Written: February 2, 2019 | Released: June 27, 2021
Change my mind! Below are my very tentative, weakly held perspectives on ten very complex policy topics. If you have strong evidence or solid arguments against (or for) any of these viewpoints, I’d be really interested to know. Please post in the comments, referencing which topic you are referring to (e.g. “#1 – Heath insurance”, “#5 – Death penalty”, etc.).
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A few notes: I’m assuming the constraint that proposed policies are not allowed to cost the government significantly more money than it spends today on the corresponding policies. It’s relatively easy, uninteresting, and most of all, unhelpful to propose “good” policies that involve the government spending lots of extra money.
I’m also not going to include any views I hold that I’m confident a lot of you will agree with, because what’s the point? So these reflect some of my less mainstream views. Also, note that these policy perspectives sometimes assume a U.S. system but may still be relevant to other countries. Finally, I’ll just say that it’s extremely likely that I’m wrong about some of these policy proposals being good (even according to my own values). I’m very interested in finding out which of these I’m wrong about so that I can switch my opinion!
Tentative perspectives on very complex policy topics: change my mind!
Perspective #1 – Health insurance: given the tradeoffs between the fairness of universal health (good), the negative externalities of not giving people the cost-effective treatment they need (bad), the bureaucratic and supply management and transaction cost inefficiencies of a heavily regulated market (bad), potentially high costs of universal healthcare (bad), and the adverse selection of a free market (bad), I suspect we’d be better off with a system that is a special sort of hybrid between universal healthcare and the free market. The idea would be that all medical care that has strong evidence of cost-effectiveness is automatically given for free to anyone who needs it. This seems likely to be a very cost-effective investment by the government in the health of the people. But then, coverage for anything beyond those most “proven to be cost-effective” would be handled by a nearly pure free-market insurance system (with people paying out of pocket for those services they want if they haven’t purchased their own free-market health insurance).
Perspective #2 – Corporate taxes: given my suspicion that companies, on average, allocate capital to activities that are more useful for society than what wealthy people allocate money to, I suspect we’d be better off if taxes on the wealthy were raised and taxes on companies were lowered (which, with smart estimation procedures, could be done in such a way as to make the total tax collected by the government kept fixed if desired). This would have the effect of shifting more dollars into the hands of companies and fewer into the hands of wealthy people.
Another way to think about this, by reducing the tax rate on companies, you increase the number of projects that are worthwhile for companies to take on (once the management has accounted for the risk of the projects), and I don’t see an analogously beneficial effect when wealthy people have that money instead of the companies.
Note: To some Facebook commenters, this change would create an incentive for wealthy people to create shell companies just to receive money and spend it on their behalf. I think this is true, but on the other hand, I don’t think that such behavior would be likely to have anywhere close to a 100% adoption rate, meaning that, if true, this would just reduce somewhat, not eliminate the effectiveness of the change. Also, rules around what companies can be used to do might have to be tightened as a response.
Perspective #3 – Voting: a lot of people view it as a good thing to get as many people to vote as possible, but it seems to me that this is only good insofar as it causes elected leader’s actions to better reflect the average interests of the people. And actually, more voters don’t really help, as you don’t need that large a sample size to get a highly accurate representation of people’s interests. This is a statistical fact, and it’s the reason why a poll with an entirely random sampling of 5000 Americans can accurately represent the views of hundreds of millions of people. So I think that what’s more important than numbers is making sure that (a) the people who vote are genuinely representative of the whole population (i.e., that they are a random sampling), and (b) that those who vote really do their due diligence on the politicians and consider their choice very carefully. So, this might sound bizarre, but I’d suspect we’d actually be quite a lot better off if, instead of everyone being able to vote, for each national vote, we chose 50,000 people at random, and these were the only people allowed to vote (with each citizen having a precisely equal chance of being selected – for instance by randomly sampling social security numbers). Then, it could be legally required for each of these 50,000 people to vote (they could get paid $250 each by the government for voting to incentivize their voting while offsetting travel and other costs, in addition to punishment for not voting). Oddly, in addition to being much cheaper than our current elections, this would actually produce a much more representative sample of the population’s perspectives than we get right now (since right now, voter turnout varies dramatically by group, area, ethnicity, and age), and it would also create far more pressure for voters to really investigate the candidates and become knowledgable, incentivizing them to be more thoughtful in their choice, since each of their votes would matter tremendously more than they do right now.
Note: Someone made the point to me that by picking people at random, you may end up with voters who are less knowledgable about politics, on average (which I think is probably true). If it is true, this would be a factor that would have to be weighed against the increased representativeness and the increased incentive to get things right (among those who cast votes) that would come about from random sampling. In a sampling-based approach, it would also be especially important to prevent vote-buying, e.g., by not publishing who the voters are, by making it illegal to try to buy the names of voters, by keeping vote-buying and selling illegal, by using voting booths such that there is no way to prove who someone voted for after the fact (so that a briber can’t tell if their bribe paid off), and by making the time between when voters are selected and when the vote occurs as short as is feasible.
Perspective #4 – Elementary school and high school education: since I think that a non-negligible chunk of what is taught in elementary and high schools is not actually useful, and also, since I think that the structure of curriculums is usually such that students have forgotten >90% of the material 6 months later, I suspect that we’d be better off if educators started with a list of knowledge that is most useful to know for most people that they wouldn’t automatically learn (e.g. words that you are most likely to see in articles and books but that are rare in spoken language, and important facts about the way the world works, etc.), together with a list of skills that are most useful to have (e.g. skills that you are most likely going to need when you get a job such as organization skills and social skills, etc.), and redesigned the curriculum so that it teaches fewer things, but with an emphasis on the knowledge and skills that are truly useful, as well as a significantly reduced amount of total memorized content so as to increase repetition, so that material can be remembered at much higher rates. That being said, it would also be important to expose kids to lots of different types of material from different areas to help them make informed choices about what future areas of study or careers they may want to pursue.
Perspective #5 – Drugs: given the tradeoffs between excessive imprisonment for minor drug offenses (bad), giving people freedom of choice (good), the legitimate enjoyment and benefits that some people get from some drugs (good), and the real damage sometimes done by drug use (bad), I suspect we’d be better off if we legalized all drugs that are below a specific threshold for “average damage per use” while taking into account addictiveness. Hence, any drug above a certain average health damage threshold would be illegal (except for cigarettes/alcohol, which might fall above that threshold, but which are ingrained in culture across the world to such an extent that making them illegal would be too difficult and cause too much anger and backlash). So, for instance, if a drug has a 5% chance of killing you with each use, it would be illegal on the grounds of clearly causing too much damage, whereas if another drug causes 5% of people who try it once to become totally addicted, and causes very substantial harm on average to those who are totally addicted (but no harm to those who don’t become addicted), it also would be banned because, on average, the damage-per-use would still be too substantial taking into account the risk of addictiveness. But this also means that all drugs that cause little harm and are not addictive would be legalized (which likely would include many drugs that are illegal today).
Note: It may be quite challenging to compare different types of harm (e.g., one drug making people slightly less intelligent vs. another drug causing a heart condition). All the different sorts of harm would have to be scored by how bad they are and then weighted by their probabilities (perhaps using a methodology like what is used for Disability Adjusted Life Years).
Perspective #6 – Death penalty: my understanding is that death sentences actually end up costing more money in the U.S. than keeping someone in prison for life (due to legal system costs), and moreover, that death sentences sometimes kill innocent people who could have later been exonerated (e.g., by new evidence coming to light). Even for those who like the idea of punishment (not me!), it’s not clear that a death sentence is actually more of a punishment than life imprisonment (it probably varies from person to person – so it’s not clear to me that the death penalty makes sense even from a punishment perspective). My view, though, is that it is bad to make people suffer merely for punishment purposes anyway (i.e., when doing so does not cause substantially more good for other people through future prevention), and I think that life in prison can be like torture for some people. Of course, putting a highly dangerous person back on the street could also be a bad idea. With all that in mind, I suspect things would be better overall if the death penalty were NEVER mandatory, but if people with life long sentences were given the option of volunteering for painlessly assisted suicide, requiring only that they apply for it and get approval from both a doctor and psychologist. Those who chose this option could avoid (what might be to them) the torture of life-long imprisonment while simultaneously ensuring they can’t harm anyone in the future, and presumably actually saving the government money (since there would be no expensive many year-long legal processes in these cases). From this perspective, it seems odd not to give lifelong prisoners this choice of suicide (i.e., it seems better in nearly all ways, since it would presumably be better for the prisoner given that they would have to volunteer for it, it would still protect the public, and it would save the government money).
Perspective #7 – Sex work: given the tradeoffs between lack of legal and physical protections for sex workers when sex work is illegal (bad), negative psychological and physical impacts of the profession that occur for sex workers even in cases where they adopt the job willingly (bad), potential increases in societal infidelity due to prostitution (bad), the very harmful effects that pimps often have on sex workers in unregulated markets (bad), potential spread of STIs (bad), enjoyment customers get from sex workers (good), and potential effects on the way prostitution influences views of women (bad), I suspect the best option would be to make sex work legal but extremely regulated (e.g., brothels require a license and sex workers must be licensed, limits on the total number of such sex worker licenses, regular STI testing of sex workers, required condom use, Johns being required to give valid ID before engaging so that if they hurt or rape a prostitute they can be much more easily prosecuted, very harsh penalties for illegal brothels, anti-pimp laws, etc.) Basically, the goal would be to reduce the harm to those who engage in sex work and raising the status and protections for sex workers while simultaneously trying to avoid a substantial increase in the number of sex workers (that legalization might otherwise inadvertently cause). The reason I think that a large increase in sex workers would be bad is that I think it would cause a number of negative externalities that would not be likely to be properly priced in by the market.
Note: Some Facebook comments, on the original post, made arguments in favor of decriminalization (i.e., making sex work neither illegal to buy nor illegal to sell) rather than regulation (i.e., making it legal to sell only under certain conditions). I’m still thinking these arguments through, and now I’m undecided about which approach is better.
Perspective #8 – Jury duty: most of jury duty consists of sitting around and waiting to be called, at which point there is a pretty high likelihood you will not get placed on a case anyway. This is a tremendous waste of people’s time. Moreover, being a good juror is not easy, and I think that jurors fairly often get mislead by nice-sounding but invalid arguments given by lawyers (e.g., tricky discussions related to evidence or probabilities) or find it confusing regarding what exactly they are supposed to be ruling based on (e.g., what evidence is admissible, and what threshold of proof is actually required to find someone guilty). My personal experience at jury duty also suggests that sometimes lawyers dismiss jurors specifically to try to make the jury more biased (i.e., reject people to get a jury that would be more in favor of their client) rather than the reverse. Keeping all of this in mind, I suspect we’d be better off with a system of professional jurors. They could still be carefully balanced to be representative of the population (e.g., by gender, age, ethnicity, and all other traits the court sees as important), but they would be paid well, not sit around doing nothing most of the day, be screened for bias, and be carefully trained in the rules of the courts, and how evidence and probabilities work, and how to not get tricked by fallacious rhetoric. They could even undergo testing after being trained to make sure they understand the evidence and legal rules. Then the standards for throwing out jurors could also be tightened since this group could be pre-screened for conflicts of interest, meaning that cases could start faster (making the whole system cheaper), and there would be less possibility of lawyers increasing bias through the juror elimination process.
Note: In some Facebook comments, concerns were expressed about such professional jurors being influenced by, e.g., politicians with political agendas. This doesn’t seem to me to be that likely to be a problem because jurors typically only vote “guilty” or “innocent” (a binary decision) in criminal cases, and I don’t see much incentive for politicians to influence these votes (e.g., influencing those guilty/innocent decisions is not going to help them get re-elected). Plus, it is illegal to attempt to influence jurors, so it would be pretty risky for politicians to try it at any meaningfully large scale. It’s one thing to influence a few jurors in a particular court case but quite another to influence thousands systematically without being caught.
Perspective #9 – Euthanasia: I think the world would be a better place if anyone who is terminally ill with a painful disease (and a very low chance of recovery) could, with the approval of both a doctor and a psychologist, get help painlessly ending their life. I don’t see why we would force people to suffer in such scenarios if they would prefer not to. Furthermore, for anyone not terminally ill, I suspect it would be an improvement to have a system where a person (with no dependents) could apply for assisted suicide, requiring both approval from a doctor and a psychologist, as well as a 12 month waiting period (at which point a second evaluation by the doctor and psychologist would occur before the assisted suicide). This would help make sure that the person isn’t acting impulsively and that they aren’t making their suicide decision based on false beliefs about the world or temporary circumstances.
Perspective #10 – Immigration: we should allow into the country all highly talented people who pass security background checks by granting them visas that last at least five years. Note that I’m not saying we shouldn’t allow other people in; I’m just making a weaker argument here: that we SHOULD allow all highly talented people in that are a low-security risk. Evaluating talent could be based on different buckets (e.g., business, science, technology, art, writing, etc.), but basically, the person’s past history could be used to make the determination. It strikes me that the people of our country are made better off by increasing the number of talented people here (because it leads to more production of high-quality new things, more wealth all around, and more value being captured by our country). What’s more, it is presumably valuable for these talented people who want to immigrate, given their choice to do so. Unfortunately, it may have the adverse effect of causing brain drain from other countries (harming those countries), but on the other hand, if people are immigrating here from poorer countries on average, their income will tend to go up, which means they could send money home, effectively returning wealth to the home country (though I’m pretty unsure how the tradeoff of brain drain vs. increased remittances nets out). It also might turn out to be good for the world overall to have more clumping of talent (which such a policy would tend to create), assuming that by bringing talent together, more things of great value would be created, that can then eventually be spread back across the world.
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