It would seem the perfect first post for a blog titled Calibrations. So are prediction markets any good at predicting things, and should we care what they say?
Prediction markets allow participants to buy shares of an event occurring or not, analogous to a bet or wager. For example, the website Polymarket has political event markets. A “share” pays out if the election occurs as you predict and pays nothing if you predict incorrectly. A market is created by people buying and selling shares on the outcomes of the events, and the price of the share represents the market’s current probability estimate for the outcome. For example, you can buy a share of Kamala Harris winning the presidential election which will pay out if she wins, but will be worth nothing if she loses. A price of 60 cents would indicate a 60% chance of her winning.
Data on Accuracy
So are prediction markets any good? Well, we can actually look at the history of prediction markets and see how often a market that predicts any given outcome actually ends up resolving in that way. Maxim Lott at electionbettingodds.com has a track record page for the prediction markets he tracks.
This is the calibration of the markets. If something that is predicted to happen 60% of the time actually happens that often, we say it’s well calibrated (and thus the name of this blog). We can also see the calibration for some other prediction sites here from calibration.city which has some excellent visualizations:
I suspect some of the systematic bias you see in the chart above and below the 50% mark is from the fact that many of these markets default to 50% and require betters to provide liquidity to move the market away from the start. To make an enticing market to bet in, the market makers have to incorrectly price a market so that bettors have an incentive to wager and earn their winnings, and we see this in the data as a the market makers systematically “betting” the wrong way to start the market. In fact, if you go to the calibration.city page and weight the y-axis for resolutions by market volume, this bias is reduced (since larger volume markets would have less weight on the initial price) although it does not disappear.
Alright, prediction markets are well-calibrated, but does that mean they are accurate? Are they actually predicting anything? Not necessarily!
Suppose we know that Republicans win the presidency about half the time and Democrats win the other half. We check the prediction markets and they always say democrats have a 50% chance to win. This is a well calibrated prediction, but it doesn’t actually tell us much information at any given point in time. We want to know about this particular upcoming election. What we can do then is use a Brier score to mathematically measure accuracy, and not just calibration. The Brier score is the means squared error for a set of predictions and their outcomes, and thus we can use it to measure the accuracy of probabilistic predictions. Here are the Brier scores from calibration.city:
I arranged by market volume and did a time weighted average, but you can also try it yourself. Overall it seems market volume didn’t have much effect, perhaps because the existing Brier scores are already pretty low around 0.15, and also perhaps because higher volume markets could reflect exciting changes in the underlying event leading to both more uncertainty and more market trading.
We can actually decompose the Brier score into calibration, resolution, and uncertainty components, although exactly why this works is beyond my current statistical understanding. This stack exchange post was helpful, but unfortunately I don’t have the time to put together a full script to grab the data from Manifold and run the decomposition.
There’s also real limitations to comparing Brier scores. You’re really only supposed to compare them across the same events; if the underlying event is more uncertain, you would expect higher (worse) Brier scores. But Kalshi, Manifold, and Polymarket are all predicting slightly different things. The legal difficulties prediction market platforms face exacerbates the accuracy measurement problem; PredictIt has to limit the number and size of bets, Polymarket and Betfair are banned in the United States, and Manifold only uses play money. Still, you’d expect much of this to contribute to worse Brier scores. The fact that these are pretty solid is encouraging. If anyone wants to run an actual Murphy decomposition on prediction market data on a narrow topic, I would be interested to see the results.
I think we can still draw some conclusions though:
Prediction markets are well calibrated: if they say something will happen with a given percentage chance, that’s actually a good estimate of how likely it will happen.
Prediction markets have pretty good (low) Brier scores, and that puts an lower limit on how practically bad their resolution decomposition component could be even if they were perfectly calibrated.
Prediction markets do all this despite major regulatory barriers.
The Bigger Picture
Taking a step back though, I think Matthew Green’s critique gets to something deeper: sure prediction markets are well calibrated in the face of uncertainty, but they don’t have any magical insight besides pushing the best guesses to the top. In other words, they’re not actually reducing the fundamental uncertainty in the world. Why is everyone so excited about this?
I think the answer is price discovery.
First let’s take the demand side. Perhaps you’ve looked up a prediction market price for an event and found the price to be…about what you expected.
The Fed has been talking about rate cuts this year, they indicated in their last meeting that it’s likely coming and the market took a sharp tumble last week before recovering. It seems pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that the likelihood of a Fed rate cut by the end of the year is high. But not everyone was paying attention. A prediction market’s existence creates a publicly known “price” of the best estimate of whether an event will occur according to the market participants. Being able to know a well calibrated estimate of an uncertain event is a huge positive externality that prediction markets provide the whole world.
This is a big deal! If you don’t have a price to check, you’re left doing all the research yourself and you only have so much time. Worse, you might have to rely on very non-quantified pundit opinions with no track record. A price cuts through everything to give you a single best guess.
Next let’s take the supply side. Think about the amount of time, effort, resources, money, labor, algorithm design, etcetera that trading firms undertake to get an edge in financial trading. There are potentially billions of dollars on the line if you can correctly predict whether an equity or future will rise or fall in price. Prediction markets can harness these incentives to uncover truth not just about company financial data, but about anything we are curious about. They tie reality and truth about the world to financial incentives. They push us to discover information about what is happening and what will happen.
Unfortunately, they are also legally limited. Event based betting is for all practical purposes banned in the United States even though political decision making is very high stakes. Our lives are worse because of this! We should want our political decision-making processes scrutinized and better understood; prediction markets provide financial incentives to achieve those ends. Prediction markets could be providing us with real time information on whether Congress will pass legislation or how an administration will respond to crises.
Of course, the actual application of prediction markets could be much broader than politics. Nominal GDP futures markets could do a better job informing the Fed of forward looking expectations than stock markets or lagging economic data. Or imagine if we had an ongoing prediction market about possible pandemics on the horizon. That would have been very handy to refer to in January or February 2020 and may have alerted us sooner than simply relying on broad media reporting, which didn’t pick up the potential danger of the pandemic until early March.
Perhaps today prediction markets don’t tell us much besides aggregating some polling data, but if we legalized them, maybe they could tell us a lot more!
Uncharted Territory
The finance industry may be driven purely by profit, but the development of new financial instruments has actually brought all sorts of benefits, some of them very widely distributed. Index funds and ETFs allow regular people with savings access to market returns without needing to expose themselves to specific stock risk and at a fraction of the cost of mutual funds. Foreign exchange and commodity derivatives can help companies reduce their risk by locking in prices now; airlines are trying to run an airline business, not predict oil prices in six months.
Prediction markets could do even more if we let them.
A conditional prediction market is a single trading market with two events allowing investors to trade on the relationship between the two outcomes. For example, you could make a prediction market for a political parties’ election prospects conditional on whether they replace their candidate or not. Democrats took months to come around to the idea that their current presidential candidate might do poorly. If they had been able to compare conditional bets on who would win, they might have been able to select a different candidate much earlier!
Conditional markets could have all sorts of interesting applications. We could answer questions like “what will different policies’ impact be on unemployment next year?” or “which scientific research approach is most likely to improve 5 year survival rates of a major cancer?”. But I think the most important point to underline is that we don’t know because the markets aren’t allowed. It took a while to develop ETFs that regular investors could use for their retirement accounts. If we allowed people to experiment and try things, we could probably create some pretty cool things.
Even today, with all the legal challenges prediction markets face, they offer great value! People on Twitter will continue to claim that prediction markets are systemically biased or simply reflecting quirky beliefs of people overrepresented in the betting pool. I think this is too quick of a dismissal, but to some extent, they’re right! And I think it’s because you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to correct the markets and collect your winnings; as long as the CFTC wages a crusade against PMs, it will be challenging to make much money on them and thus they may often have incorrect prices. But we don’t have to live this way! We could look into the future if we allowed ourselves to.
Emmett Shear went on the Clearer Thinking podcast and discussed effective altruism among other things. We can split up his points into things I agree with and things that seem incorrect. I’ll do this using Scott Alexander’s Effective Altruism As A Tower of Assumptions for some landmarks. The tower in question:
Scott’s note: “Not intended to be canonical; realistically it would be more of a tree or flowchart than a tower.”
Shear:
…what people want is a place to put money so they can buy indulgences, so they can feel less guilty. And unfortunately, that’s not a thing that exists. No one is printing indulgences that you can just just give money here and you have done your part. That’s, unfortunately, just not how it works. Do your best. Do enough. That’s good. I love that Giving What We Can pledge. I think that’s a hugely beneficial idea like, “Hey, what if we all just took 10% and we said that was enough?” That would actually be way more than people give today. And it would also be enough, I think, if we all did it. Then people could stop beating themselves up over not feeling guilty about not doing enough, which I think is acting from a fear of “I am not good enough.” That’s one of the most dangerous things you can do.
First of all, as always, if you’re critiquing EA, that means you’re doing effective altruism. You’ve agreed that there are multiple ways to do good in the world, and you think some are better than others. You’re already at the base of the tower. Next, Shear agrees donating 10% of your income is good. Giving What We Can seems pretty squarely inside EA. It’s possible Shear doesn’t realize that GWWC is a “…public commitment to give a percentage of your income or wealth to organisations that can most effectively help others“. So either Shear is endorsing effective giving or he didn’t realize what it was, and he’s making a critique about a group of ideas he has apparently little understanding of (I think it’s this).
The part of indulgences makes no sense to me. Perhaps I’m an outlier. I’m a big tent libertarian as well as a big tent EA, so I have zero guilt about the money I make. I like the free enterprise system, and I think it makes the world better. I tend to think EAs are much more accepting of market benefits than other groups in the NGO space which can skew very left-wing, but maybe other EAs actually feel guilty about making money. If they do, I agree with Shear that the point of EA isn’t to make you feel less guilty.
However, I think the point of EA is really obviously not that! Since EA was created out a specific problem actual people like Dustin Moskovitz, Holden Karnofsky, and Elie Hasenfeld actually had which was:
I’ve got a ton of money
I’d like it to donate it in ways that use the money well, but
There’s no data on which charities actually accomplish good things
Indulgences have nothing to do with it. Next, let’s move up the tower to cause prioritizations:
The malaria bed nets thing is the classic like, drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight…It’s a little unfair. There are keys to be found underneath the spotlight of quantifiable, measurable impact. And it is good work to go do that. But like most good that can be done in the world, unfortunately, is not easily measurable by randomized controlled trial or highly measurable, highly quantified, very trustworthy impact statements. To the degree we find good to be done on those, we should fund that stuff.
…You’re reducing the variance on your giving by insisting on high measurability, because you know for sure you’re having this impact. It’s not that doing that kind of low variance giving is bad, it’s just, obviously, the highest impact stuff is going to be more leveraged than that. And it’s also going to be impossible to predict, probably non-repeatable a lot of the time, and so, sure fund the fucking bednets. But, that’s not going to be THE answer. It’s just AN answer.
Obviously Shear is going off the cuff, but it’s clear he’s never heard of Open Philanthropy’s post on Hits Based Giving which is like 8 years old at this point. GiveWell has a fund explicitly to incubate new ideas that haven’t be proven yet. It’s well known that not every opportunity is going to fit into a rigorous RCT scenario. A major benefit of GiveWell is to provide a better baseline compared to what most people donate to. GiveWell really does save more lives than donating to your college. If Emmett thinks donating to Yale (his alma mater) is better, he should make that case!
But sure, I agree that if we gave $100 billion to GiveWell over the next 10 years and even if they knew exactly the most high impact thing to do with it, it’s not like all of humanity’s problems would be solved. There are a lot of very intractable political stability and institutional issues around the world, and bednets won’t necessarily solve that. But check where we are on the tower! GiveWell is there to be better than the generic charitable giving most people do, and I think it’s pretty good at that.
The conversation turns to x-risk, but this also misses a lot of work. OpenPhil gave money to the Institute for Progress which does all sorts of innovation policy work like immigration, biotechnology, and more. OpenPhil gives money to animal welfare, to land use reform work, and global health scientific research. To critique EAs for being too focused on measurable RCTs is just bonkers. But let’s talk about x-risk:
And I’d say on the other side of it, the “Oh, but isn’t it more important to go after nuclear risks and stuff like that, or AI risk or whatever?” More important is the problem. That idea that you can rank all the things by importance and that you could know, in a global sense, which of these things is most important to work on, like what is most important for you to do is contextual to you. It’s driven by where you will be able to have the best impact, which is partly about the problem, but also partly about you, and where you live, and what you know, and what you’re connected to. And if you care about one of these, you think you have an inclination that there’s a big risk over there, learning more about that and growing in that direction might be a good idea.
But, the world is full of unknowns. To think that you’ll have THE correct answer is like, “No, you won’t. You’ll only not know THE correct answer, you won’t even have a full ranking. You’ll just have a bunch of ideas of stuff where your estimates all overlap each other and have high variance… Or how you, in order to get out of analysis paralysis, insist to yourself, “We have found the correct answer: AI x-risk is the most important thing. That is all I’ll devote my life to because nothing else is nearly as important because that’s the thing.” And like, maybe, maybe not. How do you know? You don’t know. You can’t possibly know, because the world is complicated.
As we’ve said earlier,if you’re making a critique of EA, then you’re already admitting that some causes might be better than others. Shear is trying to get around this, by dismissing all prioritization as impossible. It contradicts what he said about bednets, where the argument that the highest impact work is not going to be provable under an RCT regime, but I think we can charitably restate his argument thusly: charitable impact is like a Hayekian information problem where the relevant information is scattered with everyone having specialized knowledge. In this world, you can’t standardize impact because it’s unique to each person.
Again, if Emmett wants to argue that Yale donations are as good as GiveWell, he should do that! I’m not convinced. But let’s talk about individual advice. Does EA just tell everyone to focus on AI only all the time? No, of course not. Shear is just repeating what effective altruists already do as if it’s some fundamental demolition of their core beliefs. 80000 Hours doesn’t tell everyone to go into AI risk. Most EA money doesn’t go towards AI x-risk. The point is that this wasn’t something people worried about at all until effective altruists started talking about it before AI blew up with this big boom after the transformers paper.
And moreover, the EA record here on cause prioritization is really good! It turns out prioritization is possible after all! There’s been a lot of interest in risks from pandemics for a long time. EAs weren’t the only ones talking about it (Bill Gates talk from 2014). But EAs noted this was an important and neglected area before COVID-19 killed millions of people. We need more people being ahead of the curve like this, and we should see who has a good track record of working on problems so that we have solutions on hand when the problems become real.
To Emmett’s credit, he later goes on to say that an AI which makes it easier to build a better AI could in fact be “end-of-the-world dangerous”. But it strikes me as strange to believe AI could end the world and also that it’s impossible to prioritize some resources there.
If there’s a single EA concept that it’s clear Emmett Shear doesn’t understand, it’s “neglectedness”. Doing something good is nice. Doing something good, that no one else has thought of yet, where there’s lots of low-hanging fruit and high payoff: that’s superb.
…What’s the most highly measurable impact that I can have? But you know, the charitable work I’ve done that probably had the biggest impact in terms of leveraged impact has always been opportunistic. There’s a person in a place, and I know because of who I am and who they are that I can trust them and this is a unique opportunity, and I have an asymmetric information advantage. And I am going to act fast with less oversight and give them money to make it happen more quickly. And that’s not replicable. I can’t give that to you as another opportunity to go do because most high impact things don’t look that way…
This sounds plausible until you think about what effective altruists have already done. When Elie and Holden formed GiveWell there was no repeatable, replicable way to give money to save the most lives per dollar. Imagine if they had had this attitude when starting out. They would have thrown up their hands and said “welp, guess we’ll go home and donate our money to Yale!” Instead they built from scratch an organization that tried to understand what global health charities actually did and whether they were helpful. And in 2022 GiveWell raised $600 million and directed it towards places where they expect they can save a life per $5000. Things aren’t replicable and scalable until you recreate the world to make it so. You’d think a Silicon Valley CEO would know better!
Maybe one of the highest impact things you could have done was to invest money in YouTube because YouTube has created this massive amount of impact in terms of people’s ability to learn new skills or whatever. Or donate money to Wikipedia earlier or something. But that’s not replicable. Once it’s done, it’s done. You need to figure out the next thing…
There’s a lot to say here. There’s a big difference between market transactions, which pay for themselves, and charitable work which doesn’t. It’s completely reasonable to ask if there are situations where the free market won’t solve a problem, but altruistic giving could, so I don’t think the YouTube analogy makes any sense.
But setting that aside, I need to shout “NEGLECTEDNESS” loudly into the void until someone hears me. There is no world in which the internet exists, but there’s not a major video focused social media site. For God’s sake, when Google bought YouTube, they already had their own video hosting site in Google Video. If Google had cancelled that project, I’m 100% sure Facebook would have grabbed the free money, as they tried to create a video hosting platform when YouTube already existed. Your investment in YouTube is literally worthless when it comes to altruistic impact, because there’s a vibrant market searching for business opportunities in the space. Distributing bednets that would never have been distributed otherwise actually makes a difference!
And of course, I totally endorse acting fast with less oversight. Fast Grants was good! ACX grants are good! I think this counts as EA, but to the extent that other people don’t, I will agree with Shear on the Silicon Valley mindset of variance and experimentation. I just think effective altruism does this already.
Atop the Tower
Alright, so we’re at the top of the tower. Maybe there are EA orgs which should be criticized more explicitly. Could be. I think the ones I brought up here like GiveWell, OpenPhil, and 80000 Hours are actually already doing the stuff Emmett Shear says they should be doing. And there’s individual projects and focus areas that I don’t actually think are very impactful, but if Shear thinks there are higher impact specific projects, he doesn’t do a good job of conveying that.
I also actually think there probably are some big blind spots in EA as a whole. EA isn’t left-wing, but it’s a lot more left-leaning that I am. I suspect there are real conservative critiques that EA hasn’t internalized. I’m sure there are traditional values that are doing loadbearing work we don’t realize, and since EA is pretty explicitly anti most conservative values, I suspect that could result in some poor outcomes in ways that are hard to predict. It’s a hard problem and I wish someone with more time could think about it more deeply.
But what frustrates me to no end is that EA critics never seem to bring up good points. They are often just like Emmett Shear’s: they criticize a strawman that doesn’t exist, they don’t understand that EA invests in a broad array of cause areas, and they bring up points that EAs have been discussing for years as if they were novel. They say the effective altruists are looking for their keys under a streetlight, because they’ve never bothered to move out from their own streetlights.
I was listening to Batya Ungar-Sargon on the Fifth Column the other day and realized we had fundamentally different models of how the modern American economy works. This post is exploration of how I think we ought to model the economy without much math.
Batya’s argument against immigration is that an influx of foreign workers increases the supply of labor, thereby driving down wages of the people already here. Her position singles out low-wage workers, suggesting that illegal immigrants take jobs from low-skilled domestic laborers, depressing their wages. However, this view is problematic for several reasons and fails to account for the nuances of the modern American economy.
First, as a side note, we could prioritize an immigration policy that tries to attract highly skilled instead of low-skilled workers! The Institute for Progress has a whole interactive tool on how to do this. But the last time there was a Republican President, Trump actually reduced legal high skilled immigration.
But more importantly, the American economy is not a fixed pie where low-skilled immigrants simply compete with Americans for a limited number of jobs. Consider a worker from Honduras. In their home country, employment opportunities may be limited, with jobs primarily in agriculture, local services, or perhaps managing a hotel catering to foreign tourists. However, if that same worker were to immigrate to the United States, their productivity would increase significantly, even if performing the same job.
The United States is an advanced, technologically sophisticated economy with a vast accumulation of capital and expertise across various sectors. By operating within this economic environment, workers gain access to cutting-edge technology, sophisticated management systems, and an abundance of resources that enhance their productivity. For instance, a hotel manager in the United States would likely oversee operations catering to business clients from major corporations, leveraging management software, efficient business processes, and integrated systems to optimize efficiency and service quality. Most American hotels require very few people to run them because there is so much automation already deployed. The same worker, performing the same role but within the context of the American economy, would become exponentially more productive due to the surrounding technological infrastructure and capital resources.
This phenomenon is not limited to the hospitality industry; it extends across the entire economy. The United States is a knowledge-based, service-oriented economy, where workers can be highly productive by leveraging the accumulated expertise, human capital, and technological advancements embedded within American companies and institutions.
You can see this dynamic if you take the Cobb-Douglas production function, which is a fairly simple model of outputs as a function of labor (L), Capital (K), and total factor productivity (A):
Total Factor Productivity or TFP represents technology, knowledge, and accumulated innovation that isn’t directly attributable to adding more labor or machines and buildings. In the US, TFP and capital components of this function are remarkably high, suggesting that the economy is labor-constrained. Adding even a small amount of labor can lead to substantial increases in productivity due to the abundance of capital and technological resources available.
And we see this concretely in the fact that Americans are paid so highly. Immigrants come to the US and see massive pay raises because they are now embedded in a economy with highly advanced knowledge, processes, technology, and automation. The American economy is adept at integrating labor and equipping workers with the knowledge and tools necessary to become highly productive contributors.
Furthermore, immigrants not only contribute to the labor supply but also represent a source of consumer demand. By purchasing housing, goods, and services, they stimulate economic activity and create opportunities for further businesses and workers across various sectors. Immigrants need to buy houses, groceries, haircuts, and cars too.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we should necessarily just throw open the gates to all immigration immediately; the fact that there are large benefits does not mean there are no costs. It takes time for new workers to be integrated into any economy and for their spending to be accounted for in new supply for everything they are buying. If new workers are concentrated in a specific industry, it can take time for that industry to expand to accommodate the new labor market. Thus, we can suggest specific policies that would lessen immigration impacts that are concentrated on specific people or industries.
For example, we should make the labor market as dynamic as possible. Hiring and firing should be relatively easy. Public sector unions that protect poor performers make it their services worse and make it harder to higher good talent. Also, healthcare should not be tied to your job. This would make any specific job relationship less critical for workers since switching jobs doesn’t mean switching providers. It also reduces the cost and overhead for employers to hire new workers, especially for low wage workers where healthcare would be a significant fraction of total compensation. We can also have regulations that require immigrants to live in different areas of the country. The US is a vast economy with 54 metro areas with over a million people, and over a 100 with populations over 500,000. That’s a lot of local economies we could spread immigrants out over to avoid huge shocks to the housing markets if immigrants concentrated on specific cities. As far as specific industries, many other countries have specific point based systems to target immigrants with key skills. The U.S. largely does not do this, and we ought to.
In summary, the belief that immigrants depress wages and displace native workers is the result of a direct failure to understand fundamentally the dynamic and efficiency of the American economy. The United States is a highly advanced, knowledge-based economy that can effectively leverage additional labor by integrating it with its vast capital resources and technological sophistication. Rather than viewing immigration as a threat to the working class, it should be recognized as a potential source of economic growth and productivity enhancement, particularly in a labor-constrained environment. When there are drawbacks, our goal is to figure out how best to minimize them in order to fuel the economy and make America grow.
I’ve recently added a new member to my family and become a first time parent! Here are some scattered thoughts and observations I’ve had about the experience. Beware all are basically projections of my existing biases as seen through a new experience.
Policy does not seem to take into account externalities of children. This is really the umbrella observation guiding many of these points. In a market economy, you pay for someone else’s time via wages. If there’s a new industry that forms from the advance of technology (say software engineer or YouTube creator), you can convince people to provide that labor in the new industry by paying them, and other industries will need to adjust to deal with more demand on the labor pool. They must either reduce output, offer better wages, or advance the productivity of their remaining workers. In this way, the labor pool for a given industry can expand or shrink based on the market forces of that industry, with some lag for education requirements.
However, you can’t change the whole pot of labor with market forces except in specific circumstances. Immigration is one of those, but we’ll set that aside for now. Let’s focus on population growth through new babies. Of course, adding a worker to the economy doesn’t just add to the supply side; new workers also buy things! You may think these cancel out, but I’m doubtful. As Adam Smith observed, the division of labor increases productivity and the more people you have, the larger economy you have and the larger the degree of division of labor and extent of the market, leading to super-linear productivity gains.
But just because some jobs’ wages go up doesn’t mean there are more babies being born; there’s no market feedback mechanism for this! You pay the worker once they are old enough to work; you don’t pay their parents to raise them! This results in a missing positive externality. The invisible hand is willing to pay for more workers to work in America’s massively productive economic engine (which we can see through huge immigration pressures). But there’s no market mechanism to pay parents to provide more workers! Thus the expensive costs are born by the family raising kids and the benefits accrue to the economy broadly, a classic positive externality problem.
Matthew Yglesias adds a related argument in One Billion Americans that is specific to the U.S.; there are positive spillover effects from having a large market in the U.S. which is fueled by an integrated largely free market encompassing hundreds of millions of productive workers. The U.S. economy, because of its size, dominates global commerce as companies seek to sell in the American market, which in turn exports U.S. cultural products and values of liberalism.
However, despite these economic and nationalistic benefits, failing fertility rates and deadlocks on immigration mean U.S. policy hasn’t really prioritized population growth. Assuming they should, it’s interesting to see from a parental perspective how U.S. policy impacts the decision to have children. Largely, it seems they work in the wrong direction.
The Baumol Effect is real. The Baumol Effect or Baumol’s Cost Disease is the rise of wages in jobs that have not seen increased labor productivity simply because of the rising salaries in other jobs. For most of the economy, jobs continually become massively more productive through the huge engine of a free market economy investing in new technology and capital. You expect to see rising wages for jobs in that industry since the workers are now more productive even as the overall cost of goods produced can continue to fall. For example, agriculture used to take up the vast majority of labor in the economy but is now a very small part, yet food is more plentiful than ever because mechanization and logistics is so advanced.
But some jobs have seen little labor productivity improvement, notably childcare; we don’t have robots or software that can take care of babies. So that labor needs to be done by parents or hired out via nannies or daycare. But today nannies, daycare workers, and especially parents have many more productive things to do in the economy because of the advanced capabilities and technology of the market. So the opportunity cost of taking care of children is massive. Being a new parent, you feel this viscerally. One week you are at a high paying intense job automating workloads and trying to streamline business processes that handle billions of dollars a year, and the next week you can’t get any sleep because you have to change diapers.
To be clear, I’m not complaining! Parental leave is actually a nice break despite the lack of sleep. But the cost to e.g. my employer and the economy broadly is almost hilarious. And yet, clearly there’s an incentive mismatch since collectively, the economy benefits if there are more children born in the long-run due to children’s eventual contributions to the economy and to innovation.
One could imagine a policy to try and encourage people to have children at a younger age when the opportunity cost to the economy is lower (since less experienced workers are probably less productive). But of course, the most likely to take advantage of this policy are probably people whose opportunity costs are lower anyway (the least productive workers), which means the benefits are skewed towards the members of the economy least needing this. Moreover, targeting any government policy directly at high earners is going to be an impossible political ask anyway.
Build more homes. One of the first things we realized is that we needed more space. However, our current job situation means we aren’t likely to stay in our current city for very long and so we had opted against buying a house when we had the option a few times given closing costs. There’s also some benefit I find from renting from a corporate run apartment complex with an always on-call maintenance staff. I’m sure at some point I’ll be more interested in DIY type repairs but not right now.
However, there’s not many options for people with children or especially multiple children who would like to live in an apartment. And my city is more affordable than most. This is of course just a small reflection of the overall housing overregulation we are imposing on the entire English-speaking world. The U.S. is actually more affordable than Canada, the U.K., or New Zealand in many cases, yet the U.S. could be so much better. The most frustrating part of this is that it would cost local governments literally nothing to allow more housing to be built. In fact, governments would likely see revenues rise as land value would be improved. Private actors are completely willing to provide desperately needed supply all up and down the market, but local governments have been coopted by literally landed interest groups to keep a lid on housing supply to monopolize already built housing.
It’s evil, it’s expensive, it saps growth, extracts rents for people who are not contributing to the economy, it violates property rights, and also as a smaller side-effect, it makes it harder to have a family! These are awful policy impacts and we should choose to do better.
Preeclampsia is pretty common. Preeclampsia is a condition that can occur during pregnancy characterized by high blood pressure and signs of damage to other organ systems, most often the liver and kidneys. It usually begins after 20 weeks of gestation. The exact cause is not known, but it is thought to be related to problems with the placenta, and it occurs between 5-8% of pregnancies.
I had the misfortune of having to see this firsthand and it was quite scary. Ultimately it led significant symptoms requiring an earlier than expected induced delivery and my child having to be in the NICU for over a week. Everyone is doing well now, but this seems like a major policy problem if we take as given that there are massive spillover effects to having more children. No one would get on a plane if there was a 5% chance of a serious complication requiring experts to be consulted just to land the plane. I’m not an expert on NIH funding categories, but it doesn’t appear that preeclampsia is a major priority. If long term economic growth matters and thus spillover effects from population growth matter, should this cause area be higher?
Artificial wombs would be amazing. The follow up to the last point: there are promising technologies that would solve the problem of preeclampsia and many others. Pregnancy sucks. It’s physically taxing, it can make women feel miserable for months, and there are serious risks of complications. If we can replace natural gestation with artificial wombs, we can likely reduce risks to both baby and mother and just make having children less stressful. It also means there’s less drag on the economy because women don’t have to trade off being in physical discomfort at work for several months or taking that time off.
A year ago ago when a tweet went viral talking about artificial wombs, there was a strange pushback I saw from people claiming it wasn’t “natural”. I investigated some of these claims the best I could on Twitter, but the argument really made about as much sense as you’d expect. “Natural” to me means dying from smallpox and dysentery. There’s nothing good or beautiful about dying in the state of nature. Preventing horrific and common complications for women giving birth in the 21st century is a no-brainer.
Emily Oster is really helpful. Emily Oster is an economist and author who publishes on parenting. Her books are written for non-academics and summarize the current findings for childcare and pregnancy. Her work makes it really clear what the data indicates on what’s important or not. She’s controversial because her interpretation of the data on drinking during pregnancy is that a drink or two a week during pregnancy does not have much negative effect. This is against the recommendation of most doctors in the U.S.
I haven’t actually heard any doctors cite specific studies to refute Oster’s position, but honestly, I’m of the position that alcohol is probably just bad for you regardless even if in moderate amounts the negative effects are small. I often go weeks without drinking anyway, so cutting down some more isn’t particularly difficult. So feel free to be more cautious than Oster on this point, but I don’t think it negates the overall benefits of her work.
Each chapter contains a nice summary of the key points, so if a couple weeks later you can’t remember the takeaways, its easy to look them up quickly and trigger the rest of your memory of the chapters. The only real concern is that her books are somewhat short and so I’ve found it important to have other child-rearing and pregnancy books available for more specific questions. However, Oster also has a LLM trained on her books and newsletter where you can ask specific parenting questions and it will find the citations related to your question and summarize an answer.
But besides that, I’m having a hard time getting interested in the elections, and I don’t think it’s my normal libertarian neutrality either.
If you’ve got a partisan loyalty, most interesting political commentary is about how to strategically win elections. I don’t really consider myself a partisan, so my model is to ask which party or candidate is most willing to expend political capital to pass legislation that improves the world. The issues I find most important and impactful are:
Preparing for the next pandemic
Increasing immigration
Liberalizing housing construction
Protecting the rule of law
The problem I see with the midterms are that:
These issues aren’t prioritized by the parties, so even if there are differences in position, the actual differences on these issues would be small
The actual differences at stake in the election seem not that important
A few weeks ago, Dustin Moskovitz, the largest donor in the EA space answered a bunch of questions on Twitter, including one about US politics:
FWIW I think the truth is more complicated.
(I don't speak for EA here; no one does)
I think issues > parties, and most of my work is getting policymakers from both parties to pay attention to important but unsexy problems–e.g. preventing another pandemic.
Sam Bankman-Fried is the other major EA billionaire in the space. Let’s see if Moskovitz is right.
Republicans and Democrats on the Most Important Issues
Pandemics: There were several Biden plans for a significant chunk of future pandemic funding, but then Democrats jettisoned it in favor of other priorities. Republicans seem, if anything, worse, with some even opposing the vaccines we already have despite them clearly reducing mortality.
Immigration: The story is the same on immigration. Republicans do not seem interested in reforming the immigration process, only in border enforcement. I would have hoped Democrats would counter with better border funding in exchange for clearer legal immigration paths, but they’ve not done anything of the sort. Biden decided to spend political capital elsewhere.
Housing: The Biden admin has been alright on housing, as I noted here:
Housing is actually been the area the admin has done the best, but this is probably because the fed govt can't actually do much; it's a local policy issue. So there's a lot of limitations on what's doable https://t.co/px8chGpjsu
But still housing is mostly a local issue. The highest impacts I’ve seen were at the state level in California where YIMBY democrats have gotten several impressive victories. I just don’t see much at stake in the national midterms on this.
Rule of Law: Democrats have a clear edge. Although they’ve taken their time, it appears that the Electoral Count Reform Act could pass in the lame duck session this year, with bipartisan support, although many more Democratic votes than Republican. That would be a solid victory, and Democrats have been talking about threats to democracy, so I can’t fault them for not trying to draw the distinction here. The challenge is that they relegated democratic reforms to the lame duck session and haven’t proposed specific forward-looking legislative reforms they’d like to pass in order to protect the rule of law, or talked about bipartisan efforts with Republicans they are undertaking. While I give this one to Democrats, I wouldn’t expect any actual legislation if they retain the Senate.
What’s Actually at Stake
Matthew Yglesias has a post arguing what is actually at stake in the midterms isn’t what most voters seem to think; for example, Democrats aren’t going to restrict immigration and neither party will have enough votes to do anything on abortion.
He did seem to skip over the inflation question, where it seems plausible to me that a Republican House or Senate could force a reduction in spending from the Biden administration, which could be positive for inflation. However, Republicans have not put forward an inflation reduction plan they’d like to pass like e.g. repealing the Jones Act or ending the Trump tariffs. Republicans also killed Manchin’s permitting reform which would unambiguously help with inflation, but Yglesias thinks they’ll reconsider after the midterms regardless of outcome.
Yglesias maintains that the real difference will be debt ceiling games, possibly centered around entitlement changes, as well as government appointments.
Debt ceiling games seem legitimately bad; if we should not spend money, Congress should vote to stop spending money, rather than voting to spend money and then not let the Treasury pay for the thing they said we were going to pay for. Shutting down the government doesn’t actually reduce any spending whatsoever. However, it’s not clear to what extent Republicans actually want to have a fight over the debt ceiling. Kevin McCarthy explicitly said they didn’t want to use it in conjunction with the entitlement cuts.
Yglesias emphasizes that Republicans want to cut popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. Now, his position is that this is bad political strategy and thus voters should reject Republicans because this is unpopular. However, I’m less concerned about good strategy and more concerned about who I would actually want to succeed. And right now, by default, Medicare will be undergoing automatic cuts in about 6 years because the trust fund will run out. Given that reality, getting ahead of the game sound like a good idea!
Finally, there’s government appointments. I also tend to think it’s bad that we can’t get government appointments completed when Congress disagrees with the president. We need people to run our government offices. If Republicans think an appointed position shouldn’t exist, they should pass legislation saying so! Not appointing people will come back to harm Republican presidents if they lose their midterms in the future, and we’d be at a much better spot if everyone agreed to pass each other’s appointments.
However, the judicial appointments game seems very zero-sum. If you’re a staunch conservative, stopping Biden appointments has some costs but a lot of upside. I tend to think conservative judges are better since they often act to restrain government power. Of course, I’d prefer if Republicans or Democrats actually passed legislation limiting government power directly since that seems like a much better and accountable system. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to live in a universe like that.
I think Democrats seem to be a bit better on the issue of the Rule of Law. I haven’t made a strong case on why the rule of law is good in this post, but if you’re interested, I’ve written about its importance in the past, critiquing both the Right and Left. Nonetheless, there aren’t many concrete policy promises apart from some Republicans denying Trump lost the 2020 election, which bodes ill for 2024.
Debt ceiling brinkmanship would be bad, and Republicans do seem to be talking about it, although perhaps not in relation to cutting entitlements. Of course, fixing/cutting entitlements is probably a good thing in my opinion.
Government appointment fights also seem to be a net negative for everyone. If you’re particularly conservative already, perhaps leaving lots of judicial appointments open is worth this particular cost.
Overall though, my takeaway is that I’d slightly favor the generic Democrat in most midterm races, although you should update based on the specific candidate, but I remain deeply disappointed that our political system has focused on less important issues, or indeed many issues where Congress simply doesn’t have jurisdiction.
I wrote this quickly to get it out before election day, so if you think I’m missing something, tweet at me, or leave a comment.
First, a bit of administration: I’ve been posting some blogs at outsideview.io, a new group project focused loosely on longtermist interests, although I’ve also been writing less due to demands on my time. If that project pans out, the number of posts here may be slightly lower.
The U.S. is withdrawing from Afghanistan this year. I’ve long been a critic of the war so this should be a positive development. There is, however, a consequentialist argument which seems somewhat convincing. It’s articulated by The Economist here, and it goes something like this: the Taliban is pretty horrible and as the U.S. withdraws, the Taliban is taking over the country again, placing 40 million people under a despotic extremist regime. Additionally, not many U.S. forces are required to keep the status quo going, and casualties are at a minimum in the last few years (fewer than 20 U.S. casualties per year), while political pressure to end the war is diminished. Thus, the U.S. could presumably keep the status quo going and protect Afghanistan from the Taliban indefinitely.
The ultimate cost-benefit may turn out in favor of staying, but I think The Economist misses some clear costs to the conflict. The most important is that Afghanistan’s status quo for the past five years has not been rosy; it’s been one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet. Afghan security forces have suffered an average of almost 10,000 casualties a year for the last five years according to this Brookings Institute report (page 15). There have also been over 1300 civilian deaths every year for the past five years according to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. On a per capita basis, these combined figures would be equivalent to ~98,000 deaths a year in a country the size of the U.S. The implications of this discussion have some strange results.
It’s extremely concerning that millions of people would be left under the control of the Taliban, but I suspect that a total collapse of the Afghan government would result in fewer fatalities. The Economist notes that already security forces in Afghanistan are abandoning their posts. The government’s collapse by necessity would remove one of the main belligerents to the conflict. Of course, maybe these are bad assumptions! Maybe the Taliban won’t take over and the conflict will drag on. But that also means the argument that 40 million people will suddenly be under an extremist regime is no longer valid. Or perhaps there is a worst-case scenario where the Taliban controls most cities (meaning most of the population is under their control) and the conflict remains at its current intense levels.
If we take this belief that the U.S. withdrawal will lead to a collapse of the government, we can construct an extremely simple model for a policy trade-off. The U.S. can either stay in Afghanistan and allow the continued bloodshed at 11,000+ deaths a year, or the Biden administration can withdraw, allowing the Taliban to take over. The consequentialist calculation the administration faces is to determine at what level of fatalities would it be worth it to stay or leave. How many lives is it worth to keep millions out of reach of an authoritarian regime?
This is an extraordinary choice and it feels gross to think about, but my own misgivings about discussing it doesn’t change the fact that it’s largely up to the U.S. government to decide which to sacrifice.
The position that seems most high status is that any struggle against a totalitarian regime is a good fight. But we really need a more carefully calculated answer to make a good decision. I suppose it’s also worth asking if the status quo is sustainable; will Afghan security forces stick around indefinitely if they are taking this level of casualties year after year? It doesn’t seem realistic to think casualties will go down either. Empirically speaking, we’ve now tried 20 years on attempting to outlast the Taliban and the result is that “we keep the Taliban out of power, but 1000 civilians die each year and 10x as many security forces”.
Other Costs
It’s also worth mentioning (where The Economist didn’t) the high fiscal cost; in 2018 the Pentagon estimated that yearly costs were around $45 billion. That’s larger than the 2020 NIH budget of $42 billion. There are probably more egregious misuses of government money than spending ~$1200 per capita to keep millions of people out of reach of a totalitarian regime. And there are also likely more efficient uses of money as well, but budget items each have strong political support, and it doesn’t make much sense to talk about shifting budgets around arbitrarily as that isn’t a political reality. Thus, I don’t see a strong fiscal argument either way.
Finally, there is a hard to measure legal and constitutional question. Congress authorized the invasion of Afghanistan with the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). Since then, presidents have used it as a legal basis for a wide range of interventions that Congress in 2001 clearly had no way to foresee. Would Congress have supported these interventions? Certainly sometimes. But it seems dangerous to allow presidents to have sole discretion, especially given broad concerns over presidential authority in the last few years. I think a world with a more powerful Congress relative to the president is better in many ways, but Congress has shirked responsibility perhaps due to structural political issues. Given this situation, it could make a lot of sense for a president to try and push for Congressional action by arguing that further operations in Afghanistan require a new authorization of force. However, this would take away from a key argument The Economist put forward, which is that the small U.S. contingent remaining in Afghanistan has largely escaped political scrutiny; my proposal here would thrust it back into debate, where I suspect it would do poorly.
Moreover, political capital is presumably much more limited than federal funding, so spending energy campaigning for a new AUMF would have a massive opportunity cost, reducing the ability of the administration to pass other reforms. So we’re left with either remaining in Afghanistan without real Congressional backing, leaving open the risk of presidential overreach in the future (and the previously mentioned deteriorating conflict over the last few years), or trying to withdraw and solve the legal issue that way. There may not be good options here, but this is another benefit of withdrawal that I think most Afghanistan hawks ignore. Since it is hard to place a value on these constitutional benefits though, there’s a lot of room to wrangle over how much this factor should be weighed.
None of this is to say that advocates of staying in Afghanistan are wrong, but I think the arguments offered often avoid the hard trade-offs.
Predictions
One thing that might help clarify some of the trade-offs here would be predictions. I’ve compiled a short list of questions I would like answered:
Will the current Afghani government remain in control of Kabul by the end of 2021?
…what about July 1 2022?
Will civilian deaths be worse than in any year since 2016?
Will fatalities among Afghan Security Forces in 2021 be worse than any year since 2016?
Will fatalities among Afghan Security Forces in 2021 be 25% worse than any year since 2016?
If the government is toppled by the Taliban in the next 12 months, will there be widespread human rights violations by 12 months after that?
If the government is toppled by the Taliban in the next 12 months, will there be a >5000 war or regime-caused deaths in the 12 months after that?
My current predictions, which honestly I have not spent a ton of time on are:
Yes, 70%
Yes, 60%
Yes, 60%
Yes, 60%
No, 70%
Yes, 70%
No, 60%
I’ll attempt to track these on the blog here over time.
This is the fundamental question of the Effective Altruism movement, and it should be the fundamental question of all charitable giving (and indeed, this post is largely copied from my similar post last year). I think the first fundamental insight of effective altruism (which really took it from Peter Singer) is that your donation can change someone’s life, and the wrong donation can accomplish nothing. People do not imagine charity in terms of “investments” and “payoffs”, yet GiveWell estimates that you can save a human life for somewhere in the magnitude of $3000.
Many American households donate that much to charity every year, and simply put, if the charities we donate to don’t try to maximize their impact, our donations may not help many people, when they could be saving a life.
This post is a short reminder that we have researched empirical evidence that you can make a difference in the world! The EA movement has already done very impressive work on how we might evaluate charitable giving, why the long term future matters, and what the most important and tractable issues might be.
Apart from the baseline incredible giving opportunities in global poverty (see GiveWell’s top charities), the long term future is an important and underfocused area of research. If humanity lives for a long time, then the vast majority of conscious humans who will exist will exist in the far future. Taking steps to ensure their existence could have massive payoffs, and concrete research in this area to avoid things like existential risk seems very important and underfunded.
I write this blog post not to shame people into donating their entire incomes (see Slate Star Codex on avoiding being eaten by consequentialist charitable impacts), but rather to ask donors to evaluate where you are sending your money within your budget and to see if perhaps the risk of paying such a high opportunity cost is worth it. Alma maters and church groups are the most common form of charity Americans give to, but the impacts from these areas seem much lower than donating to global poverty programs or the long term future.
Finally, part of this blog post is simply to publicly discuss what I donate to and to encourage others to create a charitable budget and allocate it to address problems that are large in the number of people they impact, highly neglected, and highly solvable. I thus donate about a third of my budget to GiveWell as a baseline based on evidence backed research to save lives today. I then donate another third of my budget to long term/existential risk causes where I think the impact is the highest, but the tractability is perhaps the lowest. The primary place I’ve donated to this year is the Long Term Future Fund from EA Funds. I remain uncertain on the best ways to improve the long term future, and so anything I haven’t spent from this budget item I’ve sent to GiveWell as part of my baseline giving.
The last third of my budget is reserved to focusing on policy, which is where I believe the EA movement is currently weakest. I donate money to the Center for Election Science, especially after their impressive performance this year bringing Approval Voting to St. Louis. I also donate to the Institute for Justice, as they work on fairly neglected problems in a tractable way, winning court cases to improve civil liberties for U.S. citizens. Finally, I donated a small amount to the Reason Foundation which publishes Reason magazine, as they are one of the larger places advocating big tent libertarian ideas today. It would be great to be able to move good policies to polities with bad institutions (i.e. many developing nations), but that problem seems highly intractable. It may be that the best we can do is create good institutions here and hope they are copied. I’m open to different ideas, but I am a relatively small donor and so I believe that taking risks with a portion of my donations in ways that differ from the main EA thrust is warranted.
There are many resources from the Effective Altruism community, and I’ll include several links of similar recommendations from around the EA community. If you haven’t heard of EA charities, consider giving some of your charity budget to GiveWell, or other EA organization you find convincing. If you don’t have a charity budget, consider making one for next year. Even small amounts a year can potentially save dozens of cumulative lives today, or perhaps hundreds in the far future!
Bryan Caplan writes this week about life years lost due to COVID and in particular what he sees as an overreaction to the pandemic:
Well, we’ve now endured 8 months of COVID life. If that’s worth only 5/6ths as much as normal time, the average American has now lost 4/3rds of a month. Multiplying that by the total American population of 330M, the total loss comes to about 37 million years of life. That’s about 15 times the reported estimate of the direct cost of COVID.
Tyler Cowen has an important critique. Given very low government restrictions in the U.S. South, Sweden, and Brazil, we can see that even as a baseline, lots of anti-pandemic actions are actually taken by citizens voluntarily rather than by force of the state. If true, then there is little we can do to mitigate these costs even if Caplan is correct. And moreover, if we could change people’s behavior to pretend that everything was normal, then why wouldn’t we also change people’s behavior to perfectly isolate when necessary and wipe out the pandemic within a couple weeks?
Cowen argues that the best way to improve the situation if private citizens’ actions are in fact greatly damaging is to push for a vaccine as fast as possible. Robin Hanson has objections here, but putting all that aside, I wanted to look at Bryan Caplan’s numbers.
If Caplan is correct, I should change my behavior; I’ve been avoiding movie theaters and indoor restaurants and perhaps I shouldn’t. Caplan suggests 37 million QALYs lost due to “COVID” time being worse than normal time. However, this is based on a Twitter poll and Caplan points out that when asked personally about how to compared “COVID” time to normal time, his median follower says it’s almost even. But let’s take the 37 million figure at face value because it’s really the best we’ve got.
Caplan points out that what we are not comparing the 37 million QALYs to the total loss in QALYs we’ve had with COVID in this timeline, but rather a counterfactual one where we didn’t overreact.
You have to ask yourself: If normal life had continued unabated since March, how many additional life-years would have been lost? I can believe that the number would have been double what we observed, even though no country on Earth has done so poorly. With effort, I can imagine that the number would have been triple what we observed. There’s a tiny chance it could have been five times worse. But fifteen times? No way.
Actually, it’s pretty easy to imagine! Every country on Earth has had a strong reaction to COVID and that’s why it’s hard to imagine a doubling or tripling of QALYs. If people simply went about their business, or very nearly so, then there really is little to stop COVID from spreading exponentially. In all likelihood, we would have seen overwhelmed hospitals. Instead of the per infection death rate being 0.55%, it seems quite plausible to me it could be up around 1%, especially given we were worse at treating the disease towards the beginning of the pandemic.
Moreover, if lots of people got this disease, they’d have to deal with the aftereffects which can be remarkably unpleasant. Certainly there’s a guaranteed loss of quality of life for half a month to a month as you battle the virus. Many people then have extended loss of taste and smell, extended fatigue, difficulty breathing, and perhaps even cognitive effects.
If we taken Caplan’s citation that people who die from COVID on average lose 10 QALYs (I would guess higher if more people got it, but we’ll go with this number) and say people who survive COVID on average lose half a QALY from lingering issues, the formula for this calculation of QALY loss is:
[Total QALYs lost] = [US population] * [% who get COVID] * ([% who die] * [10 QALYs] + [% who don't die] * [.5 QALYs])
If we say two thirds of the country gets COVID under a “no change in behavior” scenario (again, this seems very conservative, I would think it’d be higher) and 1% of infected die, we get:
Notably, this is much higher than 37 million. Interestingly, the vast majority of the cost actually comes from the people who get the disease and survive. Perhaps I was too pessimistic on how difficult their lives are, after all, we are still uncertain. Let’s change it to a quarter of a QALY lost. Some people might have trouble breathing for years, but most people won’t, so perhaps this is a better estimate.
Again, bigger than 37 million. And it’s not close. In fact, even if you say it’s only one month QALY lost when contracting COVID (which seems way too low to me considering that’s pretty much the baseline of getting and recovering from the disease) that still gets you over 40 million QALYs in our model. Add back in that the two thirds assumption is definitely an underestimate, that 10 years of QALY loss per death might also be an underestimate, and 37 million is again completely unattainable.
In other words, I don’t think the consequentialist calculation recommends going to movie theaters or indoor dining.
I’ve discussed extensively the policy choices facing Americans in the 2020 presidential election and why I think Joe Biden’s policies would result in an improved world. However, I believe the best critique of Donald Trump’s candidacy doesn’t just dryly compare policy, but also takes into account all the “extracurriculars” that come with him.
As a warning, this post will be more partisan than other things I’ve written. I’d like to catalog some of the outrageous things Trump has done or said because there is a nebulous concern with Trump’s presidency that pure policy discussions can’t convey. Again, I’ll be aiming towards a center-right audience because that’s who I need to convince, but I also can’t imagine I’ll be saying anything new; Trump is obnoxious, self-serving, and corrupt and this is well known. I admit, I’m not sure why that knowledge hasn’t convinced conservatives to dump Trump, but generally speaking I think it’s true that conservatives have stuck with the president. Thus, in my last post, I mostly ignored these more outrageous discussions in favor of more dry policy comparisons. Nonetheless, for my own sanity, I think it’s worth reiterating just a small fraction of what the president has done over the last four years. Maybe putting it all in one place will prove more convincing than hearing constant headlines for years.
Before I get to Trump, I should point out that the Left has its own nebulous darkness on the horizon. Nothing I say here should be construed to downplay that threat. Manifestations of these bad ideas on the Left include broad attacks on the culture of open discourse and free speech, advancement of racism and segregation, support for radical violence, and aggrandizement of proven failed policies of state control of the means of production.
The reason for my focus in this essay on Donald Trump despite these concerns about the Left is twofold. One is that Donald Trump is tied directly to the worst ideas on the Right. Joe Biden is not similarly bound to the above enumerated problems. Secondly, there is a strong pushback on the Left against these more radical ideas. For example, countervailing groups on the Left established the Neoliberal Project, wrote the Letter on Justice and Open Debate in Harper’s Magazine this year, and most directly, decisively elected Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders in the primary.
On the Right however, conservatism has collapsed in the face of Trumpism. The Republican Party decided to forego writing a party platform this year in favor of stating they will “enthusiastically support the President’s America First agenda”. Meanwhile the Republican National Committee, the national organization that is responsible for electing Republican candidates up and down the ballot, merged its fundraising and spending with Trump’s reelection campaign, an unprecedented move reflecting Trump’s complete domination of the political Right.
Polarization
One of the first things that comes to mind about President Trump is his unpresidential behavior. He constantly interrupted Joe Biden during the first presidential debate, and Chris Wallace entered into several verbal altercations with the president, loudly pointing out that he had agreed to these rules he was constantly breaking. He spends press conferences with foreign leaders complaining about his own petty grievances instead of actually discussing the visit. He lies constantly and retweets conspiracy theories. Does any of this matter?
I would argue that one result is continued pressure on political polarization. At the same debate, Trump was asked to condemn white supremacy and seemed unwilling to denounce anyone who might support him. Joe Biden, on the other hand easily dealt with the issue by broadly condemning violence in any form, something he has done continually since May. Just after the debate, Trump criticized Representative Ilhan Omar, not for policy disagreements, but mostly based on where she was born despite her being an American citizen: “She’s telling us how to run our country. How did you do where you came from? How’s your country doing?” Again, this pushes us further from actual policy discussions, discussions which we should be having.
In fact, last year, Donald Trump told several sitting congresswomen that they ought to “go back” to their countries and fix them before telling “us” how to run “our” country. I have been concerned with the overzealous accusations of racism coming from leftists, but despite their misuse of the accusation, prejudice is still wrong. Attacking people for qualities they do not control, like where they were born, rather than engaging with their ideas is immoral and weak. In fact, three of the representatives were born in the United States, and the last came to America when she was 12. But that doesn’t matter, these are American citizens, elected to represent other American citizens, and it’s disturbing that the president does not identify them as Americans because of what they look like.
This is polarizing and it is bad for our country. The policies and arguments put forward by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar are often terrible, and those policies ought to opposed. But when the president attacks them for where they were born or what they look like, it appears that the choices are bad socialist ideas or bigotry, which alienates Americans and forces a false choice.
I won’t go into more details on other incidents, but it’s worth noting the president’s polarizing behavior here isn’t unique. He said people in the suburbs won’t have “low income housing” built in their neighborhoods. He said John McCain was only a war hero because he got captured and he likes “people who weren’t captured”. He made no attempt to deny the QAnon conspiracy theory when asked about it and instead said he appreciated that they like him, and Trump continued to advocate for hydrochloroquine as a COVID treatment months after the FDA had cancelled clinical trials because of its ineffectiveness.
Trump’s polarizing actions should disqualify him from the presidency. We need to focus on open discussion and debate, not increasing tribalism. Trump is incapable of moving the country in that direction.
Authoritarianism
Donald Trump has authoritarian tendencies. He has praised Kim Jong-un, he’s commended Xi Jinping installing himself as Chinese leader for life, and he’s even publicly sided with Vladimir Putin over American intelligence over whether there was Russian intelligence operations during the 2016 election. Focusing on specific actions, Trump cleared peaceful protesters outside the White House with pepper spray and police in riot gear in order to get an absurd photo op of him holding a Bible outside a church. Police attacked an Australian journalist live on TV. He also attempted to fire Bob Mueller as special counsel when he was being investigated, but White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign and he backed down. Recently, Trump has urged Attorney General Bill Barr to go after his political enemies with the Justice Department.
Trump also has a poor relationship with democratic elections. He has repeatedly sought to undermine his own election in 2016 (the election he won!) claiming, without evidence as usual, that millions of fraudulent votes were cast. Trump established a commission to look into this fraud, which seemingly dissolved without issuing a report or finding any evidence. Looking ahead, Trump has called for the 2020 election to be delayed, and when asked about the election, he has repeatedly refused to say he will accept the results. Note Biden had no problems answering Chris Wallace’s softball question, stating he would wait to declare victory until the election was certified and would concede if he lost. This isn’t particularly difficult or controversial, unless you are Donald Trump! Apparently the rule of law simply does not apply to him. Before and since the debate, Trump has continued to undermine the legitimacy of the election and voting by mail in ballots, even though many states have been voting by mail for years. Given the circumstances of the pandemic and logistical challenges of rapidly expanding mail in voting, Trump ought to be taking steps to make sure the election is legitimate and transparent, yet he has completely failed to do so.
Refusing to accept the principles of the rule of law, peaceful transfers of power, and election legitimacy ought to disqualify Trump from the ballots of voters. These are authoritarian strongman tactics, and they ought to be harshly condemned.
Corruption
It’s hard to distinguish Trump’s corruption from his authoritarian tendencies. Unlike staunchly ideological leaders who might wield state power and abridge the rights of their citizens in the name of communism or ethnic nationalism, Trump seems more comfortable with simply wielding state power for his own personal gain. Regardless of where its categorized, Trump’s administration is deeply corrupt.
Trump has reserved his pardon power almost exclusively for his political allies. Roger Stone was pardoned after lying to investigators to cover for Trump (although his sentence was excessive). Trump also pardoned former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, one of the most abusive law enforcement officers in the country, who was in prison after ignoring many court orders about his inhuman treatment of inmates. Arpaio had endorsed Trump in 2016. Trump has also rewarded his family members with high-ranking offices in the West Wing. On the other hand, Trump fired Alexander Vindman and Ambassador Gordon Sondland after he was acquitted from impeachment charges in February. Both testified against the president.
Speaking of impeachment, Trump was impeached for abusing his office. On a 2019 official diplomatic call, Donald Trump asked the president of Ukraine to look into a wild conspiracy theory about a company in Ukraine having a copy of Hillary Clinton’s email server. Trump also asked the president to look into Joe Biden, his political rival, for wrongdoing. At the same time, foreign aid appropriated by Congress had been held up, according to Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, specifically to put pressure on Ukraine to investigate this email server. Trump’s EU ambassador Gordon Sondlond also testified that a White House visit was offered to Ukraine in exchange for announcing an investigation into the Bidens, and apparently Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor John Bolton were all aware. The Trump administration however, blocked all three from testifying.
I know that this became a highly political issue and Trump’s senate trial declined to hear any witnesses along party lines, but I have yet to hear any reason to excuse the president’s behavior. Trump’s own hand picked staff all agree that the president used the office of the president to achieve these self-serving political goals which had nothing to do with the the good of the country.
This is wrong, and this is corrupt. The president cannot use the powerful mechanisms of the state for his own personal ends; we must be a nation of laws where authority is strictly bound to rules that apply to all. When the Senate declined to even hear witnesses to discuss the obvious crimes that Trump had committed, they said this ought to be left up to the electorate. The results of this election ought to reflect our opinion of whether the president is above the law.
Incompetence
Trump isn’t great at accomplishing the things he actually wants to accomplish. Trump has over and over again apparently appointed terrible people to work for him who he is then forced to fire. Trump fired Michael Flynn when indicted for lying to the FBI, H.R. McMaster by tweet, Anthony Scaramucci after 10 days, former RNC chair Reince Priebus and retired General John Kelly as chiefs of staff, Omoraosa Manigault from the Public Liaison Office, and Steve Bannon as chief strategist. Gary Cohn resigned because of Trump’s protectionist policies, and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned in protest of Trump’s foreign policy. Tom Price was forced to resign as HHS Secretary after criticism of his use of private charters and military aircraft for travel, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielson was forced to resign when she didn’t stop accepting asylum seekers, Rex Tillerson was fired as Secretary of State after clashing with Trump’s policies for months, and Jeff Sessions was repeatedly abused by President Trump on Twitter for refusing to intervene in the special counsel investigation into Russian interference until Sessions resigned. Such absolute mayhem does not reflect well on the President’s ability to find the “best” people.
Consequently, despite having a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate, Trump was unable to deliver on major pieces of policy like fixing Obamacare or cutting the deficit. Also, we should have a brief reminder of the constant bizarre behavior by the president these past four years. He didn’t have a single policy he could promise when Sean Hannity asked what his second term goals would be. He has also tweeted a conspiracy theory about TV personality Joe Scarborough being involved in a murder in 2001, and most recently that Obama had had Seal Team Six murdered. These do not seem like the actions of a competent leader. Regardless of all this chaos, the economy did fairly well until the biggest story of incompetence happened: COVID-19. Trump campaigned on being a good manager and private sector CEO. I’ve expressed in the past that I didn’t think management skills mattered much in politics compared to policy, but every now and then there’s a crisis that needs managing. We got one this year and Trump has abjectly failed.
200,000 Americans are dead directly from the pandemic and the CDC estimates 250k in excess mortality since February. Trump lied to Americans about what he knew about the virus and played it down instead of sounding the alarm. Trump’s CDC and FDA had major failures that delayed testing. Then, in the summer once cases had finally started to drop, instead of trying to continue that trend, he held and has continued to hold crowded rallies. He mocked people for wearing masks, and most importantly, claimed we only had rising case numbers because of better testing. Later, in August, Trump retweeted a claim that COVID had only killed 9,000 Americans. In an Axios interview in July, Trump literally couldn’t understand the reporter talking to him about rising U.S. deaths, simply declaring that you couldn’t use that metric. Not to mention, the White House held an event in the Rose Garden to promote Amy Coney Barrett as their new Supreme Court nominee without good precautions, infecting several members of the Senate Judiciary Committee as well as the President himself. On Saturday, October 10, just two weeks later, a large rally was held on the White House lawn.
The level of incompetence here and the cost in human lives is simply unspeakable.
Future of Conservatism
Finally, returning to appeal more directly conservatives, the American Right is at a fork in the road. The Cold War anti-communist coalition of social conservatives, libertarians, business interests, and nationalists has completely fallen apart. This process has been long in the works, but the schism accelerated in the 2016 election, and now conservatives can choose to be on the side of individual liberty or authoritarianism.
Donald Trump has pulled the Republican Party towards authoritarian nationalism. He abhors the rule of law and the international liberal order, and he undermines the ideas of peaceful transitions of power or a separation of public and personal interest. The GOP party platform literally doesn’t exist. But these authoritarian ideas don’t stem from Trump alone; there are others working to maintain these ideas and platforms into the future, and it has resulted in some disturbing events. Right wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer was praised by Trump and even endorsed by Representative Matt Gaetz despite her association with InfoWars as well as her openly wishing violence upon immigrants.
On the intellectual side, Adrian Vermuele argues in The Atlanticthat conservative legal theory ought not to focus on originalism, but instead read morality into the law along with respect for authority and the importance of social hierarchies since “…the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to ‘protect liberty’ as an end in itself.” This has long been a strain in conservative thought, but usually, at least in countries like the U.S. and U.K., conservative defense of institutions has often included individual rights and the market.
The Economist notes that what’s remarkable about Trump’s insurgent brand of “conservatism” is a complete trashing of institutions across the spectrum. The message has been to “beat” the Left at any cost, regardless of Trump’s flagrant disinterest of freedom or morality. I’m not here to say Adrian Vermuele is the future of conservatism, but rather that if the intellectual Right is abandoning individual liberty and limited government under Trump, there are people with actual bad ideas waiting to fill the vacuum. Rejecting Trump is a way to avoid going down that path.
And the stakes are high. The political Left, as I mentioned earlier, is undergoing some disturbing trends. Robert Tracinski writes in The Bulwarkthat if we take the threat of the Left seriously, this election may be the Anti-Flight 93 Election; it’s the last chance to kick out Trump and get the political Right’s house in order before the leftists come knocking. Now is the time to do this when the cost is relatively low with “sleepy” Joe Biden. We need the alternative to socialism to be a vibrant communicator who can articulate the importance of the rule of law and the free enterprise system; if we are stuck with a self-absorbed authoritarian strongman with no ideology or understanding of economics, the socialists will be ascendant. And moreover, a loss for Biden would be a signal to the radical Left that appeals to the middle are dead; a convincing Biden victory is a way for more moderate parts of the Democratic party to muscle out the Bernie bros.
Finally, I’m not alone in this thought. Conservative columnist George Will, former National Review writer David French, and former editor at National Review Jonah Goldberg are all prominent right wing thinkers who oppose Trump despite being staunchly opposed to the Left. I doubt they’ll vote for Biden, but they definitely won’t be voting for the president. The only path forward for a strong American Right is to reject Donald Trump.
Earlier this year I put together a list of most important policies that the U.S. federal government could implement which are actually discussed by candidates. The list takes into account impact both broad and deep. Also as part of my election year discussions, I’ve covered issues with our current electoral system and then, given those problems, whether it makes sense to spend time researching and voting in elections where you’re only one of many thousands or millions of voters. I conclude that in close elections where there are large differences between the major party candidates, it often makes sense to vote for one of the two candidates.
This post will take a look at this year’s presidential candidates based on their policies. I’m putting aside non-policy issues, like competence, corruption, and impact on democratic norms as I intend to cover them in my next blog post. I also think a policy-specific approach is useful to cut through tribal identities and focus on actual impacts in the real world. Extending the discussion from my last essay, I will be comparing Trump and Biden to see if there are large expected differences in their policy. As stated in that post, swing state voters should probably vote for one of these candidates since their expected value of voting would be high.
This post will be aimed slightly right of center since my policy analysis shows Trump doing very poorly compared to Biden. Based on purely policy grounds, I think swing state voters should vote for Biden, even if they are conservative. I will be taking inspiration from my previous post about important policies. If you want more background on why I think these policies are most important, I suggest skimming it first.
Great Power Relations
This is a newer issue that I wanted to focus on after reading The Precipice and its discussion of existential risk. I recommend that post, but in summary: an existential event is uniquely terrible because not only are there no humans left on earth, but any future human civilization ceases to exist. We are doing very little today to assess these risks or to plan and coordinate how we might deal with existential risks. Toby Ord estimates a 1 in 6 chance of human extinction this century. Even if that’s high, Metaculus suggests a 2% risk which is still completely intolerable when discussing the future of humanity.
Presidential politics isn’t really discussing existential risk directly, but the presidency has an outsized impact on great power relations, particularly between the U.S., China, and Russia, and catastrophic relations between them could significantly heighten existential risk. Indeed Toby Ord specifically discusses great power relations as a major risk factor in his book, and Trump’s own Defense Department notes the heightened nuclear landscape we find ourselves in their 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (Brookings Institute discussion). China and the U.S. have essentially incompatible views of liberalism, freedom, and human rights, and the world is better off with an America that promotes those ideas and thwarts China’s authoritarian ideology without resulting in dangerous tensions.
Conventional wisdom might suggest Trump was especially tough on China, but in reality he emphasized the exact wrong points at the expense of actual geopolitical power. He started a trade war, harming the U.S., which ultimately resulted in extracting Chinese promises to purchase additional American exports. While undertaking these trade negotiations, Trump refrained from criticizing China’s curtailing of the rights of seven and a half million residents of Hong Kong, and allegedly even encouraged Xi Jinping to construct Uyghur re-education camps. Chinese negotiators have stated they prefer Trump’s reelection because his goals are so transparently materialistic, and those goals are in areas where the CCP can compromise, unlike other American administrations’ focus on human rights. Trump also abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a Pacific based broad trade agreement meant to specifically improve trading relations between the U.S. and major Chinese trading partners, isolating China. Biden is also not great on trade, but has emphasized that he will push China on human rights, not soybean purchases.
I’ve also mentioned in the past that a huge advantage the U.S. has over China is our ability to take in new immigrants and turn them into Americans, and this is doubly true for skilled Chinese immigrants who often attend American universities. Yet the Trump administration has attacked legal immigration (even more so during the pandemic), making it harder for America to exercise an important asset in any long term disagreements with China.
Comparatively, Joe Biden is simply not that extreme. He’s been a fairly middle-of-the-road Democrat since the Bronze Age. Of course, that does means he’s voted for the Iraq War and was part of the Obama administrations’ intervention in Libya, but Donald Trump also supported the Iraq War, although he only wanted to go into Libya “if we take the oil” (?). Donald Trump has notably strengthened relationships with Israel, but Israel has little sway over China and Russia. Meanwhile, traditional important allies have been shunned.
Donald Trump is dangerous. A cold war with China is not inevitable, and a military arms race with modern technology, AI, and advanced genetics added on top of nuclear weapons is a recipe for absolute disaster. Even a small percentage increase in this risk through mismanagement could be worth millions of lives. The U.S. needs to work with our allies to confront China where necessary and work with the Chinese government to improve transparency and understanding between our two nations, while promoting human rights. Being President of the United States should perfectly position someone to make the case for freedom, free markets, and democracy against an authoritarian regime, but Trump has failed to do so, and his bad policy here should disqualify conservatives from backing him.
COVID-19 and Catastrophic Risk
This is an expansion of risk assessment from the Great Power Relations section and from the discussion in May. Catastrophic risk management is underfunded and underprioritized. We should be preparing for the next pandemic, the next earthquake, and so on. Neither candidate has really called for comprehensive congressional action on establishing better risk management, so let’s focus on COVID-19, which remains a key issue.
The U.S. has worse per capita deaths than a wide cross section of developed countries including Italy, France, and the broad EU. Germany, Canada, and Japan have rates several times lower. The U.S. rate is similar to the U.K. but is on a much higher trajectory, similar to Mexico. At best, we’re average, at worst, we are the most advanced country to still have out of control cases.
Trump revamped his National Security Council, including removing several people who were part of pandemic preparedness, altering the pandemic response policy set up under Obama. John Bolton claimed this was a cost-saving measure and allowed for better implementation of policy. Whatever the case, there’s no one to blame except Trump; he reorganized his bureaucracy in the way he wanted, and this was the policy result we got. He is also ultimately in charge of the FDA and CDC and as we discussed in April, those agencies had colossal failures. Moreover, Trump publicly discussed how COVID was not a problem, saying in February the number of cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” Meanwhile, he was telling reporter Carl Bernstein that this virus was extremely serious and deadly in February, and that he had purposefully played it down to avoid a panic. Regardless of morality, this is simply bad policy and cost American lives.
Trump should absolutely get credit for shutting down travel from China earlier than many people wanted. However, instead of acknowledging that any policy could only delay and not prevent a full outbreak, Trump then spent all of February downplaying the virus like it wasn’t a threat. Instead, given his apparent understanding of the challenge, he should have been issuing government guarantees to purchase masks, creating guidelines for how to reduce spread, encouraging indoor sporting events and concerts to consider cancelling, and more. We know much more about this virus now than we did in March. Delaying the peak from April to June or July could have saved literally thousands of lives.
As of September 28, the CDC estimates 208,000 – 274,000 excess deaths in the U.S. since February 1, with Metaculus estimating between 220,000 and 360,000 U.S. deaths from COVID this year. This is an unmitigated catastrophe. Not every death can be attributed to Trump’s policies, but we have plenty of evidence that his policies could be considerably better. Other developed countries have death rates a fraction of ours, and Trump has constantly made poor decisions, downplayed the virus compared to the flu, encouraged supporters not to wear masks. At this point, even small policy shifts that reduced the death toll by 10% would have saved 20,000 lives. Conservatives must hold the president accountable for failing to protect American lives.
Congressional vs Executive Power
The functionality of the U.S. government as a system for creating and executing policy affects every other policy. In particular is the glaring problems of congressional mismanagement and executive overreach. Unfortunately, both Trump and Biden have poor records, although Trump may be worse.
Conservatives ought to be concerned about the power of the executive and the reduced role Congress has played in policy-making. Moving away from a consensus building model in Congress to a winner-take-all super executive elected every four years to do anything they want is a bad idea for many reasons. For one this increases the stakes at every election and thus increased polarization. It also means more power concentrated more centrally, which conservatives should be quite skeptical of, and at least many were under Obama. And finally, there are specific things that conservatives want the government to do, like maintain a strong national defense. If we continue to pile responsibilities on the President without involving Congress or actual legislation, then our national defense relies solely on the whims of one person, who you might not trust.
I’ve criticized the Obama administration significantly on executive overreach, and Joe Biden was part of that administration. Obama invented the concept of unauthorized drone wars, complete with secret kill lists, including American citizens. Yet, Gene Healy details how Trump has essentially expanded on Obama’s work in every way, including civilian casualties, all under the guise of the 2001 Authorization of Use of Military Force against the perpetrators of 9/11, even nine years after Osama Bin Laden’s death. He also bombed Syria under a separate claim of pure executive war powers which has no constitutional basis, and this year unilaterally targeted a member of the Iranian government (and a bad person) without any congressional authority. This is an unprecedented use of presidential authority to wage war, and blatant disregard of the constitution. In an absolutely insane reversal, Trump vetoed the war powers resolution passed by congress to reign in his authority. No constitutional conservative can defend this action.
Healy does note that many of the more aggressive uses of Trump’s executive power can’t be categorized as “new” power grabs; Congress had largely ceded those powers to the president even if no other president had actually used them. For example, the Supreme Court upheld a later iteration of Trump’s travel ban (although earlier ones were ruled unconstitutional), and although “there’s ample ground for disputing the Court’s decision”, Congress allowed the president to interpret national security powers quite broadly.
However, on trade, Trump clearly expanded executive authority by lying about Canadian steel imports being a national security threat. This broad interpretation of the law was again unprecedented and means that tariff levels are likely solely controllable by the president, which is an absurd constitutional farce; Congress should have the sole ability to pass tax law. Trump also declared a national emergency in order to fund his border wall after Congress repeatedly refused to allocate money (partially struck down in court). Trump needed to lead on these issues, make broad appeals to the political center, and put pressure on Congress — which Republicans controlled for two years! Instead, he failed and fell back on executive orders which fly in the face of conservative small government beliefs.
For his part, Biden has not offered to fund a border wall through executive authority, so I guess point to him. On the other hand, Biden indicated he thought FEMA should be leveraged (and presumably a national emergency declared) to fund K-12 schools due to coronavirus challenges. Again, to be consistent, school funding from the federal government really ought to come from Congress, not executive authority.
Alright, now let’s touch on impeachment. If you want my full thoughts, read this post here. In summary, regardless of legality, Trump held up Congressionally authorized funds for political purposes, trying to get dirt on his enemies. From the perspective of concerns about executive power, this is wrong, and conservatives should be terrified of progressives getting into office and doing exactly what Trump did. We need to deescalate using the state as a political weapon; Trump is not deescalating.
Of course, no one is talking about what I actually wrote about in May, which was a resurgent Congress, not just a presidency that maybe didn’t quite expand executive authority as much as before. So I think overall the most important long term affects on congressional and executive power are worse with Trump, but they’re not night and day. Something like Trump gets an F and Biden gets a D.
Liberalizing Immigration
Conservatives and I may be far apart on this issue, but I think there is some common ground. The United States has perhaps the longest and most well known history of immigration of any nation on earth, and we all agree some immigration will continue to occur. Given that immigration will continue, we can also agree that an improved system is needed; current immigration rules favor family migration instead of merit and skill. We should change our immigration system to focus more on skilled immigrants, or on retaining students who pay to be educated at the best institutions and then seek to work in the most technologically advanced and dynamic large economy in the world.
Improving our immigration system to be more merit based would be a huge boon to our free market system, to our national security, to our global influence, and of course, would result in more Americans. We want the smartest people in the world to move here and innovate on the cutting edge. If we shut our doors, those people will go to other countries, and we will lose a massive advantage we have over places like China, which, as self declared ethno-states, simply cannot attract diverse talent from across the world.
Yet Donald Trump has slashed legal immigration and made it significantly harder for skilled immigrants to enter the country, or even apply for green cards. Both green card and temporary visa applications decreased 17% each between 2016 and 2019 while rules for granting green cards were narrowed. He even banned any new H-1B visas, which focus on high skilled, high earning immigrants (who are great for innovation) for the rest of this year through executive order. Given pandemic related issues are likely to continue into next year, I wouldn’t be surprised if this continued past December.
Given these extraordinary actions, particularly during the pandemic, I would estimate a Trump second term could see a million fewer legal immigrants than a Biden term. This would have long term negative effects on the U.S. economy, not to mention on those immigrants who literally want to be Americans. Trump has also shown no ability to work with Congress on reforming the immigration system, instead working through executive unilateral action.
Biden has planned to reverse most of Trump’s immigration policies. I’ve emphasized the horrific impact on high skilled immigration, but Biden focuses on more liberal talking points, particularly about children of illegal immigrants and refugees. Trump has absolutely crushed the number of refugees the U.S. has taken, thwarting a long standing Cold War era policy. While conservatives may be skeptical of the benefits of refugees (recent data shows they contribute positively to the economy), the geopolitical benefits of being a destination for refugees are clearly all positive. No refugee is picking Russia over the U.S., for example. Unfortunately, Trump has crippled that rhetorical win.
Finally on illegal immigration, I think it’s undeniable that Trump is harder on illegal immigration than Biden would be. However, I must stress that concerns about illegal immigration are often overblown by conservatives. Although caution is warranted, it’s likely that illegal immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native born Americans. Moreover, Trump has focused on things like building a border wall (which he claimed Mexico would pay for) which the OIG found did not utilize a “sound, well-documented methodology” for where the wall would actually be built. Also, many illegal immigrants cross the border at regular checkpoints and simply overstay their visa. Additionally, the administration spent lots of effort noticeably separating young children from their parents at the border rather than on improving the infrastructure in place for immigration courts, which would actually improve the rate at which the government could deport immigrants.
Trump’s policy of harsher, haphazard (and quite frankly idiotic) illegal immigration enforcement at the cost of harming legal immigration and thwarting the American economy’s ability to integrate foreign skilled labor is simply not worth the trade off.
Housing Policy
Deregulating housing policy, especially in “blue” cities like New York and San Francisco is a key measure needed to help grow the American economy. Housing is one of the largest expenses most Americans have, yet it wasn’t always the case. Restrictive zoning has made housing exceedingly unaffordable, and conservatives ought to defend the right of property owners to do what they want on their own property. Trump actually supported deregulation ideas early on in his presidency, and then this year abruptly switched tactics to favor stronger regulation. This is anti-free market and anti economic growth. These large cities have made it harder to build new housing, which causes housing costs to rise, homelessness to increase, and the young and poor to be priced out of good opportunities. Mobility is down across the country, companies are struggling to attract employees to these high cost areas, and many are leaving. Trump is supporting this.
Network effects mean more concentrated, dense cities are much better. For example, recreating the networks that made Silicon Valley in other places is quite difficult, but as regulations make it harder to live in the Bay Area, we are forced to rebuild the aspects of the Bay Area in other places, which wastes time and energy. The same applies to every expensive U.S. city, including Boston, DC, LA, and Miami. The costs involved are astronomical, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars in lost economic productivity over years.
Biden’s housing policy is actually remarkably thoughtful and deregulatory. He proposes improving the already existing federal rental housing assistance for low income families so that all who qualify can obtain it (right now it gives out money to families until a set amount is given out instead of to all who qualify). Then he pairs that with requirements on federal housing money where municipalities must reduce zoning rules that block new housing. Obviously it’s difficult to know to what extent these policies will be exactly implemented, but if a policy even close to what Biden has proposed were to be passed, it would be a solid boon to economic growth. Moreover, it stands a good chance as it’s moderate and compromising where Trump’s housing policy.…isn’t.
Additional Issues
These issues are either where the candidates differ little, or conservatives don’t often prioritize so I’ve kept them short. Nonetheless, Biden retains an edge on these issues.
Climate Change
Many conservatives are skeptical of climate change. I found a view articulated by Russ Roberts, host of EconTalk, to be illuminating. Like nuclear war or pandemics, climate change is a risk with unknown probability. Rather than binary choice of preparing for it or not, our climate policy should weight the various catastrophic effects with the probabilities. Even if conservatives find the most dire climate predictions unlikely, some action is likely warranted under standard economic theory; negative externalities like pollution ought to be taxed. And as we’ve seen this year, it’s bad policy to shirk preparations until the catastrophe is already upon you.
Carbon taxes with offsetting tax cuts seem pretty straightforward. The Paris Climate agreement also seemed like an easy win, with countries setting their own targets. Trump’s withdrawal from this agreement seems to involve no policy calculation whatsoever since the agreement wasn’t binding anyway.
Biden’s plan is a bit aggressive for my take. It goes beyond taxing externalities and into specific government spending. Of course, Donald Trump has spent boatloads of money and would likely continue that trend. Biden spending money on green energy doesn’t seem any worse than Trump spending money on…everything. Donald Trump’s plan to do nothing about climate change seems more negative.
Fed Independence
This hasn’t turned out to be much of an issue as the Fed has been extremely active this year and we have yet to see inflation rise. Nonetheless, Donald Trump’s continued insistence that the Fed cut interest rates even as the economy was well below 5% unemployment was clearly political rather than based on any actual economic theory. This should be condemned as bad policy. Central banking should remain independent and not subject to the whims of populist rulers unless you want to be Venezuela.
Trade
Trade can have large positive impacts on the world, although trade barriers had been pretty low. The highest impact policies would be to use trade to improve relations with liberal countries and tie economic success of the U.S. to a broad liberal coalition to counter China. This is what the TPP and TTIP were, both abandoned by Trump. This is bad, free market conservatives should oppose Trump here, but Biden is not particularly free trade either.
Criminal Justice and the War on Drugs
I listed this as a large and important issue in May. However, the extent to which Trump and Biden differ on drug legalization is small. Both have expressed some interest in decriminalizing marijuana. I’m slightly more inclined to believe Biden as he has stayed with the median of the democratic party, which has largely embraced the issue, meanwhile Trump has been president for four years and done little. In overall criminal justice, democrats have as slight edge. Biden has expressed moderate views in the face of radical segments of his party, calling for reform, but also opposing calls to defund the police. Trump’s rhetoric has been rather aggressively anti-reform, but his actual policy actions seem to be small.
Counterpoints
Taxes
Joe Biden wants higher taxes than Trump. I’m against this. But I remain more positive on Biden than on Trump because of the relative weight of issue impacts. Joe Biden is not suggesting a systemic reinvention of taxation where billionaires are banned, but rather a higher level of taxation than before. I don’t know the exact details, but I would guess this would cost the American economy hundreds of billions, possibly a trillion dollars over four years. That’s pretty bad, but in a moment I’ll do a cost-benefit analysis and see how it compares.
Healthcare
I think conservatives have a strong case that Trump is better than Biden on healthcare policy, given conservative policy preferences. However, the differences are small. Trump had the opportunity to overhaul the healthcare system with a united Republican government in 2017. He provided no leadership and accomplished nothing except the repeal of the individual mandate on people who did not purchase insurance; that’s fine, but the problems in American healthcare are systemic and remain.
Joe Biden would not institute the aggressive Medicare-for-all plans of Bernie Sanders, but instead wants to create a public option. This is not a free market approach, but could actually be a good starting point to disentangle healthcare from employment. A Republican compromise that added a public option for people to buy while also reducing the mandates on what coverage employers have to provide to employees could get more people covered while also reducing reliance on employment for healthcare (which never made any sense anyway and distorts the labor market). Nonetheless, Trump could obviously try and make headway on such a system without the public option and without Biden as president, but he hasn’t. He’s mostly ignored this issue for several years.
Overall, for conservatives, I think the options are either doing nothing with a currently broken system, or see slightly worse reforms that tend to go in the wrong direction, but won’t be the end of the world. Compared to the vast differences in foreign policy, COVID-19 management, immigration, and housing policy, this just doesn’t make a dent on the enormous lead Biden has on Trump.
Justices
This is likely Trump’s biggest strength compared to Biden, however, there are some mitigating circumstances. The major one is that there are no conservative justices poised to retire soon. Clarence Thomas is 72, but many justices retire after 80. Another is that Supreme Court justices aren’t nearly as partisan as other members of the government. Many cases are decided unanimously, and many justices commonly rule against their “party” to uphold precedent. When justices do split, it’s not always clear what the lines will be. Gorsuch and Sotomayor are both strong proponents of 4th Amendment protections despite being appointed by different parties. Anthony Kennedy, despite being appointed by Reagan, was part of the majority in Kelo v New London. This ruled that state governments could seize private property and give it to private developers, which, and I can’t emphasize this enough, was outrageous. 45 states eventually passed legislation banning Kelo-like eminent domain seizures.
Which brings up another point: Congress can make laws. Remember all the debate about the Supreme Court ruling whether the President could implement his immigration bans in 2017? None of that would have mattered if Congress had simply clarified the law, and Republicans held both chambers! The level of intensity we have dedicated to Supreme Court appointments is encouraged by Congress’ inaction. We can either respond by pushing harder on court appointments, or we can respond by focusing on Congress!
Yes, appointing good justices matters, and Neil Gorsuch is an excellent justice! But we overemphasize the importance in Supreme Court nominations, and compared to the other issues that are costing thousands of American lives, this issue isn’t enough for Trump.
The Big Picture
When it comes down to it, Biden’s tax policy is not what I want, but it’s not going to have a lasting impact on the economy. Future Republican presidents can come in and fix marginal tax rates. Trump’s housing policy will cause long term harm relative to Biden’s. The reduction in cost of living for Americans if we can properly regulate construction of new homes in cities far outweighs any tax cut and brings in network effects on American cities. Cities are the currency of the economy. To see how behind we are, look at Tokyo where in 2018 more housing units were added than in New York, Boston, Houston, and Los Angeles combined. Trump wants that trend to continue, Biden doesn’t.
Add in Trump’s growth-crushing legal immigration policy, and the choice is even more stark.
Healthcare is another area where I don’t endorse Biden’s policy. But as stated, Trump has essentially nothing to offer here despite being president for four years. From a conservative perspective, at worst, Biden could implement a public option. Note however, this leaves private insurance completely intact. There is simply not a systemic risk conservatives should worry about. U.S. healthcare already has tons of government interventions and increasing government spending in healthcare 20% isn’t good, but it’s not going to be the end of America. It will put a strain on federal government finances, but Trump has consistently demonstrated that he does not care about that issue at all.
On the other hand, Trump’s actual policy when it comes to an actual pandemic has literally resulted in 200,000 dead Americans. Again, not all of this is on Trump, but it seems plausible that his downplaying of the virus, his bungling of agency responses, and his actual rallies during the pandemic has resulted in avoidable deaths. We cannot risk another catastrophe.
Finally, there’s the question of justices. To me this seems most comparable to the long term future concerns from the Greater Power Relations section. Both issues are concerning because of their impact on the trajectory of the long term future, but one is simply much higher stakes than the other. How the U.S. manages our relationship with China determines the course of human history in this century. If we screw it up badly, millions of lives are on the line. On the other hand, if Biden is elected, he might replace Stephen Breyer with another liberal leaning justice, and as stated previously, the overall impact here is smaller than most conservatives make it out to be.
I’ve detailed the importance of how we manage geopolitics and the dangers inherent on the global stage today as they impact the long term future. Arms races are extraordinarily dangerous, and in the future humanity’s weapons will only get more powerful. Trump has not managed geopolitics well. When the COVID-19 catastrophe hit, he was again subpar and his policy was not up the task of protecting Americans. Add in his poor economic policy on housing and immigration, throw in even a fleeting concern about climate change, and the evidence against Trump’s policies in favor of Biden’s is overwhelming.
Of course, I haven’t even got to some of the most devastating critiques of Trump, since I specifically tried to avoid discussions outside of policy. However, next post, I do want to cover, if it’s even possible, all of the Trump administration’s vast corruption, gross incompetence, authoritarian acts, and his divisive and polarizing approach to politics. I think much of this “extracurricular” activity matters a great deal even though some Trump supporters may brush it aside as trolling or just politics. But even if I’m wrong, Trump’s policy record is terrible enough on its own.
A Note on the LP Candidate
I didn’t want to take too much away from the more outcome oriented discussion of the Trump and Biden, one of whom is going to win the November election. However, as I noted in my last post, many readers will not be voting in a swing state, and so may be interested in the Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen.
Her policies do reasonably well on my list of issues (not very surprising on a blog about libertarianism and politics), and since non-swing state voters have essentially no chance to impact the election, libertarian leaning voters could cast their ballot for someone they actually like without worrying about electing the worse major party candidate. Very briefly, she hasn’t impressed on the issues of great power relations and catastrophic risks, two important issues. These tend not be libertarian strengths, so that makes sense, although I maintain they are key to the long term future of the world and the U.S.
On executive power, immigration, trade, criminal justice, and taxes, Jorgensen is reiterating the standard LP positions, which are generally pretty good as far as this libertarian leaning blog is concerned. I am surprised by her lack of discussion of housing deregulation (at least I couldn’t find anything) given it’s such a key issue, as standard libertarian positions should be positive here. On healthcare, I would take more incremental steps than she would. Overall, if you’re libertarian leaning and you don’t live in a swing state, I think voting for Jorgensen or Biden are defensible positions. If you want to learn more about Jorgensen’s positions, check out her ISideWith page and website.
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