A boring and obvious way to get more rural votes

A boring and obvious way to get more rural votes

By Matthew Yglesias

Describe generic progressive economics as closing urban/rural disparities

Black and Latin Americans are significantly poorer, on average, than white Anglo Americans.

This is true pretty much any way you look at it. Median incomes are lower, poverty rates are higher. If you look at lists of the very richest people in the country, you see very few Black or Hispanic billionaires, and the few you do see are nowhere near the top of the ranking.

Because of this, essentially any policy that broadly redistributes material resources from the top to the bottom will tend to reduce racial inequality. Suppose you levy a wealth tax on fortunes of over $1 billion and use the money to cut flat checks to every citizen. Well, that reduces racial inequality because the class of billionaires is significantly whiter than the general population. But what if you enact a totally different kind of policy and levy a broad tax on consumption in order to finance a poverty-reducing child allowance? That also reduces racial inequality because the poverty and deep poverty populations are significantly less white than the general population. I can’t promise that it’s literally impossible to construct an exotic redistributive policy that doesn’t reduce racial inequality, but you’d need to try pretty hard.

Here’s a bunch of stuff that reduces racial inequality:

But guess what’s also true? There’s a higher low-income population share in rural areas than in metro areas,

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and America’s billionaires have a marked tendency to cluster in a handful of big metro areas.

As a result, for roughly the same reason that all kinds of banal progressive economic policies would reduce white/Black racial disparities, they would also reduce urban/rural disparities. And while there’s a great deal that could be said about why Democrats’ share of the rural vote has declined in recent years, I think a very boring thing that could help at least a little with that problem would be for progressives to make this point explicitly. Not in a mean-spirited, bitter way where you complain about people voting against their interests, but in a forward-thinking way. Like, “man, the urban/rural economic disparity in America is a huge national scandal, but look at all these policy ideas I support to narrow it. We should make that an important priority in our decisions — it’s time to stop leaving rural communities behind.”

Is it true that the urban/rural economic disparity in America is a huge national scandal? Your mileage may vary on that. But America’s high poverty rate sure is. So is lack of health insurance. So is sky-high inequality. If you can talk yourself into supporting all these policies that would reduce urban/rural economic disparities, surely you can talk yourself into saying that you want to reduce the disparities.

More pandering could be constructive here

We have argued in the past here at Slow Boring that the progressive tic of framing race-neutral economic policy as racial equity initiatives is a mistake.

So why would framing race-neutral economic policy as pro-rural initiatives be a good idea?

Two big reasons.

One is that while African Americans are a relatively small minority of the national population whose electoral clout is even lower because of American electoral geography, rural Americans are the reverse. Counties located outside of metropolitan areas contain 15% of the country’s population, which is obviously a minority but a larger minority. It’s also an undercount of the true rural population. The OMB considers Bandera County, Texas to be part of the San Antonio metro area based on commuting patterns, but if you visit the county, most of it has the character of small towns and rural areas. It just happens to be on the fringes of a sprawling agglomeration with commuter interconnections.

But beyond the numbers, rural Americans are massively overrepresented in the operation of American political institutions.

This is not a good feature of our political system, and the very fact that rural Americans are overrepresented in our institutions is bound to make some people resentful about the idea that we should pander to their tender sensibilities. But that’s exactly why you have to do it! Rural Americans don’t want to hear “oh, your disproportionate electoral clout is so unfair, you should just suck it up and accept that our policies are beneficial even though we don’t even care about you.” They want to hear “look at all these amazing policies we have designed to level the playing field between your communities and the big, rich metro areas full of snobs who are screwing you over.” And it’s the same policy either way!

The other reason, though, is that racism is very real.

If you want to show Black people that you care about racial discrimination, you don’t need to pretend that Medicaid is a reparations program. You can talk about enforcing civil rights laws or acting on issues like D.C. statehood that would address Black structural underrepresentation in the political system.

By contrast, precisely because there isn’t strong evidence of “anti-rural discrimination” or structural disempowerment of rural people in the political system, there isn’t a ton to work with on this topic except inflecting your general policy pitch with some vibes. So why not give it a try? As long as you have a policy agenda that reduces the gap between rich and poor, and as long as reducing the gap between rich and poor mechanically tends to reduce the urban/rural disparity, why not talk about this and say it’s important?

Do things that work on the margin and have low costs

This is a more constructive framework for thinking about the country than the debate actually playing out in the punditocracy.

There we have Thomas Edsall writing “The Resentment Fueling the Republican Party Is Not Coming From the Suburbs” and rounding up a bunch of political science research on the origins of rural discontent with a nice role for Katherine Cramer and her book “The Politics of Resentment.” Then Paul Krugman penned a response titled “Can Anything Be Done to Assuage Rural Rage?” arguing that these resentments are fundamentally irrational, so the whole thing is just doomed. But then Ken Klippenstein from the internet steps up to argue that “the idea that rural communities aren’t getting screwed is laughable,” while antitrust monomaniac Matt Stoller says that airline deregulation has made life in rural America worse.

I think Stoller’s idea is kind of absurd on its face, and the fact that Klippenstein doesn’t actually name a specific way in which rural communities are getting screwed is telling.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. All the participants in this debate agree that inequality has risen a lot in the United States of America since the 1970s, and all of them support policies that would help reverse that trend. And it turns out that a generalized increase in inequality leads to a growing gap between rural and urban areas, and that policies to reverse the generalized inegalitarian trend would tend to close the urban/rural gap.

I also think that even if you agree with Krugman that it’s hard to tell a specific story about anti-rural bias motivating any of these big changes, we should all have the empathetic capacity to see how it might look that way to someone living in rural areas. After all, where is the national capital? A big city. Where is the national news media? Secondarily, the same big city and primarily, a different big city. Where are the financial markets that do so much to determine our fate? Mostly the same big city as the media, with important secondary roles for Chicago and foreign capitals like London, Frankfurt, and Tokyo. Where does entertainment come from? More big cities. Growth and big tech? San Francisco and Seattle.

If all these decisions are made in the big cities, and the people in those metro areas don’t seem to share your values on key issues, and the economic policy decisions seem to have generated a gap in the spatial distribution of material resources… well, you’re going to be suspicious, right? And responding with a complicated lecture about how the progressive-minded people who live in the big cities and mostly control big city politics are actually a different group of people from the CEOs and billionaires who also live in the big cities and it’s actually all very nuanced is not productive.

Just say you have a policy agenda to lower urban/rural disparities. After all, you do in fact have a policy agenda that does that.

Inequality of concern

Here’s the place where I do give rural resentments some credence.

Most voters have limited information about public policy, and even really well-informed people have limited ability to assess people’s policy ideas on the merits. It’s much easier to tell which kinds of people politicians and political actors say they care about. And I think progressives have been very clearly articulating in recent years that they care a lot about people likely to be victimized by rising average global temperatures; a lot about victims of racism, homophobia, and transphobia; a lot about the plight of people burdened by heavy student loan debt; and a lot about the problems faced by ambitious professional women dealing with barriers to upward mobility.

It is nonetheless factually true that most of the economic policy agenda items that Joe Biden has signed into law narrow metro/non-metro disparities.

And the same is broadly true of the Build Back Better items left on the cutting room floor. Indeed, while the chattering classes tended to talk about the BBB child care agenda primarily in terms of work-life balance issues plaguing upscale professional couples, the proposal was actually structured to be strongly progressive in its distributional impact, which would have meant disproportionate benefit to rural communities.

I not only think that framing policies that would close urban/rural gaps as policies to close urban/rural gaps might help get some votes at the margin, but I also think reluctance to adopt this framing does indicate an inequality of concern in the progressive imagination. But this is a fixable problem. People have trained themselves over time to do certain kinds of reflexive privilege-checking and to discuss certain kinds of disparities in particular ways. Everyone complains about “identity politics” when it involves elevating groups they don’t belong to, but everyone also practices identity politics all the time to appeal to voters they want to appeal to. There’s nothing wrong with bothering to try, you just have to decide it’s important.

Identity politics for people who can read maps

I never want to exaggerate the power of pure rhetoric.

As I wrote in “Obama won downscale white people’s votes by pandering to their views,” I think it’s easy to underrate the extent to which Obama’s electoral success in places like Iowa, Ohio, and rural Maine related to a level of ruthlessness in catering to the actual cultural values of non-religious, low-income, non-college white people. Joe Biden has shown it’s possible to win an electoral college majority without winning back many of those voters, but you can’t get a Senate majority that way, and candidates in rural areas are just going to have to adopt positions on issues that their constituents agree with.

But margins also matter, and just doing slightly better in all kinds of rural counties would be a huge lift for national Democratic tickets. Framing around the urban/rural divide is also clearly important for statewide races in all kinds of states that aren’t necessarily hyper-rural overall.

And that’s where I do think small-time rhetorical shifts really do matter. What kinds of disparities do you talk about? What kinds of representation matter when you’re talking about building diverse teams? Do we have any Supreme Court justices who grew up in rural areas? Should Kamala Harris go on a rural poverty tour? The media landscape is pretty unpredictable and it’s hard to know exactly what would ever break through. But I do think it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between when you’re trying to appeal to a given bloc of people and when you aren’t, and I think progressives have gotten pretty half-assed in terms of thinking of the problems of economically struggling rural people as an identity group they care about. So rather than sitting around and debating why exactly people are mad or how justified they are, I think the best thing to do is just control what you can control — the things you say and do — and make some pretty simple adjustments. Do a top-to-bottom inventory of all the stuff you’re already pushing, analyze which items on the list will narrow urban/rural disparities (I think it’s the vast majority of them), and frontload that analysis while encouraging your allies to do the same.

Keep putting it out there until people hear the message — we’re taxing the rich and expanding Medicaid while increasing support for parents and young kids in order to help close the divide in economic resources and opportunities between big metro areas and America’s rural communities. Is that so hard?

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Recalling, as ever, that the vast majority of the metropolitan population lives in suburbs and that most American central cities are pretty suburban in character.

What Biden Needs Most Right Now: More Technocrats

What Biden Needs Most Right Now: More Technocrats

Matthew G Yglesias | Bloomberg — Read time: 4 minutes

January 29, 2023 at 11:52 a.m. EST

After two years of extraordinary stability, Joe Biden’s White House is finally getting a shakeup. As the president considers replacements for two top economic advisers — his new chief of staff has already been named — he should keep in mind the administration’s most pressing need: more technocrats.

With Republicans now controlling the House of Representatives, there aren’t going to be many new bills to sign over the next two years. In large part Biden’s legacy will be defined by the implementation of legislation that’s already passed. And by far the biggest question hanging over the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is how much of the stuff envisioned in those laws will actually get built.

Biden’s choice of Jeff Zients as chief of staff, replacing the famously politically savvy Ron Klain, is a good sign. It’s also encouraging that the top contender to replace Brian Deese, soon to depart as director of the National Economic Council, is Federal Reserve Vice Chair Lael Brainard.

Zients is a mildly controversial pick among some Democrats because of his business background. But he stands out for the nature of his experience — never having worked on Capitol Hill or a major electoral campaign, he will be a very apolitical chief of staff even while working through what will presumably be a re-election campaign.

Zients’ public sector experience has been fundamentally technical. He joined Barack Obama’s White House with the gimmicky title of chief performance officer, charged with improving the efficiency of government operations. In 2013 he was tapped to help fix botched launch of the healthcare.gov website, leading a “tech surge” that addressed the problem. He also did a fairly low-key stint as head of the NEC during Obama’s final years in office.

Biden then brought Zients back to coordinate the White House’s Covid response. At the time, the administration’s hope was that the pandemic could be swiftly crushed with the efficient delivery of vaccines, and so it hired a logistics expert. Zients did well in the job he was assigned, with vaccines rolling out to the public rapidly and smoothly once he was in charge. Unfortunately, the virus evolved and became more resistant to existing Covid vaccines. By the summer of 2021, pandemic policy became a much more muddled set of political tradeoffs that largely ended up leaving everyone unhappy.

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This helps explain why even Democrats who don’t have any big ideological objections to Zients are somewhat nervous: You can’t take the politics out of politics.

Yet there’s a strong case for a post-midterms recalibration in a more technocratic direction. Not only are there a lot of big projects to oversee, but Biden has a less technocratic temperament than Obama did.

I’ve often thought about how different America would be if Biden and his old boss could’ve somehow switched places. The US needed the backslapping dealmaker Biden as president after the Great Recession, when the economy was desperate for more stimulus by any means necessary. And it would be good if the wonkier and more cerebral Obama were president now, to shepherd the country through a bout of inflation.

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Zients, especially if accompanied by Brainard at the NEC, would offer some useful ballast. With the economy at full employment and the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, wonky “chief performance officer” stuff about efficiency matters in a way that it didn’t back in Obama’s day. The left would prefer people with deeper ties to the progressive advocacy and activist communities, but someone with critical distance is exactly what Biden needs to make sure agency rulemaking is defensible on economic grounds.

The White House is clearly trying to talk more about the strength and speed of the economic recovery, and it is largely correct that the recovery has been very rapid. But when an economy bounces back fast from a recession, it hits a point where further growth needs to come from efficiency and supply-side reforms.

It’s an unaccustomed place for the US economy. And making policy under those circumstances calls for a team of technocrats. Besides Klain and Deese, Council of Economic Advisers Chair Cecilia Rouse is also expected to be leaving soon.

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Domestic-content rules in new and old government programs, for example, should be written to maximize economic benefits in a supply-constrained economy rather than dictated by political considerations. And the federal government’s dozens of employment and training programs, many of which are targeted to specific populations, could be made more efficient. Not because economics trumps politics — but because Biden’s political success will hinge more on the results he delivers than on which groups he rewards.

Someone with a “Chief Performance Officer” mindset could work with Republicans in Congress to address these and similar issues. That’s not exactly the kind of politician Joe Biden has been for the past few years, or decades. But it’s the kind of president the US needs right now, and Biden should have a team that can support that kind of vision.

An honor just to be nominated for the mailbag

By Matthew Yglesias 

I feel like we got a pretty great slate of Oscar nominees, where even the nominated movies I’m not so high on are mostly in the categories of “didn’t like as much as my friends” (Everything Everywhere All At Once) or “I was mildly disappointed relative to the scale of the talent involved” (Banshees of Inisherin) rather than the wtf zone. Speaking of which, has anyone at all anywhere in the known universe watched Coda in the past six months? Shaking my head.

Some happy stories to close out your week!

Here’s a look at the improvements in the Bronx River over the past few decades, the NRC’s certification of NuScale’s small modular reactor design, a profile of a highly effective focused deterrence effort in West Baltimore, Ukraine getting tanks and addressing corruption, Secret Congress did some good health care stuff in last year’s omnibus, we got good inflation news from the Producer Price Index, the Changing the Odds math program seems to work, and here’s a way to boost giving to highly effective charities.

Tracy Erin: The NYT ran a story on Sunday by Katie Baker about liberal parents with questions about their kids status as transgender feel a bit politically homeless and misunderstood. You seem to have some empathy for this perspective, and based on everything I know about President Biden I would think that he would have some basic sense about this as well, but so far all of his public utterances have indicated that any questioning on this issue is evidence of transphobia. Why do you think this is, and do you think it would benefit his chances of reelection and/or the Democratic party to take a more nuanced and parent sympathetic perspective on youth gender transition?

I’m basically aligned with what Michelle Goldberg wrote about Baker’s story, namely that “progressive taboos around discussing some of the thornier issues involved in treating young people with gender dysphoria” are bad, but on the narrow issue it seems like it makes sense for high schools to respect students’ privacy.

But for Biden, or for Goldberg, or for me, or for anyone else trying to have a remotely nuanced opinion on these issues, it’s difficult. Trans activists set an extremely high bar for being considered a good ally, including commitments to scientifically untenable claims about sports and trying to get everyone to deny the reality that a non-trivial number of people detransition. But if you find yourself outside the circle of activist trust, the right won’t accept you unless you adopt a totalizing and paranoid account of the world in which agreeing to address transgender adults by their preferred names and pronouns puts us on an inevitable slippery slope to disaster. So in terms of totally cold-eyed political analysis, I don’t see real evidence that Biden’s stance on this has cost him anything, and trying to inject some nuance into his position would generate a lot of headaches and maybe not be worth it. On the other hand, if you’re a Democrat running in a red state or district who needs to do something to snag a non-trivial number of crossover voters, then you basically have to take some risks and be willing to alienate some activist groups.

More broadly, I think you see from the ongoing contentiousness of these debates inside left-of-center outlets like the NYT and the Atlantic that the activists have not really won the argument on the sports and youth transition issues.

But as the proprietor of a comments section, I’ve found it very challenging to have a space where people acknowledge the reality that sex chromosomes and associated hormones are a big deal in life without the discourse immediately evolving in a dehumanizing and hateful direction. The whole situation gives me a lot of agita and I can see why a large number of people prefer to just duck it. It’s really gross and unpleasant to be associated with the not-dead-yet bloc of rightists who never reconciled themselves to marriage equality and want gay people back in the closet. There’s also a lot of people whose main interest in this topic seems to be that they enjoy being recreationally cruel to trans adults.

Greg Ellingson: As my state (IA) is about to offer vouchers for every student to private schools without any regulation on pricing, education standards, or admission standards, what are your thoughts on how to break through the arguments about public schools being anti-parent and radical as they are used in red states to achieve long held conservative policy goals?

The great strength that people who believe in public education have always had in these fights is that the vast majority of public school parents are satisfied with their kids’ education.

People who are satisfied with their kids’ education don’t particularly want to use a voucher to go elsewhere, especially given that the other options are probably going to be less convenient. And they really don’t want a minority of malcontents to destabilize the system by draining it of funding. I think this is why the Covid school closures created a big opportunity for conservatives in the education space. Parents who like and value their existing public school really don’t want the school to close. Democrats are supposed to be the party that’s preventing that from happening — investing in school renovations and teacher salaries — while the GOP tries to privatize the school system.

Schools are back open now, and I think Republicans are almost certainly going to overreach and overplay their hand as Covid relief funds run out and GOP politicians need to make hard fiscal tradeoffs. At the end of the day, they want to conserve fiscal resources for low taxes on rich people, not for schools.

That being said, over the last few years of education debates, I think professional class liberals have to some extent lost sight of the fact that public schools are public. They need to be promoting values that the voters find broadly agreeable, and they need to be providing services that parents want. That means trying pretty hard to lean away from engaging in contentious political and cultural disputes and leaning sharply into ideas like “we are trying to teach kids how to read and do math, and if you find what we are doing in that regard to be puzzling, here is a clear and easily comprehensible explanation of why it is we think this approach is good.”

Last but not least, though, I think everyone needs to try harder to not be driven insane by the internet.

There are something like 130,000 K-12 schools in the United States. You could have two stories per week of something bizarre happening in a classroom and that would be a “bizarre incident” rate of less than 0.1%. You often need to ask yourself “Is this happening more often or am I hearing about it more often because local stories go viral these days?” It’s worth trying to pay some consistent attention to a specific set of schools in your community to get a clearer sense of what’s actually happening. As an actual public school parent who talks to other parents, it’s clear to me that Covid protocols were a very real driver of lots of unhappiness, and it was a particularly tough issue for schools because literally any decision you could make around masks, testing, and quarantines would make some large fraction of the population unhappy. Disputes about testing and tracking that you hear about in the national press are also very live issues for parents.

But there’s also lots of interest in “boring” old-fashioned topics like class sizes and whether there’s enough money for good aftercare programs.

So overall, I’d really tend to favor a “back to basics” approach both in terms of actual education policy and also in meta-discourse about education policy. There’s a clear middle ground of like “normal, well-functioning public schools” between faddish radicalism and privatization that I think is open to politicians from either party to try to claim.

Eric Wilhelm: How do Laura McGann and you find #BadTakes to discuss on your podcast?

Just fire up www.twitter.com on any given day and the world of bad takes is your oyster!

cp6: I'd like your take on Ruben Gallego's Senate run. He's got a strong popularist vibe, combining strong-left views on economics with a certain disdain for wokeness. How much trouble do you think a three-way race is likely to be if Sinema doesn't bow out?

I think Ruben is great (full disclosure: I knew him a little in college and a very good friend of mine used to be his Chief of Staff), and I think Sinema’s approach to heterodoxy gives moderate politics a bad name. Her effort to duck a primary and force everyone’s hand by going independent to position herself as a potential spoiler for the actual 2024 Democratic nominee is really bad, selfish behavior. And while I understand the impulse in some quarters to say Democrats should just give into it, I do think this is a situation where you have to think of the game theory and punish people for trying to jam up their own party in this way.

Gallego is a great type of candidate for Democrats to run in general — very solid working-class background, military veteran, knows how to talk to normal people — and I think specifically in Arizona is well-positioned to hold on to Democrats’ new voters while halting or partially reversing some Republican gains with Latinos. You can’t tell all that much from his electoral track record because he’s been running in very safe blue House seats, but he did run two to three points ahead of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in 2016 and 2020 respectively, which is what you want to see. Some House members use safe seats like that to be bomb throwers and cast prudence to the wind. That’s fine if that’s what you want to do (members of the Squad run on average 6+ points worse than a generic Democrat, but none of them are at risk of losing their seats), but Gallego doesn’t do that. He’s personable, he champions mainstream Democratic positions on economic issues, and he tries to represent his constituents. He’s also got good judgment, and his team features Rebecca Katz, late of the John Fetterman campaign, and Chuck Rocha, who was Bernie’s Hispanic outreach strategist in the 2020 cycle.

People get touchy about how exactly you characterize the Fetterman campaign, but I’d say it was a good example of how to run a race that progressive factionalists are happy with while avoiding progressive pitfalls and embracing banal popular messages.

But there are sort of three interrelated challenges facing Gallego:

He needs to establish himself as quickly as possible as the immovable force in the race — the Democratic Party nominee who is either going to win the race and finish in first place, or else a Republican will win and Gallego will be in second. Sinema is a spoiler, don’t waste your vote on Sinema.

He needs to define the campaign as having some texture to it other than “he’s more left-wing than Sinema.” I think that probably means trying to find at least one topic to be in some sense to her right on, even as he can clearly position himself as a champion of mainstream Democratic positions on taxing private equity managers and prescription drug pricing against her plutocrat politics. He’s got the progressive base locked down, but he needs to be more than a factional candidate.

He needs to manage his elite politics — his relationship with Katie Hobbs and Mark Kelly and Chuck Schumer and the White House and the national press — to clarify that he, Gallego, the guy with the D next to his name, is standing up for mainstream Democratic Party positions, not for left-factionalist positions. The stuff Sinema killed from the reconciliation package was Biden/Wyden ideas on taxation and prescription drugs that Joe Manchin supports.

The upshot of all this is that as unrealistic as it sounds, I think a dream goal for a Gallego campaign would be to do something collaborative with Manchin on taxes, pharma pricing, and deficit reduction where they talk about how working-class people have a lot in common whether they’re rural whites in West Virginia or Latinos in southern Phoenix, and the Democrats need to be something more than a party for educated snobs.

We’ll see what happens. But I thought the launch ad was pretty great. My only criticism is that I think they are going to want to drop the framing that he is “challenging Kyrsten Sinema” for the seat. She has vacated the Democratic Party nomination and he is running to (a) get the Democratic Party nomination and (b) defeat the GOP nominee. Sinema is unpopular, electorally doomed, and should just bow out from running and go be a part-time lobbyist, part-time triathlete. If she wants to insist on running an obviously doomed spoiler campaign, that’s on her, but Gallego wants to rally the Kelly/Biden/Hobbs coalition of Democrats, independents, and McCain Republicans against the MAGA forces who’ve taken over the Arizona GOP.

Bill Scheel: I just watched Ex Machina again and enjoyed it as art. Does it tell us anything about real world AI issues?

The AI alignment people I’ve talked to tend to be fussy, technically-minded literalists who don’t like science fiction depictions of AI alignment problems.

As I wrote in “The Case for Terminator Analogies,” I think this distaste is misplaced. When thinking about this issue, I think it’s good to keep two things in mind:

Most people find the rationalist community very off-putting and longtermist ideas to be weird.

Humanistic culture has been considering versions of the AI alignment problem in stories like the Prague Golem, The Monkey’s Paw, and various other forms since long before digital computers existed.

Under the circumstances, I think it’s wise to try to leverage what’s available in our existing cultural tropes and not just sneer at it.

There are lots of elements of Ex Machina that seem totally off or irrelevant to the real world. The isolated, locked-door setting is a cool movie trope, but there’s no reason an AI lab would be working like this. And there’s a big psycho-sexual element to the story which, again, is good filmmaking, but involves tons of technological breakthroughs that have nothing to do with artificial intelligence. But I do think the movie does a pretty good job of illustrating some of the kinds of dilemmas that Holden Karnofsky walks through in “AI Safety Seems Hard to Measure.”

If you are training a black box whose internal processes you can’t directly inspect or understand, it is hard to distinguish between:

I am training the black box to do X.

I am training the black box to be good at tricking me into thinking it is doing X.

It’s easy to just write this down, but works of fiction are good at dramatizing these sorts of problems and making them feel real to people.

Andy: Do you have a general principle regarding what government functions should be done at the federal vs state vs local level.

I think it’s hard to give a principled answer to this because the states themselves are such heterogeneous entities. Texas and New Hampshire are both “states,” but they don’t really have anything in common in terms of geographic extent, population, the kinds of communities they encompass, or anything else.

Sean: Having lived in New York and DC, what type of housing affords a higher quality of life: rowhouses or skyscrapers? And how can this quality of life be used to support YIMBYism?

I wouldn’t say “skyscraper,” but assuming appropriate units were available, then I personally would rather live in a tall building with amenities than a rowhouse. Things like 24/7 security, dry cleaning pickup, on-call maintenance personnel, and other things that are only economical to provide in a big building are very attractive to me. The reason I live in a rowhouse despite that preference is that large, family-sized units are rare in high-rise D.C. buildings, and to the extent they do exist, they mostly seem to be in neighborhoods like the West End that I don’t particularly like and are also very expensive.

Honestly, as a matter of personal preference, I don’t have a lot of use for missing middle housing. I see a lot of appeal to detached houses and yards, and I see a lot of advantages to high-rise buildings. Owning a rowhouse is not really something I want to do in principle. But real-world real estate decisions are about location, square footage, and price, and what works for us is a rowhouse.

Generally, I think people should think less about land use policy in terms of their personal tastes and preferences. The point of YIMBYism is that while markets have flaws and failings, they are specifically extremely good at aggregating disparate preferences and balancing complicated tradeoffs. You need to give builders and buyers more flexibility in terms of what kinds of tradeoffs they are allowed to make.

Badger Blanket: What is the financial value of an elite education over the course of a career? I'm starting law school next fall and am picking between a state flagship school (ranked ~25th on US News) which has offered me a full scholarship, and an elite top-10 Ivy-equivalent private school, which has offered me nothing. After fees and living expenses, I'd expect to accrue about 60k in debt attending the former, and perhaps as much as 300k attending the latter. Which school should I attend? Is the initial debt worth it for the more prestigious degree?

I have never seen research on this question specific to law schools.

But for college, I think Dale & Krueger are persuasive that most of the students who get admitted to Princeton (for example) would do just as well attending a less selective school and thus might as well take the better financial offer. The exception, which is important, is that kids whose parents have a low level of education do benefit from attending the more selective school.

Arjun Mokha: Given that there will likely be low growth (I've seen 0.5%) in 2023 for a bunch of reasons — Inflation, resource constraints, russia, etc — what is the path to a year of mediocre growth (say 1.5%)?

I’ve tried to find a few different ways of saying this, but my basic point would be to urge everyone to look past the specifics of inflation this or supply chain that or Russia this and just try to come to grips conceptually with full employment. For a very long time, the American economy was primarily demand-constrained and the relevant lens for most debates was something like “will this help us shift workers out of being unemployed into doing literally anything else?”

But that’s no longer true. Full employment is good news.

That said, full employment also means that going forward, growth has to come from greater efficiency. Some of that is raw technological improvement — people come up with better ways of doing things, and then as they apply those better ways, the economy grows.

Efficiency-led growth can also come from policy change. The economy has at its disposal so many construction workers and so much construction material. But how many dollars worth of housing a given set of workers can create is a function not only of their skill and access to equipment, but of where they are able to go work. If more jurisdictions change their zoning rules to allow for more construction on the most expensive land, then the productivity of the construction sector rises and the economy grows. If we aligned our pilot training time requirements with the ones in place in Europe, then more Americans could earn higher wages faster and the airline industry could grow.

And even though the U.S. economy is all things considered one of the most high-productivity economies in the world, there are plenty of rules like this.

We of course might get a bad situation where the economy is forced into recession to curb inflation, and then after being depressed for a while, we re-stimulate and get fast demand-led growth. But what everyone is hoping to see is an economy where the Fed manages to constrain demand in a “slow and steady wins the race” kind of way and keeps bringing inflation down without a recession. In that case, though, growth is going to have to come from the slow-and-steady pragmatic application of supply-side reforms. And I think the challenge is going to be that short of “abolish all zoning rules nationally,” there’s no one supply-side reform that makes a really large difference to the economy. So it’s always possible to dismiss any one possible change as more trouble than it’s worth. But if we settle for that, we’re not going to get any growth at all. We need different agencies to look really rigorously at their rules on the books and see which ones don’t stand up to scrutiny on the merits. And we need bipartisan coalitions in Congress to look at the Jones Act and the use of so much agricultural land for biofuels and the NEPA regime and everything else.

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Why I'm worried about D.C.'s criminal code re-write

www.slowboring.com

Why I'm worried about D.C.'s criminal code re-write

Matthew Yglesias

14 - 18 minutes

Fresh episode of Bad Takes is out, about incoming Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and his critics.

The D.C. Council recently passed a comprehensive rewrite of the city’s criminal code, the first in a long time, only to have it vetoed by the mayor. The Council then overrode the mayor’s veto.

This process unfolded over an extended period of time, with the final document being both very long (it’s the entire criminal code) and mostly uncontroversial. It has also received surprisingly little media coverage with the honorable exception of DCist’s Martin Austermuhle, who’s sparred with me a bit over it but who has been indispensable on the beat. I really started paying attention to this process when the U.S. Attorney for D.C. raised objections to a small number of the rewrite’s provisions. I assumed that either the Council would address his concerns or else there would be a huge high-profile political fight about it. But neither of those things happened, and the Council proceeded full-steam ahead, even as the mayor and the chief of police joined the U.S. Attorney in raising red flags.

We then got some Fox News outrage-bait around this, a strongly-worded Washington Post editorial backing the mayor’s position, and some drive-by tweets from me, leading Mark Joseph Stern to write in Slate that “The Pundits Are Wrong About D.C.’s Crime Bill.”

I think Stern’s piece offers some useful clarifications. But I also think he’s fundamentally wrong to portray this as a controversy driven by opportunistic right-wing media (that would be Fox) or ignorant dilettantes (that would be me). I do wish there were a journalist covering this who possessed Austermuhle’s depth of local expertise but slightly more “tough on crime” priors and who could have given the concerns voiced by the city’s executive leadership a full and calm explication. But the world is going to have to settle for me. Suffice it to say, though, that I hope rational people can agree that Mayor Muriel Bowser, Police Chief Robert Contee, and U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves are not right-wing media personalities or dilettante pundits. Running through advocates’ side of the argument over this, it seems to me that they can’t decide whether they’re dispelling the myth that this is a soft-on-crime, anti-carceral measure or motivated by the fact that that’s exactly what it is.

One of my biggest concerns, though, is the big time bomb lurking in the bill.

Near the end of his article, Stern glosses over what I think is the biggest issue with this legislation without explaining why it’s controversial: the Revised Criminal Code Act is going to require either a large expansion in the number of jury trials held in the city or else a significant reduction in enforcement of the law against people who commit misdemeanor offenses.

    The RCCA also restores jury trials for misdemeanor offenses, which D.C. only eliminated in the 1990s due to judicial budget cuts. (The current lack of jury trials rests on dubious constitutional ground.) And the bill allows individuals to petition for release after 20 years’ incarceration if they can prove full rehabilitation, expanding a widely hailed “second look” program that currently applies only to young offenders.

I don’t object in principle to restoring jury trials for misdemeanor offenses. I personally am a sicko who enjoys jury duty and would look forward to serving more frequently.

But as Stern notes, the city didn’t move to bench trials out of principled opposition to jury trials — it happened due to a lack of financial resources for actually holding the trials. When I first heard about this, I scolded the Council for moving forward on an action that would make the criminal justice system more resource-intensive without providing the resources. As several more knowledgeable analysts pointed out, the Council actually can’t provide the resources in question due to the unusual constitutional status of the D.C. legal system.

Statehood for the District of Columbia is mostly discussed in the national press in terms of its impact on Senate math. The real consequences of non-statehood for people who live in the District, though, include the fact that D.C. does not have state courts. Instead, all the functions that would normally be performed by a state court system are instead performed by special Article II federal courts with local jurisdiction. That’s also why we have a U.S. Attorney performing most of the functions that would normally be performed by a district attorney. But this all means that we rely on Congress to provide the resources the D.C. court system needs to function. On some level, that’s a gift to the city — we are getting services that we don’t pay for in exchange for paying taxes without representation. But on another level, it’s a huge problem. At the end of the day, courts are just not a huge line item in any state’s budget. And in exchange for saving some money, we lack a major piece of self-government.

Note that even under the current criminal code, lack of judicial resources is a huge problem for D.C.

Currently about a quarter of our trial judge positions are vacant, with more vacancies expected. Two of the nine seats on our appeals court are vacant. This makes it hard to prosecute offenses in a timely manner. D.C. did progressive bail reform a long time ago, which I largely support, but that means it’s a huge problem for law enforcement if you can’t actually prosecute cases — people just end up right back on the street. If you expand the number of offenses that require jury trials without a commensurate increase in resources, you are going to de facto legalize a lot of low-level misconduct.

The Council’s answer to this is that RCCA won’t be implemented until 2025, so they have a couple of years to work something out with Congress. I hope it works! I hope we are sitting here two years from now saying “boy, Yglesias and the mayor look dumb for having worried that we plopped a big unfunded mandate on the court system. It turned out to be easy to convince Kevin McCarthy to send us more cash and to convince Chuck Schumer to take time away from confirming normal federal judges to fill these D.C. vacancies.” But I’m pretty skeptical.

And my suspicion is that we’re moving forward with this plan because the key people driving it don’t actually think it’s a big problem to de facto decriminalize a lot of misconduct.

A major driver of disagreement about criminal justice policy in the District stems from a lack of consensus on how to characterize the status quo.

Stern says, echoing reformers, that “the District has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country.”

But this is one of these areas where comparing D.C. to the fifty states is tricky. If D.C. were a state, it would be by far the densest state in the union. So does that mean zoning reform would be unwarranted or unwise? I would say no. D.C. is a city, and judged as a city, it’s less dense than Boston or San Francisco or Chicago, and of course less dense than New York and only very recently Philadelphia. It’s also less dense than a lot of smaller urban areas like Somerville, West Hollywood, and Newark. By American standards, D.C. is a reasonably dense city, but it’s not even close to being the densest.

So I think a key thing about D.C.’s incarceration rate compared to other American states is that D.C. is a city and it has city problems, including a high level of crime. There unfortunately aren’t great stats on incarceration rate by city, so we have to use the state comparison. But you can see that while D.C.’s incarceration rate is on the high side, our level of violent crime is by far the highest in the country.

“Violent crime” is a fuzzy concept. Not all violent crimes are created equal, either in terms of the severity of the offense or the kind of prison sentences the people who commit them tend to receive. Maybe D.C. is just booking a lot of random fistfights as assaults? Well, no — if you compare D.C. to other states rather than to cities, we have by far the highest homicide rate in the United States.

So while the point that D.C. has a high incarceration rate compared to the 50 states is correct, that is not evidence that D.C. is an unusually punitive legal jurisdiction. The actual situation is the reverse — relative to the number of serious offenses that are committed, we are doling out a relatively low number of person-years of prison sentences.

Now if the Council was proposing to “get tough” by moving to dramatically increase sentence lengths, I would say that’s a poor use of money. A much better approach would be to invest in prevention and in apprehending criminals. In other words, it’s better to catch a larger share of the shooters than to send a minority of shooters away for longer and longer sentences. But the Council isn’t actually doing anything to accomplish that, they’re just impeding the function of the court system out of what I believe to be a misapprehension — either that the current penal regime is unusually harsh or else that law enforcement and prison sentences are entirely ineffective at controlling crime, so we shouldn’t really care if misdemeanor offenses spiral out of control.

A secondary issue, but the one advocates pushed back the most on, is that the RCCA reduces maximum penalties for a range of crimes.

Carjackings are a particular flashpoint. There has been a continuous five-year trend of increased carjackings in D.C., which makes moves to reduce the maximum penalty for carjackers seem politically odd. Mayor Bowser says this “sends the wrong message” given the circumstances, and it’s played a large role in Fox News’ coverage of the bill. Proponents of the law, including Jinwoo Charles Park, who served as executive director of the reform commission, have convinced me that this probably isn’t a huge deal in practice because the new maximum of 24 years is a longer sentence than anyone actually receives. That’s fine and I really am more relaxed about this than I was when I first heard it. But if the best defense is “it doesn’t make a difference,” then I’m not sure I understand why it couldn’t just have been changed on the off-chance that Bowser is right about the message.

Either way, the Council needs to do something about the structural increase in carjackings. This isn’t necessarily their fault. My general understanding is that newer cars have gotten harder to hot-wire, so thieves have more incentive to carjack which is very dangerous. Longer prison sentences don’t have to be the answer to that, but there does need to be an answer — whether it’s more surveillance or reconsidering the Council’s stance that MPD shouldn’t pursue moving vehicles or something else.

While I’m now less concerned about the change around carjackings, defenders have not succeeded in reassuring me about the fact that the bill reduces the penalty for owning an illegal gun. Here’s how Stern describes the provision in question:

    One change that’s drawn outsized attention is a reduction in the maximum penalty for being a “felon in possession”—that is, possessing a gun when you have a prior felony conviction. The RCCA drops the max for the charge from 15 years to four, for several reasons. First, being a felon in possession is not a crime of violence. It applies when an individual merely owns a gun, even if it’s sitting unused in their closet. If they ever carry or use it, the penalties shoot up dramatically.

I’m not super interested in debating what is and isn’t “a crime of violence,” but this measure is disturbing to me because I think it reflects the underlying incoherence of the emerging progressive approach to guns. Having an illegal gun in your closet is not a violent crime in the same way that shooting someone is — that’s common sense. The same is true of carrying a gun in your car, having a gun in your waistband, or bringing a backpack full of guns with you as you walk about your business. As is selling your backpack full of guns or simply distributing them gratis to your friends. But the widespread proliferation of guns lays the groundwork for violence. Murders are a subset of shootings, which are a subset of incidents involving illegal gun-carrying, which are a subset of incidents involving illegal gun possession, and the city needs to move the line across the whole spectrum.

Nazgol Ghandnoosh, co-director of research for the Sentencing Project, writes in defense of the new law that “lengthy sentences also have a disproportionate impact on people of color, perpetuating cycles of discrimination that make the District less equitable, safe and prosperous. We also know that effective solutions to gun violence begin with investing in communities, not prison sentences.”

This is the kind of rhetoric that, whatever the ultimate outcome of this legislation, decreases my trust in the reform community. If you look at a map of where serious violent crime occurs, the crime itself has a wildly disproportionate impact on low-income, overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods in the city.

That makes the “disproportionate impact” analysis fully question-begging — if swamping the court system so that misdemeanor charges can’t be brought makes the city less safe, it’s people of color who will suffer. It’s a Black mayor and a Black police chief who are raising these concerns.

Here’s a version of this story that I would truly like to believe:

    The police union is mad at the Council over unrelated actions so they’re criticizing this measure even though it won’t really make a difference.

    The police chief and the mayor are just aligning themselves with the rank-and-file for political reasons.

    Conservative media is fanning the flames of hysteria for opportunistic reasons.

    The reduced mandatory minimums won’t change anything in practice.

    The issue with court resources will get worked out over the next two years, and everyone will enjoy the fairness of their day in court with the guilty receiving appropriate sentences.

But arguments like the one put forward by Ghandnoosh make it hard for me to believe that story. The Sentencing Project, as an organization, seems institutionally committed to the view that D.C.’s relatively high incarceration rate is unrelated to our very high levels of violent crime and murder. But I think, especially if we believe in the importance of investing in communities, we need to take seriously the fact that people do not want to invest in places where shootings, carjackings, and home invasions are on the rise.

The law has cleared the Council, so it doesn’t really matter what I think, and the good news is that most of it genuinely is uncontroversial. Hopefully, advocates of these reforms have a secret plan to get Congress to unlock additional judicial resources, plus another secret plan to deter carjacking, and are also plotting reforms that will make it easier to secure convictions of people caught with illegal guns. I truly hope I’m proven wrong. But I’m worried.

New-Right Christians Would Repeat Islamist Government Failures

www.theunpopulist.net

New-Right Christians Would Repeat Islamist Government Failures

Mustafa Akyol

10 - 13 minutes

Illustration of ongoing protests against the Iranian regime (Credit: DigitalAssetArt, Shutterstock)

In recent years, a new intellectual school has appeared among America’s Christian conservatives: post-liberalism. Its pioneers include a few Catholic scholars called “integralists” and various public figures known as “national conservatives.” What unites them is their rejection of liberalism. The latter term implies not the center-left “liberalism” in American politics, but the broader classical liberal tradition that constitutes the founding principles of the United States: individual liberty, religious freedom, free markets, separation of church and state.

Contrary to this liberal heritage, the post-liberals want a closer relationship between church and state. National conservatives believe, “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state.” The integralists, in turn, want the state to “publicly recognize the truth of the Catholic religion” and act “as agent for the authority of the Church” to the extent that “the state legislates and punishes for purely religious ends.” In other words, as the liberal intellectual William Galston puts it, “Catholic integralists reject freedom of religion, and they are prepared to use government power in the name of public morality to control what liberals consider private and individual decisions.”

With such an ambitious project, the integralists apparently hope to reverse the tide of secularization in Western societies, which began to take hold even in the traditionally religious United States, where there is a growing “decline of Christianity.”

As a Muslim who is interested in the role of religion in public life, with a conviction in liberalism, I have been watching these intra-Christian discussions in America with great interest—and to some extent, with surprise.

One reason for that surprise is that the achievements of liberalism are quite evident to most outside observers. Millions of immigrants to America—including myself—who have left behind authoritarian regimes, both religious and nonreligious, are deeply relieved by the liberty, security, opportunity and rule of law found in this new world. From our perspective, the “failure of liberalism” that post-liberals like Patrick Deneen refer to does not seem so concerning. In fact, a huge portion of the world today would only be delighted to live under this “failure.”

The second reason for my surprise is even more ironic: The new integralists seem to present their theory of a re-sacralized state—the restoration of a bygone religious order after a long experience with a secular one—as a brilliant new idea waiting to be tested. But, in fact, it has already been tested—just not in the West, but in the Muslim World. The results have been disastrous, not only for society and its “common good,” but also for religion itself.

I am speaking, first and foremost, about Iran. Until the fateful year of 1979, Iran was under the politically dictatorial shah regime, which was secularist and modernist, but unlike the United States, also highly illiberal. For example, during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi from 1925 to 1941, Muslim women were forced to unveil themselves—an inexcusable attack on their religious freedom. Religious Iranians’ reaction to such coercive modernism culminated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, but it simply reversed the direction of coercion: The Shiite clergy—in a sense, the Shiite “church”—took control of the state; all women were forced to wear the veil; and all “un-Islamic” ideas and practices were banned. The goal was to save Iranian society from the secular culture associated with the West—or “Westoxification,” as the regime’s ideologues called it—and to make it more Islamic.

Yet after more than four decades in power, how has this top-down Islamization worked out? Did it actually make Iranian society more Islamic?

Not really. You can see this in the spirit of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who have taken to the streets to condemn the Iranian regime incessantly since last September, when 22-year-old Kurdish women Mahsa Amini died under suspicious circumstances after being detained by Iran’s “morality police” for failing, in their view, to wear her headscarf chastely enough. These brave demonstrators include young women who, despite the risk of being arrested or even executed by the regime, have publicly burnt the very Islamic headscarves imposed on them by law. Some protestors even have attacked clerics by knocking off their turbans on the streets, a trend that went viral on Twitter as #Turban_Throwing (#عمامه_پرانی‌). These protestors are not against religion as such, as Iranian human rights lawyer Shadi Sadr has explained; rather, religion itself has become too closely associated with an authoritarian regime that brutalizes its dissidents.

In fact, these recent protests are only the latest outburst of an ongoing disenchantment with Iranian Islam, which, by being the ideology of a corrupt and authoritarian regime, has turned uninspiring, even repulsive. Visitors to Tehran often note that mosques are less popular and that the secular life banned by the regime thrives in private homes. A 2020 survey by The Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in IRAN (GAMAAN) even found out that approximately half of the population reported “losing their religion.” Only 32% identified as Shiite. This low percentage may be partly due to the survey’s being conducted online, where older and rural Iranians were less likely to participate, but regardless, 32% is an anemic figure given that Iran was once more than 90% Shiite.

Consequently, as I wrote in The New York Times a few years ago, Iran became the number one Muslim-majority country in producing defectors from the faith—the very scandal that the regime wants to avoid by punishing apostasy from Shiite Islam with the death penalty. (Yes, the death penalty.) Some of these ex-Muslims simply turn irreligious, while others convert to Christianity, making Iran the home of the “the fastest growing underground church” in the world. 

But isn’t Iran too extreme an example? That is what America’s post-liberals might say, arguing that the religious state they aspire to will be less brutal, less oppressive and therefore more successful in its de-secularization.

Yet that “moderate” model has been tested as well, this time in Iran’s prominent neighbor, Turkey, which also happens to be my home country. There, in the past two decades, another “Islamic revolution” has taken place, albeit a milder, slower and less explicit one. Under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s Islamic conservatives gradually captured all the levers of power, with a passion for revenge against the previously dominant secular class and with an ambition to raise “pious generations.” Toward the latter end, they have boosted religious education, built scores of new mosques, censored secular media, overtaxed alcohol and exploited public funds to lavishly boost Islamic communities.

But this “soft Islamization” has not worked well either. It gave the ruling party legitimacy in the eyes of its hardcore supporters, and it helped consolidate their “kleptocratic regime,” but it also left many Turks disenchanted with Islam. Turkish academic Murat Çokgezen puts it this way in a study of Turkey’s approach that’s well worth reading: “As the government is identified with religion in the eye of the public, dissatisfaction with the government turned to dissatisfaction with religious values.”

Unsurprisingly, “deism” has become a popular trend among Turkish youth in recent years. The main reason for this development, as I’ve put it elsewhere, is their aversion to “all the corruption, arrogance, narrow-mindedness, bigotry, cruelty and crudeness displayed in the name of Islam.”

To be sure, the stories of both Turkey and Iran are complicated, and they are still unfolding. Nevertheless, they do offer a lesson to all people of religion: When you build a religious state, religion does not really bring much virtue to that state; rather, religion becomes a fig leaf for all the state’s sins. Moreover, by pushing religion down people’s throats, the state makes them less religious, not more.

Integralists and Islamists can still shrug their shoulders, arguing that humanity has lived under religious states and within religious communities for millennia, so why is it a problem to re-establish them today? The answer is precisely in that history: In addition to all that pre-modern world of religious hierarchy, humanity has also seen political systems of individual freedom. You cannot simply undo that experience. A thousand years ago, most people may have found laws against apostasy or blasphemy reasonable, but today’s individuals will find them absurd. You can’t put the genie of liberty back in the bottle—and you won’t achieve any good by trying to force it.

There is even an additional pitfall in any project of a re-sacralized state: It takes the form of a zealous revolution. So just as in most political revolutions, the revolutionaries glorify themselves, claiming a special role in history, only to grab power unabashedly. As in communist regimes, they become “the new class,” indulging in the spoils of conquest while supposedly serving some higher goal.

Liberalism was born, and preserved, to end all such oppressive systems: both pre-modern ones that dictated in the name of God and modern ones that dictated in the name of the proletariat or the volk. Liberalism certainly has flaws and shortcomings—there is no heaven on earth—but it remains the most liberating and elevating political idea humanity has ever seen. It gives each individual or community the chance to live by their own values, which is what they can legitimately aspire to.

Liberalism also holds that no comprehensive worldview can rely on the state as its patron saint. It requires that proponents of these views rely on their own resources—their own ability to inspire and appeal—to win hearts and minds.

And here, I believe, lies the real reason why integralists and Islamists despise liberalism. They are not willing to compete in a free market of ideas, because they are fundamentally not confident in their own ideas. That is why they discuss “why liberalism failed” instead of asking the right question: Why is our religion failing in liberalism?

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Japan - Environmental Sustainability and Efforts to Go Green - Humble Bunny

www.humblebunny.com

Japan - Environmental Sustainability and Efforts to Go Green - Humble Bunny

Posted By Jim Kersey

9 - 12 minutes

Japan’s attitude towards environmental sustainability has changed dramatically since the late 1980s, both at a governmental and corporate level.

While the country has been criticised in the past for its extraordinarily high use of plastics and its dependence on fossil fuels, we’ve also seen Japan try to carve out a new global image for itself by investing in greener technologies, reducing its carbon consumption and tackling global environmental issues through cooperation with other nations in Asia and beyond.

We explore where Japan now stands within the context of rising concerns over climate change, loss of biodiversity, rising sea levels, deforestation and other key environmental issues

Criticisms of Japan’s Approach to Environmental Sustainability

Japanese fishing market showcasing weaknesses of environmental sustainability in Japan

Like many other developed countries, Japan has achieved much of its recent wealth and prosperity at the expense of the planet.

While many were reluctant to acknowledge this fact, we now know that industrialization is one of the main causes of global warming. Larger populations lead to increased demand for products, higher levels of consumption and elevated levels of greenhouse gases.

Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, Japan became one of the biggest consumers of meat, fish, oil, minerals and wood in the world. And with limited resources of its own, Japanese entities ventured into countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines to gather what it needed — all this contributing to a leading cause of climate change: deforestation.

Damage was also dealt to wildlife in Japanese waters as well as those belonging to its neighbours due to rampant fish consumption and the activities of the Japanese fishing industry, which has been at the centre of several controversies over the years.

Several NGOs launched longstanding campaigns targeting Japanese companies for the methods used to extract natural resources, deemed as highly destructive and unnecessary.

Many of the country’s biggest Japanese companies such as Mitsubishi were directly criticized for their role in the rapid deforestation of countries throughout SouthEast Asia and considered responsible for exporting pollution overseas by moving manufacturing bases to areas where labour was cheaper and regulations surrounding pollution were less strict.

In summary, this was a period when Japan’s reputation for being environmentally sustainable was incredibly poor.

A Turning Point for Japanese Environmental Policies

Improved environmental sustainability through manufacturing efficiency at Mitsubishi

A combination of things lead to Japan introducing a wave of new measures aimed at domestic and international environmental protection.

Environmental scandals, improved awareness of the negative impacts of climate change, growing sentiment internationally to stop corporations from damaging the planet, transforming consumer preferences, and the need to revamp the nation’s image globally prompted a new approach to environmental policy.

The fact that forests were dying, the discovery of a hole in the ozone layer, and explanation from scientists that unabated fossil fuel usage was directly leading to global warming and a multitude of destructive outcomes for the planet set the context for many important changes for Japan, and indeed the whole world, at this time.

In 1992, the world came together during the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as “Earth Summit”, which was the largest gathering of world leaders at that time and included 117 heads of state and representatives of 178 nations.

Several treaties and key documents were signed committing attendees to pursuing economic development in ways that would protect the Earth’s environment. And at this key event, Japan announced its intentions to the world to step up as a leader in environmental protection.

New ideas and principles centred around environmental sustainability and protection then became integrated into Japanese domestic and foreign policy in a way they never had before. And the world then saw Japan, which had long suffered from image problems globally, push for a new identity as a force for positive change.

Japanese businesses were largely in step with this change, jumping on the opportunity to fix their credibility issues as well as strive for the efficiency and cost-reduction benefits that would stem from more sustainable practices.

For instance, Japanese automotive manufacturers like Mitsubishi and Tokota eventually became world renowned for their energy efficiency improvements and pollution control technologies, especially concerning their low emission vehicles that required less gas than American cars.

Want to Learn More About Japanese Consumer Preferences? Read This Post!

A New Era

Flags of global leaders in environmental sustainability

In keeping with this new mood, Japan established several new environmental laws in the 1990s while establishing brand new institutions such as the global climate change division set up within the Environment Agency.

New laws and policies included:

    An Environmental Basic Law was passed in 1993 replacing the Environment Basic Law of 1967 (as amended in 1970) placing responsibility on the government to protect not just Japan’s environment, but the global environment.

    A new passage of the Environment Basic Plan was added, which established new policies and measures for reducing Japan’s environmental impact.

    Japan introduced an Environmental Impact Assessment Law in 1997.

    Several laws promoting recycling were passed, including a packaging recycling law, a home appliances recycling law and the construction materials recycling law.

    A Global Warming Prevention Law was introduced in 1998, outlining measures for reducing Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Finally, Japan hosted the Kyoto Conference in 1997 where the Kyoto Protocol was formulated. This was an agreement for developed nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and a time when Japan committed to providing increased aid for global warming programs in developing countries.

Leading the Region in Environmental Initiatives

Japanese diet house setting policy for regional environmental sustainability

Japan is now considered a leader in promoting environmental initiatives in Asia. Contrasting it’s history of causing damage to its neighbours through resource extraction, it is now part of several environmental networks with other countries in the region.

The International Environmental Symposium in Northeast Asia was set up in 1999, which brings together environmental experts from China, Japan, Mongolia, Republic of Korea, and Russia to discuss environmental conservation efforts in each country and the future of environmental cooperation in the region.

Collaborative work has also taken place with scientists in China and throughout Southeast Asia to reduce environmental damage. And the Japanese government has provided finance and new technologies to developing countries to help them as they try to phase the most harmful carbon-dependent processes while they industrialize.

Japan also became one of the leading donors of Official development assistance (ODA) designated specifically for environmental matters, focusing on Asia as the key target for this aid.

No doubt, this was prompted by a certain level of self-interest too, with the nation experiencing the consequence of China’s non-environmental activity through acid rain, caused by pollution, and depleted fish stocks, from excessive fishing in shared waters.

So How Environmentally Sustainable is Japan?

Power plant in Japan representing challenges with achieving environmental sustainability

Similar to many developed nations, Japan has a complex identity when it comes to environmental sustainability.

Certain independent measures like the Climate Action Tracker deem the country’s efforts to curb climate change and protect the environment as ‘insufficient’ and many believe it hasn’t done nearly enough to make up for its historical abuse of natural resources and destruction of forests in neighbouring countries.

However, it’s recent record in improving energy efficiency and controlling pollutants has been praised too. Especially when viewed next to other nations such as the US or China.

According to the OECD’s peer review of Japan, which evaluates the country’s engagement and leadership on global public challenges such as the climate and environment, “Japan’s presidencies of the G7 and G20 enabled it to promote issues of importance to sustainable development globally – including universal health coverage and responding to public health emergencies, quality infrastructure investment and gender equality – and to advance environmental and climate issues.”

Yet, despite all it has done to improve its environmental image, Japanese companies and the government continue to be criticized for certain policies such as its stance on whaling and dolphin hunting, as well as how it continues to fund the development of incinerators overseas.

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The Future of Japanese Environmental Sustainability

Japanese whaling boat representing obstacles Japan’s future of improved environmental sustainability

The environmental challenges faced by all nations are very real. As well as mitigating damage to individual populations and economies, many are concerned that lack of action now will result in severe damage to their reputations as pressure mounts from NGOs, the general public and other nations for change to be made.

Japan is well placed as a leader to promote positive environmental initiatives and lead by example, both at the global level and within the Asian region.

Yet, whether it is truly doing enough is debatable and it’s important that all developed nations continue to improve their approach to environmental sustainability as well as live up to the multitude of promises and claims outlined in summits such as COP26.

If you’re a business thinking about setting up shop in Japan, we’d happily help you explore how the choices your brand makes and the methods you use to communicate your values and goals to customers will be viewed within the context of local markets, competition, and consumer attitudes.

Elon Musk Sold Tesla Shares Before Company Acknowledged Weakness

Elon Musk Sold Tesla Shares Before Company Acknowledged Weakness

The stock tumbled after the CEO’s sale and fell further when electric-vehicle maker said it had delivered fewer cars than expected

Updated Jan. 20, 2023 11:21 am ET

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Late last year, after a wave of news reports pointing to sagging demand for his company’s vehicles, Tesla Inc. TSLA 4.91%increase; green up pointing triangle Chief Executive Elon Musk sold almost $3.6 billion of his shares in the electric-car maker.

On Jan. 2, Tesla announced fourth-quarter vehicle deliveries that were significantly below the company’s most recent forecast to investors. The news sent Tesla’s stock price plunging when markets opened the next day.

The timing of the stock sales raises a crucial question: Did Mr. Musk know that business had slowed when he sold his shares? Tesla hadn’t updated investors on its outlook in nearly two months.

“This should be of great interest to the SEC,” said James Cox, a securities-law professor at Duke University who has testified before Congress about insider trading. “The issue here is, what did he know and what was the market anticipating when he sold? That’s a critical moment.”

Mr. Musk and Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment. The Securities and Exchange Commission declined to comment. 

Mr. Musk sold nearly 22 million shares Dec. 12 -14 at an average price of about $163 a share, according to a regulatory filing. When the stock closed on Jan. 3 at just over $108, the shares Mr. Musk sold the prior month had declined in value by $1.2 billion. The stock has since rebounded to about $127.

In general, the SEC’s rules prohibit corporate insiders from trading their companies’ securities while aware of material nonpublic information. Exceptions abound.

For instance, officers and directors can avoid violating the rules when they buy or sell under a preset trading schedule, known as a 10b5-1 plan. Mr. Musk has traded under such plans before, including one that ended in December 2021. However, the disclosure form he filed with the SEC for the most recent stock sales didn’t say he was using a 10b5-1 plan for those trades. Under SEC rules at the time he didn’t have to disclose on the form whether he was using such a plan. 

Mr. Musk has sold more than $39 billion of Tesla shares since the stock’s November 2021 peak, including almost $23 billion last year, in part to fund his $44 billion purchase of Twitter Inc. The December sales amounted to 37% of the shares sold in 2022, according to data compiled by Refinitiv, but only 16% of the dollar amount, reflecting the stock’s sharp drop last year, when it fell 65%.

Whether Mr. Musk was aware by mid-December that deliveries would fall short of Tesla’s guidance, signs of demand weakness for Tesla vehicles had been accumulating for weeks. On Oct. 24, news reports said Tesla cut prices in China. On Dec. 1, news reports said Tesla cut prices in the U.S.

On Dec. 5, Bloomberg News reported that Tesla planned to lower production in China. Three days later, Bloomberg reported that Tesla planned to shorten worker shifts at its Shanghai factory. By Dec. 22, eight days after Mr. Musk’s sales ended, news reports said Tesla cut prices again in the U.S. and began offering 10,000 miles of free supercharging for vehicles delivered in December.

Tesla issued the guidance for fourth-quarter deliveries on Oct. 19 during a conference call to discuss its third-quarter results. Tesla’s chief financial officer, Zach Kirkhorn, told investors on the call that Tesla expected annual growth in 2022 deliveries would be “just under 50%.”

While Tesla didn’t give a more precise figure, a 45% increase in annual deliveries would have amounted to almost 449,000 deliveries during the fourth quarter. By the time Tesla reported deliveries on Jan. 2, the average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg had declined to 420,760 vehicles. Tesla missed the reduced estimate, reporting deliveries of just 405,278 vehicles.

Whether the sales-growth decline showed up in internal figures by mid-December and whether Mr. Musk saw those figures could help determine whether he might have violated insider-trading rules.

“Is it suspicious? Yes. Is it entirely possible there are other explanations? Of course. But that’s what the enforcement process is all about,” said Donald Langevoort, a securities-law professor at Georgetown University and the author of a treatise on insider trading.

Tesla’s deliveries recently have tended to be loaded heavily toward the end of the quarter, potentially complicating forecasts. On the Oct. 19 call, Mr. Kirkhorn said about two-thirds of third-quarter deliveries occurred in September and one-third in the final two weeks of the quarter.

Mr. Musk and the SEC have tussled for years. In 2018, Mr. Musk and Tesla each agreed to pay $20 million to settle an SEC lawsuit over a tweet in which he wrote that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at a premium price. The SEC said Mr. Musk had never discussed such a deal with any potential funders and that his statement, which sent Tesla shares soaring, constituted fraud.

A trial over the same episode began this week in a class-action lawsuit filed by investors against Tesla and Mr. Musk, in which Mr. Musk is expected to testify. Since its settlement with the SEC, Tesla has accused the regulator of harassing the company and Mr. Musk by repeatedly launching new investigations. An SEC spokeswoman declined to comment.

Rebecca Elliott contributed to this article.

Never answer mailbag questions angry!

www.slowboring.com

Never answer mailbag questions angry!

Matthew Yglesias

18 - 23 minutes

There’s been a lot of positive economic news lately. Pessimism about America is concentrated in news junkies, not the objectively worst-off people; at the same time, I liked Richard Hanania’s defense of the media against his fellow conservatives. We got a potential breakthrough in using solar power to manufacture hydrogen. In Texas, they’re building a giant new plant to use wind power to manufacture hydrogen.

And of course there’s always housing progress news to report, as Jared Polis is making land use reform his top priority of 2023, while over in Montana, Greg Gianforte is bodyslamming NIMBYism with an ambitious set of land use reform proposals for Montana.

On to some questions!

Marie Kennedy: It felt like your WaPo profile was a very weird Rorschach test... I saw people who like you and thought it was good/fair, people who like you and thought it was bad/unfair, people who dislike you and were mad because they thought it was too positive, and people who dislike you who were happy that it seemed appropriately negative. What do you think, both of the piece itself and the reaction to it?

My guess is that from Dan Zak’s point of view, the varied reactions to the article suggest he did a good job of writing a textured story that captures some of the complexity of the real world. From my point of view, it would obviously have been nice if the story was 100 percent flattering, but I didn’t see it as particularly mean-spirited or negative.

The main knocks on me that he gave voice to — that I’m kind of a dilettante and that over the course of two decades of writing multiple takes per day, I’ve tossed off a few real duds — seem basically correct. I would rather not have that Uvalde tweet brought up, for example, because it was an embarrassing error of judgment. But it really was an embarrassing error of judgment, so I think it’s totally fair.

I guess if I were to litigate the piece a little bit, I would make a few points.

One is that the mere fact that people who want to criticize me tend to bring up the same small number of takes, often ones that are years old and usually ones that are on subjects that are outside my normal range of coverage, tells you something — especially because my usual range of coverage is itself pretty large. People are not saying “wow, Matt really blundered when over a decade ago he made the economic costs of land use regulation a major theme in his work.” They’re not saying my advocacy for more stimulative macroeconomic policy in Obama’s second term aged poorly. When I wrote “Swing Voters are Extremely Real” in the summer of 2018, it was an unfashionable and mildly contrarian point, but I don’t think people seriously dispute it today.

Another is that everyone makes mistakes, and I think I am unusually open-minded about criticism and willing to admit to error.

The last, which links the two, is that I don’t think enough attention is paid to sins of omission, and I almost never hear anyone own up to having committed any of them. The controversy over defunding the police that raged in the summer of 2020 ended up being a big turning point in my life. Today, I think basically the same thing I thought at the time — that the defund movement was pushing something politically unworkable that was at odds with the empirical literature — and I think subsequent events have tended to vindicate my position. And while I completely respect hard-core defunders who continue to defend their stance today, what doesn’t sit that well with me is the knowledge that lots of columnists just kind of watched the fad wash over the media without ever doing a piece where they kicked the tires on the research or asked whether activists were depicting the situation correctly. Obviously nobody is required to weigh in on every controversy that passes through the world. But this was a really big controversy that raged for a long time, and I don’t really believe that everyone who went through those months without writing about it was just genuinely incurious about the topic. I think a lot of people either just didn’t want to say something unfashionable when emotions were running high or else didn’t want to look into it for fear that they’d discover the truth was something unfashionable.

And I’ve never seen someone say “you know what, I was too reluctant to engage in this hot-button policy controversy.” Now obviously if you play it safe all the time, you reduce your odds of stepping in it. But I think erring too far in the other direction has its own costs.

At any rate, if I were writing a profile of myself, that would be my key thesis. But I liked the piece. One of the big things I try to convince other journalists of is that they should be less afraid of “cancellation.” I’m someone who’s critical of “cancel culture,” but I’ve also become uncomfortable with the extent to which cancel culture critics tend to tell exaggerated scare stories of the threat of cancellation. I think the story Zak told makes the important point that I have a good life and a successful career and more people should be more outspoken about things they believe in and have more confidence in their ability to succeed that way.

Peter Wilcynski: Why are you consistently being so mean about RDS's height / physical appearance. It seems broadly out-of-character - we're not in elementary school...

Look, there were people who didn’t think America was ready for a Black president and Barack Obama proved them wrong. Donald Trump showed that you don’t need to know anything about American public policy to get elected president. Joe Biden defied the idea that he was too old to win. Maybe Americans want a short, stocky president? But I’m skeptical.

B Schack: Which widely despised conspiracy theory (fake moon landing, CIA killed JFK, birtherism, Paul is Dead, communist fluoridation, New Chronology, Roswell, flat Earth, etc.) do you believe in, or at least find most intriguing?

I’m into Epstein conspiracy theories. The fact that we have still never gotten a clear explanation of why he got the plea deal he did is very fishy to me.

I also really resent that American liberals have become so respectable that they let this become a right-wing conspiracy theory. Bill Barr’s dad hired Epstein. Epstein was a known Trump pal. Epstein got his sweetheart plea deal from a Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney who went on to serve as a Trump cabinet secretary. Epstein died in a federal prison system overseen by Barr. Right when he died, I remember there was this immediate impulse among progressives to rally around the idea that there was nothing even slightly suspicious about the circumstances of his death other than that it highlights the systemic problems in the prison system. Maybe yes, maybe no. But I just wanted everyone to gut-check their credence on “Epstein didn’t kill himself.” Am I at 90 percent on that? No. But aren’t you at 15 percent? Isn’t that high enough odds to be worth looking into?

When then-secretary Alex Acosta started facing increasing criticism for his prior role in the Epstein case as a U.S. Attorney, he immediately resigned.

Well, okay, fair enough. But why did it end there? How come he wasn’t asked to testify before Congress? How did this become exclusively a conspiracy theory about the Clintons? It’s never sat well with me.

Dean Siren: Should US-friendly businesses who want to move their supply chains out of China consider moving them to Africa?

Consider everything, but I think the U.S. government should be trying to encourage more sourcing of low-wage imports from Latin America.

Taylor: Do you think anger can be productive? I see a lot of people in progressive spaces who say things like, “If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.” This seems kind of dumb to me. It's like if you're not furious all the time, you're somehow complicit in all the bad things in the world. On the other hand, I've seen people scold others for being angry at real injustices because, “anger isn't productive” and systemic problems require systemic solution. Being angry at an individual for behaving badly isn't productive, these people say, and maybe even be counter-productive. Do you think there's a happy middle ground?

Something I learned when belatedly talking to a therapist about the death of my mother is that there’s a difference between being sad and being depressed.

It’s fine to be sad about the death of a close relative, and given that my mother died when I was relatively young, it’s not unusual for me to have moments when something happens that makes me feel sad that she isn’t around and couldn’t meet my wife or my son or see the grownup version of me. And of course we would all prefer to be happy rather than sad. But sad things happen in life, including to fortunate privileged people, and the only way to avoid sadness would be to become emotionally numb, which would be worse. What you don’t want to see is people becoming depressed, which consumes your life.

By the same token, if things happen that make you angry, then by all means feel angry about that.

I think the reminder that “anger isn’t productive” is true insofar as it just means that feeling angry about things doesn’t change anything. To be productive you need to do something. But anger certainly can motivate constructive action. Anger at Donald Trump’s election helped motivate a lot of candidate recruiting, volunteering, and small-dollar fundraising in the 2018 cycle. Political engagement can have a large causal influence on the world but is rarely strictly rational, so passions like anger can be very important and very productive.

But here’s where I would caution people. There are folks for whom expressing anger leads to a reduction in anger. This is where the phrase “blowing off steam” comes from. But there are other people, and I am one of them, for whom vocalizing anger just makes us angrier. This can become a kind of addiction, or as I put it on December 14, a rage trap. That’s especially true today because, thanks to the internet, it’s easier than ever to find an audience for our rage. I think we’ve all seen the person who starts ranting and raving after a few drinks at the bar (I have been this guy) in a way that’s entertaining right up until the moment when it isn’t, and then we just feel sad that the guy doesn’t know when to stop. But it used to be that to act out like that, you needed some actual friends who would put up with you, which also helped keep you in check. Today you can perform anger online for other angry people and implicitly compete to one-up each other in finding the most catastrophist formulations of whatever point you are making.

This kind of behavior — the careful cultivation of anger — strikes me as unproductive.

And what’s particularly unproductive about it is that I think the people doing it often believe they are engaging in constructive political work. Like sitting around thinking of ever-more florid and hysterical language while hunting around for new and better outrages to get outraged about is a good way to create policy change. That’s just not true, factually. Sure, we have our share of fiery orators making a big difference in politics. But the ones who accomplish things are also capable of calm planning and strategically modulating their tone to get what they want.

I was telling my kid the other day that there’s nothing wrong with hitting someone to defend yourself or someone else, but it’s not okay to hit someone just because they did something that made you angry, even if the causes for your anger are valid. Because even an extremely righteous, valid anger is still just a feeling, and we all need to try to learn ways to modulate our own feelings that don’t hinge critically on what other people say or do. If something is wrong and that wrongness makes you feel angry, that’s fine. But you have to ask yourself “what, if anything, can I do that will make it better?” and that is probably going to require some calm thought and consideration, not an escalation of rage.

David: In your mind what would be a maximum acceptable debt/GDP ratio? We are hanging around 120% which seems to be a historical high on par with World War II. It's pretty high on a global scale, though Japan is somewhere north of 200%. What is going on there?

I don’t think debt/GDP ratio is the right index to look at; I prefer to look at interest payments as a share of GDP. What you see here is a big spike associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, but merely to a level that’s in line with 21st-century norms. And those 21st-century norms themselves left us consistently lower than we were in the 1970-1980 period and much lower than we were under Reagan.

My basic view is that Reagan was operating in a real danger zone, which is why we got deficit reduction deals under GOP presidents in 1986 and 1990 and why Bill Clinton felt the need to do another one in 1993.

The reason Japan is able to sustain such super-high debts is that their interest rates are very low and the overall inflation and growth there is very low. Where the United States is currently is fine, but given that interest rates are rising, it is absolutely worth worrying about to some extent. As I argued over the summer that, unlike when Obama did it, we right now are in a situation where it would make a ton of substantive sense for Joe Biden to convene a bipartisan deficit reduction committee. Deficit reduction is not so urgent that I’d be willing to do a bad deal for the sake of achieving it. But it would be genuinely valuable to have a lower deficit, so it’s worth exploring the options before we reach a Reagan-style emergency situation. And I think that’s especially true because even though Japan shows us it’s possible to have incredibly high official debt levels, endless central bank quantitative easing, and other such things, the entire Japanese macroeconomic situation is riding piggyback on low growth.

I don’t want the United States to have structurally low growth — I’d like to see us greatly liberalize housebuilding which would raise demand for capital, but probably also make people be more comfortable having more kids. And that faster population growth would be its own source of higher nominal expectations and interest rates. And I’d like to see more immigration, which would raise both capital demand and growth expectations, further increasing interest rates. Those higher interest rates would mean we need to be more disciplined about our budget choices. But that would be a price worth paying for a more dynamic economy.

FrigidWind: Do you think that the racial depolarization of voting patterns will change the ideology of either party, and if so, in what way?

I think one important template here is that New Deal economic programs brought Black voters in northern states (especially New York and Illinois) into the Democratic Party coalition and once inside the tent, they allied with labor leaders and liberal reformers and others to change the party’s position on civil rights.

Nothing that dramatic is going to happen, but I do think that as the GOP voting base becomes more racially diverse, they are going to face internal pressure to crack down harder on both overt racism and also on what they almost certainly won’t refer to as racial microaggressions. There is much more to contemporary racial justice politics than simple politeness, but I do think conservatives tend to underrate the fact that some of the stuff that currently bugs them really is just politeness and they are going to have to step their game up.

A related issue is that Republicans are going to find themselves paying more attention to representational politics.

Many conservatives have a quasi-principled objection to this kind of thing, but you already see plenty of examples of conservatives in practice paying attention to representation. It’s not a coincidence that it was a Black justice who replaced Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court or that it was a woman who replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Back in the 1970s when white ethnic sub-identities were more salient, Republicans learned to embrace them as politically relevant. I think that we will see Hispanic Republicans organized as such and able to exert some kind of influence as an identity pillar inside the GOP.

For Democrats, the ideological influence will be to accelerate trends that are already underway in terms of being the secular political party and the party for people with non-traditional ideas about sex and gender roles.

This latter issue is, I think, probably the key driver of racial depolarization. I sometimes see people assert that the movement of Black and Latin voters into the GOP has been all men, which isn’t true — in 2020, Latinas were more likely than Latinos to flip to Trump — but what I think is true is that views on gender roles are an important factor. It just happens to be the case that while feminist views are more common among women than men, the gender gap on these questions just isn’t all that large. And I think we’re moving toward a world that will be more secular and more feminist on average, but where observant and traditionalist people of color will be increasingly comfortable voting Republican.

It’s worth saying that while the specific dynamics around Obama and Trump led people not to expect this, the world that’s emerging is very much the one that lined up with George W. Bush’s macro-level theory of American politics. His idea was to make the GOP more open to the soft/fuzzy elements of “diversity” while realigning politics with a heavy focus on the gay marriage issue. That particular topic flopped, but we’re seeing something of a resurgence of Christian right politics around abortion and drag shows.

Phillip Reese: There’s been a large drop in community college enrollment since the pandemic. What does this portend and how can policy reverse it (assuming we want to reverse it)?

The big thing is that the number of 18-year-olds in the country has been declining for a few years now, which means all kinds of institutions of higher education face the prospect of declining enrollment. If you’re talking about Columbia, that just manifests itself as a slight easing of admissions standards. But further down the food chain you have Cazenovia College closing permanently due to financial problems.

For community colleges, the other challenge is that the current labor market is quite strong.

That doesn’t mean going to college and getting a degree is a bad idea. But it does mean that if you don’t like school or you’re worried about cost or for whatever other reasons are undecided, you have viable options. And in particular, if you’re an adult who’s been in the workforce for a while and you’re diligent and competent and want to put in extra effort to get ahead, the odds are decent that you can do that internally. Today there are lots of places looking to give extra hours to people who want them, and lots of opportunities to get promoted off a food service line position into low-level management. These are all changes for the better, but they’ve reduced the incentive to enroll in community college.