For instance, most people will probably put the US president into the category “high-impact individual.” And there are certainly many impactful things the president can do that are not accessible to most other people. But for achieving most goals that can be said to really matter—a better healthcare system that actually improves wellbeing in the country; effective technology policy that actually reduces risks and/or advances life-improving technological developments; a sufficient response to the climate crisis; etc. - presidents themselves will tell you how incredibly constrained they are in bringing about these outcomes. The impact a president can have through sensible policies is determined by the actions of many other individuals (domestically and internationally), and it is also determined by the culture he or she operates in (the ideas that are considered normal, palatable, or even just conceivable). Yes, this individual can have an impact through their actions, but only in conjunction with the actions of many others. If we tried to account for all individuals that form part of the president’s enabling infrastructure (again, I will argue below that we probably can’t and should try), I am sceptical whether the individualised impact that remains with the president’s actions truly is orders of magnitude higher than that of many other people.
The President is indeed constrained to have to work with Congress and SCOTUS, which are both roughly equally powerful as he. But there is only one President, while there are nine SCOTUS judges and over five hundred people in Congress. So it seems very likely to me that the President is indeed orders of magnitude more important than the average Congressman. Within Congress, some (Leaders of the House and Senate, people on important committees, etc.) are more important than others (junior members, unpopular members), so the President is probably even more more important than the least influential Congressman. Yes, the President has people who work for him who he relies on, but so do those members of congress, and those subordinates are much more replaceable than he. It is true that these ordinary members of congress have an impact on the President. But the President also has an impact on each of them. And his impact is probably a lot larger.
This also matches the views of normal people, who rightly view the Presidency as very unusually important, and care about its occupant far more than they care about other offices. It seems very strange to me to claim that they are all mistaken, and that actually the difference between a good and a bad President is not much larger than the difference between and good and bad local school board member.
Similarly, there are roles for which for-profit companies are happy to pay top performers tens of millions of dollars (traders, ML researchers) or more (CEOs) and it appears they do so rationally—for example, the literature on unexpected CEO death suggests the difference between the best and average CEOs is large. In contrast, for some other people and roles firms are only willing to pay much smaller amounts of money. Given that if anything firms appear to be biased to suppress the compensation distribution vs the productivity distribution this also seems to suggest that a wide range of impact across people.
On the whole this post reads to me like you have strong moral reasons for wishing it was not the case that some people were massively more impactful than others, and for opposing people talking about this. But the object-level arguments against its being true seem much weaker in comparison.
FWIW my guess is that if you compare (lifetime impact of president):(lifetime impact of average member of congress), the ratio would be <100 (but >30).
I’m surprised you think that low, especially considering the President often will have been a Senator or Governor or top businessman before office, so the longer average term in Congress is not a big advantage.
I think I was leaning into making my guess sound surprising there, and I had in mind something closer to 100 than 30; it might have been better to represent it as “about 100” or “>50″ or something.
The fact that presidential terms are just 4 or 8 years does play into my thinking. For sure, they’ve typically done other meaningful stuff, but I don’t think that typically has such a high impact ratio as their years as president. I generated my ratio by querying my brain for snap judgements about how big a deal it would seem to have [some numbers of presidents] [do a thing over their career] vs [some fraction of congress].
Anyway I could certainly be wrong here. I think it’s possible I’m underestimating how big is the impact of having the mouthpiece of the presidency.
The President is indeed constrained to have to work with Congress and SCOTUS, which are both roughly equally powerful as he. But there is only one President, while there are nine SCOTUS judges and over five hundred people in Congress. So it seems very likely to me that the President is indeed orders of magnitude more important than the average Congressman. Within Congress, some (Leaders of the House and Senate, people on important committees, etc.) are more important than others (junior members, unpopular members), so the President is probably even more more important than the least influential Congressman. Yes, the President has people who work for him who he relies on, but so do those members of congress, and those subordinates are much more replaceable than he. It is true that these ordinary members of congress have an impact on the President. But the President also has an impact on each of them. And his impact is probably a lot larger.
This also matches the views of normal people, who rightly view the Presidency as very unusually important, and care about its occupant far more than they care about other offices. It seems very strange to me to claim that they are all mistaken, and that actually the difference between a good and a bad President is not much larger than the difference between and good and bad local school board member.
Similarly, there are roles for which for-profit companies are happy to pay top performers tens of millions of dollars (traders, ML researchers) or more (CEOs) and it appears they do so rationally—for example, the literature on unexpected CEO death suggests the difference between the best and average CEOs is large. In contrast, for some other people and roles firms are only willing to pay much smaller amounts of money. Given that if anything firms appear to be biased to suppress the compensation distribution vs the productivity distribution this also seems to suggest that a wide range of impact across people.
On the whole this post reads to me like you have strong moral reasons for wishing it was not the case that some people were massively more impactful than others, and for opposing people talking about this. But the object-level arguments against its being true seem much weaker in comparison.
FWIW my guess is that if you compare (lifetime impact of president):(lifetime impact of average member of congress), the ratio would be <100 (but >30).
I’m surprised you think that low, especially considering the President often will have been a Senator or Governor or top businessman before office, so the longer average term in Congress is not a big advantage.
I think I was leaning into making my guess sound surprising there, and I had in mind something closer to 100 than 30; it might have been better to represent it as “about 100” or “>50″ or something.
The fact that presidential terms are just 4 or 8 years does play into my thinking. For sure, they’ve typically done other meaningful stuff, but I don’t think that typically has such a high impact ratio as their years as president. I generated my ratio by querying my brain for snap judgements about how big a deal it would seem to have [some numbers of presidents] [do a thing over their career] vs [some fraction of congress].
Anyway I could certainly be wrong here. I think it’s possible I’m underestimating how big is the impact of having the mouthpiece of the presidency.