Things we should ignore

and things we shouldn’t

Based on the current or potential impact, we don’t pay enough attention to:

• Autonomous vehicles and AI in general
• Crazy housing costs driven by Soviet-style planning and zoning rules, which account for a large fraction of the economy
• Horrible inefficiencies in education and healthcare caused by particular regulations and taxes, which account for much of the rest of the economy
• Too big to fail companies, which issue most of the money
• The fact that even current meagre global growth has been achieved with a tailwind of an increasing debt-to-GDP ratio, and the implications for growth if/when global debt starts to decline
• Systemic risks such as EMP and epidemics
• Likely improvements in healthcare and longevity
• Collective action problems and how to reduce them
• Incumbent monopolies protected by regulatory moats
• A cap on the amount of statute law, and repealing laws (see Three Felonies a Day)
• Restoring sanity to the laws on drugs and firearms
• Gerrymandering, and political polarization caused by closed primaries, leading to dysfunctional legislatures
• Potentially unaffordable long-dated promises by governments and corporations

On the same basis, we pay far too much attention to:

• Day-to-day politics
• Anecdotal news
• Other people’s countries, generally when we disagree with their politics or they have lots of oil
• Passing reams of laws, because it lets politicians be seen to do something that costs them little, but may impose large costs on others
• Getting government to make long-term or tail-risk promises (mainly through explicit or implicit payments, guarantees, insurance and loans), because politicians like to make promises that can only become expensive many years later