> Republicans seem to be post-policy, their groups doubly so.
Huh? I don't know which groups you mean, but the groups I'm aware of seem pretty policy-focused, from Claremont to Cato.
There has always been less correlation between policy and rhetoric on the Republican side, but this seems like a good thing consider how pretty obviously bad the policy preferences of both Democratic and Republican bases would be.
Overall good piece, but like I said in our convo I think many people underrate how dynamic and high-variance the Republican party is.
Is Cato ever R? I thought it was libertarian. I know less about Claremont. If you provide links to some of their most exciting stuff I will check them out.
Cato is right leaning libertarian, but is considered allied with the R’s. Claremont is good at what they do but what they do is explicitly education, not policy research.* I think that there are a lot of people in the conservative movement, as opposed to the Republican Party, who are doing at least part of Balsa’s apparent plan. AEI seems especially good with the first few steps, but not so much on the lobbying, and other groups like ACC** do something similar to Balsa (pro flourishing policy work + actually pushing the policy through) albeit only in regards to narrow areas (such as climate change + energy policy.)
I agree with OP that most of the individual steps of the Balsa plan are being done competently by someone somewhere on the right, but AFAICT Balsa is unique in sticking them together in the way you’ve done.
The Claremont scholars have pretty detailed policy plans but I didn't realize that very little of it is public (or at least on their site). There's a bit of adversarial spin on this but you can reasonably reverse engineer the rough direction from here: https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2022/08/17/dc-federal-workforce-schedule-f. I think they (Claremont) have thought harder than anyone (including me) on what it would take to actually make bureaucracies accountable.
One piece of feedback: as written, this narrative strongly seems to imply/be anchored in legislative action, not executive action. I'd suggest that there's also real room for a moral-mazes grounded element here that's targeted on the executive asking, "let's figure out what stupid tasks civil servants are doing for genuinely no reason required by law, and make a bid to grab that time for our priorities under existing authorities."
Everyone in DC knows a story of their friend who asked, "why do we do this weekly report that takes up half the time of Office A and send it to Office B?" and the answer ultimately turned out to be, "Office B doesn't know either, hasn't used that kind of data in a decade, and thought Office A had a vested interest in making it, so never wanted to burn influence on suggesting stopping the report."
Yeah, that's fair. I focused on that side of things here. There's definitely other angles I'm exploring that involve more executive action, or trying to influence who is the executive then getting the action. Most of it applies there as well, transposed/translated.
I definitely noticed that no one seems to be in charge of the checking if the report is used department, or other similar questions, either, and there's surely lots of room for improvement there if one can find a way to be in position to change it.
It's funny, but I have heard multiple times Democrats complaining that their side never has workable policies/legislation designed and ready to go, unlike the Republicans who have draft legislation written and chambered for when they win an election and can pass it.
It might just be the usual "my team is stupid and ineffective compared to the opposite team who is evil and effective" gripe, but a pretty consistent one. Maybe the D's lump libertarians in with Republicans overall?
A second point: How are you going to handle policy positions like "FDA delenda est"? I note in your essay a flavor of "propose ways to do more" instead of things that maybe the government should stop doing all together. Maybe just a writing style thing, but I would like clarification on whether you think stopping particular programs or departments is just too big or politically impossible to bother with.
If this was meant to imply that there wasn't a lot of Do Less involved, that is my error. A lot of what I mean by 'draft a law' is 'draft a way to repeal the old law without things breaking in the transition.'
I do think a complete 'FDA Delenda Est' position is more than we can hope to pull off, and repealing Kefauver-Harris is also asking a lot - I absolutely intend to be strongly in favor of that and have the new rules ready to go down the line, but I'm more in a Right to Try level of ambition there to start and go from there, probably.
Ok gotcha, that makes sense! I was a little surprised by the flavor, since a lot of what you recommend is along the lines of "Sink the Jones Act" so I figured I would check.
If you can devise a way to make repealing bad laws and liquidating bad departments or programs a palatable thing that elected officials can run on and citizens cheer, you will have done a massively good deed for humanity.
Zvi, one thing to add is how to work the bureaucracy once something is passed. As we saw with ACA and many post passage regulatory actions, this process may even be more important. Very few people understand the guts of the system: incentives in the bureaucracy, procurement, and the regulatory process. Those need attention to get good policy.
Dominic Cummings says a lot of the right things but when you look at what he actually accomplished (getting Brexit done by scaremongering to old people in Facebook ads, and as a result doing significant damage to the British economy and quality of life while creating vastly more red tape and paperwork for anyone who wants to do anything involving Europe, for little or no benefit as far as I can tell), it doesn't seem like involving him would be a good idea.
Do you see a meaningful distinction between that scaremongering and standard issue scaremongering? Seems like all sides do a lot of things in the same reference class, although I was in The States the whole time so I lack context.
Well the scaremongering was stuff like “Turkey is going to join the EU soon and Britain will be flooded with Turkish immigrants”, which wasn’t true (they’re nowhere near joining) and had a racist/xenophobic undertone to say the least. I don’t think the Remain side did anything quite so blatant. Disinformation about the EU was the first stage of British politics transitioning to a post-truth environment where politicians can blatantly and provably lie and then not resign, which wasn’t the case 20 years ago. See also Cummings going on TV to explain that he had to take a car trip in violation of all his own government’s Covid rules to “test his eyesight” after having Covid.
Turkey was on the path to joining though... Cameron even said he wanted to "pave the road from Ankara to Brussels". Also, talking about control of immigration policy is hardly racist... it's that sort of view that prevents one from having full understandings of issues. Have you noticed that UKIP and immigration as a debate in general has now effectively ceased since Brexit?
Yes the car trip is perhaps unbelievable, but reality is often strange like that. The explanation is surprisingly reasonable in the Laura Kuenssberg BBC interview. Of course it is a bad thing that it happened, but not as unreasonable as some make it out to be.
His explanation about why he was travelling around illegally was not 'reasonable'. If you think a good way to check if you are safe to drive is to do a daytrip to a castle then I don't know what to tell you.
One of the biggest reasons he did Brexit was to get rid of EU red tape and promote growth. Whether that has happened/will happen is a matter of debate, but certainly is not settled fact.
As for what he has accomplished: reform in the DfE, creation of ARIA, massive changes in procurement spending, data science in No10 just to name a few... seems like the sort of thing Zvi might find interesting and useful!
I am familiar with his self-serving blog. Most economists agree Brexit has been terrible for growth. Taking the UK out of the EU customs union has hit British business that want to export to the EU (which is half of all British exports) with loads more red tape.
The British economy is empirically doing worse than other EU countries now and there is no coherent reason why Brexit will promote growth. Covid procurement was pretty terrible, ARIA won't replace the damage to British tech and science that's been done by leaving EU funding structures, and I doubt the impact of data science when the country is run by arts grads who can't read a graph and don't know how many millions are in a billion. The data driven response to a graph showing Covid cases doubling every few days would have been early lockdowns, but twice the government Cummings served waited far too late to react and then brought in insanely over the top measures like restricting outdoors activity.
The Tories don't know or care about technology and they will continue to run British science into the ground. Good young scientists are leaving for the EU.
Cummings is only good at lying and self-promotion. He's a History grad wordcel larping as some kind of rationalist, but is legacy is that he has done huge damage to the British economy. Getting him involved in Balsa would be a huge reputational hit among people who understand the issues and haven't swallowed his snake oil.
>Getting him involved in Balsa would be a huge reputational hit among people who understand the issues and haven't swallowed his snake oil.
Well I'm curious what Zvi's opinion is about him and if it is so harsh? I suspect not. And I doubt it would be quite the reputatinal hit you make it out to be.
Not familiar with the term The Blob, although I can and will guess. It's the biggest risk. I described some of my plans to avoid this, and I will especially be careful to grow slow and hire for people who will be VERY aware of this danger, and also raise money to find the right donors who won't press in that direction, etc. But yeah, it's a big risk.
An republican alternative to the ACA had been proposed by the Manhattan Institute in 2014 called "Transcending Obamacare: A Patient-Centered Plan for Near-Universal Coverage and Permanent Fiscal Solvency". Figuring out why it never made it to Congress might be worthwhile.
I've become too cynical to put any real faith into such endeavors as this, but...best of luck anyway. Wish I could help more, besides whatever small effect my subscription revenue has on the Official Project Budget. Even if Balsa ultimately goes nowhere, to-dream-of-a-better-world and attempting-to-cut-the-enemy are important skills to model for others. Nothing makes me sadder in the modern age than people who give up on their own potential. The Devil's greatest trick, and all that...
Donald Trump is the authoritarian? Are you paying attention?
Election denialism? Are you saying 2020 was simply perfect, that no laws were broken? Interesting. Why don’t we just look at facts? Here are some just on Pennsylvania. And you think this is normal?
I'm intrigued by your idea about a "full stack approach". I am worried that 'higher' layers in the stack are riskier ('operationally') and that failures there might prevent work done on 'lower' layers from being useful _then on_ – especially given your own stated preference for working in those lower layers.
There's a (frustrating) amount of apparent 'bundling' in politics and that often seems to 'poison' potential policies by association based on those bundles. (And, for many people, there seems to be only two bundles, e.g. 'left' or 'right', or Democratic or Republican.)
At some point, you're going to have to make 'risky' calls at 'layer 8' and make hard tradeoffs about 'wins for you' versus 'wins overall'. (I do expect you to do a reasonably good job at that, but less so if those decisions are made relatively more indirectly by yourself.)
Having worked in two separate bureaucracies, I applaud you for your effort and wish you the best of luck. Although I find most of the positions a state takes on issues are due to the people in the room, its somewhat the luck of the draw. Therefore I usually come to the conclusion that until there occurs a substantial change in those occupying the current administrative state unnecessary regulations will continue to be created.
> Republicans seem to be post-policy, their groups doubly so.
Huh? I don't know which groups you mean, but the groups I'm aware of seem pretty policy-focused, from Claremont to Cato.
There has always been less correlation between policy and rhetoric on the Republican side, but this seems like a good thing consider how pretty obviously bad the policy preferences of both Democratic and Republican bases would be.
Overall good piece, but like I said in our convo I think many people underrate how dynamic and high-variance the Republican party is.
Is Cato ever R? I thought it was libertarian. I know less about Claremont. If you provide links to some of their most exciting stuff I will check them out.
Cato is right leaning libertarian, but is considered allied with the R’s. Claremont is good at what they do but what they do is explicitly education, not policy research.* I think that there are a lot of people in the conservative movement, as opposed to the Republican Party, who are doing at least part of Balsa’s apparent plan. AEI seems especially good with the first few steps, but not so much on the lobbying, and other groups like ACC** do something similar to Balsa (pro flourishing policy work + actually pushing the policy through) albeit only in regards to narrow areas (such as climate change + energy policy.)
I agree with OP that most of the individual steps of the Balsa plan are being done competently by someone somewhere on the right, but AFAICT Balsa is unique in sticking them together in the way you’ve done.
*see the “what we do” section https://www.claremont.org/page/claremonts-mission/
**the American Conservation Coalition, for whom I used to work
This is basically right.
The Claremont scholars have pretty detailed policy plans but I didn't realize that very little of it is public (or at least on their site). There's a bit of adversarial spin on this but you can reasonably reverse engineer the rough direction from here: https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2022/08/17/dc-federal-workforce-schedule-f. I think they (Claremont) have thought harder than anyone (including me) on what it would take to actually make bureaucracies accountable.
One piece of feedback: as written, this narrative strongly seems to imply/be anchored in legislative action, not executive action. I'd suggest that there's also real room for a moral-mazes grounded element here that's targeted on the executive asking, "let's figure out what stupid tasks civil servants are doing for genuinely no reason required by law, and make a bid to grab that time for our priorities under existing authorities."
Everyone in DC knows a story of their friend who asked, "why do we do this weekly report that takes up half the time of Office A and send it to Office B?" and the answer ultimately turned out to be, "Office B doesn't know either, hasn't used that kind of data in a decade, and thought Office A had a vested interest in making it, so never wanted to burn influence on suggesting stopping the report."
Yeah, that's fair. I focused on that side of things here. There's definitely other angles I'm exploring that involve more executive action, or trying to influence who is the executive then getting the action. Most of it applies there as well, transposed/translated.
I definitely noticed that no one seems to be in charge of the checking if the report is used department, or other similar questions, either, and there's surely lots of room for improvement there if one can find a way to be in position to change it.
It's funny, but I have heard multiple times Democrats complaining that their side never has workable policies/legislation designed and ready to go, unlike the Republicans who have draft legislation written and chambered for when they win an election and can pass it.
It might just be the usual "my team is stupid and ineffective compared to the opposite team who is evil and effective" gripe, but a pretty consistent one. Maybe the D's lump libertarians in with Republicans overall?
A second point: How are you going to handle policy positions like "FDA delenda est"? I note in your essay a flavor of "propose ways to do more" instead of things that maybe the government should stop doing all together. Maybe just a writing style thing, but I would like clarification on whether you think stopping particular programs or departments is just too big or politically impossible to bother with.
If this was meant to imply that there wasn't a lot of Do Less involved, that is my error. A lot of what I mean by 'draft a law' is 'draft a way to repeal the old law without things breaking in the transition.'
I do think a complete 'FDA Delenda Est' position is more than we can hope to pull off, and repealing Kefauver-Harris is also asking a lot - I absolutely intend to be strongly in favor of that and have the new rules ready to go down the line, but I'm more in a Right to Try level of ambition there to start and go from there, probably.
Ok gotcha, that makes sense! I was a little surprised by the flavor, since a lot of what you recommend is along the lines of "Sink the Jones Act" so I figured I would check.
If you can devise a way to make repealing bad laws and liquidating bad departments or programs a palatable thing that elected officials can run on and citizens cheer, you will have done a massively good deed for humanity.
Zvi, one thing to add is how to work the bureaucracy once something is passed. As we saw with ACA and many post passage regulatory actions, this process may even be more important. Very few people understand the guts of the system: incentives in the bureaucracy, procurement, and the regulatory process. Those need attention to get good policy.
Is Dominic Cummings involved with Balsa Research? (I hope so)
I ask because he was recently in the US for a project and this sounds right up his alley.
Dominic Cummings says a lot of the right things but when you look at what he actually accomplished (getting Brexit done by scaremongering to old people in Facebook ads, and as a result doing significant damage to the British economy and quality of life while creating vastly more red tape and paperwork for anyone who wants to do anything involving Europe, for little or no benefit as far as I can tell), it doesn't seem like involving him would be a good idea.
Do you see a meaningful distinction between that scaremongering and standard issue scaremongering? Seems like all sides do a lot of things in the same reference class, although I was in The States the whole time so I lack context.
Well the scaremongering was stuff like “Turkey is going to join the EU soon and Britain will be flooded with Turkish immigrants”, which wasn’t true (they’re nowhere near joining) and had a racist/xenophobic undertone to say the least. I don’t think the Remain side did anything quite so blatant. Disinformation about the EU was the first stage of British politics transitioning to a post-truth environment where politicians can blatantly and provably lie and then not resign, which wasn’t the case 20 years ago. See also Cummings going on TV to explain that he had to take a car trip in violation of all his own government’s Covid rules to “test his eyesight” after having Covid.
Turkey was on the path to joining though... Cameron even said he wanted to "pave the road from Ankara to Brussels". Also, talking about control of immigration policy is hardly racist... it's that sort of view that prevents one from having full understandings of issues. Have you noticed that UKIP and immigration as a debate in general has now effectively ceased since Brexit?
Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/2033992-david-cameron-turkey-is-a-secular-and-democratic-state-this-is/
Yes the car trip is perhaps unbelievable, but reality is often strange like that. The explanation is surprisingly reasonable in the Laura Kuenssberg BBC interview. Of course it is a bad thing that it happened, but not as unreasonable as some make it out to be.
Talking about control of immigration policy is fine, but the ads claimed that Turkey was going to join the EU by 2020, which was blatant disinformation. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/unfounded-claim-turkey-swing-brexit-referendum/
His explanation about why he was travelling around illegally was not 'reasonable'. If you think a good way to check if you are safe to drive is to do a daytrip to a castle then I don't know what to tell you.
Respectfully disagree. I think you're perhaps letting your biases occlude your view of the campaign, it was far more than quote unquote "scaremongering to old people". https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-branching-histories-of-the-2016-referendum-and-the-frogs-before-the-storm-2/
One of the biggest reasons he did Brexit was to get rid of EU red tape and promote growth. Whether that has happened/will happen is a matter of debate, but certainly is not settled fact.
As for what he has accomplished: reform in the DfE, creation of ARIA, massive changes in procurement spending, data science in No10 just to name a few... seems like the sort of thing Zvi might find interesting and useful!
If you want to know what he really believes (media does a bad job explaining this generally...) this is a good subset of his writing: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/doPejjd84w8BmERqj/choice-writings-of-dominic-cummings
I am familiar with his self-serving blog. Most economists agree Brexit has been terrible for growth. Taking the UK out of the EU customs union has hit British business that want to export to the EU (which is half of all British exports) with loads more red tape.
https://www.ft.com/content/7a209a34-7d95-47aa-91b0-bf02d4214764
The British economy is empirically doing worse than other EU countries now and there is no coherent reason why Brexit will promote growth. Covid procurement was pretty terrible, ARIA won't replace the damage to British tech and science that's been done by leaving EU funding structures, and I doubt the impact of data science when the country is run by arts grads who can't read a graph and don't know how many millions are in a billion. The data driven response to a graph showing Covid cases doubling every few days would have been early lockdowns, but twice the government Cummings served waited far too late to react and then brought in insanely over the top measures like restricting outdoors activity.
The Tories don't know or care about technology and they will continue to run British science into the ground. Good young scientists are leaving for the EU.
Cummings is only good at lying and self-promotion. He's a History grad wordcel larping as some kind of rationalist, but is legacy is that he has done huge damage to the British economy. Getting him involved in Balsa would be a huge reputational hit among people who understand the issues and haven't swallowed his snake oil.
>Getting him involved in Balsa would be a huge reputational hit among people who understand the issues and haven't swallowed his snake oil.
Well I'm curious what Zvi's opinion is about him and if it is so harsh? I suspect not. And I doubt it would be quite the reputatinal hit you make it out to be.
How will this effort not just get eaten up and absorbed by what Dominick Cummings calls the blob?
Not familiar with the term The Blob, although I can and will guess. It's the biggest risk. I described some of my plans to avoid this, and I will especially be careful to grow slow and hire for people who will be VERY aware of this danger, and also raise money to find the right donors who won't press in that direction, etc. But yeah, it's a big risk.
An republican alternative to the ACA had been proposed by the Manhattan Institute in 2014 called "Transcending Obamacare: A Patient-Centered Plan for Near-Universal Coverage and Permanent Fiscal Solvency". Figuring out why it never made it to Congress might be worthwhile.
Death is the enemy?
I've become too cynical to put any real faith into such endeavors as this, but...best of luck anyway. Wish I could help more, besides whatever small effect my subscription revenue has on the Official Project Budget. Even if Balsa ultimately goes nowhere, to-dream-of-a-better-world and attempting-to-cut-the-enemy are important skills to model for others. Nothing makes me sadder in the modern age than people who give up on their own potential. The Devil's greatest trick, and all that...
This seems like a very worthwhile effort that the world badly needs. I don't have anything to contribute but I hope it works.
Donald Trump is the authoritarian? Are you paying attention?
Election denialism? Are you saying 2020 was simply perfect, that no laws were broken? Interesting. Why don’t we just look at facts? Here are some just on Pennsylvania. And you think this is normal?
https://www.einpresswire.com/article/566680689/pennsylvania-2020-election-canvassing-results
I am _very_ curious about how this turns out!
I'm intrigued by your idea about a "full stack approach". I am worried that 'higher' layers in the stack are riskier ('operationally') and that failures there might prevent work done on 'lower' layers from being useful _then on_ – especially given your own stated preference for working in those lower layers.
There's a (frustrating) amount of apparent 'bundling' in politics and that often seems to 'poison' potential policies by association based on those bundles. (And, for many people, there seems to be only two bundles, e.g. 'left' or 'right', or Democratic or Republican.)
At some point, you're going to have to make 'risky' calls at 'layer 8' and make hard tradeoffs about 'wins for you' versus 'wins overall'. (I do expect you to do a reasonably good job at that, but less so if those decisions are made relatively more indirectly by yourself.)
Reading the essay I thought of this article:
https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-procedure-fetish/
Having worked in two separate bureaucracies, I applaud you for your effort and wish you the best of luck. Although I find most of the positions a state takes on issues are due to the people in the room, its somewhat the luck of the draw. Therefore I usually come to the conclusion that until there occurs a substantial change in those occupying the current administrative state unnecessary regulations will continue to be created.