Government is the only way to solve public problems at scale
Politics is how you change government
The most impressive private companies are creating mRNA vaccines that end pandemics, AI software that drives cars, spacecraft that are 97% cheaper to operate, and are achieving breakthroughs in engineering that allow us to store energy in powerful new ways. This work is inspiring.
Meanwhile, urgent public problems – the housing crisis, climate change, megafires – linger, with no clear solution in sight. If you are studying this, then you are likely apoplectic. The current trajectory of government in the U.S. is towards failure.
This failure is especially pronounced in California, the crown jewel of the American economy and the fifth-largest economy in the world. California, for generations, considered “the land of opportunity” has the highest poverty rate in the country adjusted for cost of living.
Unless something changes, a child born today in California is more likely to grow up in poverty than a child in Mississippi or Alabama.
The biggest driver of the high poverty rate in California is the high cost of housing. High housing costs stem from our self-inflicted housing shortages created by city councils across the state who have made homebuilding mostly illegal in cities. City Councils are for the most part controlled by land-owning older, wealthier, and whiter Californians who understand and exercise modern power. For them, the status quo is working out just fine.
Sadly, we also have a new time of year between fall and winter called ‘fire season’. Megafires are virtually wiping out all of our hard-fought gains for carbon reduction.
These problems are big, but each of them is solvable.
Politics isn’t a dirty word
It is clear that U.S. Government is not as effective as it could be, especially here in California. As my colleague, Misha Chellam says, “there is a growing gap between our stated values and our governmental outcomes.”
And many people from tech are searching for ways to help.
Thankfully, while it’s certainly not easy, it’s more straightforward to improve government than you would think. However, it requires learning how to be effective in politics.
The simple fact is, the pressing public problems we are struggling with today — the housing crisis, climate change, megafires — are bottlenecked by specific problems that can only be fixed by changing government via the ‘API’ of politics.
By politics, I don’t mean running for office. I mean creating a policy vision and partnering with political leaders and organizations to get the policy passed and implemented. Policy design, advocacy, lobbying, political comms, campaigning — the entrepreneurial work of ‘enterprise politics’.
Politics is understandable, predictable, and (somewhat) rational
Most of my colleagues in tech have a strong intuition built up over a lifetime that politics is a scary, unpredictable, lowly profession full of people who lie and try to attack each other, and never seem to get anything done. If you only know politics via the lens of the 'consumer experience' – overbearing political news FOX vs MSNBC – then this perspective makes sense.
So when the answer to how to solve public problems at scale is "learn and participate in politics", a psych researcher could naturally expect some intuitive negative reaction followed by a lot of posthoc explanations from well-intentioned people rationalizing why there must be a better, higher leverage way to solve public problems.
Thankfully, the preconceptions and intuitions people in tech have around politics – their aversion to it – is mostly a misunderstanding of how things get done in politics. Most people in tech are simply unfamiliar with the professional arena of politics.
Many people in tech simply can't make heads or tails of politics. It feels arbitrary to them and driven by emotions. But politics is a complex system that runs by clear, consistent rules, much like startups. You just have to get decently far up the learning curve before things start making a lot of sense.
Politics is a high-leverage use of your time
Politics is incredibly high leverage if you know how to be effective. Politics via government controls ~30% of US GDP directly and the other 70% indirectly via regulation that governs the playing field of industry. Political entrepreneurs from tech working in small teams of 3 - 15 are able to impact billions of governmental investments in weeks/months of effort. This kind of impact easily outstrips venture-backed startups if you know what you are doing.
Most humans naturally avoid confrontation. Yes, people will confront you if you take an active role in politics, that's just the ante for achieving outcomes.
And for what it’s worth, fear of enterprise politics is a feature of the system, not a bug. It is an effective way for insiders who understand enterprise politics to keep newcomers out, enabling them to retain power for themselves.
Politics is how you solve public problems at scale
Politics is the way you change government.
Most of the reasons we tell ourselves to avoid politics are simply misunderstandings. And while there are indeed many unsavory aspects of practicing politics — as there are in every profession — the upside makes it so worth it. Politics simply provides the best opportunity to help leaders create and drive meaningful outcomes for the American people at scale, quickly.
But yes, to participate in politics you will need to be a serious learner, or you will crash and burn. Think of politics as just another complex system to learn and participate in. People from tech are generally quite good at figuring out how to be effective in complex systems.
And there is a growing community of practitioners who are here to help you. APIs are only useful when they are well documented, but enterprise politics today has been almost entirely obscured to outsiders. Our job at Modern Power is to document the ‘API of politics’ well and help guide you to solve pressing problems like housing, climate, and poverty.
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