First mailbag of 2023 / Matthew Yglesias

First mailbag of 2023

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 18 minutes

First mailbag of 2023

Managing is hard, we’re more aware of viruses, and my dream of a James Cameron Moby Dick

We kick things off with good news!

French nuclear capacity is rising, German gas storage is high and rising, people are making pizza on the frontlines in Ukraine, and Avatar 2 is setting box office records. Here’s a good Nature rundown on the new generation of obesity drugs.

Let’s do some questions.

Baseball mom: I’m curious to her more about your negative views of elite universities. I understand the criticism that they educate so few of the college-going generation compared to community colleges, where attention on higher ed should really lie. But elite universities make scientific discoveries; employ thousands; run top hospitals; signal the prestige and power of American education to the world; and many actually try to do right by their communities. Why not keep growing Harvard’s endowment, if possible?

I have a specific criticism of the intersection of elite American universities and left-wing politics. There is a lot of self-righteousness on Twitter coming from people whose jobs are working at finishing schools for rich kids, which I think is unseemly given their objective role in society. I also think there are a lot of efforts internal to these schools to promote “equity” in undergraduate education that fail to interrogate the fundamentally inegalitarian structure of American higher education.

In other words, there is no way to “do equity” at Yale. What equity would mean for Yale would be “Yale gets less money and the money goes to Gateway Community College instead.” You could offer plenty of defenses of Yale against that critique — you could say that cultivating excellence in undergraduate education is actually more important than equity, or you could say that the whole undergraduate education function of research universities is basically unimportant. But those are not the things that those institutions say about themselves, and they are generally not the things that the professors at those universities say in public. I think the change we need is one part more actual equity in higher education — meaning a redirection of financial flows to the schools that educate the kids who need the most help — and one part just a more measured, more moderate take on American politics and society from America’s successful college professors and elite administrators.

Matthew S: You've mentioned in passing a few times that when Vox was starting out you discovered you didn't like being a manager.

As someone who finds himself in a similar bind, I'm curious what exactly you didn't like about it, and whether you made a good faith effort to get better at it before you just decided it was a bad fit?

Managing an editorial organization really has two different elements. Part of what you’re doing is working with other people’s text, suggesting headlines or ideas for additional reporting or ways to tighten up the lead. I don’t think I was a great editor but I was okay (I am good at headlines, though), and closer to the heart of this question, I enjoyed it and could imagine myself working on these skills and getting better at it over time.

But you’re also managing the human beings who write the text, and that’s another kettle of fish. One problem for me is that I’m really not a very even-keeled person. That’s an okay personality flaw to have as a columnist because being a kind of temperamental over-reactor is actually generative of ideas as long as you have collaborators to help you edit them or tone them down. As a manager, though, you need to help other temperamental writers maintain equilibrium, and I was no good at that. But the larger challenge is that as a good manager, you really need to try to be objective about people and thoughtful about how to inspire them to do better. How do you criticize someone’s work in a way that makes them want to improve it rather than give up or make them think you’re an asshole? I have no idea. I can barely make small talk at a party. This kind of thing gave me constant stress in a bad way — sleeplessness, difficulty relaxing during non-work times, etc. — and I have a really hard time seeing how I’d ever get much better at it.

Nate Meyer: Is there an end in sight to the "everybody is sick" thing or is this the new normal. Almost everyone I know has had a mix of Covid/Flu/cold/RSV/whatever on and off for the last two-three months. It's much, much worse than 2018 or 2019. Is this just making up for two winters, or are we doomed to this as our future with COVID added to the panoply of diseases?

A lot of people have strong feelings about this, either of the “this shows we need to mask up” variety or of the “this is payback for the public health people overreacting to Covid-19” variety. But I’m just unsure. The CDC says there were 140,000 flu hospitalizations in the winter of 2011-2012, and that went up four-fold to 570,000 the next winter. It crashed to 350,000 the next winter and surged to 590,000 the winter after that. You said “much, much worse than 2018 or 2019,” but these were two very different years — in the winter of 2018-2019 we had 380,000 flu hospitalizations, but the winter before that was a record year with 710,000 people in the hospital, of whom 52,000 people died.

To be totally honest, I don’t remember that flu season at all — it just isn’t something I used to think about, but now Covid-19 has us all more primed to be aware of respiratory viruses. I was talking to some parents at school drop-off the other day and we were saying how “I have a cold” used to mean “I’m a little sick” and “I have the flu” meant “I’m feeling very sick.” We didn’t know what RSV was or really talk much about whether a given cold was actually a mild influenza virus infection or do antigen tests to tell whether a flu case was just a very severe infection with one of the common cold viruses. But we all learned a lot of amateur virology in 2020, and some of that enhanced awareness will surely stick with us.

Ken Scott: Following on the YIMBY / new development theme, do you have comments or thoughts about “non-resident” taxes on houses? Cities in Canada (led by Vancouver) have implemented these to discourage foreign buyers (in the case of Vancouver it's predominantly Chinese) from bidding up house prices. I don't think this policy is likely to achieve it's objective (more affordable housing). Thoughts?

There are a lot of policy ideas that basically take as a given that inflows of financial capital into the housing sector don’t reliably lead to the construction of new units, and so they claim we ought to restrict inflows in XYZ way in order to keep prices moderate. Some of these ideas may work better than others, but all of them work very poorly compared to the alternative of changing the laws that prevent inflows of financial capital from generating new construction.

Joe Byrnes: A longish time ago, Ezra Klein had Jonathan Haidt on his show and Haidt pushes Ezra to admit he believes that men and women are actually different in some ways. Ezra uses you as an example that this idea is not actually controversial in liberal circles like Haidt was claiming, saying that you snarkly tweet out something like “I believe that there are psychology different between men and women due to biology” occasionally to joke about how little controversy this drums up.

But in the last bad takes episode you hesitate and groan before saying “it’s gotten so fraught to talk about” that same thing, ie that there are real differences.

So how do you feel the discourse has changed over the last ~5 years?

I don’t know exactly what Ezra was saying. But the reason I used to drop this banal, clearly true fact into the discourse is that even at the time I felt the walls closing in where there was something ~everyone I knew in my personal life believed and would say IRL but that ~nobody in my professional circles wanted to say as part of their official journalistic diagnosis of anything. To me that was bad, and I wanted to close the gap between what everyone knew and what everyone actually said.

What I think has changed is actually coming from a different direction. What we were talking about in that episode about Louisa May Alcott is that even though there are differences, on average, in what stuff boys and girls are interested in, there’s also plenty of overlap. But whereas in Alcott’s day there was a lot of gender-essentialist pressure from the right to say that no, a girl needs to adopt more conventionally girlish interests, today there is a kind of leftist gender essentialism that wants to say that if Alcott didn’t have conventionally feminine interests, she must have been a man.

It’s this sort of scissor from two directions that has created a weirdly fraught situation — and I think you see in the comments on Slow Boring that discussions of anything that remotely touches on transgender issues have far and away the highest odds of running off the rails.

Eric P: As a center-left gay guy, I don’t know what to make of “wokeness”. Does it refer only to genuinely silly/harmful far-left social policy? Or is my very existence an example of “wokeness”? I tend to think it depends on who you ask and what’s politically convenient in the moment. This is extremely frustrating because it lets conservatives obfuscate their (and their base’s) most unsavory views, while maintaining the energy behind them. And, as a bonus, it helps foment infighting on the left.

Is there a way to pull back the veil on “wokeness” and get people to speak plainly about what they take issue with? And would that even be a good strategy?

I think you have to understand this as primarily a linguistic phenomenon rather than a political one — it’s like how for a while nobody was a hipster but also anyone might be a hipster.

In the case of “woke,” I believe it’s exacerbated by the fact there is a concerted intellectual push to say that the traditional liberal approach to racial issues isn’t good enough, but the people who hold that view haven’t come up with a name for themselves. On economics, if you’re to the left of liberalism, you’re a socialist. But if you read Ibram Kendi and think liberal approaches to racial justice are inadequate you’re … what? You’re going to be annoyed if I call you “woke,” but there’s not a broadly accepted name for this ideology.

HoosierKen: Why can't Congress have an Alaska-style cross-partisan majority coalition?

I mean we could, you’d just need members who want to do this. But it turns out that even the moderates in the House are pretty partisan.

City of Trees: Last Thursday, you tweeted that “[y]our New Year’s resolution as an economic patriot should be to continue spending money (avoid recession) but shift as much of it as possible into sectors that are still depressed (go see Tár or Avatar in theaters) or else lack supply constraints (subscribe to Slow Boring).” The second part of this goes without saying, of course, but other than movie theaters, what other sectors that are still depressed would you recommending spending our money on?

The really big one is office space. Obviously most people aren’t in a position to go lease a floor of office space (Slow Boring does have an office in a co-working space in D.C.), but if you’re some kind of corporate decision-maker then leasing office space is officially Good For The Economy. If you’re not, then going downtown to get some lunch helps. Or buying some imported goods from Europe. But I think the real winner as the housing market slows is probably to direct some funds at residential investment — build an ADU if you can, or look into renovating your kitchen.

Nicholas W: How do you feel about your work routine 2 years in to Slow Boring? You have spoken about what drove you away from Vox and the advantages of Substack. I’m curious about the reverse. What do you miss most about working at a larger publication? What are the greatest challenges of subscription blogging? Do you think you would ever return to working predominantly at a larger publication? Or do you feel you get all the advantages you would desire out of Bloomberg?

I miss working in an office with a bunch of smart people. As I mentioned above, I do have space in a co-working facility. Tim Lee, who writes Full Stack Economics, is also a member and just before I got to this question he stopped by and we made plans to grab lunch. So that’s great.

My sense is that having large groups of people working together in offices has gone out of style, which makes the whole idea of joining a newsroom less appealing to me than it otherwise might be. But I wish I could tempt more D.C.-area writers into hanging out at this co-working space! Or maybe someday we’ll get more ambitions and try to grow Slow Boring into a bigger publication, but I don’t have a vision for exactly how that would work.

Stuart: When you look at which Slow Boring posts do well, does anything surprise you? Does it impact what you decide for future posts?

It’s hard to predict what’s going to hit, both because people’s reactions are unpredictable and also because it has a lot to do with what else is going on at any given time, which is out of my control. But the thing about the newsletter is the question of what it even means for a story to “do well” is multifaceted — a story could succeed by:

Making existing subscribers feel like they got something distinctive that makes them appreciate Slow Boring as a high-quality and highly differentiated editorial product they are happy to pay for.

Causing someone on the free list to finally decide to become a paid member because they realize they do enjoy the free columns and are intrigued by this preview.

Growing the free list because lots of people are talking about the story on Twitter (or potentially elsewhere, but realistically on Twitter) and they want to know what’s up.

These are pretty different goals, and while they’re not antithetical, there’s definitely some tension in pursuing them. So the main thing is I want to have a healthy mix of different kinds of articles.

Benjamin J: If you were a struggling city in the Midwest what would you do to recover? Like how do Cleveland, Buffalo and Green Bay stay relevant?

Unfortunately, I think there’s too much focus on trying to find quick fixes and gimmicks for these cities. The only thing you can really do as a municipal government that might work is genuinely plug away at improving the schools and public safety and making public services more cost-effective. But that’s all extremely difficult, and the fact is you are running into significant headwinds in terms of the weather.

Climate change will help a little bit with that, but what these cities really need is a change in national policy toward supporting a higher overall level of population growth. If the U.S. population were growing as fast as it did in the 50s and 60s, then the major assets these cities have — not just cheap housing but relatively abundant infrastructure — would be big advantages and they’d be in the game. But with the population largely stagnant, the natural tendency of people who are interested in cheap housing to prefer cheap and warm housing over cheap and cold housing just sinks the smaller communities of the Midwest and Northeast.

simplicio: On a long-past episode of the Weeds, you mocked co-host (and noted baseball fan) Dara Lind, as well as your Dad, for keeping score at baseball games. Your tone, as best I can recall, suggested you don't care for baseball. What's your beef with America's pastime?

I don’t think I have a particularly novel observation here — baseball is a little bit on the boring side compared to other major sports. The scorekeeping is funny to me; it’s like doing homework as a hobby. But I joke with affection!

Owen: How should US regulators tackle the growing size & danger of US cars? Seems like the already-existing American preference for large cars got exacerbated by CAFE rules that have lower standards for “light trucks.” So we're seeing an arms race in car sizes, growing pedestrian fatalities, all of which disincentives people from buying smaller cars/EVs themselves. How do you address this without polarizing it (imagine “Biden's war on cars”)?

For the reasons you allude to, I don’t think it would be constructive to inject this issue into national partisan politics.

But relying on gasoline taxes to fund national road infrastructure hasn’t been working in recent years and is something that Congress is going to have to address at some point. The most natural alternative is some kind of vehicle miles traveled tax (VMT), and I think the best way to implement a VMT would be with some kind of adjustment for vehicle weight to account for both the greater wear and tear caused by heavier vehicles and the safety externalities.

Adam Wuerl: Your tedious technical change to US Healthcare was to "...make it possible for people who are on Medicaid to purchase supplemental insurance plans." How do you feel about eliminating the employer tax deduction for benefits? We could offset the tax increase by lowering the corporate rate if that helped it pass. It seems like this post-WWII era policy is the original sin behind America's third-party payer system, so my (naive?) gut is repealing it is important.

My tedious technical change was an actual tedious technical change. What you’re proposing here is something that sounds tedious but would actually have sweeping consequences for American society.

The way this works is that the money companies spend buying health insurance for their employees is a deductible business expense, but it doesn’t count as income for the people who get the insurance. This leads everyone’s compensation package to be a bit more slanted toward generous health insurance coverage and a bit less slanted toward higher wages than it otherwise would be. But the key thing is it also generates enough surplus to make it worth employers’ while to hire benefits managers and deal with operating an employer-sponsored insurance plan. If insurance benefits were fully taxed as income, then at least some employers would be inclined to stop offering health insurance and let people just go buy on the Affordable Care Act exchange. And I think an even bigger impact would be that new businesses would never start offering employer-sponsored health insurance.

All things considered, I think this would be a pretty good change. The tax exclusion is disproportionately beneficial to people in high tax brackets, whereas the ACA exchanges specifically subsidize lower-income families. So if an employer that is currently spending X per employee on health insurance decided to drop the plan and raise wages by X, then the impact would be strongly progressive. The problem is it would also lead most people to pay higher taxes and have worse health insurance so they’d be angry. To make it work politically you’d need to do something with the tax revenue. There’s plenty of good stuff you could do with tax revenue, so that’s not a reason not to do it. But the point is this switch is a much bigger deal than it sounds like.

Andrew Benson: Would you agree that the cinematic universe of James Cameron's Avatar (JCACU) posits that human industrial civilization is ontologically evil? It seems to me that the JCACU takes a rather dismal view of humanity's future: an endless growth machine driven by greed that will unsustainably gobble up the galaxy's (presumptively) finite resources. The movies don't seem to acknowledge — let alone engage with — the techno-utopian view of our future. It only presents a single alternative society to the dystopian growth machine — tribal hunter-gather societies that magically suffer very few of the drawbacks that were historically (and presently) associated with them on Earth. What would you change (if anything) about the JCACU with respect to its environmental politics?

I don’t mind it when movies have bad politics, but what I would say is bad about the politics of Avatar is less Cameron’s bleak view of industrial civilization than his extremely rosy view of hunter-gatherer lifestyles. We shouldn’t reduce industrial capitalism to just imperialism, resource extraction, and colonization, although those are all real features of it and they are ugly.

But Cameron not only critiques the colonialists, but he also posits this total fantasy version of indigenous hunter-gatherers who have great medical care, fast airborne transportation, and live in peace with each other. It’s a made-up story so he can posit whatever he wants. But why is the population density on Pandora so low? Land can only support so many hunter-gatherers. In the real world, numbers seem to be kept low by relatively high mortality rates and inter-tribal warfare. You can say what you want about the Na’vi medicine or Na’vi ability to ride weird pterosaurs or whatever else. But unless a society is technologically dynamic, there needs to be disease or famine or warfare to keep its numbers in check.

Michael Tolhurst: I just saw Avatar 2 and, spoilers, there's some scenes that seem to be a pretty close riff on some of the more technical whaling chapters of Moby Dick and even included a Nantucket sleigh ride. Yet while the movie was gorgeous, these scenes felt to be missing the essence of Melville's work. (And certainly the very obvious point that to Melville that whalers retained more of the ethos od the “noble savage,” i.e. the Navi, than the industrial civilization they came from and which they powered.)

Based on this, would James Cameron be a good or bad director to tap for a screen (small or big) adaptation of Moby Dick? The pro seems to be high technical ability and an obvious enthusiasm for filming water themed movies but I suspect he'd have trouble capturing the fullness and weirdness of the novel. He'd give the chapter on Cetology great coverage but I'd worry he would be too quick to cast the whalers as cookie cutter villains.

The movie absolutely made me want to see someone give James Cameron $4 billion to make a 12-hour limited series version of Moby Dick. It wasn’t the visuals at sea, but precisely the fact that he detoured from the main narrative thrust of Avatar 2 to offer us the technical explanation of space whaling. In terms of the story he was supposed to be telling, I think that was a screenwriting error. But it has to have been inspired by Melville’s novel, right? And I think some way of incorporating those elements onto the screen is exactly what you need to make a Moby Dick adaptation. His documentaries aren’t as well known as his sci-fi movies, but they are pretty good, and bringing some of that sensibility to the table would be great.

Orthogonal concerns: Did you end up waking your seven year-old up at midnight so he could see the ball drop for New Year's?

I did, but he was so out of it that I don’t think he remembers. Next year!

Sukrit: Why does Boston (greater Boston metro area) punch below its weight on food? Feel free to contest the premise with some restaurant recommendations.

Cambridge-resident Milan’s views also appreciated here.

Paul Krugman says that English food is bad due to early industrialization, which led to the separation of eating from farm life before the availability of modern refrigeration and freezing. I tend to think of New England as the weakest region of the United States in terms of food, and my guess is it’s not a coincidence that it was the first region to industrialize.

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