Epistemic status: speculative
Longtermists have good reasons to be interested in institutional innovation. Broad longtermist institutions could focus on improving the political representation of future generations; more targeted ones could focus on particular cause areas such as AI governance.
The community’s approach to institutional change so far seems to be two-pronged:
- Research new institutions. Examples of such work include Will MacAskill on age-weighted voting and Gillian Hadfield and Jack Clark on regulatory markets for AI safety.
- Get into influential positions in the most influential governments, so that we are better placed to take important decisions, including regarding new institutions. For instance, to my knowledge, CSET was established partly to help build the political capital of thoughtful longtermists in D.C.
Here’s another approach which might be promising:
- Get into influential positions in the most innovative governments (i.e., those most willing and able to create and change institutions), so that we are better placed to test institutional innovations.
Many of the innovations which are interesting by longtermist lights can only be implemented by governments (e.g. most of the ideas in this post, regulatory regimes); and, presumably, governments vary in their willingness to test new institutions. There’s also no clear reason why the most influential governments should be the most innovative. Field-trials would help establish which ideas work well empirically, and running them in innovative governments would allow for more ideas, and stranger ones, to be tested. According to Robin Hanson, “the key resource needed for institution adaptation efforts is actually real organizations willing to risk disruption and distraction to work on adapting promising institution ideas.”
Successful implementations could also propagate new institutions to more influential governments. A cursory look at the literature on the diffusion of policies and institutions suggests that institutions set up in one country often quickly spread to others. In the context of environmental institutions, for instance, “diffusion mechanisms contributed to a significant extent to the international spread of environmental ministries and agencies, particularly in the 1970s.” One reason for this might be the reduced risk for those following the innovator: it’s already been shown that the institution can work well.
If the above is correct, perhaps some fraction of longtermists aiming for a government career should look towards the most innovative governments. Some questions that would help clarify the value and feasibility of this approach include:
- Which governments are the most innovative?
- Could EA’s work for these governments?
- Is the diffusion of institutional innovations a robust phenomenon?
- Which countries have historically had the most success diffusing their innovations?
Thanks to Maxime Riche, Jeremy Perret, Adam Shimi, and Laura Green for feedback.
Hi Alexis, thank you for the post. I roughly agree with the case made here.
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I thought I would share some of my thoughts on the "diffusion of institutional innovations":
* I worked in government for a while. When there is incentive to make genuine policy improvements and a motivation to do so this matters. One of the key things that would be asked of a major new policy would be, what do other countries do? (Of course a lot of policy making is not political so the motivation to actually make good policy may be lacking).
* Global shocks also force governments to learn. There stuff done in the UK after Fukishima to make sure our nuclear is safe. I expect after the Beirut explosions countries are learning about fertiliser storage.
* On the other hand I have also worked outside government trying to get new policies adopted, such as polices other countries already do, and it is hard, so this does not happen easily.
* I would tentatively speculate that it is easier for innovations to diffuse when the evidence for the usefulness of the policy is concrete. This might be a factor against some of the longtermist institution reforms that Tyler and I have written about. For example “policing style x helped cut crime significantly”is more likely to diffuse than “longtermism policy y looks like it might lead to a better future in 100 years”. That said I could imagine diffusing happing also where there are large public movement and very minimal costs, for example tokenistic polices like “declare a climate emergency”. This could work in favour of longtermist ideas as making a policy now to have an effect in many years time, if the cost now is low enough, might match this pattern.
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I also think that senior government positions even in smaller countries can have a longterm impact on the world in other ways:
* Technological innovation. A new technological development in one country can spread globally. * Politics. Countries can have a big impact on each other. A simple example, the EU is made up of many member states who influence each other.
* Spending. Especially for rich countries like in Scandinavia they can impact others with spending, eg climate financing.
* Preparation for disasters. Firstly building global resilience -- Eg Norway has the seed bank -- innovations like that don’t need to spread to make the world more resilient to shocks, they just need to exist. Secondly countries copy each other a lot is in disaster response -- Eg look at how uniform the response to COVID has been -- having good disaster plans can help everyone else when a disaster actually hits.
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I think it matters not forget the direct impact on citizens of that country. Even a small country will have $10-$100m annual budgets. Having a small effect on that can have a truly large scale positive direct impact