Working in Government: Reading Group Notes 9/23

In this week’s group dinner and discussion, we examined “How to Have a Big Impact in Government & Huge Organisations, Based on 16 Years’ Experience in the White House.” The podcast features a conversation between Rob Wiblin, director of Research at 80,000 hours, an organization offering research-based career advice on maximizing one’s positive impacts on the world, and Tom Kalil, who worked under Clinton and Obama Administrations on science and Technology. 7 undergraduate and 18 graduate students attended the meeting.

We identified personal connections, right timing, and communication skills as key to one’s influence in government. According to Kalil, while individual genius may be more valued in academia and in the EA community, government work more often requires civil servants to find a coalition of people to work together for a common cause. Whereas a scholar may publish his articles whenever he wants, but an officer may want to avoid pushing important new tasks towards the end of an administration, when the work proves less likely to come to fruition as agencies had already been buried with piles of work. Although in the academia and the EA community individuals are relatively informed, government officials focusing on expert issue areas must become adept at translating technical jargon into understandable language.

Many of our members saw going into politics as a trade-off. One the one hand, a politician gains greater influence and may prove more capable of making an impact. On the other hand, he or she would be exposed to corruption and nepotism in a sizeable bureaucratic system. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian famous for portraying the president, was raised as a potential example of a lack of real experience and ability on a political platform. To mitigate these adverse effects, A government needs not only more mechanisms that guarantee transparency, but also more coordinating institutions similar to the national security committee and the national economic committee.