The student debt crisis as a macroeconomic phenomenon

The problem was the Great Recession, not anything about colleges

By Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 10 minutes

Although the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness programs have generated tremendous disagreement, there seems to be a consensus that the big buildup in student loan debt is a big problem. The disagreement is mostly about the nature of the solution, with folks on the left broadly preferring more subsidy while folks on the right broadly preferring vague anti-education posturing. In fact, everyone is so mired in this dispute that I think it’s rarely acknowledged that net tuition peaked a bit over a decade ago and that both federal loans and federal grants have been declining.

I want to propose a different interpretation of the debt problem.

There are some very serious policy questions about graduate student debt that speak to the existence of a pretty large number of programs that probably shouldn’t exist at all. But in terms of undergraduate debt, I think we are looking at two things: a demographic bulge and bad macroeconomic policy that happened to collide in what amounts to a really bad coincidence.

The single most common year for an American to have been born was 1991, with large numbers of people born on either side of that peak.

And all of these people born in 1991 turned 18 in 2009, the low point of a recession that started in 2007 and didn’t really generate a healthy labor market until 2014 or so. In other words, a huge number of people ran headlong into a catastrophic failure of macroeconomic stabilization policy.

States raised tuition because they were broke due to the recession.

Students enrolled in large numbers despite the tuition hikes because it was hard to get a job.

Graduates earned lower-than-expected pay because they were graduating into a weak labor market.

This is all genuinely very bad. But it’s not bad education policy, it’s bad recession-prevention policy. And the lessons to be learned are about the importance of stabilizing the economy, not about the need for any dramatic changes to the education system.

A governor’s eye view

Imagine that you’re a governor in the midst of the Great Recession. Tax revenue is plummeting due to joblessness, falling property values, and consumers pulling back on luxuries like travel and dining out. You’re a progressive, so you propose an “emergency millionaires tax” on a temporary basis, but that doesn’t bring in enough revenue to plug the hole in your budget. You need to cut.

So you start with the low-hanging fruit.

And looking at the list of things that could be cut, raising tuition at state colleges and universities is very attractive.

Grants and scholarships still exist, so the poorest people will be largely insulated from harm. And while this shows up on the State U balance sheet as a spending cut, from the perspective of a unified state government budget, what you’re really doing is increasing revenue. Federal funds flow to colleges and universities through students, and that frees up state funds to keep the K-12 schools running and avoid kicking people off Medicaid.

Again, you’re a progressive governor, so you don’t love the idea of raising tuition. But it’s the least-bad option — nobody needs to be laid off, and nobody needs to be kicked out of school. The institutions continue to exist and continue to provide a valuable service to the community. It’s just that instead of the money coming from the state government, it comes in the form of loans from the federal government. And that’s exactly what your state needs: an injection of credit. If it was possible to borrow some huge sum of money from a low-interest National Macroeconomic Stabilization Fund you’d do that. But there is no such fund, and the Fed wasn’t interested in intervening in the state or local bond market at that time. What existed was student loans, so the smart play was to take advantage of that.

Access to credit is very valuable

If you face a financial emergency and need to borrow a bunch of money, it’s very lucky to be a homeowner with some equity built up in your house.

Because houses are so durable and so hard to hide, they are one of the absolute best things for a bank to repossess. This means that banks place a lot of value on them as security for a loan and will give you a relatively favorable interest rate if you borrow against your home equity. If you’re not a homeowner and you need to borrow money in a rush, then you’re left with less attractive options like a car title loan or taking jewelry or other durable goods to a pawn shop. You also might find yourself relying on the very high interest rates charged for unsecured credit. You don’t need to put anything up at all to use your credit card for a loan, but you’ll pay a very high interest rate. And if your credit’s not good enough for a credit card, you need to go to a payday loan shop where the rates are terrible.

The point of all this is that while borrowing money can be expensive, it’s often a very useful thing to do. And when people are able to get access to credit on favorable terms, they tend to do so.

But during a financial crisis like we had back in 2007-2009, access to credit tends to dry up.

Ideally, the Federal Reserve would simply prevent that kind of crisis from occurring by stabilizing expectations of nominal income growth. But if that doesn’t happen or it’s not possible through monetary policy alone, what ought to happen is the federal government steps in and borrows a ton of money. Because in a crisis, everyone wants to lend money to the federal government. And of course during the Great Recession, Uncle Sam did borrow a lot of money; we have “automatic stabilizers” that make that happen. And Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that borrowed hundreds of billions in an effort to stimulate the economy. But large as ARRA was, it was much smaller than the hole in the economy.

The way the student loan program is designed, though, it can expand without affirmative legislation. You just need state governments to raise tuition and students to want to go to college. So that’s what happened. If aggregate student lending was capped, states would have had to do more furloughs and layoffs, and the overall economy would have been even weaker.

Unemployment is very painful

The fact that it was convenient for state governments (and the overall economy) for people to take out big student loans doesn’t explain why people would actually do it. The answer is that it was also good for them.

Good not just in the sense that a college degree can be useful, but good in the sense that if you turned 18 in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, or 2011, you faced a terrible time for a person with no work experience to be seeking a job. Unemployment is a really awful experience. It’s bad to not have money, of course, but even beyond the lack of funds, the psychological experience is painful. Unemployed people often become depressed and tend to suffer from all kinds of health problems. Some of this is material deprivation, of course, but an important element of it is sociological and psychological.

An important German study that takes advantage of some features of their benefit systems shows that unemployed workers are happy when they reach retirement age and can shift their social identity from “unemployed” to “retired,” even though nothing about their financial situation changes. The ability to enroll in school plays a similar kind of role. “I’m a student at X getting my degree in Y” is a perfectly respectable self-conception and a perfectly respectable thing to tell other people. Your parents aren’t embarrassed that their kid is in college, and you can hold your head high amidst peers. Being in the dating pool as an unemployed guy is bad — as a college student, it’s fine.

And then the way college bundles a bunch of different things together and interacts with credit further incentivizes attending during a downturn.

When the economy is hammered, it’s good to buy things with cheap credit if you can. And colleges will not only sell you access to classrooms and coursework, they will sell you “room and board” and access to fun activities. I think there’s an overstated tendency to emphasize ridiculous-sounding things like campus climbing walls when the most important student amenities are banal — housing and food and some places with comfy chairs where you can hang out. In a healthy economy you could gain access to that stuff by working (it’s not like student housing or meals are so great), and the only reason to buy it as part of a college bundle is a genuine desire to attend college. But the recession destroyed outside options and pushed tons of people into school, even as tuition rose.

Graduating into recessions is bad

When you graduate into a recession, you not only tend to get a worse job right after school, but the impact of that worse initial job is incredibly persistent. Jesse Rothstein finds that “the long-run cumulative effect of the recession on graduates’ employment is more than twice as large as the immediate effect.” Hannes Schwandt cites four other papers showing a long-run economic impact and extends the work to demonstrate that graduating into a recession leads to “negative consequences later in life for socioeconomic status, health, and mortality.”

That’s the hammer blow for student debt explosion. We had, all at once:

An unusually large youth cohort

Facing unusually high net tuition due to state budget cuts

Enrolling in college at unusually high rates due to poor outside options

With unusually low earnings due to graduating in a bad environment

That is really bad! The members of Congress who declined to provide additional fiscal stimulus should feel really bad. The Federal Reserve officials who declined to provide adequate monetary stimulus should feel really bad. And the people who spent 2010-2013 hyping-up national debt panic and corralling the political system into “grand bargain” talks should also feel really bad. It was a huge policy disaster, the enormity of which I think we, as a society, have still not fully comprehended.

But once you do, I think the higher education system looks less like the generative factor of the crisis.

It’s bad that homeless people have to sleep in the park downtown. But that’s primarily a housing policy problem reflecting scarcity of dwellings that naturally falls hardest on people with other problems. It doesn’t reflect poorly on the people in charge of running the parks, who are being inundated with tough cases because of failures elsewhere. By the same token, higher education became a shock absorber — both for state government fiscal problems and for individuals — amidst a catastrophic crash. Our resolve should be to achieve better macroeconomic policy next time.

We still need to fix this problem

Many economists have come to recognize that the inadequate policy response to the Great Recession was an enormous problem. And a bunch of smart, center-left policy hands put together a fantastic edited volume titled “Recession Ready” that proposed ways to incorporate more robust automatic stabilizers into the American policy framework and prevent something like that from happening again.

Then Covid-19 came, and people sprang into action full of resolve not to repeat the mistakes of the past. But instead of implementing any of these on-the-shelf automatic stabilizer ideas, they just decided to go super-big on discretionary stimulus. All things considered, I think the results of that have been better than the results of under-stimulus. But it’s generated a lot of inflation and backlash, and now I think the conventional wisdom pendulum is swinging back to “eh … maybe a prolonged recession isn’t so bad.”

I think that’s setting us up for future tragedy. The right response to overshooting the mark is the same as the right response to undershooting it — we need to stop relying on congressional guesswork. Here are some ideas from the book that would have helped enormously during the Great Recession:

Matt Fiedler, Jason Furman, and Wilson Powell argue that the federal government should automatically pick up a larger share of the tab for Medicaid when a state’s unemployment rate is high. This would let states directly use the federal government as a recession piggy bank rather than relying on the indirect mechanism of tuition hikes and student loans.

Claudia Sahm calls for the government to send direct cash payments to households when unemployment is rising, and then automatically turn them off when unemployment is falling. This would stabilize demand without overshooting the mark the way we did in 2021.

Gabriel Chodorow-Reich and John Coglianese call for expanding Unemployment Insurance to cover a larger share of the workforce and to create a provision to make the benefits more generous during periods of very high unemployment.

These ideas were influential — versions of them featured in the Covid response, but they were implemented on a discretionary rather than automatic basis. Ironically, this was because Congress underestimated how strong the recovery would be and therefore believed (incorrectly) that automatic stabilizers would be more costly. This actually led them to appropriate more stimulus funding than we needed.

We could absolutely improve higher education and higher education finance. In particular, I think the student loan system’s treatment of graduate school is somewhat bizarre in its lack of differentiation between different kinds of programs. But the college debt pileup of 10 years ago was a macroeconomic policy disaster much more than an education policy disaster. And if we want to avoid its recurrence, we need better recession-fighting policies, not more arguments about student loans.

You Don't Have a Mass Movement

rossbarkan.substack.com

You Don't Have a Mass Movement

Ross Barkan

7 - 8 minutes

Photo: Getty Images

There is a habit, among the professional class leftists and those who labor at their attendant organizations, to make sweeping claims about what they do. In some sense, this is natural. We can all inflate ourselves a little, burnishing a narrative or fibbing in such a way to make a story seem better than it really is. Social media offers numerous opportunities to be more than we really are. The politically active are not immune to these temptations.

One danger of self-delusion is weakness; if you believe great success has arrived when it really hasn’t, you may not work so hard. Or you’ll attempt a maneuver that, in a vacuum, would never make sense otherwise. In the ongoing drama over Dan Goldman’s victory in the NY-10 Democratic primary, the progressive organizations and influencers that have rallied around Yuh-Line Niou are running such a risk. Several of her most prominent supporters, including the actress Cynthia Nixon, want Niou to run against Goldman, a very wealthy lawyer who worked on the first Trump impeachment, on the Working Families Party line in the fall. Niou, a state assemblywoman, legally doesn’t have the third party ballot line, but Mondaire Jones, the sitting congressman who also lost, could give it to her. The argument goes that Goldman is too moderate for the Manhattan and Brooklyn district, he subverted the democratic process by spending at least $4 million of his own money on the race, and he barely beat Niou, who may have lost because Jones and other self-identified progressive candidates took votes from her. With a clear field and a one-on-one opportunity, Niou could have a chance to do damage to Goldman or even defeat him outright, they argue. George Albro, an attorney who founded the New York Progressive Action Network, a statewide organization that took root after the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, declared recently that Niou has a “mass movement behind her,” the type that could dislodge a Democratic nominee who only took about 26 percent of the primary vote.

This is not true at all, though it sounds very nice.

Within the context of an election, the closest any left-wing American politician has come in the last 30 years to commanding a mass movement is Sanders. The Vermont senator won millions of votes in two presidential races and captured large, diverse states like California and Michigan. He inspired a new generation of voters and activists, almost single-handedly reviving the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest leftist organization in the U.S. since the Communist Party of the 1930s. He staged enormous rallies across the country. He still lost. And it’s not as if winning candidates can be said to be the leaders of large movements. Joe Biden dominated the 2020 primary after his top rivals dropped out and most Democratic voters decided he, not Sanders, was the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump. There were few open declarations of love or affirmative feelings for Biden as a presidential candidate. He was a default, a stopgap, a repository for a great amount of anti-Trump angst.

Leftists, as a rule, have not led mass movements in America. The most clear-eyed leaders and organizers recognize how far they have to go and work harder to reach a point where they can plausibly speak for many thousands of people. The more cynical—or the more deluded—simply declare they speak for these people already. No congressional campaign can argue, with any seriousness, it has built a large movement, the kind that inspires intense interest or devotion on the level of Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter. The Niou campaign, which won 15,380 votes to Goldman’s 16,686, is certainly nowhere close. She ran a strong race. That does not mean she can now, with the help of WFP and NYPAN and all the rest of the alphabet left, work miracles in the fall. Goldman, once he is certified the victor of the Democratic primary, will have the endorsements of most of the city’s House delegation, large labor unions, and Chuck Schumer. Nancy Pelosi and Kathy Hochul, the New York governor, have already endorsed him. He is going to raise many more millions of dollars. There is no path to beating him. In part, that is the nature of politics. Voters do not pick third party candidates over major party candidates. Even in 2020, when the WFP made a concerted push to have Democrats and independents vote for Joe Biden on their line to protect their ballot status in New York, 70 percent of NY-10 voters chose Biden as a Democrat. Just 14 percent voted for him as a WFP candidate. Niou could get more than 14 percent against Goldman, but she has no chance against him in a general election. It’s the kind of race that would excite activists and volunteers before severely disappointing them, as the Democratic nominee racks up huge margins.

Pretending a mass movement exists does a disservice to supporters of Niou and the left more broadly, feeding into pathologies that have damaged progressives over the last few years. It’s the same approach to politicking the led professional class organizations to believe majorities of Black, Latino, and Asian voters wanted to defund or abolish the police altogether when, in fact, they viewed policing in America through a more nuanced lens. It led them to misapprehend entirely why working-class Latino and Asian voters drifted significantly toward Trump in 2020. It even led them to speak in increasingly alienating ways about climate change, at a time when the stakes for coalition-building couldn’t be any higher. Arrogance, for any candidate or organizer, is one of the greatest sins, the kind that unravels a movement before it ever reaches its potential.

In the belief that Niou commands a movement—a genuine movement—and is not just another popular House candidate, her allies wish for what isn’t there, projecting fantasies onto the political system and the rest of the electorate. There is nothing wrong with attempting a third party campaign, especially in a district where the Republican will be irrelevant. What is wrong is telling ordinary Niou supporters who saw her narrowly lose to Goldman that there is a great chance to defeat him running as a WFP candidate. There isn’t. The left will not build power this way. Losing by such a wide margin is not going to inspire progressives in the district. It will not aid progressives in Washington. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does not gain clout if Goldman, as the Democratic nominee, runs roughshod over Niou’s campaign. Perhaps Niou’s backers get a few more months in the sun, a chance to feel righteous. Maybe that’s enough for them.

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Don’t Mock the Payroll Protection Program

Don’t Mock the Payroll Protection Program

By Ross Barkan

For the many Democrats thirsting for a punchier, feistier Biden White House, a recent Twitter thread bashing the alleged hypocrisy of Republicans in Congress was a revelation. After Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and others took to the airwaves to attack Joe Biden for his student-debt-cancellation plan, the White House mocked several of the lawmakers for having their Paycheck Protection Program loans forgiven. (The GOP has characterized student-debt relief as an unfair giveaway to more affluent college graduates, though Biden’s plan squarely targets the middle class that these lawmakers purport to fight for.)

The White House pointed out that Greene, the doyenne of the far right, had $183,504 forgiven in the pandemic-era program — which sent out federal cash with few strings attached to millions of small and large businesses across the U.S. Gaetz had $482,321 forgiven. Vern Buchanan, a Florida Republican, had at least $2.3 million forgiven. As Democrats face inevitable conservative backlash for defending Biden’s long-promised student-loan-cancellation plan, they have merrily embraced a new talking point: Republicans took out PPP loans, therefore they are selfish hypocrites gobbling up federal cash when it suits their purposes.

This isn’t entirely false. Republicans rail against federal largesse until it benefits them. Right-wing voters hate socialism until they are collecting Social Security checks and receiving Medicare benefits. Various progressive activists, groups, and even Bernie Sanders have raised similar points, chastising Republicans for defending the PPP while excoriating student-loan cancellation.

Baked into this critique is another implication: the PPP was a giveaway to the rich while canceling student loans will benefit working and middle-class individuals. By highlighting how large some of the PPP loans were, Democrats are denigrating the 2020 program and making it plausible for left-leaning voters and institutions to mock the concept of blanket pandemic relief. Downstream from the White House messaging, one recent viral political cartoon conflated PPP-loan forgiveness with “billionaire tax breaks” and “corporate subsidies.”

The Biden White House is consciously — or unconsciously — creating a dangerous and misleading narrative on the left that may undercut future disaster-aid efforts. Student loans should be forgiven, but they were not designed to be; PPP loans very much were. It is better to conceive of the PPP loans as a mass bailout absent means-testing, the type that cried out for far more federal oversight but may have saved the country. Despite the program’s waste and lack of focus, many deserving workers and businesses still managed to benefit.

It is ironic, in some sense, that it’s only the Republicans defending the $800 billion Payroll Protection Program passed in the earliest weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic (with strong support from House Democrats and Senate Republicans alike). At the time, the economy was teetering on the brink of a second Great Depression. Schools were closing, and city centers were emptying out. Restaurants, bars, gyms, hotels, and movie theaters were shuttered indefinitely. Business shutdowns never witnessed in modern times were underway.

In such dire circumstances, Congress had to act quickly. The PPP, signed into law by President Donald Trump, was designed to pump cash at a rapid clip into as many businesses in need as possible. The goal was simple: Prevent mass layoffs.

Acting in such haste, lawmakers created a bailout fund that was easily exploited by nefarious actors. Two-thirds of the $800 billion ended up in the hands of business owners and shareholders. A postal-service employee received an $82,900 loan for a business called “U.S. Postal Services.” A man in Georgia spent $57,000 in PPP loans on a rare Pokémon card. And Tom Brady’s company took out an enormous PPP loan of almost $1 million, feeding into the perception that the ultrawealthy were getting fat off of pandemic aid.

The reality was much more complicated, though. The PPP did, as its critics argue, create remarkable opportunities for fraud that the U.S. government will be prosecuting for years to come. But it saved many, many small businesses, especially those in Democrat-run states and cities, where pandemic precautions were taken most seriously. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago would have suffered small-business apocalypses without PPP loans as coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and gyms quickly ran out of cash and closed permanently. Considering the unprecedented nature of the bailout, it worked better than expected. Within one month of being approved, companies that got loans had an average head count 8 percent higher than comparable businesses that didn’t, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics study. After seven months, their work forces were still 4 percent larger, maintaining this advantage even as hiring nationwide began to bounce back. Businesses that received a loan from the program were 5.8 percent less likely to close within one month after receiving the money and 3.5 percent less likely to do so within seven months.

But the PPP was not efficient enough, and too many wealthy actors benefited at the expense of working-class staff. The lesson for the next catastrophe is to build in more oversight or to directly subsidize the payrolls of smaller businesses for a limited amount of time — as Denmark did. The urgency with which Congress acted, however, was entirely correct and a rare example of the U.S. political system reacting swiftly to an existential crisis.

Without the PPP, enhanced unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and other bailout measures, the U.S. would have been in absolute free fall — with the pandemic eviscerating a great amount of employment and income. Instead, the economy stabilized. Today’s worries about inflation, while understandable, pale in comparison to the alternative: an employment picture on par with the 1930s. We should remember that it took a full decade, if not longer, to climb out of the last depression. No one wants to live through that again.

The case against Meta

The case against Meta

Giving people what they "want" isn't necessarily good

by Matthew Yglesias 

In a recent article about TikTok and trends in phone-based entertainments, Ben Thompson observes that “what made Facebook’s News Feed work was the application of ranking: from the very beginning the company tried to present users the content from their network that it thought you might be most interested in, mostly using simple signals and weights.”

The thing I found most interesting was the choice of the word “interested” to describe the quality that Facebook and its competitors’ increasingly sophisticated machine learning tools use to determine what they show users. After all, computers aren’t people and you can’t just tell them “show Matt some stuff you think he’s likely to be interested in.” Instead, as I understand it, the models are trained with some kind of objective reward function. We don’t know exactly how TikTok works or what its reward function is, but it’s something like “it’s good if people watch the video and keep watching more videos on TikTok.” Internal to Facebook, they reward content that is “engaging.”

And it’s not just that machine learning is, in a sense, better at this than human recommenders — it’s actually doing something different.

When I was in high school, one of my teachers recommended that I read S.E. Finer’s three-volume macrohistory “The History of Government from the Earliest Times” because he knew that I enjoyed books like “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and “Plagues and Peoples.” Similarly, my grandfather once told me I might be interested in Charles & Mary Beard’s “The History of American Civilization.”

And I did find those books interesting, interesting enough that decades later, I remember what they said. But this kind of recommendation isn’t just more artisanal than TikTok’s — it’s actually answering a different question. My teachers and family members were essentially saying “given my understanding of your interests, my belief is that reading this book will help you become a better version of yourself.” Not everyone is that good at recommendations, though, and the idea that we could improve them by using data, computers, etc. is incredibly appealing.

But somewhere along the way we run into a serious alignment problem, and the recommendations engines that are increasingly driving our lives aren’t really doing what we truly want.

Revealed preferences are overrated

The fact that all the major Silicon Valley executives seem to be reasonably slim and in pretty good shape always makes me suspicious.

Most Americans are overweight. And while the level of obesity is unusually high in the United States, every country as far as I’m aware is trending in the same direction.

Throughout the vast majority of human history, people had to endure significant periods of food shortfalls and calorie deficits, so the optimal way to behave when food was available was to consume surplus calories.

And in most domains of life, this kind of behavior is sensible. I own more pairs of socks than I need to get through a typical laundry cycle because sometimes things go wrong and it’s good to have backups. Developing an instinctual tendency to eat backup food when food is plentiful is going to help you survive periods of food dearth. The problem is that in the modern world, most people never endure a period like that. So to maintain a healthy weight you either need the iron self-discipline to avoid the overeating instinct, the iron self-discipline to practice intermittent fasting and create a simulacrum of dearth, or else to be a weirdo mutant who would have starved to death in 1622 but happens to be optimized for the modern world.

And it seems to me that most of the top Silicon Valley people do, in fact, have an iron will.

Which is great for them. But I think it pushes them toward interpretations of the world in which the things that us normal people do (overeat and get fat) represent our genuine desires, while the things we say we want to do (eat prudently and be in good shape) are just hollow virtue signaling. Obviously people lie, even to themselves. But I think this basic model of the world is wrong. When I say that I want to stop eating random snacks, that is my authentic preference — and when I go to a party and see some chips and tell myself “just one won’t hurt,” that is self-deception.

Here in the human world, though, even if we disagree on exactly what to say about overeating, we do all basically agree on what’s happening: a clash between first-order and second-order preferences. But machines are very literal about their optimization functions.

Thompson gets at this in a follow-up post, noting that the difference between Instagram Stories (where you see stuff your friends posted) and Instagram Reels (where you see content Instagram is optimizing for) is that Reels makes him feel guilty:

I have to be honest: the more I use Reels, the less interest I have in Stories; they seem so boring in comparison. At the same time, this emphasizes what a high-stakes gamble this all is for Instagram: there is a big difference between “I ought to” versus “I want to”; spending ever more time on content tailored to me is, if you step back and think about it, the exact sort of activity I ought to feel guilty about. Instagram has, thanks to its social network foundation, retained some sort of the old “connecting” DNA that Facebook used to talk a lot about, but the more it tries to ape TikTok the more it is nothing but pure entertainment that, if I’m honest with myself, I feel a bit guilty about indulging.

I think that conveys the point that whatever it is that Meta is optimizing for, it’s not that well-captured by the English language word “interested.” If Reels was interesting, you wouldn’t feel guilty about time spent on it, you’d feel satisfied — like a need had been met.

One thing I like about being in the subscription newsletter business is I don’t think you can make money doing this on a guilty pleasure basis. Because people need to actually opt in and pay money, it only works if people feel proud to be a Slow Boring subscriber. The fact that Facebook and Instagram work best as businesses when they’re free reveals quite a bit about our preferences — these platforms are temptations that people don’t have particularly nice things to say about in their more reflective moments.

And this is why I’ve tried over the years to try to get the people who work at Meta/Facebook to be a little bit more reflective about their own work. If the people who watch Reels feel guilty about it, I think you should probably feel guilty about the fact that your job is to get more people to spend more time watching Reels. When surveyors pay people to stop using Facebook for a few weeks, the recipients of the money report being happier, and many of them don’t go back to using Facebook when the experiment ends. If Facebook was genuinely showing people content that they are interested in, you wouldn’t see those responses. What it’s doing is exploiting an addiction-type mechanism.

There’s a tension between commercial incentives and doing the right thing in most fields. When I was an intern at Rolling Stone, the staff tended to roll their eyes at the magazine’s cover stories. The imperative for a cover was to find someone famous and popular — and to get someone like that to cooperate for a Rolling Stone cover shoot, the magazine had to implicitly promise a softball piece. The staff mostly had good politics and good taste, and they were not at all enthusiastic about the kind of stories that ended up on the cover. But it was a commercial enterprise that needed to pick covers for the sake of newsstand sales. You could justify the commerce-minded cover stories by saying they created the opportunity for more editorially ambitious work.

And even though the media business changed in a million ways between my internship in the summer of 2000 and when I co-founded Vox in 2014, there was a common thread: commercial considerations played a role in editorial decisions, but they did not absolve the decision-makers of responsibility.

In other words, either the product as a whole was something you could be proud of or it wasn't. You couldn’t just say “we run dumb headlines because people click on them” or “we put bad bands on the cover because it sells issues.” Staying in business is relevant, but it can’t be the only consideration unless you’re a huge asshole.

We see this in the movies, too. Ryan Coogler made “Fruitvale Station,” a great indie debut. Then he made “Creed,” a really cool reimagining of a storied franchise. Then he made “Black Panther,” which I think meant a lot to a lot of kids and got his work in front of a ton of eyeballs, but isn’t nearly as good a movie as the other two. It’s one of the better MCU films, but its political ideas fundamentally don’t make sense — not because Coogler suddenly forgot how to make sense, but because he had to fit the plot into the larger MCU tapestry. Soon he’ll be coming out with “Wakanda Forever,” and I hope he got paid a bajillion dollars for it. But then I hope he leverages that commercial success into more artistic projects. Many of the great filmmakers spend some time walking on the more pop side of the medium. But no one has the best possible career exclusively doing that kind of work.

Part of what I find so off-putting about the corporate culture at Meta is that they don’t deny that what they’re feeding people is kinda garbage. They instead deny that they have any responsibility for the machine they’ve constructed — it’s just showing people what’s interesting to them, and if they’re interested in garbage, that’s their own fault.

But I don’t accept that. Everyone has to navigate the real world, but the people who work at Meta are also responsible for their choices. And a company whose premise is that it actually isn’t responsible for its outputs is dangerous.

The last time I wrote about this, I got a lot of feedback saying I misunderstand what it is that the bulk of the talent at Meta is doing. They’re not fiddling with nobs to increase Facebook and Instagram engagement, they’re working on fundamental issues that power the underlying infrastructure.

And I’m sure that’s true, but so what?

A lot of people have technical expertise that’s relevant to food manufacturing. Some of them work for companies that are trying to make alt-meats that, if brought to a large scale, could prevent billions of animals from suffering while improving environmental outcomes. Others work for companies that are trying to make Doritos slightly more compulsive so that future people will eat bags of Doritos more rapidly. If you are doing fundamental basic research relative to the flavor and texture of food, it makes a big difference to the world which of those companies you work for!

And I don’t think the fact that people have a “revealed preference” for Doritos does much justificatory work here. Everyone’s got to make a living, and there are worse jobs than Frito-Lay. But if you do have options in life, the right option is to make cruelty-free meat alternatives, not chips. It’s no fun to be a scold, but think about all the times you’ve been mad about an article you read somewhere because you think it got something important wrong. If the author said “well, a lot of people read it,” you wouldn’t find that to be an acceptable defense, and you shouldn’t find it to be an acceptable defense.

Markets are good ways of organizing things, but a healthy market involves the individual participants having integrity and ethics.

I’ve been interested to learn recently that among people who care about AI safety, the AI research team at Meta is considered to be both highly skilled and dangerously cavalier about the risks. I’m not nearly technical enough to delve into these disputes, but I’m not surprised that Meta has earned this reputation. Its corporate culture is deeply invested in the idea that you can just say your ranking engine is showing people “things they will find interesting” and not really bother worrying too much about what that means in practice or how closely the actual implementation tracks a normal understanding of what it means to recommend interesting things to people.

So far nothing catastrophic has happened because of Meta’s recommendation engines. But the general unwillingness to ask the question “what if it’s bad to create these compulsive apps?” — or even to admit that it’s coherent to wonder if something popular and technically impressive could be bad — speaks to a larger set of blinders. The question of what we really want our machines to do for us is actually fairly subtle and difficult, even in a fairly banal case like auto-playing video. To insist that whatever maximizes time spent on the app is, by definition, tapping into our truest preferences is both absurd and dangerous.

Last week of summer mailbag!

 Last week of summer mailbag!

Alternate Gary Hart, The Daily Show, and economic complexity

Milan is starting at Yale, my kid is starting second grade next week — it’s the end of an era.

Leora: It seems like the Dems have finally got it through their heads that, with razor thin majorities, they don’t have a mandate to transform the country and should shoot for a steady stream of sensible, modest legislation that will command majority support. Most of the Slow Boring readership could have told them that on Nov. 4 2020. What took so long? Why did they waste so much time banking on Manchin voting for bills he told them unequivocally from the beginning he would not support?

I think the actual answer here is that Manchin’s willingness to embrace the American Rescue Plan (ARP) sent expectations soaring. I have over and over again defended Manchin against his critics on the left, but it would have been much better for him to voice his objections to the expanded Child Tax Credit (for example) during the ARP debate and killed it then.

Brian T: What are your thoughts on the legacy of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show?

I think the legacy of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show is always going to be his seminal work during the George W. Bush era that was both very funny and, I think, a significant political intervention. It’s hard to convey this to younger people, but in the post-9/11 environment, there was a kind of center-right hawkish hegemony in the media. And it was badly in need of puncturing, which is what a lot of us progressive bloggers were doing, but it was also susceptible to puncturing through satire and comedy, because satire and comedy are powerful weapons against hegemonic sanctimony and pieties.

The specific thing Stewart was doing then just doesn’t work today, because while the political right continues to exert incredible political power, it’s no longer hegemonic.

These days, if you want to skewer cultural pieties and take down sanctimonious people, you are more likely to be punching left. Now there’s a certain kind of person, like Matt Taibbi, who’s so committed to the aesthetics of anti-sanctimony that they’ve realigned to the political right. For me, it just means that political satire is not a large share of my media diet anymore. So I think that’s Stewart’s legacy — a tremendous media/cultural/political intervention that is just not that relevant today, in part because it was so successful.

Stewart himself has pivoted in a more earnest direction as a result, which I think reflects the fact that he’s a smart and perceptive person. But Jeff Maurer has a lot of good posts on Stewart’s more recent work where I think he correctly notes that judged as an earnest political commentator, his work just isn’t good enough. The whole burn pits campaign, for example, has obviously been a huge activist success story. But the actual scientific basis for the burn pits claims seems shaky to me. I don’t particularly begrudge the veterans their extra health coverage, but Stewart’s coverage of the issue has been demagogic and uninformative (and, dare I say, sanctimonious?).

Sharty: Sausage-making questions!

Given how much Slow Boring content is sort of news-adjacent, what does the typical process look like to identify, research, and write up a post? Are several irons in the fire simultaneously, or is this handled in more of a serial manner? Do you have a handful of less-time-sensitive completed posts in your back pocket that you can draw upon if a particular article is having trouble coming together, or is everything so finely tuned that you no longer worry about that?

The basic process is that on Monday morning I deliver a draft of Tuesday’s article to Kate, and then I spend Monday working on the draft version of Wednesday’s post.

We normally don’t plan things out in detail too far in advance (there’s no Friday huddle to map out the week to come, for example), but we do talk about future plans. Last weekend, for example, we talked about the fact that we should find time for a post on the risks of great power conflict. So at any given time I usually have a few partially written drafts lying around. My general experience as a columnist is that the amount of time it takes to actually execute a piece is pretty variable, so I also try to keep a list of ideas that would be fast to bang out that I can pivot to in a pinch if I’m hitting roadblocks on other things.

Wigan: Since video games came up today:

Are you concerned your son will ever play "way too much" video games. What would "way too much" look like to you and what will you do as a parent if that happens?

I try not to give into moral panic that’s just like “all forms of content that didn’t exist when I was a kid are bad.” But, yeah, everything I wrote earlier this week about worrying that our entertainments are getting too good very much applies to kids.

But we periodically assess our current screen time policy and take into account what effect we feel it’s having on our kid. If it seems like maybe he’s spending “way too much” time on Minecraft (the only video game he’s sometimes allowed to play right now), we dial it back. For us, “way too much” mostly looks like whining about wanting screen time or about having to do things that aren’t screen time. When that happens, we try to replace video game time with something else. And like anything, making a decision and sticking to it until there’s a compelling reason to change ultimately makes life easier for everyone.

To say something optimistic about gadgets, though, our kid loves to read, so we recently got him a Kids Kindle with subscription access to a huge library of children’s books. He’s really enjoying the ability to pick out new books and get them instantly, and I am enjoying that the house is not cluttered up with random books.

Lili: One of the things I like best about your column is the writing style. I'm curious if there are other writers who you've modeled yourself after. Also, what other essayists or nonfiction writers have a refreshing and exciting style that you recommend your readers explore (even if they aren't styles that influenced you)?

Thank you!

My columnist style icons when I was in college and early in my career were Jonathan Chait and Eric Alterman, and then I was very influenced by Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan in terms of how to blog. Like a lot of writers of roughly my age, I think I was also influenced by a sort of internet writing house voice that Choire Sicha, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Gould pioneered at Gawker. Last but not least, he doesn’t really write this way anymore for the Times, but Ezra Klein developed certain style concepts at Wonkblog that we then refined and put into place at Vox and that I still use. That means mostly:

Shameless use of bullet points

Freely mixing informality with highly technical terms

A certain willingness to break the fourth wall and address the reader

The idea there is to try to make it feel less intimidating for people to read about things that they think might be taking them out of their depth.

In terms of recommendations, I don’t really know — I’ve never been someone who particularly has a taste for prose style as such, but I think basically all the main columnists and writers for prestige publications are very good writers. The problem is they sometimes have bad ideas!

Luke Christofferson: Are there any areas where we would expect legislation to emerge from a Republican House and Democratic Senate (a situation that is looking increasingly more likely)?

I would not expect a lot from this. House dynamics are very leadership-driven so it would be unusual for an entrepreneurial GOP committee chair to just strike some kind of deal with Democrats and be able to move a bill. And Kevin McCarthy does not seem to be particularly well-respected by anyone (there was this Politico piece about how everyone thinks he’s dumb), so I don’t know that he’d be trusted to undertake daring negotiations with the Biden White House.

If something were to happen, though, I think it might be on immigration — after signaling a desire to break with Trump on asylum issues right at the beginning, the Biden administration seems to have decided they don’t particularly want to welcome asylum-seekers at the southern border. They’re not going to waste a Democratic trifecta on talking about changes that progressives would hate, but if Republicans want to move some kind of bill tightening up asylum rules, I think moderate Democrats might go for that (but note this is not real reporting on my part, I will look into it).

Kade U: Matt, I know you like alternate history scenarios, and this is one I was wondering about that I think also comes into the institutional design questions you are interested in.

Let's say we were to place a series of brilliant, reform-minded people in charge of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. What would have been the most important things for them to do in order to change history and persist rather than dissolving from external pressure? What would Matt Yglesias' policy prescriptions be for the home of history nerds' favorite light cavalrymen?

And, for bonus points, what are the consequences of that persistence, e.g. there is a major power in Eastern Europe separating Germany from Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries.

A lot of American filibuster-haters emphasize Poland-Lithuania’s political institutions, especially the liberum veto. But I think the real issues go back at least to the Great Northern War of 1700–1721. Basically, Augustus, the Elector of Saxony in Germany, got himself made King of Poland and then joined a large coalition in fighting Sweden. The Swedes beat his forces and conquered Poland, but ultimately lost the war to Russia. The whole thing left Poland in a very weak international position. But to become King of Poland, Augustus had to agree to become Catholic. Suppose he’d been more devout and refused to convert and instead François Louis had become King of Poland?

Maybe he stays out of the Great Northern War and is able to lay the foundations of a centralized enlightenment state in the 18th century.

I think the main 19th-century consequences of this are that Prussia is weaker and Austria is more German, so it’s possible you end up with German unification under Habsburg rather than Hohenzollern rule. This still leaves Poland fundamentally vulnerable to Russo-German partition (as happened IRL in the late-18th century and then again in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) but if we want to be optimistic, both empires might think it’s useful to have a neutral buffer state between them.

BD Anders: If you could, via a wish or whatever, instantly be fluent in any three additional languages, what would they be, and if you have a why, why?

I think picking three is pretty easy because after English, the most-spoken languages in the world are Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish, so I’d pick them. The harder question is if I only got one or two, do I elevate Spanish because it’s more practical in the United States? I think I would.

Max Power: In a recent mailbox, Matt mentioned watching For All Mankind and liking it as an alternate history that's not about the Confederacy winning the Civil War or the Nazis winning WWII. I'm curious what Matt thinks of the specific timeline changes they made re who was President and the course of the Cold War and what he thinks 2003 will look like in season 4.

There are some logical failures here, of which the most egregious is Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton being the Democratic Party presidential nominee in 1992 after eight years of Gary Hart in the White House.

I think they pretty obviously did that in order to be able to use the archival footage of Clinton from the campaign, but it violates everything we know about the thermostatic nature of American politics. Even in the less-polarized 1980s, it would have been challenging for Clinton to win re-election in a conservative state with an incumbent Democratic Party president. But even if he did, the whole point of nominating Clinton in Real World 1992 is that liberals were tired of losing elections and wanted to embrace a more moderate approach. If you want to tell a story in which VP Al Gore was successfully challenged from the left for the 1992 nomination, that could make sense, but the Clinton thing is weird.

But even Hart becoming president is kind of a stretch. Hart was a lawyer in Denver who rose to prominence in politics by working at a high level for George McGovern in the 1972 cycle. On the show, Chappaquiddick does’’t happen, so Ted Kennedy runs and wins in ‘72. In that world, I’m not sure Hart wins a Senate seat in 1974.

Long story short, the idea of recycling familiar historical figures into the alternate White House is fun, but I doubt it’s realistic.

Forrest: How do you feel about Substack, as a platform, as a company, and as a decision you made, after all this time? How is it working with them? Do you feel like you're part of the company, in some sense? Do you feel associatively implicated in decisions they make (like persecuting that associate of Spencer's in retribution for his exit post?) Do you ever think about striking out on your own?

I sincerely don’t have a ton of thoughts about Substack “as a platform.”

As a software vendor, as best as I can tell they are offering the best product in terms of my needs. They are also charging a relatively high fee — an unbounded 10 percent of gross revenue is a lot if you have a lot of subscribers. So I have absolutely looked into using a different product to save money, but for now I think the value they provide is worth the price. But I don’t think I’m “part of the company” any more than I’m part of Google or Stripe or any other companies whose products we use. On a personal level, I do like the Substack executives I’ve met, but I feel bad about what happened with Sam Thielman (read his account here), which struck me as petty and also kind of counterproductive on Substack’s part.

At the end of the day, I guess one thing that I feel simpatico with the Substack execs about is that I don’t want the question of “Which subscription newsletter publishing software do you use?” to be a question with big political or ideological stakes. I use an iPhone because I like iPhones, and I find the features to be worth the price. Other people value the flexibility of Android or the ability to get a cheaper phone. That’s not a comprehensive endorsement of everything Apple has ever said or done in the world, but they make the best phones so I buy them.

Romulus Augustus: I don't know if you are in the process of writing a book or shopping one around.

I do feel you would be uniquely qualified to write a book that I think is missing from the popular discourse. I am talking about a book that is a full throated defense of center-left policy, not just the politics.

I say this because as a Democratic committee person in the Philadelphia area, I often hear people who agree with the basic premise of being Shor-pilled, yet they do so under the idea that it would be better if we could get Squad type policies but that it is unrealistic to think we could.

I think we need a voice saying, “No it is not just bad politics to push for whatever the DSA wants. It is actually better policy outcomes to push for Obama/Bidenism.” I think you would be well positioned because you have the background in places like ThinkProgress and could speak that language.

I am not currently shopping this book, both because I feel emotionally exhausted after “One Billion Americans” and also because I don’t think it’s a very commercial idea. But I do sometimes think about the book title “American Liberalism: A Restatement and Defense” that would essentially be this idea — a case on the merits for liberalism-but-not-socialism.

One thing I will say about that, though, is that Paul Starr wrote a book along those lines (“Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism”), and of the four books of his that I’ve read, the other three are all more interesting. That makes me think it’s maybe not just an uncommercial idea, but one that even I find tedious, and I don’t want to write a book that I think is tedious.

Ant Breach: Have you ever engaged with the economic complexity literature? It's essentially the idea that economies are characterised not so much by their GDP/HDI or even the rarity of specific sectors they have, but the rarity of their entire bundle of activity relative to other places.

So, for example, diamond mining is not especially complex, because it is usually found in economies that also mainly produce lots of basic agricultural products - there's not much value-add going on, so the economy is rather simple even if it's prosperous.

Semiconductors are extremely complex, because economies that make semiconductors also usually design and make lots of other rare, highly specialised things like tech jobs and fighter planes — they're complex economies with lots of little ways that value is added.

I'm curious as to whether you think it is a useful way of talking about the economy and places, or if it's, er, too complex in most situations.

I love the OEC website, which has lots of great data on economic complexity, and I think I refer to it pretty frequently.

In terms of engaging with the literature, I will admit that this is a pretty shallow and simplistic view, but I’m not sure that delving deep into the details adds a ton of value beyond the simple observation that “commodity exporters’ growth prospects are hostage to global commodity prices.” So for example, Azerbaijan is richer than Indonesia in the latest per capita GDP stats. But they are basically just exporting oil and gas, so their economy will bounce up and down with oil and gas prices. Indonesia, by contrast, has been moving up the industrialization value chain (increasing their economic complexity) and stands a good chance of continuing to grow as long as they can maintain political stability and so forth.

Ben S: I'm genuinely confused about the so-called “Iran Deal” or JCPOA, and its possible replacement. Everything I've read on that topic seems to sort into two polar opposite viewpoints, where if you're a Democrat, the deal was the best thing ever and getting rid of it was insanity, and if you're a Republican, the deal was the worst thing ever and the people behind it are trying to get us all killed. Weirdly, the actual arguments (on both sides) seem to be without factual basis, and just amount to screaming. Is there anything both sides agree on?

I think the JCPOA issue is actually simpler than you might think. It was an agreement between Iran, the U.S., and our major European allies whose goal was to address our nuclear proliferation concerns. And despite what dishonest people will tell you, it was really good at addressing our nuclear proliferation concerns. At the same time, the whole point of a deal is that all things considered JCPOA, was better for Iran than an active nuclear program — that’s what made it a deal.

Now, if you’re Saudi Arabia or the UAE or Israel, you don’t want Iran to be better off. Iran is the enemy, you want Iran to be worse off! So the whole debate in the United States is: should the United States strike a deal to address nuclear proliferation concerns (Obama’s view) or should the United States prioritize the regional interests of Saudi Arabia the UAE and Israel and keeping Iran as weak as possible (Trump’s view)?

I don’t think this is a remotely difficult question on the merits, but it’s politically tough because these are countries that have a lot of clout. One of my mantras is that doing the right thing is one of the most overrated ideas in politics, and I think you see this to an extent with the Iran Deal. Had Obama gotten this done with broad political buy-in, that would have been a diplomatic triumph. But as a partisan measure, he created powerful political enemies with no assurance that the deal would stick.

Jake: You've written before about your opposition to the building height limit in DC. Have your feelings on this changed at all over time? You are probably aware that height limits aren't uncommon, including in such cities as Rome, Athens, and Paris. Dutch cities (most notably Amsterdam) seem to do pretty well for themselves with similarly squat skylines, although I believe that's a byproduct of the geological conditions of the area rather than their laws. Maybe the Dutch, Parisians, Romans, and Greeks are on to something with their recognition that the ideal form of cities is dense but not overly tall? Pomponi et. al. seem to think so, at least when it comes to life cycle GHG emissions from different urban forms.

From a purely ecological point of view, the optimal thing is for everyone to live in a home that’s really small. And if you have a whole city full of people who are occupying a small number of square feet per person, then you can achieve very high densities without tall buildings. But while I don’t think American cities should ban very small apartments, I think it’s a conceptual mistake to believe that imposing a Paris-style height limit will generate Parisian densities. America is richer than France, it’s much less densely populated than France, and it doesn’t have France’s stock of old buildings.

In general, I think that thinking about old European cities can generate misleading conclusions about urban policy. There is something very nice about the vibe in neighborhoods that were built before cars existed. But cars do exist today, and most households are going to want to own at least one and to drive it sometimes. I am the strongest critic in the world of U.S. planning paradigms that require new construction to include car storage. But it’s something most people will voluntarily pay for. And it means that modern built environments are going to look different. If you rezone Austin for more density, it’s going to look like central Houston, not like Amsterdam. And if we want to add density to the D.C. area, we need to legalize very large modern towers near mass transit stations and in the central business district.

Not because these observations about Paris and Rome are false, but just because the market isn’t going to re-create 19th-century Paris in 21st-century D.C. — we need to work with today’s technology and consumer demands.

Troy a Garrett: Match owns 90% of all dating apps. The only competition is Bumble. I understand they compete with bars but dating apps are like 30% of marriages. This seams important for things Matt has an interest in.

I do find this somewhat concerning. My guess is the technical analysis of this issue would show that there are few barriers to entry in the world of dating apps, so there’s no competition concern. But Match’s evident interest in purchasing putative competitors, along with the fact that the big players don’t seem to want to enter this space, is a little vexing.

The larger odd trend here is that as dating apps have become more mainstream and more elaborate, people have started having less sex and marriage rates have continued to decline. There have been a million articles on what is causing those trends, but I’d have thought that developing sophisticated new tools to sort through large numbers of people and find more efficient matches would lead to more sex and more marriage, similar to how the ease with which you can now find the best ramen or a craft cocktail in a random city contributed to a huge explosion in food niches.

Maurits Pino: Recently, Matt wrote approvingly about public transport in Italy and more specifically about the Milan metro-system. I just spent 5 days in Barcelona and that was impressive in terms of its metro-system. Frequent, 24/day (at least on some lines, not sure), dense network, not expensive.

Spain is absolutely top-notch at train building, and both Madrid and Barcelona have excellent mass transit systems. A slightly odd thing about Spain is that going by OECD definitions of metro areas, both Madrid and Barcelona are larger than Milan or Rome, even though Italy has a much larger population than Spain. So they’re working with really large cities. Part of what’s interesting about northern Italy is they are building out successful metros in relatively small communities like Turin.

Against the Privilege Walk

www.dissentmagazine.org

Against the Privilege Walk - Dissent Magazine

Brian Morton

Against the Privilege Walk

Today’s privilege politics is preoccupied with calculating the relative degrees of social advantage among people who share the same broad goals.

A woman holds a “white privilege” sign at a demonstration in Barcelona, Spain, in June 2020. (Josep Lago/AFP via Getty Images)

A few years ago, a friend reported that her children’s progressive summer camp had introduced a new activity. The campers were accustomed to lining up every night for a tick check; now they were also lining up for a nightly privilege check.

Another friend thought it sounded like a good idea—and was disappointed when he realized she was joking.

Those of us who are on the left love to talk about privilege. We check it, examine it, admit it, and apologize for it. Yet, even though we talk about it all the time, it’s not clear that we agree on what it means.

The idea of privilege received its most influential contemporary expression in a 1989 essay called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” by the professor and activist Peggy McIntosh. Describing privilege as a “knapsack” of advantages that white people carry around, even if they’re unaware of it, McIntosh offered a list you could consult to figure out if you benefited from white privilege:

    If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.

    I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.

    I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

Her list had twenty-six items. In other essays, she expanded it to forty-six items, and then to fifty, including some puzzling ones—“I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color”—but the spirit of the list remained the same.

McIntosh’s ideas were among the inspirations for the “privilege walk” workshops now popular in schools and nonprofit organizations across the country, in which participants are asked to line up side by side and given instructions like these:

    If you were ever offered a job because of your association with a friend or family member, take one step forward.

    If either of your parents graduated from college, take one step forward.

    If you are a white male, take one step forward.

    If you have ever felt passed over for an employment position based on your gender, ethnicity, age, or sexual orientation, take one step backward.

At the end of the exercise, participants are asked to look around the room and take note of the unequal degrees of privilege they possess. 

McIntosh’s essay was a call for compassion and fellow-feeling. She was trying to remind white readers that other people tend to have it harder than they do, that situations and spaces that seem comfortable and welcoming to white people do not always feel that way to others, and that many social goods white people take for granted can’t be taken for granted by anyone else. Chekhov has a story in which he says that outside the house of every happy man there should be someone with a hammer, tapping on his wall to remind him of all the unhappy people in the world. McIntosh was trying to be the person with a hammer.

As this notion of privilege caught on, however, it began to take on more explanatory weight than it could handle, and eventually we reached a point where the term came to obscure more than it clarified.

The word “privilege” derives from the words for “private” and “law,” and it was originally understood to refer to benefits enjoyed by the few, whether the few belonged to a guild or a geographical region or an aristocracy. The most notable early critiques of privilege appeared during the French Revolutionary period, especially in the work of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, who focused on the privileges of the nobility, which included immunity from taxation and freedom to appoint judges and other officials:

    Is it not obvious that the nobility possesses privileges and exemptions which it brazenly calls its rights and which stand distinct from the rights of the great body of citizens? Because of these special rights, the nobility does not belong to the common order, nor is it subjected to the common laws. Thus its private rights make it a people apart in the great nation. . . . How easy it would be to do without the privileged! How difficult it would be to induce them to become citizens!

Sieyès supplied the outline of what became the traditional left understanding of privilege: it was a set of benefits enjoyed by a small, parasitic segment of the social world; it exempted its bearers from the normal rules of society; and it needed to be abolished in order to bring about a society in which everyone had equal standing. A hundred and fifty years later, for example, in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” his anatomy of the condition of England in the early days of the Second World War, George Orwell was using the word in the same way. He writes that “the ruling class are fighting for their own privileges, which cannot possibly be reconciled with the public interest,” and speaks of “American millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs.” The essay is filled with references to privilege and the importance of abolishing it, and it’s clear that he’s referring to the advantages held by a very small class.

All this has changed. Contemporary critics of privilege have a different understanding of the term. They don’t view privilege as the property of a small minority. White privilege, after all, is said to be enjoyed by about 60 percent of the U.S. population, male privilege by almost half. And they don’t view it as something that needs to be stripped away so that no one enjoys its unfair benefits. When McIntosh wrote that she could “go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed,” she was calling for a society in which everyone can enjoy this freedom, not a society in which no one can.

Every word takes on new meanings over time; this in itself is unremarkable. But when a new meaning is given to a term of political analysis, things can get tricky, because the associations that cling to the term don’t just disappear. If we take a word that’s been used in a particular way for centuries and use it in a new way to describe a contemporary social question, its traditional implications may shape the way we think about the question.

In an essay titled “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” McIntosh acknowledges this problem, regretting the confusion brought about by her use of the term. She writes that “the word ‘privilege’ now seems to me misleading,” because it lumps together “positive advantages that we can work to spread, to the point where they are not advantages at all but simply part of the normal civic and social fabric, and negative types of advantage that unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies.”

As she came to recognize, her version of the idea was ambiguous from the beginning—one might even say incoherent. Privilege is a good thing that needs to be extended to everyone, except when it’s a bad thing that needs to be abolished.

It’s chiefly the “negative types of advantage” that people seem to think about when they think about privilege. Watching a group of men walk up to the head of a line at the airport, rather than taking their place at the back of it, poet and essayist Claudia Rankine sees “a spontaneous play about white male privilege.” Meditating on the events of January 6, 2021, historian Ibram X. Kendi comments that the spectacle of rioters laying siege to the Capitol and leaving without being arrested was “white privilege on display.” Philosopher Kate Manne’s recent book Entitled bears the subtitle How Male Privilege Hurts Women. A publication from the National Association of School Psychologists explains that “privilege oppresses certain groups,” and a list of resources from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology describes one book as “a must-read for anyone who seeks to understand how privilege . . . results in prejudice and discrimination.”

Because negative connotations continue to adhere to it so tightly, a strange blurring of political vision affects us when we use the word, so that many people talk about their possession of the good kind of privilege—the “positive advantages that we can work to spread, to the point where they are . . . simply part of the normal civic and social fabric”—not as something they should work to extend to others but as something they’re ashamed of. As Phoebe Maltz Bovy puts it in The Perils of “Privilege”: Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage, “It can seem as if the desired goal is for everyone to be oppressed, rather than for all to be free from oppression.” 

The contemporary idea of privilege does little to help us understand the social and economic landscape of the United States.

“My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor,” McIntosh writes in “White Privilege and Male Privilege.” The logic that underlies her description of herself—if you’re white, you’re therefore privileged, and if you’re privileged, you’re therefore an oppressor—is taken for granted in most precincts of the contemporary left. But it’s bad logic. It’s a poor political analysis that leads to poor political strategies.

Inequality has been deepening in the United States for the past half-century, and the overwhelming majority of the country has been on the losing side of this development, no matter the color of their skin. According to a 2020 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent rose from 30 percent in 1989 to 39 percent in 2016, while the share held by the bottom 90 percent fell from 33 percent to 23 percent.” A 2020 study by the Pew Research Organization tells the same story:

    The wealth gap between upper-income and lower- and middle-income families has grown wider this century. . . . From 1983 to 2016, the share of aggregate wealth . . . held by middle-income families has been cut nearly in half, falling from 32 percent to 17 percent. Lower-income families had only 4 percent of aggregate wealth in 2016, down from 7 percent in 1983.

Black people are overrepresented among the poor. According to a 2020 study by the U.S. Census Bureau, whites made up almost 60 percent of the total population in 2019 but only 41 percent of the population in poverty. Blacks made up about 13 percent of the population but almost 23 percent of those in poverty. Sixteen million white Americans were impoverished, compared to eight and half million Black Americans.

This, clearly, is a portrait of disparity. But it’s hard to see how anyone could look at these figures and conclude that the word “privilege” has any place in the conversation about working people and poor people in the United States today.

As the historians Barbara J. Fields and Adam Rothman wrote in Dissent in 2020, white working people “are not privileged. In fact, they are struggling and suffering in the maw of a callous trickle-up society” marked by “obscene levels” of inequality. “The rhetoric of white privilege mocks the problem, while alienating people who might be persuaded.”

Left politics should be about trying to bring together the vast majority of the population to press for changes that would benefit us all and would benefit the poor—who, as we’ve seen, are disproportionately nonwhite—most of all. Such changes include a living wage, labor protections, the removal of barriers to labor organizing, generous welfare programs and unemployment insurance, tax-funded healthcare and child care, decriminalization of drugs, police reform, and responsible stewardship of the environment. But today’s privilege-walk politics is preoccupied, instead, with calculating the relative degrees of social advantage among people who share the same broad goals and sorting those people into the categories of the innocent and the guilty.

This brand of politics is a gift to those who want to see our inequalities persist. If it were not progressive activists but billionaires insisting on the privilege storyline—if the Koch family or the Walton family were selling the idea that the most important social cleavage today is the one between whites and Blacks, or between men and women, or between those who have a little and those who have even less—progressives would unite in telling them to go to hell. We’d see it as an insultingly obvious attempt to divert our attention from the real problems of wealth and inequality in the United States. And yet somehow it’s a story we tell ourselves.

It’s the wrong story. When we’re thinking about privilege, we’re not thinking seriously about power. And if we’re not thinking about power, we’re not thinking seriously about social change.

Defenders of the privilege framework sometimes trace the idea back to W.E.B. Du Bois, who, in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), wrote about the “psychological wage” offered to poor white workers in the post–Civil War South:

    The white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness.

When these thinkers draw a line from Du Bois to themselves, they typically fail to acknowledge Du Bois’s point: that the advantages enjoyed by white people were the result of a “carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and Black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.” He was describing a strategy employed by the ruling interests of the time to prevent both groups of workers from seeing how much they had in common. It’s ironic that these thinkers cite Du Bois, for they’re promoting a way of looking at racial differences that Du Bois sought to expose as a “carefully planned” distraction.

Writing in the 1980s, when the contemporary idea of privilege was just beginning to take shape, the feminist critic Ellen Willis provided the best meditation on these subjects that I know of. She wrote that

    in demonstrable ways, some oppressed people are worse off than others. But I do question whose interests are really served by the measuring. . . . Insistence on a hierarchy of oppression never radicalizes people, because the impulse behind it is moralistic. Its object is to get the “lesser victims” to stop being selfish, to agree that their own pain (however deeply they may feel it) is less serious and less deserving of attention (including their own) than someone else’s. . . . But whatever the emotional comfort of righteousness, it’s a poor substitute for real change. And we ought to know by now that effective radical movements are not based on self-abnegation; rather, they emerge from the understanding that unless we heal the divisions among us, none of us can win.

Sometimes I daydream about a different kind of privilege walk, one in which participants would respond to prompts like these: 

    If you’ve never felt exploited at your job, take a step forward.

    If you’ve never worried about how you’d make ends meet if you lost your job, take a step forward. 

    If you’ve never worried about paying medical bills, take a step forward.

    If you’ve never worried about how you’d provide for yourself if you had a disabling accident or illness, take a step forward. 

    If you’ve never worried about how you’re going to take care of your parents when they’re old, take a step forward.

The way the daydream ends, everyone in the room looks around and sees that no one has moved. They realize that they have more in common than that which divides them, and together they decide to get to work.

Brian Morton is an editorial board member of Dissent. His most recent book is Tasha: A Son’s Memoir.

For the next two years, Biden needs to bring back the economists

www.slowboring.com

For the next two years, Biden needs to bring back the economists

Matthew Yglesias

10 - 12 minutes

Back in April of 2021, Ezra Klein wrote what I think is one of the most important columns of the Biden era explaining that economists and “thinking like an economist” had a reduced role in the Biden administration relative to the administrations of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

You can see that in a literal sense where the heads of the NEC and OMB don’t have degrees in economics. Or in a looser sense that economists Heather Boushey and Jared Bernstein on the Council of Economic Advisors are D.C. policy hands, not academic economists on loan to Washington. But you also see it in the policy approach. If you ask former Obama staffers with economics PhDs, they are very down on student loan cancellation. If you ask non-economists who work in Democratic Party politics, they’re way more enthusiastic. It’s not like there are no economists working for Biden or that Janet Yellen and Cecilia Rouse have no influence. But, as detailed in recent books by Elizabeth Popp Berman and Binyamin Appelbaum, there’s an economics style of reasoning that was very influential under Biden’s predecessors that has been less influential under Biden.

And I think that’s reflected in Biden’s major achievements.

He did a major climate bill that totally eschews carbon pricing in favor of industrial policy. There are problems in the economy, but a weak labor market is not one of them because the American Rescue Plan went all-out on stimulus. The Democratic Party is united rather than wracked by infighting over trade and teachers unions, yet Biden has still managed to do a lot of bipartisan legislating. It turns out that relaxing on the technocratic fastidiousness can improve both partisan solidarity and cross-aisle outreach because you’re simply doing politics in a more political way.

It’s not like any president ever governed as a pure technocrat — you can’t take the politics out of politics — but Obama leaned in the direction of technocracy, specifically toward the conventional wisdom of academic economists, while Biden has tended toward the opposite. Some of that is his personal biography, but some of it is a correction to some of the perceived problems with Obama’s approach. And I think the idea of zigging relative to Obama’s zag made sense. But for the next two years, regardless of what happens in the midterms, I think Biden needs to zag back.

Because my brain is mired in the economics style of thinking, my take on this is dominated by the idea of diminishing marginal returns.

In other words, there are real benefits to Biden’s economics-lite approach. But it’s often the case that you reap the largest benefits first, and the longer you continue with something, the smaller the upside.

On climate, for example, we’re obviously not going to get another gigantic spending-heavy, investment-led climate bill. And there isn’t some other issue of comparable importance where an industrial policy approach is going to help. It also seems very unlikely that Biden is going to be able to pass any additional significant tax increases. Doing that would require Democrats to expand their congressional majorities in the midterms, which would really defy history. So to the extent that Biden wants to spend any new money on anything, he’s probably going to need to look at the possibility of a bipartisan negotiation that involves offsetting spending cuts.

That’s the kind of thing economists love to talk about: opportunity costs. They’ll say, “why are we spending money on X when Y would be better?” Activists and political people hate that kind of optimization talk. They like to say, “look, there’s a chance to do X and X is good, so let’s do X.” And Biden got a lot of X done that way. But moving forward, I think we’re going to need more X vs. Y. Even if you think overall federal spending should be higher, I don’t think anyone thinks existing spending is perfectly optimized. There are ways to redirect funds from lower-value programs to higher-value ones and make the country better off. But it’s an economics-y conversation, especially in an economy where making the budget deficit smaller is desirable.

One of my biggest beefs with economists is that I think they underrate the value of full employment.

And even though I have my issues with the size and structure of ARP, I am fundamentally glad that Biden really went for true full employment. But the irony of populist critics of economists is that having achieved full employment, Biden is now the dog who caught the car. Because one of the things about full employment is once you’ve achieved it, the right policy approach is usually the one that you can infer from pretty simplistic supply-and-demand reasoning.

    At full employment, deficit spending pushes up interest rates, constrains investment, and reduces long-term growth.

    At full employment, inefficient regulations don’t “create jobs,” they reduce aggregate output. 

In short, at full employment, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

I spent the decade from 2009-2019 trying to convince people there were more free lunches around than they realized. That’s because unemployment is the biggest inefficiency of all. Getting people into some kind of job where they are doing something is almost always better than having them do nothing, becoming depressed as their labor market skills waste away.

But those days are happily behind us.

Today, if scrapping the Jones Act costs some people their jobs, the great news is that plenty of companies are hiring. The Federal Railroad Administration is pushing a rule that would require freight trains to have two-person crews to operate. When the Obama administration tried to do this it was a bit of a giveaway to some pretty parochial unions. But unemployment was high, so I’m not sure it would have done any harm. But in the full-employment Biden economy, it’s bad. Requiring companies to employ wasteful labor simply generates waste. And in an economy that is supply constrained rather than demand constrained, that’s bad.

The problem with this stuff is that no particular rule has that big of an impact. It’s always easy to say, “this guy in my office cares a lot about this issue, and I can do what he wants or else I can make him angry in order to achieve a nearly imperceptible benefit for 300 million people… I’m going to stick with the guy who cares a lot.”

Economics-style thinking teaches you to say, “if I consistently prioritize efficiency, that generates meaningful gains for a large number of people and only angers relatively small groups.”

Both of those perspectives are true and both contain valid insight. And Biden has done pretty well for himself by following more politics-guided than economics-guided advice thus far.

But if he wants to see decent economic growth over the next two years (and I think he does), economics-style thinking is going to be the only way to achieve it. We got a huge spurt of growth in 2021 from demand-side stimulus — that was great. Then in the first half of 2022, we ran into a brick wall of high commodity prices and it was terrible. More recently, commodity prices have been coming down, and Biden’s fortunes have been looking better. But you can’t count on oil and food to just keep on getting cheaper and cheaper month after month for two years. And you absolutely can’t count on demand stimulus to get the job done.

Growth is going to come either from sheer good luck or else from supply-side reforms. And it’s not wise to count on running into good luck.

A line that tests well in focus groups and polls is that to address inflation, we need to “build more stuff in America.” And I have absolutely no problem with that framing.

But as used by Biden, John Fetterman, and other Democrats, it carries a double meaning. One is “we need to adopt protectionist measures to replace consumption of foreign-made goods with consumption of domestic substitutes.” The other is “we need to adopt reforms that increase the aggregate productive capacity of the American economy so there are more goods to consume.”

These are different ideas, and indeed they are often opposite ideas. If we opened the door to more imports of Canadian softwood lumber, for example, building houses would be cheaper and we would end up building more of them. Some of the Americans currently working in the lumber industry, meanwhile, would need to get jobs elsewhere making something else. So we would be “building more stuff in America” under this reform in the sense that we would have more houses plus whatever output the ex-loggers make. But that’s because we’d be outsourcing more of our logging to Canada. Freer trade, by letting us achieve a more efficient distribution of labor and capital, enables us to “build more stuff in America.” That’s the reverse of saying we need to maintain taxes on imported Korean appliances in order to ensure that we build more appliances in America. We build more of the specific protected commodity with protectionism, but less “stuff” overall.

What we need in the next two years is a spirit of “build more stuff in America” that means more aggregate stuff gets built. That doesn’t mean trade protection, but rather an all-out war on rent-seeking and anti-competitive rules.

The good news about this kind of agenda is it’s something that doesn’t require huge congressional majorities, spending money, or raising taxes. It’s also perfectly compatible with core progressive goals like maintaining full employment, increasing wages, and building a more egalitarian economy. But it does mean that you can’t use the regulatory state to pursue too many weird side quests — you need to exercise discipline from the top down to regulate in order to address legitimate externalities and information asymmetries, but rigorously avoid things where the costs exceed the benefits. That’s the kind of scrutiny that Cass Sunstein used to apply during the Obama years and that drove the left bananas. I think there’s something to the idea that Team Obama was a bit too bought-in on technocratic stuff given the nature of the economic situation at the time. But Biden has rocketed us into an inflationary, full-employment economy, and he needs to tap into that kind of energy to deliver sustained growth from here on out.

Opinion | What Can We Do to Bring Inflation Down?

Opinion | What Can We Do to Bring Inflation Down?

Paul Krugman — Read time: 4 minutes

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/opinion/inflation-prices-food-employment-policy.html

Paul Krugman

You're reading the Paul Krugman newsletter, for Times subscribers only.  A guide to U.S. politics and the economy — from the mainstream to the wonkish.

Not long ago, many people were predicting a long, hot summer of inflation. To their surprise — and, for some Republicans, dismay — that isn’t happening. Overall consumer prices were flat in July, and nowcasts — estimates based on preliminary data — suggest that inflation will remain low in August.

However, I don’t know any economists who believe that inflation has been beaten. Much of the recent good news is the result of falling gas prices, which won’t continue. It’s true that we’ll probably get another round of good news from falling food prices: The Food and Agriculture Organization’s index of global food prices plunged in July, and the effect will probably show up in supermarket aisles in a few months:

In fact, beef is already getting cheaper.

Still, the Federal Reserve has learned from much experience not to let policy be driven by movements in volatile food and energy prices, and underlying inflation still looks high. So the Fed isn’t about to pivot; it will keep raising interest rates to cool off the economy, which is highly likely to lead to at least some rise in unemployment and quite possibly a recession.

In pursuing this strategy, the Fed is following policy orthodoxy. But are there less painful, heterodox strategies we could be following instead?

I’d like to believe that there are, and heterodoxy sometimes works. Unfortunately, I can’t see it working under current U.S. conditions.

What do I mean by heterodox policy? Broadly speaking, there are two ways to bring inflation down without putting the economy through a painful squeeze. One is what we used to call incomes policy: direct government intervention, whether through controls or moral suasion, to limit price increases. The other is policy to hold prices down by expanding supply.

Do incomes policies ever work? Yes. The classic example is Israel in the 1980s, a nation that experienced very high inflation, then brought inflation way down:

This achievement was made possible in large part through a package that included a temporary wage freeze and price ceilings. And Israel managed to go cold turkey on inflation without experiencing a severe recession.

But nothing like that seems possible in modern America. For one thing, Israel in the 1980s was the kind of place where you could get most of the major economic players together in a single room; the labor federation Histadrut represented about 80 percent of the work force.

Beyond that, Israel’s ’80s inflation probably reflected, in large part, self-fulfilling expectations of inflation. When that’s your problem, there’s a strong case for a timeout to break the cycle. But that isn’t what’s happening in America now, where long-term inflation expectations have stayed remarkably subdued:

So what is our problem? Probably just a classic case of too much money chasing too few goods, leading to a very hot economy — one in which there are far more job vacancies than there are people seeking work:

And any attempt to suppress the inflation caused by this hot economy with controls would almost surely be blown apart instantly by market forces.

Does this mean that Congress and the president should ignore the possibility that some companies are taking advantage of an inflationary background to exploit their monopoly power? No, a bit of naming and shaming wouldn’t do any harm and might accelerate the process of disinflation. But we’ll still need Fed tightening — reducing the amount of money chasing the limited supply of goods.

Unless, that is, we can increase the supply of goods. Can’t we reduce inflation by, say, investing in infrastructure, thereby increasing America’s productive capacity? In principle, yes. And we are, in fact, doing that. Last year’s infrastructure law and the just-enacted Inflation Reduction Act are, to an important degree, investment bills that will eventually make America more productive and hence limit inflation — more, I think, than many people realize.

But these benefits, aside from being uncertain in size, will take years to materialize. And the Fed believes — correctly, I think — that it’s operating on a clock. So far, expectations of inflation have stayed anchored, but we can’t count on that happy condition persisting if inflation stays high for an extended period. The Fed, therefore, needs to take action to reduce underlying inflation fairly quickly.

So orthodoxy — reducing inflation by engineering a slowdown — it is. It’s still unclear whether this slowdown will be severe enough to be labeled a recession, but it will be painful for consumers even if it isn’t. There are many good things to be said about a hot economy and tight labor markets, and we’ll miss them when they’re gone. But there don’t seem to be any realistic alternatives.