Economic Policy is Easy
From Zanecorpwiki
Okay, economic policy writ large is not quite as easy as an effective stimulus, but I'm going to throw out the idea that it's as hard as we've made it. The key to relatively much easier economic planning is pretty straightforward: get good data.
First off, we have pretty good data already. It's not that we don't know we need good data, we just haven't added anything new in awhile. We need a new measure to bridge macro and micro. (Grand Unified Economics? GUE=goo-ee?)
My suggestion: Nelson families for economics. Randomly pick 10,000 people[notes 1] and then track their accounts. A team of CPAs[notes 2] would do an initial set up and then everyone in the family would send in all their receipts an a cash log.
I don't think it's particularly necessary to make something like this compulsory--though in some nations you might not find that much push back--but there could be a problem with certain demographics exempting themselves. I don't think this creates more problems than the program itself would solve. Especially since it's not clear how much a problem it could be. In other words, we'll figure it out when we get there.
How much would all this help? In a word: immensely. Think of the questions you could start to answer. Where are tax cuts most effective?[notes 3] How do policy changes propagate? Who really benefits from what? Who's really hurt by what?
Notes
- ↑ There may need to some tweaking to the selection to ensure representation... but maybe not. The danger is that with whatever "criteria" is put into the mix will itself be highly controversial and a source of bias. The best approach as far as I see would be to rotate the 10,000 every 2 years so every week, you'd be exiting about 100 individuals from the program and selecting the next 100. There's still a problem of defining the population. How to include the homeless? Even more problematic: do we include aliens? Legal foreign workers? Tourists? On this, I would say it's best to be more expansive. Eventually, if the system works, it should go worldwide. Remember, it's not necessary or perhaps even wise to try and consider all these inputs in policy--meaning that national policy probably benefits from being nation specific--but it does provide information. It is true, however, that the first order relations can be inferred relatively easily, so the impetus for one nation to push for other nations to adopt and share this information is not strong, nor would it be necessary.
- ↑ You'd need maybe 1 per 10 at most. I really have no idea, but I just can't imagine it being worse than that. The point being that tracking 10,000 families only requires 1,000 CPA's. Compared to other government programs, it's not that much. You could even fund this privately. Business model? Sell the data. I have absolute faith the federal government would become a customer. Personally, I'm agnostic which way it goes. Both ways have their perils and I'm hard pressed to tell which is worse.
- ↑ Clearly we'll debate over what 'effective' means, but at least we'll have some useful data.
