The Milton Friedman Model of Policy Change
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Claude
Summary. The essay argues that most policy change outside the current Overton Window happens the way Milton Friedman described: institutions have enormous inertia, and only a crisis (real or perceived) makes previously 'impossible' policies politically viable, at which point whichever proposals are 'lying around' get adopted. The author extends this into practical advice for advocates: policymakers are easy to reach and privately receptive to taboo ideas, but pushing hard before a crisis signals that you don't understand how change actually happens and gets you filed as 'not serious.' The recommended strategy is to anticipate plausible future crises, write implementable proposals in advance, publish predictions to establish credibility, and then aggressively exploit the moment when a fitting crisis actually arrives.
Related
- crisis-driven policy change ↔ accumulating warning shots despite improving alignment metrics (AI 2040: Plan A) · Friedman's model assumes a single sharp crisis breaks the inertia, but AI risk may instead unfold as a series of accumulating warning shots that never quite crystallize into 'the' crisis, suggesting the model needs a slow-boil variant for this domain.
- calling your shot by publishing predictions ahead of crises ↔ the bureaucrat's method of incrementally testing friends' offhand ideas into feasible plans (Lighthaven DC - A Feasibility Study) · Both describe the same underlying discipline: keep a binder of proposals or half-formed ideas ready and incrementally tested, so that when an opening (a crisis or a friend's offhand suggestion) appears, you already have something workable to hand over.