This is a page where I’ll post policies that I suspect are better than existing policies.
Note on political feasibility: Concerns about the political feasibility of passing such a policy are not arguments against a status of “low-hanging fruit”. If a policy is actually a low-hanging fruit and has not been implemented or looks unlikely to be implemented, then the political infeasibility of implementation is an indication that we are stuck in a bad Nash equilibria, not a problem with the policy itself. The status of low-hanging fruit is meant to convey that the policies are things that we can be highly confident would significantly improve the world if we were to magically bypass political feasibility issues and implement them.
If I think of a policy that seems potentially better than the status quo, but I’m not extremely confident that the facts are all totally in support of its clear superiority, I’ll post the name of the policy with a question mark at the end.
Fairly confident
- Emissions taxes
- Carbon credit markets
- Increased marine protected areas
- End subsidies to deep-sea fishermen
- Catch share programs (individual transferable quotas)
- Opt out organ donation
- Bayesian statistical methods in science
- Required replication studies before publication
- Awards/recognition to both discovers and replicators
- Switch away from FPTP to a better voting system (ranked choice voting, range voting, pretty much anything is better)
- End global poverty (to be fair, happening)
- Effective altruism:
- Stricter enforcement of sanitation procedures for dealing with IVs in hospitals to prevent central line infections
Want to look more into
- Controlled trials for policies?
- Use of prediction markets for policy?
- Repeal city ordinances on building heights and densities?
- Land value tax?
- Later school start times?
- Total nuclear disarmament?
- Parental licensing?
- Opt-in fertility?
- Universal basic income?
- Publicly funded elections?
- End the drug war?
- Free trade?