I think there are a number of possible reasons why even good, bipartisan policies don’t get put into practice:

A. Political battles prevent useful things from getting done (e.g., if a policy sounds too “left,” the right will reflexively oppose it, and if it sounds too “right,” the left will reflexively oppose it).

B. Politicians fear “slippery slopes,” so they will oppose good policies out of concern that they will create momentum towards policies they oppose (e.g., “well, sure, it’s a good idea to prevent people from buying grenade launchers, but the next thing you know, all guns will be outlawed!”).

C. Voters may not understand some of these policies, so politicians don’t bother to push for them (e.g., how many people can explain the benefits of a “land value tax” relative to an income tax?).

D. Policies are limited by collective action problems, whereby the policies can only occur if a number of people act in a coordinated fashion, but it’s tough for them to coordinate (e.g., the left and right would have to put aside their differences temporarily and cooperate to get the policy to move forward).

E. It’s not uncommon for politicians to be low-empathy narcissists who are mainly aiming to serve their own interests.

F. Even if the policies make most people better off, there will always be at least a few who are made worse off, and those people may act aggressively to block the policies (e.g., “sure, this will be convenient for almost every American, but industry X will lose out, and they are a major donor, so we can’t push it through”). Or another version of this could occur where some people would gain a lot more than those who would lose out, but those who would gain have less power than those who would lose (e.g., “sure, this would help lots of poor people a great deal, but powerful people would be slightly worse off”).

G. Small groups with particular interests have excessive power over politicians, which enables them to block some valuable policies, e.g., by acting as a unified voting block – especially in low turnout elections, or because of financial power, such as that wielded by large corporations or billionaires).

H. I’m wrong, and some of these are, in fact, bad ideas for policies for reasons I am not aware of.

Here’s my first pass at a list of what I see as “low-hanging fruit” for policies in the U.S. that I think would be likely to make society better at low cost:

1. Improving Mail: Require regular mail to have a clearly labeled unsubscribe phone number or URL on the outside of the envelope, much like how we already require emails to have an unsubscribe link. This requirement has been used for email for a long time and seems to have a really clear and obvious benefit there, so why would we not do it for regular mail as well?

2. Improving Tax Time: The government should prefill all of our tax forms and then simply send them to us to edit/approve. For many of us, the U.S. government already knows what we owe! And any information they don’t know, we could simply add to what they filled out for us. It’s insanely wasteful that we have to go through the lengthy and tedious process of filling out taxes. My understanding is that this has mainly been blocked by corporate interest groups that make tax software, along with some Republican politicians who fear it could be a sneaky way for the government to stick you with extra taxes. It seems like the benefit clearly outweighs the risk.

3. Sane Marijuana Policy: Release everyone who is in prison for charges related only to marijuana possession or sale, and stop arresting people for it. Marijuana is already legal or decriminalized for at least some uses in most of the U.S., yet somehow people are still in prison for this! The public is now pro strongly pro-legalization (more than 2/3rds support it), and it is extremely unjust to keep people in prison for a “crime” that is, in fact, (a) legal in many states, (b) enforced non-uniformly, (c) usually victimless, and (d) not even considered a crime by most people.

4. Taxing Pollution: Add a gradually ramping up corporate tax for air pollution (or a “cap and trade” system). Pay the revenue raised from this taxation immediately back to all people (as tax relief, or for those who pay no tax, as cash). Air pollution has multiple negative externalities that are not properly priced in by the market! Even if you don’t believe in human-caused climate change, it’s obvious that air pollution has other negative externalities, as it causes many health problems. And if you do believe that human-caused climate change is a problem (or has even a 30% chance of being a big problem), this is a no-brainer.

5. Moral Animal Policy: Over a period of time (so that industry has time to adapt), ramp up regulations to prohibit raising animals in a hellish nightmare, which is currently the normal life of most farm animals. The food industry secretly implicates most Americans in moral atrocities that most of us would be sickened by if we witnessed it. There is no reason that animals need to be tortured the way they are so that people can eat meat, eggs, and fish.

6. Improving Taxation Methods: Gradually switch some income tax to instead be a combination of (i) “land value tax” (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax), (ii) taxes on very high-priced items that are mainly about wealth signaling (like very expensive new watches/jewelry/yachts), and (iii) progressive forms of consumption tax. Most economists agree that there are better approaches to taxation than we use now that don’t distort behavior as much. One of the interesting properties of taxing goods that primarily exist for wealth signaling is that by taxing them, you don’t make them less desirable. By taxing them, you cause their price to tend to go up, making them even better items for wealth signaling! Land value taxes also have appealing properties. But by taxing income, you make earning additional income less desirable than it otherwise would be, which is not the sort of disincentive we want to create.

7. Fixing Tax Breaks: Gradually remove tax breaks that incentivize things we don’t actually want to incentivize. There are many examples of this, such as the mortgage tax deduction on interest (why do we want to incentivize people to have mortgages?) and the tax-deductions employers get for health insurance (why do we want to incentivize companies to give their employees higher-priced insurance plans instead of higher salaries?). Instead of giving these weird tax breaks, we could just give this money back to all people in the form of equal tax breaks. One thing that makes this kind of change tricky is that there will always be someone losing when these tax breaks change. That being said, that issue could be reduced by announcing the tax breaks will be phased out in five years or by paying some extra money in a one-time fee to those who are losing out due to the changes. Planet Money has a great podcast episode that discusses this, along with other policy improvements that economists of very different political leanings tend to agree on (see: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/26/499490275/episode-387-the-no-brainer-economic-platform).

8. Legal Complexity: The law gets longer and more complex each year. At this point, it is impossible for any human to understand. It is also expensive to comply with, and it tends to get more expensive each year. This leads to bad situations where large companies can easily afford to follow the law, and tiny companies can’t even afford to figure out what the law is, let alone follow it! A simple proposed solution is to require the removal of an old law whenever a new one is added (the removed law would have to be at least as long as the new one). Alternatively, a new body could be created to find antiquated laws and bring them to congress to vote on removing. The only groups I know of that benefit from the law becoming endlessly more long and complicated are (1) large corporations who can use it to their advantage against startups and (2) lawyers who must be hired at great expense to navigate the insanely complex rules.

9. Sane Sex Work Policy: Currently, sex workers are much more likely to be punished than those who seek their services. This is bizarre because sex workers (i) are often exploited (either through sex trafficking or pimps), (ii) are often impoverished and, in many cases, resort to sex work out of desperation, and (iii) are often the victims of violence and rape (so it’s obviously really important that they can easily report crimes). Some people think sex work should just be legalized, which is controversial. It seems to me that a less controversial plan that is still a clear improvement over the status quo is to merely switch the penalties and legal enforcement away from sex workers and instead to those who buy their services. The fact that a person who is sex trafficked can be punished for being sex trafficked (and therefore may be afraid about going to the police) is insane!

10. Stop Gerrymandering. It’s not an easy math problem to define gerrymandering, but with some effort, mathematicians can certainly design a set of requirements for setting voter district lines that make it much harder to manipulate election results. It’s appalling that this still happens so regularly. It is practiced both on the right and the left and is a clear perversion of democracy. Surely both the left and right can agree that this is immoral and should be stopped on both sides?

11. Allow People to Die in Peace. It is controversial whether assisted suicide should be legal for anyone who wants it. But it is not controversial that assisted suicide should be an option (after a psychological and medical evaluation) for those who are terminally ill with a short, excruciatingly painful future ahead of them. And yet, right now, we subject many such people to untold, needless agony. Instead of peacefully passing surrounded by their loved ones in their preferred setting, they die horribly in a hospital after months of torment. A minority of people who are uncomfortable with this idea end up inadvertently ruining the final months of many people’s lives and causing vast amounts of needless suffering.

12. Insane Prisons: We literally have solitary confinement prisons, where people can end up being (essentially) alone for years. This amounts to torture that would drive most people crazy. If solitary confinement is not banned, at least it should be severely limited in duration. There is no justification for sticking a person in one of these places for a year.

The list above represents my first pass at some policy interventions that seem to me likely to be beneficial according to the values of both the left and the right. That being said, chances are that I am wrong about the benefits of one or more of the above, as the world is a complex and chaotic place, and my understanding of it is far from perfect.

But, as far as I can tell, the left and the right scream at each other (sometimes about unimportant things) while massive, easily prevented suffering is all around us. We could fix more of these problems if we could find more common ground and cooperate on the problems that both the left and the right care about fixing. Politics doesn’t have to be a mostly zero-sum war.

This piece was first written on March 13, 2021, and first appeared on this site on September 23, 2022.

(A) Collective Action Problems, where many individuals or groups are currently better off taking action X, even though they’d be better off in the long-term if everyone agreed not to take action X.

Some of the big challenges with Collective Actions Problems are (i) getting people or groups to agree to stop the behavior in the first place, and then (ii) creating a very strong commitment mechanism so that the parties don’t just later defect against the agreement.

(B) Incentive Misalignment Problems, where many individuals or groups are currently better off taking action X, even though such actions harm the rest of society broadly.

The big challenge with an Incentive Misalignment Problem is finding some way to align the incentives of individuals and groups with the incentives of society as a whole.

Unfortunately, we humans seem to be quite bad at solving these kinds of problems on a society-wide scale much of the time (we are better at solving them on smaller scales, such as within companies and within families).

I think that figuring out how to better solve Collective Action Problems and Incentive Misalignment Problems is extremely important for the future of humanity.

Here’s my list of some of the major unsolved problems in the world right now that are of these types:

(A) Collective Action Problems

1. The development of nuclear weapons (e.g., North Korea developed them pretty recently, Iran may still develop them, the U.S. and China may still develop more of them, etc.). We would all be safer if countries could somehow credibly commit to getting rid of their nuclear weapons and never making trying to make them again.

2. Arms race dynamics in the development of advanced A.I. (e.g., where players feel rushed by competition instead of proceeding cautiously and cooperating on the numerous safety challenges).

(B) Incentive Misalignment Problems

3. Publication of risky forms of “gain-of-function” research (where researchers find ways to make viruses more infectious or more deadly to humans) and other forms of bioresearch that might threaten our species.

4. Products being optimized to generate craving, immediate hyper-stimulation, and/or addiction at the expense of long-term consumer benefit (e.g., junk food, some social media, clickbait, some video games, etc.).

5. The creation of animal products involving what seems to be vast amounts of suffering (e.g., keeping an animal in a tiny cage its whole life so that a human can spend 30 mins enjoying eating it).

7. The incentive that many groups and individuals have to spread false, misleading, and/or politically biased information; this bad information sometimes overwhelms the spread of true information on the same topics (leading to bad decisions, misinformed voters, and polarization).

8. Over-focus on the short-term welfare of society at the expense of the long term (including our own lives in 10-20 years’ time and future generations).

(C) Hybrid Collective Action Problems + Incentive Misalignment Problems

9. Running a highly risky environmental experiment with the stupendous quantity of greenhouse gases we dump into our atmosphere. If we could cooperate on taking the most cost-effective actions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we could greatly reduce the risk. But this is not strictly a collective action problem, as there are some companies and people who would be individually better off continuing to pollute tremendous amounts (and the personal benefits to them would likely offset the projected negative impacts of global warming on them).

10. The disturbingly high levels of false results that seem to be present in various branches of science (e.g., ~40% of claims from social science papers in top journals appear not to replicate, and an even higher percentage fail to replicate in preclinical cancer biology). Even those who want to change their practices often find themselves stuck in a system that rewards shoddy practices that produce compelling-seeming results.

This piece was first written on November 16, 2020, and first appeared on this site on May 13, 2022.