(no title)

Should You Vote? And How?

This post is a discussion of the U.S. voting system and the implications for strategic voting. The general conclusions are:

You should vote if the election is competitive
You should spend time researching candidates in competitive elections
In competitive elections, identified differences in policies between major party candidates makes it worth voting for a major party and not a third party
This includes smaller elections, but may not include voting for president as many states are uncompetitive

Soon I will be discussing in depth specific presidential candidates, but this post does not contain any endorsements and instead contains all the other information you might want to consider before actually researching and ranking candidates.

There’s a lot of extensive calculations doing the cost-benefit analysis, so it may be more interesting to skip around to the sections you find most interesting.

Why Do We Vote?

Harder and Krosnick (2008) suggest a variety of reasons people vote, some of which take into account cost-benefit analysis elements like the ease of registering to vote, strong differences in preferences of candidates, and the closeness of elections. They also identify many other qualities associated with voting which seem to be unrelated to the actual election, like voter demographics (education level, age, race, marital status), feelings of duty, and civic organization membership.

Generally speaking, I think most people vote by trying to select the “best” candidate through their personal lens, and they often ignore strategic voting. In contrast, I would like to cautiously advocate thinking about voting more in terms of a cost-benefit or “rational” approach.

I think voting analysis should be done in a more rigorous, forward-looking way because this approach forces a much deeper interaction with the democratic system (and the problems inherent with it). If we keep our interaction with the system relatively shallow and devoid of analysis, we can’t fix major problems that govern the voting rules themselves. It can also lead to tribalism and groupthink when actual solutions require significant problem solving and nuance.

I was inspired to think about this recently when a friend asked who I planned to cast my presidential vote for, especially since I’ve talked about third parties in the past. I responded that I hadn’t thought much about who I’d personally vote for, since I live in an extremely uncompetitive state. She surprisingly disregarded this point, and asked more pointedly who I was going to vote for. The implication seemed to largely be tribal signalling; what mattered is that we’re all on the right side, not whether our actions are actually effective.

I think this way of viewing the political system is relatively common and generally bad. Everyone has nuanced views shaped by their perspective, experience, background, etc. We should strive to create a political system with robust voting (like approval voting or score voting!) that is able to capture lots of information from voters, instead of what it currently does which is allow many ballots to be purely signalling.

However, in this blog post, I’ll be taking our troubled electoral system as is, and assume that I am unlikely to change it today, or to convince many other people to change their thinking about the electoral system. Given what we know about how ballots will be cast, what should I (and my relatively small base of readers) do to strategically maximize the payoffs in this nationwide election?

Should you vote at all?

I detailed a lot of issues with the American electoral system in the last post: uncompetitive elections, bad voting systems, gerrymandering, etc. Given all of that, whether to vote at all is an important question! Voting requires time and effort, time that could be spent in other ways that improve the world. Many libertarians don’t vote, pointing out that the chances of your vote deciding an election are minuscule. But this excellent paper (Edlin, Gelman, Kaplan 2007) makes a rigorous case for why they should.

The “waste of time” argument can be compared to arguments against playing the lottery. Yes, the payoffs if you were to cast the deciding vote in a tied election are huge, just like winning the lottery could be life-changing. Yet, you are unlikely to win the lottery. Edlin et al take this argument head on, modeling it using this equation:

$Net Utility = pB - c$

Utility is the term we’re using to describe whether voting is worth it
p is the probability of changing the election outcome
B is the benefit from voting
c is the cost of voting

Basically, if the benefit of deciding the election (i.e. winning the lottery) times the chance of changing the election (the election is tied until you vote) is higher than the cost of voting, we should vote. Unfortunately, p is absurdly small. It’s proportional to the total number of voters, and it’s not uncommon for many of our elections to include hundreds of thousands, if not millions of voters. There’s also the issue that many elections are uncompetitive. Thus this modified equation from the paper:

$Net Utility = \frac{K}{n}B - c$

n is the total number of voters
K is based on the closeness of the election (it’s the inverse of the expected percentage margin of victory). It reflects what fraction of the vote is actually “swing voters”.

More on K, for most competitive elections where we expect our candidate to get between 45-55% of the vote, K would be about 10. It is inverse to how close we expect the spread to be, so if polling indicates the candidates are within the margin of error (the closest possible election we could measure), we expect K to peak at around 25 (indicating a 4% margin of error). As elections become more of a blowout, K trends towards 1. But even if the election is close, and you estimate thousands of dollars difference in payoff between the candidates, the number of voters, n is a major problem as it quickly erases any chance of you actually affecting the outcome. Note if you add in the benefits of your family or future children, it’s not going to help much as this number is fixed and small, while the total number of voters is often in the millions.

Ok, so now the good news: the paper points out that the vast majority of voters care about what happens to the country, not just themselves. It is true that for voters completely uninterested in everyone else’s well-being, there is no reason to vote in most cases. But if you take into account the wider social benefits, then voting is often beneficial:

$Net Utility = \frac{KN}{n}\alpha b - c$

Here, we’ve exchanged capital B for Nɑb, where:

B was the total benefit
b is the benefit per person
ɑ is the amount you discount others’ benefits compared to your own
N is the total population of the jurisdiction of the election

N is usually a lot larger than the actual number of voters n, but the ratio of N/n depends on the jurisdiction versus the voters. For a gubernatorial election, it’s probably ~2.5, but for a congressional election, N is the whole country, while n is only your state or district. This is looking pretty good now.

There’s not much guidance of ɑ since it’s really up to the person, although the paper uses an example of ɑ = 0.1. How valuable is it to you that random strangers are $100 better off? Most people give some to charity and so clearly ɑ is something, but intuitively it doesn’t seem to be 1 since that would imply you’re indifferent between keeping all your money and giving it to a stranger. Sometimes there are “matching” charity drives, but those don’t necessarily seem more successful than regular charity, so that might imply ɑ < 0.5. The the rest of this post, we’ll use 0.1 and K=10, since those seem like reasonable assumptions and so that these terms will cancel out. Feel free to recalculate with your own values.

The Close Elections Assumption

Close elections are doing a lot of heavy lifting in this model. For the remainder of the post, I’ll be assuming that the election being discussed is close, but I should note, this actually isn’t that common. Most incumbents are handily reelected, and 34 states are at 90% or higher to vote for one presidential candidate or another a couple months before the election. There are a variety of ways to check if an individual election is actually close, and this should always be the first step before even checking out the costs and benefits of an election. They include prediction markets like PredictIt or Betfair. We’ll discuss the electoral college more directly, including swing states, later in this post, but larger elections for senator and governor might have prediction markets which can tell you when to expect a blowout. For House races, there are some prediction markets for very competitive races, but another good resource is the Cook Political Report which categorizes House races as “solid”, “likely”, “leans”, and “tossups”.

Resources for local elections for state legislature are harder to come by. Historical data can be helpful to lookup an incumbent, but sometimes this information just isn’t available. If anyone has any good advice on how to gather information for local elections, please send it to me on Twitter or leave a comment. I would love to expand this section.

K means we still shouldn’t vote in blowout elections, N/n we will address at each election, and now we just need to calculate b and c.

Costs

This isn’t straightforward, but we can estimate the cost c based on a few variables, resulting in a range for most people from an hour to a few hours. If we take the median U.S. wage of ~$20, that’s $20-$60, although since I would hope that my readership would have really high time valuations (OTOH the length of this post clearly indicates I have too much free time), that might push this range more like $50-$150. This cost of voting includes the time and effort to register to vote, research the candidates, and fill out the ballot.

Registration time costs can vary wildly. You might already be registered as most DMVs will ask if you want to register while you’re there. But if you’ve moved since your last DMV visit, you often have to fill out a form and mail it in. Finding the forms, filling it out, mailing it, etc is going to cost some time, although if you don’t move again before the next election, you can split that cost across several election cycles. If you don’t have an ID at all because you don’t drive, your state might require an entire trip to the DMV (although voter ID laws vary). I’d estimate such a situation would likely triple the cost of just voting and research time. Next, research is essential if we are going to count the social benefits b towards reasons we should vote. Obviously, we all approach politics with our own biases and viewpoints. However, I think I can still advocate for a systematic approach, trying to find the issues that have the broadest impact on the world and then comparing the candidates on those specific issues. Voting itself doesn’t take too long especially if you can request an absentee ballot which I would have recommended even before the pandemic.

Candidate research has challenges; it can be difficult to track down candidate positions. If candidates haven’t held office before, they have no record to look up, and you’re left sifting through their vague campaign websites, tweets, or speeches. You could rely on party affiliation, but that may not map well onto issues you care about. Even if you do generally prefer generic Republicans over Democrats or vice versa, a cursory lookup of each candidate is vital, as you never know when an extremist or controversial candidate could slip by, trying to ride party affiliation to office.

National or statewide races tend to be less costly in research terms since you might already be somewhat familiar with the candidates and any differences they have, so I would expect this model to support voting in more prominent races more unambiguously. This is a change from how I thought about voting in the past.

For the rest of the post, I’m going to use $300 as the cost for voting because it seems likely to be far higher than the actual cost for most people; if we can show voting (in close elections) makes sense at this cost, we’ll have shown it for the vast majority of readers.

Benefits

That covers the costs of voting, what about the payoffs? The bottom line is that the government in the U.S. is pretty large. With a fiscal budget of trillions of dollars, even small changes can have large payoffs. This means that for most (competitive) federal elections, it’s almost always worth it to vote. State officials depend on the state budget and impact of state laws, but they too are often worth voting in.

There is, of course, uncertainty in this model. For single executive positions like President and Governor, we can be reasonably sure of policy differences which we might be able to quantify. For example, Trump has significantly reduced legal immigration into the country, while Biden has opposed this move. Legal immigrants are quite likely to start businesses and pay taxes, and so the order of magnitude difference in benefits from this Biden policy over Trump is at least in the tens of billions of dollars. Of course, immigrants can start major companies that have huge impacts on the country, like Google, eBay, and Tesla. These second order effects start to complicate how long it takes us to research candidates and compare across many issues, and with the higher research costs, the higher the benefits have to be to justify all this work.

So we’ve got uncertainty in how well we can quantify any specific policy issue, but we also are uncertain about which policies will be important; most people didn’t know terrorism was going to be presidential issue a year after the 2000 election, nor pandemics four years after the 2016 election.

Nonetheless, the following sections explore best estimates we can make about prospective candidates and incumbents to see if voting is worth the effort, given some reasonable assumptions. Moreover, with the cost of voting we calculated of $300, we only have to believe there is a difference in payoff between candidates of a few hundred dollars per capita for voting to be clearly worth it. These sections are pretty dense showing the work, so feel free to read as much or as little as seems interesting before moving on to the section about uncompetitive elections.

Governor

We can reach the $300 threshold most simply for gubernatorial elections. As stated earlier, to calculate the benefits side of the equation we can cancel out K and ɑ, leaving us N*b/n. Gubernatorial elections are simpler because N is the population of the state and n is the number of voters of a state (in e.g. Senate elections N is the whole county while n depends on each state so the ratio varies widely). The ratio of population to voters is between two and three for governor races, so I’m calling it 2.5. With c=$300, dividing that by 2.5 yields b>$120 for Net Utility to be positive. Meaning we only have to see a difference of $120 in expected per capita benefit between gubernatorial candidates for it to make sense to vote (and probably that’s too high).

Can we do that? Here is a list of U.S. states with their accompanying budgets, including per capita budgets. $120 per capita is lower than 6% of the budget of all states. I suspect different governors can result in 6% of the budget going to different places. Additionally, state governments also pass plenty of non-fiscal legislation which won’t show up on our budgetary calculations, but is likely a major part of whatever gubernatorial candidates run on. I’d argue that reaching a $120 per person difference in expected outcomes between two candidates is pretty doable if the election is competitive.

Finally, note that similar logic applies to all state officials that run in statewide races.

House

For legislative elections, uncertainty becomes much worse, as there is additional complications introduced when legislators are part of a much larger body.

If we take the cost of voting as conservatively high at $300, then we just need the benefits of voting to be higher than that, even if figuring out the actual benefits is hard. Again this is down to Nb/n. N here is the whole country, so it’s easier to combine it with b to create the full benefit for the whole country of one House candidate winning over the other. That’s what we’re trying to find out. n is the number of voters in a House district. It varies, but is usually between 200,000 and 400,000. Worst case scenario is 400,000. In this worst case then, Nb, the total benefit of a candidate winning has to be greater than $120 million.

Can we convince ourselves that a House seat is worth more than that? I think we can do a clever lower bound estimate on how valuable a House seat is by looking at single-margin House votes over a two year period since that’s the length of a term.

Thinking through this problem: half the time a close vote goes the way you want, and half the time it doesn’t. Additionally, ties count as failures to pass, so changing a two-vote bill passage to a tie counts as a flip, but a two-vote defeated bill that turns into a tie is still defeated. You can take a look at my data and script here, but it’s not an exact science. I’m not checking whether these votes are actual final passage, discussions of House rules, rules of debate, or even if it’s actually a 3/5 vote that just happens to fail with a tie. In fact, the data source I’m using called voteview seems to have some inaccurate data compared to the House website, so any conclusions we take should be ballpark estimates. Nonetheless, since 1991, I find we would only expect a flipped House seat to change a couple votes a year. In a two year term, we’ll call it one to four votes. Maybe there are a few more that are simply not seen in this data set, but I would be surprised if there were more than say…10 per term.

So what does this mean? The sheer size of the federal budget means even small changes can have large payoffs; even a hundredth of a percent of the federal budget would be hundreds of millions of dollars. Individual legislators can submit amendments to fiscal bills which could change a hundredth of a percent of the budget. But since the amendments process is strongly controlled by House leadership, it’s hard to say how much power there really is at the individual legislator level. There are also non-fiscal bills whose fate is much more in the balance; a single failed vote could mean they never pass at all (examples might include Obamacare or free trade agreements).

Essentially, this is a fat-tailed scenario (the average is dominated by outliers). Most of the time, I’d guess your representative doesn’t cast deciding votes, and those deciding votes aren’t on interesting things. But every once in a while, they likely stick in an amendment or pass a bill that has a massively outsized impact that far exceeds the $120 million threshold. Still, I should admit that this is tricky .

Obviously, if the House majority were in the balance, that would pretty quickly explode the benefits of a House election, as your vote for your representative would contribute to your preferred party holding the House, assuming you prefer one party over the other. For full calculations, check Footnote 1, but it would significantly outweigh the costs discussed if the House were in the balance (this year it appears it is not).

There’s a lot of uncertainty. Quantification of policies is hazy at best, and it’s also very difficult to predict individual candidate’s actual votes or which votes will actually happen. I think future research in this area should explore situations where important issues are entirely ignored by candidates (or by Congress), as reasoning here is hard. Nonetheless, important policy differences likely exist and so it makes sense to undertake the cost of researching candidates in close House elections.

Related: I would really appreciate a website that lists every close vote so voters can look up their representative and see (A) if these votes were important and (B) whether they agree with the way in which their representative voted.

I am least confident in this section’s calculations, but assuming risk aversion of outlier scenarios (or the House being in the balance), I think we’ve gathered enough evidence that the better candidate winning would result in more than $120 million dollar difference.

Senate

Similar “close votes” logic can be applied to the Senate, although it’s complicated with the Vice President who can break ties. You can see some of the methodology discussion in Footnote 2.

Again, the methodology is rough, and I haven’t been able to count cloture votes which are often important, as well the fact that we are overcounting actual close votes, since some of these are listed as 51-49 when in reality they were cloture votes which needed 60 ayes and they weren’t close at all. I count something like ~6 votes flipped per year if you flip a Senate seat. At 6 year terms, that’s ~36 votes flipped per election, but again, this is an overestimate of close votes, but an underestimate of cloture votes. At best this gives us an order of magnitude estimate. There is another source of uncertainty when senators vote against their party, which I found slightly more common in the Senate than the House, so keep that in mind as well (538 has some data on that here).

Looking up close votes, it’s clear they vary a lot in importance. The latest roll call vote I could actually find that was a single vote victory (roll call 51) was an amendment adding boilerplate language to the joint resolution to prevent the US from attacking Iran without congressional authorization. Flipping this vote seems like it’d have no impact on anyone’s life. Roll call 30 is much more interesting. In it, 47 democrats, Susan Collins, and Mitt Romney voted to subpoena John Bolton for the senate trial of the president. The vote failed as 51 Republicans voted against it. Here, clearly an additional democratic vote would have been large in revealing whatever John Bolton would have said, although likely would have remained far short of the 67 votes needed to remove him from office.

Generally speaking, I think we can say there are more close votes in the Senate due to being a smaller chamber and having six year terms instead of two. Additionally the Senate also has more responsibility in major appointments. I estimate 4-10x as many close votes and more important votes. However, the number of voters in a Senate race varies massively since districts are not population adjusted like in the House. For example, the 2018 California Senate election had 11 million votes, while the Wyoming Senate election had only 200,000, basically equivalent to a House district. Of course, we should note that the Wyoming Senate election wasn’t close and the California senate seat wasn’t that close either, and even then it was between two Democrats so the difference in payoff was likely smaller than between a Republican and Democrat. Here’s a worst case scenario for Senate benefits in California. Again, were looking for Nb as that’s the benefit to the entire country of a Senate seat flipping:

That’s $3.3 billion. Can we find that in close Senate votes over six years? I think so. Unlike highly variable and rare House votes, we can usually guarantee at least one close vote will happen on an important topic. $3.3billion is less than a percent of non-military discretionary spending, so this seems plausible.

Our conclusions are similar to the House elections. In close elections, it makes a lot of sense to vote even though there is going to be a lot of uncertainty in what votes elected officials will actually face and even what their position could be. Voters in smaller states with close Senate elections have the largest expected payoffs. If you’re uncertain about which candidate is better because of previously mentioned issues with candidates ignoring your primary issues or split among important ones, close Senate elections in small states are probably worth the time to sit down and try and do some estimations of each candidate and policy payoffs.

The Electoral College

I wrote about the implications of the electoral college for third parties in 2016. This year’s post on strategic voting is an elaboration on that model, so even though I’ve taken a slightly different editorial position, the implications for president are similar. It all comes down to the K variable we’ve been using. I’ve had to preface every recommendation with the fact that the election must be close, because even Edlin at al don’t say there’s a positive payoff to vote if the election is already decided.

This most often asserts itself in the presidential election with the electoral college. The way to think about this idea is the “Tipping Point Jurisdiction”. If we listed every state in order by (Trump percentage) – (Biden percentage), and then added up the number of electoral votes, the state that puts either one above 270 is the tipping point. In 2016, this was Wisconsin. Even though Michigan was closer in percentage points, Clinton would have needed to win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and then Wisconsin to get 270 electoral votes. In 2000, this was famously Florida. Your vote for president is only decisive if cast in the Tipping Point Jurisdiction.

Here is a prediction market for chances of any state becoming the Tipping Point state. Because of PredictIt’s fee structure, these probabilities are slightly inflated, and I wouldn’t trust much in a market below 5% to reflect what bettors actually thought. Additionally, it’s still relatively early in the election cycle, so we’d expect more certainty as we get closer to election day.

State	Predict It %	538 %
PA	23	23
FL	22	24
WI	14	10.4
MN	8	8.9
MI	8	6.4
AZ	7	5.3
NC	6	3.7
NV	4	2.8
OH	3	2.7
Total:	95	87.2

This isn’t meant to be a projection, but just a snapshot that we can use. Even today, two months before the election we’re 90% sure that one of these states will be the tipping point state. The payoff equation for these swing states is pretty clear:

Nb is again going to be the full benefit to the country (actually, I guess the world?) if one candidate is president compared to another.
n is the number of voters in your swing state
p_t is going to be the chance your state is the tipping point jurisdiction, which is what table above shows
p_m is the probability that the margin of the electoral college ends up being less than the electoral votes in your state.

These ideas are taken from this paper by Gelman, Silver, and Edlin. To get a rough estimate, we can use this prediction market, which suggests for most states p_m is probably only 10-20%, although that could change as we get closer to election. We probably need a full table of probabilities, but here’s Florida’s calculations:

So if there’s a difference in the world of Biden being president over Trump of $76 billion, it’d be worth it to vote in Florida, although it’d be good to redo the calculations with updated numbers closer to election day. Can we get to that number by comparing Biden and Trump? I think so, but you’ll have to wait until my next blog post for the full discussion.

Additional Offices

I don’t have much to add here because advice becomes exceedingly hard to give. The math suggests that state legislator elections will actually scale marginally well since you have a much smaller pool of voters and thus your vote is worth more, precisely outweighing the loss of stakes when switching from federal to state elections. You can try to do the same trick I did earlier with small vote margins in state legislatures, and I’d be curious what you find. Many states are dominated by one party and so I can imagine fewer close votes, but I don’t know. However, as mentioned earlier, the costs to obtain good information might be much harder. Single office elections like Mayor seem much more likely to be easier to calculate benefits and compare candidates.

But What If It’s Not Close?

The short answer is: don’t worry about uncompetitive elections.

The longer answer is: there might be a couple marginal reasons to vote. For example, in presidential elections, ballot access for third parties often depends on small thresholds for third party votes, like 2% or 5%. These might be achievable if you prefer third parties and live in a non-swing state. This is likely what I will personally do, as I live in an uncompetitive state, and tend to favor libertarian candidates.

Also, a quick note on personal enjoyment; some people really like voting. I’ve eschewed psychological reasoning in the rest of this post, but we can’t ignore that a sense of duty or tribal fervor could also be a benefit you get that outweighs the cost of waiting in line or filling out registration forms. The reason I only include those benefits in this section is that unlike benefits from policy, these psychological benefits do not accrue to your fellow citizens. In close elections what should motivate our actions is what would actually improve the world.

When it comes to Donald Trump, there have been predictions and accusation by Obama and Trump of election engineering that could occur during this election. This is concerning. If you strongly support or oppose Donald Trump, it may be worth it to vote even in uncompetitive states to push the popular vote total in your direction in the hopes of making the vote such a rout that a constitutional crisis is impossible. I’m unsure to what extent this will matter in the case of a contested election compared to election results in swing states, but The Economist thinks a decisive popular vote could assure an uneventful transition of power. In swing states, I recommend voting for a major party anyway.

Third Parties in Close Elections

In perhaps a disappointment for my libertarian skewing readership, it only makes sense to vote for third parties in elections that aren’t close. For good or bad, there are tons of uncompetitive elections, and I think third parties, and the Libertarian Party in particular should continue to target those elections. In gerrymandered districts where single party rule dominates, they have a chance to become a real “second party”. The payoff of who is in government is actually really high, and so on expectation, it makes sense to choose a specific major party candidates when both have a chance to win.

That doesn’t mean you can’t advocate for voting reform (reminder that approval voting is on the ballot in St. Louis this year!), or call your senator, or donate money to libertarian causes, it just means that some elections matter and you can have real impact by deciding the winner.

Footnotes

Footnote 1: House majority calculations. If you see strong differences between Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy deciding which legislation is brought to the floor, that could potentially be worth tens of billions of dollars, maybe even $100 billion. I’m doubtful it would be worth much more than that though, as this is only one chamber of one branch of government. And of course, if you’re a libertarian who disagrees with much of what both Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy believe, then such differences in majority control are smaller. The analysis here would be like a second order election on top of your vote for local congressman. Assuming House majority control is in the balance in the election (this year, it doesn’t appear to be), you’d need to add another term to our equations to account for smaller probability of your representative casting the deciding vote for Speaker. We’d thus multiply by an additional K/n where K=10 and n=435 for all House members.

We’ll cancel out K and α, Nb is the full benefit of a certain party being in control, n= between 200,000-400,000 for most House districts. The second fraction K_H/n_H = 0.023. Overall, this works out to ~$5000 ballpark estimate for a $50B difference in majority control. Obviously, this would make it worth it to vote in House elections, although again, that’s not likely to be on the table in this election.

Footnote 2: Senate calculations. The Vice president acts like an extra Senator. So if the VP is someone you agree with, you can take that into account (or vice versa). But if there’s uncertainty (for example, we don’t know who will be Vice President in 2021), you can estimate that half the time the VP votes in your interests. The other half of the time your “side”, however you define that, loses the vote. An extra senator would flip those votes because the tie would be broken before the VP votes (i.e. the VP could break a tie against your side if it’s 50-50, but doesn’t get a chance to if the vote is 51-49). I downloaded Senate vote data here and looked at votes from 1991 on. You can find my code and data here.

Picture credit: League of Women Voters of California, licensed under CC-BY-2.0

Electoral Reform

This is the first post in a series on the 2020 U.S. election. The next post will likely be on strategic voting in the U.S. electoral system. But before we get there, this is a short biennial plea to remind you that the current way the U.S. conducts elections and government is not the only way. While you may not always be able to reform the electoral system while you are voting from inside it, sometimes opportunities can arise, and it should always be in the back of our mind.

All democracies have drawbacks of some kind, but the American electoral system seems to have a lot of issues, many of them fixable. I’ve had a lot to say about the issue (and more, and even more).

I’m not just talking about the electoral college, although yes, that is a problem (some good critiques here). Our use of first past the post voting is the worst of all possible voting systems. I’ve often advocated Approval Voting but there are many good alternatives. Nonetheless, all voting systems will trend towards two parties under winner-take-all single member districts like we have today. We might consider multi-member districts, although discussion about such an idea is essentially nonexistent. Worse still, House districts are gerrymandered to create uncompetitive elections. Perhaps you’d hope other parties might be able to enter into uncompetitive elections, but ballot access laws place barriers to entry to alternative parties, sometimes costing thousands of dollars to obtain signatures just to get on the ballot, while requirements are waived for Republicans and Democrats. This also makes it generally more difficult for alternative voting coalitions to arise.

Unfortunately, many general election races are already decided before you even consider who to vote for in November. So perhaps we should focus on voting in primaries as the way to exercise your right to vote? Sadly, primaries themselves have many issues: they also use first past the post, they have an extremely narrow electorate, and their structure incentivizes ignoring moderates because they either can’t vote or are split between the primaries of the two parties. Even if you know of a competitive primary in a state where the general won’t be close (for example, Republicans usually win in the deep south, but the Republican primary might be competitive), in many states you have to either be registered with that party (or sometimes independent) in order to vote in that party’s primary. That often means you have to spend time changing your voter registration while predicting ahead of time whether the primary will be close. Each state is different, so this can be a major headache trying to cast an actual decisive vote. Note, that there are plenty of good primary reform ideas as well; St. Louis Approves is campaigning for a simple blanket primary with approval voting, with the top vote-getters going on the general election.

So far we’ve covered a lot of voting issues and possible reforms, but I want to also emphasize that there are important democratic channels outside of pure voting. For example, voting provides no feedback for specific legislation, so representatives don’t receive direct electoral feedback about how they are voting. A better way to express opinions here would be to call legislators’ offices and complain directly. Note legislators will probably only care if you are a voter, but not that you spent any actual time and effort to research who you were voting for. We’ll revisit that in the next post.

Legislative institutions also have major impact on how policy becomes law, and they have their own problems. Representatives in the House have very little ability to offer amendments on most legislation, which is instead crafted by House leadership from the top down. This discourages broadly popular coalitions in favor of partisan priorities. Moreover, Congress has continually ceded power to the president, which hypercharges the importance of the imperial presidency. This results in division and every presidential election being a winner-take-all high stakes competition. If Congress was powerful and moderate, much less would ride on every presidential election..

In conclusion: the median American voter this year will vote in a uncompetitive non-swing state in the electoral college, have an uncompetitive Senate and House election, and have uncompetitive state legislative elections about which they know very little. This is not great.

All hope is not lost though. Last time I wrote this type of post, I mentioned that Reform Fargo was trying to get an approval voting system implemented for Fargo municipal elections. That effort passed, and they are currently using approval voting, which already resulted in council members getting broad support instead of the tiny fractions of the vote they were getting before. This year, St. Louis is looking at implementing an approval voting system as well. Both of these efforts were helped by the Center for Election Science, which is one of the charities I suggested donating to in my end-of-year charity discussion.

While most of us won’t have a chance yet to vote to improve our election system, it does seem like improvements are possible. And look out for my next post discussing more in depth the electoral landscape we will be facing this year.

Picture credit: David Maiolo licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported.

Book Review: The Precipice

I have titled my annual blog post summarizing where I donate my charitable budget as “How can we use our resources to help others the most?” This is the fundamental question of the Effective Altruism movement which The Precipice‘s author, Toby Ord, helped found. For a while, Toby Ord focused on figuring out how to fight global poverty, doing the most good for the worst off people in the world. Now, he is focusing on the long term future and existential risk.

The Precipice is fantastic. It’s incredibly well written, engaging, and approachable. It covers a lot of ground from why we should care about the world, what risks humanity faces in the future, how we might think about tackling those risks, and what the future might look like if we succeed.

The Precipice eloquently interweaves fairly philosophical arguments with more empirical analysis about the sources of existential risk and tries to statistically bound them. The book discusses a pretty concerning topic of the potential end of humanity, but it does so with an eminently reasonable approach. The complexities of philosophy, science, probability, epidemiology, and more all are brought into the narrative, but made easily digestible for any reader. I honestly wish Toby Ord could teach me about everything, his writing was so clear and engaging.

The main discussion is never overwhelming with technical details, but if you ever find a point interesting, even the footnotes are amazing. At one point I came up with a counterpoint to Ord’s position, wrote that down in my notes, only to find that the next several paragraphs addressed it in its entirety, and there was actually a full appendix going into more detail. Honestly, this will be less of a book review and more of a summary with a couple final thoughts, because I think this book is not only excellent, but its content is perhaps the most important thing you can read right now. You are welcome to read the rest of this blog post, but if you have found this compelling so far, feel free to stop reading and order Toby Ord’s book posthaste.

Existential Risk

The consequences of 90% of humans on Earth dying would be pretty terrible, and given our relatively poor response to recent events, perhaps we should better explore other potential catastrophes and how we can avoid them. But The Precipice goes further. Instead of 90% of humans dying, what happens if 100% of us die out? Certainly that’s strictly worse with 100>90, but in fact these outcomes are far apart in magnitude: if all humans die out today, then all future humans never get to exist.

There’s no reason we know of that would stop our descendants from continuing to live for billions of years, eventually colonizing the stars, and allowing for the existence of trillions of beings. Whatever it is that you enjoy about humanity, whether that’s art, engineering, or the search for truth, that can’t continue if there aren’t any humans. Full stop. As far as we know, we’re the only intelligence in the universe. If we screw up and end humanity before we get off this planet, then we don’t just end it for ourselves but perhaps we end all intelligent life for the remaining trillions of years of the universe.

Even though I was aware of the broad thesis of the book, I was continually impressed with just how many different angles Ord explores. He early on notes that while we might normally think of a catastrophic extinction event, like an asteroid impact, as the thing we are keen on avoiding, in fact there are several scenarios that would be similarly devastating. For example, if humanity were to suffer some calamity that did not kill everyone but left civilization stuck at pre-industrial technology, that would also preclude humanity from living for trillions of years and colonizing the stars. A 1984 style global totalitarian state would also halt humanity’s progress, perhaps permanently.

Ord also discusses the fundamental moral philosophy implications of his thesis. The natural pitch relies on utilitarian arguments as stated above; if humanity fails to reach its potential, this not only harms any humans currently alive but all future generations. Other arguments against extinction include a duty to our past and what we owe to our ancestors, the rights of those future generations who don’t get to decide for themselves, and the simple fact that we would lose everything we currently value.

The book categorizes three types of risk: natural, anthropogenic, and future risks. Natural includes asteroids, supervolcanoes, and stellar explosions. These are pretty diverse topics, and Ord is quite informative. The story about asteroid risk was particularly fascinating to me. In the 90s, the relatively new discovery of the dinosaurs’ demise led Congress to task NASA with identifying all the largest near-Earth asteroids to see if they pose a threat to Earth. They allocated some money, and NASA tracked every near-Earth asteroid over 10 km in length, and determined that none pose a threat in the next century. They then moved on to 1 km asteroids and have now mapped the vast majority of those as well. The total cost of the program was also quite small for the information provided — only $70 million.

This is one of the rare successes in existential risk so far. Unfortunately, as Ord points out several times in the book, current foundational existential risk research at present is no more than $50 million a year. Given the stakes, this is deeply troubling. As context, Ord points out that the global ice cream market is about $60 billion, some 1000x larger.

I’ll skip the other natural risks here, but the book bounds natural risk quite skillfully; humans have been around for about 200,000 years, so it seems natural risk can’t be much higher than 0.05% per century. Even then, we’d expect our technologically advanced civilization to be more robust to these risks than we have been in the past. Many species survived even the largest mass extinctions, and none of them had integrated circuits, written language, or the scientific method.

That doesn’t mean that all risk has declined over time. On the contrary, according to Ord, the vast majority of existential risk is anthropogenic in origin. Nuclear weapons and climate change dominate this next section. It’s remarkable just how callous early tests of nuclear weapons really were. Ord recounts how there were two major calculations undertaken by a committee of Berkeley physicists before the Manhattan project got underway in earnest. One was whether the temperature of a sustained nuclear reaction would ignite the entire atmosphere in a conflagration (the committee believed it would not). The other was whether Lithium-7 would contribute to a thermonuclear explosion (it was believed it would not). It turns out that Lithium-7 can contribute to a thermonuclear explosion as was found out when the Castle Bravo test was about three times larger than expected, irradiating some 15 nearby islands.

It turned out the other calculation was correct, and the first nuclear explosion in 1945 did not ignite the atmosphere. But clearly, given the failure of the other calculation, the level of confidence here was not high enough to warrant the risk of ending all life on Earth.

Luckily, current risk from nuclear weapons and climate change that would wipe out humanity seems quite low (although not zero). Even a nuclear winter scenario or high sea level rise would not make the entire Earth uninhabitable, and it is likely humans could adapt, although the loss of life would still be quite catastrophic.

Instead, the bulk of the risk identified by Toby Ord is in future technologies which grow more capable every year. These include engineered pandemics from our increasingly powerful and cheap control over DNA synthesis, as well as artificial intelligence from our increasingly powerful and integrated computer systems.

The threat of engineered pandemics is particularly prescient as I write this in August 2020 where SARS-CoV-2 is still sweeping the world. Ord notes that even given quite positive assumptions about whether anyone would want to destroy the world with a virus, if the cost is cheap enough, it only takes one crazy death cult to pull the trigger. Even an accidental creation of a superweapon is a serious risk, as production is cheap and there are many examples of accidental leakages of bioweapons from government laboratories in the past. Unfortunately, we are also woefully unprepared on this front. The Biological Weapons Convention had a budget of $1.4 million in 2019, which Ord notes is less than most McDonald’s franchises.

Risks from unaligned artificial intelligence are similarly related to technical advancements. Ord notes that artificial intelligence has had some impressive achievements recently from photo and face identification to translation and language processing to games like Go and Starcraft. As computer hardware gets better and more specific, and as we discover more efficient algorithmic applications of artificial intelligence, we should expect this trend to continue. It therefore seems plausible that sometime in the future, perhaps this century, we will see artificial intelligence exceed human ability in a wide variety of tasks and ability. The Precipice notes that, were this to happen with some sort of general intelligence, humanity would no longer be the most intelligent species on the planet. Unless we have some foresight and strategies in place, having a superior intelligence with it own goals could be considerably dangerous.

Unfortunately, we are already quite poor at getting complex algorithms to achieve complicated goals without causing harm (just take a look at the controversy around social media and misinformation, or social media and copyright algorithms). The use of deep learning neural networks in more high stakes environments means we could be facing opaque algorithmic outcomes from artificial intelligence that we don’t know if we’ve correctly programmed to achieve the goals we actually want. Throw in the fact that human civilizational goals are multifaceted and highly debated, and there is a great deal of mistakes that could occur between what humans “want” and what a superior intelligence attempts to accomplish. While Toby Ord doesn’t think we should shut down AI research, he does suggest we take this source of risk more seriously by devoting resources to addressing it and working on the problem.

So What Do We Do?

I’ve spent a lot of time on enumerating risks because I think they are a concrete way to get someone who is unfamiliar with existential risk to think about these ideas. But Ord isn’t writing a book of alarmism just to freak out his audience. Instead, starting with the high levels of risk and adding the extremely negative consequences, Ord details how we might begin to tackle these problems. Unprecedented risks come with modeling challenges: if an existential risk cannot by definition, have ever occurred, how can we know how likely it is? We have to acknowledge this limitation, use what incomplete knowledge we can have access to (number of near misses is a good start), and start building institutions to focus on solving these hard problems.

International coordination is a major factor here. Many of these problems are collective action problems. Humanity has found ways around collective action issues with international institutions before (nuclear arms treaties), and so we need to replicate those successes. Of course, we can’t establish new or better institutions unless we get broad agreement that these issues are major problems that need to be solved. Obviously, that’s why Ord wrote this book, but it’s also why I feel compelled to blog about it as well. More on that momentarily.

In this section of the book, The Precipice outlines preliminary directions we can work towards to improve our chances of avoiding existential catastrophes. These include obvious things like increasing the funding for the Biological Weapons Convention, but also discussions on how to think about technological progress, since much of our future existential risk rises as technology improves. We also obviously need more research on existential risk generally.

Finally, I want to wrap up discussing Appendix F, which is all of Ord’s general policy recommendations put into one place. As policy prioritization has long been an interest of mine, I found Toby Ord’s answer to be quite fascinating. I wrote a post a few months back discussing the highest impact policies actually being discussed in American politics in this election cycle. Comparing it to Toby Ord’s recommendations, the overlap is essentially nonexistent except for some points on climate change, which most democrats support such as the U.S. rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement. There’s also a point about leveraging the WHO to better respond to pandemics, and given Trump has essentially done the exact opposite by removing U.S. funding for the WHO, I suppose I should at least include that as relevant policy debate.

I want to emphasize that Ord has 9 pages of policy ideas, and many of them are likely uncontroversial (improve our understanding of long period comets, have the Biological Weapons Convention have a real budget), but our political system is failing to even address these challenges, and I think it’s important to highlight that.

There is room for optimism; human knowledge is improved by discussion and research, and that includes reading and blogging. If you find these ideas interesting, or even more broadly, if you think there are valuable things in the world, one of the most effective activities you could do this year might be to just read The Precipice. Even without the weight of humanity, the concepts, problem solving, and prose are worth the read all by themselves. This is definitely by favorite book I’ve read this year, and I’ve skipped over summarizing whole sections in the interests of time. Ord even has a whole uplifting chapter about humanity’s future potential, and is overall quite positive. Please attribute any gloominess on this topic to me and not the book.

And if you do read this book, it also just makes for intriguing conversation. I couldn’t help but tell people about some of the ideas here (“are supervolcanoes a national security threat?” ), and the approach is just wonderfully different, novel, and cross-disciplinary.

For more on this, but slightly short of reading the whole book, I also recommend Toby Ord’s excellent interview on the 80000 Hours Podcast. On that page you can also find a host of awesome links to related research and ideas about existential risk. I’ll also link Slate Star Codex’s longer review of The Precipice, and places to buy it.

Pitching Conservatives on Ditching the Police State

During Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, the Red Guards were a radical student-formed paramilitary organization. Inspired by the push to recreate a new communist China and destroy the “Four Olds”, the Red Guards targeted anyone deemed sympathetic to intellectual or bourgeois ideas. Red Guard tactics quickly devolved into property damage, violence, and torture. Thousands were murdered. The Red Guards were both condoned and condemned by the central government, but they were unable to be controlled. The movement in some cases spiraled into a civil insurrection that was eventually defeated by the army in 1968. Lawlessness, destruction of private property, disregard for human life–clearly, conservatives and I agree that the terror campaign of the Red Guards was a moral abomination. But I have a question for conservatives:

Were the Red Guards bad because of their ideology, or because of their violence?

Well, what if we kept the ideology, but got rid of the violence? Apparently, the “Party for Socialism and Liberation” is an American political party that advocates communism. Their positions (perhaps unsurprisingly) are rather odious, but as far as I can tell, they are not actively going around the country murdering small business owners for owning capital. This is clearly morally superior to the Red Guards.

What about the reverse? What if there were paramilitary organizations in the United States operating outside the law, but they happened to not be communists? What would their moral standing be? They wouldn’t target people holding onto traditional values, like the Red Guards did, but that would not make citizens feel better that hundreds of people were being murdered.

American police forces are Red Guards without communism.

Too harsh? Let’s take a look into this phenomenon where we’ll find outrageous situation after situation. In 2011, cops killed a former marine with no criminal record, Jose Guerena, while his wife and children were hiding in a closet from the unidentified intruders. Guerena, while armed, never removed his safety from the gun. Naturally, he was hit over 20 times by police. No evidence was found in his home of any illegal activity. The warrant was served suspecting that Guerena was selling marijuana. At the time medical cannabis was legal in Arizona, but someone selling it without a license? Better have a no-knock raid. Police settled out of court for civil damages, and a County Deputy is quoted saying ” the officers performed that day in accordance with their training and nationally recognized standards”.

In 2013, three off-duty police officers working as security guards in a Frederick County, Maryland movie theater were asked to remove a patron who was attempting to see a second showing of a movie without paying. The customer, Ethan Saylor, was 26 years old and had Down Syndrome. The officers refused the help of his aide, arrested Saylor, and in the process, fractured his larynx, resulting in his death from asphyxiation. A grand jury found no wrongdoing, and I could find no citation indicating the officers had lost their job. The family settled for $1.9 million (the judge did decline to extend qualified immunity for the officers).

In 2015, police destroyed a Colorado man’s home in pursuit of a shoplifter armed with a handgun. When I say destroyed, I mean “… the tactical team bombarded the building with high-caliber rifles, chemical agents, flash-bang grenades, remote-controlled robots, armored vehicles, and breaching rams”. The house was condemned afterwards leaving Leo Lech homeless. The city compensated him with $5000. He took the city to court and an appeals court ruled in 2019 that he was entitled to no compensation, as the police were acting within their police power, not taking items as part of an investigation.

I could go on and on: a homeless person beaten to death by officers, Massachusetts state police using military helicopters to spot single marijuana plants, a retired unarmed Sunday School Teacher shot four times in her car (cop lied on his report, was convicted of manslaughter, served two years), but there was one final story that stayed with me.

In May 2014, one night just past 2 AM, police in full SWAT gear served a no-knock warrant in a small Georgia town. A roommate of an informant they had never used before had apparently bought methamphetamine at the house earlier in the day. Ignoring the minivan parked in front with the car seat in it and the kid sized play pool, police assumed no children were present in the house despite no actual surveillance having been conducted. Their target, it turned out, wasn’t present and when he was apprehended later in the morning, he was not armed. Nonetheless, they easily obtained a no-knock warrant on the flimsiest of information. Police broke into the house and threw a flashbang grenade inside where no less than four children under the age of ten were sleeping. It landed in the playpen of the youngest, a 19 month old baby, and exploded. The police found no contraband or illegal items, but the infant was put into a medically induced coma. A grand jury declined to indict the deputy who obtained that warrant (naturally), and the county paid out a multi-million dollar out of court settlement.

American police have been a threat to freedom for a long time and in many forms. Violent no-knock raids on unsuspecting families, drug enforcement that both fails to stop drug use while also stacking up bodies, executions of unarmed and nonthreatening citizens because they don’t obey police orders, burning infants, the stories sound unbelievable. They are clearly an out of control, unaccountable paramilitary force.

Let’s talk about the recent protests, the catalyst for this post. Left leaning protesters have focused on police abuses’ connection to racism. I stated earlier that American police are Red Guards without the communism. Leftists are extending that argument; instead of Red Guards murdering people for the Cultural Revolution, protesters point out that American police are murdering people due to systemic racism. John Oliver details this argument here. Libertarian critiques of the police state have tended to categorize the ideology of the police in terms of authoritarianism, or opposition to personal liberty; hence the focus on the enforcement of drug laws that infringe on individual autonomy.

Naturally, libertarians emphasize a narrative where police abuses can be counteracted by libertarian ideology while progressives emphasize an alternative narrative that can be solved by social justice. If you are a conservative, you are likely to be suspicious of these critiques as they seem self-serving. Nonetheless, both critiques have a solid basis: Black Americans are killed at a disproportionate rate, and many unnecessary deaths clearly occur when serving drug warrants on citizens who have done nothing violent. Moreover, compared to the Red Guards, American police are not nearly as ideologically cohesive, yet they remain a powerful and unaccountable force as we’ve seen. This creates a dangerous situation where many ideologies and interest groups have an incentive to influence the police for their own ends.

But let’s recall what we stated earlier. Are unaccountable paramilitary groups bad because of their ideology or their violence? I argue, it’s their violence.

And we’ve seen from the previous examples, American police are remarkably violent. But those were just anecdotes. Here is part of a table of countries, and highlighted in blue is the rate of police killings per 10 million people. The United States at 46.6 is surrounded by renowned criminal justice systems like Iraq and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and trails standout nations like Iran.

This is bad.

We don’t actually know the amount of people killed by the police in the U.S. because the government doesn’t require police departments to track that data. The data linked in the Wikipedia article is from the Fatal Encounters database, which suggests about 1800 people killed every year by American police. The Washington Post database focuses only on police shootings and indicates around 1000 people are shot to death by the police each year.

To drive the point home, let’s first consider developed countries. The United States is by far the worst developed country in terms of police killings per capita, but the distant second place is Canada (which is so far up on the table, I couldn’t include it on the screengrab). Canadian police kill around 10 people per 10 million population compared to America’s 46.6–nearly a five fold decrease. In fact, American police are significantly outperformed by those of Pakistan, a country where military coups are commonplace, and which only had its first peaceful transition between elected governments in 2013.

The Washington Post database suggests about 25% of those killed by police are Black, which is disproportionately high for their percentage of the U.S. population. But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that we could wave a magic wand and prevent all Black killings by the American police. Even if we did that, our rate of police killings would remain 350% of the next highest developed country. And to be clear, Canada is the second worst developed country we have data on, most others are much better.

I want to reiterate that last point: American police killings are not 350% of Canada’s total police killings, but 250% higher deaths per capita even if there were no more Black victims of police violence.

In fact, even if this hypothetical scenario of drastically reduced police killings, the rate of American police violence would remain much worse than a country like Egypt’s. In 2018, Human Rights Watch wrote of the Egyptian election:

Since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi secured a second term in a largely unfree and unfair presidential election in March, his security forces have escalated a campaign of intimidation, violence, and arrests against political opponents, civil society activists, and many others who have simply voiced mild criticism of the government.

This is the country that has a significantly less deadly police force than us. This is disgraceful.

So if you’re a conservative, and you feel left-wing (or libertarian!) activists have a differing ideology than you, you’re probably right. But I think you may have much more in common on this issue that you might initially believe. The question we must agree on isn’t “which ideology should an unaccountable paramilitary force within our borders have?”, the question is “do we want unaccountable paramilitary organizations murdering hundreds of citizens a year?”

If think you might have some common ground with reformists, here are some simple ways to make the police more accountable:

Get your congressional representatives to sign on to Justin Amash’s bill to end qualified immunity or Rand Paul’s bill to end no-knock raids
Push your local representatives to pass the 8 Can’t Wait police reforms to make police more accountable
Consider reforming or busting police unions, which are the single most powerful interest group that has opposed police reform for decades

A 2020 Policy Platform Proposal

It’s election season so it’s time to start talking electoral politics again. The Trump administration has been particularly successful in ignoring policy discussions in favor of political point scoring. This isn’t too surprising given Trump’s lack of consistent ideology, apart from perhaps opposition to free trade and immigration. Impeachment has also helped focus attention on Trump’s political situation rather than his policies or lack thereof. Don’t get me wrong, I think there is a strong non-policy case against Trump, and I think in particular Congressman Justin Amash has done an excellent job in articulating why Trump’s behavior is concerning.

However, I think there is also a policy-based critique of Trump. In order to properly make that case and compare Trump’s policies to Biden’s or other candidates, we must establish a foundation declaring which problems are most important, and what policies could be used to implement them. Criteria for these policy ideals include some utilitarian calculus, i.e., how to improve the lives of the most people in the largest way. Thus, the first of these policies is actually a meta-policy, a way to improve congressional power to pass laws and run the state. Changing the way we make policy can affect all of our future policy making.

Countering this interest in utilitarian idealism is a preference for some political feasibility; in other words, while I might prefer to emphasize revolutionary changes that significantly improve the country (changing all of our voting systems to approval voting or quadratic voting or switching taxation to be based on land value), I’ve left them off this list because they are not just unpopular, but in fact virtually never discussed. If you find a particular policy interesting, please follow the links in that section for additional policy discussion and details.

Finally, there is uncertainty here, and I’ll mention other policies that didn’t make this list at the end. Trying to filter major talking points out of a broader range of political ideas is difficult. Policies and political philosophies are interconnected, and where I’m drawing boundaries must be arbitrary. Nonetheless, these ideas should form a good basis for uniformly judging candidate policies.

Congressional Power

Any policy platform has to address the fact that our current system for governance, for crafting and enacting policy, is deeply flawed. We have uncompetitive and broken elections, we have bad ways of choosing candidates, and we have too much power in the executive branch. Executive authority compounds our problems by making each election a stark singular choice between polarized sides instead of a well rounded government built on a legislature with many interests represented. I can’t fix all of these in this policy platform, so improving the balance between the president and Congress seems like a good place to start.

The entire budget for the legislative branch, including congressional staff, offices, and congressional agencies like the GAO and CBO, is about $5 billion. Congress is then responsible for oversight and legislative action for the entire $5 trillion federal government. The CBO has a mere 250 person staff, and it can’t even research and score all Congressional bills. This is absolute insanity.

Congress needs to be able to wield its muscle. It should not be relying on executive branch bureaucracies as unbiased experts evaluating their own performance. It should have a better staffed research arm which can oversee all aspects of the massive American bureaucracy. Congressmen also need to have more and more policy-focused positions on their own staff, along with fewer committee assignments. National Affairs has an excellent in depth discussion of the thinking behind this brief overview. Legislators are currently underpaid amateurs who spend half their time outside of Washington focused on other things besides governance. This does not allow for knowledgeable congressional oversight of the federal government.

Cato also has some excellent ideas for strengthening Congress such as having a standing committee to review executive overreaches from statutory law, and forcing votes on major rules as implemented by regulators or bureaucrats. Other ideas include expanding the congressional calendar, making a new Congressional Regulatory Service to oversee the regulations made by independent and executive agencies, and requiring all civil asset forfeitures to be deposited into the Treasury to be spent by Congress, not the executive.

Unfortunately, even despite a recent impeachment trial this is simply not a major political issue in this year’s campaign, and no candidate is running with strengthening Congress as a priority. In fact, there are essentially no meta-policy ideas being floated. Yet ideas are not hard to come by!

Liberalizing Immigration

The U.S. immigration system is terrible (see section 8 here). It is esoteric, slow, and requires a complete overhaul. It should have a focus on a merit-based system rather than nation-of-origin and family ties as it does now. It should be simpler for high-skilled workers to be hired by American companies and it should definitely be easier for young workers, educated at excellent American colleges, to be hired by American companies and remain in the United States where they can pay tax dollars for decades.

Why is this so high up on the list?

This is a matter of national security. China is a growing power, but crucially, it cannot expand its influence or economy through immigration. The Chinese state has largely decided that ethnicity matters, and China is not seeking to create a multicultural amalgamation to improve the world, but rather a nationalist state. The U.S. isn’t restricted in this way; anyone can be an American. Immigrants are also more likely to start businesses and take risks. That means the most creative and ambitious people in the world can come to the United States and contribute to our culture, knowledge, technology, and wealth. Moreover, these remarkable people already want to come here. Increased dynamism and economic growth also makes the rest of our geopolitical challenges easier; it means the national debt is less of a burden, and national defense spending can be higher in absolute terms while costing less of a percentage of GDP.

This is also perhaps the best and simplest way to improve the world quickly. It’s extremely difficult to improve nations with poor institutions, yet people who struggle in developing nations can be immediately more productive if they are transplanted to the U.S. And of course many are quite willing to do so, uprooting their entire lives for a chance at the American Dream. We can pursue limitations on their access to public money, or a simple tax upon immigrating, but nonetheless we should be voting to improve the world in the most altruistic and nationalistic way possible: expanding legal immigration in order to make more Americans!

Federal Incentives to Build More Housing in U.S. Cities

This is a specific policy taken from the Niskanen Center’s Will Wilkinson. Cited on this blog before, he suggests giving federal money to urban areas that add large amounts of new housing stock. Why? Because American cities are absurdly expensive to live in, yet new housing is extremely difficult to develop due to overregulation and zoning laws.

The impact of our poor housing policy is enormous. Economists suggest housing constraints have lowered U.S. GDP by as much as a third over the last 50 years. Think about that. We could be missing a third of GDP because millions of people who wanted to move somewhere for a better job couldn’t find a place to live. It’s clear that the most productive areas in the U.S., especially cities like New York and San Francisco, are prohibitively expensive, keeping out potential new productive workers.

Wilkinson’s suggestion isn’t the only possible policy solution; another is to change zoning to be hyper local, composed by residents of a single street or city block. This would allow experimentation and innovation, instead of immovable local land interests which keep out future non-residents who can’t vote in today’s elections.

While the viable solutions are still up for the debate, the impact is clear: the lack of housing development in U.S. cities due to overregulation may be the single greatest barrier to economic growth, thus earning its inclusion on this short list of policies.

Decriminalization of All Drugs

Ever since Pete Buttigieg announced his support for this policy, I’ve had it circled for inclusion on this list. The War on Drugs has been a colossal failure, has not reduced drug use, and has radically increased prison populations. There have been extraordinary costs to the taxpayer in both civil liberties and assets. Massive application of state force has helped to give a monopoly in funding to the most bloodthirsty and gruesome organized criminal elements in the world, including terrorists. There have even been spillover effects as governments crack down on prescription pain killers, leaving patients in agony.

This policy is wrong morally, practically, and economically. It is not the place of the state to determine what substances informed adults can consume or inject. It is also abundantly clear the state has zero capability to halt the trade or consumption of drugs. Rather, enforcement of drug laws have bolstered a black market where information is asymmetric and scarce, endangering all involved. The only thing the state has succeeded in doing is making organized crime more financially viable. The resulting conflict in Mexico has killed over 150,000 people, making it one of the largest conflicts of the 21st century behind only the Iraq War, Syrian Civil War, and Darfur. It is this monstrous loss of human life as a result of changeable government policy that places this item so high on this list.

And of course it goes without saying that this massive assistance to organized crime is occurring at great financial cost. Estimates for enforcement, prosecution, incarceration, and military interventions are as high as $50 billion a year. State prohibition of private mutually consensual transactions also requires erosion of our rights in ways that frustrate measures of concrete financial cost. The ACLU notes extensive surveillance has been justified under the guise of drug enforcement while increasingly militarized police forces have abused their power to break into homes unannounced or preemptively shoot victims all in the name of stopping transactions among consenting adults. It’s time to end this failed policy.

Catastrophic Risk

It’s clear today that the federal government does not respond well to large disasters. Perhaps too much relies upon the whims of the executive who happens to be in power, but it seems likely that we could institutionalize better responses to catastrophic events. Yes, this includes pandemics, but also major earthquakes, solar flares, artificial intelligence, and even plans for averting nuclear war (for a more detailed analysis, read Toby Ord’s recent book, The Precipice).

This is a highly neglected problem and thus one of the highest impact policies we could undertake (climate change could go here, but it has not been quite as neglected a topic as other risks, so I’ve detailed it later). At the beginning of 2020, I would not have included this in the list of top policies, not because it was low impact, but simply due to the fact that it was not discussed as a major political issue. The failings of the federal government to respond to a deadly virus have pushed catastrophic risks into the mainstream. While the likelihood of any given catastrophe is low, it is the enormous impact of the tail-risk that should concern us; preparing now will mean the difference between devastation and mere hardship.

We should look to create public commissions to investigate our preparedness for various catastrophic events, identify what can be done now for relatively small budgets with larger payoffs when a disaster comes, and then pass legislation that enshrines this knowledge institutionally in ways that do not rely on the whims and competence of whomever happens to be president. It is vital that any commissions include our preparedness for other challenges besides pandemics; preparedness for unexpected events is not selected through democratic pressures, and perhaps this has resulted in our current difficult situation with COVID-19. It would be wise to use this opportunity to prepare not just for the next viral outbreak, but for other unlikely events as well.

We’re All State Capacity Libertarians Now

Tyler Cowen kicked off this year with a heavily discussed blog post defining what he calls “State Capacity Libertarianism“.

I didn’t get it.

Cowen described a moderate libertarianism while adding the nebulous concept of “state capacity”, in particular noting that a capable or powerful state was different from a tyrannical state. I read the words, but I assumed he was describing a “left libertarianism“, where a typical position might be to push for the government to collect efficient taxes, and then distribute those to everyone via a basic income, and avoid otherwise messing in the economy. I’m open to engaging with something like that, but I didn’t grok how Cowen’s take was different or what this view offered.

And then there was the worst pandemic we’ve seen in the 21st century. Huge swaths of the American economy have been shut down, and this disease is still likely to kill the equivalent of an entire year’s worth of influenza fatalities in a single month. Pandemics are an obvious market failure scenario, with difficult to control externalities, and thus we have state institutions to deal with this and pick up the slack. They failed.

Policy Failures

I looked up my first tweet about COVID-19 (back then it was just novel coronavirus or nCoV). It was on January 30 in a reply to Robert Wiblin. My first standalone tweet was a few days later:

Interesting that @metaculus median predictions for total cases of 2019-nCoV by year end doubled over the last few days with no real new information. https://t.co/DBmjuXb0eJ
— JSM 🏗️ (@postlibertarian) February 3, 2020

Now, I wasn’t warning people that this would be bad or telling people to start prepping. But it was certainly something occupying my mind, as I tweeted about it a dozen times in February. I did start mildly stockpiling food and household items starting in mid-February. Ultimately, I consider my actions to be a failure. I didn’t short the market (although I didn’t buy any index funds either), I didn’t warn enough of my close friends and family to start gathering supplies, and I didn’t advocate loudly for changes in government policy. I was partially concerned about looking alarmist, which in retrospect was a really silly thing to be concerned about.

Nonetheless, this blog is a hobby. I have a day job which isn’t concerned about government policy. My question is about the people whose day job is pandemic preparedness. If an anonymous blogger with a few hundred twitter followers can be concerned about a possible pandemic, then where were the people who are paid specifically to deal with this eventuality?

Why didn’t the CDC and FDA start a program to quickly approve new COVID testing in mid-February instead of mid-March? In an exponential growth situation, that is a long time. Why didn’t they start pushing hospitals to create new isolation wards in February? Why didn’t the CDC start putting together lists of events it strongly urged local governments to cancel when the first case appeared at local hospitals? Why did the NBA have to unilaterally suspend its season only after a player was diagnosed in March? Why was there confusion between who was in charge and what steps should be taken?

Beyond lack of distancing and lockdowns, there were several other failures. Firstly, the CDC created their own test which differed from previously used ones in the world. It was shipped to public labs around the country and…didn’t work. The FDA compounded the problem, disallowing any tests except the one the CDC had created. The University of Washington virology lab was able to create their own test and applied to the FDA for approval. The FDA said it couldn’t approve the test until the lab had demonstrated it wouldn’t return false positives for other dangerous coronaviruses. Perhaps this would be a good idea in more normal circumstances, but it was an asinine requirement if you were trying to head off a pandemic where every day saw exponential growth in a virus spreading across the country. The lab started using the test through a research loophole, but the story gets crazier:

Still, Greninger complied. He called the CDC to inquire about getting some genetic material from a sample of SARS. The CDC, Greninger says, politely turned him down: the genetic material of the extremely contagious and deadly SARS virus was highly restricted.
“That’s when I thought, ‘Huh, maybe the FDA and the CDC haven’t talked about this at all,’” […] “I realized, Oh, wow, this is going to take a while, it’s going to take several weeks.”
By this point, there were already over 50 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States and still, nobody but the CDC was permitted to conduct testing.

It was on February 28th, a full 8 days after the UW virology lab had applied for their test to the FDA, that the agency finally allowed other tests besides the CDC’s. Of course, most other labs hadn’t started making a test yet. What a disaster.

What’s interesting to me about the testing fiasco was its independence from President Trump. I think Trump is a bad leader, incompetent, unintelligent, a bad judge of character, and has terrible policies, but ultimately the point of a capable bureaucracy would be to have experts on hand with the proper plans in place to implement them regardless of political leaders. We shouldn’t have to recreate all the accumulated knowledge of the government every time there is a new president. Here, Congress had created agencies to oversee health and pandemic responses, the scenario arose…and then those agencies actively made things worse.

Of course, we can’t allow President Trump off the hook. He decided to dismantle the NSC pandemic response team which Susan Rice had set up, combining it into a single directorate with arms control, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health. The president is entitled to manage the National Security Council bureaucracy as he wants, as it’s part of the EOP. It was claimed that there was too much bloat leftover from Obama’s NSC, and so this should have streamlined communication, which may have sounded reasonable. Nonetheless, whatever changes Trump implemented were a colossal failure. Managing the CDC, FDA, FEMA, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to coordinate in a pandemic is crucial, and it did not occur until weeks after it should have. We should ask if the NSC, which varies from president to president, should even have this coordination power or if Congress should implement a more permanent response hierarchy.

Moreover, the president himself downplayed concerns about the virus the entire month of February, and even promised that 15 cases would soon be down to “close to zero”. This is an idiotic statement but is not unexpected. Trump has long ignored expert advice, lied to the public, and spoken erratically about how his administration will execute at his direction. The difference is that while the first 3 years of his presidency had few crises that weren’t self created, a pandemic actually requires decision making and policy implementation. Trump claimed that he would surround himself with good managers, and yet his White House has been plagued with scandals, including one that resulted in his impeachment. Ultimately, Trump is responsible for the leaders of the agencies that failed so spectacularly to manage this crisis. When asked about the testing fiasco, Trump said “I don’t take responsibility at all”.

Finally, the Obama administration had even created a “pandemic playbook”, a 69 page document you can review at this link which details decision making rubrics, key agencies that need to be consulted, and which questions need to be asked. It’s apparently unclear if senior leaders at government agencies even knew the playbook existed.

“State Capacity”

The typical consequentialist libertarian critique runs something like “the government doing things is bad because the state has poor incentives”. However, with this pandemic, we have instances where the state did too much, like where the FDA got in the way of scaling life-saving testing, but also where the state did too little, like coordinating responses of expert state agencies, or providing guidelines to local governments. A consequentialist libertarian critique would have a hard time dealing with these two failure types, and as somewhat of a consequentialist libertarian, I didn’t understand Cowen’s “state capacity libertarianism” until I was faced with these current government failures.

In a pandemic, every individual and company wants to continue working and consuming as much as possible, but each action also endangers non-parties to the transaction (e.g. other grocery shoppers or attendees at a basketball game). Here was a role for government to play, and yet it completely failed in that role. While a more typical libertarianism might treat the state as a necessary evil from which helpful action is capricious and rare, state capacity libertarianism suggests there is an expected duty for the state to play where there are negative externalities like the spread of a pandemic. The government’s failure here should thus be taken more seriously under state capacity libertarianism.

This also opens up a discussion about “state management” that previously I have often avoided. For example, it’s quite onerous to file taxes in the United States. Some libertarians argue that this is actually a good thing, and in fact making these state interactions difficult helps to convey to citizens how useless the state is, and they will thus be supportive in making the state smaller. Other libertarians might argue that added difficulty in the form of coerced taxation is adding additional rights violations on top of an already immoral action. A state capacity libertarian approach wouldn’t have this confusion; in this view, taxes ought to be collected in the most economically efficient way possible (land value tax or Pigouvian externality taxes would be a good start), and that method should be carried out competently and easily by the state. The IRS would just calculate your Pigouvian externality tax and send you a bill without requiring each citizen to compile their own information, spend hundreds on tax advice and then be punished when the amount is incorrect.

Relatedly, the management ability of electoral candidates sometimes comes up, and I think I may have even argued in the past that if congress or the president are less capable, then they would pass fewer laws. If most laws are net negative, then perhaps this incompetence would be good. However, elected officials do not just pass laws, they impact how government services are carried out. When a high risk, externality-laden scenario arises, like a pandemic, the management aspect of governance rises in importance.

Many presidents, especially Trump, have campaigned on the idea that they are good managers. Until now, I mostly shrugged at these claims, since governing is most often about policy and posturing than actual management. Yet the rare scenarios where management is required have outsized impacts; having fire insurance doesn’t matter until you actually have a fire, but then it matters a great deal. If we are concerned about catastrophic risk, then government management is a vital skill to be evaluated. State capacity libertarianism strongly favors evaluating this skill.

Libertarian Critiques Remain

Finally, we should quickly cover that a strong libertarian critique of government intervention into markets remains. Private property based markets with competition have much better incentives for rapid development and innovation. The FDA’s intervention to thwart testing probably killed thousands, especially compared to an alternate world where additional testing kits were explicitly allowed beginning in mid-February. Libertarians have been criticizing FDA policy on slow drug approval for decades though, and COVID patients will not be the FDA’s only victims this year.

And that’s not the only place where the state is dangerous: the War on Drugs, for example, has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands as prohibition empowers organized crime, makes drugs more dangerous, incarcerates people for non-violent crimes, creates more violent interactions between citizens and police forces, and on and on. U.S. government policy has also resulted in long-lasting deadly wars in the Middle East with little to no concrete benefits for the U.S. globally, and I’m sure your local libertarian could continue on with a very long list.

This pandemic places into stark realization that government both needs to get out of the way in some areas to save lives, and also competently carry out the tasks only it can do. A Cowenian marriage of state capacity and libertarianism is the way forward.

Observations on Impeachment

Impeachment is a highly political process. I want to walk through the impeachment process and trial and try to articulate my own thinking.

The Transcript

Let’s start with the phone call on July 26th. Trump released a transcript of himself asking the head of state of another country to investigate a conspiracy theory that Ukraine has a copy of a server of Hilary Clinton’s emails. The intelligence community believes this is Russian propaganda and National Security Council official Fiona Hill testified to this under oath. Trump also brought up a political rival during an official call with the head of state of another country, and asked President Zelensky to investigate them.

There’s a lot to discuss here. Apart from the intelligence community’s views of the Ukrainian server conspiracy theory, I think it reflects poorly on Trump’s…mental state? priorities? that he is still trying to investigate theories around Hillary Clinton’s emails four years after his own election, which he won! It doesn’t seem like he is prioritizing implementation of American policy, but rather stuck in the irrelevant past.

Also of note, Trump brings up Viktor Shokin, who, as far as I can tell was widely believed to be corrupt, yet Trump seems to think his dismissal was unfair. There’s also the discussion of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son. Hunter seems to be a screw up and a bad human being. Yet, as Senator Romney pointed out, there was no evidence that the Bidens’ actions were criminal although certainly morally questionable. In particular, Joe Biden had a conflict of interest, but I don’t think anyone can argue Viktor Shokin should have remained in office…except Trump.

Moreover, it doesn’t seem to be a matter of national security or indeed foreign policy that Joe Biden be investigated by the Ukrainian government even if he were directly implicated in a crime. Instead, I would expect the FBI would just investigate him for wrongdoing. That seems much more effective if you wanted to get to the bottom of it. Moreover, looking at the testimony presented by Trump’s defense, it doesn’t seem like a crime was committed.

Yes, when making a public announcement about Ukrainian prosecutors, the Vice President should acknowledge all conflicts of interest. He didn’t, and that seems bad. While it isn’t a violation of a particular law (the respective law would have to be pretty specific), it reflects pretty poorly. In fact, there are many parallels to Trump’s actions. I’d go so far as to say that it’s inconsistent for one to believe that Joe Biden’s actions are wrong while saying Trump’s are not. They are almost identical.

Both are accused of undertaking policy decisions that they claim are in the national interest while appearing to have personal conflicts. The differences are that (1) Trump is currently in office, while Biden is not, and (2) the House of Representatives seems like the correct place to investigate whether Trump had a conflict of interest, while the Ukrainian government absolutely should not be in charge of investigating Biden. And it definitely shouldn’t be incentivized with U.S. taxpayer funded military aid; it should be done by a law enforcement agency. Finally, I would be remiss not to mention that Trump has an even closer parallel with the Hunter Biden situation: his own children, in particular his son-in-law who was given a prominent position in the west wing. If Hunter Biden’s actions in Ukraine are worth using the office of presidency in such a way, what are we to make of Trump’s own nepotism?

Returning to the call, the Trump defense team pointed out that no quid pro quo was mentioned in this phone call. This is true, and also seems irrelevant. The use of the office of the president to encourage foreign governments to investigate political rivals and conspiracy theories is most certainly an abuse of office, regardless of whether a quid pro quo occurred. Whether this is grounds for removal from office we can address later.

Witnesses and Evidence

More circumstantial evidence for this being a political abuse of office include testimony from several witnesses. Most interesting is from Gordon Sondland who stated that a quid pro quo did exist offering the President of Ukraine a White House visit in exchange for an announcement of investigations into the Bidens. He also stated that John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Mike Pence were all aware.

Although not a witness, Mick Mulvaney gave a press conference confirming that military aid authorized by Congress was held up in order to get Ukraine to investigate the DNC server.

Also of note is that the White House released the aid to Ukraine on September 11, only days after Congress announces an inquiry into Rudy Giuliani’s involvement in Ukraine and possible interference with US policy. No one has made any attempt to explain what particular evidence of the Ukrainian government fighting corruption came to light on that day which made the White House approve the aid.

Finally, the House asked (not subpoenaed) John Bolton to testify which could have turned the circumstantial evidence into specific testimony against Trump, at least according to the testimony of Gordon Sondland. The Trump administration blocked those witnesses from testifying, citing executive privilege. The Constitution gives the House the sole power of impeachment, not the executive the power to overrule their investigation. The House could definitely have taken this to the courts with an official subpoena, but they decided not to, I suspect because they felt that impeachment was somewhat politically toxic given the President’s support in the Senate. That’s a political calculation. I think the political case against Trump would have been stronger if both the House and the courts sided against the President. They decided not to the and I think the case against Trump for obstruction was weaker because of this procedural choice. Nonetheless, I can’t see any legal argument that would side with the President; if so, the House’s impeachment power is useless. Therefore, the obstruction of Congress charge certainly seems appropriate.

However, I need to take the Democrats down a peg; the stated reason for not taking the subpoena to court was that Trump presented an immediate threat to our democracy because of his election interference attempts. Democratic impeachment managers argued Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and Trump had encouraged this. I find this completely unconvincing. Russia favored a Trump victory over Hilary Clinton, and I’m sure they spent a bunch of money trying to achieve this, but I have never bought into the narrative that Russia can control the outcome of U.S. elections through Facebook ads. It’s ludicrous. Democracy is powerful because it utilizes disparate information from voters; if you think voters have to be shielded from information, even misinformation, then you don’t believe democracy is a force for good in the world. You instead prefer some sort of government where gatekeepers determine what information voters receive and then voters are allowed to vote with that limited information.

Trump’s attempts to use the Ukrainian government to help him win reelection seem to be an abuse of office. But I don’t think he is a threat to a fair election. The biggest threat to a fair election is our entire electoral system.

Senate Trial

Trump maintained that the impeachment inquiry was a “witch hunt” and a “hoax”. Under this view, it’s not surprising that he opposed John Bolton testifying at his Senate trial. Of course, the President’s claims do not address the significant (although circumstantial) evidence gathered against him. Moreover, Bolton supposedly implicates Trump in his new book. The only real explanations for the President’s behavior is either that there was a vast conspiracy, including many witnesses, his own handpicked ambassador to the EU and massive donor Gordon Sondlond, his own handpicked National Security Adviser John Bolton, his own handpicked Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and presumably his own Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (although he wasn’t asked to testify). Or, Trump is guilty of doing some pretty shady stuff that he doesn’t want people to testify to. The President maintained that it is the first scenario. This seems to be quite unlikely given the circumstantial evidence.

But there’s an easy way to check, just have the Senate ask Bolton to testify. Senate Republicans declined to do this. I have a hard time explaining this in a good faith way. Some maintained that the evidence presented by the prosecution was inadequate. Unless Gordon Sondlond and Mick Mulvaney just spontaneously made up the same story despite being integral parts of the Trump’s administration, this seems hard to believe. John Bolton is a well-respected lifelong Republican, serving in the Bush and Trump White Houses. He is a strong opponent of the Obama backed nuclear deal with Iran, a defining Republican foreign policy position in the last election. Any attempt to say Bolton is a left-wing sympathizer is bizarre, and yet virtually no Republicans voted to hear his testimony.

I believe what is actually happening is that there is significant political pressure from Republican voters to end the impeachment process. Even if a Republican Senator believed Trump to be guilty, to stay in office, they must survive a primary challenge from a pro-Trump challenger, which would surely win in a Republican primary against someone who voted against Trump in impeachment. One could easily argue that the Senators are doing the democratic thing by following their voters’ interests, but it would not mean that Trump was innocent of these charges. It would simply shift blame from the Senators to our current democratic system, which is apparently unable to deal with a president who abuses the powers of his office.

Other senators, like Lamar Alexander of Tennessee stated that the prosecution made a compelling case of misbehavior, but that it doesn’t rise to the level of impeachment. We will get to this defense in a minute.

Non Defense Arguments

It’s worth taking a minute to discuss some points I have heard often, but are not actual defenses of President Trump. The first is the critique of hypocrisy, which is pretty common in these partisan times. Hypocrisy is an excellent way to impugn the motives of your political opponents, but it doesn’t address the object-level arguments. The way I’ve heard this phrased is that presidents have been expanding executive authority for decades, and now Democrats are only calling out Trump’s abuses of power because they don’t like his tribal affiliation, which is more than the usual Right-Left divide. In other words, Trump is a jerk to his political enemies and that’s the reason the House impeached him. Reason Editor Nick Gillespie has espoused something like this view, and tied it in with a libertarian point which is that Democrats don’t actually care about executive authority, they just don’t like Trump. This is a double standard other presidents have not been held to.

Closely tied with this critique is that House Democrats have wanted to impeach Trump from the beginning and were just waiting for a chance they could exploit. Note, neither of these related points address whether Trump actually abused his office. I think it’s absolutely true that Democrats have wanted to impeach Trump, but that doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not he did bad enough acts that he should be removed from office. This argument would be equivalent to Al Copone’s lawyers arguing that the prosecution had been wanting to catch him for a long time and so it’s irrelevant that he broke the law. This is not an argument. The only thing that matters is what Trump did, and the evidence isn’t good.

Returning to the abuse of executive power, I fail to see how continued abuse and concentration of executive authority over time means we should continue allowing abuse of authority. This view basically says that if one government official gets away with abuse, then we have no standing to ever challenge their successors abuses again. This makes no sense to me.

I’ve written pretty extensively about the problem with increased executive authority that’s accrued to the president. A thousand wrongs don’t make the next wrong a right. Instead, trying to restore some of the rule of law one piece at a time sounds like a good idea. And we should be using this opportunity to recruit more who didn’t use to care about executive authority into the tent.

Allowing unchecked executive power to own the libs is a dumb strategy.

Finally, there’s a lot of talk about the whistleblower who wrote a letter that helped to start this investigation. According to Republicans, this whistleblower was a partisan who didn’t like Trump. I have to admit, I have no idea how this argument is supposed to work or how it could possibly be relevant, but it seems so common, I have to include it. However the House finds out about presidential abuse, they have the sole authority of impeachment, meaning they can call witnesses and investigate wrongdoing. They’ve done so, and the witnesses have implicated Trump in abusing his office. The whistleblower’s testimony isn’t necessary. Why Rand Paul keeps talking about the whistleblower seems to just be a distraction from the evidence of Trumps wrongdoing.

Defenses

To summarize, apparently Trump sent his personal lawyer to Ukraine with intention to dig up dirt on his political opponent and even met with Ukrainian officials to achieve this end. Trump then used his office and capacity as president to directly bring up his political goals with the Ukrainian president on an official call. Witnesses and Mick Mulvaney say that military aid and a White House visit were conditioned on investigations into a discredited conspiracy theory about the DNC servers (which are not a matter of national security) and also an investigation of his political rival’s son from several years ago (also doesn’t seem to be a matter of massive national security importance).

This seems pretty bad.

I have a low tolerance of abuse of power. I think Obama was horrendous in his abuse of the office of the presidency including when the IRS targeted conservative groups, and when the administration targeted journalists with the Espionage Act. I think these could pretty easily be classified as impeachable. In that light, I don’t see how the evidence against Trump is much different.

We’ve already covered how the disinterest in the Senate on hearing from John Bolton is pretty suspect. But let’s talk about the actual defenses given by the president’s legal team. There are quite a few.

Some seem pretty specific and weak; Ukrainian President Zelensky said he was not pressured to investigate the Bidens or Crowdstrike. Of course, if your entire presidency is based on opposing Russia and you need U.S. help to maintain that stance, and the Senate is entirely controlled by Republicans, why would you risk antagonizing Trump who viciously attacks his own officials if they ever cross him (see Jeff Sessions, Gordon Sondlond was fired). If Trump was removed, it’s certain that Zelensky could quickly make friends with any future Democratic president regardless of his current positions, and so it makes sense that he would offer to support Trump publicly. This public position seems to count for little compared to actual testimony of American witnesses under oath.

More interesting I think was the argument that there could be no impeachment without a statutory crime. This could be promising, but as Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy points out, holding up Congressionally approved funds is a violation of federal law. Moreover, if you had to pass a law specifying every possible way that the president should be constrained then we would have no limits on the presidency.

Returning now to Senator Lamar Alexander, who argued against subpoenaing John Bolton by saying the President acted inappropriately but his actions didn’t rise to the level of impeachment. Supposing what the President did was not impeachable, why would this preclude getting more information from a witness? Senator Alexander didn’t know the extent of Trump’s actions prior to the House investigation and the testimony of witnesses. He says Trump’s actions were inappropriate, then it would seem judicious to get additional information to make sure no further wrongdoing had occurred. The Senator’s position is completely incoherent. Moreover, his beliefs about the world don’t explain what we see happening: Gordon Sondland was fired from his position as ambassador to the EU. If Alexander is correct and Trump did some things wrong but nothing impeachable, why was Sondland fired?

Trump maintains everything was a vast conspiracy. I’ve noted before, this is bizarre and would mean that everyone Trump happens to hand-select for prominent positions in his administration turned on him with the exact same beliefs about how his administration operates, supported by tons of circumstantial evidence, including Trump’s own phone calls. However, if you wanted to maintain such a narrative, you’d fire everyone who was in on this conspiracy, including Gordon Sondland, who testified to the existence of a quid pro. Of course, you might also act this way if you were actually guilty of abusing your office. Perhaps only John Bolton could have told us the difference. One thing that does not explain this evidence is Senator Alexander’s position: “Trump did things but they weren’t that bad”. If so, why purge the administration? If the actions revealed by Sondland weren’t a big deal (and honestly I kind of thought Sondland thought this) then what did he do wrong from Trump’s perspective? I don’t think Senator Alexander can explain this, and thus I think his position makes little internal sense.

Moreover, I think he’s wrong on the object level as well. The actions undertaken by Trump are serious. He held up Congressionally authorized aid for personal political reasons. Separation of powers is a vital part of our limited government. If the executive can simply kidnap funds authorized by Congress, then we have no limits on government power. We are no longer a limited Republic where the rights of individuals and the minority are defended against an overzealous majority. Instead we are simply electing a despot every four years who will terrorize his political enemies. If what Trump did was an acceptable use of the office of the president, can the president just deny funding for things until people do his political bidding? Could Obama have denied highway funding to red states until they agreed to drop lawsuits against Obamacare? Could he have held up funds until Congress authorized his strikes in Libya? If Trump could do the same for Ukrainian aid, I’m not sure what the difference is, or how any of this could be called limited government or separation of powers.

Finally, there is the argument that this matter should be left to the voters. It is, by definition, a very democratic argument. Clearly, of course, such an argument could not always make intuitive sense; if a president decided that he had the power to cancel elections and declare himself permanent dictator, then the voters can no longer give any input. This is the tact the Democratic impeachment managers took. I’ve already stated my skepticism about it.

However, we do not have to go there; the Constitution doesn’t indicate that impeachment can only be used if the president endangers elections. Instead it states that he can be impeached for treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors. It is clear that Congress can remove a president who misbehaves, not just about election endangerment. And this makes sense; the separation of powers in our Constitution means that both the president and Congress can claim separate democratic mandates, even conflicting ones. The president isn’t elected dictator for four years, but given limited powers and told to work in conjunction with Congress to exercise authority. If the president misuses that power, it’s clear Congress has the authority to remove him, even in an election year. To believe otherwise is to believe that there are no limits on presidential authority.

Conclusion

It seems clear to me that congressional Republicans are backing Trump due to political expediency rather than the facts as they appear. Yes, it’s true, we don’t have much in the way of direct testimony of what Trump knew and when. But we have ample circumstantial evidence to warrant taking a closer look. Republicans failed to do so, declining to hear from literal Republican heroes like John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney. I understand the reality of their politics but I don’t understand why Republican voters aren’t concerned about the massive power abuses going on in the White House and what that could mean when the other party gets into power. I’ve searched hard for another explanation for the current state of affairs, even looking at Trump’s own defense team, and I found them entirely unconvincing.

Grading 2019 Predictions

I make predictions every year to put empirical tests on my model of the world. I tend to do a lot of predictions, in order to get a larger dataset, and at the end of the year, I grade them. These were made last year in March. I’ve placed levels of confidence for each prediction with the odds I would bet on those outcomes in the vein of Bryan Caplan. I’ve created a chart at the end to show my calibration versus perfect calibration.

Trump Approval Rating end of year <50% (Gallup): 95% ✔️
~~Trump Approval Rating end of year <45% (Gallup): 90%~~ (was 45% exactly)
~~Trump Approval Rating end of year < 40% (Gallup): 70%~~
US will not get involved in any new major war with death toll of > 100 US soldiers: 60% ✔️
No single terrorist attack in the USA will kill > 100 people: 95% ✔️
The UK will not leave the EU this year: 80% ✔️
North Korea will still be controlled by the Kim dynasty: 95% ✔️
North Korea will not conduct a nuclear test this year: 60% ✔️
~~North Korea will not conduct a missile test this year: 60%~~ They conducted 10, with several launching many missiles
North Korea will not agree to give up nuclear weapons entirely, contingent on US troops staying in the Korean peninsula: 99% ✔️
North Korea will not agree to give up nuclear weapons as a result of any negotiations: 90% ✔️
Yemeni civil war will still be happening: 70% ✔️
S&P 500 2019 >10% growth (from 2506 on Jan 1): 60% ✔️
~~S&P 500 will be between 2400 and 3100: 80% (80% confidence interval)~~ was 3231
Unemployment rate December 2019 < 6%: 80% ✔️
Unemployment rate December 2019 < 5%: 70% ✔️
WTI Crude Oil price up by 10% (from $45.41): 70% ✔️
Price of Bitcoin in dollars up over the year (Coinbase – 3823 Jan 1): 70% ✔️ was $7163
Price of Bitcoin < $8,000 (does not double): 60% ✔️
Price of Bitcoin > $1900 (does not lose half value): 70% ✔️
Price of Bitcoin < $12,000 (does not triple): 70% ✔️
Drivechain opcodes not soft-forked into Bitcoin: 80% ✔️
No drivechains soft-forked into existence: 99% ✔️
US government does not make Bitcoin ownership or exchange illegal: 95% ✔️
Self-driving cars will not be available this year for general purchase: 95% ✔️
Self-driving cars will not be available this year to purchase / legally operate for < $100k: 99% ✔️
I will not be able to buy trips on self-driving cars from Uber/Lyft/Waymo in a location I am living: 95% ✔️
I will not be able to order groceries on self-driving cars in a location I am living: 90% ✔️
I will not be able to buy a trip on a self-driving car from Uber/Lyft/Waymo without a backup employee in the car anywhere in the US: 80% ✔️ This is tough. You can get self driving cars in Phoenix, but only if you’re part of the Waymo beta and so far they are free, so no “buying”.
The artificial general intelligence alignment problem will not be seen as the most important problem facing humanity: 99% ✔️
Humans will not be in lunar orbit in 2019: 99% ✔️
SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch again this year: 90% ✔️
~~SpaceX will bring humans to low earth orbit: 60%~~
SpaceX will test the “Starship” mock up this year: 70% ✔️ (pretty sure I just meant this giant water tower thing, not a real launch)
Mexican government does not pay for wall: 99% ✔️ (lol)
Border wall construction not complete by end of 2019: 99% ✔️ (some construction occurred, mostly replacing existing wall)
National Debt increases by >$1 trillion (from
$21,943,897,000,000): 90% ✔️ (was $23.201 trillion on Jan 1 2020)
There will not be a significant decrease in trade barriers between US and China from pre-2017 tariff levels: 90% ✔️
Democratic RCP front runner will not be Bernie Sanders: 80% ✔️ (front runner on Jan 1 was Biden)
Democratic RCP front runner will not be Kamala Harris: 80% ✔️
Democratic RCP front runner will not be Beto O’Rourke: 80% ✔️
Trump not removed from office or resign: 95% ✔️
~~Trump not impeached: 70%~~ I was not expecting this
~~No CRISPR edited babies will be born: 80%~~ (it turns out the researcher responsible for the two 2018 CRISPR edited babies had already treated a third unborn child in 2018 when the story broke. Apparently the third baby was born in 2019 if you carefully read Xinhua, so technically this prediction is wrong, although I meant no other researcher would do anything. Remember to properly word your predictions!)
No full year US government budget will be passed (only several months spending): 90% ✔️ (they basically only do continuing resolutions now)
Some tariffs raised: 90% ✔️ (like a bunch)
Trump administration does not file a lawsuit against any news organization for defamation: 90% ✔️

I got 4 of 6 predictions correct at 60% confidence
I got 7 of 9 predictions correct at 70% confidence
I got 7 of 9 predictions correct at 80% confidence
I got 8 of 9 predictions correct at 90% confidence
I got 7 of 7 predictions correct at 95% confidence
I got 6 of 6 predictions correct at 99% confidence

Overall, not bad at all, and we should note that from last year’s grading, my 60% confidence predictions have tended to be overconfident. I only had 6 of those predictions this year, so actually 66% is the closest I could have been to perfect calibration. 70% also ended up being a bit overconfident, but a single additional missed prediction here would have dropped me down to 66% as well. Had I moved one of my correct 70% predictions to 80%, I would have been perfectly calibrated.

Combining this data and data from last year gives:

I got 11 of 15 predictions correct (73%) at 60% confidence
I got 14 of 20 predictions correct (70%) at 70% confidence
I got 14 of 17 predictions correct (82%) at 80% confidence
I got 14 of 15 predictions correct (93%) at 90% confidence
I got 16 of 17 predictions correct (94%) at 95% confidence
I got 10 of 10 predictions correct (100%) at 99% confidence

In 2018, as I noted in the post last year, I should have made some of my 60% predictions at a higher confidence, but other than that, these predictions are remarkably well calibrated if I do say so myself.

I hope to post my 2020 predictions soon.

How can we use our resources to help others the most?

This is the fundamental question of the Effective Altruism movement, and it should be the fundamental question of all charitable giving. 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 $2500.

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 causes where I think the impact is the highest, but the tractability is perhaps the lowest. Top charities I’ve donated to here include the Machine Intelligence Research Institute for AI alignment research, as well as the Long Term Future Fund from EA Funds.

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 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. I also like the Center for Election Science as they work to improve the democratic processes in the US. 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. This is by far my most uncertain category, and thus usually I will not entirely fulfill my budget for policy charities. I plan on giving anything remaining to GiveWell.

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!

Podcast Recommendations October 2019

Last year I wrote up a post discussing my recommended podcasts, and I figured it was about time to update my list. Podcasts have grown significantly in the last 10 years to the point where I honestly haven’t listened to terrestrial radio stations for several years. Podcast distribution is decentralized, and the barrier to entry is low. We live in a world where if you have a niche interest, there’s going to be a podcast and several YouTube channels covering it.

But since podcast discussion is decentralized, my most common method of hearing about podcasts is through other people. In that light, I have created this list of recommendations. It is loosely grouped with podcasts I have listened to longer and/or enjoy more at the top, with more recent podcast discoveries or podcasts whose episodes I have found hit or miss towards the bottom.

I’d also like to take a second to recommend a method of podcast listening: have a low barrier to skipping an episode of a podcast that you otherwise enjoy. This was actually a recommendation by 80,0000 Hours podcast host Rob Wiblin. He encourages his listeners to skip podcast episodes if they find it uninteresting because he’d rather they continue to enjoy the pieces of content from the podcast that they do like, rather than feel like they have to slog through parts they don’t. Moreover, there is just so much good content out there, you should never waste your time with something you don’t find interesting. And now the (slightly sorted!) list:

Reason Podcast

First up, the Reason Podcast includes several different types of excellent content. My favorite is the Monday Editor’s Roundtable which usually includes Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman. It’s well-edited, sharp, witty, and always tackles the latest news of the week from a libertarian perspective. In the last few years I often find myself wondering if the political world has lost its mind, and on Mondays I’m able to get the message that yes, everyone has gone crazy, but you’re still not alone, there are these four libertarian weirdos who are right there with you. Moreover, Nick and Matt’s obscure 70s and 80s pop cultural references and cynicism play well off of Katherine and Peter’s more techno-libertarian science fiction vibe.

However, that’s not the only content here! There are many interviews from presidential candidates to authors and professors. Audio from the monthly SoHo Forum debates are also posted, and I always listen to at least the opening statements (audience Q&As are less interesting to me). Overall, I almost never skip an episode of the podcast and they produce a ton of great content!

80,000 Hours

80,0000 Hours is an effective altruist organization researching how people can do the most good with their careers. The effective altruist movement does great work, and I think anyone seriously interested in making a difference in the world should be aware of it and the approach with which effective altruists analyze the world. But more than that, this podcast is just more awesome than other interview shows. Rob Wiblin, the host, is excellent at interviewing. He presses the guests on issues but is also willing to accepting strange concepts about the world and follow them to their interesting conclusions.

The interviews are also long, sometimes resulting in 3 hour episodes. This is on purpose, as they can cover in depth why people have the beliefs they do, and what specialized knowledge they have accumulated working in niche roles. Sample episodes include Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum) on ways to revamp public goods, blockchains, and effective giving, Paul Christiano (AI alignment researcher at OpenAI) on messaging the future, increasing compute power and how CO2 interacts with the brain, and Philip Tetlock (author/inventor of Superforecasting) on why forecasting matters for everything.

This one is perhaps a bit more intense than some of the more chill “people hanging out” podcasts, but I listen to every episode.

EconTalk

EconTalk is centrally an economics podcast hosted by Russ Roberts. It’s funded by the Library of Economics and Liberty and Roberts leans libertarian, but he is a courteous and thoughtful interviewer. He knows his biases and acknowledges them during discussions. The podcast strays into many related fields, not just economics; Russ is interested in personal philosophy and introspection as well.

As of late, Russ has particular concerns about the economics field and how free market policies fall short of what we might hope for. In particular, he has discussed themes of societal disillusionment and isolation that simple “material” concerns that dominate economic metrics cannot capture. I wouldn’t say I always agree with Russ and certainly not with all of his guests, but I can say I listen to almost every episode because there are so many good insights discussed.

The Fifth Column

I recently heard the term “Dive Podcast”. This is an excellent description of The Fifth Column, a talk show hosted by Kmele Foster, Matt Welch, Michael Moynihan, and Anthony Fisher. All lean various degrees and shades of libertarian, and discuss the news and/or critique the ever continuous stream of takes in print media, television, online, Twitter, etc while in various states of inebriation. This is much less of a cerebral lecture and more of a “rhetorical assault” as Kmele calls it.

I find the show incredibly entertaining, often informative, and very funny. I listen to all episodes as soon as they are posted.

Hello Internet

Hello Internet is another talk show, hosted by YouTubers CGP Grey and Brady Haran. It isn’t really related to any topics we cover here on the blog, but it is nonetheless entertaining and charming. Unlike The Fifth Column, there is no alcohol involved in the making of this podcast, but it does have an amusing self-grown culture and language.

For example, there is an official flag of the podcast after a referendum of users was held, but one of the losing flags is occasionally taken up by rebellious listeners. There are also unofficial official birds of Hello Internet (the Reunion Swamphen with limited edition t-shirts). Topics covered include YouTube, technology, but also the various interests of Brady and Grey, such as mountain climbing or Apple products. There’s no simple way to convey this podcast, but I do recommend it, and I do listen to every episode.

Rationally Speaking

Rationally Speaking is an interview show hosted by Julia Galef, founder of the Center for Applied Rationality and who I’ve heard described as one of the major pillars of the rationality community. Like Russ Roberts of EconTalk, Galef is an excellent, fair, and thoughtful interviewer. However, the subjects of these interviews are much broader than EconTalk’s admittedly broad discussion of economics. There is a general focus on the philosophy of why we believe what we believe. I do tend to skip more episodes of Rationally Speaking than I do of previously mentioned interview podcasts, but I estimate I still listen to 90% of all episodes, and I would absolutely recommend this very accessible podcast to everyone.

The Economist Editor’s Picks

This one is pretty straightforward. In a world where we tend to get news continuously from the internet or our smartphones, this podcast is a short, ~20 minute weekly selection of important topics from a global perspective that you might not know much about, and that may have gotten swept away in the torrent of your daily information deluge. The Economist is certainly opinionated, but I think does a good job of promoting moderate, liberal ideas that would improve the world. This podcast is an excellent way to expose yourself to some of those simple important concepts in a global context.

Anatomy of Next

From Founder’s Fund, this is a bit of an outlier podcast on here. It’s much more of a series of scripted journalistic pieces or lectures rather than recorded unscripted discussions between people. However, it is quite ambitious in its ideas. The latest season, entitled “New World” which finished up in early 2019, is about how to build a human civilization on Mars. Anatomy of Next explores everything, most of which does not exist yet, but perhaps could. There is terraforming, genetic engineering, sci-fi launch concepts, etc.

I wouldn’t say this podcast is for everyone, but if you feel like you are missing out on human optimism, where people talk about settling Mars with technology that doesn’t exist and yet remain incredibly compelling, this is a podcast you should definitely check out. Also, thanks to Nick Gillespie and Reason for interviewing Mike Solana and letting me know about this podcast in the first place!

Building Tomorrow

Building Tomorrow is a podcast about technology and innovation, and how that is leading to and interacting with individual liberty. It’s hosted at Libertarianism.org which is a project of the Cato Institute. I only recently discovered this podcast and thus it is lower down on my list only because I haven’t had a chance to listen to as many episodes as I would like. Nonetheless, every episode I have listened to is really great! Of course, this program is the perfect niche for me to enjoy, but I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys this blog.

Conversations with Tyler

Tyler Cowen co-hosts one of the most popular econ blogs in the world, Marginal Revolution, and, of course, he is quite an accomplished economist and author. I have recently discovered his podcast, and it’s pretty wonderful. I admit, I don’t listen to every episode, as it turns out Cowen’s and my interests diverge somewhat, which is quite alright. On the episodes that I do find interesting, Cowen is an excellent, although unorthodox interviewer. I rarely go into an episode knowing much about the interviewee or even thinking that I’d really enjoy the topic, but I am always impressed.

There are some additional podcasts I listen to sporadically, but either don’t fit the context of this blog, or I haven’t listened to enough episodes to recommend them here. Nonetheless, it’s worth mentioning that I have listened to a handful of episodes from the Neoliberal Podcast, and I hypothesize that if I wrote this list again in 3 months, it would likely be here.

If you have any podcast recommendations, please tweet at me or leave a comment! I’m always interested in more podcasts.