Never answer mailbag questions angry!

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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.