Particulate-induced brain fog mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Particulate-induced brain fog mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

23 - 29 minutes

I do not care for this smoke situation. The East Coast of the United States has worse weather than the Pacific Coast or Europe but consistently better air quality. That’s our thing. Our calling card. It’s what we have going for us. And now this smoke? From Canada? Do not like.

Today’s good news does not, on first read, seem like good news. The charity GiveDirectly, which focuses on direct cash transfers, had $900,000 stolen in an elaborate fraud scheme that deprived thousands of extremely low-income people in the DRC of money that could’ve made a huge difference in their lives. Kelsey Piper at Vox’s Future Perfect has a detailed write-up here.

But while this was absolutely awful, it’s good that GiveDirectly is being so transparent about what happened. All aid organizations have to contend with fraud, and their story might help others detect similar problems. We’ve written before about our enthusiasm for GiveDirectly’s mission (Slow Boring readers have raised over $15,000 for the organization since that post), and will happily continue to support the organization in the future.

Now, on to your questions!

Wigan: How do you see the California's reparations situation playing out? Will they go ahead with payments of any meaningful size? Will other states follow California's lead? Will they trigger a political backlash? Will they close longstanding inequalities as their political proponents say they will?

A Politico piece came out right after this question was submitted saying that basically all of the task force recommendations are hitting a brick wall in the state legislature, and the prospects aren’t going to improve as state/local ARP funds run out. At this I honestly feel like there isn’t much one can say that’s original about reparations at this point — the political and substantive problems seem pretty obvious to me. I do think Martin Luther King’s 1966 foreword to the Freedom Budget proposal is worth quoting:

    After many years of intense struggle in the courts, in legislative halls, and on the streets, we have achieved a number of important victories. We have come far in our quest for respect and dignity. But we have far to go.

    The long journey ahead requires that we emphasize the needs of all America’s poor, for there is no way merely to find work, or adequate housing, or quality-integrated schools for Negroes alone. We shall eliminate slums for Negroes when we destroy ghettos and build new cities for all. We shall eliminate unemployment for Negroes when we demand full and fair employment for all. We shall produce an educated and skilled Negro mass when we achieve a twentieth century educational system for all.

I don’t think we have really advanced in our understanding of the relevant dynamics since that time. If anything, the large expansion of the non-European immigrant and immigrant-descended population that’s occurred since the passage of the 1964 immigration act makes King’s point about this truer today than when he said it.

Sean: How would the entertainment industry have evolved if, say 20-30 years ago, cable and satellite companies began being more flexible in their offerings, with things like a la carte channel selection, smaller, cheaper, channel bundles, and more on-demand options? Would cord cutting, transition to streaming, and studios providing their content directly to consumers have happend as quickly or as drastically? Would content delivery be as fragmented or would it be more centralized?

Twenty years ago, I got hyped up about the idea that the FCC should mandate à la carte cable, and someone (I think maybe my uncles, who are actual experts in regulatory economics and antitrust economics) talked me out of it.

The basic deal with unbundling is that you push the average consumer’s monthly spending down, but you achieve that by, in effect, pushing the price per channel up and making the whole thing less attractive to consumers (Josh Barro wrote a good explanation of the economic logic here). Cable companies liked the big bundle because the marginal cost of distributing a channel to more households is roughly $0, so from their perspective, accepting a lower price-per-channel in order to generate higher overall monthly cable spend is a good deal. Mandatory unbundling would have made some households better off, but most people (especially those in families) would end up spending more money on fewer channels.

On top of being bad for most (though not all) households, this would have been very bad for cable companies. The most direct downstream consequence of that is probably less investment in the buildout of Fios networks from Verizon and AT&T, which in turn means less pressure on cable companies to invest in upgrading their own networks. Downstream of that, everyone’s internet is slower and/or more expensive, which probably makes streaming internet video somewhat less attractive. But that just means slowing down the structural changes we’ve seen, not actually stopping them.

G. Sahani: I’ve been intrigued by a de-aging lab that approaches the de-aging question holistically and entails cancer as one of the obstacles to greater life expectancy. However, normies view de-aging as a tech-billionaire fantasy, similar to the cosmetic vanity projects of the Hollywood elite. This response contrasts sharply with the high esteem I used to get talking about dedicating a life to pursuing cancer research. What are your thoughts on de-aging research efforts? 

I am way out of depth discussing biotechnology, but I think that particular framing you just offered is probably the most compelling pitch for de-aging as a research agenda.

A basic normie view is:

    Cancer research = life-saving, virtuous undertaking

    Anti-aging research = cosmetic, vain undertaking

But the upshot of the viewpoint you’re floating here is that cancer is essentially a specific form of aging, and that understanding the overall process of senescence is the key to understanding how to fight cancer.

Is that actually true? I have no idea, though I did meet a guy at my reunion who said it’s true. But I think that’s probably the best possible foot for de-aging to put forward — “people hear de-aging and think I’m talking about wrinkles or whatever, but actually the key to combatting cancer is blah blah whatever.”

Jeff: In selecting which questions to answer, how much weight do you put on the vote total, the number of comments, and the content of the ensuing discusdion in the comments?

The calculus is mostly “do I think I have an interesting answer?” The votes and the comments are a useful indication to me of how interesting people find the overall topic, which is relevant to whether or not I think my own answer is interesting, but far from decisive.

Alex Newkirk: What's your view on the elite overproduction hypothesis? I just read that guys new story in the Atlantic, and I read the previous profile of him, and came away thinking that it does seem to describe the dissatisfaction amongst my fellow grad students decently well.

I find Peter Turchin’s work intriguing, as do a lot of people these days, but I’m fundamentally allergic to this kind of bigthink and prefer a kind of plodding literalism.

Here’s my view of graduate school. There was a period in the postwar United States when the population was growing rapidly and when the share of young people attending college was also growing. That meant there was sustained demand for new college professors, which meant there were decent job prospects for everyone who worked diligently in grad school. More recently, population growth started slowing down and even more recently, the number of teenagers has started shrinking. The share of the population attending college sort of leveled off, and there’s been a shift toward students being more interested in taking classes in technical subjects. At the same time, life expectancy for well-educated people has continued to rise, and “college professor” is the sort of job that’s intellectually rewarding and physically not-so-challenging that old people like to continue doing. This has created a very difficult job market for newly minted PhDs in many fields.

That explanation could certainly be described as “overproduction of PhDs.” And a person with a PhD is, I suppose, a kind of an elite. And you could probably link it with a few other issues and describe a master narrative of elite overproduction.

But I tend to think that deflating the “what’s up with the academic job market?” question into a handful of basic demographic facts helps people understand the situation, whereas inflating into a big thing about elite overproduction does the opposite. There is probably in practice very little overlap between the people who would identify themselves as strong pronatalists and the people who desperately wish there was a more robust job market for history PhDs. But if people had more babies 15–20 years ago, there would be more hiring of historians today.

John E: There are 56 thousand people who live in Greenland and 5.8 million in Denmark. If we went to Denmark and paid them 100k for each person in Denmark and 1 million for each person in Greenland to purchase Greenland, it would cost 640 billion dollars. Is this a good deal for us? For them?

Is this worth doing in case we can't stop global warming and need to resettle Florida's growing population?

I have long supported the idea of trying to buy Greenland, something that is associated with Donald Trump (boo hiss) but that the Truman administration also tried to do. Truman’s offer was to pay Denmark $100 million (in 1946), but they said they said it wasn’t enough money. Adjusting for inflation, Truman would have been offering about $1.56 billion which comes out to about $28,000 per Greenlander, and I agree does seem low. At the same time, your $640 billion offer seems too high to me. There’s a deal to be made here, but I wouldn’t pay that price.

J. Willard Gibbs: You mentioned in last week's mailbag that RFK Jr would've had a reasonable chance at the Democratic nomination years ago but not presently. Care to elaborate? He's an anti-vaxx crank who's never held political office, so pretty much his only qualification is “he's a Kennedy.”

My point was just that 15–20 years ago, he was considered a mainstream Democrat despite those anti-vax views. Check out the coverage of his 2009 speech to the Solar Power International Conference in The New York Times or Mother Jones.

A few months earlier, his name was floated as a possible EPA chief for the Obama administration. That’s not to say his anti-vaccine views were uncontroversial at the time — the American Prospect ran a blog post denouncing the idea specifically focusing on the vaccine issue. But Mike Allen’s writeup of the possible pick didn’t even mention vaccines. And Obama himself courted the anti-vax vote in 2008 with ambiguous rhetoric, as did Hillary Clinton. One reason for that is the scientific evidence wasn’t quite as settled at the time. But per that contemporaneous TAP blog post, it was in fact pretty settled. It’s just that “Democrats shouldn’t associate with anti-vaxxers” was an eccentric position 15 years ago and only became the dominant one relatively recently.

Now to be clear, I personally was never an anti-vaxxer.

And I have always associated RFK Jr. with a strand of neo-pastoralist technophobia that I don’t like — he’s against nuclear power, he’s against GMOs, he has all kinds of positions that I think are bad. But these are conventionally left-wing bad positions. The other thing that’s changed from how I remember it, though, is that I think progressives have become increasingly intolerant of the idea that you want to get as many people as possible to vote for you. Mass politics is a counting game where you win by assembling a coalition that is larger than your opponent’s; it’s not a game you win by proving that your coalition is morally superior to the opposition coalition. It’s all well and good to point out that the current GOP coalition contains a ton of kooks, cranks, and conspiracy theorists, along with decent helpings of racists and misogynists. But it’s not as if the whole country was dramatically more sane, better informed, and more enlightened back when Obama won a landslide in 2008. It was the same country with the same cranks and racists and misogynists as we have today — realistically, probably more of them — but he got a larger share of those people to vote for him, which is your job as a politician.

myrna loy’s lazy twin: Does forced drug treatment work? Are there types of forced treatment that work and types that clearly don't? Does it depend on the drug that the person is addicted to? I ask because I have seen a number of pieces in the media claiming that it doesn't work but the evidence they cite doesn't seem very strong to me.

One important question is: work at what? I think most people find it problematic if other people are doing fentanyl on the metro or in parks or what have you. So if you want that not to happen, there needs to be a rule against it and something has to happen to you if you break the rule. Mandatory treatment seems like a much better approach to drug addiction than prison without treatment, and having a rule against getting high in public spaces seems much better than turning cities into open-air drug markets. So coerced treatment à la Portugal ends up being the sane, relatively humane solution, and that’s kind of true even if the programs aren’t very effective.

In the real world, actual drug treatment programs are all over the map in terms of efficacy, and it’s not like America has a highly scalable, cheap, turnkey drug treatment solution we could just make people enroll in.

One program that I think is interesting, which is about alcohol rather than illegal drugs but seems to have clear implications, is South Dakota’s 24/7 Sobriety. Here’s a description from Jennifer Doleac’s literature review on recidivism:

    Kilmer et al. (2013) evaluated another SCF program in South Dakota called 24/7 Sobriety. The program requires individuals arrested for alcohol-related offenses to take a breathalyzer test twice per day or wear an alcohol-monitoring bracelet that continuously checks whether the person has been drinking. This dramatically increases p. If someone tests positive for alcohol consumption, they receive swift, certain, and modest sanctions. This program was gradually phased in across counties in South Dakota, allowing a difference-in-differences analysis. Trends in places that adopted 24/7 Sobriety were compared with trends in places that had not yet adopted the program. The researchers found that adoption of the program caused a 12 percent reduction in repeat DUI arrests and a 9 percent reduction in domestic violence arrests. Both effects were statistically significant. A follow-up study found that 24/7 Sobriety also caused a significant reduction in deaths (Nicosia, Kilmer, and Heaton 2016).

That works! I have to say, though, that when 24/7 Sobriety was first described to me over 10 years ago, my expectation was that it would work better than that. It turns out that addiction is tough.

M Bartley: Are there any of the major issue areas where you would position yourself closer to Republican political leadership than Democratic political leadership?

They don’t really talk about this in Congress, but (like most people) I am closer to what I take to be the GOP position on affirmative action than to the Democratic one, though I hold out hope that Democrats will actually articulate a better stance on this.

This is not a particularly live issue now, but I thought Republicans were right to press Biden for a more rapid wind-down of non-pharmaceutical interventions on Covid, and their position on Covid vaccine mandates (which I thought was wrong at the time) was vindicated by events. The partisan divide on the TikTok question is a bit murky; the most enthusiastic proponents of my view on TikTok are Republicans while the most enthusiastic opponents are Democrats. I think Republicans are right about the student debt relief question. Republicans were correct to say that the original Build Back Better proposal would have been inflationary.

These aren’t exactly “major issue areas” — I broadly favor legal abortion and a more generous welfare state, while Republicans don’t — but I think GOP leadership has shown sound judgment on some of the passing controversies of the day.

srynerson: First Pride Month Matt's Mailbag question (a.k.a. “And during Pride month!”): Matt, do you think your more studied (not to say critical) takes on trans issues than many other center-left/left commentators are driven by your having studied philosophy for your undergrad degree? I ask because I feel like a lot of the on-line discussion on the subject takes place in a complete vacuum relative to the past three centuries of philosophy on mind-body dualism and related topics.

Not really. Here’s what I’d say.

Look around at some prominent liberal writers who have zero reputation for heterodoxy on this topic and pay attention to what they’ve actually said or written about it. That some conservative legislation on trans issues is an overreaching infringement on people’s freedoms? That some conservative rhetoric on trans issues is mean-spirited or even hateful? That some conservative interest in championing women’s sports seems to be in bad faith? I bet you’ll find a lot of that (and I agree with it). But do you see prominent liberal writers doing columns where they say they really kicked the tires on the science and determined that XY college swimmers have no advantage over XX ones? I bet you don’t. Because they never looked into it? Because they never wanted to look into it?

I don’t know that the world needs a Paul Krugman deep dive into the question of trans women’s participation in college sports, but I bet if anyone had anything really persuasive on this, he’d have seen it already and mentioned it at some point. I’m just a more surly, disagreeable person than the average internet pundit.

My philosophical commitments on this topic are pretty left-wing, though, in the sense that I really truly believe people should be able to do what they want in terms of attire, nomenclature, hormones, surgeries, or whatever else. I grew up in Greenwich Village in the 1980s and those are the values I was raised with — live and let live. I just ask people on the left to remember everything they know about the health care system in other contexts. People with products to sell say things about the benefits of their treatments that aren’t always accurate. This is not a fact about “gender ideology” but just about life in general.

Kevin: Is there any common economic wisdom about the downsides of a full employment economy? I feel like any task that requires interacting with another human being has become an impossible slog these days. How much of this is because it's hard to hire better people, or because it’s hard to fire the bad employees?

I wish people would distinguish more clearly between “strong labor demand” and “scarce labor supply” when thinking about these issues.

It’s bad for consumers that due to population aging, we have a very slow-growing labor force. It’s good that demand for workers is robust. A larger flow of well-organized, legal immigration would let us meet our workforce needs more effectively and create deeper labor markets with a more extensive division of labor and higher productivity.

Dave: You've hinted before that some “conspiracy theories” might be true. Would you ever do a deep dive on one or more, and why you find them credible?

Every once in a while I mention that I believe JFK assassination theories, and then someone inevitably pops up urging me to read some tedious books that will supposedly debunk that.

But why would I want to read tedious debunking books? After all, if I did that, then I would need to read a tedious conspiracist’s debunking of the debunking. And probably read a second pro-Warren Commission book. And a bunch of secondary literature. And all for what? To learn that maybe it was all just a big coincidence and a guy under CIA surveillance killed the president for no real reason and then was killed in turn for no real reason by a mobbed-up Dallas nightclub owner? It doesn’t seem like I would actually do anything different in my life if I were talked into this, so I prefer not to waste a ton of time on it. JFK, by contrast, is a very fun movie.

Stephen: You write a lot about education reform, but on a personal level how did you choose what school to send your own children to? What criteria mattered to you and what do you think is the biggest missed opportunity when it comes to how “school quality” tends to be measured today?

We feel strongly about supporting public schools, and our kid goes to the public elementary school that’s across the street from our house. D.C. has a pretty extensive public pre-K system, so he was able to enroll there as a three-year-old, and I think our general sense was that a free and logistically convenient pre-K option was very valuable, and as long as we liked the school and our child was safe and happy, we would keep enrolling in it. He’s now wrapping up his last few weeks of second grade there.

The school has a very hardworking and charismatic principal (you can read a New York Times article about his efforts at vaccine persuasion) and a bunch of great teachers and uses a solid phonics-based literacy curriculum (here’s another New York Times article about his fantastic kindergarten teacher Ms. Smith’s literacy instruction). It’s a funny school, since it’s located in what’s now a very expensive gentrifying neighborhood and has a lot of parents who are connected in politics and media, so it winds up being an example that’s on the radar of national reporters at the New York Times. At the same time, the reason it works as an example is that at the end of the day, it’s still an “inner city school” that’s about a quarter Hispanic, slightly less than 50% Black, and qualifies for Title 1 funding and universal free school lunch.

But broadly speaking, I think it’s a model for how I’d like to see public education work in this country.

It’s a socially diverse, racially integrated school that has enough affluent parents that we are able to have a vibrant and well-financed PTO, but also enough poor parents that it’s not just rich people helping their own kids. The principal has an education reform background and used to work in charter schools, but it’s a neighborhood school that helps sustain a whole community. The teachers work very hard and are self-selected into wanting to work for a mission-driven principal and for a student population that has non-trivial challenges, but DCPS also pays its teachers well. They use a rigorous, research-based curriculum and they take test-based assessments seriously, not because high test scores are the be-all, end-all of education but because if you’re not benchmarking yourself against some external yardstick, it’s easy to get lost in the fog.

Matt M: Advertising is usually seen as a left coded industry yet it seems to be Democrats who so often have messaging problems. What gives?

People use “messaging” in an ambiguous way.

Hillary Clinton in 2016, for example, put out a couple of very well-crafted ads touching on immigration policy that focused grouped well, but I’m told modern testing techniques suggest the ads actually pushed people to vote for Trump. That’s because even though the message of the ads was a good message, raising the salience of immigration helped Trump. The choice of what to message about, in other words, was more important than whether the message was well-crafted.

Today, Democrats have gotten way better at testing, and this is the first ad Biden floated on television for his re-election launch.

But what makes this ad so great is that it’s actually pretty different in tone and tenor from how Dem-aligned communications staffers run the party’s day-to-day messaging and communication. Notwithstanding the specific references to Covid, this is basically an ad you could have run in 2012 or 2008. Which I think is great. But I think Democrats would do even better to align their overall national political message with this tested and optimized message.

Tak: As a Democrat, what do you root for in terms of GOP primaries? There's a balance between trump-like candidates being less competitive and at some point the GOP will be in charge and then you wouldn't want too many of those types of people around, right? How does the type of race and its competitiveness alter your calculus?

I think that one can overthink this stuff. It’s bad for the country to have nutjobs securing nominations for high office, so I am broadly anti-nutjob, especially for executive offices. But I do think the media tends to set the bar excessively low in terms of what qualifies a Republican as a moderate — even Susan Collins is completely in hock to the cult of low taxes on rich people.