I think you’re wrong on policy tractability of some approaches. In some cases, policy for “appropriate zoning of flood-prone areas (perhaps as parks, recreation facilities),” and “compulsory flood insurance for flood-prone areas” are relatively easy policies, and if there are places where EA has policy influence, these seem like potentially big wins for at least preventing additional exposure to flood risk going forward. (For the second idea, I think the key caveat is to do this for all new construction, rather than taxing current occupants.)
If people are interested in the topic of policy for reducing flood risk, please reach out. It’s been years, but I did a bunch of work on this in NYC at RAND, both here, and for the Rockefeller foundation, but unfortunately the latter report was never released. And the applications for developing countries weren’t explored, but I think a small part of the work transfers.
Hmm yes policy work is tricky—probably even harder to model in a CEA than the more physical interventions I was mainly thinking about.
I suppose this is what I was gesturing at with “So plausibly EAs that have significant sway over government decision-makers and can convince them to invest more in flood defences should do this. This would be the case for almost any good policy though: if it is low-effort to convince the government to do it, you should.”
But yes perhaps I did undersell the value of policy here.
I think I mostly stand by my claim that if you are able to influence policy a lot you should probably focus on other things first. If as you say the policies needed for flooding are unusually tractable then yes that would change things.
Yeah, my only disagreement with you is that I think people who have policy influence should look at tractability and effectiveness across more domains than just ones you’ve identified as the most effective, since policy windows are fairly unpredictable, and in my experience, over-focusing on “your” issues often means you miss opportunities to get very impactful things done, while spinning your wheels on items that aren’t currently possible.
I think you’re wrong on policy tractability of some approaches. In some cases, policy for “appropriate zoning of flood-prone areas (perhaps as parks, recreation facilities),” and “compulsory flood insurance for flood-prone areas” are relatively easy policies, and if there are places where EA has policy influence, these seem like potentially big wins for at least preventing additional exposure to flood risk going forward. (For the second idea, I think the key caveat is to do this for all new construction, rather than taxing current occupants.)
If people are interested in the topic of policy for reducing flood risk, please reach out. It’s been years, but I did a bunch of work on this in NYC at RAND, both here, and for the Rockefeller foundation, but unfortunately the latter report was never released. And the applications for developing countries weren’t explored, but I think a small part of the work transfers.
Hmm yes policy work is tricky—probably even harder to model in a CEA than the more physical interventions I was mainly thinking about. I suppose this is what I was gesturing at with “So plausibly EAs that have significant sway over government decision-makers and can convince them to invest more in flood defences should do this. This would be the case for almost any good policy though: if it is low-effort to convince the government to do it, you should.” But yes perhaps I did undersell the value of policy here. I think I mostly stand by my claim that if you are able to influence policy a lot you should probably focus on other things first. If as you say the policies needed for flooding are unusually tractable then yes that would change things.
Yeah, my only disagreement with you is that I think people who have policy influence should look at tractability and effectiveness across more domains than just ones you’ve identified as the most effective, since policy windows are fairly unpredictable, and in my experience, over-focusing on “your” issues often means you miss opportunities to get very impactful things done, while spinning your wheels on items that aren’t currently possible.