Post-exam mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Post-exam mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

26 - 33 minutes

It’s been warmer and sunnier back here in D.C. than it was last week in Los Angeles, but I guess that’s life for you.

Some more good vibes beyond my personal weather triumphs: Milan is celebrating the end of his first year of college, rent inflation has probably peaked, Donald Trump was finally held legally accountable for something, Dianne Feinstein is back in the Senate, and college tuition is now falling.

Questions!

Polytropos: Baumol cost disease— a side effect of growth that drives up the expenses of low-productivity industries as they have to compete for inputs with higher-productivity counterparts— seems to fall particularly heavily on public or publicly-funded sectors like education, childcare, healthcare, and law enforcement. If these sectors remain as stubbornly labor-intensive as they’ve been over the last forty-odd years, governments will have to spend more and more on them to provide the same level of service.

If improving productivity in these areas remains an intractable problem, how should elected officials deal with the messaging challenge of explaining why services are getting pricier to a public whose members will mostly either fail to understand Baumol disease or find it emotionally unsatisfying relative to blaming amorphous social villains?

I don’t think there necessarily is an alternative to getting people — both the mass public, but also elite political actors — to understand the basic underlying dynamic that you are pointing toward.

Maybe one way to think about it, though, is that there’s always a lot of public anxiety about the idea that technological progress is going to eliminate jobs. That, of course, is another way of saying that technological progress can raise productivity. Productivity is good. Loss of jobs is bad. But as far as I can tell, there’s lots of ongoing demand for human-provided nurses, cops, and kindergarten teachers, and that’s likely to continue to be the case even as technology advances. But you need a mechanism to shift money from one sector to another, and the name of that mechanism is “taxes.”

City Dweller: What do you think about governments that have procurement preferences for minority-owned, women-owned, local, and/or small businesses? This is an extremely widespread practice among governments nationwide.

Also, do you have any idea how preferences for businesses based on the race or gender of the owner don't run afoul of anti-discrimination laws?

In terms of running afoul of anti-discrimination laws, it doesn’t run afoul of them because that’s not how the statutes are written. The Supreme Court may, in the future, decide to rule that these set-asides violate the 14th Amendment. Traditionally they haven’t because the justices didn’t want to do that, but there are different justices on the Court now and they may want to do different things — my guess is they probably will.

A more interesting question is what is the actual impact of these policies. I noticed one day that the school lunch provider at my kid’s school is called Sodexo Magic rather than regular Sodexo. What’s Sodexo Magic? It seems like basically a joint venture between Sodexo (a French company that runs food services for lots of schools, prisons, hospitals, and nursing homes around the world) and NBA star-turned-entrepreneur Magic Johnson. What does Magic bring to the table? Well, he’s very skilled at marketing, and also by taking him on as a partner Sodexo becomes eligible to benefit from minority-owned contracting preferences.

Aaron K. Chatterji, Kenneth Y. Chay, and Robert W. Fairlie find that city contracting set-asides increase the Black business ownership rate “with the black-white gap falling three percentage points,” and that the “gains were concentrated in industries heavily affected by set-asides and mostly benefited the better educated.” David Blanchflower found essentially the same thing in 2008, with the added bonus that the set-asides partially offset the impact of discriminatory small business lending practices by banks. This is an important point because more recent research on PPP lending confirms that there’s significant discrimination in this area, especially from smaller banks relative to how fintech startups promise.

This is an area where the first-best solution is easy to specify — don’t discriminate in either lending or contracting — but it’s harder to say exactly what we should think about the real world. This is, however, part of my argument that it’s a bad idea to promote fragmentation in the banking sector and a bad idea to be sentimental about small business.

My broad sense about municipal contracting is that this is an area where good government proceduralism has just gone too far relative to democratic politics. The backdrop for the existence of minority contracting preferences is the idea that contracts should be awarded according to some highly bureaucratic rule-governed process rather than just “the mayor hires whoever she thinks will do the best job.” The theory of bureaucratization is that this will make sure that contracts are awarded on the basis of merit rather than cronyism. But in practice, this mostly just seems to encourage contracts to be awarded to companies that have a high degree of specialized expertise in the field of contract application. In your regular life, cronyism is a desirable feature of a contracting process. If your roof started leaking and a good friend of yours was a roofer, you would of course hire your friend and see him as less likely than a randomly selected roofer to screw you. The mayor handing out contracts to her cronies is, in theory, different because she’s handing out taxpayer money, not her own money. But if all the schools sprung leaks in their roof, citizens would expect the mayor to do something about it. Are we sure the incentives aren’t aligned for her to want to get them fixed rapidly?

Under the actual non-crony system, the D.C. government seems to be really bad at getting working HVAC systems in city buildings, but nobody is held accountable because the whole thing is inflexible and bureaucratized.

So I know that ended up far afield of the original question. I guess my bottom line is that the status quo has failures in multiple directions, minority-owned contractor set-asides do seem to achieve their main purpose, and I doubt the people who are likely to rule them unconstitutional are going to be equally vigorous at cracking down on discriminatory lending practices.

Allan: I thought your response to Megyn Kelly calling for better ways of dealing with mentally ill individuals without infringing on civil liberties was good and incisive — too often people handwave away tradeoffs and take an “assume a can opener” view when it comes to tough policy problems.

My question is what do you think we should do about mentally ill homeless people in our cities? Seems like everyone here would agree that they're deserving of dignitity and respect, but also antisocial behavior is not something that people should be expected to put up with in public places. So what do you think the best solution here is?

To recap the Megyn Kelly point, she responded to the Jordan Neely tragedy by calling for “greater willingness to lock ppl up (w/protocols in place for civil libs),” and I complained that she’s just avoiding the issue here, which is “how do you do that?”

There are 330 million people in the United States. The WHO says that 0.32% of people suffer from schizophrenia, which is a tiny share of the population but still amounts to about a million people. Do they all need to be involuntarily committed to mental institutions? Obviously not. Should some of them be? I think so. But which ones, and who decides? That’s a difficult problem. Any system you pick is going to have some type 1 errors and some type 2 errors, and I think it is correct to err on the side of trying to avoid unjustly institutionalizing people against their will and accepting that this will mean some problem cases on the street. Note, though, that Neely is not only a case of someone who I think clearly did need to be coerced into treatment, but under existing law in New York state, he was in fact coerced into treatment. The problem is that he ran away.

    He was to go from court to live at a treatment facility in the Bronx, and stay clean for 15 months. In return, his felony conviction would be reduced. He promised to take his medication and to avoid drugs, and not to leave the facility without permission.

    “This is a wonderful opportunity to turn things around, and we’re glad to give it to you,” Mary Weisgerber, a prosecutor, said.

    “Thank you so much,” Mr. Neely replied.

    But just 13 days later, he abandoned the facility. Judge Biben issued a warrant for his arrest. 

At this point we get out of the realm of hot takes (“greater willingness to lock ppl up”) and into the realm of really banal takes (it is good to enforce warrants).

My emerging view of this is that “we need to force the mentally ill/drug addicts to get help” is becoming a bit like the standard liberal view about the need for more gun control where people are abstracting too far away from the details of enforcement. There isn’t a magic wand that will cause guns to disappear, and there also isn’t a magic wand that will keep people in treatment facilities. Someone would have to enforce those rules. That could be the police, or it could be some form of social worker who is given coercive authority and trained in the use of physical force. But it would have to be someone very cop-like (disappointing to the left) and it would cost actual money (disappointing to the right).

City of Trees: If you had to move out of DC (and to make this interesting, out of the DC/Baltimore/Arlington combined statistical area), what cities in the nation would you find the most favorable to move to? And what criteria would be important to you in determining which cities you'd find the most favorable?

The boring answer is that I’d probably move either to New York where my dad lives, or else to San Antonio or Austin, which are pretty close to where my wife’s parents live.

Totes McGoats: Why didn't the Democrats simply lift the debt ceiling to $100 trillion dollars or whatever when they had full control in 2022?

It’s a mix of some Democrats feeling that would be a “bad vote” and (more importantly, I think) the belief that dragging Republicans into a fiscal policy debate is beneficial to Democrats. They now have all these House Republicans on record as voting for huge cuts to border enforcement, police, and everything else.

Aaron Krol: I've noticed Elizabeth Warren is one of your go-to sources of liberal language to mock or disapprove of. Wondering, as someone who still thinks the CFPB is quite an impressive accomplishment and the student loan forgiveness for some of the worst for-profit colleges was a great example of a senator exerting influence on the executive branch, if you think Warren is a bad senator or just a bad model for Democrats in, like, 45 states to the right of Massachusetts?

Warren is an extremely effective senator in the sense that she wields a lot of influence over and above being a prominent person. But while I think her early influence was mostly influence for good, she more recently has been wielding influence in bad ways.

Grace: If we were to make the (perhaps faulty) assumption that Biden is going to have to negotiate for a debt ceiling raise, and that some deal can be found that's in between no spending cuts and what the House Republicans passed, what would you advise the Biden team to offer that would be the least harmful to the country (and/or least harmful to Biden's political prospects)?

One important way that I think the current situation is very different from the 2011 debt ceiling standoff is that in principle, cutting federal spending should have a beneficial short-term macroeconomic impact rather than a harmful one.

So it’s not like a “McCarthy is trying to force Biden to commit political suicide by doing austerity” situation — if this were a normal appropriations process and Republicans were just bargaining for a lower appropriation than the one that passed last time, I’d say “well, elections have consequences, and it is what it is.” But the size of the cuts Republicans are asking for is absurd. So at the end of the day they should settle on … something less than that? We’ll see.

Rory Hester: I've seen talk that your opinions and takes have become less progressive and more moderate. Support policing, etc... You have denied this in the past, but at the very least you seem to have shifted what you are willing to publish or highlight. If this is true, is it drive by age, being a parent, or just having more license to publish what you have always thought?

I’m sure I’ve changed, but I do think the main thing is that the world has changed.

Consider the United States in 2013:

    There were ongoing military operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan that I thought should be brought to an end, which was a left-of-Obama view.

    Many states barred same-sex couples from getting married, which I thought was unjust — a view Obama had only just come around to about a year earlier.

    Obama was pushing for a balanced deficit reduction plan while Republicans pushed for an all-cuts plan, and my view was that if anything, the deficit should be larger to obtain full employment.

    There were a bunch of ongoing controversies about labor force participation and the optimality of the regulatory state where I thought people were missing the vote, and the low-hanging fruit for generating economic growth was to stimulate demand more.

    Left-of-Obama activists were trying to convince him to adopt “supply-side” climate policies like killing the Keystone XL project, but he was refusing. 

I thought of myself at the time as broadly aligned with Obama but somewhat to his left, torn between the view that Obama was too moderate and the view that Obama’s progressive critics weren’t pragmatic enough. Ten years later, I think the landscape is quite different. Biden is to Obama’s left on a number of issues, and the state of the world has changed such that “just stimulate more” is no longer correct, and fussy efficiency considerations are a much bigger deal.

In line with that, I would not have thought 10 years ago that “supports policing” was a spicy progressive take — the whole discourse was in a different place. It was Bill Clinton who pioneered the COPS grant program, and it was Obama who gave it a big temporary boost as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Fraternal Order of Police didn’t endorse it in 2012. But this is also an area where the focus of my writing has shifted. Back in 2013, crime had been falling steadily for 20 years, so I thought it was very important to look at ways to make the criminal justice system less cruel without compromising on public safety. I thought a promising idea was to reduce the length of prison sentences and plow the savings into more policing — try to stop crime before it starts. I was also very taken with Mark Kleiman’s idea that if we made parolees wear GPS ankle monitors, that would probably reduce recidivism rates considerably, which would in turn make it possible to further reduce prison sentences. Those both still seem like reasonably promising ideas to me, but the whole situation is different now — crime rates have risen quite a bit since 2013 and there has also been a big increase in the political clout wielded by people who are just root-and-branch opposed to policing and incarceration.

At any rate, you could go down the line of issues like this, and I do think there are some places where my opinion has genuinely altered.

Ten years ago, I was aware of criticisms of the FDA’s drug approval process but I’d never really looked into it, and I was pretty skeptical of the critics. The events of the Covid-19 pandemic caused me to pay more attention to this — I think most of the criticisms checked out, and they were vindicated as events unfolded. This is a weird topic where even though the facts on the ground, I thought, validated longstanding conservative complaints, the actual direction of the conservative movement has been in the opposite direction — in favor of vaccine skepticism — so I’m not sure it counts as me having shifted right or left. But I definitely did change my mind about this.

Broadly speaking, though, I am mostly surprised by the number of people who haven’t shifted their relative positioning in politics even though the world has, in my view, changed a lot. In particular, it seems to me like a really big deal with sweeping consequences for how we should think about specific public policy issues that Biden actually did a giant stimulus and the economy is at full employment. But most people in the broad left-of-center camp seem to have just shrugged this off.

Ds: I have a theory, wonder what you think. The left has moved WAY left on criminal Justice since the 1990’s. My theory is this: Shawshank Redemption was not a box office hit. But it’s attained “among best movies ever” status due to non-stop airing on cable. Those younger than Gen X firmly believe that all criminals are either Andy (innocent and exploited by corrupt system) or Red (deeply good man who made a regrettable mistake in his youth). They think all prisons are run like Shawshank - brutal murdering guards, corrupt wardens. They’ve seen this movie 200 times before they were 16. It’s why they leapt from “maybe some drug sentences are too harsh” to “abolish all prisons”. Little else explains the radical views disconnected from all of human behavior and history.

This is a funny theory, but I think probably wrong. That said, if some enterprising PhD student somewhere can come up with a way to study the causal influence of “The Shawshank Redemption” on criminal justice policy views, I would love to read it.

Badger Blanket: I’m moving to the DC area to attend law school. My school is in the district, but I rented an apartment in Arlington (Rosslyn, right across the river) because its more affordable and I can get a larger place. Do I have your permission to tell my family and friends that I “live in DC?”

Growing up in New York City, I was always annoyed by people from New Jersey who’d say they were from New York. I would prefer that you say you live in Northern Virginia, “the D.C. suburbs,” or “near D.C.”

Max Power: I periodically see stuff in the media along the lines of “Biden should start worrying about 2024 because polls show him losing to Trump and DeSantis.” Kind of a silly headline given that Biden has presumably been “worrying about” 2024 for his entire presidency just as any president worries about reelection. Nonetheless, is his situation actually that dire, or is this a situation where it's too early to focus too much on general election polls. And if Biden really were to “start worrying” in a way he hasn't already, what would that look like?

It would look like getting together all the party’s top donors and advocacy group leaders and sending someone who is understood to speak for Biden to talk to them.

He says to them: This is not a discussion, this is me passing a message on to you. Job number one from now until Election Day 2024 is winning re-election. That means saying things that are popular and implementing policies that bolster real incomes. That means sometimes doing stuff that you won’t all like. One possibility is that blowing you guys off in favor of a Win Reelection First agenda will backfire, that you will use your influence to plant negative stories about our administration with sympathetic journalists, and all around try to increase the level of intra-coalition infighting and dissension. You hope that by doing this, you will convince us that we should cater to your whims in order to boost enthusiasm and turnout — implicitly threatening to spike our reelection campaign. I’ve been sent here to tell you that we are not going to do it. We are not going to worry about blowback. We are not going to worry about enthusiasm. Your job is wake up every day and ask yourselves what you can do to boost enthusiasm for Joe Biden and to make Joe Biden look good. Our job is to wake up every day and ignore you completely in favor of currying favor with cross-pressured voters.

If you choose to dedicate your time to trying to sink us, you might succeed. If you choose to dedicate your time to trying to help us win, we’ll probably win. So if you think Trump winning is good for progressive causes, then by all means, keep acting this way. But if you think Trump winning is bad for progressive causes, then help us win. But regardless of your choices, our priority is going to be saying popular stuff and trying to bolster real incomes. We think we put a lot of points on the board for progressive causes in the 117th Congress, we continue to fill out judicial slots, and we think winning re-election will be good for you guys. That is our priority and we hope it will be yours as well.

Sam Kington: David Atkins posted a twitter thread recently pointing out that while Democratic Party voters are both economically and socially left-wing, Republican Party voters are united in being socially right-wing. His immediate point was “moderate Republicans like Mitt Romney basically don't exist,” and therefore popularist stuff like “let's tone down the wokeness so people listen to our pocket-book message” is doomed to failure because those people don't exist. His ultimate point is “you can't persuade fascists not to be fascists, so you just need to wait for them to die,” which resembles enough the idea of an Emergent Democratic Majority that you should probably instinctively add a [citation needed] label. But still: if the persuadable voters are economically left-wing but socially-conservative, how do you gain their trust if they *believe* that their main thing is that they're socially-conservative?

I have three points on this.

One is that I think it’s telling how convoluted these threads and arguments become in order to obscure basic realities. We know that there are Obama-Collins crossover voters in Maine. We know that there are Trump-Golden crossover voters in Maine. We know that John Bel Edwards, Andy Beshear, Laura Kelly, and Roy Cooper all won gubernatorial elections in red states. We know that some people are sufficiently non-racist to have voted for Barack Obama twice but sufficiently indifferent to racism to have also voted for Donald Trump twice. Crossover voters are real. Swing voters are real. Cross-pressured voters are real. If you’ve talked yourself into the conclusion that they aren’t real, then your argument has gone awry because it’s simply not possible to explain the big macro facts about American politics that way.

Two is that I think “quadrant thinking” elides some really important distinctions. Given the current state of play in American politics, “I don’t think we should do sharp cuts to the existing social safety net” codes as an economically-left position. But on Twitter, economically-left means something like “we should overhaul the American economic system and replace it with the one they have in Sweden.” I think moderate voters are mostly oriented toward the status quo. Activists see people’s discontent with the political system and choose to read that as evidence that voters want radical policy change. But most Americans are reasonably content with their personal lives, asymmetrically loss averse, and have low trust in political actors who are telling them changes will make things better.

Third, I think this “wokeness versus pocketbook” dichotomy has been running for so many years now that it’s been overtaken by events.

Back in, say, 2018 you could get a good argument going about whether Democrats should talk a lot about how Trump is racist or whether responding to those racial provocations plays into Trump’s hands. And at that time, I was largely in the “plays into Trump’s hands” camp and thought Cory Booker had a good strategy for defusing it and refocusing attention on unpopular Trump policies like corporate tax cuts and tossing people off their Medicaid benefits. This was basically a messaging argument, a lot of people had strong feelings about it, it engendered a lot of ill-will, and because Twitter feuds never stop, a lot of people are still arguing about it. But I don’t think it actually has a lot of application to today’s world in which Joe Biden rather than Donald Trump is president. I think everyone agrees that it’s better for Biden’s reelection if the economy is doing better and worse for his reelection if the economy is doing worse. That just leads into a policy debate about the actual economic impact of various policies.

Seth Chalmer: In last week's mailbag, you wrote: “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.” Separately, you've also written many times (correctly, in my view) that parliamentary systems are much better than presidential systems. Do you have any Burkean ideas for moving incrementally and/or realistically toward the structures of a parliamentary system in the U.S., or something marginally closer to it? To make the switch all at once feels politically unfeasible in the extreme but what, in practice, does it look like to slowly bore this particular hard board when so much of the relevant substance is baked into the Constitution, and Constitutional amendments are very difficult?

The short answer is, no I don’t have any particularly good ideas about this.

The medium answer is that I want to promote the insight that parliamentarism is superior to elite institutions in the United States, because I do think it’s relevant in contexts outside the four corners of American constitutional politics. In the wake of World War II, our government encouraged Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan to adopt parliamentary systems. We also urged parliamentarism in both Iraq and Afghanistan during the War on Terror era, but ultimately deferred to Hamid Karzai's preference for presidentialism. I’m not sure there were any good options available to actually overrule Karzai on this, but I wish people took this fateful choice more seriously in their efforts to understand why the postwar Afghan government failed. I think the people in charge of American foreign policy and American institutional aid should do what they can, at the margin, to promote parliamentarism when countries are making constitutional changes. In the event that the United States ends up in a state of constitutional collapse, I hope elite figures keep these facts in mind when restoring civilian rule.

But the long answer is that in terms of day-to-day American institutional change, you need to think more holistically.

One thing we see playing out in state government is that in Wisconsin, for example, the legislature has been really eroding the power of the state’s governor. In a pure parliamentarism frame, I approve of that — I would sort of love to see some state go adopt parliamentarism. But in terms of actually existing American politics, state legislatures are often highly gerrymandered whereas governors races aren’t. Beyond gerrymandering, though, we also know that in practice, voters pay very little attention to state legislature elections — they just kind of robotically vote for the party they prefer based on presidential politics. It’s governors who face competitive elections and where moderate Dems can win in red states and moderate Republicans can win in blue states. So due to both gerrymandering and blind partisanship, I tend to prefer stronger governors rather than weaker. But I also think we should make institutional changes to address gerrymandering, and ideally create separate state-level political parties that are divorced from the national parties (like in Canada), in which case parliamentarism for states might make sense.