Beginning to feel a lot like Mailbag

Beginning to feel a lot like Mailbag

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 19 minutes

Beginning to feel a lot like Mailbag

Long movies, dysfunctional agencies, and the case for incumbency advantage

At the suggestion of Matthew Edwards in the comments of “Secret Congress delivers more good news on clean water,” I’m going to try to routinely include some positive developments at the top of these mailbag columns.

The obvious one this week, I think, is the inclusion of the Electoral Count Act in the omnibus appropriations bill. The ECA will help forestall efforts to steal future presidential elections, which is good on its own terms. But more broadly, its inclusion represents implicit recognition on the part of GOP leadership that what Trump did at the end of his presidency was really bad in ways that transcend partisan politics. And I think that’s worth noting not because the ECA solves every problem, but because I think its passage does cut against certain widely-made, super-pessimistic forecasts that I haven’t really seen people revisit, even though it’s been looking likely that this would happen for a while now.

I’m also glad to see governor-elect Maura Healy talking about the need for land use reform in Massachusetts.

Now, on to the mailbag!

Marie Kennedy: Not sure if you caught Michelle Goldberg highlighting a piece by Maurice Mitchell as an antidote to the Tema Okun problem... What’s the word on the street in DC? Is “the fever breaking” in leftist political organizations, or is it just wishful thinking on Goldberg’s part?

It’s a great piece column from Goldberg and a great piece from Mitchell and I’m glad they wrote them. Is it wishful thinking? I wouldn’t put it that way. I think that if you could read Goldberg’s mind, she would say that institutional dysfunction is in part self-sustaining because if people think other people are terrified, they will be terrified themselves. Part of causing the fever to break is to tell other people that the fever has broken and they will be safe if they respond in a sensible way to controversies that arise.

My broad sense is that she is right, and the fever is breaking.

That said, my word of caution continues to be that progressive groups are inherently vulnerable to meltdowns as long as they don’t meet their own standards for diversity, and those standards may be unrealistic unless people can go back to addressing talent pipeline issues as legitimate concerns.

Mike: I was pleasantly surprised that you liked Jeanne Dielman, because you've seemed to have very “dadcore” movie tastes. And now I see you watching Claire Denis movies and also liking them. Newfound appreciation for arthouse cinema, or have you always secretly liked this kind of thing? And bonus question: Is it good for the S&S list to be headed by an excellent movie that most people haven't heard of and will probably hate, or would it be better for it to stick to safe popular classics?

I spent a lot of time seeing arthouse movies in the mid-aughts when I had tons of time on my hands and friends who liked to do that sort of thing. I drifted away from it over the years and I do fundamentally have a poppier sensibility than the “Sight and Sound” poll. If you ask me my favorite movies, the answers just aren’t going to be old foreign films. That said, the latest poll jolted me out of my dogmatic slumber and got me to finally sign up for Criterion Channel, and I’ve seen a bunch of great things there.

In terms of “Jeanne Dielman” at the top of the list, it’s not a choice that I love from the standpoint of what’s good for cinema’s role in culture.

I think it’s not just an arty movie but almost an academic one — you need to be pretty steeped in movies to appreciate a film that’s largely playing with our expectations of what a movie should be like. Now by that token, I can see why a distinguished panel of film critics would like it — they’ve seen a ton of movies. But what I liked about the AFI “100 Greatest American Movies of All Time” list is that I think it makes for a good homework assignment for someone who’s decided they like movies and want to learn more about movies and film history. You can quibble with the picks and it has terrible representation of Black and female filmmakers, but in broad strokes, this is an introduction to some of the best-executed versions of mainstream filmmaking and serves a clear pedagogical purpose.

That’s not really a criticism of S&S to be clear, but I think a survey of critics’ tastes is just less interesting than a more deliberately curatorial exercise.

George: I’ve read a lot of commentary handwringing movies being too long (think the 2.5-3+ hour runtimes of movies this year like “The Batman,” “Wakanda Forever,” “The Fabelmans,” “Avatar 2,” and the upcoming “Babylon”.) As a guy who likes movies, do you have any thoughts to contribute on this discourse?

I am not a fan of the long movie trend. I think it is defensible if you are adapting a novel to sometimes say “look, the novel was written to be a novel, not to be a movie, so I was forced to choose between the compromise of an inappropriately long film or compromising on the story, and I decided all things considered that the best thing to do was to go long.” I will also accept, as in the aforementioned Jeanne Dielman, that sometimes being long is part of the point.

But in general, the nature of the medium is that it should be short. James Cameron said that if you can binge-watch a TV show you can watch a long movie and that it’s fine to just get up and go pee. But I disagree with that. Part of what makes a TV show not just a very long movie is that it has breaks built into it. You should be able to sit down in a movie theater with a soda, drink the soda, and then go pee after the movie is over. And part of the job of the screenwriter, the director, and the editor is to compose a story that fits those parameters. You’re sitting down to make a Batman reboot and you could write basically anything — go write something that’s the length of a proper movie! Raiders of the Lost Ark is 115 minutes, E.T. is 114 minutes — the whole reason we might care about Steven Spielberg’s thinly veiled autobiography is that he’s a master filmmaker. He knows what length a movie should be. Go make a movie that length.

I rewatched the 80-minute “Run Lola Run” recently. Part of its brilliance is that Tom Tykwer and his editor Mathilde Bonnefoy pack a ton of information into this frame. You learn all about Lola’s family, the creepy bank security guard, Manni’s life of crime, and the whole possible future life trajectories of several other residents of Berlin all in the context of a gripping, suspenseful movie that is also short. This isn’t easy, but that’s the job.

Claire: Obviously, your (Matt’s) relationship with Effective Altruism has always been a bit uneasy, and that’s even more true now post-FTX implosion. You’ve mentioned before that the optics of Effective Altruism were never particularly good (it’s largely a group of nerds sitting around in T-shirts, and not a group you can easily introduce to policy makers), and I think we can all agree that the SBF has at least temporarily made EA politically toxic.

If you were going to deliver advice to individuals in EA leadership roles, what would you personally recommend on how to make these ideas less politically toxic over the next several years?

(Disclosure: I work for an EA-aligned organization, but not in a communications or external-facing role.)

One baseline observation is that the large amount of money FTX was pumping into the movement created gravitational incentives toward being inward-looking. There was a sense of an abundance of money but scarcity of attention, so the key first-order priority to was to persuade other EAs that your thing was important on EA terms so that you could elevate it on the EA agenda.

This post I wrote making the case for more funding of alternative protein research came about because of a conversation Kate had with Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute at the EA Global conference in D.C. And in official EA doctrinal terms, the case for alternative protein research is mostly about animal welfare. But my post is mostly about climate change, because climate is a more mainstream policy issue, climate philanthropy is a lot larger than EA, and “negative environmental externalities associated with farming should be reduced when possible” is a lot less philosophically contentious than animal welfare. It’s a completely above-board pitch — the climate impact of agriculture is genuinely large, and we have thus far made almost no progress on addressing it. But it’s also an effort to spend less time in an internal argument about cause prioritization and more time just bringing an EA perspective to bear on a conversation that’s very mainstream in policy circles.

By the same token, I liked this Scott Alexander post about ChatGPT and racism. Instead of refighting the “x-risk versus algorithmic bias” wars, he’s pointing out that a lot of people are already worried about algorithmic bias and already doing stories about how the anti-bias measures at OpenAI don’t work, so maybe let’s have a broader conversation about the reality that the frontier AI companies keep releasing products that are both incredibly impressive and also fail their own stated goals. The norm in the software industry is that it’s fine to release buggy products and then fix them. But the FAA won’t let you iteratively design passenger airplanes on that basis.

James B: You've written before about the phenomenon of “unrepresentative activists” who claim to speak for minority communities, and how this has played out with respect to the Black, Latino and Asian communities. Do you have a read on whether this same phenomenon is playing out with Native Americans? I have notice a lot of indigenous activists promoting (or being used by progressives to promote) various lefty ideas, some of which feel uncomfortably close to the old “noble savage” trope. Most recently it was a TED Talk about “Indigenous Guardians” protecting the planet from climate change.

There is absolutely some of this going around, but the difference is that Native American nations have formal governance institutions that involve accountability to constituents. So if you want to know what the Navajo Nation wants with regard to some controversy in Arizona or New Mexico politics, there is an actual Navajo Nation President whose job is (among other things) to advocate for Navajo interests. This isn’t to say there’s uniformity or monolithic opinion — the incumbent president lost his reelection bid last fall — but that’s exactly the point. Tribal officials have to actually worry about how representative their ideas are.

Peter Gerdes: What's going on with the NRC? Are the political appointees secretly trying to scuttle nuclear power? I can't imagine that the physicists, nuclear engineers and environmental scientists are attitudinally against more nuclear power.

Is the problem a failure to apply cost/benefit analysis, eg, each concern about a possible risk gets a rule to fix it regardless of the complexity cost? Is it an incentives problem (no one wants to be blamed if things go wrong)?

I wrote about this for Bloomberg recently, but I think the basic model with the career staff of any federal agency is that they basically don’t want things to change. In part because people impatient for change tend to select out of a career in the civil service, but in part because they live in fear of being hung out to dry. There are not, right now, members of Congress yelling at NRC officials about why they aren’t licensing more reactors, and there are no protests at their office. If they do something different, there might be protests and they might get yelled at.

I don’t think of the political appointees as “secretly trying to scuttle nuclear power,” but they also haven’t made a definitive choice to advance nuclear power. And this really becomes a question for Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, and other congressional leaders. Do they want the NRC commissioners to prod the career staff, even if that results in some articles in the Washington Post about how NRC career staff are worried about prodding from the political appointees? If the NRC does issue new rules and people do start building a new generation of nuclear plants — will the top politicians face down protestors and complainers and tell them they are wrong?

Joseph Politano: What economic event/outcome since the start of the pandemic most surprised you, and how much (if at all) has it shifted how you think about the economy?

I was surprised when the original durable goods inflation took off. Like a lot of things, it’s easy to explain this in retrospect — people had extra money from relief programs and didn’t want to spend it on travel or dining out, so they bought tons of durable goods and that sent prices soaring. But at the time, I thought prices would go up a little bit but then pretty quickly people would say “fuck no, I’m not paying that” and just sit on excess savings. After all, durable goods prices had been in structural decline for a generation or two, and I thought sticker shock would nip inflation in the bud.

Taylor: What’s the case for a young person to become a journalist today? The pay is low, the layoffs are frequent, people blame “the media” for all kinds of bullshit and you’re limited to living in one of two cities, more or less. If you’ve got the skills to be a good journalist, there are many jobs you’ll be good at where you’ll make more money and have better job security. Why bother?

I don’t really encourage people to pursue careers in journalism, but I do want to complicate “the pay is low” as an idea. What’s happened is that journalism has become more of a star-driven, hits-driven, tournament-like business. Thanks to the internet, it’s possible to reach more people than ever before and to monetize in a bigger variety of ways. So the pay has become more unequal, which has made it a riskier undertaking but not necessarily a worse one, depending on your appetite for that kind of thing.

kjz: Tyler Cowen recently wrote a short post about his disillusionment with the Westminster system of government. The main thrust of his criticism is that UK politics is even more gridlocked than American politics, despite the centralization of executive power. Given that you've previously written favorably of the Westminster system (which Tyler mentions in his post), does this argument resonate with you? Why or why not?

The main thing I think about U.K. politics is that their land use policy is very bad and also a much bigger deal than comparable land use issues in the United States thanks to the different geography of the country. I don’t see that problem as stemming from either parliamentarianism or centralization, which are the two main aspects of the British constitutional order that Cowen criticizes.

I’d also say that a lot of recent problems in British politics have their origins at least in part in key actors abandoning the logic of Westminster-style constitutionalism. That’s Nick Clegg joining a coalition rather than letting David Cameron helm a weak minority government, it’s Cameron holding a Brexit referendum rather than upholding parliamentary sovereignty, and it’s both Labour and the Tories making big policy pivots based on American-style leadership primaries rather than closed-door meetings of MPs.

Greg S: Is the fact of incumbency advantage good? Should we want to see it shrink or grow?

Here are two things I want from the political system:

Voters should be responsive to what politicians actually do in office.

Politicians should be responsive to what their constituents want.

If both of those things hold, most incumbents will cater to local interests and voters will notice that, and the result will be that incumbents outperform on average. So I think a healthy incumbency advantage is probably a sign of a healthy political system. But that’s not because incumbency advantage is per se good.

David: Are there any issues where you felt very strongly before you found some data that reversed your position?

It’s pretty rare to see some data and then suddenly change your mind. But there are lots of things where my opinion has shifted over time as I’ve learned more — one is about transportation infrastructure, where back 10-15 years ago I would have adhered to a very conventional “just spend more money” line. My land use views have evolved over time from “we need to foster quality urbanism” to “we just need to allow more housing.” And I think my health care views have shifted to more emphasis on health insurance as financial insurance to protect people against the economic consequences of ill health and less as a central lever of public health policy.

Walker: Who would be the best plausible nominee for Dems in the 2024 Presidential Election? I think it would be Whitmer.

In the real world, the best thing for Democrats is for Biden to run again.

If you could avoid a primary and just install a different person by acclamation, then yeah, I think Gretchen Whitmer looks like a very strong choice. You could maybe balance the ticket with Ben Ray Luján.

But realistically, it remains the case that the odds are very good that the next time Biden is not the nominee it’s going to be Kamala Harris, and the best thing for Democrats is for Harris to make better political decisions. I feel like I end up saying this every other mailbag, but she should be spending time with Whitmer and her team (and Catherine Cortez Masto and Tammy Baldwin and Roy Cooper) and building out a circle of people who are experienced with winning in purple and red states. Harris’ only genuine weakness in a potential primary is that people are worried she’ll lose. If she has a laser focus on being popular and winning, she’ll easily brush off leftist opposition. But right now, almost nobody is convinced she’s a general election winner.

Michael Adelman: How do you rate the chances of Ron DeSantis becoming an American Orbán and achieving a decades-long hammerlock on power for the GOP? David Shor considers DeSantis a heavy favorite to win the 2024 election with a massive Senate majority. And DeSantis has shown many Orbán-like tendencies - aggressively entrenching partisan advantages, wielding state power against civil society in illiberal ways, rallying support with anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ culture war, etc. I could easily imagine a world where DeSantis and the state/Federal officials that ride his coattails grow the GOP's structural advantages by a few more points, after which it starts to feel hopeless to oppose them especially in a country where self-described liberals are a tiny minority. As a supporter of social programs, environmental policy, and pluralism, this makes me really sad, but I fear the odds of DeSantis both winning and locking in GOP power are pretty high. Do you agree? And what (if anything) should liberals be doing now to avoid the fate of the Hungarian opposition?

I don’t find it that constructive to dwell on exactly how likely I think worst-case scenarios are.

The main thing I would say about DeSantis is that given the 2024 map, he could easily take the White House and a large Senate majority with 50 percent or even 49 percent of the two-party vote. And DeSantis plus a large Senate majority would likely enact large cuts in Medicaid and other anti-poverty programs and at least attempt the kind of big cuts in Medicare that he voted for as a House member. We now also see that he’s come out for a near-total ban on abortions in Florida. To me, those are sufficient reasons to not vote for him, and I think that if most Americans believe a DeSantis administration would mean cutting Medicare and Medicaid while banning abortion, they won’t vote for him either.

So unless he radically pivots away from his House record on these issues, the idea I am going to try to keep front and center is that Ron DeSantis has bad positions on major public policy issues.

Philip R: Me and my fiancee are moving to DC soon and want to live inside the city - what neighborhoods would you recommend for a young YIMBY couple with a basset hound? Access to parks and the metro would be a major plus.

It’s a little hard to opine without knowing the details of your situation, but my general advice would be to look in the string of neighborhoods that follow the Green Line north from downtown — Shaw, U Street, Columbia Heights, Petworth — that all offer good city living and transit access, but also plenty of opportunities to have a small yard for the dog.

David_in_Chicago: Why can't successful CEOs find successful replacements (e.g., Iger, Dalio, Bezos, Schultz)? Does the shadow loom too large? Does the replacement's need to insert their ideas create disruption?

It’s not like this never happens — both Apple and Google have had successful leadership transitions, and I don’t think it’s clear that your pessimism about Amazon is entirely correct.

But my guess is the main reason that these transitions sometimes go badly is that it’s objectively hard and also not necessarily something any given CEO has experience with. There’s not some obvious way to practice. What’s interesting is that when a successful transition does happen, it often constitutes big change. Tim Cook has been a successful CEO, but he’s nothing like Steve Jobs. He is instead a guy who rose to a senior leadership role at Apple by having skills that were highly complementary to Jobs’ skills, which meant that he was already running large swathes of the company before taking over. But that in turn meant that while Cook is now the CEO instead of Jobs, it would be misleading to say that Cook does the work that Jobs used to do — the whole way responsibilities are parceled out is completely different.

Michael Tolhurst: If part of good policy is priming the culture, I'm curious what a Slow Boring holiday Hallmark movie might look.

Is it a high powered executive director of a DC progressive non profit returning to her hometown and falling in love with a staffer for a congressman from a suburban district outside of Cleveland? Or does the couple find love after feuding over the future of a now defunct historic holiday theme park that is planned to be redeveloped into [a new mass transit station/high density housing/large scale renewable]? What would be the key themes of such a movie, and how could the genre be adapted to best express the themes of the blog?

A greedy real estate developer, a woke community activist, and a normie homeowner end up snowed in together with some construction workers and sales agents and need to piece together an improved holiday celebration for themselves. By actually talking to each other in a real and direct way, they discover that their interests, though not identical, are reconcilable once they recognize that reducing deadweight loss generates surplus.

Russell Brandom: Do you have a favored remedy for reforming a broken institution? What should we do when an important agency is no longer capable of fulfilling its function? Lots of the discourse (both right and left) seems to be grappling with some version of this, but I have not heard a general theory of how to respond to institutional failure.

I think shutting agencies down and spinning up new ones is underrated. One of the real successes of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law was creating a brand-new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with a distinct ethos and esprit de corps. They also shut down the dysfunctional Office of Thrift Supervision and parceled out its functions to other regulatory agencies.

Another example is the police reform saga of Camden, New Jersey, which didn’t “defund the police” but did literally eliminate the city’s police department and replace it with policing services they contracted from the county. Many of the officers in the “new” department were just the people who’d worked at the old department, but the point was that the new department was new and everyone had to apply for their jobs. I have a friend who ran a school turnaround project where, similarly, a failing high school was shut down and then a “new” high school was established in the same building. She ended up hiring a lot of the “old” high school’s former employees but not all of them — and it was a fresh start with not just a new principal and some new staff, but a new tone and a new culture.

Update your profile

Only paid subscribers can comment on this post

Check your email

For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.

Click the link we sent to tka.lee@gmail.com, or click here to sign in.