AMA: Jeremiah Johnson, Director/Founder of the Neoliberal Project

This is a complex thing to measure, because the largest thing we're trying to do is to create an ideological movement that captures a lot of people in the long run. I admire the DSA a lot and think they're very much an example of the impact I'd like to have (but obviously with what I think are preferable political views).  I think they have had enormous impact on current US politics.

But if you had asked 10 years ago 'What has the DSA accomplished?', it'd be a tough question to answer.  They had a handful of local politicians, but nobody really notable nationally was an out-and-proud DSA member until Bernie Sanders exploded in popularity. It'd be hard to describe them as having a huge impact on US politics at that time, but since the Sanders Moment they've had a massive impact, both in shifting the overton window of the Democratic Party in a lot of ways and in having very high profile members of Congress. I think a longrun path to success for us likely looks similar, in that we have to build the foundation of what we're working on for years and then hopefully at the correct moment we'll be able to leverage it in a huge way to change politics.

More concretely!  I think we've successfully made 'advocate for sensible monetary policy' the socially accepted elite position.  It's been a signature issue for us for as long as we've existed, and and area few people used to care about. Now both center-right and center-left (and even portions of the further right/left) now advocate for how important Bernanke, Yellen and Powell have been and how important it is to keep them independent and free of partisan politics. Goldbugs are now simply laughed off, and when someone like Elizabeth Warren goes after Jay Powell, the majority of the center-left is jumping to dunk on Warren and defend Powell (who is a fantastic Fed chair and should be reappointed).

That's one where I think I can really pinpoint us as key actors, because it's a niche issue and we were so early on it and so loud about it. A lot of other issues it's very difficult to measure impact - when someone votes the way you want, was it truly because of you?  Who knows? I can also say that a lot of talking with officials is talking them out of dumb ideas, and that's influence that never sees the light of day. There's another part of this that will be frustrating as an answer - there are high level politicians who have directly told us that they love what we're doing and basically agree with us/identify with us, but prefer to keep it silent because they avoid ideological labels. I know that sucks as answer, but it's the truth.

One other concrete thing - we have a small number of members who are elected, almost all at very local levels on local city commissions and things like that.  I think it's fair to count whatever they do as direct influence.

The idea was to reclaim what was previously a slur and turn it into a positive term, similar to what LGB people did with 'queer' and so on. This essentially began with Southwood and Bowman in 2016, and the Adam Smith Institute more generally. 

While wikipedia is generally very good I wouldn't necessarily rely on it for left-right wing issues due to the aggregate bias of the editors. 

The term came from wonkish people who supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary being called 'neoliberals' by Bernie Sanders supporters and general leftists.  There was a sense of "If supporting Hillary and being a wonk is being a neoliberal, fine, I'm a neoliberal".

I'm someone who thinks of myself as an EA, but I don't engage at a deep level with the community at all times, so this is my half-insider-half-outsider view of EA. My general sense is that EA famously focuses on a handful of areas - AI, animal welfare, catastrophic risk management, GiveWell-style medical interventions, etc. I very rarely see EAs talking about 'normal politics' as a place to do good, and I think there are some normal politics issues that have deep promise.

One example is advocacy for increased immigration for rich countries.  The evidence seems incredibly strong to me that increased immigration is an enormously  valuable opportunity. Estimates for this kind of drastic change are always a little fuzzy, but fully open borders would have an impact on the scale of doubling world GDP. It's a multi-trillion dollar bill we're passing on the sidewalk and refusing to pick up. Even making a small difference in immigration policy can produce extremely large benefits. And support for immigration is increasing over time, so there's real promise for change.

There are probably some EA-oriented types thinking about this already, but I think it deserves more prominence. It would also make so many other EA favorites (like AI research) a lot easier to coordinate.

If Eliezer Yudkowsky had spent 30% less time writing the sequences and used that time to shitpost a bunch of solid memes on twitter about the shorter version of the sequences, EA would probably be twice as large as it is now.

This is both a joke and directionally true. Twitter and reddit are community building tools and best at creating memes and viral content. I haven't really thought this through in any detail, but I wonder if the EA/rationalist obsession with deeply analyzing and debating everything makes them bad at memes.

1. - open borders. If there was no political blowback it's a multi-trillion dollar idea.  Second would either be some sort of giant green package focused on carbon taxes + huge amounts of green energy R&D funding + international agreements, or some sort of federal control of zoning where I liberalize the hell out of EVERY city's zoning (this is probably impossible constitutionally, but no blowback!)
2. Go outside Mike :)

I think it's important to realize that different names serve different purposes at different points in time.

If the initial subreddit had called itself the very sober sounding "/r/NewLiberal" from the beginning, I firmly believe that what we are doing right now would not exist.  The subreddit would never have gotten the attention it got, and would never have grown as fast as it did.  Reclaiming the term neoliberal was delightfully subversive and grabbed people's attention - people who loved it and people who hated it.  Before the Neoliberal Project had even been conceived and we were just a loose collection of social media spaces, we had already been profiled in Vice, Gawker, NPR, and many other places.  We had mainstream media attention because the name was controversial. The attention brought in both supporters and attackers, and the inevitable tribal battles that happened forged a sense of community that attracted people further. We've grown pretty fast, all things considered.

So I think there were very strong reasons to lean heavily into the neoliberalism branding early in our existence. And once you lean heavily into a brand, it's hard to divorce yourself from that brand - path dependency is a thing. A lot of our members identify with the neoliberal brand. I also continue to think there's a benefit to being controversial and iconoclastic.  Think about the DSA's rise in popularity, and how the left has successfully redefined 'socialism' from 'the scary communist USSR with a brutal dictatorship and absolute total state control over every part of the economy' to 'socialism is when free college and healthcare'. (which may be a slight exaggeration of how many GenZ socialists understand themselves, but only a slight one)

With that said! I do think it's likely that as we move further into serious advocacy within the political establishment, we'll move more towards a different branding. We already have the Center for New Liberalism which is essentially just a new wrapper on the same ideas, and is helpful to use in instances when 'neoliberal' might scare people off. Clearly it does restrict some things for us and isn't the best branding in all situations. Right now we're letting our chapters choose whichever name is best for them in their local context. I'm ultimately a pragmatist and am willing to use different names in different contexts.

Big fan of many of the groups discussed here, and we're often close with the groups you listed. We've had Matt and Ezra on the podcast several times, as well as Dylan Matthews from Future Perfect to discuss kidney donation.  Love the work that Future Perfect does. I've also hosted on the podcast Glen Weyl, Jason Crawford of the Roots of Progress, and Mark Lutter of the Charter Cities Institute.  Much less a fan of Peter Thiel, whose goals are explicitly anti-liberal (and being an ideological liberal I obviously view this as a very bad thing).

I think your answer is a pretty thorough overview of the space, to be honest.  'Rationalists' generally, like the LessWrong and SlateStarCodex crowd, are heavily EA aligned.  But that's a fairly explicit thing. Economics as a field is fairly fertile ground due to the tendency towards cost-benefit analysis, modeling, etc.

Neoliberalism is an explicitly globalist ideology, with heavy emphasis on free international trade, free immigration, and cooperative international institutions.

Of those

• Free trade is something I see as incredibly beneficial to the world, but also an area where most of the hard work has already been done and the gains from further trade liberalization are small-to-medium sized.  Not necessarily an EA area of focus.
• Increasing immigration is something I think has enormous potential for EA action (I go into more depth in a different comment chain)
• Cooperative international institutions are highly aligned with EA goals such as 'preventing large scale war' and 'preventing nuclear explosions' and other such global tail risk scenarios.
• I also tend to think that advocacy for socially liberal causes in developing countries - women's rights, ethnic minority rights/protections, LGBT rights - is a place where a little bit of political will can go a long way. I'm unsure how to set up a series of value calculations on this, but my instinct is that there's a lot of opportunity in that area.

I wish it was more mainstream!

EA is basically a group of weirdos caring about very weird, abstract things.  I think that's great and we need weird people pursuing weird passion projects, because that's how a lot of important shit has gotten done throughout history. But I also wish there was a more mainstream version of EA.

What I have in mind here is not an EA movement trying to get John Q Donor to give money to things like AI-alignment, or animal welfare studies, or any of the generally very weird and off-putting  stuff that EA often focuses on. I'd like a Main Street Friendly version that instead focused on 'Popular Charity Inc should change to do X instead of Y' or 'Donate to Popular Cause A instead of Popular Cause B', where all of the suggestions are very mainstream and easily understandable (but efficient versions of that mainstream thing).

Most people are going to get turned off by abstract calculations, anything they see as weird,  etc. They just want to do some good and not think too hard about it. Improving how those people donate - not by making them optimal, but by making them moderately better - seems to be an area where lots of good could be done.

To use a food analogy - EAs are very often like people examining tens of thousands of obscure recipes, trying to identify the optimal, perfect dish. Something like beluga caviar over the world's most expensive wagyu cooked by a Michelin chef. Normal people just select a food and cook it and eat it - here's some mac and cheese from a box, yum. Rather than trying to recruit more weirdos in the search for the ultra-perfect dish, there should be more focus on giving normal people tips to improve their mac and cheese.  That would do more to increase the average culinary level of the population (and I'd expect any successful mass appeal strategy to recruit more weirdos than a weirdo-recruiting strategy would anyways).

One thing that I do is try to convince regular people who like to donate to charity to donate some portion (a quarter to a half, depending on how receptive they are) internationally. In the US only about 6% of charitable giving goes overseas, and money donated in the developing world is usually far more impactful. I don't try to lecture them or explain the most optimal thing to do, just nudge them in the right direction. I often use explicitly the same thing they're already doing - if they donate to cancer stuff here, I find an effect cancer charity in a poor country. If they donate to schools here, I find a good place to fund education in the third world. It's an easy win and I have a pretty high success rate with this.

There's definitely a set of principles that underpins our policy beliefs.  A lot of this goes all the way back to classical liberalism - to be a neoliberal means first and foremost that you are a liberal and are grounded in liberal political philosophy.  This means we hold the core liberal values of equality before the law, democratic governance, a market economy, freedoms of press/religion/speech/assembly/etc.

Modern neoliberals take that liberalism and add and emphasize a few things.  Neoliberals are internationalist and globalist, which leads to our support for free trade, free immigration, international institutions, etc.  We are social liberals who fight against racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry. We are capitalists who believe in using a relatively free-market economy to make a richer world, but paired with a welfare state to alleviate poverty and suffering.  And we have an emphasis on evidence-based policy.  All of those are relatively base-level beliefs that inform the policies we support.

Going through the first list

• Single Payer Healthcare. -Weakly opposed. I prefer a multi-payer system like many, many other rich countries have. I'm usually annoyed when people present single payer as the only way to get everyone affordable healthcare coverage.
• Build More Housing. Huge yes, neoliberals are pretty explicitly YIMBY. 
• Legalize Drugs. Yes, but I'm unsure about harder drugs.
• Jail People Less. Very much yes 
• Less Military. This is complicated and I'm unsure.
• Give People Money. In general, fungible cash benefits are better than restricted benefits or in-kind services provided.  The flat tax idea is bad.
• No Minimum Wage. Opposed. Monopsony power is a thing and "No minimum wage" types typically don't understand actual labor econ very well beyond a ultra simplified econ101 view.
• Tax Land Value. Yes.
• Tax Harmful Things. Yes
• Reduce Other Taxes. The pattern I'm sensing is that this person REALLY likes simplicity but it often seems like just simplicity for simplicity's sake without much real justification.
• Fund Schools Federally. Probably a good idea
• Let People In. YES
• Opt-Out Organ Donation. A decent idea, but the research I'm aware of is that this doesn't actually move organ donation rates all that much.
• Randomize Everything. 'Everything' is hyperbole, but I think more experimentation is a good thing.

In general I'd say this platform has a great deal in common with a neoliberal platform, but it also falls into a lot of overly simple policies (or more generously one-size-fits-all) that are aesthetically pleasing in their simplicity but ignore hidden depth.  Specifically thinking of 'one tax rate', 'remove all other taxes', zero MW, Single Payer.

Yes, lobbying officials is part of what we do.  We're trying to talk to officials about all the things we care about - taking action on climate change, increasing immigration, etc etc etc. Truthfully I don't have a ton of experience on this front yet - I've been part of the project since its inception in early 2017, but have only been formally employed by PPI for the last 8 months or so. So I'm not a fountain of wisdom on all the best lobbying techniques - this is somewhat beginner level analysis of the DC swamp.

One thing I've noticed is that an ounce of access is worth a pound of attention, which is worth ten pounds of idea.  Access in DC is the real currency, not money.  True high quality access directly to powerful congresspeople or cabinet-level people is phenomenally rare. Access to regular congresspeople, important congressional staffers or mid-level executive branch types is still limited and fought over. Access is golden. The number of hours in a day for any of these decision makers is finite and someone always wants their time.

If you can't get direct access to decision makers, the next best thing is attention (which can lead to access later, if your ideas get traction). There are a lot of small think tanks with very bright people writing quality reports...  that will then go on to be downloaded a grand total of 11 times ever (and maybe 1-2 of those downloads actually got read more than a third of the way through).  Getting important people to pay attention to your work in DC is hard. There are quite a lot of think tanks and non-profits and people writing reports on every imaginable topic under the sun, and you have to stand out somehow.

Our model that we're hoping to lean into as we grow is to take our natural talent for community building and getting online attention and leverage that into attention/access among people who matter in DC (and elsewhere). We have a network of politically active chapters in cities around the country and globe. We have a large, boisterous social media following that we can mobilize. That's a reason for someone to court us, to pay attention and care what we're telling them. I guess maybe that's a piece of advice - if you want a decision maker's attention, if you want access, recognize how that's a limited resource to the decision maker and give them a reason to care beyond just yelling 'My Idea Is Very Good!' like everyone else.

You need more emojis and memes.

Sounds like a joke, but it's serious. My theory of politics is that basically all politics are identity politics. 'Identity politics' has traditionally been used to mean things like "Black person cares about race issues' or 'Woman cares about women's issues', but I think it goes beyond that. Tribalism is infecting virtually everything we do and every issue we care about, and when you get separated into tribes you develop identities. 'Neoliberal' and 'Socialist' are identities today, there are people who strongly identify as those things, whose sense of self is defined by them to some extent. 'Trump fan' is an identity. 'Coal miner' and 'Gun owner' and 'Anti-racist' and 'Bayesian statistician' and 'Breastfeeding mother' are identities. Every single one of these groups has their inside jokes, their memes, their semi-religious hero figures and iconography, their organizations, their hated outgroup, etc.

One thing that I really believe is that for a movement to grow, there has to be a coherent sense of identity uniting members of the movement. You can get a little ways purely on ideas and convincing people with long explanatory argumentation, but only a little. To grow further you've got to make people want to be part of the organization on a tribal level, to not just agree with you but identify as you. And one of the primary ways to do that is silly memes, insider jokes and symbols you all use together, etc. Group identifiers.

Even Julia Galef, leading rationalist/EA spokesperson, wrote a book about how to be a more rational thinker... and ended up endorsing identity formation. The entire point of The Scout Mindset is to stop letting your identity do your thinking for you, which I agree with... but in the end you can't really  escape the pull of identity unless you start to develop an identity as 'the sort of person who doesn't get sucked  into tribal politics'. Galef calls this 'developing the Scout Mindset', which I would call identifying as a Scout.

So I'm very serious when I say that the lack of an EA emoji identifier to put in your twitter handle is holding you back. I really believe that matters. Neoliberals are globes. The DSA has the red rose. YIMBYs have the Avocado. Urbanists use a crane or a building emoji.  There are specific emojis for crypto fans, Georgists, social democrats, free trade lovers, and even more niche topics. Why not EA?

I'm not aware of any serious arguments that open borders are bad on a first-order, only that the political backlash is something to worry about.

With that in mind, I'm a pragmatist (and pragmatism is one of our core values). I'll fight for whatever increases in immigration I can get and work within the political reality that we live in. I'm willing to explore what Bryan Caplan calls 'keyhole' solutions that are much less than ideal or unfair in some ways, but better than nothing. 

I also think that the backlash angle can be overstated.  A lot of the backlash is not really about the actual number of immigrants (which people are largely ignorant of - the most opposition comes from the places with the least immigrants), but the perception of chaos. And sometimes you can just power through - Merkel accepted millions of refugees in one of the greatest acts of political courage I've ever seen. It briefly empowered the AfD extremists in Germany, but Merkel just bulled forward and ended up doing fine. She's retiring as one of the most popular and effective German leaders ever. The AfD is now shrinking and the refugees are still there and millions and millions of lives have been drastically improved. I also think that Singer is wrong when he says

"But given that concerns about immigration have clearly brought about the election of Donald Trump, the Brexit vote, and the election of right-wing governments in Hungary and Poland"

This seems like a very simplistic analysis. Immigration likely played a part, but the rise of right-wing nationalism is a global phenomenon with a lot of moving parts. How does immigration explain Bolsonaro, Duterte, Erdogan, Modi, etc?

Given all this, I'm going to keep advocating for the immigration increases I can get (which will not be anything close to Open Borders) and continue making the public case for immigration to change public attitudes. Immigration is on a gay-marriage-like trend, and god willing public attitude keeps moving that way

My response here would be that immigration to the UK has probably bought more benefit than the costs of brexit and US immigration more than the costs of Trump. Even if the causality is clear which I'm not sure it is, I'd bet on those being bet positive anyway.

Initially the name came from wonkish Hillary Clinton supporters getting called '****ing neoliberals' or other angry denunciations by Bernie Sanders supporters in the 2016 Dem primary. We kind of ran with it - if being a Clinton supporter is being a neoliberal, fine, I'm a neoliberal.

Once the name was there, it attracted attention like a lightning rod and the community grew very fast.  At the beginning nobody was trying to make this into anything, it was just a bunch of people memeing about central bankers, globalism and woke capitalism. There wasn't a conscious decision about how This Is The Name That Will Eventually Win Suburban Moms And Create Our Political Moment, it was just a small community having fun that turned into a much larger community. By that point the name was the name.

Moving forward, we have some soft-rebranding where some of our chapters choose to go by 'New Liberals' instead of Neoliberal. We are moving into using different names in different contexts.

Another longtermist question: What do you think about Stubborn Attachments?

I'm somewhat of a skeptic on the dangers of AI, so I may not be the best person to address that point. On pandemics, I think it's likely that Gain of Function research should be heavily curtailed - but I don't think that's a core neoliberal value or anything, just my personal opinion.

More broadly, I don't really think of x-risk and economic growth as things that necessarily have to be traded for each other.  I think that in many important ways a more prosperous society has more stability and less x-risk.  One important area to worry about is the possibility of nuclear conflict.  To me it seems pretty clear that the more than every country in the world can become a rich country, the more stable international geopolitics will be and the lower the risk of a catastrophic war will be.

Morally, I think any attempt to slow growth in the name of x-risk had better be really damn sure that the x-risk is truly intolerable, because in practical terms 'trade off for growth' means 'potentially impoverish millions/billions of people'. Purposefully trying to slow economic growth seems to me to be a moral evil in almost all cases, barring some exceptional edge cases, simply because economic growth is so good (and this is especially true in developing countries).

I think Tyler Cowen's general idea that economic growth is extremely important is true and underrated in our political discourse. I'm not always in agreement with the prescriptions that Cowen believes would actually achieve that growth.  There's an exciting revival in the general big-tent-neoliberal world of a 'pro-growth progressive' attitude.  Sometimes you hear this called a 'supply side liberal'. Ezra Klein wrote about this in the NYTimes, but I would also recommend the general works of Sam Hammond at the Niskanen Center, Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith for other versions of this.

I'm hesitant to act like I know the One True Answer here because while this is a global phenomenon, I think Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro, Le Pen, Duterte, Erdogan, Modi, Xi, Putin, Orban, etc etc etc all have their own unique circumstances that makes any kind of general answer impossible. Putin is propelled by unique factors relating to the fall of the USSR and the sense of decline/malaise in Russia.  All American politics is inexorably tied into our race relations. Erdogan's boosted by Turkey's tortured history with 'liberal coups' and its historical dance between Islam and secularism. There's no single thing to address all these guys at once.

I'm honestly unsure that individual action can do much to influence the authoritarian wave. I think there are likely geopolitical solutions, but geopolitics is hard and far more messy and complicated than most casual observers understand.

Or I could just answer all of them :)