Yes, basically (if I understand correctly). If you think a policy has impact X for each year it’s in place, and you don’t discount, then the impact of causing it to pass rather than fail is something on the order of 100 * X. The impact of funding a campaign to pass it is bigger, though, because you presumably don’t want to count the possibility that you fund it later as part of the counterfactual (see my note above about Appendix Figure D20).
Some things to keep in mind:
Impacts might change over time (e.g., a policy stops mattering in 50 years even if it’s in place). If you think, e.g., transformative AI will upend everything, that might be what you need to think about here in terms of how long this policy change matters.
I’m looking at whether this policy or a version of it will be in place. It’s possible policies will be substituted for in some way in ways that make things wash out somewhat. (For instance, we don’t pass one animal welfare policy, but we pass some policy to shrink the farming sector.) I think this effect is small given the lack of differences by policy topic—this should be much more of an issue for some topics than others—but see the next point.
There are some hints of less persistence for policies where there’s more room for negotiation/more ways to dial it up and down. See my reply to Erich Grunewald lower down—for taxes and Congressional legislation, it seems like the effect on whether some possibly weaker version of the policy eventually passes might wash out.
Yes, basically (if I understand correctly). If you think a policy has impact X for each year it’s in place, and you don’t discount, then the impact of causing it to pass rather than fail is something on the order of 100 * X. The impact of funding a campaign to pass it is bigger, though, because you presumably don’t want to count the possibility that you fund it later as part of the counterfactual (see my note above about Appendix Figure D20).
Some things to keep in mind:
Impacts might change over time (e.g., a policy stops mattering in 50 years even if it’s in place). If you think, e.g., transformative AI will upend everything, that might be what you need to think about here in terms of how long this policy change matters.
I’m looking at whether this policy or a version of it will be in place. It’s possible policies will be substituted for in some way in ways that make things wash out somewhat. (For instance, we don’t pass one animal welfare policy, but we pass some policy to shrink the farming sector.) I think this effect is small given the lack of differences by policy topic—this should be much more of an issue for some topics than others—but see the next point.
There are some hints of less persistence for policies where there’s more room for negotiation/more ways to dial it up and down. See my reply to Erich Grunewald lower down—for taxes and Congressional legislation, it seems like the effect on whether some possibly weaker version of the policy eventually passes might wash out.