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Something Like A Sketch of A Rationalist-Adjacent Political Program
The subculture associated with the LessWrong diaspora and forums in its sphere has a distinct political approach worth interrogating. At least since The Californian Ideology was published people have noticed "silicon valley types" tend to engage with governance in a way that puts them in a unique and honestly awkward position relative to the US status quo. A decade ago Scott said the cultural signifiers of this group were:
They might have been less reform-minded at the time, but today there is a loose set of internally coherent policies we can identify with the heirs of that scene. 'Grey Tribe' (I really wish there was a better catch-all term) tends to have three broadly identifiable commitments unified by a vision of politics as an attempt to achieve administrative efficiency, in a way they tend to imagine as post-political. Many of the policies under each category naturally overlap with one another. I have tried to keep the list to things I have seen or heard discussed in these circles. The first is a broad institutionalist critique ("Meta-Politics"), the second is an intolerance for the rent-seeking behavior commonly used as a dealmaking instrument ("Rent-Aversion") and the third includes both a select few object-level concerns - I'm particularly interested in any more of these you could identify - and an inclination to shift status quo functions off the state and on to trusted markets and experts ("Optimizability").
Meta-Politics
Rats tend to be, relative to other smart people, interested in comprehensive reform of, or imagining alternatives within, Constitutional Political Economy. Hacking at the root instead of the branches of inefficiency. Here is what I imagine they are likely to suggest on that front.
Electoral Reform: Widely popular given the perceived inefficiency of FPTP. Often comes as support for Instant-Runoff ("Ranked Choice") Voting, or the Single-Transferable Vote in the case of Proportional Representation advocates, who are ironically overrepresented. The more distinctly Rat position tends to be support for STAR over IRV/RCV, and something like Allocated Score over STV. Occasionally: Quadratic voting, Independently drawn districts, Unitary Primaries, Fusion voting.
Legislative Reform: Relatively more proportionally representative legislatures. Increased House Apportionment, e.g. the Cube Root Law. Occasionally more unique proposals like introducing secret ballots to congressional voting procedures. Paying legislators competitively with top talent, as well as doing the same for their (substantially increased) staff. Codify law on a GitHub clone, and fold the Federal Register/CFR in to the same site.
Pseudo-Futarchy: Utilizing prediction markets to generate more reliable information for agency regulators and legislative deliberation. Low hanging fruit.
Meritocracy: Re-legalize and center the use of g-loaded tests for cognitively demanding public and private employment.
State Capacity: Move towards a legible society through national identification systems, unified federal databases, and modernized technology infrastructure. Nationwide ERIC to replace Crosscheck. Hire, fire, and compensate administrative talent commensurate with their skill.
Private Governance: Of particular interest to Bay Area writers. Why try for voice when you can exit? Charter Cities Institute, Prospera, Seasteading, etc. Replace poorly aligned democratic incentives with the productive clarity of polities competing for workers and firms in a market of policy regimes. Long libertarian history of related visions - Puydt's Panarchy, Nozick's Meta-Utopia, Yarvin's Patchwork, Scott's Atomic Communitarianism all grasp at similar intuitions. Looks more like SEZs in a domestic political context.
Libertarian Paternalism: Well aligned with Grey Tribe instincts even if some specific claims fell to the replication Crisis. Use of choice architecture to encourage but not coerce prosocial action.
Adjacent: e-governance, vTaiwan, sortition assemblies
Rent-Aversion
Deliberative lawmaking between representatives of particular communities with their own interests will on some level always be about managing the distribution of gains and losses of some new condition or proposed change. Rationalist see this and, with a quasi-libertarian read of the situation, see a mess of rent-seeking carve-outs left in the wake of policymaking that is not meaningfully distinct from corruption. A lot of their policy approach concerns the abolition of (non-schumpeterian) artificial rents and the redistribution of natural rents away from private capture.
Occupational Licensing: Lift artificial caps on doctors and residency in the US. Institute licensing reciprocity with peer states like Canada. Broad abandonment of loosening of licensing regimes, especially ones simply serving as a tertiary education filter.
FDA Reform: Reciprocity with peer states for recognition of drugs. Generalize Operation Warp Speed for all applications. Prime target for comprehensive restructuring.
NEPA Abolition: Environmental protection suits have been co-opted and abused to extract rents by incumbent landowners. The more interesting question is how to structure law that can achieve some of the environmentalist goals of the original legislation.
Zoning Reform: Municipal control of land use may be the single most costly norm in US law. Ideally abolish all land use restrictions excepting designated zones for heavy industry, and simply rely on a (clear and independently drafted) building code. Pairs well with privatized governance as a single beneficiary of land policy internalizes all externalities.
Carbon Taxes: Production and consumption that releases carbon in to the atmosphere is a simple underpriced negative externality.
Land Value Taxation: Tax the full annualized market value of land, exempting all improvements and constructions on top of it. As supply is unaffected, this tax incurs no deadweight loss, improving economic efficiency when it substitutes other taxes, and arguably improving allocative efficiency of land.
Destination-based Cash Flow Taxation: Replace Corporate Income Taxation with a tax on firm profits after full expensing of new capital investment via the transfer of an equivalent tradeable tax credit, with border adjustment to simplify compliance and nullify tax haven incentives. Resulting tax falls solely on consumption owed to supernormal profit/capital rents. Lacks deadweight loss. Some capital incomes are earned, some are luck. This targets the latter.
Jones Act/1905 Dredging Act: Domestic shipping requires American ships, which acts as a distortionary subsidy to American industry. Similarly, American ports are under-dredged because a 1905 law required American ships to do the dredging, and ours are now internationally subpar at that task. These policies are something of synecdoche for relic rent-seeking behavior that we all grew up a little poorer for.
Subsidy Abolition: Oil, agriculture, sports - substantial subsidies flow arbitrarily to wielders of political attention. Subsidies have a place in industries of national security importance or industrial policy planning, like semiconductor manufacturing, but not stadiums.
Outlaw Non-competes: Non-compete agreements distort labor markets and should be banned at the federal level.
Open Access Journals: Academic journals only serve to poorly gate-keep scholarship. Make a public sci-hub alternative. Likewise, revive the original Google Books vision of full, readily accessible digitization.
IP Reform: Tax patents proportional to a self-assessed value under an option for public purchase (Harberger taxation), buy them to put them in the public domain at a price determined at public auction (Kremer Buyouts), or some other variation
School Choice: Introduce market competition and consumer preference into schools through education vouchers. Dovetails well with LVT and zoning reform as it decouples municipal property taxation from school quality.
Adjacent: Strategic litigation reform, Civil Asset Forfeiture, Real Estate/Car Dealership mandates
Optimizability
Arguably where the neoliberalism of rat politics shines through. This is a change in state outputs, as opposed to Meta-Politics' focus on inputs to functionality. The Grey Tribe prefers policy-informed approaches to achieve goals it broadly shares with liberals, as well as speculative approaches to achieve goals it often does not. Many suggestions are just particular instantiations of the guiding anti-regulatory principle of market liberalization.
Market Monetarism: Replace the inflation and unemployment mandate of central banks with NGDP Targeting (sometimes Gross Labor Income Targeting) with innovative instruments of monetary policy when at the ZLB. This has been popular on LW since the recession, and macro has slowly moved closer to that direction.
Permitting Reform: The legal ability to perform large or atypical tasks is significantly harder than it once was. The continual updating of Nuclear Plant regulatory requirements during the construction process made them de facto illegal. Likewise constrains advancements in rail, geothermal, hydrogen airships, autonomous cars, autonomous drones.
Grant Reform: Lead researchers by their own reckoning burn time and money writing individual federal grant applications. Move towards a system of cooperative, directed, institutional research funded by large block grants. Similarly, employ Romer's Self-Organizing Industry Boards for private innovation.
Direct Transfer Benefits: UBI, NIT, whatever you want to call it. Replace the myriad difficult to navigate system of state programs with an income floor ensured through direct cash transfers. Progressive income tax structures (or some substitute) recoup the transfer so it maximally targets those with no alternative income.
Organ Markets: Regulated, compensated sale of spare kidneys as we currently do for blood plasma.
Open Borders: Provided some minimal health/criminality screening, uncap immigration. American institutions and localized production act as a multiplier on labor productivity. Simply increasing available labor grows general production more than linearly with the number of added workers. Some culture transplant and golden goose concerns, but this is very popular.
Free IVF: Polygenic screening during IVF allows health, including likely cognitive performance, to be estimated in fertilized embryos before implantation. The multiplier on this intervention is likely well above costs even at this early stage, and should be free and subsidized.
Pragmatic Criminal Justice Reform: Anti-social violence is concentrated in young men with high risk tolerance, low intelligence, and high time preference. The intentionally slow, abstracted process of criminal prosecution fails to disincentivize this cohort. Consequences can be lower so long as they are swift and expectable.
Factory Farm Ban: Current law forbids the recording of industrial livestock processing. These laws should be lifted and their contents infoblasted to the public until reform is inevitable. Likewise, ban octopus farming and shrimp eyestalk ablation
Adjacent: Free GLP-1 agonists, Drug decriminalization, Geoengineering
Sometimes people say this scene's politics are identifiable in the Progress Studies publications, or in the Neoliberal orgs, or esoterically in Bostrom papers about singletons. I think, while conversant with all of those, it has its own MO. It is now mature and active enough that its originating, 'post-political' self-conception is in tension with its desire to effect change. I kept this in mind particularly with how slow the relevant orgs were to get any serious lobbying presence on the Hill for AI.
Regardless, this seems like a fitting technocratic vision for a group that sees itself as cosmopolitan, longtermist, and high-decoupling. Improve the function of the state as if agnostic to its ends, socialize rent-claims when they must exist and abolish them everywhere else, lean into the innately productive forces of well structured, well priced markets. If anything what stands out in this sketch is what is missing.
I think this broadly captures the political proposals I've seen discussed in those circles, and how they relate. Interested if there's any substantial disagreement, missing pieces or elements of rationalist political thought that should be explained, or policy proposals you think also fit. Also interested in blind spots, or how you imagining something like this list changing in 10, 20 years if the people in question continue to become more organized or active.
I should clarify: This is a collection of policies that I believe an abstracted, idealized LW/ACX/EA poster would commit to, and some musing on what I think ties them together in his mind. There are several policies on it I think are bad, many that are undertheorized, and many desirable policies that remain relatively unknown in these spaces. My personal platform has significant overlap but differs in basic attitudes and specific judgements.
What do you happen to consider as desirable yet obscure policy proposals?
There's a lot of ways to answer that question depending on how high the obscurity threshold is, how I should treat relatively unknown and unlikely to be enacted proposals that seem creative and intriguing but I am personally too small-c conservative for, how uncertainty of outcomes plays into meta-political reforms, etc.
In congress there are plenty of reforms that can amount to minor adjustments in procedural rules - roll-over appropriations, default appointee approval, open election for house steering committee positions - but which range from merely major to a potential sea change in functionality, and they have changed before. Hard to judge but underrated either way. A big legislative change I think would be great but will never happen is for them to adopt SCOTUS' ban on any media or deliberative leaks save audio recordings of special hearings/oral args
For huge, can't-hate-it, won't-buy-it proposals: (1) Martin Bailey had a mechanism for baking something like Kaldor-Hicks transfers into the lawmaking process with an "insurance for proposed law" system, as well as "competing" bicameral chambers compensated proportionally to the long run economic benefits of their chamber's legislation. (2) Glen Weyl's Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, which you might have heard of. Not every day an economist figures out how to abolish property efficiently. (3) Replacing subnational government with federally granted charters to private, self-legislating firms collecting (but ultimately not capturing) all land rents in a metropolitan area. Lot to dig into on that, might write it up in full at some point.
One approach I think is very underappreciated is exploiting money illusion and loss aversion in policy structuring: Don't tax people and then pay them in retirement based on (a crude function of) their payments, require an (ideally pseudo-) "mandatory savings account" with the state. Don't give people negative income taxes that they feel bad about getting and worse about losing, give everyone a UBI and subject everyone to progressive payroll taxes (the same ones later filling those savings accounts? At least with expensing of savings to make it consumption based ofc) so it always feels like it's "there" even though these policies are identical in accounting terms.
Things I more or less like off the top of my head, more or less obscure, a few might just be personal preferences:
Perpetually extending daylight savings,
granting special academy-and-service visas to under-15's that score in the global 1% on state department administered tests
congressional apportionment by citizen count instead of population
75 year age ceiling for electoral candidacy
Ceasing legal recognition of dual citizenship
Stagger drinking ages by ABV
German style vocational selection
Euro style law & med training
Repealing the disparate impact language in the '91 CRA
Rollback DoT CAFE regs
Privatize ATCs
Independently maintained, dynamic pattern books for purposes of public beauty
Experimentation and choice in criminal sentencing.
6 Year single presidential terms
3 or 4 year house terms
Returning carbon tax revenues to everyone in a direct flat transfer (only real solution to how bad they effect low-income household consumption via gas inelasticity)
State assimilation of municipal LEO orgs and the establishment of state police academies modeled after service academies
Elect city councils at-large and through citizen's assemblies hearing from relevant experts (turnout is way to low and wards are functionally a gerrymandering mechanism)
I'm sure there's more. Honestly a transition to a tax/transfer system based in negative externalities, some negative internalities, non-Schumpeterian rents, passive funds, and (whatever remaining) progressive consumption through not-even-thought-about payroll, that ideally flows into provident accounts, with social insurance and automatic public banking for UBI...that would be my contented zone.
How would it work when the supply of land zoned for residences is inelastic? What stops a large investment fund from buying everything in a prime location, doubling the declared price and leasing the properties back to their owners? Yes, theoretically people could coordinate and wait it out, but good luck doing that in practice.
In such a case we are talking about incumbent landholders who did not assess their property as high as it is theoretically worth because they did not wish to pay higher taxes. The purchasing firm will take a relative loss in cash flow by setting it at that higher assessment (and remember, higher land taxes are not passed on to tenants, so even if the old residents move back in their rents will just be their previously unrealized imputed rent) and are presumably willing to do so because they believe they can make more money than the previous incumbents even given higher taxes, which requires some kind of productive change in property use, which entails more efficient allocation, which is largely the point of COST. In any case, it's interesting many of the critiques of Radical Markets take the form of "what if rich people buy out xyz?" when it is not clear what it even means to be a rich person in such an economy, when they don't own anything in the traditional sense of the term.
They didn't want to pay higher taxes because they lived on it and didn't derive any profit from it beyond living close to their workplace.
For a more concrete example, let's say there's a large factory and a town that is mostly settled by people who work for this factory or provide services to the workers. All the land around the factory is zoned for agriculture. Every house is owned by its residents, is worth $100K and everyone pays $1K in property taxes.
Company X buys every piece of residential property in the town for 100K, sets the new valuation at 300K and offers to rent them back to the former owners for $13K a year, with every house paying them $10K a year, 10 years to break even
The owners have three options:
Option 3 sounds like a perfectly rational way to punish Company X for trying to squeeze, but this depends on coordination between the former homeowners. If one third choose option 1, Company X immediately breaks even and can sell the rest at any price. If one quarter chooses option 2, Company X will not be losing money on this venture and can slowly deal with the rest of the homeowners. And if rezoning is hard or impossible, it's not even an option.
And what's worse, none of the options actually improve the productivity of the properties.
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