Interesting post. I havenât conducted the depth research to verify most of the figures, but I do think the idea that you have a 55% chance of success with a $208k 1 year advocacy campaign pretty implausible and suspect thereâs something dubious going on with the method of estimating P(success) here.
I think an appropriate fact to incorporate which I did not see would be âactual costs of lobbying in the USâ and âfrequency of novel regulations passingâ on which I presume there is quite a bit of data available.
The probability of advocacy success is a fairly critical variable, and I agree that the estimate provided could well be too optimistic. It really depends on (a) what reference class you take, and (b) how you weigh it against subjective inside view estimates. For example, my estimate of (b) as informed by working in the public sector/âpolitics is fairly low, but if you look do a case study of when sugar taxes were actually advocated (and implemented or not), itâs really impressive (~90%), and the real challenge becomes adjusting for selection biasâboth with respect to it being tried (in countries where political conditions were more favourable in the first place), and successful attempts being noted in the news (while failed ones die inside the government, unreported).
On the one hand, sugary drinks taxes really arenât that uncommon, so itâs not that surprising that it wouldnât be too difficult to advocate for (relative to something like sodium tax advocacy, which is probably a quarter as tractable). I would also caution against using US lobbying costs, since that isnât necessarily representative (i.e. the modal campaign wouldnât be hiring K-street lobbyists in the US, so much as an NGO talking to low and middle-income countries governments, which tend to defer to NGOs than western governments do).
In general, I hope to get a better sense of this by talking to experts (even while noting that the public health experts may well also be overoptimistic due to halo effects/âwishful thinking!)
My general sense is that a lot of policy advocacy projects look really well in terms of CEAs as the scope tends to be high but few properly discount for likelihood of success or indeed, as you suggest, actual lobbying costs over time and relevancy, frequency, take up of regulations.
Interesting post. I havenât conducted the depth research to verify most of the figures, but I do think the idea that you have a 55% chance of success with a $208k 1 year advocacy campaign pretty implausible and suspect thereâs something dubious going on with the method of estimating P(success) here.
I think an appropriate fact to incorporate which I did not see would be âactual costs of lobbying in the USâ and âfrequency of novel regulations passingâ on which I presume there is quite a bit of data available.
The probability of advocacy success is a fairly critical variable, and I agree that the estimate provided could well be too optimistic. It really depends on (a) what reference class you take, and (b) how you weigh it against subjective inside view estimates. For example, my estimate of (b) as informed by working in the public sector/âpolitics is fairly low, but if you look do a case study of when sugar taxes were actually advocated (and implemented or not), itâs really impressive (~90%), and the real challenge becomes adjusting for selection biasâboth with respect to it being tried (in countries where political conditions were more favourable in the first place), and successful attempts being noted in the news (while failed ones die inside the government, unreported).
On the one hand, sugary drinks taxes really arenât that uncommon, so itâs not that surprising that it wouldnât be too difficult to advocate for (relative to something like sodium tax advocacy, which is probably a quarter as tractable). I would also caution against using US lobbying costs, since that isnât necessarily representative (i.e. the modal campaign wouldnât be hiring K-street lobbyists in the US, so much as an NGO talking to low and middle-income countries governments, which tend to defer to NGOs than western governments do).
In general, I hope to get a better sense of this by talking to experts (even while noting that the public health experts may well also be overoptimistic due to halo effects/âwishful thinking!)
My general sense is that a lot of policy advocacy projects look really well in terms of CEAs as the scope tends to be high but few properly discount for likelihood of success or indeed, as you suggest, actual lobbying costs over time and relevancy, frequency, take up of regulations.