The small amendment that I would make is that the space of policy options is quite vast and taking time to compare different options is probably not a bad idea, but I largely agree that it would generally be much better for people to move to the n-1 level.
Thanks! If you are directly and literally comparing the utility of two or three or four concrete policy options, that’s more valuable than general academic research—it’s at least level 3, and possibly better if you write up your conclusions in a format that can be easily digested by policy wonks (level 2) or by politicians (level 1).
Unfortunately, most academic research weighs the pros and cons of general categories of policies and then offers no concrete recommendations, so a lot of what looks like “comparing different options” at first glance is not immediately valuable as a tool for picking the best currently available option.
Brainstorming new policy options to further explore the available space is at least a level 3 activity, and possibly level 2 (if you write up some of those options in enough detail that someone could advocate for them). However, as I’ll argue in the fifth post in this sequence, we already have a dozen “orphaned” policy proposals that nobody is drafting up or advocating for, so unless and until this changes, we’ll get limited value from having an even larger stack of orphaned policies. Even if you find a policy that’s an order of magnitude better than previous ideas, that policy still doesn’t generate any utility until someone goes and does the political work needed to turn it into law.
I find this pretty convincing.
The small amendment that I would make is that the space of policy options is quite vast and taking time to compare different options is probably not a bad idea, but I largely agree that it would generally be much better for people to move to the n-1 level.
Thanks! If you are directly and literally comparing the utility of two or three or four concrete policy options, that’s more valuable than general academic research—it’s at least level 3, and possibly better if you write up your conclusions in a format that can be easily digested by policy wonks (level 2) or by politicians (level 1).
Unfortunately, most academic research weighs the pros and cons of general categories of policies and then offers no concrete recommendations, so a lot of what looks like “comparing different options” at first glance is not immediately valuable as a tool for picking the best currently available option.
Brainstorming new policy options to further explore the available space is at least a level 3 activity, and possibly level 2 (if you write up some of those options in enough detail that someone could advocate for them). However, as I’ll argue in the fifth post in this sequence, we already have a dozen “orphaned” policy proposals that nobody is drafting up or advocating for, so unless and until this changes, we’ll get limited value from having an even larger stack of orphaned policies. Even if you find a policy that’s an order of magnitude better than previous ideas, that policy still doesn’t generate any utility until someone goes and does the political work needed to turn it into law.