Abstract
A review of the potential importance of undertaking different causes for improving society in the United States. Considerations include estimated cost or benefit per year of doing so, the uncertainty of these figures, and issues regarding the types of costs and benefits used in the calculations. Relative importance is given in terms of annual dollars, but the authors emphasize that the types of benefits considered in different issues are not comparable. Causes given uncertainty-weighted importance in the hundreds of billions of dollars include improving democracy in the United States, implementing macroeconomic policies to reduce deadweight loss, improving public health outcomes, subsidizing organ transplants, expanding access to the internet, reforming agricultural subsidies and trades, implementing defense policies that reduce spending, opposing climate change, increasing immigration, conducting health research, reforming sentencing for criminal offenses, and implementing policies that result in software patent reform and factory farm reform. Causes with intermediate uncertainty-weighted importance in the tens of billions of dollars include supporting drug and alcohol policies to enhance public health, regulating labor to improve occupational licensing outcomes, and zoning reform. – AI-generated abstract.
