Here is a post of EA reasons not to pursue political action and how to do political action well. Check out the electoral politics tag for some of the political efforts EA has done and how they turned out!
From what I understand: Government money is notoriously inaccessible. Often, it can only be changed by a long process of approvals or people inside organizations who generally have no interest in changing things because stirring the pot would enrage everyone else in the department/their electoral base and possibly break quite a lot of informal arrangements that keep things running. There is almost no incentive to make things better and quite a lot of disincentive for the power-wielding individuals to change anything.
A lot of EA energy then moved to how to fixing that by improving institutional decision-making processes. This has lead to a lot of discussion of better voting systems (approval,quadratic), prediction markets, impact certificates, and other things. These are being tried and deployed.
EA tends to see gov intervention and diplomacy as 1/3: Important, but not Neglected or Tractable, with some exceptions.
I’m not terribly acquainted with this area and hopefully someone else who knows more about this can weigh in.
Here is a post of EA reasons not to pursue political action and how to do political action well. Check out the electoral politics tag for some of the political efforts EA has done and how they turned out!
From what I understand: Government money is notoriously inaccessible. Often, it can only be changed by a long process of approvals or people inside organizations who generally have no interest in changing things because stirring the pot would enrage everyone else in the department/their electoral base and possibly break quite a lot of informal arrangements that keep things running. There is almost no incentive to make things better and quite a lot of disincentive for the power-wielding individuals to change anything.
A lot of EA energy then moved to how to fixing that by improving institutional decision-making processes. This has lead to a lot of discussion of better voting systems (approval,quadratic), prediction markets, impact certificates, and other things. These are being tried and deployed.
EA tends to see gov intervention and diplomacy as 1/3: Important, but not Neglected or Tractable, with some exceptions.
I’m not terribly acquainted with this area and hopefully someone else who knows more about this can weigh in.