Thanks to Aaron Gertler for inviting me to do this AMA.
My name is Jeremiah Johnson, and I'm one of the founders and directors of the Neoliberal Project. The Project is a organization dedicated to advancing liberalism with thousands of members and 70+ chapters around the world. You can find the quick version of what we believe here or here (happy to go into more detail). I help run the Project day to day, host the Neoliberal Podcast, and do basically anything/everything else including social media, political commentary, content creation, managing local chapters, etc.
Aaron was kind enough to invite me here because the EA and neoliberal online communities have a surprising amount of overlap. I've been personally involved in the EA movement in a number of ways. I created a series of charity drives on the neoliberal subreddit that have in total raised more than 1/3 of a million dollars for EA favorites like DeWorm The World and Against Malaria Foundation. I've interviewed EA-related guests on my podcast like Alvin Roth, (Nobel winning economist who created the algorithms for kidney swaps) Robert Wiblin (of 80000 hours), Rob Mather (CEO of Against Malaria), etc. I donate a portion of my salary to GiveWell recommended charities every year, and two years ago I donated a kidney to a stranger after some EA-aligned people convinced me that it was a good choice (I had a popular AMA on donating a kidney here, but happy to answer any questions here as well).
Ask Me Anything about:
- Purely EA topics like
- Kidney donation - either the policy side or my personal experiences going through the process
- Raising money for AMF, and why I like malaria bednets so much
- The intersection between the neoliberal community and the EA community
- Why I think politics is an underrated way to do good that the EA community sometimes overlooks
- The Neoliberal Project, neoliberalism, politics or political philosophy, etc.
- Or anything else that seems relevant or that you're curious about.
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.