Why Balsa Research is Worthwhile
It is easy to see why improving government policy would be impactful. The part where one has a chance of pulling it off requires explanation. Here are four fair questions.
Why believe there is an opening in what would appear to be a well-covered, highly crowded space of trained professionals pushing their preferred policies?
Why is this tractable or neglected?
What is the theory of change?
You?
My answer to all of these, as it is in most other places, has two central explanations.
There are no adults. In most places, also no trained professionals. There are only a bunch of adaptation executors, rewarded when they are seen cutting the enemy rather than ensuring the enemy is cut, and for reinforcing the party line.
Where adults do exist, they do not have the right incentives. This causes them to mostly do things that don’t help solve the underlying problems. Existing organizations are instead focused on pleasing their donor bases and otherwise looking good. This makes them bad at generating effective solutions and at getting anything implemented.
There are several entire ecosystems of think tanks and political activists seeking to make their case, have their voices heard and enact change. We have no shortage of such projects, from all sides: Left wing and right wing, statist, liberal and libertarian. Some generalize while others narrow their focus.
Almost none of them are taking actions designed to cause change. That is not what gets them or their employees more status or more funding. That is not what their organizational memory or culture says to do.
This is why, from the perspective of someone looking for good policy as a result, such results seem to be few and far between, no matter one’s underlying preferences. When it comes time to choose policies on which to campaign or laws to enact, the choices and details reliably fail to seem to be anything approaching optimal and are often atrociously bad. They are not much informed by what preparatory work has been done.
Recently I talked to a number of Democratic operatives, and all of them winced at most of what the party has been centrally attempting (often successfully) to pass, both on political and practical grounds.
When Republicans have had the power to pass legislation recently, they seem to have little idea how to in practice implement either general good governance or their own core principles. They have instead mostly focused on either looking tough on culture war issues and point making or trying to mechanically win future elections.
When the time came to ‘repeal and replace’ the ACA, with years to prepare, the proposal that was voted on was the null proposal. No alternatives seem to have been seriously considered.
Corporate tax reform was a top Republican priority forever. Its implementation was technically botched.
With a new opportunity to pass abortion laws, we see once again that the research simply was not done, by anyone, on any side.
Leftist and statist organizations propose policy primarily on the basis of symbolism rather than whether the proposal would work in practice. Usually what they propose would sabotage the very cause they say they wish to promote if it were implemented. Often the motivations are various internal struggles.
Libertarian groups are good at pointing out the flaws in new proposals and existing laws. Alas, they mostly do not present these arguments in the forms or with the credibility that causes the system to listen. Everyone is tired of hearing it, often including me. Nor do they pack a sufficient lobbying punch. Nor do they sculpt proposals in ways that allow them to be picked up by the media or would make them popular with voters, or make them palatable enough to be seriously considered.
Centrist-style thought is embodied by the Forward Party having zero policy stances at all.
Effective altruist efforts have mostly chosen to hone in on a handful of narrow cause areas, neglecting the issues that impact elections and daily lives. It is too early to tell if those efforts will succeed on their own terms.
Republicans seem to be post-policy, their groups doubly so.
The result, from all sides, is usually neither good policy for the country, good policy for the particular cause the group behind it cares about most, or even good politics, let alone all three.
One can blame this on political practicalities. On lobbyists, individual lawmakers with leverage, various special interest groups and coalition members and the dynamics of primaries and increasing partisan division, the details of the filibuster rules and CBO scores and the echo chambers of Twitter and the mass media. On overworked and overwhelmed congressional staff and the impossibility of staying on top of all the issues while spending half one’s time fundraising and having to focus primarily on winning elections. Or on much of the work necessary to succeed being the type of long term, permanently private work for which no one can take credit.
These certainly make the problem harder. They also absorb almost all the money, which is spent fighting partisan battles.
File these problems under Degree of Difficulty, and treat them for now as endogenous.
You want to win? I say: Play better.
