Windy City mailbag / Matthew Yglesias

Windy City mailbag

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 13 minutes

Windy City mailbag

Big cars, language change, and the case for more conspiracy theorists

I’m on a brief trip to Chicago this week so didn’t answer quite as many mailbag questions as I normally do — but first, a bit of happy news.

There’s been a steep decline in homeless veterans, the labor market remains strong, remote work is saving people a lot of time, Massachusetts towns are up against a zoning reform deadline, and productivity is up.

JeffD: Why are cars/SUVs/trucks getting bigger? Why are more people driving SUVs? Is this a policy failure and if so can the failure be reversed?

I live in a dense city and when I drive, I often end up parallel parking on the street. I also own a very small garage that opens onto a narrow alley. Under the circumstances, I actively prefer the size of my Prius to a larger car that would be more difficult to park and maneuver around the alleys.

But that’s an unusual situation. Most people live in the suburbs and park in parking lots, and from that standpoint, a bigger vehicle is better for the boring reason that you can put more stuff in it. Sure, most of the time you don’t fill it up with stuff, but sometimes you do — and when you do, it’s nice to have a truck/SUV/car that can fit a lot of stuff and/or passengers. Now of course a bigger vehicle is more expensive to buy and also more expensive to operate since it’s less fuel-efficient. That’s a good reason to not buy the very biggest vehicle on the market. At the same time, the average income in the country has risen and fuel efficiency has improved, so people can afford larger vehicles on average.

Which is to say I think vehicles have gotten larger mostly for the same reason that houses have gotten larger — we’re getting richer!

Now I think this rightly bothers people who are cognizant of pedestrian safety issues. The larger vehicles are much less safe for everyone on a bike or on foot who needs to share space with these behemoths. Arguably the larger vehicles are safer for the people inside them, but even here it seems like an arms race dynamic. The bigger the other cars on the road get, the less safe your small car is, and the more you need to upsize, which makes things less safe for others.

Beyond pedestrian safety, though, there’s a more mundane issue with big vehicles: they inflict more damage on roads. A long time ago in a political climate far, far away, the federal gasoline tax was established as the main means of financing road construction. At the time, gas consumption was a pretty pure function of how many miles you drove and how heavy your vehicle was. That’s no longer true because engine technologies vary so much and electric vehicles, in particular, burn zero gasoline while being incredibly heavy and obviously occupying space on the road.

Conceptually, what we need to do is move to a system where we have:

A gas tax for pollution externalities that’s unrelated to road funding.

A tax on vehicle miles traveled that’s adjusted for vehicle weight and serves as the road funding workhorse.

Separate congestion charges on select roads.

This would not by any means end the trend toward vehicles getting larger, but it would at least address the downsides of big vehicles in an appropriate way. But how do you get from here to there? I have no idea.

Paul: I'm currently using stable diffusion AI to do power point art for me instead of blank space or clip art. Josh Barro is doing something similar on his substack. What do you see as the most important AI uses in the short to medium run?

All this stuff with music, art, text, etc. generation is very interesting, but I don’t think will amount to very much economically in the near term.

But what could be a huge deal (if someone makes it work) is something like a medical advice chatbot. Not necessarily an “AI doctor,” which would pose a lot of regulatory issues and require the model to be able to interact with the physical world. But a greatly improved version of Dr. Google that combines powerful technology with oversight from some kind of group of actual medical professionals. At a certain point in any given chat, Dr. GPT might well end up telling you that you need to go into an office and see a real doctor. A lot of the time, though, people don’t really need medical treatment. What they need is authoritative medical advice about home remedies, what to watch for, when to worry, etc.

A pure tech company like OpenAI probably can’t craft something like this that people would consider credible or acceptable. But it’s a huge opportunity for a doctor-led startup that’s using language model APIs.

My thoughts on this turn to medicine because when you’re asking about the significance of AI, you need to ask not only “what does it seem like computers could do soon?” but also “where are the actual constraints in the economy?” I assume we’ll have whole AI-written novels soon and musical compositions people enjoy and lots of other stuff in that kind of cultural consumption space. But the American economy is not currently constrained by an objective lack of entertainment options. There are already tons of perfectly adequate novels that nobody is reading, new albums that nobody is listening to, etc. So while flooding the zone with new cultural outputs is going to be a dizzying experience, it’s not transformative.

And when you look at constrained sectors like energy and primary commodities, I don’t think AI is a big short-term help. Computers aren’t going to lay eggs; the biggest constraint on housing is policy.

But on health care, we really do have an objective shortfall of medical practitioners. This is, to be sure, partly policy-induced. But it is also something that technological improvements really could help us with, even without revolutionary breakthroughs in computer interactions with physical objects. But it will raise a lot of regulatory questions. An AI isn’t going to be allowed to write a prescription, at least not at first. But medical practices may want to do “AI-informed prescribing” where the bulk of the patient interaction is with a model, and the doctor signs off on the conclusion. People will of course want to know where the line is between judiciously using technology to increase productivity and running an abusive pill mill, and to what extent the doctor is using AI to increase his productivity versus an arrangement where in effect the doctor is working for the AI. After all, it’s the robo-doctor who is making all the decisions, and one’s ability to obtain clients and stay on the right side of regulators ultimately comes down to the quality of the robo-doctor’s decision-making. The human doctor is just there for compliance purposes.

Rusty: Is there any connection between the higher real wage growth in the bottom half of the income distribution and lowered immigration in recent years?

We’ve seen improving relative wages at the bottom, which is plausibly related to immigration, but real wages have been falling as a result of inflationary pressures.

Neither of those trends is exclusively due to immigration, but it does contribute to both. And that illustrates my main point about immigration restrictions, which is that they cause tremendous deadweight loss and, like other restrictions on labor supply, are an extremely leaky bucket of redistribution. We ought to be trying to find ideas that advance equality and efficiency, not ideas that shift relative wages in favor of low-income people by making everyone poorer.

MikeCD: Over the past decade or so, what, if any, changes to the generally accepted language we use around race/gender/etc. do you think have been meaningfully good?

It's easy to get annoyed by people being sanctimonious about using more inclusive language, but I also think it's hard to dismiss it all as just a “shifting code of manners” used to signal one's elite status.

I sincerely do not think that linguistic changes are significant in and of themselves, but there is social significance in the distinction between people who participate in changing norms and those who refuse to do it as a way of signaling their overall allegiance to older ideas and values.

There was this very funny and since-deleted AP tweet where they called for the use of person-first language for people experiencing Frenchness alongside people with mental illness. Everyone made fun of them, and they apologized. But the whole reason they made this mistake is that they were taking the person-first trend too seriously, as if there’s some deep logic to it when it’s actually profoundly arbitrary.

But to be clear, just because something is arbitrary doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. If I hear someone in 2023 talking about “the Jews,” my inclination is to think that person is probably an antisemite. But my late grandmother talked about “the Jews” all the time — and she was Jewish. That’s how people from her milieu talked. They talked like Archie Bunker who, like my grandma, was an outer-boroughs New Yorker of a certain vintage. Archie Bunker, of course, was a huge racist. But people didn’t talk that way because they were racist, and there’s nothing inherently racist about the language they used. But it came to be understood that “talking like Archie Bunker” was a racist kind of way to talk, and while it’s hard to get old people to change their ways, younger people shifted their speech patterns. To anachronistically refuse to go along with the trend increasingly marks you out over time as someone who is deliberately refusing to stay up-to-date.

Saying “the French,” by contrast, doesn’t convey anything at all about you, and French people aren’t agitating for any kind of change. It’s all arbitrary.

One recent change I like is the rise of Black with a capital B. I don’t think this accomplishes anything particularly meaningful, but it does strike me as more logical — it’s the name of an ethnic group like Hmong or Roma and not the description of a color. But of course the shift to Black has created a new logical consistency issue where most outlets say “white” instead of “White” because we’re uncomfortable, as a society, with the idea of cultivating whiteness as an ethnic identity. That strikes me as a reasonable thing to be uncomfortable with, but I assume the tension will need to be resolved at some point.

Edward: On Jan. 18, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order titled “Creating Opportunities by Prioritizing Work Experience for State Government Jobs.” In doing so, the Keystone State became the latest state to abolish the requirement of college degrees for most of its government positions.

I think this is a great thing both practically and politically. It reduces the need for unnecessary education that taxpayers later pay for through loan forgiveness and it sends a message to non-college educated voters that you’re valuable too.

What do you think about this and do you think more Democrats will follow suit?

Definitely a good idea and immediately endorsed by the New York Times, so I do think the trend will spread. What’s not yet clear to me is how much difference it makes in practice.

Tom Hitchener: I'm a bit confused about your running line about "conspiracy polarization" and how it's a problem that conspiracy theories are now mostly found on the Right. I don't know if this is just a bit, or maybe just a personal preference, but if it's an actual political point, why should I as a Democrat prefer that my side have more cranks than it does now? Aren't normie voters turned off by weirdos? So aren't Democrats' electoral fortunes helped if the weirdos are mostly on the other side?

It’s a question of balance.

You don’t want your party’s image to be dominated by the idea that its leaders are all cranks and conspiracy theorists. At the same time, there are lots of people who don’t have super-strong views on the main issues (taxes, abortion, guns) that dominate political conflict but do have strong views on topics like “have UFOs been visiting the Earth routinely?” or “is agribusiness poisoning us with seed oils?”

It’s good to try to get some of those people’s votes. This means it’s good to have some of your party’s figures associated with at least some of these ideas.

But I’d also just say one reason I talk about this a lot is that I think most people don’t talk about it enough. Most liberals, it seems to me, experience the Trumpian transformation of the Republican Party as a pure example of the GOP getting more extreme. And there is certainly an element of that happening. But if that’s your only lens for understanding the past 10 years of American politics, you’ll end up with the wrong impression.

The fact that JFK conspiracy theories and 9/11 trutherism have shifted from the left to the right might be something that you think speaks well of contemporary Democrats and poorly of contemporary Republicans. But it’s definitely something that helps explain shifts in the electorate.

If in 2004 you were describing a guy who thinks the government never fully came clean about who brought down the towers or the CIA’s connections to Lee Harvey Oswald, who thinks the FDA is too in bed with Big Pharma for vaccines to be 100 percent trustworthy, who’s getting into lots of diet fads, and who thinks the mainstream media is much too close to the intelligence community, you’d be describing a John Kerry voter. This guy probably doesn’t attend church regularly, doesn’t think the government should cut Social Security and Medicare, and thinks abortion should be legal, even though he’d never in a million years describe himself as a feminist. He thinks political correctness is kind of dumb, he thinks NAFTA was a disaster, and he thinks both parties are too soft on illegal immigration. That guy is a Trump voter in 2020. In part because Trump moved right on immigration, but in part because Trump moved left on Social Security and Medicare, and in large part because the conservative movement became much friendlier to socially isolated weirdos with strong anti-establishment leanings.

You might say “well, we’re better off without that crank’s vote.” But are we? Sherrod Brown isn’t better off without him, and abortion rights aren’t better off without Sherrod Brown.

Gabe Stanton: What do your days look like? Do you endeavor to work 9-5 ish or is it more like “when the moment strikes” kind of work?

It’s honestly pretty variable. Some of that is based on the day of the week (Tuesday mornings I record “Bad Takes,” Monday afternoons I take my son to swim lessons) but a lot of it is the ups and downs of other people’s schedules. Some days I just sit at my desk typing. Other times I meet people for lunch or coffee or get invited to something official downtown. But to generalize, I guess I would say that relative to someone working a 9-5 schedule, I’m more likely to do midday errands and more likely to knock off early, but it’s not unusual for me to work late at night or early in the morning.

Mutton Dressed as Mutton: I just finished the book “Strangers To Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us,” which I read on your recommendation. I found it to be a haunting and at times harrowing book. I also found the themes and conclusions to be somewhat slippery, which I suspect may in part be the author's intention. You raved about this book. What did you take away from it?

It’s a nonfiction book, but it has a very literary sensibility and it’s written as narrative, so it doesn’t have an incredibly clear thesis statement followed by a lot of charts that are designed to support the argument. That’s part of the pleasure of actually reading the book and it’s one reason I enjoyed it — I read a lot of more typical nonfiction material for my job, but I prefer to read stuff that’s different to relax and also to an extent to expand my mind.

Given all that, I somewhat hesitate to put words in Aviv’s mouth by saying what I think the takeaway is, because she’s clearly chosen not to write it that way.

But what I think she’s trying to draw attention to is the extent to which the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness is a recursive process in which efforts to define problems end up shaping identities and behaviors. I think it’s now broadly accepted that while there have been men having sex with other men forever, the “gay man” as an identity is a relatively recent concept. And the widespread acceptance of that concept is even more recent. In the early days of what was called at the time the “Homophile Movement,” same-sex attraction was classified as a mental illness by most psychiatrists. And that mental illness concept was itself a change from earlier ones. But over the past couple of generations we’ve had not only a revolution in gay rights, but also a revolution in our understanding of gay identity. That’s a change in how society views gay men, but it’s also a change in how gay men view themselves and a change in how people view themselves influenced by how they actually behave.

Aviv is basically generalizing this point to all kinds of behaviors.

She writes about her own experience with anorexia and how part of the treatment of anorexia is defining the ailment and defining an identity around it. And I think the project is not to debunk the concepts in contemporary psychiatry, but to at least complicate them somewhat by drawing attention to the ways in which the reification of these concepts feeds back into the underlying pathologies.

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