Solstice is nearing mailbag

Solstice is nearing mailbag

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 18 minutes

Solstice is nearing mailbag

Hypothetical podcasts, local abundance, and my efforts to be strategically annoying (but never rude)

What did they do with all that daylight they saved back during Daylight Savings Time? Can we tap into some of it?

Jackie Blitz: Do you think Tim Scott is an underrated potential GOP presidential candidate?

In general election terms, Ron DeSantis is an answer to the question “who seems optimized to beat Trump in a primary while addressing his most erratic behavior?” The actual strongest GOP contender would probably be someone boring like Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, who’s solidly conservative but rejects DeSantis’ hard-right views on Medicaid. That said, GOP elites will probably insist on a nominee who has hard-right views on Medicaid, and Tim Scott seems like a pretty solid choice in that regard.

maynardGkeynes: Every once in a while, I go back and re-listen to Weeds podcasts you did with Ezra. Damn, they were great. I wish both of you the best in your careers, but it would be great for you guys to do a Reunion podcast from time to time.

I’m glad you like those old Weeds episodes! I think it was a great show and I miss it in many ways. I was on Ezra’s podcast back in late October and I think it was a good episode.

Marie Kennedy: Thoughts on Ezra’s take on Twitter? Specifically what I think is the money line, “I think there is a reason that so little has gotten better and so much has gotten worse. It is this: The cost of so much connection and information has been the deterioration of our capacity for attention and reflection. And it is the quality of our attention and reflection that matters most.”

Ezra’s points are almost always good and that includes his points in this column. If we were on a podcast together talking about this, then for the sake of keeping things moving, my pushback on him would be that there’s a fine line between his praise of the Quaker wisdom of silence and Aaron Burr’s “talk less, smile more, don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for” advice from Hamilton.

Now to be clear, this is pretty good self-interested advice from Burr. But I think the world suffers when too many of the most level-headed people simply opt out of certain conversations for the sake of avoiding contentiousness. So while Ezra sees too many hotheads and attention-sucks, I see too many Ezra Kleins staying silent, creating a “best lack all conviction, worst are full of passionate intensity” dynamic. Both of these things are clearly present, though, which is why it would be a good podcast discussion.

City of Trees: What's your take on the four day work week? I'm curious after you indirectly linked to this Derek Thompson interview via this retweet of Kay Steiger that expressed concern about how school would be handled with a four day work week.

I took Kay’s point here less to be that this is an insuperable problem and more that it’s an example of the idea being a little bit underbaked in terms of exactly what we’re talking about. Teaching is a particular example because of its high social necessity. But more broadly, this isn’t 1932 — most people are producing personal services for others. Nursing homes aren’t going to be staffed four days a week, nor are restaurants or yoga studios. Do we want to make it less convenient to go see a dentist?

Thompson was interviewing Juliet Schor, well known for her 1993 book “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure.” I thought her point in the book that we should be taking more of our productivity growth in the form of leisure was sound. But guess what? In the time since I graduated, the average hours worked and the employed share of the population have both fallen. So I worry less about Schor’s macro concern and more about these little details.

Zack Lubarsky: How do you think we could or should advocate for an Abundance Agenda on a local level? What should the demands of an Abundance Agenda be at the state and local level be?

Housing housing housing housing housing housing housing housing. And after that, depending on the specific circumstances, you have to look at your most locally abundant energy resource (geothermal or solar or wind, depending on your geography) and how your local permitting rules are constraining it. But really, housing is a huge share of the economy and all the policy is state and local, so the answer is housing.

Isaac: What does the political coalition to get rid of the Jones Act look like? What rhetoric would it use?

It’s Mike Lee and AOC teaming up and it probably doesn’t involve a ton of rhetoric, other than people saying this law is old and dumb and everyone knows it. You probably also need to bring in some defense hawks who have some shipbuilding program for the Navy they want to attach to it that makes the industry happy.

Estate of Bob Saget: Most underrated place in the US with population under 100k?

Always gonna rep Bangor, Maine in this kind of question. But it’s also a reminder that I always want the internet to give me more “official” indexes because it’s hard to know what’s underrated or overrated without reference to a ratings index. That’s part of the reason something like the Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time critics poll is a fun resource when it comes out — you can debate not just the movies but their rated-ness. As far as I know, nobody is rating these small towns at all.

Ant Breach: Do you watch anime? What is your favourite anime?

I am not really an anime fan, though as I believe I’ve mentioned before, when I was in high school I lived next door to a movie theater that for several years specialized in Asian cinema so I saw some 1990s anime there. The best was probably “The Ghost in the Shell,” which later became the subject of a terrible live-action remake.

Nate Meyer: Is there a limiting principle to YIMBY-ism (per the J. Demsas article in the Atlantic)? For example, the implication of the Demsas article is that if “X” number of people want to live in Beverly Hills, Beverly Hills has to provide housing for them, even if there is housing somewhere else. This seems a non-starter politically. Is there a point at which it's okay to say “no, you can't live here at all because you can't afford it” as long as there is adequate housing elsewhere?

This is the wrong way to think about it. The right question is, suppose you own some land in Beverly Hills and were thinking of building dwellings on it. What limitations should there be on the number of dwellings you can build, on the size of the dwellings, on the height of the structure, or on the fraction of the land that is covered by the structure? As a pragmatist, I am happy to accept less than this, but my answer to those questions would be “no limits imposed by the government.” If there are contractual agreements with neighbors, then so be it. But if you own a parcel of land and want to build an apartment building on it, you should be allowed to. If you own a parcel of land and want to sell it to a developer who wants to build an apartment building on it, you should be allowed to.

Should there be regulations aimed to meet bona fide safety needs? Of course. You don’t want buildings that will fall down or be fire hazards. But the preponderance of our land use codes are about saying there are certain kinds of dwellings that can only be built in certain kinds of places.

Ryan: How are you feeling about Twitter? I appreciated your enthusiasm for tweeting through it and I never really bought into the idea that it would collapse but I’ll admit I would like to see Elon get kicked off his pedestal. As a Twitter lurker I have noticed that it is markedly worse now. Replies are less witty and filled with many more weird Elon defenders or just like right wing nuts. Are you Matt feeling the same? Is anyone else feeling this too?

Relative to the doomsaying that occurred when Musk announced the layoffs, everything is fine. But I agree with you that there’s been an uptick in annoying activity by low-quality right-wing accounts. Not sure if there’s a software change or just some kind of mobilization effect, but on those terms I’d say we’re still in a better place than we were in 2015-2016.

Sean: What do you think of the various proposals for the federal government to buy out the patents of expensive prescription pharmaceuticals and treatments as a way to control costs?

We were talking about Kyrsten Sinema on Bad Takes, and I said that her opposition to prescription drug pricing reform is politically disastrous, but I don’t think the concern that price controls are bad for innovation lacks merit. At the same time, patents and monopoly pricing for pharmaceuticals lead to massive deadweight loss, so just sticking with the status quo seems unacceptable to me. We ought to be looking at a suite of measures designed to increase pharmaceutical abundance. That should include:

Prizes rather than patents for high-priority pharmaceutical research programs.

Buyouts of certain existing patents along the lines of your suggestion.

Regulatory reforms to make it cheaper and faster to conduct clinical trials.

Right now we make it unnecessarily expensive to bring a new drug to market and then agree to overpay for the drugs that do make it in order to attract the requisite capital. It’s a bad system!

BD Anders: I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Eric Adams plan for taking the mentally ill off the street and medicating them without consent.

I am not well-versed on the details of the situation in New York City and obviously you can’t just conjure up mental health treatment facilities that don’t exist. But I am supportive of the idea that there should be a coercive element to addressing severe mental health and drug abuse problems and that maintaining orderly public spaces (sidewalks, parks, subways, etc.) is a legitimate local government function.

I really believe in urbanism, which to me entails believing in the importance of creating high-quality public spaces. Something I fear about the anti-coercion turn in progressive politics is that we’re creating a world in which all anyone is going to want to do is live in a gated community, shop at a mall, and take their kids to a SkyZone because only privately owned spaces will be free of tents and street-urinators and people blowing marijuana smoke. The public thoroughfare shouldn’t be quite as tightly governed as a private space, but it shouldn’t be a zone of anarchy either. If there are people who need help, we should get them help, not lock them in prison. But they shouldn’t be just out on the street.

David Muccigrrosso: What’s your most authoritarian impulse?

I guess it’s what I just said there.

Max: Do you have any thoughts on Eric Adams' performance as New York mayor so far? I was pretty optimistic when he was first elected but so far, it doesn't seem like he's doing too well. He seems to be friends with too many shady/corrupt people (and also appears to be liberally giving them positions of power), and a lot of his ideas seem half-baked or poorly implemented (or not even implemented at all). However, I feel like because most media-types hated him from the get-go that I may be getting a really biased view of his administration, and maybe we're missing out on positives that he has done so far.

I think Adams would be a great senator. There are some workhorse senators who really spend a lot of time sweating the details and hammering out legislation, but even for the workhorses, at least half the job is public position-taking and there are plenty of successful senators who aren’t workhorses. Adams’ problem as mayor, it seems to me, is that it’s an actual administrative position where the “sweating the details” part is actually a very large share of the job. I think Kathryn Garcia, an experienced administrator who also had good positions on the issues, would have been a better mayor.

That said, position-taking is a pretty big deal and I think Adams has broadly taken the correct positions on the big issues in municipal politics. Murders and shootings are down this year, which is really important. Unfortunately, other crimes are up, which people are upset about. But starting to re-tackle the crime problem by getting shootings back under control seems like very reasonable prioritization, so I’m guardedly optimistic. It’s funny that garbage bins are an innovative technology in New York, but they are in fact doing the right thing here. So I think he’s doing okay, but there is a bit of a mismatch between job function and temperament here (I say this with love; I’d be a better senator than mayor, too).

Scott Rada: I think being a governor — even of a smaller state — is a much tougher job than that of a U.S. senator. But on the imaginary organization chart (in my mind, at least) they're equal. Which of those jobs do you think is more difficult?

I’ll just say that there are a lot of politicians who’ve served as both governor and senator and nearly 100 percent of them say they preferred being governor.

The way I’d explain it is that while senator is an easier job, governor is a much more rewarding job if you’re someone who likes politics, and politicians generally do like politics. Senators mostly just vote with party leadership while governors have much more capacity to chart an individual course. Governors have agenda-setting power, get to take the lead on natural disasters, get to manage a large staff, and get to make decisions of real consequence.

Jim Barnett: You say that you were surprised that Tabibi and Greenwald had moved from the (aggressive) left to the equally aggressive right instead of becoming moderate. Isn't it possible that radical vs moderate is a separate ideological/temperamental dimension from left vs right? Some people always seem to adhere to the radical version of their current ideology, while others shift their views between moderate positions.

Did I say I was surprised or did I just say I think it’s bad? Either way, that’s what I mean — temperamental radicalism and over-focus on symbolism are bad ways to engage with the political system.

Sharty: As someone who runs a successful little media fiefdom of your own, how much longer do you think news outlets are going to try to keep covid stories a going concern? They presumably respond to click statistics in addition to whatever they think is newsworthy on its merits. Naturally, some outlets (in my subscription universe, notably the Atlantic) seem to be pushing harder than others.

I think you could make a case that “over 50,000 people died of the flu in the unusually severe 2017-2018 flu season” was an under-covered story relative to its objective importance. That was an increase of 14,000 people relative to the prior year, and it was just the thin edge of a wedge that included 710,000 hospitalizations (a 24 percent increase over the previous high from 2014-2015). If thousands of people had died in a hurricane, that would have been a huge deal, but because it was just an unusually bad flu season, we wrote it off.

So now that there’s a minority of the population who is highly engaged with respiratory virus news, I think there’s going to be a steady diet of genuinely alarming information for them to read about. My pious and so-far-unfilled hope is that the energy around this topic will ultimately be directed at vaccine and therapeutic research, making pathogen-agnostic home tests, exploring the potential of far-UV light to sanitize the air, and other scalable technological solutions.

Loren Christopher: You tweeted that there's no point in getting mad at NBA players who are vocal on social justice but would never speak up for Uighers (or, in the event, Hongkongers). But in fact I was (am!) pretty mad at Lebron for that. Care to elaborate on why I'm wrong there?

I’m against getting mad. But on reflection, the thing about NBA stars is they want you to buy their jersey and take their product endorsements seriously, and I do think hypocrisy on this score is a good reason to mark down your fandom in that regard. They stay quiet on China for money, which is understandable, but does make me not want to give them my money.

Mike: So you advocate for blocking people on Twitter when they're being rude/annoying. And you are yourself kinda rude/annoying to Elon Musk. I can see the merits of polite conversational norms, and I can also see the merits of being a gadfly to the powerful — but obviously there's a certain tension between those two ideas. How do you reconcile them for yourself? Would you advise Musk to block you?

I wouldn’t blame him for blocking me, but I do want to say that while I’m absolutely being annoying about his silence on China-related issues, I am endeavoring to be polite.

The main thing, though, is that I would like conservative China hawks to write something about this. I totally get why conservatives are enthusiastic about Musk’s Twitter project as he has chosen to frame it, but there’s a big problem here on an issue that many conservatives claim to believe is important and where they have rightly given a hard time to a lot of NBA players and Hollywood stars. Objectively, though, Musk is much more important than LeBron and this is something people should be talking about. Not leftists who want to take Musk down a peg, but honest-to-God conservative China hawks who care about the issue on the merits. If he were to block me over this, I think it would Streisand Effect the issue somewhat and that might be good.

sasara: In light of your recent post about your experience launching Vox and the challenges of training people in certain journalistic models/skills, your post today about higher education, and your past writing about low value masters degree programs, what's your take on this recent report from Georgetown about the economic value of journalism degree programs?

I’m very skeptical of journalism degree programs. Two facts from the report that jump out are that most journalists didn’t major in journalism and a huge majority of journalism majors don’t work in journalism. I feel pretty strongly that undergrads interested in journalism should study something where the content is relevant to the kind of work they’re interested in doing (economics or biology or whatever else) and then work on a school paper or write a Substack or whatever.

In terms of master’s degrees, the claim I’ve always heard made on behalf of Columbia and Northwestern is that they are useful networking opportunities that will help you get a job. The report does seem to bear out the fact that the two most famous and prestigious journalism MA programs do, in fact, lead to the highest short-term earnings payoff, so that’s at least a little reassuring. But I think it says bad things about the profession that we are letting Columbia and Northwestern reap huge amounts of revenue for what amounts to an internship placement service.

wacko: Hey Matt, the other day you tweeted:

“This threat to change which currency oil transactions are denominated in is always the world’s emptiest threat — other countries denominate in dollars because it’s convenient for them it’s not a favor to America.”

Would you mind explaining why this is?

So here’s the situation: when people buy and sell oil in the global market, they use dollars. Every once in a while, someone will threaten to change that — most recently, Saudi Arabia was saying maybe it would do its oil sales to China in RMB because they’re mad at Joe Biden.

As it happens, Saudi-China trade is fairly balanced, so this would actually work without too much complication. But the Saudis export $14 billion worth of stuff to South Korea and only import $4 billion, and they import $1 billion more from the United Kingdom and Brazil than they export to those countries. Accepting oil payments in dozens of different currencies and then swapping them into the currencies they need would be annoying. Getting all the inflow in one currency is much simpler. And asking for payment in the same currency that all the other oil-exporting currencies accept payment in is much simpler for the buyers. The positive impact on the United States of our currency being used this way is pretty minor, whereas the convenience for everyone involved of coordinating on a single widely available currency is large.

Ray: How much do you think expertise matters in a cabinet position? More specifically, with the IRA & BIF there is a ton of money and responsibility flowing through DOT and DOE. Meanwhile, the secretaries of these two departments are basically party hacks (with all due respect).

I've worked for the federal government before and appreciate that the careers usually just keep on keeping on regardless of the politicals ‘above’ them. But in any other organization, the lack of expert executive leadership would be a big deal, especially when so much more is being asked of the departments in question. Since you interact a fair bit with senior executive staff I wonder what your view is on this.

The normal model in parliamentary systems is for essentially all ministers to be pretty generic party hacks, but then concerns about expertise are addressed by having dramatically fewer political appointees and much more reliance on senior civil servants. So a rising star like Pete Buttigieg would be an obvious choice for a junior cabinet post like Transportation, and then if people liked his performance (which I think they do) he’d swiftly get bumped up to something like Treasury (probably called Finance).

But in the American system, we rely so much on political appointees rather than professionals that there’s a sense that appointees should themselves be subject-matter experts.

I think the parliamentary model of frankly political ministers backed up by a stronger civil service is better, all things considered. The cabinet is fundamentally a political institution. And even when you do have a technocratic cabinet secretary like Miguel Cardona at Education, he’s not a subject-matter expert in all the things that fall under his portfolio because the portfolios are too big for anyone to have genuine expertise in all the relevant issues. It would be better to have more expertise and professionalism where it really counts instead of America’s proliferation of Assistant Secretaries and then a more political cabinet.

Benjamin J: In retrospect was Joe Biden a poor choice for Barack Obama in 2008? Would the Democratic Party be better off had Obama chosen a younger, and less politically vulnerable running mate which could have acted as his obvious successor instead of Hillary Clinton?

I think it’s important to remember how close this came to working out. Biden was an effective campaign surrogate, and an effective Vice President in his key jobs as an early emissary to foreign leaders and outreach coordinator to senators. He also stood aside in 2016 in favor of Clinton, and the apparent Obama-Clinton deal that she’d be his successor was effective in generating party unity during his eight years in office. Clinton was a very popular Secretary of State and came extremely close to winning in 2016, and had she won, Obama would have entered the rarified three-peat pantheon of presidential success.

I think a time traveler could easily make the expected-value case that Clinton should have been more careful with her email compliance practices, should have eschewed buckraking after stepping down from the cabinet, and should have avoided the woke pivot after the Iowa caucuses.

By contrast, Obama’s options don’t seem great. Probably the right thing in the grand arc of history would have been to pick someone like Kathleen Sebelius and try to displace Clinton from her role as First Woman President Apparent, but that would’ve been a bumpy ride and Sebelius wouldn’t have been able to play the elder statesman role that Biden did.

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