Beware Policy Abstraction

The recent US presidential election should be fresh enough in your memory to let you directly confirm that the issues focused on there were biased in two key ways. First, they were issues that mattered more in “swing” states, due to the US electoral college voting system. And second, they were more “cultural” issues, which are more vague, aspirational, and hypocritical, have more emotion and symbolism, and are more aligned with key identities and alliances, and fights between those. 

It seems to me that another key correlate of “cultural” issue is abstraction. Issues that are framed more abstractly, in a near-far sense, are more easily made culturally salient. While such issues may well have relevant concrete statistics and track records, some key part of their appeal is not tied to such concrete measures. 

For example, when IVF first became feasible, it was a hotly contested cultural issue. But then as people gained experience with it, the debated faded, until today it is a non issue. Regulation tends to go far better when it responds to a concrete track record of prior problems, than when it tries to prevent an abstract space of imagined harms. 

Such as regulation going very badly with nuclear power and genetic engineering, and with AI recently. Environmentalism works better when it responds to concretely experienced track records of air or water pollution, relative to abstract concerns about the existence of species few have ever experienced. Concrete concerns about poverty and crime go better than abstract concerns about invisible structural racism. Med and school policy tied to actual concrete useful treatments and learning go better than abstract faith that more is always better in these things. 

We economists know many ways in which popular policies have harder-to-see negative consequences. But it’s a big problem that we need to use abstract analysis to show such effects. As our abstractions are far less emotionally compelling than the usual cultural abstractions. The more that we legitimize abstractions, the less impact we economists may have. 

A big virtue of futarchy, i.e., decision markets, is requiring that people translate their abstract concerns into concrete statistics that can be measured after the fact. This should greatly limit the damage from policy abstraction. Though anticipation of this fact is plausibly a big reason that many are wary of it. Harder to move folks to favor your policy positions via symbolic rhetoric if you have to do that via moving them to favor different concrete outcome statistics. Alas that, until we can generate a longer concrete track record of futarchy use, arguments for it remain pretty abstract.