Policy ideas

last non trivial update: september 2022

Welcome to the Policy Ideas section! Sometimes, I have a few small policy ideas that come to mind after reading an article, watching a video or having an interesting discussion with someone. Most of them are public policy ideas that can be applied in the French national framework or in the European framework. They don’t have any kind of validity, they are just my own ideas that I haven’t necessarily explored in depth but I thought it might be interesting to share them. I try to categorise these ideas and give references. As this is still a bit of a theme for my blog, most of my ideas are related to AI (but more on the long term side of the issue) and animal welfare.

If you’re interested by evidence-based decision making, I highly recommend to read Reasoned politics by Magnus Vinding.

Some previous small considerations (briefly)

• To my mind, there is a kind of paradox when it comes to politics:
  • Politics is a great area to which one can apply one’s rationality individually
  • But in the mean time, politics is a terrible area for learning rationality, or discussing rationality
• When choosing a specific policy within a set of public policies, it is important for the decision maker to take into account the political, financial and temporal opportunity cost of such a policy. Policies that are most likely to be chosen are thus those that have the lowest opportunity cost while having the maximum impact in line with the primary objective.
• Some interesting things to note as well is that, generally speaking when regulating a specific sector, decision makers can choose between different kind of public policies: coercive measures and nudges. There several pros & cons for nudge policy that I’ll discuss briefly here. These remarks stem primarily from the work of the economist Romain Espinosa which I highly recommend reading.
  • The use of nudges to change consumption behaviour can be useful precisely because it ensures that individuals do not feel constrained in their choices. The perception of constraint or loss can slow down the transition from one consumption behaviour to another (loss aversion, reactance). The use of nudges thus appears to be primarily instrumental: they are used because they are effective (cf. decision sciences/behavioural economics) in changing individuals’ behaviour.
  • Habits are mainly based on system 1 (automatic) thinking (cf. Kahneman, Thinking: fast and slow). Information campaigns tend to provide rational arguments about consumption choices. However, these arguments are processed by system 2 of the cognitive process, which is not or hardly used in everyday life. Because nudges primarily affect the choice architecture and do not involve system 2, they are more likely to affect consumption decisions. In other words, nudges can influence behaviour (what people actually do), whereas information campaigns, based on rational arguments, are more likely to influence intentions (what people would like to do). Thus, interventions that aim to affect system 2 have more limited effects on behaviour than interventions that target system 1 (nudges).
  • However, here are some cons. (1) Nudges are useful to push individuals into a particular consumption habit when they are largely indifferent between the options available to them. (2) Nudges can also be interpreted as short-term palliatives. Indeed, playing essentially on system 1, nudges only accompany decision making as long as they are in place and their long-term effects are more mixed.
• There is a tendency, at least in France, for the left to resign from the institutions when it disagrees with them and to paradoxically define radical action (e.g participating in demonstrations, strikes etc.) as depriving oneself of the sites of radical action. It seems to me that one of the places to produce systemic changes are precisely the institutions. I don’t think institutions have a kind of nature or essence, and from this point of view, it may be interesting for the bearers of progressive ideas to try to go directly into politics rather than doing politics through second-order channels such as activism (although the latter is still be necessary; guess it depends on your comparative advantage in public policy making). Still, I think this very simple model (if you have a desire to change the world for the better, then you should go into politics, e.g going into the government or Parliament) is more appropriate in a two-party model as in the US or the UK. In such a bipartisan political system, I think that inertia forces are more prevalent and there is not much degree of freedom within the political class when compared to a more a multi-polar political system. In a bi-partisan system it may therefore be easier for a paradigm shift to occur endogenously, rather than for something new (bold but innovative and effective public policy proposals) to emerge exogenously as the forces of friction may be quite strong.
  • If you consider a very broad definition of the word ‘politics’, you might object that there are several other ways to do politics besides working in a public institution, and indeed, there are. The different channels of influence of public policies are numerous and to make a short review of them would be too ambitious for this modest little post but let me draw some of them I find interesting:
    • (1) going into academia and market your research papers that lead to public policies recommendations (e.g Gael Giraud, Philippe Aghion, Thomas Piketty, Julia Cagé, Esther Duflot etc.)
    • (2) going into entrepreneurship and influence the decisions of businesses or consumers (e.g JM Jancovici with Carbone 4, Bruce Friedrich with the GFI etc.) or, in the same vein, working for large consultancy
    • (3) make a lot of money and give a substantial part to associations or think tanks which then do lobbying towards decision makers (e.g ‘earn to give’ community, Sam Bankman-Fried CEO of FTX etc.)
      I think the last two points are particularly neglected, not to say rejected, by the left and it seems a pity since it can have huge potential of impact.
• According to me, in the case of a new (set of) decision maker, policies to be taken in the first place must take into account a priority and urgent character, but also, and perhaps above all, the fact that it is scalable in the sense that it can have a positive feedback loop that can be easily implemented and self-sustaining rapidly in order to have a maximum effect over the long run. I’ll give a few examples below.
• To my mind, influential people are those who have the capacity to take advantage of informal relationships, develop partnerships, convince others and be bold whether they be business or political leaders. I think that the engine of politics is somewhat fueled by interpersonal connections and a certain comfort in taking many bold initiatives. Thus, from an instrumental perspective, being agentic is one of the most valuable skills one can learn, both from a professional and an inter-personal point of view.

under construction

Disclaimer: I do not have strong views on the following expect maybe for animal welfare policies so I’ll be happy to heard your opinion and belief on any of these ideas.

Artificial Intelligence

Animal welfare

As mentioned in my first blog post, the consumption of animals produces large negative externalities to society as well as being a morally questionable practice with regard to the interest of the animals to not suffer. Our society must therefore develop new models of food production and consumption. To initiate an agricultural and food transition that truly takes non-human animals into account, this brief table contains a non-exhaustive series of complementary policy that can be implemented in the short and long term and that have sometimes been tested abroad. Public policies concerning animal welfare can, I think, be divided into several sub-categories. Firstly, policies concerning farmed animals, secondly, policies concerning wild animals, and thirdly, policies concerning animal exploitation outside of farming (experimentation, captivity in zoos etc.). I am mainly informed in policies concerning farmed animals and I do not have strong views otherwise.

Political system

Biosecurity