Anti-Dutch Mailbag

www.slowboring.com

Anti-Dutch Mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

24 - 30 minutes

Folks, the Netherlands is in many ways a hard country to hate. But this weekend it is our patriotic duty as Americans to hate the Dutch. No more going Dutch. No Dutch ovens. No double-Dutch jump rope. I saw a big display of gouda cheese at our local Whole Foods and felt ashamed on behalf of the whole neighborhood. It’s a time for moral clarity.

Edward: Could you share a little insight into how you choose which questions to answer or not answer?

No.

Eli: I don’t know how much of this has been tongue-in-cheek on your part, but some things you’ve tweeted suggest you think healthy friendships between men look different from healthy friendships between women, or at least can function without the kinds of deep conversations and airing of emotions that many people see as essential to a friendship. That hasn’t been my experience – my friendships with men and my friendships with women look pretty similar, and I noticed your tweet from today in particular because over Thanksgiving I met up with multiple male friends primarily to talk. We talked about life events, careers, relationships, and politics. I know I’m atypical in having more close friendships than the average US man, but is there a reason to believe my friendships with men aren’t typical intermale friendships? Do you believe that men in fact are less into getting together and chatting than women, and if so do you believe that contemporary anxiety over male loneliness is overstated, and if so why?

I know this has become a contentious subject in recent years, but my slightly banal opinion is that men and women are different, on average, in some pretty important ways, while at the same time there are lots of exceptions and zones of overlap.

One of those differences is that relative to women, men prefer to center their interactions around some kind of (perhaps pretextual) activity. I could get into elaborate, somewhat speculative theories about why this is, but it seems to me to be pretty well-established that this difference exists, even though there are also obviously exceptions. Something that is less well-established but I think is interesting is that I suspect gender difference in friendship styles interacts with the huge technological advances in home entertainment in a way that is probably bad for men. If your style of friendship is organized around the idea that you explicitly need to directly converse with each other about personal matters, then it’s just going to be obvious on its face that streaming video home alone is not a viable substitute. And cheaper communication technology means it’s easier and more convenient than ever to keep up a running dialogue via text or to do a phone call or video chat.

But if your friendships are more activity-based, then the fact that the relative quality of alone-at-home activities is rising compared to going-out activities is going to significantly disrupt your friendships.

John from VA: You've written a lot about popularism, but you also advocate for some unpopular policies because you think they're good ideas. How do you decide which policies to try and persuade people on and which to throw up your hands and say, "It is what voters say it is"? Obviously, we all have opinions about what really matters, but what's your framework for drawing that line, if there is one?

I feel like I get some version of this question every week so I’m going to keep trying to explain myself better. It might be easiest to look at Maggie Hassan, who just crushed it in her reelection campaign, as a good example of what I mean. She won in part because of a weak opponent, but in part because of tons of ads like this one touting her fiscal responsibility and status as “the most bipartisan senator.” I’m told this ad in particular — highlighting her work on prescription drug prices and surprise billing, but also her bipartisanship and willingness to stand up to President Biden — was extremely effective at persuasion, given that it aired so late in the campaign when persuasion is hard.

The thing about this is that Hassan, with all due respect, is an extremely generic Democratic Party senator. But what she has presented here is a fully accurate, if highly edited, version of herself that is designed to appeal to cross-pressured voters. This idea is so boring that I can’t believe there is a raging, years-long internet controversy about it. But let’s be clear, that’s what Hassan is doing — she’s not firing up the base, she’s not trying to inspire a hypothetical constituency of leftist young people, she’s not promising big structural change, and she’s not engaging in viral cultural war content. And it works really well. I would like to see Democrats bring more of this energy into their communications strategy and earned media rather than just ads. And to acknowledge that while this works really well in New Hampshire, if you want a Senate majority, you need to be competitive in Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, and Iowa, which are more conservative than New Hampshire. And that’s probably going to mean putting more meat on the moderate bones than Hassan did. But the basic formula of “publicly emphasize your most popular stuff, quietly do your most important stuff, and acknowledge there are tradeoffs” applies everywhere and carries the critical implication that activists and advocates should not engage in pressure campaigns aimed at forcing candidates to publicly avow controversial stances.

Estate of Bob Saget: Favorite and least favorite airport?

I’m an airport enthusiast, so I can’t just narrow this down to one simple favorite since there are so many dimensions of airport excellence.

For example, DFW is really well-optimized to make transfers. Especially if you’ve flown through it more than once, you understand how it works, and you understand how to get where you’re going. They’re able to manage a very large volume of flights on tight schedules. It’s impressive and it works well compared to the chaotic layouts of IAH or O’Hare. At the same time (and in part for the same reason), it totally lacks character and is a kind of weird, unpleasant place. Now, for most people on a connecting flight, the goal ideally is to not be spending a ton of time waiting in the airport and DFW is fit for purpose there. But if you do have a long connection, then the incomprehensibility of O’Hare isn’t a big problem and the fact that it has great food options is a big plus. I’ve had genuinely good times waiting for flights in Chicago.

Internationally, the airport I’ve been to that’s always praised is Changi in Singapore, which I agree is excellent. But my sleeper choice is Copenhagen, which has a lot of classic Nordic architecture and design, great ground transportation links to the city, and a weirdly large number of upscale luxury stores that make you wonder if a lot of people are making spur-of-the-moment Hermes purchases at the airport. Plus lots of Legos!

Walker: Do you think LBJ is underrated as a President? The vast majority of the American welfare and regulatory state is tied to legislation that LBJ passed as President.

What makes this so tricky is that I don’t really have a clear sense of to what degree we should attribute either the successes of the Great Society or the failures of the Vietnam War to Johnson relative to a replacement-rate president. The sort of great Boomer Kennedy Mythos is built around the idea that Vietnam was an eccentric Johnson mistake, while the Great Society was just continuity with JFK or baseline Democratic Party stuff.

I’m not sure that’s right. But for a long time it was paired with a conservative view that the Great Society was some huge mistake, which truly left LBJ friendless. I think looking back you can say the biggest and most important Great Society programs (Medicare and Medicaid) were clearly successful, and while there were flaws in some of the smaller programs, ultimately we have done much more to build on the LBJ foundation than to roll it back. An interesting thing about historical memory is that while basically nobody these days would defend the Roosevelt administration’s internment policy or find his silence on anti-lynching legislation acceptable, a lot of people are also very willing to yadda yadda past it and evaluate him primarily in light of his domestic policy returns. Johnson in a curious way arrived in our memory pre-cancelled as the Vietnam Guy when I really think it’s a pretty comparable situation — a very serious policy error that mostly amounted to going along with the prevailing politics of the era when the prevailing politics were just badly wrong.

Dave Coffin: Is there any political appetite for actual compromise gun control legislation? E.G. something like a federal license for semi automatics that includes universal background checks and a red flag provision in exchange for CCW reciprocity and removing suppressors and short-barreled rifles from the NFA. Or do all roads of gun control end at confiscation for the foreseeable future? It really seems like the gun control states and cities should be looking to deal on the stuff that is obviously on the SCOTUS chopping block anyways.

Compromise seems like the wrong frame for thinking about this because it assumes that Republicans are facing some pressure to compromise when they just aren’t. The relevant issue is more like “given elite Republicans’ sincerely held empirical beliefs and values, can you convince them that there’s anything good to do regarding guns?”

The big thing I think liberals don’t get is that we are really talking across a conceptual void about the normative status of non-criminals amassing firearms. To liberals, that’s something you might grudgingly accept as non-harmful. But conservatives see it the way most Americans see alcohol. People mostly think it would be bad if you couldn’t enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, meet friends for a drink at the bar, or enjoy a restaurant meal cross-subsidized by high-margin alcoholic beverages. They feel Qatar not allowing beer sales at World Cup matches is very eccentric and meaningfully detracts from the fan experience. People obviously don’t deny that drunkenness also causes a lot of problems, but they see tremendous positive good associated with recreational consumption of alcohol, and in addition to whatever specific qualms they have about specific anti-booze policies, they would view any intervention by people who don’t share their booze-is-good values as inherently suspect. By the same token, gun owners view basically anything Democrats could possibly say about guns as inherently non-credible and a manifestation of what they (accurately!) see as Democrats’ fundamental belief that the positive good theory of household gun ownership is insane.

So for something to happen, I think it either needs to be led by Republicans or else Democrats need to learn to do a much better job of pretending to believe in the positive good theory. I notice that Mitt Romney and other LDS politicians do not seek out every heart-wrenching story of an innocent person killed by a drunk driver and then tweet about the high cost of widely available alcohol.

To the extent that there’s something progressive politicians in progressive jurisdictions can do, I think it’s to push for much more aggressive policing efforts to deter illegal gun carrying. But note this means not just seizing the guns, but punishing the gun carriers — in other words, it’s tough on crime politics, not gun control.

Sam Taylor: Do you have any hot takes on Singapore? The reason I ask is it takes hugely idiosyncratic approaches to a broad range of issues, making it ripe for hot takes. Some examples of its uniqueness

    Personalised retirement accounts rather than pensions (CPF)

    Mass government subsidised housing (HDB)

    Multiracialism not Multiculturalism (where racial groups are homogenised and given explicit rights)

    Successful state capitalism in Temasek and GIC

    Use of exchange rates to manage inflation not interest rates

Taking these out of order, I think (5) is actually not idiosyncratic but pretty typical of small countries. In a lot of ways, I think monetary policy is much more intuitive when you think about small countries, where it operates primarily through an exchange rate mechanism. In terms of Temasek, I keep meaning to do a post about sovereign wealth funds, which I think are underrated. On (1) and (2), you have an incredible success story that I just don’t think has any real application to the United States. On independence, Singapore started out as a very capital-poor country that also did not seem like a very attractive destination for global investment. A big part of its success as a developmental state was promoting high levels of domestic savings and channeling that savings into domestic capital investment. A risk for a lot of small countries is even if you get a burst of good economic news, that gets plowed into a short-term consumption boom and/or people moving their newfound wealth into offshore investments. Singapore did an amazing job of averting that, it’s just not actually a problem that we face.

Singapore’s racial policies are interesting. Americans tend to lack comparative perspective on racial or ethnic issues. We’re of course familiar with the fact that various forms of straightforwardly repressive or discriminatory regimes exist around the world. But people typically don’t realize the sheer range of ideas about what equality might look like. Singapore leans much harder than the United States on reifying race as a formal legal concept where you have to make an official statutory declaration of your racial identity and then you’re allowed to change it once (but only once!) and your selection has a lot of formal consequences. That’s almost like a gesture toward the idea of doing “separate but equal” except they then have a lot of mandatory integration — there’s no such thing as a stigmatized Malay or Indian ghetto. But it also means that every neighborhood is majority-Chinese. In the U.S. of course we would never mandate neighborhood-level ethnic composition, but our official discourse never confronts the question of what we think the ideal is — would it actually be desirable to eliminate all ethnic enclave neighborhoods in the name of integration?

Sheridan: In light of the FTX collapse, do you think that regulators should try to regulate & work with the crypto industry more, or continue to largely ignore & shun it?

I’ve always had mixed feelings about this because it’s a little hard to say what the goal of crypto regulation would be. The whole crypto regulation conversation leapt very quickly into debating specific positions (CFTC vs. SEC, etc.) without a moment to talk about the principles we are trying to enact.

But that’s important. There’s plenty of scope for disagreeing about how the stock market should be regulated, but that comes within a sphere of broad consensus that it’s useful to the economy for companies to be able to stage IPOs, which in turn means it’s useful to have broad and deep markets in which to trade shares of stock. We then face questions about what kind of rules of the game will set the stage for successful stock markets over the long run — we want markets that safeguard the interests of middle-class investors, that are attractive to global capital, and that suit the needs of established businesses, but that are also friendly to newcomers, etc. By the same token, there is a lot of gambling and speculation on commodity markets, but the existence of commodity markets both helps commodity users manage their risk and helps incentivize producers to scale production to meet demand.

But what is the purpose of cryptocurrency regulations? What are we trying to accomplish? I’m not sure.

Nilo: What do you like about the District that makes you prefer it to New York City?

Three virtues of D.C. that don’t detract from the things the Big Apple stans like about NYC:

    D.C. is smaller — it’s easy to get from my house to any neighborhood in the city, and it’s also easy to leave the city and go apple picking or whatever. New York is a logistical nightmare.

    I personally enjoy the fact that D.C. is full of federal employees and people who work in policy-adjacent fields — I am constantly learning interesting things from the people I meet.

    The D.C. area has a high median income, which is great for economic opportunity, but there are more billionaires living just in Manhattan than there are in all of D.C., Maryland, and Virginia combined, and that relative paucity of super-rich people is nice. 

Now the flip side is that New York’s combination of scale, diversity, and extreme wealth means it contains the largest number of pockets of true excellence across a huge range of categories. I just don’t find that in my day-to-day life I’m especially bothered by the fact that I don’t have access to better soup dumplings, better live theater, or a wider range of art galleries. Like most middle-aged parents, I’m more constrained by time/exhaustion/logistics than by the objective presence or absence of interesting things to do. I also of course enjoy the Magnetic Fields song “Washington, D.C.”

David Margolis: The DC Auditor just released a report that says Dept of General Services is not using its Salesforce platform properly (or at all). Consequently DCPS principals have no idea if their repair requests are being handled. Tweet here from DCist:

Yet another example of poor governance in progressive cities. This could just be more fodder for a riff that you and Ezra are both good at. But I’m struck by the extent of the management problems across the city agencies in DC - and their imperviousness to modern public management techniques. Do you think the Bloomberg / KPIs for everything model is universally applicable or is the problem somewhat spiritual? Would a greater sense of civic connectedness inspire a worker to care more about uploading a real photo of completed work instead of a stock photo — and how can we cultivate that sense in a world of tight budgets and partisanship?

I’m glad to see this story out in the open because from what I’ve heard from a few people involved in the school system, the state of this maintenance stuff is genuinely awful.

Ducking the big-picture question here, I think the main issue the DGS situation poses is that it’s good to think more seriously about when it makes sense to have functions in-house versus when it makes sense to outsource because you see errors in both directions. An issue that recurs in transit construction cost inquiries is that American transit agencies have zero in-house capacity to plan and manage projects so they’re left depending on consultants. It’s hard to build effective public sector institutions, but when it comes to a function like planning and executing a subway, there’s basically no alternative.

By contrast, you look at Tyler Elementary School’s broken air conditioners and pest control problems and there is absolutely a way to address these issues without building a highly effective Department of General Services — you’d just pay a private company to fix the HVAC. There is a robust private market in providing these kinds of services, and while it’s certainly possible that a centralized public agency could do better, if you don’t happen to have an excellent public agency on hand you could just contract out and focus on achieving excellence in areas that are more inherently public.

Chris: If you went back to the Medieval age and had to advise political leaders on how to rule, what insights from a millennium of philosophy, political science, and economics would you impart to them? Assume their goal is to build a strong and prosperous country, but also to retain their own power.

I think this would be a very frustrating experience. Like I’d be sitting there, aware that it is possible to boil water and use the steam to power an engine, but I actually have no idea how to build a steam engine. And I could tell you a lot of great facts about the geography of the world, but I’m pretty sure you need a sextant in order to sail across the ocean in an efficient way, and I don’t know how to build one.

What could I actually pull off with my actual level of knowledge? I’m not really sure, except at the margin to urge the ruler to be more positive about manufacturing, commerce, and finance as various decisions came to light. My extremely amateur impression is that all that stuff was broadly considered low-status and disreputable compared to tilling the land and fighting on horseback. But even without any incredible feats of innovation, a medieval country could raise its income by encouraging investment in mills and being friendly to commerce and trade.

Vince A: Is the biggest obstacle to a female presidential candidate the media? I get the sense that female candidates (Democrats especially) get the Al Gore treatment every time. Tons of “likeability” stories and focus on gaffes. Very little positive coverage and much swallowing of GOP attack points.

OTOH, is there a pattern of overperformance among female Democrats with a strong element of lower-middle class markers in their public persona? Perolta, Davids, Klobuchar, Baldwin and Gluesenkamp Perez all seem to support this. Gluesenkamp Perez filmed campaign ads in her auto repair shop and pulled off the biggest upset of the cycle.

I don’t think there is any clear evidence of a systematic electoral penalty for women. Now before people get too mad, I want to distinguish a couple of other claims:

    All candidates get criticized, and women candidates in particular face criticism that is sexist or misogynistic in nature.

    Candidates are evaluated through a gendered lens.

Both of those things can be (and in fact are) true without it being the case that women systematically face an electoral penalty. It’s all a question of who you run and how. And here I think the problem for Democrats is that a certain kind of white-collar professional woman has a good amount of clout in Democratic Party politics and the specific women who these women are most enthusiastic about are not necessarily the most broadly appealing women in politics. Barack Obama is Black, but he has a very white-friendly political persona. Pete Buttigieg is gay, but he has a very straight-friendly political persona. The most successful women in politics probably won’t be the ones whose personas are most appealing to college-educated feminists — it’s going to be, as you said, women with a bit more of a working-class vibe.

Jason S: Considering how impotent modern medicine still is, isn’t it wild how the world cannot come together to spend an order of magnitude more on medical treatment and research? Mortality and morbidity are our common enemy. We shouldn’t need malevolent aliens to bring us together.

I wouldn’t say that modern medicine is “impotent,” but I agree that medical research is underrated.

The note I would add is this isn’t just a question of money, it’s a question of medical ethics, which has a pretty dubious anti-research bias. I really recommend Alan Wertheimer’s book on this.

Matt Hagy: Do you have take on the looming railroad strike and Biden calling on Congress to avert that by passing a bill to require the unions to accept the tentative contract?

I don’t have a super-hot take on this other than the observation that the unions themselves deprioritized sick leave over wages in their bargaining, which is one reason they ended up with a contract that doesn’t have sick leave. If you leave that context out, you’ll misunderstand the situation. When Vox workers unionized and bargained for their first contract, they chose to prioritize a generous parental leave program, which is how they ended up getting one. They probably could have gotten a slightly better deal in terms of health benefits if they’d been willing to accept less on parental leave, but what the union wanted was a strong parental leave program, so that’s what they got. The rail unions like the sick leave as a talking point, but did not prioritize it in practice in bargaining — they did get a 25 percent raise, though, which is not nothing.

Patrick Bringley: You mentioned somewhere that writing and publishing your last book was emotionally trying. What was it that threw you for a loop? Any advice for someone whose first book publishes in February? My expectations change by the hour, so I’m working on ignoring them…

I wish I had advice but I mostly just have a lament. You work so hard on a book! And then it’s out in the world and … not that big a deal to most people.

Cameron Parker: There was a Darrel Owens tweet you recently responded to about how the internet made people stupid. Doesn’t seem to me like the modal person is dumber and also doesn’t seem like the people on the fringes are either. Has anyone gotten dumber from the internet, or are they just wrong more, or neither?

I think the idea that people are stupider or worse-informed than they used to be is really underbaked. In the past, educational attainment was lower, it was dramatically harder to look things up, and the general quality of prestige media was much worse — read newspaper articles about policy debates from the 1990s and they’re just awful.

What I do think is true is that the internet, and especially Twitter, has a perverse way of amplifying dumb ideas relative to normal ones. Like if someone were to tweet tomorrow “I’ll almost certainly vote for whoever Republicans nominate in 2024 because I generally agree with the GOP preference for lower taxes and tighter restrictions on abortion,” that take would sink like a stone. But if someone were to say “I’ll almost certainly vote for the 2024 GOP nominee because that’s the only way to stop the mass child abuse cult that’s taken over the Democratic Party,” that would generate tremendous discourse. The issue here isn’t that people are dumber, but that we pay more attention to the most inflammatory things that are said on any given day.