasing low-skilled immigration (which is bad for a lot of reasons, of which ethnic conflict is the most important, but ignoring for the sake of argument ethnic conflict, social trust, quality of life, and other intangibles, and focusing purely on GDP per capita, https://www.amazon.com/Wanted-Workers-Unraveling-Immigration-Narrative/dp/0393249018 and https://georgefrancis.substack.com/p/national-iq-is-the-best-predictor are probably the two clearest pieces of evidence that low skilled immigration is bad news) and ending Affirmative Action and its hundreds of variants (given that AA mandates incompetence, making doing literally anything else much harder)? What about actually preventing crime, which is quite easily doable on a technical level (US crime rates today are higher then in 1960, despite vastly more advanced forensic technology, far more surveillance, vastly more money spent on crime prevention, and an older population) and would have huge benefits. Imagine the US with the crime rates of, say, early 20th century England.
As it is, this seems like it will very rapidly turn into just another (D) NGO on top of the hundreds that already exist, which would be a huge waste of talent.
I agree that if it turns into simply another (D) NGO that doesn't do anything differently it will be a waste of talent, and I hope that if that happens I would be sensible enough to hand it off and go do something else more valuable. 'Simply another' NGO with any policy goals, even the best possible ones, would be a similar waste if level of expected progress was typical of NGOs.
I do think that if you looked at the actual much longer policy draft documents you would not worry this was a 'typical D' agenda, on these or other issues, although it would of course also not give you everything you would like. You might, of course, still worry about such an organization being captured and turning into a typical one, but it would lose interest to me if it did.
I have no idea what you have in mind for crime prevention here. What would you do?
I am also curious what you think I should be doing with my time instead, if anything.
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.)
This is one of the biggest problems facing the world. American political dysfunction absolutely cripples our progress. While I have no idea how to even affect this in the slightest and it SEEMS completely intractable to me, I suspect that it must not be; the perception of intractability is incredibly paralyzing to attempts at, well, 'tracting' it.
I don't really have anything to contribute to your cause unless you need a moderately competent software dev for a few hours a week, but at least here's some encouragement:
Go. Cut the enemy. This fight is worth it even if you merely show others that it CAN be fought.
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.
Thank you for the feedback. My responses would be:
1) There are big synergies to be had, in addition to not knowing what is most promising, and also different people will have different things they will be best at doing. To me, it all fits together. Agreed that the focus will in some ways narrow as we learn more.
2) You know, I kind of am. My model of the world is much less opposition-focused than it used to be. Of course there are forces blocking things from happening when they are not happening, and there are lots of public choice problems that require changing the game in various ways. So sure, the systems will warp everything and you need to fight through that, and drafting the first best solution is not the hard part. That's fine.
3) We will see. I agree you have to be able to model others much better. I do think I am vastly better at this than I used to be, and also that the standards for it are supremely low. A lot of even high-level candidates can't do this at all.
I think if you turned this problem upside down, it would say "Made in Higher Education." That is, colleges are turning out so many mis-educated people that I don't think that good public policy stands a chance. But I hope that I am wrong. Good luck!
Thanks! I do think that is one aspect of the problem, although it is one I do not have a good path yet to directly addressing, and I would model the core thing that is going wrong there more as the absence of what is being replaced. That would be its own post.
Glad to see this on the list. Our open source tax and benefit rules engine can identify opportunities to improve cliffs (https://policyengine.org). Just submitted the form, hope we can partner.
Update is that we exist, my one employee will start June 1 and we're going to soft level explore for opportunity. IRS is taking forever to certify, once that's done and we can take funds without a haircut we'll see if people want to fund for real.
If the true odds were 2% that we would get one of those effects or something similar in magnitude, and otherwise nothing happens except we get data on what doesn't work, that seems pretty great. I don't know that it would be the best possible thing to be doing, but it would be worth doing.
As for Sci-Hub or alternative vaccine distribution, well, some of you should do one thing, and some of you should do the other.
In terms of taking into account feasibility, one does need to worry about letting oneself become too constrained and unambitious, to be sure. Yet not actually planning to cut the enemy, and simply figuring out some abstract first-best solutions, to me is actually much less intellectually interesting rather than more interesting, because you would have abstracted away the hard part of the problem.
The fact that effective people with actual solutions believe that getting involved government is a fool's game that cannot possibly produce results is part of the immune system that the (current) government has evolved to keep those people away from politics, thereby reducing competition - and most importantly, stopping people who value tangible results from bringing that pesky trait into the political arena. Yes, it is likely that this specific effort may not work, in the same way that prototype #47 of the light bulb didn't work.
The reason that everything is politics is vacuous content-free PR symbolism is because that is way easier to manage by pols and bureaucrats into things that make them look good - if you have to produce concrete results to keep your job then maybe you might not, and then what?
Look at Trump. The guy has no idea what he's talking about from a policy perspective, but his campaign/takeover of the R party is absolutely ideas-based. He stood up and screamed about something he thought was bad: "immigrants destroying our country", provided a solution: "build a giant wall!!!", and a branding campaign that convinced people to associate that problem->solution with himself: "make america great again."
Just replace "bad thing" with "a compelling way to describe the aggregate harm of those bad policies", replace solution with "a pithy description of a policy package that would actually solve them", and the branding campaign with something more persuasive than what Donald Trump, noted non-genius, came up with. And obviously, since he didn't build much a wall, replace "build content free support for Donald Trump without caring about actual wall results" with "use that publicity to focus solely on associating actual results with getting votes". Is this naive and impractical? Probably! But if Donald Trump - whose largest failure (if you're a person who supported him) is mostly not actually accomplishing any of the actual things he promised, indicating perhaps a skill at branding but not governing, or ironically, deal-making - can do it, then surely there are a few talented people on The Internet who could figure out how to do it.
I'll back them at 19:1. (So, expressing <95% on your claim.)
Details: I'll send you $20. If, within fifteen years, (1) "any policy change similarly good to..." has happened and (2) a reasonable retelling of the story would have to include the thing that is started by these three here, then you pay me [$400, adjusted for change in the S&P500 from now until then].
Do we have a trade?
If you don't want to keep track of the trade, I'll wear the cost of monitoring, and point you at this comment thread if I want to declare victory.
I agree to your operationalization. My $20 up-front to your [$400 adjusted by SPX TR from 2022-09-27 16:00] paid back if it pays.
SPX TR is either of https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5ESP500TR/ or https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/.SPXT or the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested.
I'm ross@r-y.io and I'll email you direct for payment details.
How about decreasing low-skilled immigration (which is bad for a lot of reasons, of which ethnic conflict is the most important, but ignoring for the sake of argument ethnic conflict, social trust, quality of life, and other intangibles, and focusing purely on GDP per capita, https://www.amazon.com/Wanted-Workers-Unraveling-Immigration-Narrative/dp/0393249018 and https://georgefrancis.substack.com/p/national-iq-is-the-best-predictor are probably the two clearest pieces of evidence that low skilled immigration is bad news) and ending Affirmative Action and its hundreds of variants (given that AA mandates incompetence, making doing literally anything else much harder)? What about actually preventing crime, which is quite easily doable on a technical level (US crime rates today are higher then in 1960, despite vastly more advanced forensic technology, far more surveillance, vastly more money spent on crime prevention, and an older population) and would have huge benefits. Imagine the US with the crime rates of, say, early 20th century England.
As it is, this seems like it will very rapidly turn into just another (D) NGO on top of the hundreds that already exist, which would be a huge waste of talent.
I agree that if it turns into simply another (D) NGO that doesn't do anything differently it will be a waste of talent, and I hope that if that happens I would be sensible enough to hand it off and go do something else more valuable. 'Simply another' NGO with any policy goals, even the best possible ones, would be a similar waste if level of expected progress was typical of NGOs.
I do think that if you looked at the actual much longer policy draft documents you would not worry this was a 'typical D' agenda, on these or other issues, although it would of course also not give you everything you would like. You might, of course, still worry about such an organization being captured and turning into a typical one, but it would lose interest to me if it did.
I have no idea what you have in mind for crime prevention here. What would you do?
I am also curious what you think I should be doing with my time instead, if anything.
What sort of software do you think would help you here that doesn’t currently exist?
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.)
This is one of the biggest problems facing the world. American political dysfunction absolutely cripples our progress. While I have no idea how to even affect this in the slightest and it SEEMS completely intractable to me, I suspect that it must not be; the perception of intractability is incredibly paralyzing to attempts at, well, 'tracting' it.
I don't really have anything to contribute to your cause unless you need a moderately competent software dev for a few hours a week, but at least here's some encouragement:
Go. Cut the enemy. This fight is worth it even if you merely show others that it CAN be fought.
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.
Thank you for the feedback. My responses would be:
1) There are big synergies to be had, in addition to not knowing what is most promising, and also different people will have different things they will be best at doing. To me, it all fits together. Agreed that the focus will in some ways narrow as we learn more.
2) You know, I kind of am. My model of the world is much less opposition-focused than it used to be. Of course there are forces blocking things from happening when they are not happening, and there are lots of public choice problems that require changing the game in various ways. So sure, the systems will warp everything and you need to fight through that, and drafting the first best solution is not the hard part. That's fine.
3) We will see. I agree you have to be able to model others much better. I do think I am vastly better at this than I used to be, and also that the standards for it are supremely low. A lot of even high-level candidates can't do this at all.
I think if you turned this problem upside down, it would say "Made in Higher Education." That is, colleges are turning out so many mis-educated people that I don't think that good public policy stands a chance. But I hope that I am wrong. Good luck!
Thanks! I do think that is one aspect of the problem, although it is one I do not have a good path yet to directly addressing, and I would model the core thing that is going wrong there more as the absence of what is being replaced. That would be its own post.
>avoiding 100%+ marginal tax rates
Glad to see this on the list. Our open source tax and benefit rules engine can identify opportunities to improve cliffs (https://policyengine.org). Just submitted the form, hope we can partner.
I am glad you are doing this!
Just curious for an update on what has happened with Balsa Research since September? Thanks!
Update is that we exist, my one employee will start June 1 and we're going to soft level explore for opportunity. IRS is taking forever to certify, once that's done and we can take funds without a haircut we'll see if people want to fund for real.