And so it begins...

Introducing: The 31 Days of Policy

For the next month I intend to write one Substack post per day related to a public policy topic.

• Each post will feature a public policy recommendation that I subjectively consider “under-discussed”. So no YIMBY, no permitting reform, none of the standard healthcare topics (which I’ve already written about anyway). I should note that these recommendations are not strong - some of them will be fairly wacky or speculative in character.

• I’ve chosen topics that I feel illustrate interesting ideas in empirical social science. To better understand public policy one needs to understand the world we live in, and the more robust fields and subfields of social science (namely economics, political science, cognitive psychology, social choice theory, game theory, law, inferential statistics and applied analytic philosophy) are a prerequisite to that.

• I am not an expert in anything. I’m an amateur who spends a copious amount of my free time learning about public policy. Please take everything I say with a grain of salt, and if I say something false and you are an expert in any of the topics I write about please correct me!

• I reserve the right to skip a day if there are exigent personal circumstances but I will be sure to make it up to you, dear reader. I have a month’s worth of topics planned and I’m not going to let them go to waste.

• Yes, I’m aware the middle of January is a weird time to start a month of blogging challenge. Doing it in February would short-change the project and March will have too many personal conflicts. I’d prefer to strike while the iron is hot rather than wait until April.

Today is just the intro post. Tomorrow we’ll kick off this challenge in earnest with a post about toilets.