Frankly, I’m worried you have bitten off more than you can chew.
This project has real Carrick Flynn vibes: well-meaning outsider without much domain expertise tries to fix things by throwing crypto money (I assume) at political problems where money has strongly diminishing returns. Focusing on lobbying instead of on a single candidate is an improvement to be sure, but “improve federal policy” is the kind of goal you come up with when you’re not familiar with any of the specifics.
Many people have wanted for a long time to make most of the reforms you suggest. Just to take your first two examples, NEPA and the NRC each have huge well-funded interest groups that want them reformed and have been trying for decades, with little success. What does Balsa bring to the table? What actual reforms do you even have in mind?
I think this is an unnecessarily negative response to an announcement post. Zvi’s been posting regularly for some time now about his thoughts on many of the areas he talks about in this post, including ideas for specific reforms. You’ve picked on a couple of the areas that are most high-profile, and I agree that we’d need extraordinary evidence to believe there’s fruit in arm’s reach in NEPA or NRC.
At the same time, I know Zvi’s interested in repealing the Foreign Dredge Act, and that act didn’t even have a Wikipedia article until one of his blog posts inspired me to make one. It seems to me he’s doing a breadth-first search. I doubt he’s going to land on an area where he doesn’t bring anything to the table. I’m personally excited to see what Balsa comes up with.
That’s fair, I could have phrased it more positively. I meant it more along the lines of “tread carefully and look out for the skulls” and not “this is a bad idea and you should give up”.
I can speak a bit to what I have in mind to do. It’s too early to speak too much about how I intend to get those particular things passed but am looking into it.
I am studying the NEPA question, will hopefully have posts in a month or two after Manchin’s reforms are done trying to pass. There are a lot of options both for marginal reforms and for radical reimagining. Right now, as far as I can tell, no one has designed a outcome-based replacement that someone could even consider (as opposed to process based) and I am excited to get that papered over time, as well as looking in detail to what marginal changes would have the most real impact.
NRC is more straightforward in terms of what to do, you order them to approve plants if they’re safe, and do general permitting reforms, although details still matter. I am partial to ‘hold nuclear plants to only require they be much safer than other power plants’ although it’s still early. I do think that there will be far more opportunity here going forward due to the course of events.
I understand why you get the impression you do. The issues mentioned are all over the map. Zoning is not even a Federal government issue. Some of those issues are already the subject of significant reform efforts. In other cases, such as “fixing student loans” it’s unclear what Balsa’s goal even is.
But, many of the problems identified are real.
And, it doesn’t seem that much progress is being made on many of them.
So, Balsa’s goal is worthy.
And, it may well be that Balsa turns out to be unsuccessful, but doing nothing is guaranteed to be unsuccessful.
So, I for one applaud this effort and am excited to see what comes of it.
I agree the goals are good, and many of the problems are real (I work in one of these areas of government myself, so I can personally attest to some of it). But I think that the attitude (“Elites have lost all credibility”) and the broad adversarial mandate (find problems that other people should have fixed already but haven’t) will plausibly lead not just to wasted money but also to unnecessary politicization and backlash.
Those are fair concerns, but my impression in general is that those kinds of attitudes will tend to moderate in practice as Balsa becomes larger, develops and focuses on particular issues. To the extent they don’t and are harmful, Balsa is likely to be ineffective but is unlikely to be able to be significant enough to cause negative outcomes.
This project has real Carrick Flynn vibes: well-meaning outsider without much domain expertise tries to fix things by throwing crypto money (I assume) at political problems where money has strongly diminishing returns.
Can you talk a bit more about what gave you this vibe? They aren’t starting a fund or a PAC, which is what comes to mind for me when people throw money at problems, and is literally what Carrick Flynn did.
My assumption about crypto money is because SBF/FTX has been the main EA funder giving extensively for political activity so far. Zvi’s comment that “existing organizations nominally dedicated to such purposes face poor incentive structures due to how they are funded and garner attention” also implies that Balsa has an unusual funding source.
Availability of money encourages organizations to spend that money on achieving their goals, and Zvi’s blogging about policy failures, here and in the past, has tended to be rather strongly worded and even derisive. This leads me to believe that in practice he will be more focused on using the organization’s resources to enact changes, e.g. through advocacy/publicizing failures, than on impartial policy analysis.
If I turn out to be wrong on these points, then I would be significantly more optimistic about the project. In principle I think more policy engagement could be a good thing, if handled carefully.
Ah, thank you—I didn’t twig on the incentives comment, but I can see how that would be a signal of different operation.
I noticed you mention you work in one of these areas: from your perspective, what would you want an org like this to do differently from the existing ones that would make it more successful at getting policy implemented?
I suspect (though it’s not something I have experience with) that a successful new policy think tank would be started by people with inside knowledge and connections to be able to suss out where the levers of government are. When the public starts hearing a lot about some dumb thing the government is doing badly (at the federal level), there are basically three possibilities: 1) it’s well on its way to being fixed, 2) it’s well on its way to becoming partisan and therefore subject to gridlock, or 3) it makes a good story but there isn’t much substance to it, e.g. another less tractable factor is the real bottleneck. So you’d want to be in the position of having a thorough gears-level understanding of a particularly policy area that lets you be among the first to identify mistakes/weaknesses and how they could be fixed. Needless to say, this is tough to do in a whole bunch of policy areas at once.
Frankly, I’m worried you have bitten off more than you can chew.
This project has real Carrick Flynn vibes: well-meaning outsider without much domain expertise tries to fix things by throwing crypto money (I assume) at political problems where money has strongly diminishing returns. Focusing on lobbying instead of on a single candidate is an improvement to be sure, but “improve federal policy” is the kind of goal you come up with when you’re not familiar with any of the specifics.
Many people have wanted for a long time to make most of the reforms you suggest. Just to take your first two examples, NEPA and the NRC each have huge well-funded interest groups that want them reformed and have been trying for decades, with little success. What does Balsa bring to the table? What actual reforms do you even have in mind?
I think this is an unnecessarily negative response to an announcement post. Zvi’s been posting regularly for some time now about his thoughts on many of the areas he talks about in this post, including ideas for specific reforms. You’ve picked on a couple of the areas that are most high-profile, and I agree that we’d need extraordinary evidence to believe there’s fruit in arm’s reach in NEPA or NRC.
At the same time, I know Zvi’s interested in repealing the Foreign Dredge Act, and that act didn’t even have a Wikipedia article until one of his blog posts inspired me to make one. It seems to me he’s doing a breadth-first search. I doubt he’s going to land on an area where he doesn’t bring anything to the table. I’m personally excited to see what Balsa comes up with.
That’s fair, I could have phrased it more positively. I meant it more along the lines of “tread carefully and look out for the skulls” and not “this is a bad idea and you should give up”.
I can speak a bit to what I have in mind to do. It’s too early to speak too much about how I intend to get those particular things passed but am looking into it.
I am studying the NEPA question, will hopefully have posts in a month or two after Manchin’s reforms are done trying to pass. There are a lot of options both for marginal reforms and for radical reimagining. Right now, as far as I can tell, no one has designed a outcome-based replacement that someone could even consider (as opposed to process based) and I am excited to get that papered over time, as well as looking in detail to what marginal changes would have the most real impact.
NRC is more straightforward in terms of what to do, you order them to approve plants if they’re safe, and do general permitting reforms, although details still matter. I am partial to ‘hold nuclear plants to only require they be much safer than other power plants’ although it’s still early. I do think that there will be far more opportunity here going forward due to the course of events.
Our funding sources are not public, but I will say at this time we are not funded in any way by FTX or OP.
I understand why you get the impression you do. The issues mentioned are all over the map. Zoning is not even a Federal government issue. Some of those issues are already the subject of significant reform efforts. In other cases, such as “fixing student loans” it’s unclear what Balsa’s goal even is.
But, many of the problems identified are real.
And, it doesn’t seem that much progress is being made on many of them.
So, Balsa’s goal is worthy.
And, it may well be that Balsa turns out to be unsuccessful, but doing nothing is guaranteed to be unsuccessful.
So, I for one applaud this effort and am excited to see what comes of it.
I agree the goals are good, and many of the problems are real (I work in one of these areas of government myself, so I can personally attest to some of it). But I think that the attitude (“Elites have lost all credibility”) and the broad adversarial mandate (find problems that other people should have fixed already but haven’t) will plausibly lead not just to wasted money but also to unnecessary politicization and backlash.
Those are fair concerns, but my impression in general is that those kinds of attitudes will tend to moderate in practice as Balsa becomes larger, develops and focuses on particular issues. To the extent they don’t and are harmful, Balsa is likely to be ineffective but is unlikely to be able to be significant enough to cause negative outcomes.
Can you talk a bit more about what gave you this vibe? They aren’t starting a fund or a PAC, which is what comes to mind for me when people throw money at problems, and is literally what Carrick Flynn did.
My assumption about crypto money is because SBF/FTX has been the main EA funder giving extensively for political activity so far. Zvi’s comment that “existing organizations nominally dedicated to such purposes face poor incentive structures due to how they are funded and garner attention” also implies that Balsa has an unusual funding source.
Availability of money encourages organizations to spend that money on achieving their goals, and Zvi’s blogging about policy failures, here and in the past, has tended to be rather strongly worded and even derisive. This leads me to believe that in practice he will be more focused on using the organization’s resources to enact changes, e.g. through advocacy/publicizing failures, than on impartial policy analysis.
If I turn out to be wrong on these points, then I would be significantly more optimistic about the project. In principle I think more policy engagement could be a good thing, if handled carefully.
Ah, thank you—I didn’t twig on the incentives comment, but I can see how that would be a signal of different operation.
I noticed you mention you work in one of these areas: from your perspective, what would you want an org like this to do differently from the existing ones that would make it more successful at getting policy implemented?
I suspect (though it’s not something I have experience with) that a successful new policy think tank would be started by people with inside knowledge and connections to be able to suss out where the levers of government are. When the public starts hearing a lot about some dumb thing the government is doing badly (at the federal level), there are basically three possibilities: 1) it’s well on its way to being fixed, 2) it’s well on its way to becoming partisan and therefore subject to gridlock, or 3) it makes a good story but there isn’t much substance to it, e.g. another less tractable factor is the real bottleneck. So you’d want to be in the position of having a thorough gears-level understanding of a particularly policy area that lets you be among the first to identify mistakes/weaknesses and how they could be fixed. Needless to say, this is tough to do in a whole bunch of policy areas at once.
Pandemic policy lobbying is not an efficient market.
I expect high returns in this domain from the strategy of doing basically the same thing as everyone else but slightly differently