Depends on what you mean by “low-hanging fruit”. I think there are lots of problems like this that seem net-negative, but it doesn’t seem anywhere close to the most important thing I would recommend politicians to do.
By low-hanging fruit I mean 1) non-trivial boost in electability and 2) good effort-to-reward ratio relative to other things a politician can focus on.
I agree that there are other things that would be more impactful, but perhaps there is room to do those more impactful things along with smaller, less impactful things.
I don’t think there IS much low-hanging fruit. Seemingly-easy things are almost always more complicated, and the credit for deceptively-hard things skews the wrong way: promising and failing hurts a lot (didn’t even do this little thing), promising and succeeding only helps a little (thanks, but what important things have you done?).
Much better, in politics, to fail at important topics and get credit for trying.
Depends on what you mean by “low-hanging fruit”. I think there are lots of problems like this that seem net-negative, but it doesn’t seem anywhere close to the most important thing I would recommend politicians to do.
By low-hanging fruit I mean 1) non-trivial boost in electability and 2) good effort-to-reward ratio relative to other things a politician can focus on.
I agree that there are other things that would be more impactful, but perhaps there is room to do those more impactful things along with smaller, less impactful things.
I don’t think there IS much low-hanging fruit. Seemingly-easy things are almost always more complicated, and the credit for deceptively-hard things skews the wrong way: promising and failing hurts a lot (didn’t even do this little thing), promising and succeeding only helps a little (thanks, but what important things have you done?).
Much better, in politics, to fail at important topics and get credit for trying.