Last mailbag of the year

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Last mailbag of the year

Matthew Yglesias

28 - 35 minutes

Not a lot of news of any kind in the final week of the year, but some upbeat things I learned this week:

Solar output in 2021 exceeded the IPCC’s most optimistic forecast for 2030. DC is set to close the year with murders and carjackings both down about ten percent. After declining during the worst of the pandemic, the American population is growing again. There are large positive health effects of closing coal-fired power plants, even if the replacement is natural gas.

On to the questions and Happy New Year!

Lost Future: Why does it seem like immigrants assimilate much more smoothly in the US than in Europe?

The obvious reason is that the United States, like Canada and Australia and a few other settler societies, has a longstanding self-conception as a “nation of immigrants,” which means that even people who are very skeptical of immigration on a policy level tend to have a clear story about why “the good ones” are fine. We’re a country whose anti-immigrant populist leader was married to a Slovenian-born woman who maybe did some paid work that was inconsistent with her original visa status.

This has a productive symbiosis with the fact that the United States is a much more patriotic country than most of western Europe. So the official ideology of the United States is that immigrants are welcome here, but then you are asked to do something that is both very specific and also very doable in order to be accepted as an American and that’s be patriotic. Wave a flag. Respect the troops. Stand for the national anthem. We have this civic religion of founding fathers who, like any great set of myths, can have their lives told and retold again for new generations with interpretations that suit the times.

On the other side, I think Europeans exacerbate their disadvantages in two ways.

One is that a large share of immigrants to many European countries come specifically from former colonies. There are understandable historical reasons for that, but it creates a tougher bar for new residents and their family to adopt a “rah rah” patriotic spirit. The other is that lots of European countries have formally recognized national minority populations and official policy structures in place to recognize and support the established minority community. There’s a special school system for the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, and they have their own political party. Belgian politics is structured around separate Francophone and Flemish institutions. Corsica, Catalonia, and lots of other regions special status. The unintended consequence of having these separate formal identities is that it creates a presumption of an ethnic basis of citizenship, and that equality means a kind of separateness.

The shadow cast by all these dimensions is that, of course, the worst-off groups in the United States are the groups descended from enslaved people or from the conquered indigenous population — the exceptions to the “nation of immigrants” narrative.

Last but by no means least, it’s worth saying that assimilation in the American context means something that Europeans might find a bit odd. Last spring I was talking to an Irish guy — as in actually born and raised in Ireland — who was surprised by how enthusiastic Joe Biden was about the official St Patrick’s Day celebration in the United States. After all, it’s Biden’s great-great-grandparents who emigrated from Ireland. But there’s a very well-established tradition in the United States of families hanging on to very vague and distant ethnic roots without that being seen as in tension with them being fully American. And that ties back into American patriotism. We are really asking people to affirm certain things about American civic culture, not to give up on attachments to the old country.

Benjamin, J: Can Congress claw back more power from the executive, and if it can what is the most likely scenario for it to do so?

The only impediment to “congress” clawing back power “from the executive” is that congress would need to want to claw back power from the executive.

If there were anything remotely resembling a bipartisan consensus in congress that it would be good for this to happen, the obstacles to it happening would be trivial. But congress would need to actually want it to happen, which they mostly don’t. Members of congress need to balance policy goals and partisan goals against personal goals like winning re-election, but nobody sacrifices all of those goals together for the sake of bolstering the institutional power of congress.

One thing I’d say about this, though, is that I think congressional abdication of governing authority has in practice empowered the judicial branch. The American state wouldn’t work at all unless lots of practical decision-making was delegated to the executive branch. But an active and efficient legislature could be constantly changing the scope and terms of executive delegation if it felt that delegated autorities were being misused or abused. In practice, that never happens. Instead of answering a question like “does congress want the president to have the leeway to do X?” as a practical question in which the answer is “if they don’t like it they will pass a law saying so,” we just assume that basically no laws on any subject will ever pass congress. So it becomes an abstract question where federal appellate judges make up answers, and they and their interns wield vast power in a way that I don’t think is in keeping with the intended spirit of Madisonian government.

Federowski: You’ve said that you’ve avoided discussing AI risk because you haven’t been presented with actionable and concrete proposals that policymakers/political actors should adopt that maybe are neglected. I think the same could be said of many different topics. But isn’t this precisely one reason to highlight such issues even more? Maybe more people should be thinking about solutions, arguably a lot more people than currently are, and you could help move the needle in that direction — say, in the same way you’ve directed people to think twice about working for Facebook.

I sort of agree with this. But the thing to keep in mind is I also want to publish articles that are good, and that to an extent limits me to topics where I have good ideas for articles.

But I will say that I liked this Katja Grace post arguing that the AI safety community should become more open to the idea of deliberately slowing AI development. I think it’s obvious that OpenAI is incredibly proud of the work that went into ChatGPT rather than ashamed that they built a bunch of safety features into it that either don’t work or else are easily evaded. It’s easy to understand where that pride comes from — their work is very impressive — but it also speaks to the culture of the software industry. In software it’s become normal practice over a span of decades to release buggy products and try to fix them later. Commercial aviation doesn’t work like that. In commercial aviation, the planes are really, really not supposed to crash. When it turned out the Boeing 737 Max had a design flaw that caused the plane to crash in certain circumstances, that was a big embarassing fuckup, not a moment for bragging about how all things considered the 737 Max was a pretty impressive engineering feat.

This is a regulatory fact, but it’s also part of the culture of commercial aviation. The guys who work at Boom Supersonic don’t do a lot of public bragging about “move fast and break things.” This absolutely slows down the pace at which commercial aviation capabilities increase. But it also ensures that planes are extremely safe. And even though there are intense international rivalries in aviation, and even though international coordination is imperfect, there really is a lot of international coordination on safety.

Charles Target: Not a question really, more a request for guidance and a long take on something I'd love to understand: What does the shift to a service economy mean for the inflation-wage-productivity nexus? With goods, prices can often fall while wages and productivity rise. Prosperity! But with services? Seems much harder. E.g. if food service workers are to make real wage gains, do the rest of us have to get used to eating fewer, more expensive meals? (Geneva minimum wage $25/hour: Price of Swiss Big Mac $13.50).

In her autobiography, Agatha Christie writes about living in London in 1919 with her husband. They had a live-in maid and were expecting their first child so they started looking to hire a nanny. She writes decades later: “Looking back, it seems to me extraordinary that we should have contemplated having both a nurse and a servant. But they were considered essentials of life in those days, and were the last things we would have thought of dispensing with. To have committed the extravagance of a car, for instance, would never have entered our minds. Only the rich had cars.”

So, yes, what happens over time is that labor-intensive services get more expensive. Today, of course, more people own cars than pay for regular housecleaning, but more to the point, the broad mass of affluent people hire someone to clean once a week — a full-time live-in servant would be a wild extravagance.

The good news is that unlike Christie, we have things like dishwashers and laundry machines to lighten the load.

In terms of restaurants, I think the key thing is that traditionally there’s been a sense that fast food chains mean bad food. But the big recent trend in dining has been “fast casual” restaurants: Shake Shack and Chipotle rather than McDonalds and Taco Bell. The idea here is that instead of making the cheapest, fastest meal possible, you’re trying to make a pretty good meal in the least labor-intensive way possible. Eventually, I think upmarket counter service will displace broader and broader swathes of the restaurant market, leaving the full-service experience for true fine dining establishments where the price is so high that the cost of paying a server to bring you your food is trivial.

Sravan Bhamidipati: Apparently news headlines are often not written by the writer of the article. Why does this practice exist? How common is this? Why do journalists, who bear the brunt of the criticism about headlines, not push back? Curious how the incentives are all aligned towards preserving this when every reader and writer seems to agree it is bad.

Traditionally this has to do with how a newspaper is designed and assembled. The question of which stories go where in the newspaper is a high-level editorial decision, and not up to the reporters or even the assigning editors. And then what headline should go on a piece is in part a downstream function of where the headline is running physically. Things like sub-heads are then in part page layout elements designed to make the article fit. So in this context, headline-writing is part of that page-assembly process, not part of writing the article.

When we launched Vox, though, we created an editorial process so that the author of the piece and the editor who worked on it decided on the headline.

Joel Kohn: I saw Glass Onion yesterday and didn’t like it. My main issue is that the movie seems to be built around taking down “characters” who are pretty obvious archetypes for real world people the director doesn’t like. It fells like this has become a pattern in entertainment. Creators feel like they have to make political statements with their art at the expense of its quality. Don’t Look Up, The Last Jedi, that terrible episode of The Simpsons with Hugh Jackman and Robert Reich all come to mind.

Am I just a grumpy old man or has our current politics made entertainment worse?

I think you are just a grumpy old man. That Simpson’s episode and Don’t Look Up aren’t very good, but that’s because they’re not good. I thought The Last Jedi had some interesting ideas but fundamentally doesn’t work because the story is disorganized and the whole three-movie arc doesn’t make sense.

But “Glass Onion” was fun! I think both the people who are praising its politics and the people annoyed by its politics are seeing more politics in the movie than are really there. I would just say that if you haven’t seen the movie yet but you are worried you might be annoyed by leftist politics, just close your eyes and repeat to yourself three times “this is a right-wing movie about Sam Bankman-Fried not a left-wing movie about Elon Musk” before you fire it up and you’ll be fine.

EP: What's your take on the Twitter Files story - real crisis for free expression or manufactured tempest in a teapot?

It’s neither of those things. I think that we knew, broadly speaking, that Twitter content moderation was not going very well. The Twitter Files stories have fleshed that picture out but not revolutionized my understanding of what was going on. The one that moved my views the most was Lee Fang’s one about Twitter working with the Pentagon to assist with US information operations abroad, but that’s also been the least-hyped story because it doesn’t play into right-wing ax-grinding about Twitter.

The thing that really makes these stories not so interesting is that Elon Musk already bought Twitter, and it was clear from the beginning that his plan was to stop doing content moderation with a progressive thumb on the scales and instead do content moderation with a conservative thumb on the scales. And I think that’s fine. It’s his company, he can do what he wants. But literally, he can do whatever he wants. He doesn’t need to “prove” that the prior policies were bad in order to change them. If he wants to deliberately make the content moderation policies worse, he can do that. It’s his company!

Bennie: There has been a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking over the 80s-90s decisions to open trade with China. While some of the specifics could have been handled better, wasn’t it still the right thing to do When the world’s most populous nation appears to be making a big move from communism to capitalism, do you work with them or tell them to get lost?

I don’t think “get lost, we’re refusing to trade with you” would have been a good idea. But I also wouldn’t downplay the extent of the failures here.

The key thing on the domestic front is that Permanent Normal Trade Relations only led to tiny changes in actual US tariffs on Chinese imports. Because those tariff changes were so small, the American officials who crafted the policy thought the impact of import volumes would be pretty small. This was really wrong and the permanent part of PNTR turned out to be a huge deal in terms of driving supply-chains and investment decisions. This was a big analytical error on the part of Clinton-era proponents of PNTR. The China shock that unfolded after they left office was both larger and faster than they’d anticipated, meaning the economic transition for affected areas (especially in the Midwest) was bigger and worse than they anticipated and also the opening to China ended up substantially undermining their prior policy of doing NAFTA to promote Mexican economic development.

If they’d understood the situation properly, they still would have done the opening-up (it was on net beneficial to Americans) but they would have designed the process to unfold more slowly so there was more time for reallocation to take place.

But the other big mistake was that George W. Bush reacted to the events of 9/11 with not just specific anti-terrorism moves, but by conceptually framing the United States as engaged in a generational ideological struggle comparable to World War II or the Cold War. This greatly delayed recognition of the need to think of competition with China as a relevant frame for analyzing big decisions. When I went to China in 2008 on a propaganda tour for journalists, PRC officials were quite open about the idea that the post-9/11 orientation of American policy was a huge win for them, so I’m sure American officials were aware of this as well. And Barack Obama sort of tried to change this with his “pivot to Asia,” but that was much more like a “gradual turning of a huge slow boat toward Asia.” Eventually under Trump and Biden we got there, but the whole process started 10 years too late.

Bob: We are approaching the most consequential and significant election in our lives. Of course I am referring to the 2023 Kentucky gubernatorial election. What are your thoughts and predictions for the race?

As you know, I’m a big Medicaid expansion guy and thus a leading member of the Beshear Hive. Kentucky is a very conservative state, so I wouldn’t count Republicans out, especially with Joe Biden in the White House. But it’s worth noting that Beshear was very popular the last time polling was done in October and incumbent governors in general did well in 2022, so I think he’ll probably get re-elected. Republicans don’t even have a nominee yet so we don’t know how crazy they’ll go. But it’s Kentucky where even really nutty far-rightists like Rand Paul can win.

Scott: As someone who believes that proportional representation is the best solution to gerrymandering, what do you think the best path is to getting PR adopted by either a state legislature or the House of Representatives? Are there organizations out there working on this? All I’ve seen is FairVote, but it seems like they’ve switched their focus to IRV.

I wouldn’t say FairVote has switched their focus, exactly. The big proximate problem with proportional representation is the common belief that a provision of the Voting Rights Act constrains states’ ability to adopt PR. The concern was that a majority-white state might say “we’re going to have six at-large members rather than six members, each of whom represent one-sixth of the state” in order to get out of needing to draw majority-Black districts, so they curtailed states’ ability to rely on at-large districts. Of course if you elected six at-large members in a proportional way, there would be no dilution of Black voting power at all. On the contrary, you’d have guaranteed representation without needing to resort to funny-looking districts. But people say the VRA is written in such a way as to not draw that distinction.

It’s never been clear to me if that interpretation is actually what courts would run with. But the proximate step forward would be legislation clarifying that proportional representation is permissible.

Carl Johnson: Will summer homes become more popular in the era of climate change and remote work? Winter homes?

My dad has had a summer house my whole life, and something I always struggle a little to explain is that he wasn’t really quite as rich as “owns a summer house” implies — he’s just been a remote worker with a flexible schedule all along. One big problem with buying a summer house is that it’s expensive. But another problem is that it seems wasteful: there’s this big home and you can only use it for a tiny fraction of the year. But it was much less wasteful for my dad than it was for my friends’ parents who were lawyers or worked in finance, because he could (and still does) spend very long summers in Maine working remotely. Now, thanks to remote work, a larger fraction of affluent people are going to decide that it makes sense to get a vacation house near seasonal leisure amenities.

This is part of a larger theme I’ve been trying to develop, which is that we need to understand remote work as spurring a dramatic increase in demand for housing. Over time that’s either going to mean scarcity that really hurts the poor, or else we adopt lots of YIMBY measures and the amount of square feet per person will go up a lot — in part because of home offices, but also because of increased consumption of seasonal housing. Some of that will be rich people buying second or third homes, but a lot of it will probably be through the Airbnb/Vrbo market.

Matt: If you could make one change to the US healthcare system, what would it be?

The idea of “one change” seems misleading because I think you could write down “everyone should get comprehensive government-provided health insurance” and say that’s one change.

So I’m going to offer a tedious technical change that I nonetheless think is important: I would make it possible for people who are on Medicaid to purchase supplemental insurance plans. Right now, you either get Medicaid or you don’t. If you’re eligible for Medicaid but also for a job-based plan that offers better benefits than Medicaid, you either need to take Medicaid for free or else pay the full price for the job-based plan. The situation with Medicare is different. With Medicare, you can (and many people do) buy a “Medigap” plan to supplement Medicare coverage. This is also how health insurance works in Australia and Singapore where everyone gets a very bare bones plan from the government and then most people supplement that with private insurance.

Right now the non-supplementability of Medicaid isn’t a huge deal in practice because Medicaid beneficiaries are mostly very low-income. But the non-supplementability of Medicaid makes expanding Medicaid eligibility further up the economic ladder dicier than it should be, and makes it hard for states to experiment with creative ideas like a “Medicaid buy-in” plan.

Amir Sagiv: I’ve been listening to “Bad Takes” and generally speaking love it. I was wondering, though, given your recent commentary on Twitter with its spiralling-downward dynamics, whether you think the format of taking people’s bad take as the starting point somewhat… bad? By which I don’t mean not entertaining, or not useful, but somehow psychologically draining for you personally; continuation of Twitter by other means. The same way that watching Fox or OAN all day long can be.

I’m glad you like it (subscribe here!) but to your point, I would say that I actually find it therapeutic.

Part of what I am trying to do is spend less of my Twitter time dwelling on negativity and other people being wrong about stuff. But it’s still the case that negativity is compelling and other people being wrong about stuff is annoying. In the podcast format, I think it’s possible to leverage that annoyance to create content that’s actually somewhat enlightening about broader issues.

John: How much of Boston’s (and the surrounding area’s) high housing prices are attributable to the smallness of the city’s geographically? in other words, what if boston proper was boston plus suffolk county, cambridge, somerville, quincy, brookline, medford, malden etc instead of a small big city surrounded by smaller cities?

I have 2 thoughts on why small municipal borders may be a culprit: the costs associated with more people living in everett, for example, aren’t balanced out for everett by more jobs and companies to tax in cambridge; the search for high quality schools adds to housing prices in a town like arlington but this wouldn’t be as big a factor if education was leveled across the region.

William Fischel, who’s like the godfather of land use scholarship, canonically argues that municipal fragmentation in New England leads to unusually NIMBY politics (see his book “Zoning Rules!” for the most up-to-date form of the argument) for basically the reason you outline.

I do think the script may flip on Massachusetts, though, because YIMBY advocacy is increasingly bypassing the municipal landscape altogether and focusing on state legislatures. And here Greater Boston’s very large size relative to Massachusetts becomes an advantage compared to a multi-city state like California, Texas, or Florida or to a state that has big polarization between “the city” and “the rest” (Washington, Oregon, New York). In Massachusetts, I think it really makes intuitive sense to most people and most legislatures to think of housing + transportation policy for the Greater Boston region — which includes commuter rail connections as far as Worcester, Fall River, New Bedford, and Lowell — as state government’s premiere economic development imperative.

Aaron: What are some of the issues with the biggest gaps between your first-choice, optimal policies and second-best, politically feasible alternatives? When writing about such issues, how do you think about the tension/balance between persuading others to adopt your beliefs and preferences regarding your first choice versus using your scarce resources to advocate for suboptimal policies that are nevertheless an improvement on the status quo?

I don’t love the whole first-best / second-best bit. I think the right way to think about policy is to try to understand the status quo and then to try to understand proposals for changing the status quo and then to say as best you can whether the proposal will make things better or not.

Pure first-bestism where you just shit on everything because “the real solution” is some totally different idea is dumb. But I also don’t love the idea of constructing your whole politics around various claims about finding second-best solutions. I just want to try to analyze issues on their merits, to set the status quo as the baseline for comparison, and to help people understand the underlying dynamics.

To make this concrete, one common analysis among economists is that the optimal strategy for climate policy is to price the externality. I basically agree with that, but as everyone agrees, the politics are really hard. So some people talked themselves into the idea that using random regulatory sticks to block fossil fuel extraction at the source was a good “second-best” policy approach. But the important thing for everyone to understand about this idea is that its apparent greater feasibility hinges entirely on the premise that the policy won’t actually reduce emissions. Because if you did reduce emissions by constraining fossil fuel production, that would have to be because you raised prices substantially. And that’s exactly the thing we decided was politically infeasible. So you end up with activists blocking the Keystone XL pipeline and then angrily denying this did anything to make gasoline more expensive — which I think is probably true, but raises the question of why you did it in the first place.

The Digital Entomologist: How much does executive compensation affect the economy? Is it just bad optics or does it distort functioning of the economy? If we went back to executives making non-obscene amounts of compensation, would American productivity suffer?

This is sort of neither here nor there as to your question, but something I think people don’t know about CEO compensation is that it peaked back in 2000, crashed after the stock market bubble burst, and has stagnated ever since then. You can see the full data on this in the left-wing Economic Policy Institute’s annual report on skyrocketing CEO pay. Sometime a few years back they realized it was no longer skyrocketing, so they switched methodologies from counting compensation in terms of grants of options to counting it in terms of exercise of those options.

CJ: What are some positives of urbanism that could be sold to skeptics that are unrelated to environmental arguments?

I’m against trying to convince people who don’t like cities that they should get into urbanism. It’s unlikely to work and it misframes the relevant policy issues. Imagine if tea were illegal and someone showed up to try to convince me I should support a tea legalization ballot initiative. I might say “I dunno, I don’t like tea — I think most Americans just want to drink coffee.” It would be really dumb for your next move to be to try tell me all about tea, and why tea is good, and the benefits of tea culture in the United Kingdom and whatever else. The policy argument that tea should be legal has nothing to do with convincing people that they as individuals should like tea or arguing about coffee vs tea as preferences.

You should be allowed to build denser housing on land that you own if that’s what you want to do with it because making it illegal for people to do this imposes massive deadweight loss on the economy. That’s the argument. My experience is that it’s really difficult to get people to hear this argument because everyone is constantly on edge and looking out for identity-based arguments where they can have a scrap about the nature of the good life and defend the merits of suburban living. I think it is absolutely crucial to the project of pro-urbanist policymaking to be clear that we are not at all, on any level, trying to persuade even a single person to like cities, enjoy city living, become urbanists, appreciate urbanism, or alter their negative opinion of people who post on the internet about why cities are good. People should be allowed to build what they want — that’s all there is to it.

Dysphemistic Treadmill: Anti-doomerism: What can progressives do to encourage young people to have a positive attitude towards having kids?

This is another area where I don’t think trying to talk people into changing their preferences is going to be very productive. We can make public policy more supportive of parents and children.

But I also think we as a posting community can try to talk people out of the specific claim that climate change means kids born today are likely to grow up with lower living standards than their parents or grandparents. This is a meme that a lot of people seem to sincerely believe, and that I think they believe is grounded in global scientific consensus, but it’s just not what the IPCC reports about climate impact say. It’s of course possible this consensus is mistaken, but my sense is that most doomsayers don’t perceive themselves as outliers who’ve “done their own research,” they think they are faithfully repeating what the IPCC is saying. But what they say is that under current projections of warming, future generations will be worse off than they could have been in a counterfactual version of the future in which less warming takes place. That’s why it’s a good idea to adopt emissions-reducing policies. But living standards are still projected to improve over time.