Artisanal, human-crafted mailbag

www.slowboring.com

Artisanal, human-crafted mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

22 - 27 minutes

I prompted Chat GPT to “Write an introduction to a weekly mailbag column” and it gave me this: Welcome to our weekly mailbag column where we answer questions from our readers. Each week, we will select a few questions from our readers and provide insightful and informative answers. Our goal is to help our readers learn more about a wide range of topics and to address any concerns they may have. Whether you have a question about current events, science, history, or any other topic, we are here to help. So send us your questions and we will do our best to provide you with thoughtful and helpful responses. Thanks for reading and we look forward to hearing from you.

That’s pretty good writing, but it’s soliciting questions and not actually introducing the column where the questions get answered. So there is still room for human journalists!

M Bartley: What did you like about the ending of “The Menu”? Myself and the two other people I know who saw it both enjoyed the movie but found the ending pretty weak.

Definitely an example of a movie where the first hour is better than the second hour. What I said on Letterboxd (don’t click unless you’re ready for spoilers) is that I think you have to consider the curve you’re grading on. Despite the horror and thriller trappings, this is really a comedy and comedies are usually weaker at the end. And really high-concept stuff like this in particular has a tendency to fall apart. I think given all that, they stuck the landing pretty well and the very last shot is cool.

But whenever this movie ends up on a streaming platform, I can definitely see myself firing it up, watching for a while, and then heading to bed without finishing the rewatch.

Sharty: What possible incentives could be offered the journalistic ouroboros that could incentivize at least a little bit of policy coverage with respect to potential presidential (and other) candidates like RDS, as you have complained before?

Or, more prosaically, how can we individual media consumers contribute on the margins to such incentivization? I can avoid clicking on culture war chum online, which is easy enough (and I do), but what about print/TV/radio media? There seems to be no good/direct/succinct feedback mechanism.

It’s hard for any one person to massively influence these things. But I like to say that posting is praxis. If journalists see a lot of people talking about Ron DeSantis’ refusal to expand Medicaid, hurting his state’s economy, and denying insurance coverage to hundreds of thousands of people all for the sake of avoiding a trivially small spending increase, then they are going to be more inclined to write about it or ask about it. If journalists get questions about DeSantis’ past votes for Paul Ryan's budget frameworks or what DeSantis thinks about fiscal policy issues, they may be inspired to write about what we know and don’t know about this.

If higher-level pundits and political figures who talk about DeSantis in a taxes/health care frame receive positive feedback, then they will talk about it more. I just encourage everyone to try to be polite, sincere, and upbeat in what they say, but most influential people on social media are paying at least some attention to the feedback they get from less influential people. If you express interest and curiosity in certain things, you can push people to pay more attention to them. I also think it’s important to try to avoid getting dragged into “is he just as bad as Trump”-style debates. There are certain unique, awful aspects of Trump that RDS hopefully avoids. But it’s totally legitimate to express fear and concern about the prospect of a president who has repeatedly taken big political risks for the sake of making health insurance worse for the poor and the elderly — there’s a kind of incommensurable badness there that’s just worth talking about.

Joshua: What are the prospects (if any) for better local media coverage of local political issues and candidates? The demise of medium- and small-size papers has left a coverage gap in many parts of the country. There are various efforts to fill the gap with new papers, blogs, websites, nonprofits, but many places (like central PA where I live) are still missing good (or any) local coverage. What can individuals do to help, assuming we don't have time to attend local council and board meetings personally?

It depends in part on the specifics of the local situation, but the biggest thing anyone can do is be the audience for state and local coverage. Paying some money to subscribe to the best local news available is a pretty good idea, even if it’s not amazingly good, because the way markets work is you only get investment and competition if people think there is a market. One thing I always suggest people check out is whether there is something like Central Penn Business Journal that may be off the typical consumer’s radar.

My basic view is that local news is largely an audience interest problem, which makes it hard for even nonprofit players to operate successfully. Even if your business model is nonprofit, it’s still the case that foundations and grantmakers are going to want to give money to outlets with large audiences.

Srw: The White House Press Secretary said several times, in a threatening tone, that the White House was “keeping a close eye” on Twitter. It is easy to imagine a future White House similarly threatening, say, the Washington Post or Slow Boring. Does this go beyond criticism and call into question the administration's respect for the first amendment?

I didn’t view that as a particularly threatening statement, but if the Biden administration were to start directly threatening media outlets, they would be joining the Trump administration (which said tons of crazy stuff and also actually abused antitrust law to punish CNN) and the Obama administration (which launched unprecedented levels of criminal leak inquiries) and the Bush administration (which was the king of the vaguely worded “watch what you say” threat). Those are the only administrations I’ve covered, so I can’t really speak to how things went under Clinton or Poppa Bush, but it’s absolutely a reasonable concern that government officials will seek to improperly coerce the press. That’s why you need regulators and judges with integrity.

Jacob: How do you think large language models, like ChatGPT, are going to change education?

It’s not at all obvious to me, so instead I’ll frame my answer as a question: Should educators think of these tools as a source of cheating and redesign their assignments so that students aren’t using them, or should they think of them as writing tools (comparable to a spellcheck program) that everyone should use and that just set the bar higher in terms of what kinds of outputs we expect to see?

Lost Future: You have been pretty enthusiastic about the Inflation Reduction Act and associated moves to enhance clean energy tech in the US. However, our allies including Europe and South Korea are apparently much less enthusiastic about it- the bill contains a number of Buy American provisions, and I believe only grants tax credits to American electric cars. In fact I'd go so far as to say that France, Germany and South Korea are mildly apoplectic about this kind of protectionism, and to my understanding they can make a formal complaint to the WTO if they choose to.

I believe that you're generally pro-free trade (correct me if I'm wrong). How can we balance national investments in much-needed clean energy technology, with non-protectionist legislation that doesn't harm our major allies & trading partners?

I think this is a question of leveling up versus leveling down. What the EU wants is for all the IRA subsidies to be in place, but without the provisions in place designed to prevent the money from leaking to foreign producers. It would be nice for them if we did that, but it would also undermine the political economy behind the law. What Europe ought to do is enact a similarly ambitious set of production subsidies, and then the U.S. and Europe should allow imports of each other’s stuff.

Tokyo Sex Whale: What do you think of the House Democrats working out a coalition deal with a few moderate Republicans? Let one of them (or a non-member like John Kasich) be Speaker and give them whatever committees and chairs they wish with modest servings of pork. The Dems would have little legislative expectations either way, but it would defang MTG, Gaetz, Jordan, etc. and prevent stunts around investigations and the debt limit. It would also give Biden and the D's a moderate bipartisan vibe going into 2024.

I don’t see great prospects for action here. The basic issue is moderate Republicans aren’t particularly motivated to do favors for Hunter Biden, and while Democrats would like to raise the debt ceiling, they also aren’t particularly motivated by this issue because they think Republicans making a big public demand for cuts to retirement programs will backfire.

Mattdmk: Did our experience with large scale direct cash payments during the pandemic, and the inflation that followed it, ruin the politics for universal basic income?

I don’t think anything is ruined. But back during the 2010-2020 period, claims like “the real constraint is inflation, not budget math” were often taken to have very left-wing implications which I think turn out to not really be true.

Scott Rada: What do you think parents should tell their kids about Santa?

As a person experiencing Jewishness, my anxiety is always that if Jews spill the beans, Santa-enthusiast parents will orchestrate pogroms. Beyond that, I leave it in the hands of the goyim.

[Editor’s note: As a person not currently experiencing Jewishness, I think everything about the concept of Santa is pretty weird! While Matt and I are divided on the question of whether to threaten our child with pogroms, we found offering a bonus New Year’s present for not making any of his classmates cry before Christmas to be pretty effective for our non-Santa household.]

Chip Mosher: I've thought for a long time that the progressive Dems should promote universal single payer healthcare as a boon to entrepreneurship. I don't have any hard data to prove that that's right but it feels right to me, that more people would start more business if they didn't have to worry about healthcare. Looking at my industry for example, comic books, with a handful of publishers that rely on freelancers for talent pool — there's an inordinate amount of creators from UK and Canada, and I always thought that was indicative of bigger social safety net letting people pursuing more non-traditional career paths...

The practical politics of this end up hanging pretty substantially on financing mechanisms — if everyone got health care through a government program (including potentially one with private participation like ACA exchanges or Medicare Advantage) that was funded through a VAT, then I think that’s clearly a boon to entrepreneurship and broadly speaking “good for business.” But real-world progressive health plans rely heavily on taxing the rich, so it ends up playing as primarily a tax policy question.

Hutcheson: Granted that “cancel culture” in academe is not the world’s top priority problem but is there anything productive that a good faith conservative state legislature could do to promote less of an ideological bias in state universities.

I think conservatives need to think a little bit harder about what it is they actually think about higher education. Here are three different center-right narratives that are in reasonably wide circulation:

    We need more practical education that is aimed at useful job skills and delivers economic benefits to individuals and society. This is like a conservative critique of student loan relief or something Marco Rubio would say.

    We need more “old-fashioned” education that challenges preconceptions, wrestles with difficult ideas, and engages the canon. This is like the Chicago Principles or the kind of thing I heard a lot when I went to a Heterodox Academy conference.

    We need to accept that education is largely just pointless status-seeking and consumption, and we should reduce the number of resources our society dedicates to this and the power and prestige of top universities. That’s in Bryan Caplan’s books and in a lot of takes you see on the internet about how employers should give job candidates IQ tests. 

These takes all kind of converge to express a negative attitude toward incumbent universities, left-wing faculty, faddish political ideas, cancel culture, etc. But they’re actually very different claims. And in particular, the kind of ideas from bullet point two or in the book “The Coddling of the American Mind” have opposite implications from the ideas in points one and three. Right now, anti-coddlers are in a coalition with anti-humanists and education skeptics on the basis of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” but to devise a constructive anti-coddling agenda, you need to break out of that coalition.

City Dweller: Any thoughts on the White House's just-announced guidance on incorporating “indigenous knowledge” into federal agency decision-making?

I’ve read this twice, and I don’t really understand what it says.

I think it’s an example of a dynamic that is pretty toxic: academics like to come up with striking-sounding terms for things, then foundations tend to port these academic concepts into an advocacy context, and then executive branch officials want to show responsiveness to the advocates, so they embrace weird, radical-sounding jargon, the upshot of which may actually be pretty banal. There was a Nature article right around Thanksgiving whose headline was about “Decolonizing” agricultural research, but its specific proposal was that “decolonization should go beyond simply citing colleagues from developing countries to including them in conferences and as co-authors.” Now if I were trying to communicate the idea “it would be good to invite more scholars from poor countries to conferences about agriculture,” I think I would just say that. These scholars might have valuable perspectives, and the conferences are a networking opportunity that could help the field.

So back to “indigenous knowledge” — is this a fancy, off-putting, radical-sounding way of saying “we should consult with indigenous communities about what’s up when we make changes?” That sounds very reasonable! Or are we actually endorsing some radical epistemological ideas? I find the document very unclear and the overall rhetorical approach to be at best unhelpful.

Ed Tantamount: Could you please reduce your use of the phrase “at the margin” in non-economic contexts? You seem really fond of it but it tends to make your meaning obscure and confusing.

I should perhaps try to use this phrase slightly less often (see me not saying it there), but I think exposing the concept of thinking at the margin to slightly more people would be valuable and one of the most efficacious ways to achieve that is to encourage those who are already familiar with it to use the terminology a little bit more frequently and publicly.

Alex Newkirk: Has the last 2 years caused any adjustment in your assessment of the hydraulic vs. expectations hypotheses of monetary action?

I used to be all-in on expectations, and I think the past year has mostly supported a hydraulic interpretation so I’m now a little uncertain. However, I do think commodity price shocks and measurement error in housing inflation have been a really big deal as well. I’ll be interested to see what happens in the year ahead. The real hydraulic heads are saying that despite housing inflation now calming, we’ll need a recession to tame inflation, even if we can keep commodities on track. I’m just not sure I buy that.

Mitch P: One underrated piece of the SBF story and his unconventional, outspoken response to the whole FTX collapse is his mom literally wrote the book on nonconsequentialism , which it seems is a driving force behind his ambivalence to whether what he did was wrong or feeling any remorse. Does that change the way we should be looking at his response, namely eschewing legal advice and trying to aggressively win in the court of public opinion?

I really like that book and am a pretty ardent consequentialist, so I’ve been annoyed by the tendency to see what happened here as reflecting underlying flaws in consequentialist thinking. To me it’s the opposite: the kind of reckless actions and breaches of faith that SBF undertook have been plainly disastrous for the causes that he claimed to believe in. A lot of people think consequentialism implies weird, perverse things about banal interpersonal relationships like “should you rip off your customers if it’s for a good cause?” but we just got an object lesson in the reality that it does not.

As Fried argues in her book, the merit of consequentialism is that non-consequentialism doesn’t provide any good way of thinking about complicated, large-scale questions that inherently involve interpersonal tradeoffs. But boring deontological intuitions about how we should interact with other people on a day-to-day basis are themselves well-backed by consideration of practical consequences.

Henry: What do you think of Sam Bankman-Fried's statement that he “would never read a book” since any book could be a “six-paragraph blog post”? I've certainly read books that could have been articles and articles that could be summed up in a few paragraphs, but to me this indicates that he really doesn't think the world is a very complicated place, which makes me skeptical of his ethical reasoning and ability to identify humanity's biggest challenges and their potential solutions.

I think he should have read his mom’s book.

srynerson: Alternate history question: George Washington runs for reelection a second time and wins a third term as President. (I think the general historical consensus is that he likely could have won a third term without difficult had he chosen to do so.) Superficially, this probably doesn't change much in the short run because, presuming he still dies in 1799, Washington would die partway through his third term and John Adams as VP would succeed him, just as Adams followed Washington by reelection. At the same time, however, it would probably establish the acceptability of at least running for three terms, if not the acceptability of running until one either loses or dies in office.

At what point do you think this would cause the choice of presidents to diverge from the historical record (i.e., who would be the first three-term president after Washington) and what would the consequence be of that specific change in who was president? (I won't ask for your projection over the rest of US history, because my suspicion is that after the first three-termer, things would start diverging rapidly enough to make any analysis unmoored from the historical record, but feel free to disagree.)

I’m not really much of a Jefferson-head, but my understanding from a tour at Monticello years ago and confirmed by a Wikipedia page (at least I’m not letting AI write these answers), Jefferson didn't really enjoy being president and was thrilled to hand things off to James Madison, who along with Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin had been kind of running the show for much of his second term anyway.

Madison and James Monroe, by contrast, had a bad relationship in Jefferson’s second term, and one of the things Madison did was take action to patch things up. With that done, he seemed happy to follow the Washington/Jefferson precedent and hand off to Monroe. But imagine a world in which that reconciliation doesn’t quite work, and Monroe continues to be an intra-party rival of Madison’s, which maybe makes Madison want to hold on to office. Madison could have secured re-nomination and would have crushed Rufus King in 1816 (as Monroe did), precipitating the collapse of the Federalist Party just as we saw in our world. But I don’t ultimately know how much difference this makes to American history — I think you still see the emergence of something a lot like the Second Party System. Maybe Jackson ends up serving a third term in this history. Maybe Grant does. But neither of those occurrences would have a dramatic impact on history. What’s more interesting is the prospect of Teddy Roosevelt running for re-election in 1908 and averting the GOP split in 1912.

TF: How would you advise a candidate from the left of the Democratic Party to win the primary while still being positioned to win the general?

First off, I would hire consultants with roots on the left side of intra-factional disputes. Second, I would invest some real time and energy in talking to journalists who have roots on the left side of intra-factional disputes to make sure they know I’m on their side and agree with them about the need to overthrow the corrupt Democratic establishment. And I would try to convey the same to major institutional funders of left-factionalism. I want to really convince these people that I am one of them, that I agree with them, and that I want them to help me beat the bad establishment — in part by neutralizing their electability arguments — rather than have them spend a lot of time urging me to say leftist stuff.

But then publicly, I would talk a lot about Medicare price negotiations for prescription drugs, federally-funded generic drug manufacturing, and regulating credit card interest rates. These are very popular leftist ideas that industry hates and moderate Democrats resist. But I wouldn’t call my intra-party antagonists “moderate Democrats,” I would say “the weak establishment of both parties.” And I wouldn’t call my ideas progressive or left-wing, I’d call them common sense. I’d complain about corporate wokewashing and fake DEI efforts in a way that leftists would hear as leftists but moderates would hear as moderate. Last, I’d insist on being super-patriotic while also talking about patriotism as a foundation of solidarity — we should expand Social Security benefits so that nobody who worked and paid into the system is living in poverty, and we should have free school lunches for all our kids.

Chris Freeberg: From the NY Mag on Matt Taibbi "There is, of course, no single style of Substack writer... but the platform has attracted numerous media dissidents — including [Taibbi], Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, and Greenwald" Motley crew to be lumped in with! I enjoyed when you and Josh Barro discussed where you disagreed most on his pod.... In the same vein, how you feel to be lumped in with Taibbi, Greenwald, and others who go in such a different direction with their dissident status? Are there areas where you see common ground or specific rabbit holes that you feel most explain your differences?

I guess I feel pretty good about being lumped in with Andrew Sullivan, who I think of as pretty similar to me in outlook but more conservative. What we both are, though, is moderate. What’s weird to me about Taibbi and Greenwald is that they processed getting disgruntled with the left by becoming right-wingers rather than by becoming moderate. I don’t think it’s hypocritical or inexplicable in either of their cases, but I do think it reflects a wrongheaded way of engaging in the political system and a misguided addiction to edginess.