So in the US, the benefits of a policy proposal are, unfortunately, almost irrelevant. We have essentially infinite lists of suggestions for better policies; adding more does basically nothing. The entirety of the problem is the construction of the law-making machine
I guess I don’t currently believe this is true. My model is sort of:
Everything is a chaotic jumble and there’s lots of variation from politician to politician and from government agency to government agency. Within that jumble, new good ideas (and normal smart well-intentioned actions, etc.) sometimes pop up, and periodically make a big difference.
To the extent this look homogeneous it’s usually because of mimicry; what gets mimicked is highly contingent; and some of the things that shift the mimicry focus are good new ideas.
So there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit unplucked, and yet new good ideas are still quite useful… somehow. I don’t really have a theory for why that is. UBI-ish ideas seem to be catching on even though plenty of milder, less-weird improvements have languished in obscurity for decades. To my eye, academics and bloggers continuing to chatter about this seems to have made a difference.
One possible explanation for things like UBI: perhaps policymakers tend to look for modest improvements because their local incentives and bad models make them feel this is better; weird bloggers tend to gravitate toward more ambitious improvements because they’re fun to think about; but in fact ambitious improvements are better across the board because they generate more enthusiasm and they more effectively shift the Overton window / break bad equilibria of silence.
and so to me, your suggestion in that sphere is that we deny the only thing that matters: the sausage-making machine.
I think some people should talk about electability and popular appeal, but hidden in specialized blogs rather than on the front page of newspapers or in most online policy discussions.
It sounds like the key cluster of evidence for your view here is roughly this:
Everything is a chaotic jumble and there’s lots of variation from politician to politician and from government agency to government agency. Within that jumble, new good ideas (and normal smart well-intentioned actions, etc.) sometimes pop up, and periodically make a big difference.
I.e. things look chaotic, and you do sometimes see good ideas adopted within that chaos, therefore more good ideas does sometimes matter.
Here’s a different model for the same phenomenon. There is a “policy equilibrium”, determined by the incentives faced by policymakers, and policy is generally near-equilibrium. An example relevant to current events: policymakers at the FDA and CDC are incentivized largely to avoid blame. So long as they aren’t blamed for any major problem, they face a pretty stable career trajectory without much room for other career incentives. So, this model would predict that at any given time FDA/CDC policies are approximately-optimal for blame avoidance. (This is oversimplified; a proper discussion would include both other incentives and the distinction between optimization-via-intentional-planning vs optimization-via-selection.)
New good ideas (and new bad ideas) sometimes pop up mainly because the environment sometimes shifts external incentives. For instance, if the FDA/CDC perceive themselves to be at serious risk of blame for blocking pandemic response, then they’ll adopt policies less likely to block pandemic response (or at least less likely to be perceived that way).
I guess I don’t currently believe this is true. My model is sort of:
Everything is a chaotic jumble and there’s lots of variation from politician to politician and from government agency to government agency. Within that jumble, new good ideas (and normal smart well-intentioned actions, etc.) sometimes pop up, and periodically make a big difference.
To the extent this look homogeneous it’s usually because of mimicry; what gets mimicked is highly contingent; and some of the things that shift the mimicry focus are good new ideas.
So there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit unplucked, and yet new good ideas are still quite useful… somehow. I don’t really have a theory for why that is. UBI-ish ideas seem to be catching on even though plenty of milder, less-weird improvements have languished in obscurity for decades. To my eye, academics and bloggers continuing to chatter about this seems to have made a difference.
One possible explanation for things like UBI: perhaps policymakers tend to look for modest improvements because their local incentives and bad models make them feel this is better; weird bloggers tend to gravitate toward more ambitious improvements because they’re fun to think about; but in fact ambitious improvements are better across the board because they generate more enthusiasm and they more effectively shift the Overton window / break bad equilibria of silence.
I think some people should talk about electability and popular appeal, but hidden in specialized blogs rather than on the front page of newspapers or in most online policy discussions.
It sounds like the key cluster of evidence for your view here is roughly this:
I.e. things look chaotic, and you do sometimes see good ideas adopted within that chaos, therefore more good ideas does sometimes matter.
Here’s a different model for the same phenomenon. There is a “policy equilibrium”, determined by the incentives faced by policymakers, and policy is generally near-equilibrium. An example relevant to current events: policymakers at the FDA and CDC are incentivized largely to avoid blame. So long as they aren’t blamed for any major problem, they face a pretty stable career trajectory without much room for other career incentives. So, this model would predict that at any given time FDA/CDC policies are approximately-optimal for blame avoidance. (This is oversimplified; a proper discussion would include both other incentives and the distinction between optimization-via-intentional-planning vs optimization-via-selection.)
New good ideas (and new bad ideas) sometimes pop up mainly because the environment sometimes shifts external incentives. For instance, if the FDA/CDC perceive themselves to be at serious risk of blame for blocking pandemic response, then they’ll adopt policies less likely to block pandemic response (or at least less likely to be perceived that way).