What policy ideas do you think are both tractable and high impact?
(For governments)
Interested in all ideas at any level of certainty, concreteness and polishedness, focused on any cause area.
(For governments)
Interested in all ideas at any level of certainty, concreteness and polishedness, focused on any cause area.
No strong opinion on re-posting the same question, but would rather previous versions not be deleted to re-post them if they got answers:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230103122818/https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/85EmFxDmcQBhnrABt/what-are-some-high-impact-policy-ideas-that-you-consider-to
Don’t have time to write up the full arguments why, but housing and pandemic preparedness would be my top two. Immigration is less tractable but highly valuable. This is from a US perspective.
Globally, I think that promoting women’s rights in many developing countries is a potentially high impact activity.
For developed countries, my favorite policy is unemployment benefits contingent on unemployment level. When the economy is heated, benefits are contracted, when turns recessive, they are expanded and lengthened.
It is good for people and for economic stabilization.
Disclaimer: this is very much just me spitballing. And I only know about the U.S. And I ditched the tractability requirement (see below).
Reasonably high confidence that these are high-impact (though I don’t claim to be an expert):
Unconditional cash transfers (weaker form: child tax credit (big effects on child poverty))
Liberalizing land-use restrictions (like zoning )
Land value tax (this op-ed based on this research was making waves today)
Prison reform (I understand this used to be an EA cause area, but I don’t hear about it much anymore?)
Pandemic resistance (pretty sure there are EAs working on this right now?)
Welfare reform (this is a massive category that deserves to be broken down more, but in the interest of my not pouring too much work into this post I’ll just say: housing vouchers are way too difficult to get and too many programs use work requirements that don’t do much good)
Proportional representation (or, a weaker but perhaps more achievable electoral reform: ranked choice voting)
Liberalizing immigration
It felt wrong not to include something healthcare-related here, but health policy is an area I don’t know much about. As I understand it, the highest impact reforms in the U.S. would need to involve both moving in a single-payer direction, but also require supply-side interventions to decrease the costs of care and drugs (see patent idea below)
These policies are also interesting to think about, though I have lower confidence in their impact:
Sectoral bargaining
Occupational licensing reform (too many jobs require too many hoops to jump through)
Patent reform (could we get the same innovation with prizes? I don’t know but it seems worth considering)
Public school funding (LARGE CAVEAT: There’s clear benefits to higher quality teachers, but it’s less clear how much you’d need to pay high quality teachers to get them into disadvantaged classrooms where they’re needed)
I ditched the “tractability” requirement here because I’m not sure how to think about it. A lot of great policies already have people working at them but still aren’t getting enough attention. Could EA move the needle? Idk, maybe (though frankly, I think our current brand is probably too politically toxic). But then there’s also the fact that once any good policy starts getting attention, it triggers political resistance.
Also, I’m all but certain that policies in low-income countries have way more impact than here in the U.S. I just don’t know enough to speak to those.