The Libertarian Movement has a Huge Priorities Problem

We need to take a fresh look at how we decide what matters

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In my last post, Stop Guessing What the Most Important Problems Are, I discussed the fact that doing good is much more complicated than almost anyone appreciates. We established that:

1. There are sometimes vast differences between the most and least effective ways of contributing to the common good. I.e. the spread premise.

2. The most effective ways of contributing to the common good are often not obvious. We must use careful reasoning and evidence to identify them.

3. The reason for such vast differences is because of differences in the scale, neglectedness, and tractability of different problems and their respective solutions

4. We should expect the spread premise to hold true regardless of which types of problems we’re interested in solving – whether technological, social, political, or economic.

5. We must use frameworks like the SNT Framework if we want to properly understand the best ways of contributing to the common good.

All of this implies that any movement that wants to be serious about having a high impact should dedicate resources to priority-setting. The libertarian movement is no exception. After all, it may be the case that working on some issues is literally hundreds or thousands of times more impactful at increasing people’s liberties than working on other issues.

Some will read this and (correctly) note that many of the differences in impact of different cause areas (e.g. free speech vs immigration) come down to value-judgements that aren’t easy to empirically research. 

However, there *are* decidedly some differences in impact that *can* be empirically researched. Which strategies toward promoting free speech are most supported by public opinion? How many people would gain free speech if we liberalized immigration laws? How does immigration affect GDP growth? How about housing deregulation or occupational licensing reform? What is the relationship between GDP and liberal freedoms? Which libertarian priorities are closest to being politically viable? Which libertarian problems receive the most vs the least amount of labor-hours and dollar-donations?

These are not questions that can be reasoned a-priori. They also happen to critical uncertainties that deserve serious research! Donor dollars, activists’ time, and other resources are being allocated by the millions in movements such as the liberty movement. Unless some of these crucial kinds of questions are answered, we could be wasting colossal amounts of time. 

In fact, for reasons articulated by Nathan Goodman, we should expect inefficient allocations of resources by-default, in the absence of any correcting mechanism. The correcting mechanisms that enable market efficiency are profit/loss, prices, sales, etc. But there are no analogous mechanisms in the non-profit sector or in any other kind of movement-building apparatus. 

As Goodman suggested, this is why effective altruist methodology is so useful. It can provide a methodological structure for research to be conducted – research that can enable a much better allocation of resources.

That’s exactly why we do see the effective altruist movement engaging not only in object-level research (i.e. researching the issues themselves), but also meta-level research (i.e. researching how much we ought to prioritize different issue areas). Organizations like Rethink Priorities, the Global Priorities Institute, Open Philanthropy, the Future of Humanity Institute, and many others try to figure out what the most pressing problems are and how we should try to solve them.

So, who in the libertarian world is using tools like the SNT Framework to do libertarian priorities research?

At the moment, the answer seems to be: nobody. But, as we mentioned in our first posts on this blog, we hope that Longterm Liberalism can provide an initial intellectual foundation for this project to take place.

In trying to get libertarian priorities research on the map, I became curious about what libertarian scholars who were familiar with the SNT Framework thought about cause-prioritization. So I asked them! 

In my next post, I’ll list out the rankings that Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen, Jessica Flanigan, and Chris Frieman gave for “most important libertarian priorities.” Then, I’ll discuss what their rankings have in common in the hopes that we can begin to illuminate what libertarian priorities ought to be.