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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Analysis of the German Coalition Agreement 2021–2025, published by Yannick Muehlhaeuser on January 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. On 24 November 2021 three German parties (SPD, FDP and the Greens) agreed on a coalition agreement (PDF in German) that sets the German government’s plans for the next four years. Here, we will analyse this agreement with effective altruist considerations in mind. We hope this post will improve the effective altruist community’s model of the new German government and what to concretely expect for various cause areas. Epistemic Status: Overall we expect to have a positive bias towards the new government’s plans. Furthermore, all of us are non-experts in the covered policy fields, limiting the depth of our analyses. Across all authors we’ve spent around 40-50h on this post. As every government is incentivised to present itself in the best possible light, we expect our methodology of focussing solely on the coalition agreement to slightly—though systematically—overrate the coalition. Planning fallacies on the government’s side will likely also limit some policy proposals’ full execution and impact. Max Räuker, Jasper Götting, Marius Hobbhahn, Simon Grimm, Ludwig Bald and Yannick Mühlhäuser contributed equally to this project. Executive Summary Across the government’s agenda we found only a few concrete policy proposals on core EA topics. We considered the following proposals particularly promising: Plans to increase PPE stockpiles Measures to enhance farmed animal welfare Increased and more sophisticated state investments in R&D Streamlining permitting procedures and addressing NIMBYism (largely) technology-agnostic climate change mitigation The government’s continued stance against nuclear energy strikes us as a mistake. Given the COVID-19 pandemic, we also found the lack of ambition on biosecurity surprising. The coalition agreement puts significant focus on shortening and streamlining permitting procedures and other bureaucratic hurdles, which we welcome. German policy-making currently seems more in flux than usual. Hence, the case for EA engagement with German politics arguably got stronger (see conclusion). Background Germany is the wealthiest and most populous member of the EU and plays a key role in international affairs. Germany has high favorability ratings throughout the world and relatively high state capacity. We therefore think that the plans of the next German government are particularly relevant for effective altruists focused on policy. The new government consists of three parties: SPD: center-left social democratic party Greens: progressive party with major focus on climate change FDP: socially liberal, fiscally conservative party All three parties are in general supporters of stronger European integration and social liberalism. Remaining differences are biggest in climate and fiscal policy. The Greens favour a more expansionary fiscal policy, which the FDP opposes. The FDP supports more moderate free-market solutions on climate change, while the Greens endorse more ambitious state-directed projects. We have the impression that coalition agreements are a relatively honest representation of the government’s goals, though the language is often very finely crafted and might hide disagreement. Nevertheless, according to one estimate the last government fulfilled around 80% of its promises—we expect similar to slightly lower results for this government. The rest of this post will first focus on major EA cause areas; further below you will find a summary of other policy changes we thought notable. Core EA Issues Artificial Intelligence Overall, the government’s stance is very vague, e.g. it is not clear how they want to balance regulation and innovation. There is no explicit stance on AGI or AI safety. The government ...