I disagree with most of your points.[1] But even if I didn’t, it would be unclear to me how those considerations outweigh Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, which you barely address.
What Trump and his supporters did in the wake of the 2020 election is a pretty central example of an attempted self-coup. To recap, Trump filed hundreds of lawsuits in all of the swing states to attempt to get ballots thrown out. He asked on Twitter for votes not to be counted. He begged and pleaded the Georgia Secretary of State to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. He successfully got fake Electoral College certificates in seven different states. He urged Mike Pence to overturn the election for him, and after that didn’t work, he chose a running mate this year that said he would have overturned the election if he were in Pence’s place.
This is not the kind of thing that has ever happened before in a national election in a democratic country (that remained democratic afterward).
So, unless you have a counter-example in mind, we have to confront the fact that the United States is in a reference class with a very real risk of transitioning to an autocracy. And, notwithstanding some unfree, anti-market policies promoted by the Democratic party and the existence of woke journalists, the United States under Democratic rule is still a much better place to pursue EA projects (or pretty much any kind of large-scale enterprise) than any existing autocratic or hybrid regime.
[1] Here are some of my disagreements, in no particular order:
On immigration, Trump has said he will do STEM degree visas, and has put forward point systems before for increasing high-skill immigration.
I think you’re misremembering an offhand comment he made on a podcast in June. He said that he would give green cards automatically to foreign graduates of US colleges, which does sound great, but then his campaign walked back on that promise after the (predictable) backlash from his supporters.
Trump’s last administration definitely cracked down on high-skilled legal immigration; it’s unclear why he’d do a 180 in his next administration.
On natalism: humans evolved and are not happiness machines in a vacuum: we should expect people will have higher wellbeing when they have healthy kids than when they don’t. More happy productive people is good, and sustainable fertility lowers the pressure for AI as a deus ex machina to save/sustain everyone in the future.
If you want people to have more children, it’s unclear why you’d support a candidate whose primary policy goal is to prevent immigrants from providing affordable services to Americans.
Trump is also more willing to fire people whether for competence or personal loyalty, but the net result is more competence in decision making relative to the incentives provided by not firing people for anything other than scandals.
Trump once hired his personal bodyman (literally the guy who carried his bags around, John McEntee) as Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, who then performed a witch hunt in federal agencies, targeting everyone who wasn’t MAGA enough or who made the mistake of liking a Taylor Swift Instagram post and replacing them with zealots. Trump seems to hire people on the basis of sycophancy rather than merit; many of his appointees had no expertise in the areas they were supposed to lead and even denied scientific consensus (e.g. Scott Pruitt).
In his next administration, Trump plans to fire tens of thousands of non-political federal government workers (including scientists and experts) and replace them with loyalists. This is a very clear indication that he values zealotry over expertise and merit. So I don’t think it makes sense to claim that Trump would hire more competent people, when he transparently cares way less about competence than Democrats do.
while I don’t think the change in abortion rights was great, Sam is right that it is a sunk cost.
This is very much not true. JD Vance has hinted that he’d support federal surveillance of interstate travel to prevent women from getting abortions; the federal government could ban mifepristone nationally if Trump is elected (which Project 2025 recommends), and Republican trifecta could, of course, pass a national abortion ban.
If you want people to have more children, it’s unclear why you’d support a candidate whose primary policy goal is to prevent immigrants from providing affordable services to Americans.
I mean TFR (total fertility rate) is falling everywhere, but it’s at least plausible that preventing people from higher-TFR countries immigrating to lower-TFR countries will increase net number of children. (Just narrowly making a claim about the logical implication; not saying that I endorse this policy).
Re, coup risk: see my responses to Phib below. I agree anything coup related is extremely concerning. I understand why they did so much nonsense given their belief state, and I think it is extremely important to take action to credibly address their belief state. The right is exacerbating it’s own belief state with spammy nonsense accusations, but the left is also amplifying the worst ones and ignoring their far more plausible complaints related to illegal immigration. In other words, the Dem’s strategy intentionally (or via motivated laziness?) makes the risk of coup from the right worse to attract voters via fear and prevent the loss of any minor advantages derived from potential election vulnerabilities that on net favor the left. It is very much not a good situation overall, the election norms are currently in a very bad state on the left and the right, but I think there is more common knowledge of how bad things are to the right election manipulation wise than to the left. I do not think the risks are equal, and I don’t want to play the both sides game.
On immigration, thanks for correcting me. Green cards are different from visas, I will correct my comment from earlier. That said, Trump walking back his promise to include a vetting process is ambiguous: on paper if you pass a background check and you get the degree, you’ll still get a green card: so what matters in practice here is if he kills the process with bureaucracy (e.g. like the entrepreneur visa). On H-1Bs, increasing stringency doesn’t matter much if the flows don’t decrease: it just increases the expected value of those that get through at a given cap. In other words, for the cap, Trump made changes to select the best: the admin changed the lottery to prioritize those with the highest salary offers, which is both good for growth and for not driving down wages. The Trump admin basically stayed at or exceeded the Obama era H-1b maximums with the exception of COVID. The Biden admin went even lower for the second year of COVID, but I assume Biden will finally catch up to and exceed the Trump H-1b average this year via uncapped visas to Universities and NGOs?
On natalism, it is very unclear that illegal immigration will increase the domestic birthrate. Illegal immigrants can build houses but they can also occupy them. People who have their wages competed down will tend to have fewer kids, but being able to afford more may help. Ultimately I think the bigger issue is regulations more so than labor supply forcing minimum costs up, and cultural issues that leave basically all high income countries below replacement. If I recall correctly, Israel is the only high income country above replacement fertility (and now secular Israelis going below replacement too).
On competence: To steel man the Dems a bit, I do think they have a better talent base to select from (other than for some areas of business/industry) and an inherently lower alignment penalty which can reduce cost overruns in some programs. At the same time, this also generates a tremendous amount of groupthink in government relative to a Trump administration. In terms of witch hunts, you are missing the big picture: Dem admins don’t need them because they can afford to thoroughly purge everyone they don’t like at the start and do things more quietly. In the last Trump admin, something like 50% of the political appointees were Republican, below the 60% peak of the Bush admin. In the Obama and Clinton admins it was over 80% Democrats and supposedly around 90% for the Biden admin (though the NBER data I can find doesn’t get that recent). When the ideology of the bureaucracy is so myopic and unopposed it can do worse than a few crazies that get counter balanced (Iraq War neocons may be a good counter example, but also the type of people Trump did seek to remove). Even when people with false beliefs get power, we have to consider how consequential their false beliefs are compared to the alternative. It doesn’t matter if the director of EPA is biased enough to believe CO2′s contribution to climate change are minimal, when overall energy and EPA policy went in a more desirable direction in the Trump admin than the Biden admin. From a long-term perspective we still need more de-regulation, to get nuclear going faster, to get environmental reviews out of the way of infrastructure, etc. Climate via warming is unlikely to be an x-risk, stricter regulations in the U.S. will often not be a net decrease in CO2 depending on how the economy shifts internationally, and reducing carbon emissions is often not going to be the most cost effective manner to mitigate harm. (I am still excited about the current permitting reform, though I think it stops very short of what is needed/further reforms that Republicans probably want more than Democrats). So perhaps my summary would be: Dems in theory should govern better due to talent advantages, but squander their talent advantage via choosing the wrong things to do in the first place due to ideology, groupthink, and bad incentives. If a Trump admin is more prepared with appointees this time and does enact reforms to fire more civil servants, A) performance incentives will improve within the bureaucracy, B) future Republican admins won’t all keep facing as much of an alignment penalty as they currently have, and C) group think will likely be reduced at the margin (there is no way they can do without Democrats entirely given the talent base). Republicans nevertheless need more quality people to go into public service jobs that can tolerate living in/be able to raise families in the areas where such jobs are concentrated.
On Project 2025 and abortion, many of Heritage’s recommendations are deeply misaligned with the direction Trump has taken the Republican platform. It’s hard to tell from the outside what threats are real without networking in policy circles because Trump has incentive to distance himself, while Democrats have the incentive to hype up every bad thing on the Project 2025 agenda. Talking to Republicans, I don’t see a national abortion ban happening, and Trump is explicitly against banning mifepristone. I almost wonder if JD is like an anti-assassination insurance policy.
I disagree with most of your points.[1] But even if I didn’t, it would be unclear to me how those considerations outweigh Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, which you barely address.
What Trump and his supporters did in the wake of the 2020 election is a pretty central example of an attempted self-coup. To recap, Trump filed hundreds of lawsuits in all of the swing states to attempt to get ballots thrown out. He asked on Twitter for votes not to be counted. He begged and pleaded the Georgia Secretary of State to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. He successfully got fake Electoral College certificates in seven different states. He urged Mike Pence to overturn the election for him, and after that didn’t work, he chose a running mate this year that said he would have overturned the election if he were in Pence’s place.
This is not the kind of thing that has ever happened before in a national election in a democratic country (that remained democratic afterward).
So, unless you have a counter-example in mind, we have to confront the fact that the United States is in a reference class with a very real risk of transitioning to an autocracy. And, notwithstanding some unfree, anti-market policies promoted by the Democratic party and the existence of woke journalists, the United States under Democratic rule is still a much better place to pursue EA projects (or pretty much any kind of large-scale enterprise) than any existing autocratic or hybrid regime.
[1] Here are some of my disagreements, in no particular order:
I think you’re misremembering an offhand comment he made on a podcast in June. He said that he would give green cards automatically to foreign graduates of US colleges, which does sound great, but then his campaign walked back on that promise after the (predictable) backlash from his supporters.
Trump’s last administration definitely cracked down on high-skilled legal immigration; it’s unclear why he’d do a 180 in his next administration.
If you want people to have more children, it’s unclear why you’d support a candidate whose primary policy goal is to prevent immigrants from providing affordable services to Americans.
Trump once hired his personal bodyman (literally the guy who carried his bags around, John McEntee) as Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, who then performed a witch hunt in federal agencies, targeting everyone who wasn’t MAGA enough or who made the mistake of liking a Taylor Swift Instagram post and replacing them with zealots. Trump seems to hire people on the basis of sycophancy rather than merit; many of his appointees had no expertise in the areas they were supposed to lead and even denied scientific consensus (e.g. Scott Pruitt).
In his next administration, Trump plans to fire tens of thousands of non-political federal government workers (including scientists and experts) and replace them with loyalists. This is a very clear indication that he values zealotry over expertise and merit. So I don’t think it makes sense to claim that Trump would hire more competent people, when he transparently cares way less about competence than Democrats do.
This is very much not true. JD Vance has hinted that he’d support federal surveillance of interstate travel to prevent women from getting abortions; the federal government could ban mifepristone nationally if Trump is elected (which Project 2025 recommends), and Republican trifecta could, of course, pass a national abortion ban.
I mean TFR (total fertility rate) is falling everywhere, but it’s at least plausible that preventing people from higher-TFR countries immigrating to lower-TFR countries will increase net number of children. (Just narrowly making a claim about the logical implication; not saying that I endorse this policy).
Re, coup risk: see my responses to Phib below. I agree anything coup related is extremely concerning. I understand why they did so much nonsense given their belief state, and I think it is extremely important to take action to credibly address their belief state. The right is exacerbating it’s own belief state with spammy nonsense accusations, but the left is also amplifying the worst ones and ignoring their far more plausible complaints related to illegal immigration. In other words, the Dem’s strategy intentionally (or via motivated laziness?) makes the risk of coup from the right worse to attract voters via fear and prevent the loss of any minor advantages derived from potential election vulnerabilities that on net favor the left. It is very much not a good situation overall, the election norms are currently in a very bad state on the left and the right, but I think there is more common knowledge of how bad things are to the right election manipulation wise than to the left. I do not think the risks are equal, and I don’t want to play the both sides game.
On immigration, thanks for correcting me. Green cards are different from visas, I will correct my comment from earlier. That said, Trump walking back his promise to include a vetting process is ambiguous: on paper if you pass a background check and you get the degree, you’ll still get a green card: so what matters in practice here is if he kills the process with bureaucracy (e.g. like the entrepreneur visa). On H-1Bs, increasing stringency doesn’t matter much if the flows don’t decrease: it just increases the expected value of those that get through at a given cap. In other words, for the cap, Trump made changes to select the best: the admin changed the lottery to prioritize those with the highest salary offers, which is both good for growth and for not driving down wages. The Trump admin basically stayed at or exceeded the Obama era H-1b maximums with the exception of COVID. The Biden admin went even lower for the second year of COVID, but I assume Biden will finally catch up to and exceed the Trump H-1b average this year via uncapped visas to Universities and NGOs?
On natalism, it is very unclear that illegal immigration will increase the domestic birthrate. Illegal immigrants can build houses but they can also occupy them. People who have their wages competed down will tend to have fewer kids, but being able to afford more may help. Ultimately I think the bigger issue is regulations more so than labor supply forcing minimum costs up, and cultural issues that leave basically all high income countries below replacement. If I recall correctly, Israel is the only high income country above replacement fertility (and now secular Israelis going below replacement too).
On competence: To steel man the Dems a bit, I do think they have a better talent base to select from (other than for some areas of business/industry) and an inherently lower alignment penalty which can reduce cost overruns in some programs. At the same time, this also generates a tremendous amount of groupthink in government relative to a Trump administration. In terms of witch hunts, you are missing the big picture: Dem admins don’t need them because they can afford to thoroughly purge everyone they don’t like at the start and do things more quietly. In the last Trump admin, something like 50% of the political appointees were Republican, below the 60% peak of the Bush admin. In the Obama and Clinton admins it was over 80% Democrats and supposedly around 90% for the Biden admin (though the NBER data I can find doesn’t get that recent). When the ideology of the bureaucracy is so myopic and unopposed it can do worse than a few crazies that get counter balanced (Iraq War neocons may be a good counter example, but also the type of people Trump did seek to remove). Even when people with false beliefs get power, we have to consider how consequential their false beliefs are compared to the alternative. It doesn’t matter if the director of EPA is biased enough to believe CO2′s contribution to climate change are minimal, when overall energy and EPA policy went in a more desirable direction in the Trump admin than the Biden admin. From a long-term perspective we still need more de-regulation, to get nuclear going faster, to get environmental reviews out of the way of infrastructure, etc. Climate via warming is unlikely to be an x-risk, stricter regulations in the U.S. will often not be a net decrease in CO2 depending on how the economy shifts internationally, and reducing carbon emissions is often not going to be the most cost effective manner to mitigate harm. (I am still excited about the current permitting reform, though I think it stops very short of what is needed/further reforms that Republicans probably want more than Democrats). So perhaps my summary would be: Dems in theory should govern better due to talent advantages, but squander their talent advantage via choosing the wrong things to do in the first place due to ideology, groupthink, and bad incentives. If a Trump admin is more prepared with appointees this time and does enact reforms to fire more civil servants, A) performance incentives will improve within the bureaucracy, B) future Republican admins won’t all keep facing as much of an alignment penalty as they currently have, and C) group think will likely be reduced at the margin (there is no way they can do without Democrats entirely given the talent base). Republicans nevertheless need more quality people to go into public service jobs that can tolerate living in/be able to raise families in the areas where such jobs are concentrated.
On Project 2025 and abortion, many of Heritage’s recommendations are deeply misaligned with the direction Trump has taken the Republican platform. It’s hard to tell from the outside what threats are real without networking in policy circles because Trump has incentive to distance himself, while Democrats have the incentive to hype up every bad thing on the Project 2025 agenda. Talking to Republicans, I don’t see a national abortion ban happening, and Trump is explicitly against banning mifepristone. I almost wonder if JD is like an anti-assassination insurance policy.