Your insights make a lot of sense, and are well written.
However, while I am pretty convinced that this is probably the most effective way to influence policy, it does not sound like the most democratic way to me.
The way I read your post is that we should not try to get voters behind EA ideas (‘politicize them’) but instead tell voters what they want to hear and push policy behind closed doors without them having a chance to vote on it, preferably even without them knowing it afterwards (no media attention is good).
I’m not sure how to balance effectiveness and a vague notion of ‘democraticness’ and I was wondering if you, or others, have some thoughts on that.
I think it’s unrealistic to expect voters to take a personal interest in all policy issues. There’s too many, they’re too complicated, and people aren’t interested.
I’ve just been reviewing proposed legislation the government has introduced recently. There’s a bill to replace the National Skills Commissioner with a statutory body called Jobs and Skills Australia. There’s a bill to allow Medicare fraud-prevention mechanisms to apply to non-medical practitioners. There’s a bill to remove one of two definitions of “export entry advice”.
No normal person is paying the faintest attention to these bills. They don’t have an opinion, and don’t want to have an opinion. And fair enough! I wouldn’t be paying attention either if it wasn’t my job.
The reality is that the majority of legislation is like this—unheralded, uncontroversial, technical, boring, and quite often jointly supported by both sides of politics. The issues you hear about in the media are the exceptions, the ones that animate large numbers of people. Taxes, inflation, jobs, healthcare—things that directly affect lots of people in clear and tangible ways. So the question is, are EA issues like the majority of issues, or are they the exception?
I don’t think they are exceptions, or that they should be seen that way. “Place regulatory restrictions on gain of function bio research” or “Allocate foreign aid according to objective measures of impact” fits right into that category of boring technical stuff. It’s not undemocratic, people can still get upset about it if they want to. But realistically they’re going to be happy to just shrug and say “Yeah, fair enough, I guess”, and leave it to the experts. And that’s not a bad thing.
Answer: There shouldn’t be a balance. The most important thing for EA is to be effective, and other values are assessed on that criterion. It doesn’t mean taking a stand for or against democratic politics.
Great post Nathalie,
Your insights make a lot of sense, and are well written.
However, while I am pretty convinced that this is probably the most effective way to influence policy, it does not sound like the most democratic way to me.
The way I read your post is that we should not try to get voters behind EA ideas (‘politicize them’) but instead tell voters what they want to hear and push policy behind closed doors without them having a chance to vote on it, preferably even without them knowing it afterwards (no media attention is good).
I’m not sure how to balance effectiveness and a vague notion of ‘democraticness’ and I was wondering if you, or others, have some thoughts on that.
I think it’s unrealistic to expect voters to take a personal interest in all policy issues. There’s too many, they’re too complicated, and people aren’t interested.
I’ve just been reviewing proposed legislation the government has introduced recently. There’s a bill to replace the National Skills Commissioner with a statutory body called Jobs and Skills Australia. There’s a bill to allow Medicare fraud-prevention mechanisms to apply to non-medical practitioners. There’s a bill to remove one of two definitions of “export entry advice”.
No normal person is paying the faintest attention to these bills. They don’t have an opinion, and don’t want to have an opinion. And fair enough! I wouldn’t be paying attention either if it wasn’t my job.
The reality is that the majority of legislation is like this—unheralded, uncontroversial, technical, boring, and quite often jointly supported by both sides of politics. The issues you hear about in the media are the exceptions, the ones that animate large numbers of people. Taxes, inflation, jobs, healthcare—things that directly affect lots of people in clear and tangible ways. So the question is, are EA issues like the majority of issues, or are they the exception?
I don’t think they are exceptions, or that they should be seen that way. “Place regulatory restrictions on gain of function bio research” or “Allocate foreign aid according to objective measures of impact” fits right into that category of boring technical stuff. It’s not undemocratic, people can still get upset about it if they want to. But realistically they’re going to be happy to just shrug and say “Yeah, fair enough, I guess”, and leave it to the experts. And that’s not a bad thing.
Answer: There shouldn’t be a balance. The most important thing for EA is to be effective, and other values are assessed on that criterion. It doesn’t mean taking a stand for or against democratic politics.