This is a complex thing to measure, because the largest thing we're trying to do is to create an ideological movement that captures a lot of people in the long run. I admire the DSA a lot and think they're very much an example of the impact I'd like to have (but obviously with what I think are preferable political views).  I think they have had enormous impact on current US politics.

But if you had asked 10 years ago 'What has the DSA accomplished?', it'd be a tough question to answer.  They had a handful of local politicians, but nobody really notable nationally was an out-and-proud DSA member until Bernie Sanders exploded in popularity. It'd be hard to describe them as having a huge impact on US politics at that time, but since the Sanders Moment they've had a massive impact, both in shifting the overton window of the Democratic Party in a lot of ways and in having very high profile members of Congress. I think a longrun path to success for us likely looks similar, in that we have to build the foundation of what we're working on for years and then hopefully at the correct moment we'll be able to leverage it in a huge way to change politics.

More concretely!  I think we've successfully made 'advocate for sensible monetary policy' the socially accepted elite position.  It's been a signature issue for us for as long as we've existed, and and area few people used to care about. Now both center-right and center-left (and even portions of the further right/left) now advocate for how important Bernanke, Yellen and Powell have been and how important it is to keep them independent and free of partisan politics. Goldbugs are now simply laughed off, and when someone like Elizabeth Warren goes after Jay Powell, the majority of the center-left is jumping to dunk on Warren and defend Powell (who is a fantastic Fed chair and should be reappointed).

That's one where I think I can really pinpoint us as key actors, because it's a niche issue and we were so early on it and so loud about it. A lot of other issues it's very difficult to measure impact - when someone votes the way you want, was it truly because of you?  Who knows? I can also say that a lot of talking with officials is talking them out of dumb ideas, and that's influence that never sees the light of day. There's another part of this that will be frustrating as an answer - there are high level politicians who have directly told us that they love what we're doing and basically agree with us/identify with us, but prefer to keep it silent because they avoid ideological labels. I know that sucks as answer, but it's the truth.

One other concrete thing - we have a small number of members who are elected, almost all at very local levels on local city commissions and things like that.  I think it's fair to count whatever they do as direct influence.

The term came from wonkish people who supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary being called 'neoliberals' by Bernie Sanders supporters and general leftists.  There was a sense of "If supporting Hillary and being a wonk is being a neoliberal, fine, I'm a neoliberal".

I'm someone who thinks of myself as an EA, but I don't engage at a deep level with the community at all times, so this is my half-insider-half-outsider view of EA. My general sense is that EA famously focuses on a handful of areas - AI, animal welfare, catastrophic risk management, GiveWell-style medical interventions, etc. I very rarely see EAs talking about 'normal politics' as a place to do good, and I think there are some normal politics issues that have deep promise.

One example is advocacy for increased immigration for rich countries.  The evidence seems incredibly strong to me that increased immigration is an enormously  valuable opportunity. Estimates for this kind of drastic change are always a little fuzzy, but fully open borders would have an impact on the scale of doubling world GDP. It's a multi-trillion dollar bill we're passing on the sidewalk and refusing to pick up. Even making a small difference in immigration policy can produce extremely large benefits. And support for immigration is increasing over time, so there's real promise for change.

There are probably some EA-oriented types thinking about this already, but I think it deserves more prominence. It would also make so many other EA favorites (like AI research) a lot easier to coordinate.

1. - open borders. If there was no political blowback it's a multi-trillion dollar idea.  Second would either be some sort of giant green package focused on carbon taxes + huge amounts of green energy R&D funding + international agreements, or some sort of federal control of zoning where I liberalize the hell out of EVERY city's zoning (this is probably impossible constitutionally, but no blowback!)
2. Go outside Mike :)

I think it's important to realize that different names serve different purposes at different points in time.

If the initial subreddit had called itself the very sober sounding "/r/NewLiberal" from the beginning, I firmly believe that what we are doing right now would not exist.  The subreddit would never have gotten the attention it got, and would never have grown as fast as it did.  Reclaiming the term neoliberal was delightfully subversive and grabbed people's attention - people who loved it and people who hated it.  Before the Neoliberal Project had even been conceived and we were just a loose collection of social media spaces, we had already been profiled in Vice, Gawker, NPR, and many other places.  We had mainstream media attention because the name was controversial. The attention brought in both supporters and attackers, and the inevitable tribal battles that happened forged a sense of community that attracted people further. We've grown pretty fast, all things considered.

So I think there were very strong reasons to lean heavily into the neoliberalism branding early in our existence. And once you lean heavily into a brand, it's hard to divorce yourself from that brand - path dependency is a thing. A lot of our members identify with the neoliberal brand. I also continue to think there's a benefit to being controversial and iconoclastic.  Think about the DSA's rise in popularity, and how the left has successfully redefined 'socialism' from 'the scary communist USSR with a brutal dictatorship and absolute total state control over every part of the economy' to 'socialism is when free college and healthcare'. (which may be a slight exaggeration of how many GenZ socialists understand themselves, but only a slight one)

With that said! I do think it's likely that as we move further into serious advocacy within the political establishment, we'll move more towards a different branding. We already have the Center for New Liberalism which is essentially just a new wrapper on the same ideas, and is helpful to use in instances when 'neoliberal' might scare people off. Clearly it does restrict some things for us and isn't the best branding in all situations. Right now we're letting our chapters choose whichever name is best for them in their local context. I'm ultimately a pragmatist and am willing to use different names in different contexts.

Big fan of many of the groups discussed here, and we're often close with the groups you listed. We've had Matt and Ezra on the podcast several times, as well as Dylan Matthews from Future Perfect to discuss kidney donation.  Love the work that Future Perfect does. I've also hosted on the podcast Glen Weyl, Jason Crawford of the Roots of Progress, and Mark Lutter of the Charter Cities Institute.  Much less a fan of Peter Thiel, whose goals are explicitly anti-liberal (and being an ideological liberal I obviously view this as a very bad thing).

I think your answer is a pretty thorough overview of the space, to be honest.  'Rationalists' generally, like the LessWrong and SlateStarCodex crowd, are heavily EA aligned.  But that's a fairly explicit thing. Economics as a field is fairly fertile ground due to the tendency towards cost-benefit analysis, modeling, etc.

There's definitely a set of principles that underpins our policy beliefs.  A lot of this goes all the way back to classical liberalism - to be a neoliberal means first and foremost that you are a liberal and are grounded in liberal political philosophy.  This means we hold the core liberal values of equality before the law, democratic governance, a market economy, freedoms of press/religion/speech/assembly/etc.

Modern neoliberals take that liberalism and add and emphasize a few things.  Neoliberals are internationalist and globalist, which leads to our support for free trade, free immigration, international institutions, etc.  We are social liberals who fight against racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry. We are capitalists who believe in using a relatively free-market economy to make a richer world, but paired with a welfare state to alleviate poverty and suffering.  And we have an emphasis on evidence-based policy.  All of those are relatively base-level beliefs that inform the policies we support.

Yes, lobbying officials is part of what we do.  We're trying to talk to officials about all the things we care about - taking action on climate change, increasing immigration, etc etc etc. Truthfully I don't have a ton of experience on this front yet - I've been part of the project since its inception in early 2017, but have only been formally employed by PPI for the last 8 months or so. So I'm not a fountain of wisdom on all the best lobbying techniques - this is somewhat beginner level analysis of the DC swamp.

One thing I've noticed is that an ounce of access is worth a pound of attention, which is worth ten pounds of idea.  Access in DC is the real currency, not money.  True high quality access directly to powerful congresspeople or cabinet-level people is phenomenally rare. Access to regular congresspeople, important congressional staffers or mid-level executive branch types is still limited and fought over. Access is golden. The number of hours in a day for any of these decision makers is finite and someone always wants their time.

If you can't get direct access to decision makers, the next best thing is attention (which can lead to access later, if your ideas get traction). There are a lot of small think tanks with very bright people writing quality reports...  that will then go on to be downloaded a grand total of 11 times ever (and maybe 1-2 of those downloads actually got read more than a third of the way through).  Getting important people to pay attention to your work in DC is hard. There are quite a lot of think tanks and non-profits and people writing reports on every imaginable topic under the sun, and you have to stand out somehow.

Our model that we're hoping to lean into as we grow is to take our natural talent for community building and getting online attention and leverage that into attention/access among people who matter in DC (and elsewhere). We have a network of politically active chapters in cities around the country and globe. We have a large, boisterous social media following that we can mobilize. That's a reason for someone to court us, to pay attention and care what we're telling them. I guess maybe that's a piece of advice - if you want a decision maker's attention, if you want access, recognize how that's a limited resource to the decision maker and give them a reason to care beyond just yelling 'My Idea Is Very Good!' like everyone else.

My response here would be that immigration to the UK has probably bought more benefit than the costs of brexit and US immigration more than the costs of Trump. Even if the causality is clear which I'm not sure it is, I'd bet on those being bet positive anyway.

Initially the name came from wonkish Hillary Clinton supporters getting called '****ing neoliberals' or other angry denunciations by Bernie Sanders supporters in the 2016 Dem primary. We kind of ran with it - if being a Clinton supporter is being a neoliberal, fine, I'm a neoliberal.

Once the name was there, it attracted attention like a lightning rod and the community grew very fast.  At the beginning nobody was trying to make this into anything, it was just a bunch of people memeing about central bankers, globalism and woke capitalism. There wasn't a conscious decision about how This Is The Name That Will Eventually Win Suburban Moms And Create Our Political Moment, it was just a small community having fun that turned into a much larger community. By that point the name was the name.

Moving forward, we have some soft-rebranding where some of our chapters choose to go by 'New Liberals' instead of Neoliberal. We are moving into using different names in different contexts.

Another longtermist question: What do you think about Stubborn Attachments?

I'm hesitant to act like I know the One True Answer here because while this is a global phenomenon, I think Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro, Le Pen, Duterte, Erdogan, Modi, Xi, Putin, Orban, etc etc etc all have their own unique circumstances that makes any kind of general answer impossible. Putin is propelled by unique factors relating to the fall of the USSR and the sense of decline/malaise in Russia.  All American politics is inexorably tied into our race relations. Erdogan's boosted by Turkey's tortured history with 'liberal coups' and its historical dance between Islam and secularism. There's no single thing to address all these guys at once.

I'm honestly unsure that individual action can do much to influence the authoritarian wave. I think there are likely geopolitical solutions, but geopolitics is hard and far more messy and complicated than most casual observers understand.

Or I could just answer all of them :)