I kind of did this analysis in 2019 on “how to move the needle on progress” and landed on health, housing, energy, and transportation as important sectors to fix.
If you think about it in productivity terms, in general equilibrium, low-productivity-growth sectors will tend to get bloated as a percent of GDP, while high-productivity-growth sectors will tend to shrink.
I still think the 2019 analysis is basically right, although I would emphasize one particular aspect of tractability, which is having a specific solution in mind. Tom Kalil talks about this as a test of policy maturity: suppose you have a 15-minute meeting with the President of the United States, and after the meeting the President is willing to call somebody and tell them what to do. Who do you have him call and what do you have him tell them to do? Until you have an answer to that question, your policy solution isn’t mature.
I think there’s a division of labor in the policy world between the more researchy and more activist groups. The researchy people should be working to discover mature policy ideas (in the Tom Kalil sense) and then the more activist groups should be working to get them implemented.
So for the research side, who are starting out without mature policy ideas and trying to generate them, tractability isn’t really a concern, it’s more about importance. The goal is to generate something tractable. The more activist people need to think more about taking the mature policy idea and running with it, and for them, tractability (political viability, etc.) is more important starting out.
Progress is so hard to come by in the policy world that I don’t think we should disqualify anything for not being neglected. Even housing/YIMBY stuff, I’m happy for more people to go into it if it gets us over the line.
So policy researchers should work on big industrial sectors like health, housing, energy, and transportation (and major cross-cutting issues like immigration and permitting), and try to come up with mature policy ideas that increase productivity. Then the more activist groups should take the tractable ideas and amplify them and try to get them over the line.
If I’m writing a priority list for another org, the first question I’d ask is whether you want to be a more researchy org or a more activist org.
Thanks, Eli! This is a super helpful framing to me as I think about our role here at The Roots of Progress.
Follow-on question: when you say “researchy” do you mean academia—or do you mean groups in the more public intellectual policy space (think tanks) that take on more of an explainer rather than activist bend?
The latter, although sometimes they overlap with academia. For example, CGO and Mercatus publish a lot of academics and are situated within universities.
I kind of did this analysis in 2019 on “how to move the needle on progress” and landed on health, housing, energy, and transportation as important sectors to fix.
If you think about it in productivity terms, in general equilibrium, low-productivity-growth sectors will tend to get bloated as a percent of GDP, while high-productivity-growth sectors will tend to shrink.
I still think the 2019 analysis is basically right, although I would emphasize one particular aspect of tractability, which is having a specific solution in mind. Tom Kalil talks about this as a test of policy maturity: suppose you have a 15-minute meeting with the President of the United States, and after the meeting the President is willing to call somebody and tell them what to do. Who do you have him call and what do you have him tell them to do? Until you have an answer to that question, your policy solution isn’t mature.
I think there’s a division of labor in the policy world between the more researchy and more activist groups. The researchy people should be working to discover mature policy ideas (in the Tom Kalil sense) and then the more activist groups should be working to get them implemented.
So for the research side, who are starting out without mature policy ideas and trying to generate them, tractability isn’t really a concern, it’s more about importance. The goal is to generate something tractable. The more activist people need to think more about taking the mature policy idea and running with it, and for them, tractability (political viability, etc.) is more important starting out.
Progress is so hard to come by in the policy world that I don’t think we should disqualify anything for not being neglected. Even housing/YIMBY stuff, I’m happy for more people to go into it if it gets us over the line.
So policy researchers should work on big industrial sectors like health, housing, energy, and transportation (and major cross-cutting issues like immigration and permitting), and try to come up with mature policy ideas that increase productivity. Then the more activist groups should take the tractable ideas and amplify them and try to get them over the line.
If I’m writing a priority list for another org, the first question I’d ask is whether you want to be a more researchy org or a more activist org.
Thanks, Eli! This is a super helpful framing to me as I think about our role here at The Roots of Progress.
Follow-on question: when you say “researchy” do you mean academia—or do you mean groups in the more public intellectual policy space (think tanks) that take on more of an explainer rather than activist bend?
The latter, although sometimes they overlap with academia. For example, CGO and Mercatus publish a lot of academics and are situated within universities.