Mailbag forever

Mailbag forever

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 12 minutes

Mailbag forever

Anger management, Wakanda, the CHOAM monopoly, and the state of Kamala Harris

Trump is running again. It seems to me and to everyone else like his campaign is flailing and he can’t possibly win. At the same time, that’s how it seemed to me and everyone else in 2015. Maybe this time we’re right? I know “everyone underestimated Trump before so they’re probably underestimating him now” isn’t exactly a valid inference. But I can’t help but wonder.

Cameron Parker: If Dems get 51 senate seats, and in theory no longer have to please Joe Manchin, how does that change what's on the policy agenda? Or does it?

The Georgia Senate race is important on a number of levels, and I really encourage anyone who’s able to give Raphael Warnock some money, but it shouldn’t significantly alter the 2023-24 legislative agenda for the simple reason that Republicans are going to control the House. Can some legislation pass with mostly Democratic votes despite a GOP House majority? Yes, in theory, though McCarthy may not allow it. But you’re not going to see a reconciliation bill done that way, so any bills that pass the House will be 60 vote bills.

Marie Kennedy: You’ve mentioned before that you attended anger management classes once upon a time. Has it had a lasting effect on you? You seem remarkably cool-headed for someone who is an extremely online commentator for a living. I was particularly impressed by your reply a while back that the “beef” was not mutual with the podcasters behind “Know Your Enemy. It’s a reaction that few people seem to have the emotional maturity to know is an option.

The whole issue is that I’m not at all cool-headed, but I did learn some strategies in cognitive behavioral therapy that I find helpful.

Basically, though, I think most people can get kind of mad and act out a bit, and that blows off steam and helps them feel better. But just like alcoholics can’t have a beer and a half and leave it there, when I start expressing anger, it spirals and goes to bad places. So I try, to the extent possible, to not do that.

James Schapiro: What’s your take on the geopolitics of Wakanda Forever?

I enjoyed a lot of the movie on a scene-for-scene level, but without spoilers, the big-picture plot didn’t make sense to me. I thought they nicely set up the conflict with Namor as stemming from some pretty fundamental ideological disagreements, and it seemed to me those disagreements didn’t actually get resolved.

Longwalkdownlyndale: We were having fun arguing on Twitter on who should get "credit" for winning World War II. Noah Smith put forward Phillip OBrien's theory that the USSR's contribution is “overrated” and it's much more about the US's/UK's air and sea power. Does Matt have a strong opinion on this? (I follow the "classical revisionist" theory that pushed back against early Cold War era histories that often brushed over the Eastern Front and argued that while it was obviously a group effort the USSR bore the brunt of the assault and caused the most Wehrmacht casualties so deserves an equal share/plurality of credit.)

I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, yes, conventional Anglo-American pop culture and pop historiography overrate the military significance of the western theater relative to the generally larger battles fought by the Soviet Union.

But if you think in terms of counterfactual and but-for causation, I think the USSR looks less impressive. If Hitler had never invaded the Soviet Union, the Allies would have still won the war. Germany lacked the capacity to invade Britain, and eventually it would have been settled by American nuclear bombs. By contrast, if Britain had signed a separate peace with Germany in 1940 and America hadn’t offered lend-lease aid, Hitler could have beaten the USSR one-on-one. So there’s a sense in which British sea and air power and American technology and industrial production really were the decisive factors in the war, even though it was the Soviets who did the biggest part of the fighting.

Joshua: What TV show or movie best depicts how actual political progress is made in government? I'm thinking vote-wrangling, deal-making, compromise, etc. Let's leave out fantasy shows, or if that is a problem, why are there no realist shows that demonstrate that well?

I don’t think there really is a great show that depicts politics in a realistic way as you’re suggesting. Probably the closest is the Danish show Borgen.

I do think the much-derided West Wing has a bit more merit than people give it credit for. This is often stereotyped as a show about how giving a rousing, high-minded speech will solve problems and get things done. But while Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for “The American President” does have that structure, the Bartlet administration just doesn’t actually achieve very much domestic policy change because they are dealing with constant GOP congressional majorities the whole time. What they show on the series — gridlock, and an administration that becomes absorbed with scandal defense and foreign policy initiatives — is actually what you would expect from that situation. Now of course there are also a million ridiculous things about that show, but I did want to speak up for it a little.

What’s interesting to me is that to the best of my knowledge, we’ve never seen a show that’s set primarily in Congress that even attempts to dramatize how legislating actually works.

Thomas: Going into the 2024 election, would you rather be the Republicans or the Democrats? I can see why Democrats would be the obvious answer, but maybe Republicans are finally free of their Trump problem and it's worth noting that where they didn't have problematic candidates it mostly functioned like a normal midterm.

Incumbent presidents are usually re-elected and the 2024 Senate map is very favorable to Republicans. Beyond that, it’s premature to speculate.

Jeff: US government debt plays a very important role in finance & in economics. Imagine we completely retired the debt & ran no deficits / balanced budgets forever after. What effect would this have on finance & economics?

In the corporate world, you frequently see profitable companies issue bonds for various financial engineering reasons.

And by the same token, even a government running a budget surplus could still sell bonds and use the capital to buy stocks or build up foreign exchange reserves or accumulate other kinds of financial assets. If for whatever reason you told me the government had to run a surplus, that’s what I would recommend precisely because — as you say — the existence of the bonds is useful.

But of course instead of accumulating financial assets, it might be better to accumulate hard assets like aircraft carriers, port upgrades, highways, etc. Which is to say it might be better not to run a budget surplus at all. This gets us into what’s a little weird about public sector accounting that just treats all “spending” as equivalent. But in a business, there’s a difference between spending money on a big corporate retreat, in which case the money is just gone, and spending money on building a new conference center, in which case you have a conference center. Either kind of spending might be wise or foolish depending on how much it costs and what you were hoping to achieve, but there’s a categorical difference between obtaining a durable asset that is useful over time and a one-off expenditure.

Eric Wilhem: Why couldn't anyone compete with CHOAM in the interstellar trade of melange? And how does CHOAM compare to OPEC's control of crude oil on Terra?

First off, to quote St. Alia of the Knife, CHOAM is “much more than the Priesthood or melange. It was inkvines, whale fur, shigawire, Ixian artifacts and entertainers, trade in people and places, the Hajj, those products which came from the borderline legality of Tleilaxu technology; it was addictive drugs and medical techniques; it was transportation (the Guild) and all of the supercomplex commerce of an empire which encompassed thousands of known planets plus some which fed secretly at the fringes, permitted there for services rendered.”

In terms of why CHOAM is a monopoly, I take this to be a political issue rather than a market structure issue. Today we take it for granted that states will obtain revenue primarily through taxes. But setting up a system for collecting taxes is logistically difficult, and so is organizing public sector bureaucracies to do things and provide services. Historically, one common way to get a bridge built or get a ferry service running was to provide an entrepreneur with a legal guarantee of a monopoly. And a common way to raise revenue was to sell monopoly rights to certain aspects of trade in certain regions.

Befitting the whole quasi-feudal nature of the setting, Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles is supposed to be something along those lines. The Great Houses of the Landsraad came together to create a trade monopoly. But instead of selling the monopoly rights, they turned themselves into shareholders. So each house gets a cut of the profits from interstellar trade rather than relying on a local tax base. On one level, this incentivizes cooperation and prosperity. But it also weakens Tiebout Competition and lets houses be wealthy whether or not their home planet is well-governed. And of course it should also greatly reduce the total volume of interstellar trade and raise prices. In part, that’s a transfer from commoners to the Great Houses. But the deadweight loss involved must be enormous, and the galaxy as a whole is much poorer than it could be with better policy.

Eli Youngs: What’s your take on Scott Alexander’s idea of using prediction markets to crowdsource the trustworthiness of public figures (including yourself)?

One area where prediction markets have proven to be very useful is in these situations where you have a slow west coast vote count and you want to know what are the odds of winning.

And the reason I think markets are so valuable here is that the questions — what is Katie Hobbs’ existing lead, how many votes are still outstanding, where are those votes, what can we infer about the remaining uncounted votes based on the last batch that did get counted — involve a lot of tedious math and busywork but are fundamentally tractable. For media organizations, doing the work tends not to pencil out for a few reasons. It’s labor intensive and the reputational upside to getting it right just isn’t all that high. Betting markets, by giving people a concrete financial stake in putting in the time to do the analysis, deliver a lot of value.

The other place I find betting markets useful is for questions like “will Russia take Kyiv by July 2022?” The virtue here isn’t so much that the market has magical insight, but that aggregating and quantifying conventional wisdom is itself a useful service. People like to argue about whether things are overrated or underrated, but those arguments often end up hinging on disagreements about how things are rated. So just being able to say “look, this is what the conventional wisdom is” becomes helpful. And if you think the CW is wrong, you can make a bet on it, which is fun.

In terms of betting on public figures, I think you’d optimistically end up with a conventional wisdom aggregator, which could be handy but is unlikely to be revelatory. To really secure information out of these things, you need it to be the case that a question could be answered with busywork but that absent the betting, nobody is going to put in the time.

Evan MacBeth: From a practical politics perspective, with attention to what could actually be done given political constraints, what laws or regulations could be passed or implemented to curb gun violence in the wake of this year's elections. (Not that I am self-interested sitting in Charlottesville or anything.)

My general view of this hasn’t changed and that view, unfortunately, is pessimistic.

I do think that blue states and cities can probably make useful progress on overall violence by refocusing their efforts on deterring illegal gun carrying. That should mean stiff punishments for people caught with illegal guns, and it should mean strict enforcement against people who violate “low-level” rules, because searching farebeaters and street urinators and speeders and open-container drinkers is a way to catch people with illegal guns. That kind of measure could do a lot to reduce lethal violence in the states that already have fairly strict gun laws. But of course a lot of states don’t have strict gun laws, and I also don’t think routine enforcement would do much to stop the kind of spectacular spree shootings that unnerve people so much. There just isn’t a lot that can be done to remediate those given the actual state of public opinion and preference intensity.

Jim: How much is Biden’s Approval Rating (say 538 avg) depressed by progressives for whom he is not progressive enough? I assume in the twitterverse this is a much bigger deal than the real world, but I’ve never seen the numbers.

I don’t think “progressives who wish he were more progressive” is a big thing. But there is a related issue, which is that as you can see with Trump, the perception that someone is a loser can hurt them with their own party. My suspicion is that Democrats doing well in the midterms will boost Biden’s numbers with Democrats as they decide, “hey, this guy knows what he’s doing.”

Greg Ellington: Should Biden pick a new running mate in 2024?

Would it be better if Biden had another running mate? Yes. Would actually dumping Kamala Harris from the ticket be a good idea? I doubt it. The reason nobody does this in the modern world is that the dumping saga itself would be a ton of bad news cycles and create big problems.

The best solution by far for Joe Biden, for Kamala Harris, for down-ballot democrats, and for the country is for Harris herself to change her image and be more popular. Hire some operatives who work for Laura Kelly and Andy Beshear and Roy Cooper. Go on some factory tours with Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro. I think she feels vulnerable and defensive right now because it’s palpable that few people in the party want her to be the nominee in 2028. But she’s still the Vice President and she has huge, obvious advantages — if she can become more popular, tons of people will want to bandwagon with her. So instead of being defensive, she should just follow the lead of people who are winning in red and purple states and trust that the rest will follow from that.

JasonB: I know you probably don't have any special knowledge here, but I'd love some thoughts on how the Elon who created SpaceX, an incredibly successful company that has pioneered game-changing technologies in rocketry, can be such a screw-up running Twitter.

Alternatively, how can screw-up Elon be so successful running a complicated, sophisticated company like SpaceX?

I think we shouldn’t be overconfident in our assessment of how ElonTwitter will go. It absolutely does seem bad so far. But imagine a story in which a controversial billionaire makes a high-profile leveraged buyout, enacts dramatic cost-cutting under intense scrutiny, and successfully ratchets up the pressure to increase productivity and improve the product. That story would feature a period in which things “look really bad” because you have a bunch of disgruntled ex-employees, a bunch of nervous current employees, and a bunch of spectators eager to say bad things about the controversial billionaire. I’m not saying the people who think the current situation seems bad are wrong, just that the evidence is, I think, a bit murkier than people want to admit.

But I do think the fundamental issue is that leading LBOs of established companies is its own line of business that’s pretty distinct from leading early-stage startups. And in particular, we already know that Musk screwed up the crucial first stage of a successful private equity takeover by offering way too much for the stock. In a successful LBO, you need to find efficiencies that are large enough to exceed the debt service costs associated with the acquisition. That’s dramatically harder to do if you are overpaying for the equity.