Here's a list of things that I think would not be controversial among economists and relevant experts but nonetheless seem very unlikely to happen any time soon:
I don't think there's a single explanation for why none of those policies seems likely to happen, though at least there's substantial movement on the drug legalization front recently.
Of course there's a single explanation: in a democracy, everyone gets a vote. Not 'everyone' knows enough about these subjects to understand why the experts are right. Moreover, in a representative democracy, there is a second layer where entrenched interests - who guard virtually everything you listed - get to bribe politicians to go against the preferences of their constituents.
I do have to ask about one issue on this list: regarding free trade. The argument has been made that China applies indirect tariffs to U.S. made goods. Spe...
There should be no attendence requirement for any occupational licensing. Reduce all occupational licensing to tests that can be taken in a few days provided a person has the requisite knowledge.
This should be enshrined by a federal right to work law.
Yeah! I don't want a surgeon who's wasted YEARS in supervised (and unpleasant/difficult to be sure) conditions. Let them pass the test and pick up a scalpel!
A better reform would be "do away with occupational licensing entirely for many non-critical professions. For those with high risk, replace it with liability/insurance and reputation mechanisms (which will end up looking like accreditation, or they will be unable to get insurance, but there's at least a chance at diversity of types of accreditation)".
Drug approval denationalization would create an incentive to for regulatory agencies to be faster at approving drugs while still having standards for safety and usefulness for drugs.
I have a personal belief that a lot of low hanging fruit does not get picked because of we have masses where each benefits a little vs smaller entities with a lot to lose, such as drug companies wanting smaller enforcement. As such the invested minority can outlast the majority in terms of preventing these changes from becoming law.
Do you see other factors having more significance? Further, can we avoid these impasses?
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Why are my appliances allowed to be designed to become landfill? Why isn't there the digital equivalent of putting stuff you don't want on the street for people that do want it?
But there is that digital equivalent, it's called ebay and Craigslist. I have purchased a used washer and dryer for $100, both worked for over a year after. I sold my entire desktop PC for parts on ebay a few months back, receiving $600 for 5 year old hardware, and I put the unsellable metal case on the curb and posted it to Craigslist.
There's a couple of factors here. &...
Why are my appliances allowed to be designed to become landfill? Why isn't there the digital equivalent of putting stuff you don't want on the street for people that do want it?
There are digital ways to do that depending on location. In Berlin where I live Ebay Kleinanzeigen/Craigslist/A facebook group for that purpose are all ways where you can give away stuff for free if other people want it.
Forced choice for whether one wants to be an organ donor or not. Part of applying for passports or driving licenses should include a form where a person has to chose whether or not to be an organ donor. This maximises both moral concerns of not taking away people's organs without consent and increases the organ donations over the default of opt-in.
Adopting Japanese style planning & zoning alongside European models of social housing organization & finance would unlock a considerable degree of economic growth in a lot of Anglophone countries. It'd also have the additional benefits of reducing the carbon intensity of housing and transport through greater density, and make efficient public transit easier to finance and develop. It also would in the long-term stabilize urban housing costs and reduce the precarity of low-income households, while enabling a larger number of people to benefit from higher big-city wages through more dynamic housing stock growth.
As it is, we are locking people out of the places where their labor is most valuable and where they would have the smallest environmental impact to the benefit of (relatively wealthy) incumbent property owners. This equilibrium is difficult to change when there's expansive local control over land use and housing development, as it's much easier for narrow coalitions of property owners to dominate those nominally democratic decision-making processes, and because local constituents have little incentive to take the utility of newcomers or the metro region into account.
Yes. Note that the general idea that "California pays the most but once you factor in state income tax and housing costs, it's about the same" has been true since about the late 1970s.
I agree with you completely, just:
a. Hard to see how it's going to change if it hasn't changed in 40 years
b. Competing jurisdictions are a thing. Theoretically some other city elsewhere will gain a comparative advantage if they have the right building codes and gain a critical mass of tech co...
There are indications that there are enormous deadweight losses in many sectors, which are not fixed because of political constraints. Eli Dourado wrote a great post about this: https://elidourado.com/blog/move-the-needle-on-progress/, and I wrote a short one for Works in Progress: https://worksinprogress.co/progress-studies-the-hard-question/.
There are various different social engineering techniques from public policy, political economy and related fields for smart policy design (not campaigning) that could be tried by policy entrepreneurs to engineer changes from these inadequate equilibria, but those techniques seem little known outside those fields. I'm working with a few others to summarize them and can supply more links if people are interested.
Make nuclear our main source of power. It's green, safe, sustainable, cheap and reliable. We could have done this in the 60's/70's as France did but irrational fears of nuclear power and subsequent over-regulation and lack of gov support killed it in the US and UK.
It's not rational to think it will happen. I agree nuclear has advantages, but it doesn't come close to penciling in.
Instituting rule of law in foreign policy. In many countries foreign policy is essentially at the discretion of the executive. Insofar as it is controlled by the legislature, it's controlled through committees and reporting requirements rather than actually courts and rules of conduct. Imagine if the prime minister could choose to kill whoever they wanted and was only contrainted by the threat of parliamentary sanction. That's basically the status qou for foreign policy at the moment.
The model of "applying" discoveries to society, or things "we" could do is at best misleading here. Society is mostly self-regulating, not controlled by outside. And even more not controlled by any "we" that I'm knowingly part of.
EMH isn't perfect, but it does apply here, in the sense that truly low-hanging fruit has already been incorporated. Anything society is doing wrong or suboptimally (which there are PLENTY of) have pretty strong forces maintaining the inefficiency.
The fact that some equilibrium is inadequate does not imply that the adequate equilibrium is reachable.
Thanks for sharing Dagon, you made me realize a couple of things! I never thought about EMH applying in this situation and that some adequate equilibriums might not be reachable without a very large change.
I still think some of the examples shared by others might be still partially useful to think about when deciding who to vote or discussing issues with other people.
I was recently listening to Robin Hanson on Signaling and Self-Deception and he mentions that most of the Social Sciences discoveries haven't been applied back to society.
He then goes to mention Prediction Markets as an example. They also came up as a great example in a recent LW question, What are some real life Inadequate Equilibria?
I'm curious about what things we could be doing as a society that have been proved benefitial and we're not doing so far. Either because we're stuck in a bad equilibrium or they haven't reached the general public.