• political wars that pull things back and forth instead of moving forward

• voter confusion

• voters prioritizing other topics

• collective action problems

• they’re blocked by the few who are made worse off by them

• they are bad ideas, I’m wrong about them, or people’s values around them differ too much

Regardless of the reason, here are some ideas for what I would consider “low-hanging fruit” policies that would make things better:

1. 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 email to have an unsubscribe link.

2. Prefill all of our tax forms, and then simply send them to us to edit/approve. For many people, the U.S. government already knows what they owe! It’s insanely wasteful that they have to go through the lengthy and tedious process of filing taxes in that case.

3. Release everyone in prison for charges related only to marijuana possession or sale, and stop arresting for it. It is legal or decriminalized for some uses almost everywhere (except 2 of 50 states?). Yet somehow people are still in prison. The public is now pro-legalization.

4. Add a gradually ramping up corporate tax for air pollution (or cap & trade system) and pay this money immediately back to all people (directly or as tax relief). Air pollution has multiple negative externalities not properly priced in by the market.

5. Over time, ramp up regulations to prohibit keeping animals in a hellish nightmare, which is currently the normal life for most farm animals. The food industry secretly implicates most Americans in moral atrocities that most would be sickened by if they witnessed them. Most people are actually against the conditions that some animals are routinely kept in when they understand what they actually are.

6. Gradually switch some income tax to instead be collected via other more efficient/less distorting forms of taxation, for instance, a combination of (i) “land value” tax, (ii) tax on social signaling items (like super expensive watches/jewelry/yachts), and (iii) consumption taxes. Most economists agree that there are better approaches to taxing than we use.

7. Gradually remove tax breaks that incentivize things we don’t actually want to incentivize (unfortunately, there are many). E.g., the mortgage tax deduction on interest and the tax deductions employers get for health insurance. Instead, this money could be distributed to everyone while simplifying the tax code.

8. The law gets longer and more complex each year, is impossible for anyone to understand, and is expensive to comply with. This could be improved by requiring law removal (of matching length) when adding new ones, or creating a body to find antiquated laws and bring them to Congress to vote on removing.

9. Currently, sex workers are much more likely to be punished than those who seek their services, despite sex workers having a high chance of being impoverished/in a dangerous situation/exploited. All the major alternatives may be an improvement to the current system: decriminalizing, making legal and regulating, or flipping who is prosecuted.

10. Prevent gerrymandering. It’s a horrendous abuse of the political system, and both major political parties do it. It’s appalling that this still happens regularly. It’s not an easy problem, but mathematicians can design a set of requirements in setting voter district lines that make it much harder to manipulate election results. Or, a simpler solution comes from Nicholas Gruen: districting can be done by a randomly selected group of citizens instead of being determined by politicians.

11. For those terminally ill with a short, excruciatingly painful future, provide a way for those who want it to get assistance with painless suicide if they choose (after passing a psychological and medical evaluation). We subject people who are already doomed to die in pain to live for months or years in torturous circumstances, rather than dying in peace.

12. Right now, we have solitary confinement prisons, where people can end up being alone for years, amounting to torture that would drive most crazy. It should be totally banned or severely limited in duration (e.g., no more than 2 days per month).

This piece was first written on August 23, 2020 and first appeared on my website on June 17, 2026.

1. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
2. Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
3. Gates’ Law: Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
4. Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
5. Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or, don’t invoke conspiracy when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence).
6. Acton’s Dictum: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
7. Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
8. Benford’s Law: In a diverse collection of unrelated statistics, a given statistic has roughly a 30% chance of starting with the digit 1.
9. Betteridge’s Law: Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.
10. Brooks’ Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
11. Chesterton’s Fence: Reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
12. Claasen’s Law: Usefulness = log(technology).
13. Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right, but when they state something is impossible, they are probably wrong.
14. Cromwell’s Rule: Nothing but logical impossibilities have a prior probability of 0 or 1.
15. Cunningham’s Law: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.
16. Doctorow’s Law: When someone puts a lock on a thing you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.
17. Dunbar’s Number: Most people can’t maintain stable social relationships with more than 150 people.
18. Eroom’s Law: Drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology.
19. Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: You’ll believe articles outside your area of expertise, even after acknowledging that neighboring articles in your area of expertise are completely wrong.
20. Gibson’s Law (or the Expert Witness Law): For each PhD (to use as an expert witness for one side) there’s an equal and opposite PhD.
21. Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
22. Morley-Souter’s Law (Rule 34): There is porn of it (no exceptions).
23. Greenspun’s Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
24. Hebb’s Law: Neurons that fire together wire together.
25. Hubble’s Law: Galaxies recede from an observer at a rate proportional to their distance to that observer.
26. Hume’s Guillotine (Is-Ought Problem): Normative statements (about what’s moral/immoral/right/wrong) cannot be deduced exclusively from descriptive statements.
27. Humphrey’s Law: Conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance.
28. Kranzberg’s Law: Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
29. Lamarck’s Principle (or “Use it or Lose it”): Use it or lose it (evolutionarily speaking, but also in the brain).
30. Lewis’s Law: The comments you’ll inevitably find on any article about feminism justify feminism.
31. Littlewood’s Law: Individuals can expect miracles to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month.
32. Maes–Garreau Law: Favorable predictions about future technology will fall at the latest possible date they can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the predictor.
33. Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.
34. Miller’s Law: To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.
35. Moore’s Law: Computation per dollar grows exponentially (or: number of transistors per circuit doubles roughly every 24 months).
36. Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
37. Alder’s Law: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
38. O’Sullivan’s Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
39. Pareto’s Principle (80/20 Rule): For many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
40. Peter’s Principle: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
41. Poisson’s Law (or Law of Large Numbers): For independent random variables with a common distribution, the average tends to the mean as sample size increases.
42. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In bureaucracy, those devoted to the bureaucracy get control, those devoted to what it’s supposed to achieve lose influence.
43. Putt’s Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.
44. Rosenthal Effect (Pygmalion Effect): High expectations lead to an increase in performance, low expectations to a decrease in performance.
45. Schneier’s Law: Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.
46. Shermer’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.
47. Zipf’s Law: The frequency of use of the nth-most-frequently-used word in any natural language is approximately inversely proportional to n (few words are used often, most are used rarely).
48. Wirth’s Law: Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster.
49. Sturgeon’s Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud.
50. Stigler’s Law: No discovery is named after its original discoverer, including this one.

This piece was first written on July 6, 2020, and first appeared on my website on May 30, 2026.