I’m all for this, though I’ve got a dog in the fight: I’m ED of PolicyEngine, a nonprofit that largely intends to improve epistemics around economic policymaking by making epistemic tech available to everyone. Our free, open source software estimates households’ taxes and benefit eligibility, and lets users design customizable policy reforms and estimate impacts on society and households.
Since you mentioned a carbon tax, our new app beta.policyengine.org, which we’ll launch in January, lets you design a custom carbon tax in the UK. Here’s a 2-minute video on how to do that and pair the carbon tax with a dividend, or the link directly to the policy. For example, we estimate that a budget neutral £100/ton carbon dividend would benefit 2⁄3 of UK residents and lower the poverty rate by 7%. We also model much of the US tax-benefit system, though we currently only model carbon taxes in the UK (here’s how).
We’d be excited about building PolicyEngine into an educational initiative, especially with EAs. We’ve also started working on an EA Forum post for a shallow dive cost-effectiveness of computational policy simulation—I think this plays well into our community’s embrace of forecasting as well. Happy to chat more with folks on this.
I’m all for this, though I’ve got a dog in the fight: I’m ED of PolicyEngine, a nonprofit that largely intends to improve epistemics around economic policymaking by making epistemic tech available to everyone. Our free, open source software estimates households’ taxes and benefit eligibility, and lets users design customizable policy reforms and estimate impacts on society and households.
Since you mentioned a carbon tax, our new app beta.policyengine.org, which we’ll launch in January, lets you design a custom carbon tax in the UK. Here’s a 2-minute video on how to do that and pair the carbon tax with a dividend, or the link directly to the policy. For example, we estimate that a budget neutral £100/ton carbon dividend would benefit 2⁄3 of UK residents and lower the poverty rate by 7%. We also model much of the US tax-benefit system, though we currently only model carbon taxes in the UK (here’s how).
We’d be excited about building PolicyEngine into an educational initiative, especially with EAs. We’ve also started working on an EA Forum post for a shallow dive cost-effectiveness of computational policy simulation—I think this plays well into our community’s embrace of forecasting as well. Happy to chat more with folks on this.