April is the cruelest mailbag

www.slowboring.com

April is the cruelest mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

14 - 17 minutes

I was not a Brandon Johnson supporter, but I’m glad to see he’s a single-staircase guy and I will now claim to believe that Vallas would’ve won if he’d embraced staircase reform.

In other upbeat news: I like that Greg Gianforte is stumping for a refundable child tax credit, it seems like two sensible moderates made the mayoral runoff in Denver, here’s a cool paper about successful climate adaptation via irrigation, abortion politics is blueing Obama-Trump country, and millennials are better off than they think. Some people view China’s role in conducting Saudi-Iran diplomacy as bad news because it illustrates increasing Chinese diplomatic clout, but I think war is bad and peace is good, and this is actually a positive development and pretty clearly not something an American government would be able to pull off.

Zachary Anglin: Does your tendency to hire interns from Yale contradict your position that the more valuable institutes are those that enable more economic mobility?

For the record, Slow Boring has hired interns from a diverse array of Ivy League schools including both Yale and Dartmouth.

But I don’t think there’s a contradiction. If you want to hire smart, hard-working, well-informed interns, it’s not like “Yale or bust,” but your odds are pretty good if you’re going with Yale! America’s system of higher education is imperfect at performing its meritocratic sorting function, but it’s not terrible at it. That’s different from saying these are the most socially valuable institutions or the ones that benefit the most at the margin from additional resources.

Stepping back, though, a lot of what prestigious universities do is research. A professor at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering recently developed a new, more efficient way to pull water out of the air. A lot of the social value that universities generate is stuff like that, and a lot of the money they pull in is dedicated to supporting research of various kinds. There’s a lot that one could say about this kind of thing, but it’s not really something I’ve ever looked into in detail or written much about. What we’re really talking about is the social value of different institutions’ undergraduate education.

And here I think one core point everyone needs to understand is that, judged as undergraduate institutions, Yale and Chicago are both “good” but Yale is “better” only in the sense of selectivity. Nobody has any idea which of the fancy colleges generate more learning gains for their students, and none of them even attempt to measure it. Yale is highly selective because Yale gets tons of applicants. And Yale gets tons of applicants because Yale has a great reputation. And Yale has a great reputation because Yale has a very distinguished group of graduates. But Yale has a distinguished group of graduates because Yale is highly selective. How’s the actual education? I’m sure it’s fine. But it also sort of doesn’t matter, because we know graduates of selective schools do well in life, and we also know they are overwhelmingly from privileged backgrounds where it sort of doesn’t matter.

But then the United States has a long tail of less prestigious institutions of higher education that serve students who were in the second and third quintiles of high school education.

    These kids come from much less privileged backgrounds.

    These kids don’t all end up doing well in life, though many of them do.

    The schools in this tier exhibit a lot of dispersion in terms of graduation rates and other outcomes for students. 

A school that does a really good job of taking 60th- or 70th-percentile students and equipping them with useful skills that help them get good jobs while growing the economy as a whole is performing a service of incredible social value. A school that takes 60th- and 70th-percentile students, loads them up with debt, and then has half of them drop out and not even leave with some sheepskin is doing something really problematic.

The main point I like to annoy people on Twitter about is that if the thing you are concerned about is specifically diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education, then you should be really focusing on high-quality un-selective institutions. Those are the institutions that are inclusive in a literal sense. Because they are inclusive, they are diverse. And by supporting them, you are making the world more equitable. By contrast, while you could certainly make the case that the undergraduate education program at Yale or Chicago is serving some kind of social value, it is inherently not going to be the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The purpose of these institutions is to promote hierarchy and exclusion! That’s not necessarily a bad thing. While I’ve been wasting students’ time talking about journalism here at the Chicago IOP, a lot of students have been learning valuable things about politics and government from Adrian Perkins, Beto O’Rourke, Peter Meijer, and Steve Sisolak. There is a case to be made that channeling the knowledge and wisdom of veteran politicians specifically to elite college students is good because those students are likely to end up in positions of political and social leadership.

USA Hockey tries to identify talented youth and invest in their hockey skills in order to give the country the best possible crop of hockey players. This is a very traditional way of thinking about skill development in both academic and non-academic contexts, and it’s the stock in trade of America’s prestigious colleges.

But that’s just to say there are limits to egalitarian ideals and that in some realms of life, it’s better to be elitist. Part of what’s driving American society insane, though, is that educational institutions that are both elite and elitist at their cores are now disproportionately staffed by people with left-wing political commitments that make them averse to articulating the elitist and hierarchical values of their institutions. This also generates a lot of pointless (or counterproductive) diversity work, a lot of angst, and a lot of neglect of the genuine egalitarian value of supporting high-quality inclusive institutions.

City of Trees: What's your take on the utility level of in-person mass protests? How many times can you recall participating in them, and when was the most recent time that you did so?

When I was in college I attended a bunch of protests related to efforts to secure higher pay for the cafeteria and janitorial staff. That strikes me as a really good case for high-visibility protests, in that most stakeholders at the university probably didn’t care very much about the topic but to the extent that you could polarize the Harvard community around the issue and make people talk about it, most people were inclined to support the workers. At any rate, they got a nice raise.

That’s my general take on protests — “abortion should be legal” is something that most people think but that doesn’t necessarily loom large in everyone’s day-to-day consciousness. Abortion rights protests make people think about the subject and that tends to promote gains. But protests demanding a total shutdown of fossil fuel production don’t accomplish very much, because you’re raising the salience of an idea that people don’t like. Advocates of unproductive political action often take solace in the fact that the Civil Rights Movement had some pretty bad polling at times. But I think it’s important to recall that Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were both popular. White northerners may have found it annoying that civil rights marchers and sit-in orchestrators were constantly putting this issue on the agenda, but the reason they did that was to force the white north to choose sides, knowing that when forced to pick, most non-southern whites favored civil rights.

Tracy Erin: Are you really going to wait until the end of this final season of Succession to start watching? You are missing out on some fine television that makes you laugh out loud and feel terribly sad all in one hour with incredible writing and great acting. I think you need to binge and catch up (actually I think that would be too much but don't you want in on the conversations?)

I’m sure that everyone is right and Succession is great and I’m missing out, and I’ll probably binge it someday soon.

But I’ve gotten really disgruntled with the “prestige TV” landscape and am trying to redirect my content consumption accordingly. One thing that makes movies really great in my view is that before they shoot a movie, they write a screenplay and the screenplay has an end. Both the screenwriter and other people have read that screenplay all the way from beginning to end and they’ve tweaked and changed it and gotten it into a position where they are ready to start production. Then after a movie is filmed, the editor and director work with the footage and come up with a complete movie that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. They then ship the movie out, and it’s screened by critics who watch the entire movie before writing their review.

This does not guarantee that every movie that comes out is good. But it does guarantee that if someone tells you “‘The Menu’ is good,” they are evaluating a completed product.

“The Menu” features a couple of plot twists. It features a shift in tone. It features an ending. Your knowledge of how it ends influences your understanding of what you saw earlier. As is typically the case for high-concept fare, I found the ending less enjoyable than the beginning. But it’s a pretty good ending! You could imagine a movie with the exact same first 45 minutes totally collapsing and being a bad movie. But instead, they made a good movie. That it’s good rather than bad is an important fact about the film, and the only way to know that is to have seen the end.

By contrast, TV shows have this quasi-improvisational quality where the showrunners are constantly needing to come up with new balls to toss into the air. In old-fashioned non-prestigious “adventure of the week”-type shows, this actually works fine because the writers are not building up tension or setting unexplored plots in motion. But as serialized TV storytelling has gotten more and more common, we’re more and more often asked to show patience through early episodes or to try to find things intriguing with no ability to know whether any of it will pay off. Creators often have no idea where they’re going with the story.

Back in HBO’s heyday, the tradeoff was that The Sopranos and The Wire got to paint on a giant canvas and tell stories that are just too capacious for the movie format. But eventually networks got tired of spending that kind of money and cut back the sizes of the casts to something more normal for television. Every once in a while, something truly great gets tossed up out of this stew of small-cast long-form storytelling — The Shield, The Americans, Breaking Bad — but it’s also very common for things to start out promising and then fall apart, like Ozark. So I’m opting out. I’m excited for a new season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds with its alien-of-the-week format, I’m watching movies, and I may binge Succession someday when it’s over.

John E: Given today's post, what is your personal familiarity with firearms? Have you fired long guns and/or pistols? Somewhat relatedly - if you had to procure meat by hunting, would you do that or become a vegetarian?

It’s been a while, but I learned to shoot rifles at summer camp and was pretty good at it. Then later I did some shooting at the Westside Rifle & Pistol Range in NYC near where I grew up, and I’ve used shotguns at the PG County Trap & Skeet range near D.C. I think it’s a pretty fun hobby. In terms of hunting, I have no idea how to clean and butcher a deer or whatever so I’d struggle on a practical level. I do love to play the Big Buck Hunter arcade game, though.

Andrew: A set of personal questions if you're open to it (as I generally appreciate your thought process and am curious how you've applied it to areas other than "takes"): Why did you and your wife choose to give your son your wife's last name? Did you have any concerns (e.g. resume discrimination) about giving him a Latino-coded first name? Or with the perceived incongruity of his first name with an Anglo-coded last name?

It’s basically just a feminist/gender egalitarian gesture.

We gamed out naming scenarios for both a boy and a girl, and a girl would have had the last name Yglesias and a first name from my wife’s family. I wanted to name a boy after my grandfather, and so he’s Jose Yglesias Crawford, which is both a progressive statement in the American context and also in line with standard Spanish naming conventions.

My assumption was that nobody else would have this particular linguistic hybrid name, but I looked it up once on How Many Of Me and there were seven Jose Crawfords. Crawford is a very common Scots-Irish name, and there are of course a lot of Mexican-American families in Texas, so I think the specific Southern/Latin name, though unusual, is not quite as unusual as I had thought it would be.

Frank W Stanton: You recently wrote about mindful posting, persuasion, and the case you made for Bernie Sanders back in early 2020. Bernie himself delivers a common sense narrative that's appealing. His campaign operatives and very online fans, however, are frequently off-putting. Never banal. Why does he allow that?

This is pure armchair psychoanalysis on my part, but I think Bernie 2020 was plagued to some extent by the candidate’s fear of failure. I think he should have tried harder to ingratiate himself with normie Democrats (by formally joining the party, for example) and to do more reassurance of Dem elites (he got an A rating from the NRA, he won his first mayoral election with the support of the police union). But the problem with really going for it like that is he might have lost anyway. By contrast, running with a David Sirota message reduces your odds of winning, but he’ll be on hand to explain that the system was rigged rather than that you just fell short.

CoveneyNM: What “lane” of modern American politics — from MAGA to the “Squad” — would Abe Lincoln represent today given what we know about his political persuasions, life experience and governing philosophy?

Of course everyone thinks that if Lincoln were around today he would endorse their politics, but I think it’s basically correct to map a pre-realignment moderate Republican like Lincoln as a contemporary moderate Democrat.