This is cool; I often think about how much better the UK system is than the US when it comes to educating doctors.
I think my biggest quibble with your post is: “I assume the odds of a successful campaign are 50%.”
I would maybe revise that down to 5%? Professional organizations like the American Medical Association have their professions in a stranglehold; they have financial incentives to keep their profession difficult to access (eg allows them to demand higher wages), and they can easily manipulate the public by saying things like “Don’t you want a FULLY trained doctor? Not somebody who skipped undergraduate and went straight to medical school?”
A substantially more skeptical campaign success probability obviously lowers the expected ROI of this effort. But I wonder if other people who know more about politics are as skeptical as me.
All that being said, I would vote for your campaign if it came up on my state’s ballot!
feels possible to establish a decent base rate by looking at previous ballot initiatives by the mentioned firms and other similar ballot campaigns. I think it will vary a lot between licensing for a doctor vs hair braiding, and 50% might be reasonable for the latter.
This is cool; I often think about how much better the UK system is than the US when it comes to educating doctors.
I think my biggest quibble with your post is: “I assume the odds of a successful campaign are 50%.”
I would maybe revise that down to 5%? Professional organizations like the American Medical Association have their professions in a stranglehold; they have financial incentives to keep their profession difficult to access (eg allows them to demand higher wages), and they can easily manipulate the public by saying things like “Don’t you want a FULLY trained doctor? Not somebody who skipped undergraduate and went straight to medical school?”
A substantially more skeptical campaign success probability obviously lowers the expected ROI of this effort. But I wonder if other people who know more about politics are as skeptical as me.
All that being said, I would vote for your campaign if it came up on my state’s ballot!
feels possible to establish a decent base rate by looking at previous ballot initiatives by the mentioned firms and other similar ballot campaigns. I think it will vary a lot between licensing for a doctor vs hair braiding, and 50% might be reasonable for the latter.
Maybe I could get a more precise rate. The 50% assumption is close to the average success rate over the last 20 years.
There weren’t sufficiently similar ballot initiatives, IMO, to make me want to use a more specific reference class.