Respectable Rants

I’m not very impressed with most political arguments, especially those targeted at mass audiences. I don’t mind such things being informal, passionate, rude, speculative, rambling, or redundant. But I need them to address what I see as key issues. Yes, my tastes may be unusual, but there are many others like me. So let me explain what I want to hear in a good political “rant”.

Don’t Exaggerate – You know who you are, and you know what I mean. There is plenty enough at stake in most areas to motivate me without your exaggerating. At least pretend toward honesty. All of history isn’t at stake, and no this by itself won’t decide between freedom and despotism. Yes, I can roughly correct for your exaggerations, so this item does the least harm. But it still bugs me.

Admit Tradeoffs – We usually can’t get more of something good without also getting less of something else good. Or more of something bad. I might be willing to go for the package, but don’t pretend there won’t be costs. If this choice isn’t new, tell me why we made the wrong tradeoff before. If this used to be a private choice, explain why private choices about this tend to go wrong.

Show Search – The world is complex, our systems in it have many parts, and things keep changing. So much of finding better policy consists of searching in a vast space of possible system-situation combos. Don’t pretend that the best combo is obvious, or that you are sure what will happen under your favored option. Tell me about what options we’ve tried, what we’ve seen there, and about new promising combinations. Tell me about key design principles, and how you may have found a rare design option that happens to embody many good design principles at once.

Prepare To Learn – This is the most important, and neglected, item. Don’t just tell me you have a plan, with details on request. Tell me how we will learn to adapt and improve your plan. What size experiments do we start with, where, and measured how? How we will change our designs in response in new iterations? Don’t tell me we will all make those decisions together, that just won’t work. Instead, tell me who will make those decisions, and especially, what will be their incentives to do this well.

If you want to just copy something that’s worked out pretty well elsewhere, okay maybe I mainly want to hear about tradeoffs seen there. Data. But if you want to do something new, then I need to hear a lot more about your learning plan. Especially when your proposal has a wide scope, its outcomes are hard to measure, and take a long time to be revealed.

Look, our main social problem is how to organize activity so that we can learn together how to be productive and useful to each other. There are other problems, but they are minor by comparison. Somehow each of us must react to the signals our world sends us, and send our own signals in response, to induce all the stuff that needs to happen, and efficiently and well. It is all terribly complex, but also terribly important.

Every policy proposal is of some way to change this huge system. We need some theory not only to estimate consequences of your proposal, but also to deal with its many unanticipated consequences later. Please give me some indication of what theories you’ll rely on. The weaker the theories you need, the better of course, but you’ll need something.

For example, if you propose to nationalize US medicine, tell me which other nationalized system you plan to copy. How does it decide on which treatments are covered, and where new facilities are built? How are doctors evaluated and if needed disciplined? How do patients express their differing individual preferences within this system? And since those other systems don’t contribute much to global medical innovation, tell me that you are okay with a big reduction in global medical innovation, or tell me how your system will be different enough to promote a lot more innovation.

For example, if you propose to regulate social media to be less addictive, stressful, and fake-news-promoting, tell us exactly what is the scope of powers you propose to grant regulators, what standards they will use to measure such things, and how the rest of us are to judge if they do a good job. Is this new proposed feedback process plausibly more effective than each of us individually switching our social media platforms when we feel addicted, stressed, or faked?

As you know, most political discourse purposely avoids most of what I’ve asked for here. Advocates instead tend to frame each dispute as a simple and fundamental moral choice. Details are avoided, dangers are exaggerated, and tradeoffs, search, and learning are rarely unacknowledged as issues. Politicians refer to goals and avoid talking about difficulties of implementation, incentives, measurement, or learning.

And that’s a big reason to be wary of letting political systems manage complex things of wide scope. When I buy something from a private source, they tend to say more about details, about how to measure payoffs, and about how they and I will learn about what works best. Maybe not an ideal amount, but definitely more. They more tell me what I want to hear in a rant, or an ad. If you want to make a to-my-ears good political rant, learn a bit from them.