A case of precocious policy influence, and my pitch for more research on how to get a top policy job.
Last week Lina Khan was appointed as Chair of the FTC, at age 32! How did she get such an elite role? At age 11, she moved to the US from London. In 2014, she studied antitrust topics at the New America Foundation (centre-left think tank). Got a JD from Yale in 2017, and published work relevant to the emerging Hipster Antitrust movement at the same time. In 2018, she worked as a legal fellow at the FTC. In 2020, became an associate professor of law at Columbia. This year − 2021 - she was appointed by Biden.
The FTC chair role is an extraordinary level of success to reach at such a young age. But it kind-of makes sense that she should be able to get such a role: she has elite academic credentials that are highly relevant for the role, has riden the hipster antitrust wave, and has experience of and willingness to work in government.
I think biosec and AI policy EAs could try to emulate this. Specifically, they could try to gather some elite academic credentials, while also engaging with regulatory issues and working for regulators, or more broadly, in the executive branch of goverment. Jason Matheny’s success is arguably a related example.
This also suggests a possible research agenda surrounding how people get influential jobs in general. For many talented young EAs, it would be very useful to know. Similar to how Wiblin ran some numbers in 2015 on the chances at a seat in congress given a background at Yale Law, we could ask about the whitehouse, external political appointments (such as FTC commissioner) and the judiciary. Also, this ought to be quite tractable: all the names are in public, e.g. here [Trump years] and here [Obama years], most of the CVs are in the public domain—it just needs doing.
What’s especially interesting is that the one article that kick-started her career was, by truth-orientated standards, quite poor. For example, she suggested that Amazon was able to charge unprofitably low prices by selling equity/debt to raise more cash—but you only have to look at Amazon’s accounts to see that they have been almost entirely self-financing for a long time. This is because Amazon has actually been cashflow positive, in contrast to the impression you would get from Khan’s piece. (More detail on this and other problems here).
Depressingly this suggests to me that a good strategy for gaining political power is to pick a growing, popular movement, become an extreme advocate of it, and trust that people will simply ignore the logical problems with the position.
My impression is that a lot of her quick success was because her antitrust stuff tapped into progressive anti Big Tech sentiment. It’s possible EAs could somehow fit into the biorisk zeitgeist but otherwise, I think it would take a lot of thought to figure out how an EA could replicate this.
Agreed that in her outlying case, most of what she’s done is tap into a political movement in ways we’d prefer not to. But is that true for high-performers generally? I’d hypothesise that elite academic credentials + policy-relevant research + willingness to be political, is enough to get people into elite political positions, maybe a tier lower than hers, a decade later, but it’d be worth knowing how all the variables in these different cases contribute.
A case of precocious policy influence, and my pitch for more research on how to get a top policy job.
Last week Lina Khan was appointed as Chair of the FTC, at age 32! How did she get such an elite role? At age 11, she moved to the US from London. In 2014, she studied antitrust topics at the New America Foundation (centre-left think tank). Got a JD from Yale in 2017, and published work relevant to the emerging Hipster Antitrust movement at the same time. In 2018, she worked as a legal fellow at the FTC. In 2020, became an associate professor of law at Columbia. This year − 2021 - she was appointed by Biden.
The FTC chair role is an extraordinary level of success to reach at such a young age. But it kind-of makes sense that she should be able to get such a role: she has elite academic credentials that are highly relevant for the role, has riden the hipster antitrust wave, and has experience of and willingness to work in government.
I think biosec and AI policy EAs could try to emulate this. Specifically, they could try to gather some elite academic credentials, while also engaging with regulatory issues and working for regulators, or more broadly, in the executive branch of goverment. Jason Matheny’s success is arguably a related example.
This also suggests a possible research agenda surrounding how people get influential jobs in general. For many talented young EAs, it would be very useful to know. Similar to how Wiblin ran some numbers in 2015 on the chances at a seat in congress given a background at Yale Law, we could ask about the whitehouse, external political appointments (such as FTC commissioner) and the judiciary. Also, this ought to be quite tractable: all the names are in public, e.g. here [Trump years] and here [Obama years], most of the CVs are in the public domain—it just needs doing.
What’s especially interesting is that the one article that kick-started her career was, by truth-orientated standards, quite poor. For example, she suggested that Amazon was able to charge unprofitably low prices by selling equity/debt to raise more cash—but you only have to look at Amazon’s accounts to see that they have been almost entirely self-financing for a long time. This is because Amazon has actually been cashflow positive, in contrast to the impression you would get from Khan’s piece. (More detail on this and other problems here).
Depressingly this suggests to me that a good strategy for gaining political power is to pick a growing, popular movement, become an extreme advocate of it, and trust that people will simply ignore the logical problems with the position.
My impression is that a lot of her quick success was because her antitrust stuff tapped into progressive anti Big Tech sentiment. It’s possible EAs could somehow fit into the biorisk zeitgeist but otherwise, I think it would take a lot of thought to figure out how an EA could replicate this.
Agreed that in her outlying case, most of what she’s done is tap into a political movement in ways we’d prefer not to. But is that true for high-performers generally? I’d hypothesise that elite academic credentials + policy-relevant research + willingness to be political, is enough to get people into elite political positions, maybe a tier lower than hers, a decade later, but it’d be worth knowing how all the variables in these different cases contribute.
Yep—agree with all that, especially that it would be cool for somebody to look into the general question.