Mailbag of Angels. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Mailbag of Angels

Matthew Yglesias

27 - 34 minutes

I’ll be back in D.C. when this mailbag runs, but we’ve been in LA this week to visit family and were able to meet up with local Slow Boring readers on Wednesday. Thanks to everyone who joined us for happy hour!

Some brief good news: India is undergoing an infrastructure boom, a YIMBY bill moving forward in California and Montana, and immigration is back.

Questions! Answers!

Bo: What do you think about LA public parks vs NYC public parks? What’s the difference and is one city doing it better? If so, why?

lindamc: Yes please, and maybe include other big-city park systems (DC, Chicago) as well? I have noticed that DC (non-NPS) parks have improved a lot recently.

I’m obviously speaking based on limited experience here, but the big difference is that Los Angeles is taking advantage of its natural circumstances and later date of settlement to have bigger and more ambitious parks. Griffith Park has more of the vibes I associate with a state park (it’s very nature-y) versus NYC’s big parks, which are like European landscape exercises.

The flip side, though, is that New York has a clear sense of itself as an urban landscape that should be populated with lots of small-scale neighborhood outdoor recreational areas. LA seems to operate on a “fewer, but better” principle and assumes that lots of people will have yards and that you can always just drive to a really cool park that’s far away. That’s a different version of the urban form and not one that I find as congenial.

In terms of Chicago, I hesitate to offer broad commentary, but my observation of Hyde Park was that there sure seemed to be a lot of parks. The whole neighborhood is surrounded by parks, but then also has several medium-sized parks internal to it, a bunch of small parks besides that, and the University of Chicago’s various quads as well.

Honestly, it seems like too many parks to me, especially given that it’s mostly cold in Chicago. That being said, given the limited demand for new construction in Chicago, I’m not sure the opportunity cost of all those parks is especially high.

Maranna Y: You recently mentioned that comparing housing subsidies vs. affordable housing construction vs. cash assistance is an area that needs more research. What are some other areas that you think need more research? Asking as an economics Ph.D. student.

I really think the question of which land use rules prevent housing abundance is important and understudied. Sara Bronin has a cool new law review article out looking at this specifically in Connecticut, but one point she makes is that we don’t even have clear national information on what the land use rules are. If I have a pet complaint about academic social science, it’s that the professional incentives seem to point in the direction of “I did something methodologically cool with readily available data” rather than “I invested time and energy in assembling data on an important subject.”

Lost Future: Any takes on colleges not giving students accused of sexual assault due process in disciplinary hearings? I feel like this is an underdiscussed issue. As a TLDR explanation, some colleges have moved to limit the accused's rights to cross-examine witnesses, see the evidence against them, or even be present during hearings — the kind of rights that are constitutionally guaranteed in a criminal trial. In general this seems like a bad trend, but of course it's tangled up in culture war issues — the Trump Education Department attempted to limit this, so the current left has to be for it. Should accused college students be given the kind of full due process we see afforded in criminal trials?

The last time I really paid attention to this was back pre-Trump when Emily Bazelon was arguing that sexual assault penalties should be tougher but colleges should set a higher evidentiary bar for deeming accused students guilty.

That seemed broadly correct to me at the time, and I’m not sure I’ve had occasion to revisit it.

But the big question I have in this space is why is it such a big area of federal policymaking in the first place. The people I know who work on federal higher education policy are a bit frustrated by the extent to which this has ended up in their laps since it’s so far afield from their core competence. The basic idea that a college might want to set up a procedure that affords accused students fewer rights than the Constitution grants to criminal defendants doesn’t seem totally crazy to me. If your boss thinks you’re stealing office supplies, he doesn’t need to give you a full trial before holding you responsible — a business is allowed to decide for itself how it wants to handle its internal business. If he wants to have you criminally prosecuted for theft, then there’s going to be a trial and all the usual rules apply. And that’s just as true if your employer is a university and your boss is a university administrator — everyone is allowed to have rules that differ from the rules of criminal procedure.

What makes the campus sexual assault situation different is that there are federal requirements about what the rules should be, which does seem to suggest that constitutional protections should be in place.

So not to be too persnickety here, but I really do think people ought to treat two questions distinctly:

    If you were a university president with a free hand, what rules would it be good to set for handling sexual assault allegations in-house?

    If you were the President of the United States, what rules do you think it would make sense to have the Department of Education require schools to use?

I’m not sure what the answer is on (1), but on (2) I’m inclined to think it would be better to let schools have flexibility rather than try to have a uniform national policy on this. A while back, I wrote a post saying Joe Biden should appoint some boring bipartisan commissions, and this strikes me as a topic that is ripe for that kind of treatment. The “we need to do more to police sexual misconduct” arm of progressive politics and the “we need to care more about fairness in the criminal justice system” arm of progressive politics are in a bit of tension, and in this particular case, the tension seems to have been resolved by ignoring all the criminal justice reform impulses and bureaucratically routing the system through the Department of Education rather than the Department of Justice. But that’s not really a good basis for making policy.

I also don’t think it’s a good idea to have policy on this topic swing back and forth every time there’s a change of administration. It would be smart to get a range of stakeholders together and try to work out something stable.

Deadpan Troglodytes: Do you think anonymous internet identities are a net positive or negative?

There was a time when I thought that forcing people to use real names* would solve a lot of web pathologies, but I came to my senses when I started thinking about how (for example) old-school blue-checks behaved on Twitter. What's more, amid the many mediocre-to-truly-awful pseudonymous posters, there have always been a substantial minority of really interesting and entertaining personae that would have lost a little something if they'd been associated with pedestrian names — our own dysphemistic treadmill springs to mind, or to take an example from Twitter, EigenRobot.

* Or at least tie their names to real-world identities.

I’m inclined to think that forcing everyone to use real names would raise the average quality of the discourse, since pseudonyms are very frequently used by low-quality participants.

But we’d also miss out on a bunch of very good accounts if we had that policy, and in my view it wouldn’t be worth that cost. The solution to bad accounts is to do lots of individual banning, not to require real names.

Pancake: I'm curious to hear your thoughts on aviation policy and regulation, in particular on the political messaging side. I read Gary Leff's piece in Discourse on the subject and was met with many horrifying reminders of current FAA practice, along with a lot of suggestions related to deregulation. The suggested policies sound potentially good to me. However, when I bring them up with regular people, the reaction is often quite negative as there's a perceived safety risk (“Fewer flight hours for pilots? I want more!”)

What do you think is the best way to message on this subject? As a bonus, any novel policy ideas related to aviation?

I thought it was a good piece and I broadly agree with what he had to say.

To register a small complaint, I do wish he’d tried harder to identify which policy changes would generate the most actual gains rather than which ones sound most absurd on their face. For example, he talks about the FAA rejecting some petition because the stationary it was submitted on wasn’t formatted correctly. That’s laughable, but also probably has very few actual costs to the economy. By contrast, as you say, if you just tell people “we should reduce training standards for pilots,” I think you’ll get a lot of pushback. But I’ve written about this one previously because I genuinely think it’s important. The nickel version of the story is that back in 2009 when the aviation market was very depressed, a Colgan Air flight crashed. Supposedly in response to that crash, Congress enacted a law that (among other things) increased the number of required training hours from 250 to 1,500.

This never made any sense on the merits — the pilots of the plane in question had over 1,500 hours of experience, and the new rule didn’t set any kind of new competency threshold. It just created an arbitrary barrier to entry.

And that, of course, was the real point. It was good for pilots to create an arbitrary barrier to entry, and given the economic circumstances of the era, the costs of doing this were low. Today, of course, the economic situation is totally different and a lack of pilots is a significant bottleneck to various aspects of the American economy. Note also that this kind of supply-side restriction, though nominally motivated by pro-labor sentiment, ultimately reduces jobs in airplane manufacturing, reduces employment for flight attendants and other non-pilot airline employees, and is fundamentally anti-worker, even as it’s pro-pilot.

There’s a little crew of people who are dedicated to arguing that the price deregulation initiated by the Carter administration was a mistake and citing as evidence the fact that some markets have suffered a reduction in air service levels over the past 40 years. This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me, since the flip side is a bunch of other markets have enjoyed an increase in service levels. But what’s absolutely true is that if it were possible to expand the number of flights to smaller cities without kneecapping airlines’ ability to service the highest-demand routes, that would be good for the country. How could we accomplish that? Well, we’d need to build more airplanes, and our factories can do that. But we’d also need to train more pilots, which would be easier to do if we stuck to bona fide safety rules instead of pretextual ones.

Michael Tolhurst: I'm sort of curious, does substack offer you much in terms of meaningful analytics about your subscribers and has this helped you think about how to craft your posts? (E.g. can you know if a lot of your subscribers have also read post y by person x so maybe you want to reference/respond to said post?) If so, have you ever thought about sharing aggregate information about your community?

The analytics are not that sophisticated as far as I can tell, and that seems fine to me.

srynerson: Alternate history question prompted by recent events: If RFK had not been assassinated (1) could he have won the Democratic nomination and (2), if he did get the nomination, could he have defeated Nixon in the general election, and what would the historical impact be?

The idea that Bobby Kennedy could have defeated Humphrey for the nomination had he not been killed has always struck me as a baseless claim. The whole deal with the 1968 nominating process is that the vast majority of delegates weren’t allocated by primary and the establishment and the machines were lined up for Humphrey. Nothing about Kennedy being alive really would have changed that.

All that said, the 1968 election was very, very close. It’s pretty easy to imagine Kennedy beating Nixon or really just a butterfly flapping its wings and Humphrey beating Nixon. Importantly, this could have happened purely through Wallace doing better rather than through the Democrat securing more votes. In practical terms, any Democratic administration that came in under those circumstances would have had a rough go of it. There was a clear conservative majority in the election, but Nixon/Wallace vote splitting gave Democrats a shot. You’d have an administration with a weak mandate from the voters and a clear commitment to end the war in Vietnam. That would have set up a scenario in which the Fall of Saigon plays as a political fiasco that gets relentlessly attacked from the right, and the Kennedy (or Humphrey) administration wouldn’t get any noteworthy legislation passed.

The interesting question really becomes: which Republicans win a landslide in 1972? Do we get the Reagan Revolution eight years early, or does some more moderate/establishment figure manage to win the nomination?

What’s interesting, though, is that the 1968 election was incredibly consequential for the Supreme Court — Nixon confirmed four justice during his first term. So even if the Kennedy administration was largely unpopular and legislatively inconsequential, you would have had a dramatically more progressive Supreme Court through the 1970s. I think that likely means capital punishment is outlawed and states are required to equalize education funding across districts.

Andrew: You've joked before about the benefit of “cross-subsidy” or the “horny bundle” in the heyday of print magazines (sexy celebrity pictures combined with reporting on more serious topics). But there is a real kernel of truth to this. It feels like we're now in a "backlash to the backlash" to this model — at first we got unbundling because everyone claimed they didn't want to pay for stuff they didn't read / watch, but now many people are increasingly dissatisfied with a model where dozens of writers / content providers each ask for ~$100 a year to subscribe to a newsletter / streaming service, which is clearly untenable.

So why does it seem like Substack is resistant to offering a bundle, and do you think management will eventually create one? What does a good Substack bundle look like in your mind? And what would the economics have to be for it to make sense for you?

The joke is that there are only two ways to make money — bundling and unbundling.

But I do want to separate out the cross-subsidy point. Bundling, when it works, benefits consumers by giving most people access to more content without needing to pay more. A distinct, though related, idea is that bundling can change the incentives facing producers. The idea of the “horny bundle” is that the men’s magazines of my youth heavily relied on sexy celebrity pictures to sell magazines, but relied on more substantive reporting as a branding exercise. You wanted to be able to say to advertisers, to your subscribers’ girlfriends, and to the sexy celebrities themselves that your magazine was not a close substitute for pornography, and that it was in fact an exercise in highbrow journalism. Which was best accomplished by spending some actual money on the production of highbrow journalism.

A big part of internet-induced unbundling is that the content market is now more efficient.

Advertisers can target specific individuals based on detailed knowledge about who they are, rather than relying on ricochet effects based on the brand of the media outlet. That means it no longer makes sense for outlets to make wasteful expenditures on highbrow journalism. That’s a huge improvement if you think a big problem circa 1998 is that people lacked sufficient access to a wide range of sexy pictures, but probably worse for the world if you think highbrow journalism has value.

In terms of Substack, one thing to say is that they are not preventing people from bundling. The Free Press and the Bulwark are both using Substack to create what are essentially journalism bundles. I do personally think they should create some kind of bulk discounting system, though.

Tom Hitchner: I don't know if this is fair game as a question, but how do you respond to people who say your “don't fear cancel culture” post showed a lot of survivorship bias? It does seem like you and Doleac were better set up to weather the storm than a cub reporter or an adjunct instructor might be.

I want to be clear that I’m not saying nobody should fear cancel culture, I’m saying I don’t think influential people should be spreading exaggerated fears about cancel culture.

I think that if you are a successful person who is concerned about the problem of politically motivated publication bias in academia and journalism, you should do what I try to do and defend people from attempted cancellation while encouraging others to also defend people from attempted cancellation. Are there some people who are in genuinely too precarious of a situation to be brave? Absolutely. But are there people who already have tenure who are just ducking controversies to avoid taking shit on Twitter or enduring a little interpersonal awkwardness? I think there are. And I think that if we can get fewer controversy-duckers at the margin, that creates an objectively safer environment for everyone else. And I also think that if other people simply find it good for business to promote a doomer narrative, that encourages more ducking at the margin and makes the problem worse.

In journalism (as opposed to academia) I actually think people are just misperceiving their career incentives.

You will be much more successful as a writer if you sail into storms and try to do good work than if you try to steer around them. Now of course if you steer into storms and don’t do good work, then you may end up shipwrecked. But this is a tough industry, and if you can’t navigate the stormy waters, you’d honestly be better off finding that out sooner rather than later and coming up with something else to do with your life.

Paul S: I was not a philosophy major, but am finding myself drawn to heavily consequentialist movements — YIMBYism and Climate Hawkism (not sure if there's newer terminology).

What should be on my crash course towards understanding the philosophical underpinnings of that mindset?

I sincerely do not recommend that people read academic philosophy books, but if you must try, then I would check out Derek Parfit’s “Reasons and Persons” for a solid grounding in consequentialism. Importantly, relative to what you might expect, this book is actually very short on wild thought experiments like “should you murder someone to harvest his organs and save five lives?” It’s non-consequentialists who like to toss those kinds of ideas around, insisting that consequentialists either do or in some sense should embrace that kind of thing, even though actually nobody does.

What Parfit does instead is step back to the fundamentals of personal identity. Most of us have a strong intuition that I am me and you are you, and that this me-ness of me versus the you-ness of you are incredibly profound and important. Parfit denies that that’s the case, and argues that your relationship to future versions of yourself is more like your relationship to other human beings than most people believe. Everything else about ethics (the reasons) follows from these ideas about personal identity (the persons).

Joel Blunt: Lots of the news is presenting bank failures as a problem? Isn't this the system working as designed? (We have banks compete and try new things, markets move, and some fail). Confused about whether we actually need new regulation? Seems like banks not failing would also be a problem.

I agree that a lot of the coverage is muddy-headed and confusing. As you say, it is not per se a problem that banks fail. In a country with a bunch of banks, you would expect some bank management teams to make above-average decisions and others to make below-average decisions. Some banks will benefit from above-average levels of good luck and others will suffer below-average levels of good luck. If a bank is run by people who make bad decisions and suffer bad luck, then of course the bank will fail — what else would you want to see happen?

In part, we worry about the larger stability of the financial system, which is fine.

But it’s no longer 2009 when we worried that banking system problems would lead to reduced credit availability and lower demand. Right now we are trying to reduce demand in order to slow inflation. Some level of “financial system stress” not only isn’t a problem but is literally policy working as designed. If the Fed were raising rates and raising rates and raising rates with no impact on the financial system, we’d be asking what’s gone wrong with our theories.

The fly in the ointment is the fraught question of uninsured deposits. People understandably get upset at the prospect of their bank deposits going up in smoke. This normally doesn’t happen because the FDIC sells a failed bank to a different bank and things just keep on keeping on. With Silicon Valley Bank, there seems to have been initial resistance to taking that path out of misguided concerns about bank consolidation, and that hesitation created a situation where ultimately a decent amount of Deposit Insurance Fund money had to be used. On one level that’s okay (that’s what the fund is for), but this is where you get a regulatory problem. If we’re actually insuring the uninsured deposits, then banks with large amounts of uninsured deposits should be paying higher FDIC fees. This is a pretty blah problem as far as problems go — I don’t think it requires Elizabeth Warren to rain hellfire down on the industry — but it is a change that should be made.

Evan Ball: When comparing charter schools with traditional public schools, is there not an inherent problem with selection bias? The fact that parents/guardians need to proactively make the effort, however small, to get their kid into a charter school indicates some level of parent involvement and regard for their child’s education (which should result in a better-performing student population).

I agree that this selection issue is a big deal (and discussed that here), but that’s why good charter school studies don’t compare charter school students to public school students, they compare charter school lottery winners to charter school lottery losers (that post is here).

That provides an unbiased sample and it shows that some charter schools deliver consistently positive results while others deliver consistently bad results, with the results generally better in the places with stricter rules. So even though this is a very fraught and polarized discourse topic, I think the right policy is actually pretty clear — the most deregulated states should be stricter about shutting down underperforming charter schools, but the stricter states should ease their caps and allow the good charter franchises to expand.

Trizzlor: Since your writing is at least somewhat tied to current events, have you found it easier / more enjoyable to write during certain times or administrations? In times of relative political calm and prosperity, does it become harder to find topics to write about or does it clear your plate to focus on more general issues you don't otherwise have time for? During the Trump administration there were a lot of accusations flying around that journalists had a co-dependent relationship with Trump because he was always creating Discourse that was easy to write about, is there any truth to that or do political writers actually prefer it when politics is boring?

This is incredibly dependent on the specifics of your role.

When I was at Slate, which was a very generalist publication with a pretty limited politics staff, I found covering the 2012 campaign very stressful because there was a ton going on and a good amount of conflict between covering the stories I thought were most interesting and covering the stories that I thought the publication most needed coverage of. I preferred the quieter times when I could do weirder, Slate-ier stuff.

But then we launched Vox with a decent-sized and really good team of political journalists and plopped ourselves into the extreme doldrums of 2014. It felt at times like more talent than there was anything useful to do with, so when Trump came along and supercharged things, that was very refreshing. I thought we in some ways had our finest hour in the stretch of time that ranged from Election Day 2016 through to the passage of TCJA — there was tons of Trump Show stuff but also lots of policy change and meaty stories, and while it was a time of hard work for everyone, it seemed rewarding and important and it wasn’t hard to think of ideas.

At Slow Boring, though, it’s a totally different model, and while I certainly take inspiration from what’s in the news, we’re not really set up to “cover” the news in that sense. With this job, I kind of enjoy slow times that maximize creativity.

RO Cokesville: Recently you made a reference to becoming more Burkean, and your cities and water post couldn’t be more Burkean. Could you say more about what you think of Burke? Are there specific insights you take from him, or is it mostly the general idea that traditional ways of doing things have their own power? Was he right about the French Revolution?

I want to be clear that I’ve never actually read Burke, so I don’t have any particularly specific thoughts on him.

But I would say that my appreciation for “Burkean” themes comes mostly from a standpoint of having started out all the way on the other extreme. You say the cities and water post couldn’t be more Burkean, and that’s certainly true on a thematic level. Then again, the hypothesis under consideration was the idea that we could delete all of Los Angeles and rebuild the city with its civic center in a different location. My explicit Burke reference was me talking about why I no longer think we should eliminate all public libraries. I’m talking here less about “the wisdom of tradition” in some really deep sense than a mix of practical realities and the spirit of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

It’s worth trying to focus your time and attention on topics that seem both important and tractable, rather than just I Cooked Up Some Argument Why This Doesn’t Make Sense.

Keenan Ashbrook: Having recently reread the transcript of your conversation with Eric Goldwyn, I’ve been thinking a bit about the deeper dynamics that drive excessive construction costs in the US. On one hand, it’s clear that post-New Deal institutional developments pushed by both the right (privatization of state capacity) and the left (“public interest liberalism” that revels in creating veto points) are key parts of the story. But separately, it also seems like there is often a total lack of political will by elected officials to control costs—for example, there was no gubernatorial effort in New York to force NYC Transit to compromise on its demands for unnecessary back-of-house space. Why do you think American elected officials are so uninterested in realizing efficiencies, even when doing so involves coordination amongst public agencies they themselves theoretically control?

In a non-Burkean mood, I blame this on America’s obsession with dividing state power up.

We not only have our famous three branches of federal government, but one of those branches (Congress) is subdivided into two houses. Then the country is split into 50 states, so fair enough. But then each state has its own separation of powers into three branches — and again (except in Nebraska), the legislative branch is bicameral.

But states normally separate the executive branch as well, with an independently elected attorney general and often a bunch of other offices. Well then, is the attorney general in charge of prosecutions throughout the state? No, each county has its own elected district attorney. And oftentimes an elected sheriff as well. But then the county has a county government elected separately from those people, usually a unicameral legislature. But wait that’s more! Within the county, there will be cities with an elected mayor and a separately elected council. Then in most of the country, that’s separate from the school board, which is elected by someone else. So then you have the transit agency, which is normally multi-jurisdictional in a confusing way and has its board nominated by a bunch of different elected officials. And any given jurisdiction may also be served by multiple agencies.

The upshot of all this diffusion of authority and responsibility is that the dominant strategy for addressing thorny problems is normally to blame-shift rather than to say “look, it’s my job to make this better, so I need to develop a theory of how to do that even if it means pissing some people off.”