Vaccines are better than you think — plus Robinhood, schools, and hurricanes. By Matthew Yglesias.

Vaccines are better than you think — plus Robinhood, schools, and hurricanes. By Matthew Yglesias.

January 29, 2021.

Happy Saturday — here’s some quick takes.

Vaccines are really good

When you read in the press that a vaccine is 90 percent effective vs another one that’s only 70 percent effective, do you know what that means? It turns out that what everyone is measuring in their Covid trials is the share of people in the control group who develop symptoms vs the share of people in the treatment group. That focus on symptoms has a bad news aspect that’s been widely publicized — they measured symptoms rather than doing constant PCR tests so some of the vaccinated people may have had asymptotic infections, and it’s possible that vaccinated people can still spread the virus.

Less widely publicized is the good news: None of the people in the Pfizer/Moderna treatment groups died or even fell seriously ill and had to be hospitalized.

This is typical of vaccines. For virology reasons that I don’t really understand, flu vaccines have very low efficacy as measured in this way. One of the main reasons doctors recommended them anyway is that the immune system head start they provide greatly reduces the severity of flu infections even when it doesn’t stop them. These days they vaccinate kids against chickenpox, so kids mostly don’t get chicken pox. But even more remarkable, when they do get chickenpox these days it’s a “sick for a few days” kind of thing not “miss weeks of school while suffering in agony.”

This is a really big deal with regard to the lower efficacy we are expecting from the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. A vaccine that’s only 70 percent effective at blocking infection would be expected to generate a larger than that reduction in hospitalizations and an even larger reduction in death. Which is to say that especially as a solution for the non-elderly, a vaccine like that is actually really good. Giving everyone under 65 a 70% effective vaccine sounds a little lame, but would eliminate almost all the loss of life among the non-elderly and also take a huge burden off America’s hospital system. These vaccines are really good.

Knowledge is dangerous

(Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds)

Something I’ve been thinking about these days is that there was a view in the winter of 2008-2009 that some legislation might pass with moderate Democrats voting yes on cloture but no on final passage. That’s how the Assault Weapons Ban got done in 1993, and on the flipside it’s also how Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito got confirmed to the Supreme Court.

Then one day, this once-common legislative gambit went away.

This sometimes gets chalked up to “polarization,” but I think the key point is that the bait and switch went in both directions. Several Democrats voted no on Alito to register that they disagree with his jurisprudence without wanting to be obstructionist. Later that would be untenable and you have to actually try to obstruct. That’s consistent with polarization. But several Democrats voted no on the assault weapons ban without obstructing its adoption, I assume because they privately favored it even if their official political position was more pro-gun.

What’s common to the two cases is that the electorate became more sophisticated about this kind of game and less tolerant of funny business. By the same token, today a very sophisticated political observer will recognize that however deranged Marjorie Taylor Greene is, 95 percent of her job is just to vote to concentrate power in Kevin McCarthy’s hands rather than Nancy Pelosi. So if you like tax cuts and hate abortion, you vote for her. An earlier, less-knowledgeable public would be more likely to reject someone like that.

Robinhood is marketing

The Reddit bandits trying to make money by exploiting the power of collective action to ruin a handful of short-selling hedge funds is a fun story, but a lot of folks are imbuing it with a level of drama and class politics that it doesn’t deserve.

Let’s be real. Just because some hedge funds are on one side of a trade doesn’t mean that causing those funds to lose money is striking a blow against “hedge funds” or “Wall Street.” There are a lot of funds! They make a lot of different investment bets. The way you strike a blow against hedge funds is to subject their income to a higher level of taxation.

The name Robinhood is a clever marketing gimmick for an app. But day trading is not stealing from the rich to give to the poor. It’s in fact a great way to lose money. This can be obscured by the fact that during a bull market, probably any stock you pick will go up. That can make it look like picking stocks is an amazing way to make money and get over on the big boys. But index funds go up in bull markets too. And they have less risk and low fees.

Hurricanes and municipal finance

Since 1980, over 2,000 local governments in US Atlantic and Gulf states have been hit by a hurricane. Such natural disasters can exert severe budgetary pressure on local governments’ ability to provide critical infrastructure, goods, and services. We study local government revenue, expenditure, and borrowing dynamics in the aftermath of hurricanes. These shocks impact, both, current local public resources through reducing tax revenues and expenditures, as well as future local public resources through increasing the cost of debt. Major hurricanes have much larger effects than minor hurricanes: major storms cause local revenues to fall by 6 to 7%. These losses persist at least ten years after a hurricane strike, leading to a 6% decline in expenditures on important public goods and services and a significant increase in the risk of default on municipal debt. Our results reveal how hurricanes can create a “vicious cycle” for local governments by increasing the cost of debt at critical moments after a hurricane strike, when localities are in greatest need of funding sources. Cities deemed riskier by ratings agencies face higher borrowing costs and thereby face constraints to invest in climate change adaptation. Municipalities with a racial minority composition 1 standard deviation above the sample mean suffer expenditure losses more than 2 times larger and debt default risk 8 times larger than municipalities with average racial composition in the decade following a hurricane strike. These results suggest that climate change can exacerbate environmental justice challenges.

I would say the lesson here is less specifically about climate change than about the broad desirability of creating some kind of system to ensure local governments against fiscal shocks.

School reopening

After nearly a year of absence, my kid is supposed to resume in-person school on Monday (though it may be delayed another day because of the snow).

Part of that process has opened my eyes to a dynamic that I think is a little obscured in some of the media discourse on this. The low-income families who I think of as being disproportionately in need of in-person school services are much more reluctant to actually send their kids back to school than the upscale professionals who are better equipped to supervised remote school. And one of the big reasons, it seems to me, is that all families correctly perceive that the actual public health situation is not greatly different in February 2021 relative to where it was in August 2020. But they have different interpretations of what that means.

In yuppie circles, it’s largely taken for granted that this is a political decision, with the school system only belatedly doing what it should have done at the start of the school year. But of course, the city doesn’t come out and say that.

So a lot of the lower-income families see a situation that was unsafe in August and hasn’t changed that much in the subsequent months and wonder why they’re being asked to trust it now. If you’ve been consuming a lot of highbrow media over the past six months, you know how much the school reopening decisions have been driven by union politics — whether you think the unions are right or wrong on this, the difference between which school systems reopen and which don’t is clearly the political clout of the union rather than facts about the virus. But lots of people don’t consume lots of highbrow media, take city officials’ statements and face value, and rightly note that what they’re saying doesn’t quite make sense.

The "cancel culture" debate is dumb. By Matthew Yglesias

The "cancel culture" debate is dumb. By Matthew Yglesias

SlowBoring.com

January 27, 2021. 

Hey folks: It’s Thursday and “cancel culture” has been back in the discourse this week.

I think it’s a stupid term and I agree with everyone who thinks conservatives have been simultaneously incoherent and hypocritical in their take on this topic. I don’t use the term and don’t think that I ever will.

But I will say that I think the general dialogue on this issue has gotten too focused on the particulars of Twitter dynamics and the possibility of people getting fired for bad tweets. There are a bunch of interesting questions about social norms around social media use, and a bunch of other interesting questions about at-will employment and workplace norms. But what I actually think is roiling left of center circles is not these process questions, but questions of substance.

When I was a kid in the 1990s, it was common for people to call things “gay” as a kind of generic insult. But kids who went to Grace Church School in Greenwich Village didn’t do that — it was a super pro-LGBT community, and all the adults would give you shit about it. Then for high school, I went uptown and it was “gay” this and “gay” that, but the students insisted that they didn’t mean it in a homophobic way, and it was just kind of tolerated. Obviously, there were many places in the United States in 1997 where people would just say “there’s nothing wrong with homophobia.” But that wasn’t the culture of my high school on the Upper East Side. Anti-gay bigotry was definitely wrong; there was just this question of whether or not that particular slang counted. I hope people have changed their view of this since then — change can be good!

But not every change is good. And one thing that’s happening is that we are arguing not about whether or not it’s okay to say racist stuff, but about which stuff is racist.

Ibram Kendi’s redefinition of racism

Ibram Kendi followed up his excellent book Stamped From The Beginning with the less academic, better-selling How To Be An Antiracist, which I think is a good book that’s worth reading and engaging with. But like many good books that are worth reading and engaging with, I don’t agree with all of it.

The main thrust of the book is that Kendi is self-consciously trying to redefine racism.

There are a few steps to this but his main idea is that any form of inequality between racial groups is racist (by definition) and that failure to support policy measures to close that gap is, again, racist.

And he takes this in fairly extreme directions. Where I think most progressives would traditionally have said that Black children’s lower test scores and high school graduation rates reflect structural disadvantages, Kendi argues that calling attention to this “achievement gap” is itself racist.

The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade Black minds and legally exclude Black bodies. We degrade Black minds every time we speak of an “academic-achievement gap” based on these numbers. The acceptance of an academic-achievement gap is just the latest method of reinforcing the oldest racist idea: Black intellectual inferiority. The idea of an achievement gap means there is a disparity in academic performance between groups of students; implicit in this idea is that academic achievement as measured by statistical instruments like test scores and dropout rates is the only form of academic “achievement.” There is an even more sinister implication in the achievement-gap talk—that disparities in academic achievement accurately reflect disparities in intelligence among racial groups. Intellect is the linchpin of behavior, and the racist idea of the achievement gap is the linchpin of behavioral racism.

My view is that it is 100 percent correct to say that if someone tweets something racist he should be criticized. And if someone is persistently tweeting racist things, you’d want to fire him. But I don’t remotely believe that saying the racial achievement gap is a real thing and a real problem in American society is racist. There’s a disagreement here not about “is it okay to say racist stuff,” but rather about what stuff is racist.

Kendi is wrong about this

My sincere hope is that Kendi could actually be convinced that his analysis of this topic is wrong.

For starters, academic achievement is not the same thing as intelligence. My dad is a smart guy but he didn’t graduate high school so there’s plenty of random math stuff that most college-bound people learn that he never did. I’m sure he could learn to pass an AP Calculus test if it seemed important, but it doesn’t, so he hasn’t done it. If you can pull off what dad did and get a novel published when you’re a teenager and then drop out of school and go on to have a successful career as a writer, then good for you. But the expected value of this strategy is low, and for most people, learning skills in school is important aside from questions of how smart you are.

There’s also tons of research like:

Kids do worse in school when they’re food insecure

Kids do worse in school when they survive a school shooting

Kids do worse in school when they have racist teachers (Kendi himself actually says this in the book)

Kids do worse in school when they lack stable housing

Now what would be convenient would be if this all meant that school is meaningless somehow. But it’s not. When kids face problems early in life that make it hard for them to learn, the consequences of that ripple forward. Black kids are more likely to suffer from disadvantages outside of school. They are also more likely to be assigned to less experienced and less effective teachers, which makes things worse.

My point here is not particularly novel. Kendi was criticized on this specific achievement gap point by Kelefah Sanneh in his 2019 review of Kendi’s book for The New Yorker and in Randall Kennedy’s review for The Washington Post.

But of course, despite those criticisms, Kendi is a more prominent figure today than he was when those reviews were published. And to the best of my knowledge, he stands by his view, and his book is now widely recommended in education circles. As I say, I think it’s a book worth reading. But I do worry about its use in schools precisely because its specific take on education policy seems really wrongheaded.

This is a dispute about the substance of the issue — not “is it okay to say racist stuff about education?” but “is it in fact racist to see significance in Black kids’ lower test scores or does the existence of a gap just show that the tests are racist?”

The culture of conformity

It’s fine as a matter of process to sanction people for bigotry. It’s also fine for standards of what is considered bigoted to change over time. We have had a lot of change in that regard in my lifetime, and much of the change has been warranted and good. But some of it is bad and worth criticizing.

Now here’s where we get to “culture.”

My perception of one of the ways in which the media industry has changed is that it used to be the case that editors would actively encourage writers to lean into addressing this kind of controversial subject. It would stir things up, attract attention, set the agenda, and broaden the terms of the debate. That’s how James Bennet edited the Atlantic when I worked there, and it’s the approach he took to the New York Times opinion section until he rather suddenly stopped working there. They don’t Slatepitch at Slate anymore. When I was on The Ezra Klein Show in September we talked about this a lot, and I think it’s a good conversation since Ezra and I have very similar substantive opinions about American politics but different views about this transformation in journalism.

Something I’m a little obsessed with is how these days on social media you’ll get scolded sometimes for failing to “read the room” and people have created the character of “the contrarian” as a villain.

I have a friend who in real-life social settings totally refuses to read the room and insists on being a contrarian who picks little arguments with people rather than letting conversations flow. I like this guy a lot, but I think that’s legitimately bad manners and an annoying way to behave. But I don’t think journalism should be done like you’re a guest at a dinner party. This trend isn’t “incipient totalitarianism” or the end of free speech but it’s making publications dull and tedious while depriving the audience of interesting and informative content.

Some of this, I hope, is just a reaction to Trump. It was natural, to an extent, to want to adopt a “no enemies on the left” approach to an emergency moment for American democracy. But I do wish that progressive media people would keep in mind that what we do has much more impact on how progressive spaces themselves are governed — both in the sense of the internal norms of progressive institutions and in the politics of big cities and blue states — than we do on the choices of swing voters. If the only people who push back on certain unsound left-wing ideas are right-wing people, then those ideas will end up triumphing in blue areas with real consequences. It’s necessary, at times, not to fail to read the room but precisely to read it and pick the fight anyway. And to have institutions that support that.

So there is a real procedural aspect to this, in terms of whether controversial takes are valued or stigmatized and what kinds of controversies are welcomed. But fundamentally it’s not a question about who should be fired or what should happen on Twitter, it’s a question about which ideas are right, which are wrong, and which are in the middle ground where we need to see some debate and argument to make up our minds.

You can't blame bad leaders for everything. By Matthew Yglesias.

You can't blame bad leaders for everything. By Matthew Yglesias. 

The public is troublingly tolerant of bad Covid response

Matthew Yglesias

15 min ago

January 25, 2021. 

Hey folks. The impressive pace of mRNA vaccine development helped spark a December burst of what Noah Smith called “techno-optimism” in a post where he grouped me in with the techno-optimists.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I agree and disagree with in that characterization. And I guess the sentiment I would affiliate myself with is more what I might call tech-positivity than techno-optimism. By that I mean not an affinity for America’s existing big high-tech companies, which I think are a mixed bag, but a belief that technological progress is good and important and should be embraced and encouraged.

The reason I’m not sure I would call myself a techno-optimist is that I don’t think tech-positivity is very widely shared, and I think it’s a huge open question as to whether transformative technologies will actually be used in the future.

One way to explain my view is in terms of two different books Tyler Cowen wrote during the Obama years. One, The Great Stagnation, was politically important and influential because it helped convince right-wing people that the post-1975 slowdown in income growth was a real and significant problem, something they spent most of the previous twenty years denying. But its specific thesis about why that was — a slowdown in the rate of technological progress — seemed a little under proven unless taken as a tautology.* A few years later he published The Complacent Class, which has not been as influential but which I think better diagnoses the problem: the public itself is too small-c conservative and averse to change, so we get stagnation because that’s what people want.

Conor Friedersdorf said over the weekend that the sluggish vaccine rollout was “the biggest failure of American institutions in [his] lifetime.” That’s overstated and got some pushback. But I follow an ideologically diverse group of smart people, and something they all have in common is significant frustration with the overall quality of the Covid response in both the United States and Europe, up to and including the vaccine distribution.

Conor Friedersdorf 

@conor64

The slow pace of vaccinations is the biggest failure of American institutions in my lifetime. Bigger than the Iraq War, bigger than 9/11. The deaths pile up daily and I see nothing close to adequate urgency among federal, state, or local leaders.

January 24th 2021

130 Retweets621 Likes

But something that I think is a little underrated in pan-ideological Frustrated About The Virus Response circles is the extent to which the mass public doesn’t agree with us. The US seems to be doing better than Europe at vaccinations but worse at non-pharmaceutical interventions. But neither has done particularly well at either. And critically, none of the relevant electorates seem particularly upset about it. Aversion to change is triumphing over technological progress.

Voters are okay with wasting vaccine doses

As an example, here’s a Slow Boring World Exclusive poll result that shook me when I first saw it.

Data for Progress asked people if we should put ourselves in the situation of needing to throw out expired vaccine doses if that’s what it takes to ensure that there’s no line-cutting, and there is strong support for wasting doses across parties and among both working-class and college-educated voters.

Trying to talk me off the ledge, Ethan Winter from DfP cautions, “Attitudes may also shift as the Biden administration takes charge and vaccination programs proceed more quickly and, hopefully, with more transparency — building trust in the process.”

I certainly hope so! Still, the fact remains that a lot of people I read seem to have a vision of fussbudget bureaucrats standing in the way of simple common sense on this topic. But that’s not the case.

And while I wouldn’t read too much into a single poll asking an unfamiliar question, there’s a pretty broad pattern in both the United States and Europe where voters seem pretty happy with the way things are going.

There’s little evidence of Covid backlash

A lot of liberals spent 2020 experiencing emotional whiplash as they were first appalled that the Covid death toll didn’t generate a total collapse in GOP political standing, then encouraged by polling that indicated maybe it did, then depressed by the election results which suggested the polls were 3-4 points off the whole time.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths on his watch just didn’t hurt Trump that much.

But consider France, which has done a bit better than the United States in avoiding deaths and quite a bit worse in terms of its economy and vaccine distribution. Emmanuel Macron is not popular (French presidents never are), but he’s never fully given up his spring “rally-round-the-flag” Covid bump.

New York State has had the highest death toll of any US state; people have labored under fairly strict restrictions, and the early vaccine rollout there had some high profile snafus. But a January 19 poll said that “two-thirds of those polled say they approve of the way Cuomo is handling the pandemic,” including 41 percent of Republicans. New York is a rare state that lacks term limits, and 48 percent say they’re ready to back him for an extraordinary fourth term. This percentage is roughly the same as it was during his second term on the potential support for his third. Twenty-eight percent of New York Democrats say they’d like to see another governor, which is a healthy number, but not enough to beat him in a primary, and unless Republicans can pull a really strong candidate out of their hat, they’ll get crushed in a very blue state.

An effective-for-Europe response like Germany’s has generated a big, sustained improvement for Angela Merkel’s CDU.

And this is the general trend throughout Europe: incumbents are not suffering because of Covid. Here’s Spain.

Recall that the financial crisis and ensuing austerity really shattered the Spanish political system, leading to the rise of three new parties (Podemos, Vox, and Ciudadanos). But the new fragmented party system has been hardly impacted by the virus in one of the hardest-hit countries in the world.

In Italy, polling has shifted, but what’s happened is the populist right party Lega is losing ground to Silvio Berlusconi’s old populist right party while the incumbent governing coalition holds steady.

American college-educated professionals can end up a little confused about this, because most of them (us) are outraged about the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic. But if we are honest, we will admit that we were outraged by Trump’s conduct during the 2016 campaign, outraged by the Access Hollywood tape, outraged by the Muslim Ban, outraged by ACA repeal, outraged by his regressive tax cuts, outraged by his climate denialism, and generally in a constant state of high-pitched outrage about Trump since long before Covid.

Leaders all around the world have different baseline levels of popularity. Macron’s was low; Cuomo’s was high; Trump’s was in the middle. But what we see everywhere is that approval bumps are more common than approval declines, and nobody has collapsed in the face of this.

What people protest for

AstraZeneca and Oxford University made a vaccine that, as best I can tell, virtually all scientists believe based on the available evidence is safe and effective against Covid-19.

But if you live in the United States of America, you’re not allowed to take it. That’s because AstraZeneca kinda botched their Phase 3 trial, and the data isn’t considered sufficiently high-quality for the FDA to issue an Emergency Use Authorization. From the FDA’s point of view, holding off on approval is particularly wise because we already have two very good mRNA vaccines in use, and it’s widely believed that a third vaccine from Johnson & Johnson will be approved soon anyway; plus, AstraZeneca has another trial underway that should avoid the problems and get them approval sooner or later.

Still, I want to emphasize that while most (though not all) scientists I’ve spoken to support the FDA view of this, none of them are expressing to me serious doubts that the vaccine will in fact be approved.

And if you go back to October/November coverage of the mRNA vaccines, you’ll see the same thing — scientists were talking about when the vaccines would be approved based on completion of the process, not experiencing serious doubts as to whether they would be approved. It turns out to be quite rare for a vaccine candidate to make it to a Phase 3 trial and then turn out not to work. The point of the process is to set a very high evidentiary bar for vaccine approvals — a bar that one might think should be lowered given the particular circumstances of the current pandemic.

What’s striking to me, however, is that not only hasn’t the AstraZeneca vaccine been approved for use even on a special “right to try” basis, but that there is absolutely no movement in favor of such approval. And that’s not because Americans lack the know-how or will to protest things. Just during the past twelve months, we’ve seen big stop-the-steal rallies, huge anti-racism protests, and several rounds of protests against non-pharmaceutical interventions. The takeaway from the anti-lockdown protests was that Americans are too individualistic to abide by prolonged business closures. The takeaway from all three rounds of protests is that Americans of diverse ideological backgrounds have profound mistrust of America’s governing institutions. This is a country so taken with the spirit of liberty that we can’t get people to endure the relatively minor inconvenience of wearing a mask while out and about.

The minority of libertarians who aren’t deeply invested in being Covid denialists would like you to believe that the fussbudget FDA is standing between you and the AstraZeneca vaccine. But it’s clear that the American people are absolutely not prepared to let public health experts tell them what they can and can’t do. If people were clamoring for faster approvals, we’d get them. But there’s no Covid Era version of ActUp demanding access. If public health bureaucracies ask people to change, a large share of the population declines to do it. If they try to force people to change, you get significant resistance. But if they block change, then the public is fine with that.

It’s the complacent class.

Technology is not enough

I’ll stop talking about vaccine approvals now since I’m not knowledgeable enough to discuss the details. I just want to make the point that if you look at public resistance to masks and other NPIs, it’s clear that public acceptance of the FDA’s view of vaccine approvals is not driven by universal deference to public health experts.

So let’s talk about something else. Eli Dourado wrote a really useful roundup of technologies he considers promising for the 2020s and one of them related to something I actually know a lot about — mass transit in the Washington, DC area:

The Boring Company has a small, near-operational “loop” under construction in Las Vegas. The project will whiz people around the convention center at up to 155 mph. Expansion plans include the Las Vegas Strip, the airport, and eventually connecting to Los Angeles. Another Boring project, currently mired in environmental review, is the DC-Baltimore Loop, which would connect the two cities’ downtowns in 15 minutes. All of Boring’s loops are designed to be compatible with hyperloop requirements, which would eventually enable 600-mph travel between major cities.

Although the full realization of this technology—a nationwide hyperloop network—is unlikely by 2030, even the 150-mph version is worth following. The time and hassle cost of travel is an important input into the gravity model of trade. I expect the DC-Baltimore Loop to significantly increase economic activity between the two cities—especially helping to revitalize Baltimore, as it would become easier to live there and work in DC.

Here’s the thing about connecting DC and Baltimore by rail: the current 30 minute travel time on the Acela is already really short. When you consider that a person still needs to get to and from the train stations in both cities, and the fact that neither Penn Station in Baltimore nor Union Station in DC is really optimally located, the hyperloop’s improvement on total travel time would be pretty small. The other issue is that people don’t actually take the Acela between DC and Baltimore because the fares are too high because the seats are valuable for through-service to Philadelphia and New York.

The real rail connection between DC and Baltimore is the MARC Penn Line and MARC Camden Line commuter rails. These connections, however, could be greatly improved by adopting the German S-Bahn model, best exemplified by the S-Bahn Mitteldeutschland connecting Leipzig and Halle, even more so than the better-known ones in Berlin and Munich. For exactly the reasons Dourado offers, upgrading our commuter rail to the S-Bahn standard of frequent, cheap, convenient service could have huge benefits for the region.

What has to happen?

Instead of commuter trains from Maryland stopping at Union Station and taking up valuable track space, they should run through the First Street Tunnel to the L’Enfant Plaza station, then over the Long Bridge to the job centers at the Pentagon and the new Amazon development at Crystal City, and then out to all the Virginia Rail Express stops in the Virginia suburbs (and of course the VRE trains should do the same in reverse).

All the relevant tracks should be electrified so that instead of diesel locomotives we can use electrical multiple units (like you see on any metro or subway system) that can stop and start faster.

All the stations should have high platforms so people can get on and off the trains without the use of stairs — good for accessibility and parents with strollers, but also lets you make the station stops faster.

Eliminate the bulk of the conductors who check tickets and replace them with a much smaller squad of people who do sporadic proof of payment checks and fine you if you haven’t paid.

With operating costs lower, you can cut fares and boost frequency. The trains also move faster, which is nice and helps with frequency.

Last but by no means least, you need an integrated zoned fair system that aligns the S-Bahn model with WMATA and the various Maryland and Virginia transit agencies, so that the amount you pay is based on how far you ride regardless of whether you take the Metro or the S-Bahn or transfer to or from a bus or whatever else.

This is not a “we don’t need a hyperloop; we just need to adopt German best practices for regional rail” take. Faster intercity trains could be very useful in a different context. It’s just to say that for the particularities of the DC-Baltimore area, the S-Bahn model is actually superior because it includes the secondary job centers at Crystal City, L’Enfant Plaza, and BWI Airport, as well as onward connections via WMATA and the Maryland Transit Administration to the DC central business district.

And it’s all done with long-established proven technology! None of which, again, is to dump on Elon Musk’s efforts to develop better technology. It’s just to say that if America isn’t going to use the best technology that exists today, there’s no particular reason to assume that we’ll use hypothetical better technology in the future.

Why are we stuck with bad commuter rail?

Stakeholders in the Greater Washington area have been talking about MARC/VRE through-running forever, and it looks like Ralph Northam has finally gotten the money together to make the upgrades on the Long Bridge over the Potomac River that you need to accomplish this.

I’m glad to see that. But it only makes it more frustrating that we’re not talking about the full suite of improvements that would truly unlock the potential of regional rail for the Baltimore/Washington area. So why don’t we do it? Well, electrifying tracks would cost money. And building higher platforms would cost money. But also you’d need to talk Amtrak into not price-gouging MARC on using the existing electrical infrastructure on the tracks that the Penn Line runs on. And you’d need to work out the bureaucratic turf between MARC and VRE. You’d need to do something about the fact that the infrastructure needs are larger in Virginia than in Maryland but the economic gains are larger in Maryland than in Virginia**, so you have to decide who pays. And of course the unions aren’t going to like the idea of laying off conductors.

All that said, these are hardly insuperable obstacles.

Besides which, it’s not like the train conductors union is such an overwhelming political force in the United States that it’s impossible to imagine a politician picking a fight with them and winning. The issue is simply that the public would need to want improved train service enough for politicians who don't deliver it to pay a meaningful political cost. By the same token, while all these track and platform upgrades would cost money, it’s honestly not that much money in the scheme of things — we’re talking about a swathe of the country that is both high-income and politically liberal and could easily afford it.

The issue on all these fronts isn’t that the political obstacles are so daunting, but simply that they are non-zero. To make it work, you’d need to pick a couple of political fights. You’d also need to deal with annoying stuff like how the Union Station building in DC is owned by the US Department of Transportation, which doesn’t really care about Maryland commuters.

But at the end of the day, if the elected officials of Maryland and northern Virginia were all convinced that the mass public was frustrated with the state of regional rail in the area, they could get this done. They don’t do it because there isn’t really strong evidence of a big desire for change.

Voters are angry — but complacent

Over the weekend, Bernie Sanders tried to psyche his fellow Democrats into taking decisive action on curbing the filibuster and enacting sweeping legislative change by arguing that the public punishes parties that don’t deliver boldness.

Bernie Sanders 

@BernieSanders

In 1994, Democrats in power lost big because they were not bold.  

In 2010, it happened again. 

If we do not take aggressive action NOW to protect working families, it will happen in 2022. 

January 23rd 2021

17,535 Retweets94,040 Likes

Ezra Klein wrote something similar a couple of days earlier quoting Sanders.

To me, though, it’s important to draw a distinction here. Klein and Sanders are right to think that more decisive action to improve the economic situation would have mitigated Democrats’ losses in 2010 just through the basic mechanism of “voters like having money.”

But House Democrats who voted against the Affordable Care Act did something like 5-15 points better than similarly situated members who voted for it. In general, public opinion on issues shifts against the incumbent president’s party. Republicans suffered midterm losses in 1982, 1986, 1990, 2006, and 2018), and I doubt Sanders would say that’s because they were insufficiently right-wing. The most likely explanation is that we see a recurring pattern of overreach and backlash. The public wants to see the government stabilize the economy but generally prefers politicians who avoid big controversial change. Promising to be bipartisan polls really well, then informed people get angry that these promises amount to a promise to not do very much, but that just goes to show that voters like the idea of a politician who’s not doing very much.

After all, look at the best-polling governors in America — are they hard-chargers who fuse ideological zeal with technical competence to drive forward a rapid pace of change that becomes a model for the country? Of course not. They’re moderate Republicans in northeastern states who serve as checks on the excesses of the state legislature but don’t push contentious right-wing ideas. Andrew Cuomo, whose critics keep pointing out that he’s a kind of fake progressive who keeps deliberately trying to sabotage Democratic control of the state legislature, is also well-liked by his constituents, who don’t mind this idea. These are White Guys In Suits who sort of perform governance without actually rocking the boat too much.

And that’s what the voters want.

The people are wrong!

We live in an era where a certain style of populist sentiment has overwhelming clout.

If you tune in to cable news at 8:00 PM, both Tucker Carlson and Chris Hayes will be on their respective channels explaining to you that elites are running the country into the ground and we need to listen to the wise voice of the people. There is nothing less welcome in any venue than to simply state that the people are mistaken about certain important things.

And to be clear, my anti-populist stance on this is not meant to be in tension with my general view that progressive activists should pay more attention to public opinion and Democrats should try harder to make sure they are doing popular things. It’s precisely because I’m not dug in on populist rhetoric that I’m able to say practical politicians need to trim their sails sometimes. There are good policy ideas that are also popular. And it’s really important to focus on those ideas, because lots of other good policy ideas are unpopular and you’ve got to be careful if you want to win.

But ultimately to build a better future, we can’t just implement ideas that are good and popular. We also need ideas that are good but currently unpopular.

And by and large I don’t think it’s possible, viable, or desirable to do those ideas by tricking people or creating anti-democratic political structures. We need, on some level, to persuade more people that specific changes are desirable. And even more than that, we need to persuade more people that the idea of change and progress is desirable and we should be more skeptical of do-nothing leaders and conservative processes and more open to getting things done.

~~ footnotes ~~

* There is a thing in economics called Total Factor Productivity which is essentially the unexplained residual when you try to figure out why productivity has risen. Some of it is you’re using more capital goods. Some of it is your workers are more skilled. And the rest is TFP. Some economists just call Total Factor Productivity “technology” and therefore derive the result that technological progress drives income growth. To me this is basically phlogiston theory and not an explanation of anything at all. Brief example: on any reasonable use of English words, the printing press was an incredibly important technological innovation but it didn’t drive much productivity growth because the book industry just wasn’t a big deal economically.

** Baltimore is much bigger and poorer than any population center served by VRE. The Pentagon/Amazon job cluster in Northern Virginia is really useful to gain access to. And VRE already serves L’Enfant Plaza. So while Virginians would of course gain new ability to commute into Maryland, quantitatively most of the traffic will go the other way.

© 2021 Matthew Yglesias. See privacy, terms and information collection notice

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Japanese Twitterverse parroted calls of U.S. election fraud, study finds

Japanese Twitterverse parroted calls of U.S. election fraud, study finds

January 24, 2021

Yomiuri Shimbun file photo

Supporters of then U.S. President Donald Trump march in Washington on Nov. 14, claiming there was fraud in the presidential election.

The Yomiuri ShimbunNearly 70% of Japanese Twitter posts related to the U.S. presidential election contained unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud, a Yomiuri Shimbun study has found.

Of Japanese language posts that trended in November and December last year, a majority echoed rhetoric from the United States of a “rigged” election, a trend that continued even after the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory was confirmed. The data revealed Japan’s susceptibility to the dangers of social media as a megaphone for the spread of false stories.

The study, which was conducted with JX Press Corp., analyzed Japanese language posts that directly addressed the presidential election and had garnered at least 2,000 retweets. The posts were then categorized as containing “false information,” “unsubstantiated information,” or “criticisms/opinions predicated on fraud,” per reports by the U.S. Federal Election Commission and state election agencies.

In the week starting Nov. 4, there were 186 Japanese tweets that trended in response to the initial ballot tallies. Of these posts, 68% questioned the integrity of the election results, accounting for approximately 500,000 retweets. There were 75 posts that suggested the election had been manipulated in Biden’s favor, citing false or unsubstantiated claims of ballot counterfeiting and vote tampering. There were also 52 posts critical of Biden, such as those branding him an “enemy of the world.”

The study found that 13% of posts were influenced by mainstream media reports, while the rest were primarily statements of opinion in support of then President Donald Trump.

Of the 55 posts that trended in the week starting Dec. 4, roughly 80% were found to reflect unsubstantiated information and opinion-based claims of fraud, a trend that may have been influenced mainly by Trump’s continued insistence on a “stolen” election.

■ False stories surge as Biden leads

“In just an hour, 120,000 votes went for Biden — none for Trump.”

“200% turnout. If this isn’t fraud, what is?”

Such posts in Japanese began to proliferate on Twitter on the night of Nov. 4 last year.

In the United States, the vote count was reaching its climax in states where a fierce battle between Trump and Biden was underway. After the media reported Biden’s lead, the number of posts with baseless information soared.

“Counterfeit ballots for Biden have been found.”

“Voting was done under the names of dead people.”

All of these posts were apparently based on messages sent out from the United States by Trump supporters, who claimed election fraud. Such information was confirmed to be false by state election commissions and other entities. However, the false stories also spread quickly in Japan.

Main sources of the false information include unidentified personal accounts. There seems to be a trend in which certain critics are among those who “import” inaccurate information from the United States and spread it in Japanese with their radical comments.

Previous posts by such people show that they are hostile to China and foreign residents in Japan, sympathizing with Trump’s hard-line approach to matters.

By spreading conspiracy theories such as Biden and the media in Japan and the United States are being manipulated, quite a few accounts have seen a surge in followers since around last October.

■ Truth becomes secondary

Why does such information spread?

A research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined 126,000 posts in English on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. When the team looked into the time it took for information to reach 1,500 people, it found that false stories traveled six times faster than true stories.

This trend is seen to be more pronounced for political-related posts.

In 2019, a video was posted showing as if then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had made this remark when answering a question in the Diet: “Raising taxes on the wealthy is a ridiculous policy.” The video had been edited in a distorted way, but it spread among opposition party supporters.

Kazutoshi Sasahara, an associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology who wrote a book on the science of fake news, warned of the risk of relying on social media.

“When we’re flooded with information, we tend to see what we want to believe,” he said. “Whether the information is true becomes secondary.”Speech

Lawyer-brain, NECTAs, marriage penalties, and the trouble with normal. By Matthew Yglesias

Lawyer-brain, NECTAs, marriage penalties, and the trouble with normal. By Matthew Yglesias

A weekend policy potpourri

Matthew Yglesias

Jan 23

(Stefani Reynolds - Pool/Getty Images)

Hey folks, had a little extra time this week and wanted to try something a little bit different — instead of a full article, something like a little potpourri of relevant policy and politics information that’s more substantive than random tweets and available exclusively for subscribers.

I don’t know if this will be a permanent thing, but if you guys like it at all, it will at least become a sometimes thing.

So let me know what you think.

No more NECTAS?

This is extremely nerdy, but fun for people who like data and urban policy. Right before Inauguration Day, the Office of Management and Budget put out a proposed rule that would, among other things, get rid of NECTAs.

What’s a NECTA? It’s a New England City and Town Area. In most of America, most of the land consists of unincorporated areas and a lot of government functions are performed by counties. But in New England, essentially all of the land except for some uninhabited parts of Maine is part of a town or a city. County governments generally perform sheriff-and-court functions but don’t otherwise provide public services and generally speaking aren’t “important” the way they are in other parts of the country.

So traditionally outside of New England, the OMB defined metro areas (both the Metropolitan Statistical Areas and their bigger cousins, the Combined Statistical Areas) in terms of commuting patterns between counties, but inside New England they used NECTAs instead which focused on town boundaries. This had a kind of narrow logic of being more true to the lived experience of New Englanders, and it’s also more precise. But normally people want to use this kind of data to make comparisons, and since NECTAs weren’t directly comparable to MSAs or CSAs, it created a lot of pain-in-the-butt problems for researchers.

Lawyer-brain and its discontents

I’ve been thinking lately about something I’ve decided to call “lawyer-brain” though it is of course not exclusive to or universal among lawyers.

What it amounts to is the belief that things that are not courts of law should act like courts of law, where every decision is made with heavy emphasis on both adhering to precedent and setting new precedent and an extremely high priority is placed on the application of neutral principles. Courts act this way for a reason. But nowadays we often see demands that other institutions — social media companies, op-ed pages, elected officials, vaccine administrators, etc. — act like appellate judges when there’s no actual reason everything should be like a court. The bouncers at bars and clubs will normally give some kind of reason before they kick someone out, but it’s not a binding precedent and you have no right to appeal. The limiting principle is that your bar goes out of business if you can’t run it properly. Hotels have policies, which is a way of managing the staff and setting customer expectations, but the managers can also just make ad hoc exceptions if they want to.

“Check out time is at 11AM” is not a constitutional principle, and even if you write it as “Check out time is at 11AM — no exceptions,” they can still make an exception.

What economist-brain asks about Trump’s deplatforming is not “how will this precedent be used?” but “what are the incentives?” Do social media companies have strong financial incentives to be overly censorious of disfavored political views? The answer is no — if anything the incentive is to amplify non-mainstream views out of proportion to their prevalence in the population. And with the vaccine distribution, too, we ought to be thinking more about whether the relevant people are properly incentivized and less about what the rules say.

Normal is a mixed bag

I watched a fair amount of Pete Buttigieg’s confirmation hearings and it was reassuringly “normal” in exactly the sense people mean when they say they hope Joe Biden can help turn down the temperature on American politics. It’s not just that there was no Donald Trump present. The Republican senators just didn’t spend their time trying to gin up weird culture war controversies or talk about Antifa. Instead everyone from both parties asked about picayune stuff.

Roy Blunt asked Buttigieg to commit to supporting the Essential Air Service program.

Richard Blumenthal asked Buttigieg to commit to supporting the Gateway Program to increase rail capacity across the Hudson.

Deb Fischer asked him to say that the Jones Act is good.

Buttigieg (wisely for someone looking to be confirmed) said he agreed with all three of these senators. That’s extremely normal stuff. But the Essential Air Service (which subsidizes otherwise unviable air service to small airports) is bad! The Jones Act (protectionism for American shipowners that cripples the economy of Puerto Rico and hurts us during natural disasters) is bad! The Gateway Program is not bad per se, but it’s horrifically bloated and overpriced and it’s never going to get done without reform.

This is all better than Trumpian madness, but it’s a reminder that the “normal” state of American politics has its bad elements too. Kudos to Brian Schatz for mostly using his time to ask about real subjects of national significance like road safety and climate change.

How to fix marriage penalties

Scott Ruesterholz at The Federalist calls on Republicans to support a new pro-natal program that would deliver:

$5,000 per year to married parents of one kid.

$15,000 per year to married parents of two kids.

$20,000 per year to married parents of three kids.

That strikes me as odd relative to a flat per-child amount, but I think the real juice here is that it only goes to married parents. That’s understandable from a conservative point of view because conservatives want to encourage marriage. But what does this accomplish? The IRS isn't going to be able to spot-check to see if couples claiming the benefit are actually co-habiting and co-parenting. You’re just encouraging random box-checking.

The good news for people willing to spend money on pro-marriage initiatives is that the existing welfare state includes a lot of marriage penalties (see Willis Krumholtz at the Institute for Family Studies). This happens because lawmakers tend to want to phase out benefits pretty rapidly once a family becomes non-poor, and two-parent households tend to have more market income. The way to fix this is to just make the programs more generous and eliminate the penalties. My impression has been that conservatives would hate this idea because it costs money. But Ruesterholz is talking about spending a lot here, and eliminating the existing marriage penalties would be the place to start.

Filibuster and democracy

Nate Cohn is confused.

Nate Cohn 

@Nate_Cohn

There's a straightforward case for eliminating the filibuster, but this (which seems all over lefty twitter this month) isn't really one of them?:

--GOP threatens democracy 

--GOP has a structural edge in the Senate

--Save democracy by making it easier to pass laws in the Senate

January 21st 2021

108 Retweets1,054 Likes

I think you can answer this question in two ways.

One is that the welfare state is a ratchet — even in the UK where there are no veto points, the Tories don’t eliminate the NHS. It’s true that absent the filibuster, Republicans “could” go do all kinds of crazy stuff, but I don’t believe that they actually would. Note that the Affordable Care Act survived 2017 despite the GOP’s use of the reconciliation process.

The second is that the filibuster is standing in the way of adopting anti-gerrymandering reforms, and creating a statehood option for DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands. Filibuster reform does not itself create democracy, but it’s a necessary prerequisite for creating a more democratic system of government.

Leftist Twitter is kind of unhinged

Brendan O'Connor 

@_grendan

All the libs are memeing Bernie, who is now a very powerful member of the Senate, because they believe the left has been sufficiently disciplined and brought into line with the Democratic Party. Remains to be seen how correct they are.

January 21st 2021

10 Retweets137 Likes

No further comment except to say that Bernie is better than Bernie Twitter

Have a good weekend!

The politicization of covid. By Dominik Stecula

The politicization of covid. By Dominik Stecula

January 21, 2021

Source: Slices of Light

After over 9 months of the novel coronavirus pandemic in the United States and over 400,00 lost Americans, the initial batches of the vaccine are being distributed throughout the

country. But, unfortunately, not everybody will be willing to take it and one of the important reasons will have to do with our toxic political landscape. At the time when strong partisan identities shape how Americans feel about an increasing number of issues, politicization of COVID, and science more generally, can be a major obstacle in vaccine adoption.

COVID, much like so many other issues of the day, has been politicized, and that makes science communication behind the vaccine difficult. Simply put, in our current political climate, the moment an issue enters the political arena, debilitating polarization follows. It doesn’t particularly matter if an issue is based in science, like vaccines, or whether it’s a moral issue like abortion, the same process tends to unfold. Because attachments to political parties are important aspects of our identities, and because public opinion tends to be driven by trusted elites, such as party leaders like Donald Trump or Joe Biden, what politicians say about an issue tends to drive what Americans think about it.

Take the example of global warming. With my co-author, Eric Merkley, we have studied how Americans polarized on climate change. What we found was that politicization of the issue played a key role. As climate change became more prominent in the media and in the minds of Americans, experts and scientists were featured in the news, but had to share space with politicians who increasingly took over coverage. In another study, we found that these messages from partisan elites, and especially from Democrats, played a key role in driving Republican climate skepticism. Because partisanship colors a lot of our perceptions of reality, messages from politicians tend to drown out any signals from scientists.

A contributing factor might also be the increasing politicization of science in general. Messages from scientists might be less persuasive to the most fervent of Republican voters, simply because they are increasingly viewed as part of the Democratic coalition. When in the spring of 2017, thousands of people across the country participated in the March for Science rallies, the effect of that was not a universal increase in support for scientists. Instead, liberals came to like scientists more, while conservatives liked them less. Prior to the 2020 Presidential election, leading scientific journals took an unprecedented step of endorsing Joe Biden and condemning Donald Trump for his administration’s hostile policies towards the scientific community. A growing number of scientists also ran for office, mostly as Democrats. This aligning of science with one political party, regardless of how justified on the merits, can backfire: as the public increasingly sees scientists as a constituency of the Democratic party, they might not only be less inclined to trust them, but also to treat them as an out-group. That might be a problem when messages from scientists are needed to persuade Americans to vaccinate against COVID.

It is important to highlight that, thankfully, opposition to vaccines is limited to a small number of Americans. Similarly, a small minority of Americans are misinformed about vaccines and their benefits. Most Americans also take COVID seriously and adhere to best public health recommendations. However, it is also true that COVID has been politicized in the US a lot more than in other countries, and that partisanship strongly affects not only beliefs about COVID but also behaviors. Current polling suggests a 20 percentage point gap in the intention to vaccinate between Republicans and Democrats. Despite remaining relatively high, public trust in Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC has been polarizing along party lines as well.

These developments are troubling, because to achieve levels of herd immunity necessary to protect us from COVID, we will likely need 60-70% of Americans to become immune through natural infection or vaccination. As my colleagues pointed out earlier this year, this means that twice as many Americans need to get a COVID vaccine than get a seasonal flu shot. To reach these numbers, continued politicization of COVID and the vaccine could be a major obstacle.

To avoid further politicization, non-partisan health experts should take the lead as messengers on this issue and as growing numbers of vaccines become available. Celebrities, and other non-political actors who are well known and widely trusted should also get involved in promoting the vaccine. Of course, because this is a major public health issue, it is inevitable that politicians will speak up. That is understandable. But when they do, it is important for the media to highlight general consensus among Democrats and Republicans about the importance of the vaccine, instead of fishing for partisan conflict or elevating fringe voices. Instead of focusing communications on the scorn of Republican “anti-science” politicians, it will be more productive to elevate the voices of those that take the scientifically sound positions. In general, the aim should be to not activate partisan identities when talking about the vaccine, but instead focusing on what unites us: the desire to put the pandemic behind us, so life can go back to normal and we can all spend time with our families and friends.

Of course, politicization of the vaccine is hardly the only obstacle that we’ll face. Misinformation, especially on social media, needs to be counteracted. Vaccine skeptics will need to be persuaded. There is a long road ahead for public health professionals, especially as more vaccine doses become available to the general public. But at a time when polarization affects so many issues, it is important to try to avoid, or at least limit it on yet another one.

Dominik Stecula is an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University.

Raise the minimum wage. By Matthew Yglesias

Raise the minimum wage. By Matthew Yglesias

January 21, 2021. 

(Scott Olsen / Getty Images)

Raising the minimum wage to $15/hour is broadly popular with the mass public, enjoys healthy political support among Democratic Party elected officials, and would on the whole raise incomes and living standards for disadvantaged people while coming primarily at the expense of relatively affluent people.

In other words, it’s a good idea. Joe Biden should do it. Congress should do it.

And most of all, centrist wonk types who feel, correctly, that minimum wage hikes are not optimal policy should do what they often tell left-wing people to do and be practical about it. Some day, perhaps, the wonks themselves will work out a consensus around a more optimal system of explicit wage subsidies and start doing the spadework to build political support for it. It’s a perfectly reasonable idea in theory, and I tend to think that — just like a single-payer health care system — it’s probably a better idea than the current trajectory of wage regulation.

But one can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good here.

Delivering assistance to families in need is urgently important, and a reasonably phased-in minimum wage increase will help. More broadly, skeptical wonk types should consider that the realistic alternative here is not the status quo (which would be bad enough), but the endless escalation of Trump-style “populist” efforts to bolster working class pay with trade and immigration restrictions. In the universe of mechanisms that raise wages and that normal people understand and support, a minimum wage increase is easily the best of the lot. And just as single-payer supporters should accept more practical keyhole ideas, so too should wonky optimizers accept that a minimum wage increase is a good idea for the real world.

Steelmanning the case against

Lately Twitter has been full of progressives retweeting or dunking on really bad arguments against minimum wage increases, generally being made by right-wing people who are not especially prominent or influential. This is something that happens all the time on social media, and it’s a real illness. It infects not just partisan politics but factional battles, too, so that on any topic people are maximally exposed to the worst arguments of the people on the other side.

So you’ve got:

Allegations that a minimum wage increase will cause eye-poppingly large increases in the price of food.

Allegations that a minimum wage increase will spark a massive wave of automation that eliminates human labor.

The sentiment that fast food workers are basically bad people who don’t deserve higher living standards.

This is all really dumb. Everyone deserves high living standards. Within reason, if a minimum wage promotes capital deepening and higher productivity, that’s an argument in favor of doing it, not an argument against. And while it is probably true that a big minimum wage hike would lead to some kind of upward price pressure on low-end fast food, that’s hardly a reason not to do it.

It’s healthier for your brain to engage with serious arguments.

For example, the composition of the workforce might change. Jennifer Doleac, a very good empirical economist who doesn’t particularly specialize in labor market issues, noted that she personally would hire fewer RAs if she had to pay higher wages.

I don’t know exactly what her research situation is like, but if you think about the non-profit sector in general you’ll see that she obviously can’t respond to an increase in her cost basis by raising prices. Of course if she’s lucky, someone in charge of financial matters would show up with a bag full of money and say, “we know labor costs have gone up but we want everyone to keep their RA headcount steady.” But she’s saying she doesn’t think that will happen. Instead, since she’s dealing with a basically fixed budget, she will try to hire a smaller number of more experienced researchers.

Note that this will very plausibly happen even if there isn’t any impact on employment aggregates. Say most employers do adapt to the higher wage structure without reducing employment. That puts more money into the pockets of low wage workers, and thus creates more job opportunities producing the things that low wage workers consume. That creates new job opportunities for the people disemployed by economics professors hiring fewer RAs, so you end up with fewer undergrads working as research assistants and more working retail jobs. But unlike productivity increases driven by investments in better technology, I do think that driving people out of jobs that have non-pecuniary benefits could be a real problem.

And that’s over and above the fact that empirical studies of minimum wage increases are very slightly more likely to show job losses than job gains.

If you’re a casual consumer of the news, you may be under the impression that there is a heated research battle over the employment impact of the minimum wage. But I think it’s important to see that this isn’t really true. Instead there’s a heated battle between people who on the one hand say, “there’s no reason to believe a minimum wage hike will substantially reduce employment” and people who on the other hand say, “the bulk of the literature says a minimum wage hike will reduce employment.”

Those are very different ways to characterize that chart, but they are completely compatible statements. My view is that the right way to look at this chart is that we should raise the minimum wage.

People want a higher minimum wage

Minimum wage increases are really popular.

They’ve passed in ballot initiatives in Florida and Missouri. The $15/hour idea polls in the high 60s in most results I’ve seen. You can push those numbers down a little bit by providing negative messaging, but it doesn’t budge that much since this is a widely debated idea that people are generally familiar with. Elected officials have good reason to want to try to identify popular ways of helping people. Under the circumstances, the right question to ask about a minimum wage increase is not “is it optimal?” or “does it have some downsides?” but “is it actually bad?”

And while I know some people of good will who insist that it is actually bad, I don’t see that as credible.

Michael Strain, for example, is a labor market guy who I respect a lot, and he recommended to me this CBO report, which he said reflects the consensus in the literature that a big minimum wage increase will reduce employment. Well, the report does say that. It also says that earnings will rise for poor and near-poor families, offset by a big drop in income for relatively affluent people.

To me that clears the bar for “this is a good idea.” You’re talking, in the main, about a large transfer of income from relatively affluent families to relatively needy ones. It is absolutely true that doing this with an explicit tax and transfer program would allow for better targeting than doing it with a minimum wage hike. But a practical politician has very good reason to prefer the minimum wage hike, and this CBO report makes a minimum wage hike seem good to me.

Then, of course, there is also the minority of more optimistic studies, where a minimum wage hike produces much larger economic gains by modestly increasing employment rather than modestly reducing it.

Is there a better way?

Economists often vaguely gesture at the Earned Income Tax Credit as a superior alternative to the minimum wage.

The EITC, unfortunately, has a lot of administrative problems that lead to a lot of people who should be eligible not getting it. There’s also a ton of auditing of EITC claimants. And the EITC is linked to family size, so there’s a view that by subsidizing low-wage work from parents, it lowers market wages and reduces the incomes of non-parents. There’s also a view that because the EITC is non-transparent, it doesn’t actually encourage work because people don’t know it’s there.

Rather than sort through all that, let’s just say there is probably an Idealized Wage Subsidy Program (IWSP) that abstracts away from these ideas. The IWSP would be an explicit tax-and-transfer program that would have several benefits relative to the minimum wage:

A minimum wage increase makes most (but not all) low-wage families better off, whereas an IWSP could get all of them.

A minimum wage increase probably reduces non-pecuniary job quality, whereas an IWSP would, if anything, raise it.

The costs of a minimum wage increase are borne in an opaque way by a fairly broad swathe of affluent people, whereas an IWSP could more narrowly target the top one percent.

There’s also a school of thought on the right, exemplified by Charles Murray, that you should give everyone a Universal Basic Income and have that replace the whole welfare state and all labor market regulation.

Coming from a whole other direction, Sweden and the other Nordic countries don’t have minimum wages because they have strong unions and sectoral bargaining (they also have very low levels of in-work poverty). Personally, I find this model to be very attractive. The Center for American Progress came out with a proposal in 2018 for states to use wage boards to create a sectoral bargaining system. If the federal minimum wage rises, I assume pressure will resume on rich blue states to go even higher than $15/hour. And I think it’d be great if states like California and New York took the wage board approach to higher pay instead.

That being said, CAP sensibly puts forward the wage boards thing as their blue sky idea and also supports a minimum wage increase in the real world.

And that’s what I ask of the wage subsidy crowd, too. I agree that an explicit subsidy would be better, just as I agree with leftists that a single-payer health care system with explicit taxes would be better than our current crazy-quilt of cross subsidies. The reality, though, is that voters get tax sticker shock and prefer opaque solutions. So on health care we need to look to stuff like incremental Medicaid and Medicare expansions, plus clever public option designs that avoid huge overt tax increases. And by the exact same token, in the real world, the minimum wage is a great politically tractable way to raise pay. Political pragmatism is a virtue for centrist wonks just as much as it is for progressive activists.

The regional difference

The minimum wage quibble that makes the most sense is concern about regional differences in the United States. In a place where average wages are higher, it probably makes sense for the wage floor to be higher.

That’s especially true because these are places where the cost of the other factors of production is higher.

If a higher minimum wage causes lower retail profits in Boston, that probably ultimately feeds its way through the system in the form of cheaper rents. In Bangor, ME, that exact same effect might manifest in the form of less construction.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes these regional price parities that helps you get a sense of the relevant scale.

What this says is that $15/hour nationally has about the same purchasing power as $17.90 in Hawaii or $12.66 in Mississippi. Or alternatively, if $15/hour is the right wage for Mississippi, then that implies it should be $17.77 nationally and $21.20 in Hawaii.

Now, if it were the case that partisan control of state governments was distributed randomly across the price spectrum, that might lead to some interesting questions. But given that the lowest price parity states are also very right-wing, in effect what we’re talking about is a scenario in which the minimum wage goes up to $15/hour in the cheap states and then the activists who used to “fight for $15!” in the expensive ones decide to “turn out for $20!”

That again strikes me as basically fine. The first “Fight for $15” rallies happened in 2012, and adjusted for inflation that should be $17.24 by now. If the “Raise The Wage Act” passed as written, the federal minimum wage would hit $15 by 2026. If moderates want to stretch that timeline out by a year or two that’s fine. If they want to hedge against possible problems by reminding the Fed that we need robust full employment monetary policy to make this work — that’s better than fine. That’s exactly what we should do.

And if you’re not willing to get on board with raising pay with wage regulations, then you should ask yourself what’s the real-world political alternative? Is it wage subsidies? I’d love to see a movement for wage subsidies. But what I see movements for on the right are blocking immigrants from coming to America and saving low-productivity small business from competing with chain stores, perhaps with a side of imposing tariffs on foreign-made products. Those are all ideas that definitely have the kind of negative impact on economic efficiency that minimum wage skeptics worry about, but they also deliver direct hits to the economy’s productivity and capacity to innovate. I’d urge people with right-of-center views on economics to remember the wisdom of Ed Prescott and Stephen Parente — the kind of bad regulations that hold societies back are the ones that prevent the use of the best available technologies.

Zoning rules that stop us from using apartment buildings to address land scarcity are a really big deal. Even a “too high” minimum wage would not be a big deal in this sense, and it’s at least possible that a move to $15/hour would encourage productivity-enhancing investments and organizational improvements.

Progressives looking to win tough races should embrace a higher minimum wage enthusiastically. Republicans looking to co-opt populist energy without hopping on the anti-trade bandwagon should consider this a far superior alternative. Free marketers who strongly favor deregulation should find something more important to focus on. And people who think the real answer is a wage subsidy scheme (does the restaurant-backed Employment Policies Institute ever actually advocate for a more generous EITC or just bring it up as a talking point?) should do the legwork of building the coalition for that rather than just standing in the way.

The Future of American Politics



The Future of American Politics

by Kathleen J. Frydl, prospect.org

January 21, 2021 05:00 AM

Recent reporting by The New York Times finds that the “falsehoods, white nationalism and baseless conspiracy theories” that Donald Trump “peddled for four years have become ingrained at the grass-roots level” of the Republican Party. Yet the outcome of the presidential election and the runoffs in Georgia show that these ideas are deeply repellent to the independent and suburban voters Republicans need in order to win many elections. This presents the GOP with a predicament: They cannot win national office without endorsing fabulist conspiracies, and they cannot win national office if they do.

Sealed off in a world of their making—sporting majorities who believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, or that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq—Republicans crossed the Rubicon long ago. Trump provides only a vantage point to view the river from the other side—and the insurrection of January 6th, a pointed summit. No GOP candidate can vie for the presidency without scaling this mountain in some way, picking up the necessary votes to win the primary the higher she climbs, while shedding general-election votes in equal measure. In losing control of their party, Republicans also lost the ability to control the national narrative.

Republicans cannot win national office without endorsing fabulist conspiracies, and they cannot win national office if they do.

The next political election is a long way off, and American memories can be short. Six years after Watergate, Ronald Reagan swept into office. Nevertheless, in its current form, the Republican Party is no longer viable for the presidency. The GOP has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections; if Democratic gains in the Sun Belt continue, the Electoral College will become a less reliable prop. In an age when so much power is vested in the executive, the inability to run competitively for the White House will be a punishing blow to the Republican Party.

We could view the national collapse of the Republican Party in a number of ways. Scholars typically follow a standard history of political-party organization as described through a series of successive “systems” (we sit now in the sixth, or perhaps the start of the seventh). Recent modifications to this scholarship emphasize long stretches when one of the two parties dominated national life, as well as the polarization that has followed from the rough parity of recent years.

But a more abrupt framework to understand party evolution is available as well. Since the country’s founding, one organized political faction has been dedicated to preserving institutionalized racism, whether slavery or its successors. To observe this fact is not to imply that the other party showed reciprocal devotion to the Black freedom movement, nor is it to delineate all facets of white supremacy and its enduring imprint on American life. Acknowledging this, a consideration of a strictly partisan nature may yield benefit. Regardless of party “system,” whiteness appears as a constant: One party always espoused the preservation of white power, not in incidental fashion, but as a dedicated agenda.

Republicans supply the latest iteration of this pattern. Will they also be the last?

As the white share of the electorate falls, so too does the reach and relevance of a party dedicated to structural racism. From the standpoint of party organization, this marks new (if also unheralded) territory. Most important is the fact that the standard historical pattern—that some entity exists ready to accommodate the politics of white privilege without risking majority status itself—no longer applies.

On the other hand, the voters professing the overt racism of pro-insurrectionists, as well as their many sympathizers, will not simply fold their tents, renounce their views, and melt back into the landscape of American life. (This is to say nothing of the forces of racism broadly speaking.) An entire media ecosystem ministers to their delusions; a political system built by slaveholders amplifies their electoral power. Nor will right-wing authoritarians wander like vagrants, from pillar to post. They will organize into an identifiable set of voters ready to leverage their voice.

That may take the form of simply taking over the Republican Party, pushing the apostates, the Lincoln Project and “Never Trump” Republicans, into the waiting arms of the Democrats. Or it may lead to an exiled third party running its own candidate for president. On the final full day of the Trump presidency, The Wall Street Journal reported that the now ex-president has discussed forming a new party called the Patriot Party, as perhaps a final act of revenge on—or leverage over—a Republican establishment he feels abandoned him after the election.

We can reasonably anticipate at least one additional party emerging from the delusive chords of Republican disarray.

Trump might instead call his wistful creation the “American Party,” the official name for the Know-Nothings, a mid-19th-century eruption of anti-immigrant, conspiracy-minded nativists who destroyed the Whigs, the northern counter to the Democratic South. In fact, it was the unusual difficulty the Republican House caucus encountered when electing a Speaker in 2015 that first attuned me to the prospect of a possible imminent collapse of the Republican Party; a very similar thing happened to the Whigs in 1854. (The House Speaker election discloses a lot more about the tensile strength of a party coalition than a campaign for president, which has so many placating promises at its disposal.)

Out of the ashes of the Whig Party came the Republicans, dedicated to stopping the spread of chattel slavery. Their arrival reinvigorated the strange stability of our party structure, in that guardians of institutionalized racism always had a preferential home in one party, or else a standing invitation to join the other. Whiteness—recognized by myself and other scholars as the architecture of our political system—also served as a stealth anchor for a two-party system; a partner with two suitors vying for her hand, always ready to play one off the other.

As she struggles to find a partisan home that will include access to the presidency, will the long-reigning, often valorized dominance of the two major political parties struggle alongside her?

Brief periods of disruption to two-party stability are common, typically heralding the slow and fitful process of political realignment. Strom Thurmond’s “Dixiecrats” in 1948 (formally, the States’ Rights Democratic Party) foreshadowed the emergence of the 1968 Republican presidential coalition, which relied on white voters in the previous Democratic stronghold of the South. Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 presidential run under the banner of the Progressive Party (sometimes called the Bull Moose Party) forecast the rupture of Republican electoral dominance in the North, later capitalized on by Franklin Roosevelt to form a New Deal coalition. Observing these harbingers of realignment, famed political historian Richard Hofstadter once noted that in American politics, third parties are like bees: They sting, then they die after one or both parties restructure in response.

If we look at the Republican Party from a pragmatic perspective, we can see some noteworthy political bolts, suggesting that perhaps American politics may soon suffer some bee stings. There could be internal battles among the Trumpist and non-Trumpist factions, coupled with a more sedate period of Democratic dominance. The minority party, once stabilized, could capitalize on inevitable shortcomings that, by process of accretion, will result in a return to majority status.

On the other hand, despite our deep habituation to a world of only Democrats and Republicans, the balkanization of our media habits suggests the viability of organizing various internal and external constituencies into formal parties. We can reasonably anticipate at least one additional party emerging from the delusive chords of Republican disarray. Lacking the predicate of whiteness, my additional supposition is that, within 20 years, we will see the end of two-party dominance in American politics.

In the end, whiteness as a structuring partisan force is without rival.

I say this with due regard to the ways in which the Electoral College favors a two-party structure, though it’s worth noting proposed changes to this system, as well as the growing popularity of runoff thresholds or ranked-choice voting. I also recognize that elections run based on a first-past-the-post electoral system—where voters cast only one vote, and the candidate with the most votes wins—play a poor host to governing coalitions forged in parliamentary systems. Finally, I acknowledge the adaptability of parties, disciplined in defeat to follow a new mode of politics, and pursue new voters.

Nevertheless, these all pale in comparison to the fact that whiteness can no longer command a majority in a party system, serving to cement together what would otherwise be divided along other factional lines. Is there any surrogate or substitution to accomplish the same purpose? I would be the last person to diminish the significance of anti-choice politics for the Republican Party, but recent events—in Argentina, in Poland—suggest that, like whiteness in an era of diversity, the actual implementation of extreme policies invites a scorching backlash. It might be possible to weave together an impressive multiracial electoral coalition relying on anti-choice politics, but you could not long govern on that basis. Likewise, a loosely jointed celebration of “diversity” may serve as mortar in the joints for a dominant Democratic Party, but lacking a serious opponent for the presidency, how long would that hold?

In the end, whiteness as a structuring partisan force is without rival. As of now, for the first time in our history, she is also without a serious new suitor. But she is not done wielding her ruinous force, promising to hobble the Republican Party in one way or another. Amid the turmoil of her damage and disgrace, we may fail to see that we stand on new political ground, with buried fault lines soon to surface as the new boundaries of partisanship.

After obsessive focus on Trump, White House reporters need to zoom way out. By Dan Froomkin

After obsessive focus on Trump, White House reporters need to zoom way out. By Dan Froomkin

Covering Donald Trump’s White House was easy. All that mattered was Trump.

By Dan Froomkin -January 21, 2021 4:40 pm EST

It might have been exhausting, given his manic and narcissistic proclivity to say absolutely whatever came to mind, whenever, and regardless of what he had said before. But it was hardly mentally taxing, especially for the many White House reporters who were satisfied with simply capturing his words rather than genuinely contextualizing them.

Tracking down Trump cronies to whom they could offer anonymity in return for lies and gossip was also time-consuming for those reporters, I’m sure. But it did not require an understanding of the complex work of governing. In fact, that would probably have been a handicap.

But now, we return to a state of affairs in which the White House is more than just the president’s whims and mood disorders. It is filled with staff, and process, and sometimes competing senses of mission.

And it’s hugely important for our major news organizations to break themselves of the habit of obsessively focusing on what the president says  – and instead devote themselves to exploring much more broadly what is going on inside the White House, and how, and why.

The nation faces an unprecedented array of challenges, which require a wide-ranging series of actions all of which must come from this White House, which needs to not just reverse course but set an entirely new one.

“What did the president just say?” is no longer the question reporters should be consumed by. “How can we fix this mess?” is the right question. It’s also a much more complicated question, much harder to answer, requiring a lot of research and context and critical thinking.

To his credit, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain actually summarized the challenges quite well in a public memo to staff four days before they all became official:

We face four overlapping and compounding crises: the COVID-19 crisis, the resulting economic crisis, the climate crisis, and a racial equity crisis. All of these crises demand urgent action.

So the daily press briefings, for instance, shouldn’t be about what the president thinks about this or that, they should be about what the White House is actually doing about those crises.

Instead of asking about Biden’s exercise bike or whether he will keep Trump’s Air Force One color scheme or other fluff, reporters should be asking what specific steps are being taken. Even better, they should be asking what future steps are being contemplated, by whom, what the alternative views are, and which seems to be prevailing. And they should get substantive answers, not canned talking points.

It was great to see new White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki come out only hours after the inauguration, treat the press with respect, promise to come out daily and – most significantly – not constantly utter a stream of lies. But reporters should demand not just announcements, but a metaphorical flinging open of the White House windows.

It’s in the White House’s own interest: Only with radical transparency can the government earn back the trust of the people. That can’t happen if all the people in the decision-making process are hidden away out of public view.

I realize that it being so early, reporters may first need to get to know the new players. Biden swore in nearly a thousand appointees on Wednesday. His “landing teams” have fanned out to all the executive-branch agencies. And of course nominees to the Cabinet and other major jobs are just now going through the confirmation process.

Those are the people who will actually be getting things done. Reporters should be actively pursuing them and getting them to share their backgrounds and views — on the record. In fact, a key initial test of the Biden White House’s true dedication to transparency will come when those officials either agree to talk on the record or not.

To that end, reporters should join the Society of Professional Journalists in insisting that the Biden White House “end restrictions on employees in federal offices and agencies that prohibit speaking to the press without notification or oversight by authorities, often by using public information officers as gatekeepers.”

Reporters should join the good-government groups pushing for greater transparency about possible conflicts of interest by requiring appointees coming in from the private sector to disclose not just who they worked for but what they did for the companies they worked for.

As I’ve written previously, reporters should demand that the White House proactively establish entire classes of documents that will be made public by federal agencies without reporters having to ask – including calendars of top White House officials and agency heads, agency org charts, unclassified correspondence with Congress, and more.

Reporters should then report about what they’ve found out — not just follow the president around.

And after four years of effectively no process at all, reporters should keep a close eye on what sort of processes the Biden White House is following.

There was already one significant sign of change on Wednesday, which as far as I can tell, our leading White House reporters didn’t even notice. It was a hugely ambitious memo with the subject line: Modernizing Regulatory Review.

That memo would appear to be the first step in turning the innocuous-sounding Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from a notorious bottleneck for pro-consumer and pro-worker regulations into a powerful force for progressive reform. The memo envisions a regulatory review process that will “promote public health and safety, economic growth, social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity, and the interests of future generations.” This would be a seismic change, even from past Democratic administrations.

James Goodwin, a policy analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform, wrote in an email on Thursday that he’s been trying to persuade reporters that “this was potentially the most important thing Biden did yesterday.” But apparently, without much luck.

Something else to keep in mind: Historically, some of the best White House coverage hasn’t involved the president at all. It comes from reporters with deep sourcing in the agencies and in the field – reporters who don’t just react to official statements, but act proactively.

I have found it depressing to see so many of the same people assigned to cover this White House as the last one, instead of, say, subject matter experts. If it were me, I’d replace most of the White House press corps with health reporters, environment reporters, and reporters who focus on racial and economic inequality – and I’d encourage them to ignore talking points in favor of original reporting.

One positive sign worth noting is the Washington Post’s assignment of longtime White House reporter David Nakamura to an entirely new beat, “to write broadly about the federal government’s role in protecting and ensuring civil rights in America, based at the Justice Department.” I think theme beats like that are the future.

Finally, there’s another good reason to stop focusing so much on the president. It’s not just that with Biden as president, the president is no longer the only person in the White House who matters; he may not even be the person in the White House who matters the most.

Given the choice of who I’d most want an hour sit-down interview with, I’d probably pick Klain over Biden. He would be more likely to know the answers to my questions.

Biden is the right man for the moment: He is almost uniquely human, after a president who was almost uniquely inhuman; he is compassionate and empathetic, after a stunning absence of both; he seems truly devoted to bringing about greater unity in this country at a time when, as he said in his inaugural speech, people can’t even agree on common facts.

But I suspect that his leadership style will be more Ronald Reagan than Barack Obama – or Trump. He seems likely to be more of a figurehead, leaving the weedy work to others.

And that weedy work is what will make all the difference.