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 law firm using hourly billing has a profit incentive to exaggerate how long work takes. And, unless the firm is already right at capacity in terms of the workload they are able to manage, it is advantageous for the firm to stretch out the time that your work takes so that it fills the otherwise free hours of their employees. It is easy to make a project take longer in ways that don’t feel very unethical: for example, spending extra time on formatting documents nicely, double and triple checking work, compiling cases that are unlikely to be all that relevant, or meeting unnecessarily to further discuss the case. Parkinson’s Law may also be at play here: if a project must be completed in two weeks, there may be a tendency to work on it for two weeks, regardless of how many hours optimally would be spent.

Two obvious incentives law firms also have are to avoid getting sued and to avoid looking incompetent. If they provide you with inaccurate information, or make obvious mistakes in their work, they are putting themselves at risk. You, of course, also don’t want inaccurate information or large mistakes in the work they hand you. But it is not necessarily the case that you care about these mistakes to the same degree as the firm. For instance, some errors affect them much more than you, such as irrelevant spelling errors in work that is merely intended for you to read. Such errors make the firm look bad but don’t impact the quality of the legal work. Yet a law firm may spend extra hours scrutinizing documents to eradicate such unimportant mistakes. On the other hand, other errors are far more likely to harm you than to harm the law firm, such as terms in a contract that are not what you intended, but which you would not have a strong legal case to sue the firm over.

The profit incentive of a law firm will tend to impact how its employees act, as it will incentivize upper management to put structures in place to promote this profit generation. But we can also consider the incentives of the individual lawyers assigned to work with you. They too have a reason to exaggerate how long work has taken. More recorded billable hours make employees look good to bosses, and make them appear to be more valuable employees (which, for associates, may increase their chance of making partner). Some associates at top law firms don’t even bother to use timers to keep track of time billed. In such cases, you can imagine how easy it can be for them to fudge the numbers, or conveniently round up. Even workers with no intention of dishonesty may rationalize over billing, or simply have an exaggerated sense of their own productivity. When we simultaneously have a strong incentive to do X, and also to believe that X is not immoral, we humans are remarkably good at coming up with reasons why X is a fine thing to do (conveniently not searching for reasons why it wouldn’t be fine). And, of course, nobody can verify how many hours were actually worked by any particular lawyer.

Whereas firms as a whole have a profit incentive to do work slowly when the firm is operating below maximum work capacity, individual lawyers have mixed incentives when it comes to doing work slowly. On the one hand, slow work increases billable hours, which makes the lawyer look good. On the other hand, being able to turn around work quickly is viewed as a virtue by bosses, and in some cases, the faster a lawyer gets her work done, the sooner she can go home at night. [Note: it has also been reported to me that sometimes new lawyers will under report their hours worked, so their bosses don’t realize how much they struggled with the work they had been assigned.]

Incentives aside, another challenge of hourly billing is that it can make it difficult for a client to know whether the service for which they are hiring a law firm is worth the cost, since they don’t even know what the cost is going to be. Some firms will produce estimates of the time that a project will take, but these can be quite unreliable (I personally know of at least one case where a firm was off by a factor of more than five) and while there is little incentive to overestimate the time a project will take, underestimating it will encourage a client to work with your firm rather than another. Even without such financial incentives, it is well-known that people tend to underestimate the time that projects will take. Remarkably, this often still holds even when people are aware that project completion times are usually underestimated (perhaps an instance of Hofstadter’s law).

One countervailing force to the incentive alignment problem is that law firms have to worry about reputation and getting repeat business. If they take a long time to do your work, or exaggerate the number of hours that work took, or give you bad estimates of how long future work will take, you will be less likely to hire them in the future, and may speak poorly about them to others. Unfortunately, due to the difficulty of acquiring information, this probably produces less of an incentive than many people assume. It is very hard for an outsider to estimate how long specific legal work should take, or evaluate the quality of the work done. How do you know, for instance, whether the will a law firm produced for you is a good one? Are you, as a non-lawyer, able to evaluate its quality? And if you never get sued, how do you know whether a contract you hired a firm to create truly protects your interests? For that matter, how do you know whether the 30 hours billed was a reasonable amount of time to produce that particular contract? As a non-expert, you most likely would not be able to tell from the contract itself if they had in fact only spent 20 hours working on it. Even in the instance of a case that was won or lost, while it may seem easy to evaluate the firm’s work quality, it is unclear what would have happened with that case if you had gone to competitors. Did you win because of your lawyer’s skill, or despite their lack of it? Did you lose because of weak performance, or because the case was very difficult? Would a competitor have achieved a better settlement, or a better plea bargain, or gotten the same result but at 80% the cost? It is fundamentally difficult for a non-expert, non-lawyer to measure the quality of work produced by lawyers. Of course, many issues similar to these apply to areas outside of law as well, when the person hiring lacks the ability to evaluate the quality of the product that they receive. [As some commenters have noted below, when large corporations hire law firms, they should be capable of holding these firms much more accountable than individuals are, because they have internal legal counsel with expertise in evaluating the quality of worked performed.]

What about reputation? Many people will choose a firm in part based on personal relationships, or what they happened to have heard said about that firm, or based on the firm rankings, or based on how famous the firm is. But if most individuals hiring law firms can’t evaluate the quality of the work that they are hiring firms to produce, it is not clear that firm reputation will be updated very efficiently. Does the fact that a friend of yours had a good experience working with large law firm X imply very much about that firm’s average quality? First of all, he likely only worked with a tiny fraction of their lawyers. Second, it is fairly likely that your friend is basing his assessment largely on softer factors like how attentive the firm was, how closely they matched his expectations of what a good lawyer seems like, and how much he personally liked the people he dealt with there, not on the quality of legal work produced and cost effectiveness (since as we’ve said these can be hard for a non-lawyer to evaluate).

The law firm ranking systems can be problematic as well. For instance, the Vault ranking, which is one of the most commonly used, is based on the opinions of law associates. They rate firms “on a scale of 1 to 10 based on prestige” (not being allowed to rate their own firm, and being asked to not rate firms they are not familiar with). How much does this really correlate with how good or cost-effective the work of a firm is for a typical client? Somewhat, surely, but it is far from an ideal measurement. What’s more, the prestige that an associate assigns to a law firm itself probably depends somewhat on the prior year’s vault rankings, adding circularity to the process.

Fame is a problematic measure as well. Older firms will tend to be more famous, as will those involved in famous cases, or that frequently appear in the news. But again, this may not correlate that well with quality of service and cost effectiveness for a typical client. In fact, famous firms and older firms may have less incentive to provide good service to new clients, since they have long established relationships and so can typically afford to rely less on new business.

There is little question that hourly billing creates misaligned incentives between you and your law firm. Project based billing (where a cost for the project is fixed in advance) fixes some of these problems, but produces new ones. With project based billing you at least know what hiring the firm will cost you, and so may be able to do a better job of estimating whether the project is worth the expense. But, in this case, firms have an incentive to get your work done in the least hours possible, since they get paid the same whether it takes them 100 hours or 200. So they may spend less than an ideal amount of time working on your project in this framework, and produce lower quality work than under the hourly billing paradigm.

When you hire a law firm, their incentives are not very well aligned with yours. You may be able to improve this problem, in some cases, by consulting with an unbiased lawyer about the quality and cost effectiveness of another lawyer’s work  (compared to the available alternatives) before hiring the latter. Of course, the former lawyer would have to be reliable herself and quite familiar with the latter’s work.

1. Murder violates an abstract principle that I would like all people to live by.

2. The Bible (or some other religious text) forbids murder.

3. As a result of evolution and natural selection, most people have an innate emotional “moral” aversion towards murder.

4. Murder is against the law.

5. Murder is labeled as “immoral” by most people in my society.

6. Murder usually reduces the total net happiness of society.

7. The idea of murder provokes in me a morality-related emotional state of “wrongness”.

8. Nearly all philosophies forbid murder or say it should be avoided.

9. Nearly all societies have laws that punish murderers or have customs that ostracize them.

10. Most people would feel a sense of guilt if they committed murder.

Unfortunately, dictionaries cannot clarify for us what the word “moral” means. For instance, one dictionary defines “moral” as “conforming to a standard of right behavior”. Looking up the relevant definition of “right”, we find “being in accordance with what is just, good, or proper”. But the definition given for “good” is just as vague and circular as were the definitions for “moral” and “right”. Checking another definition, the result is no better. It defines “moral” as “conforming to accepted standards of behavior.” Accepted by whom, and for what reason? The dictionary does not answer these questions, and hence does not provide us with an unambiguous explanation of what “moral” means.

Many well-respected philosophers begin by assuming that morality is a single, well-defined thing and argue about what properties it must have. But if we haven’t defined morality, how can we derive its properties? Are we even talking about the same thing as each other – if we’re not, then of course we can’t agree on the properties of that thing. As the list of interpretations above shows, there are many very different things that we might reasonably call “morality”, including our genetic moral intuitions created by natural selection, the societal rules that are deeply ingrained in us, religious laws, and certain abstract concepts about how to treat each other.

Some people claim that whenever someone says that an action is “moral”, all that person is doing is expressing a feeling or emotion about that action. It’s easily falsified that this is ALL that talk of “morality” is doing – Christians, Kantians, and Utilitarians at least sometimes use the word “moral” to refer to actions that are compatible with biblical teachings, the categorical imperative, and the happiness principle, respectively. These individuals likely have an emotional feeling that their systems of ethics are worthwhile, but nonetheless, they often speak of morality in direct reference to their philosophical systems, independent of their personal feelings. Many people who speak about what is moral at least genuinely believe themselves to be expressing a fact.

Ultimately, before we can decide whether a statement like “murder is immoral” is true, we must first decide what we mean by “moral”. When we don’t know the definition of a word, it is difficult to have a meaningful discussion that relies on it. If we decide that morality is simply whatever the law says, or is determined by what the Bible says, or is a genetic characteristic of human beings, then the question of whether “murder is immoral” becomes an empirical and factual one. We need only check the laws for our country, or search through the Bible, or study human genetics and behavior in order to answer questions about what is moral.

In practice, though, typically when statements about morality are made, there is rarely any explicit or even implicit definition of morality being used. Your average person relies on an intuitive sense of what is right and wrong. This intuitive sense is influenced by many factors, including our genetics, the standards of the society that we live in, the religion that we practice, our personal experiences, and the philosophies that appeal to us. Unfortunately, it appears as though questions about morality are usually unanswerable without further specification about the sense in which “moral” is being used.

If the argument made thus far is true, then how can we understand the fact that nearly everyone seems to agree when it comes to certain ethical statements? For example, how can we account for the fact that almost all people in most of the societies that have ever existed have believed that most kinds of murder are immoral? Well, one relevant factor may be that a strong predisposition to viewing as bad the maurder of close others (especially the murder of family members) is inherent in the human genetic code. More generally, our sense of what is morally wrong appears to be strongly correlated with what we feel an emotional revulsion towards, and those things that we find repulsive are influenced by our genetics. If most humans share a “moral feeling” that is caused by the genes that we share in common, then that provides a plausible explanation of why, for example, murder is generally thought to be immoral.

It is not difficult to imagine that when pre-humans lived in groups, an aversion towards certain types of murder could increase an individual’s chance of survival (perhaps because would-be murderers had a high chance of being killed by their intended victim or the victim’s family). If this were the case, then the process of natural selection could help make a revulsion towards murder a common trait among our ancestors. It may be illuminating to note that many types of carnivores, though feeding daily on other (typically smaller) species, very rarely kill members of their own species (even during fights that break out). This is likely due, at least in part, to the fact that members of a single species are usually fairly evenly matched in strength and fighting skills.

A lion is very unlikely to be killed attempting to kill an antelope. Still, he is fairly likely to be killed or seriously injured when attempting to kill another lion, so lions that focus on eating antelope rather than killing other lions may tend to pass down their genes more effectively (even though there are obvious reasons why one lion might benefit if it does manage to kill another). What’s more, social species may ostracize the members of their group who they feel threatened by, which could dramatically reduce the chance of survival for a “murderer” (by which, in this context, I mean a creature that kills members of its own species). A “moral feeling” would be one possible way, among many, that our genes could urge us not to kill members of our own species.

Another reason for the high convergence in moral views about murder being bad may simply be due to the act itself – it is one that, on nearly any moral view, is bad. But different moral theories, while agreeing on its badness, disagree on why it’s bad and what exactly counts as murder. For instance, they may disagree about whether killing someone in self-defense is murder, or as part of war, or as a punishment for a serious crime.

It’s hard to make progress when discussing moral questions when people mean very different things by “moral,” which, very often, they do.

This piece was first written on July 22, 2009, and first appeared on my website on February 10, 2026.