Depends on domain we’re talking about. The post I linked in the last paragraph will probably answer your question in more detail than you’d ever want, but I’ll answer it briefly here.
I’d very happily back the two examples that I gave. And that’s because we can define reasonable optimality criteria for each of those areas (voting systems and tax policy) and show that our policy proposals satisfy those criteria under some reasonable assumptions.
The key point here is that, for the land value tax, the optimality criteria and the assumptions required are extremely weak, i.e. every person informed on the matter would agree with them.
For the voting system change, there’s actually a proof that you can’t satisfy all the conditions that you probably want for that system (Arrow’s impossibility theorem). So in that example, there could be reasonable debate about which property set we want, but I’d be happy If America changed to any number of proposed voting systems. For an introduction on the topic, see CGP Grey’s video.
This delay strategy is definitely a last resort. If you can implement a good policy today, then do that. But if you face insurmountable road blocks, and you know the policy is optimal (by some reasonable definition), then it may very well be the best option available to you.
As for the 1923 question, I’d say we didn’t have a theoretical foundation for what makes a policy optimal. Given that, there is no policy I would have tried to have advocated for in this way (even though the land value tax was invented before 1879). The article that I linked you to contains my attempt to lay those theoretical foundations (or the start of it anyway, I haven’t finished it yet).
Depends on domain we’re talking about. The post I linked in the last paragraph will probably answer your question in more detail than you’d ever want, but I’ll answer it briefly here.
I’d very happily back the two examples that I gave. And that’s because we can define reasonable optimality criteria for each of those areas (voting systems and tax policy) and show that our policy proposals satisfy those criteria under some reasonable assumptions.
The key point here is that, for the land value tax, the optimality criteria and the assumptions required are extremely weak, i.e. every person informed on the matter would agree with them.
For the voting system change, there’s actually a proof that you can’t satisfy all the conditions that you probably want for that system (Arrow’s impossibility theorem). So in that example, there could be reasonable debate about which property set we want, but I’d be happy If America changed to any number of proposed voting systems. For an introduction on the topic, see CGP Grey’s video.
This delay strategy is definitely a last resort. If you can implement a good policy today, then do that. But if you face insurmountable road blocks, and you know the policy is optimal (by some reasonable definition), then it may very well be the best option available to you.
As for the 1923 question, I’d say we didn’t have a theoretical foundation for what makes a policy optimal. Given that, there is no policy I would have tried to have advocated for in this way (even though the land value tax was invented before 1879). The article that I linked you to contains my attempt to lay those theoretical foundations (or the start of it anyway, I haven’t finished it yet).