Back in the USA mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

28 - 36 minutes

I am back in the land of the free and the home of iced coffee, which I am drinking plenty of because I am bad at jet lag.

A quick housekeeping note: we heard from a commenter who was upset because he felt he had been unfairly one-day-banned and wanted to know our moderation policy. The short answer is that we don’t have a super specific policy because we don’t have the bandwidth to enforce it with the level of consistency required of such a specific policy (though Milan, who moderates comments, has outlined his general philosophy here). Will that sometimes feel unfair? Perhaps! But none of us are children. If you do or say something inappropriate, you may experience negative consequences, and the fact that someone else may have gotten away with something similar is annoying but not entirely relevant. Everyone should do their best to be polite and constructive.

Now some good news on my radar: A new bill in the D.C. Council to crack down on fake tags and MPD’s new chief wants to address spatial misallocation of officers, both causes that Slow Boring has championed! Wesleyan is ending legacy admissions, excess deaths are now down to zero and the pandemic is truly over, insurrectionists are facing accountability, Robert E. Lee has lost in litigation just as he lost in war, racial disparities in incarceration have declined, and it seems like they have maybe found a way to cure HIV.

Thanks for bearing with us during a long vacation, folks!

Marie Kennedy: Not a question per se, but I’m awfully irritated at the current electoral shenanigans going on in Ohio and would like your opinion/spotlight on the issue. Long story short, the heavily gerrymandered Ohio State House general assembly is afraid that a citizen initiative to pass a constitutional amendment to protect abortion might actually pass this November. So in an attempt to prevent it from passing, they are reinstating an August special election that they themselves killed off JUST last year, and the only issue on the ballot is their proposed constitutional amendment to raise the passing threshold for ballot initiative constitutional amendments from 50% to 60%. I think what pisses me off most is that I actually think 60% is not such a terrible idea — California is a good example of ballot initiatives gone wild — but these mf’ers play so dirty and of course I want the Nov issue to pass, so I will be voting No. Has any of this been on anyone’s radar outside of highly politically engaged Ohioans?

I think it’s fine to be opportunistic in situations like this and vote no.

Thomas: What are your thoughts on the Justice Dems laying off half their staff, while the DSA is reportedly seeing membership declines? Has the moment passed for that portion of the left?

There are two relevant concepts here that I think explain it. The first is our old standby thermostatic public opinion — Joe Biden is president so public opinion is shifting rightward, just as it shifted leftward under Donald Trump.

The other is a general statistical phenomenon that people tend to overlook. If something that’s normally distributed undergoes a modest shift in the average, you end up with a huge change in the number of outliers. One context where this frequently arises is climate change. A shift of a few degrees in average temperature leads to a large increase in the number of super-duper hot days, even though super-duper hot days remain relatively rare in the grand scheme of things.

By the same token, even at the peak of backlash against Trump, very few people were hardcore leftists. But a general leftward shift in the distribution of opinion leads to a large proportionate increase in the number of leftists. And a general rightward shift back under Biden leads, mechanically, to a huge decline in the number of leftists.

I think people tend to overthink a lot of political dynamics when they are actually explainable in terms of this outlier effect. A lot of why digital media seems so politically loopy is that even though relatively few digital media professionals are loopy leftists, the distribution of opinion among digital media professionals is to the left of the national average. You’re talking about a group of young college graduates who live in big cities. So loopy leftists are, in fact, dramatically more common in the field of digital media than they are in the country at large, even though the typical digital media person is pretty blah center-left.

Bennie: Does manufacturing have a place in high density urban communities or does it have to stay in the boonies? Even with abundant housing affordable on a factory wage, who is going to say “YIMBY” to a steel mill?

Without manufacturing, is a high degree of urban inequality inevitable, given the “missing middle” of higher paid blue-collar jobs?

This is an important question because it gets at some of the deep history of American land use policy. If you look at the transportation technology of 1923, there are really important land use conflicts between factories and housing. That’s in part because factories really wanted to be located near railroads and ports, which is to say in cities. But it’s also in part because factory workers needed to be able to get to their jobs, which meant either living within walking distance from the factory or else having some kind of transit connection to it.

So there was both incentive to ignore the nuisance aspects of living near a factory and to build housing there for convenience, and also potentially incentive to plop factories down in residential areas. The official, defensible argument for why the world needs city planning and Euclidian zoning with segregated uses is precisely to prevent this. For a lot of people whose first exposure to land use policy is through SimCity or one of its competitors, this seems like a really big issue — without strict zoning, aren’t residential neighborhoods going to be exposed to insane levels of pollution and noise? I do think that’s a legitimate concern, but there are some important considerations that the SimCity view of the world misses:

    Zoning law predates basically all of modern environmental regulation, which now renders most of these concerns obsolete. More broadly, the up-to-date way of thinking about it is that if we are worried about pollution, we should regulate pollution, not the metaphysics of whether or not the activity under consideration is “industrial.”

    Zoning has always embedded terrible class politics. I used to think it was called Euclidean zoning because it involves shapes on a map like Euclid and classical geometry. But it’s actually from the Supreme Court’s original bad zoning decision, Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co., which was about a town banning apartment buildings, not factories. The Court, which at the time was very hostile to economic regulation, held that this is fine because an apartment building is a “mere parasite” in a residential neighborhood. That decision came just five years after the Court ruled in Buchanan v. Warley that cities could not adopt explicit racial zoning rules that say Black people could only live in certain neighborhoods. That’s a nice early civil rights ruling, but it also establishes that from the beginning, zoning was used by cities to exclude people and not factories.

    It’s not 1923, and in the modern world, nobody wants to build a factory in the middle of an existing residential neighborhood. The lot assembly would be extremely annoying, the costs would be high, and the upside would be minimal. What’s more, in practice these kinds of big projects tend to end up with different areas competing against each other to offer tax incentive packages to try to “win” the investment. If you don’t want someone to build a semiconductor plant in your town, just don’t offer them any subsidies. They’ll be happy to take someone else’s money. 

What’s interesting, though, is that while industrial zoning originally came to American cities to prevent factories from being built in residential neighborhoods, it persists at least in part on the theory that cities should preserve industrial jobs and prevent old industrial neighborhoods from being converted to residential uses. I think if you look at the industrial activity that actually happens in these places, it tends to be stuff like auto repair or brewing beer that’s not especially high-value or obviously hazardous to human health. I’ve lived right by auto repair places twice in my life and while it may not be for everyone, in my opinion it’s fine. The upshot of this is I don’t think there’s any particular reason to prevent housing from encroaching on urban industrial activity or any reason to believe industrial activity is likely to encroach on existing residential neighborhoods.

Philip Wallach: It seems like there’s a growing contingent of reformers in the US who are interested in shifting the House of Representatives to some kind of proportional representation system, or at least experimenting multi member districts in which more than one candidate wins. Putting aside the (very great) difficulties of getting these reforms enacted, what are your instincts about how they would affect the dynamics in Congress and in the broader political system?

For starters, I don’t think the political impediments to accomplishing this are all that large, except in the sense that the odds are generically stacked in favor of the status quo. What makes multi-member districts and proportional House voting a relatively achievable reform is that it doesn’t have an obvious partisan skew, it tends to be good for the frontline/marginal members whose views are decisive, and it’s easy to make the case for it to swing voters and disaffected types in the mass public.

In terms of changing political dynamics, I think the biggest impact would be reducing the tendency for partisanship to line up perfectly with geography. Right now, the number of House seats held by urban Republicans fluctuates between zero and one, and if they win one, it’s always a seat based in Staten Island, which has a very peculiar relationship to New York City. Under a proportional system it would still be a small number, but it would be higher than that. So you’d have some Republicans who break with their mostly exurban party on certain topics of particular interest to cities. But you’d also have some Republicans who are articulating distinctly conservative approaches to urban issues.

This would be offset by an increase in the number of rural Democrats. Under PR, Democrats could sometimes win one seat in West Virginia rather than always winning zero. Republicans in Arkansas have a map where Biden got 34% of the vote but Democrats got blown out in all five House seats. Under PR, they’d win one. And perhaps more to the point, they’d have a shot at winning two. So just as Republicans would have an incentive to develop more appeal to city-dwellers, Democrats would have an incentive for some renewed focus on rural areas.

The other dynamic change is that in a multi-member system, no incumbent is truly safe, regardless of the underlying partisan dynamics. If you happen to be the laziest Republican in the Texas delegation (or the laziest Democrat in the Illinois delegation), you could end up getting squeezed out. So everyone needs to be a bit sharper and more on their toes, or potentially just quit and do something else if they’ve lost the fire in the belly for legislating.

Tom: It strikes me that other Anglosphere countries have a number of examples of former journalists and think tank staffers going on to become high-level politicians, from Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Michael Gove in the UK to Chrystia Freeland in Canada. The US doesn't seem to have a similar tradition. Why do you think this is the case?

There are a lot of relevant institutional differences that play a role here. To talk about Freeland a bit, since we were sort of econ blogosphere peers before she was a politician, she was recruited by Justin Trudeau because he wanted her on his economic policy team. Trudeau was very young at the time and was seen as a bit of an inexperienced lightweight. People in that position want to assemble a team that conveys gravitas and knowledge, without losing the appeal of fresh faces and new ideas. Someone like Freeland who was prominent, but not a veteran of Ottawa politics, fit the bill perfectly. And in parliamentary politics, the way you get someone on your team at a senior level is you get them a seat in Parliament.

You could tell a structurally similar story about Austan Goolsbee in the United States.

He was an economics professor and New York Times columnist who got tapped by Barack Obama to be a senior economic policy advisor during his 2008 campaign. Obama was young and potentially too inexperienced, so adding a well-known and media-savvy economist to his team was smart. At the same time, though Goolsbee was prominent, he wasn’t a veteran of D.C. economic policy — he addressed the perceived weakness while still signaling fresh ideas. Obama won, so Goolsbee has since held a series of policy jobs and is now president of the Chicago Federal Reserve. And people follow that kind of trajectory from think tanks or academia into policymaking, often mediated by some time writing op-eds or doing TV hits, all the time. The difference is that in the United States, you don’t need to become a member of Congress to get a top economic policy job.

loubyornotlouby: Are you going to take your victory lap after the recent (and brutal) FTC loss on the Microsoft / Activision acquisition?

The Khan FTC basically made a nonsensical bid to stop Microsoft that essentially boiled down to what you diagnosed as a bad faith “Anti-Bigness is Bad” argument. They insisted Microsoft was going to yank Call of Duty from Sony (which makes no financial sense given Microsoft's distant third place in the gaming market) which was supported by absolutely ZERO evidence in all the Microsoft emails, PLUS Sony's emails about what they thought Microsoft would do DIRECTLY undermined the FTC's case.

It certainly seems like Progressive “Anti-Bigness” ideology in Anti-Trust is flailing at the moment and even supporters had to admit that Khan did an awful job with the case. Do you see any long term concerns with Democrats empowering folks like Khan?

I don’t really want to comment on Khan personally, but I do think this is a good time to reiterate that there are two basically distinct ideas operating in the antitrust zone that I think tend to get run together.

    One idea is that America would benefit from a renewed emphasis on antitrust enforcement — tougher scrutiny of proposed deals, less willingness to settle cases, and more willingness to look at negative consumer impacts beyond price.

    Another is that America would benefit from ditching consumer welfare as an objective of antitrust policy in favor of anti-bigness and defense of small business.

As a policy matter, I think the first idea is correct and the second idea is incorrect.

Politically, I think one popular view on the left is that there’s no real tradeoff here. And it’s certainly true that the Khan FTC has done a lot on normal antitrust topics that involve vigorous enforcement but no real conceptual novelty. What I think you see in the Microsoft/Activision case, though, is that there genuinely are tradeoffs — FTC staffers spent time on that case and the time was basically all wasted. There’s a good argument that if you never lose a case in court you’re not being aggressive enough with your litigation strategy, but there are finite resources available, and expending them on doomed actions isn’t smart and doesn’t make it easier to recruit and retain good people or convince Congress to give you more money.

Isaac: Given your enthusiasm for Secret Congress, what do you think of Brian Kogelmann’s Secret Government proposal (summarized here) to have all congressional votes take place by secret ballot?

I strongly agree with the general thesis that the post-Watergate United States of America has erred far too much on the side of “transparency” as a governing value.

The specific proposal to have Congress do all voting by secret ballot strikes me as in some ways far too extreme and in other ways far too narrow a view of the excess transparency problem. But I think a good, Congress-centric view of the problem is provided by C-SPAN. The idea here originally was that bringing television cameras into the halls of Congress would let citizens see how the sausage is made. But to quote my favorite poet, Wallace Stevens, “things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.” It’s simply false that C-SPAN lets the public see the work of Congress. What C-SPAN has accomplished, instead, is turning Congress into the set for a television show. Members of Congress obviously continue to haggle over bills and debate legislation, but none of that work happens on camera because what happens when the cameras are on is almost by definition posturing rather than legislating. In terms of major bills, that’s actually fine because Congress is perfectly capable of finding other places to work.

But congressional committee hearings have distinct legal powers that can’t be replicated outside the specific venue of the committee, and putting the hearings on television essentially ensures that they won’t have any actual value and the committees can’t do real work. That’s bad. Having Sam Altman and other relevant people deliver testimony, under oath, to members of Congress about AI policy is a good idea. Yet under modern transparency doctrines, it’s essentially impossible for that to happen. Instead, you get an episode of The American Politics Show With Special Guest Star Sam Altman.

Jeff: I wonder what your position is on non-merit college admissions preferences more broadly. Are you opposed or OK with differing thresholds for athletes, legacies, applicants from underrepresented regions, or applicants to departments with fewer majors? The recent supreme court decision left a carve out for race based afirmative action for the service academies. Do you agree with that? I am wondering what an intellectually consistent position would be that non-merit admissions preferences are OK for anything except race, or do you believe that only merit should ever be considered?

Setting the service academies aside for a minute, I think the question of “what are we trying to do here?” in college admissions is significantly under-theorized.

Legally speaking, racial discrimination has a special status in the United States thanks to the Civil Rights Act and to the conventional understanding of what the 14th Amendment is about. Given that reality, “don’t discriminate against Asian applicants” is grounded in the shallow principle “don’t discriminate based on race” rather than in a general theory of merit. By the same token, if a restaurant was charging Asian customers prices that are 5% higher than anyone else, that would be illegal not because it violates a principle of meritocracy (it doesn’t!) but because you’re not supposed to engage in racial discrimination. Even if you said you’re just doing it as a proxy for income or whatever, it still wouldn’t be allowed. You’re just not supposed to racially discriminate.

Now separately, a lot of people seem to have the intuition that college admissions should be a form of pure meritocratic sorting based on test scores or some broader index of academic ability. Maybe it should be, but I’d just want to point out that this would actually be a very different system from the one we have.

There is, currently, a kind of broad understanding that even within the narrow category of “Ivy League,” Harvard/Princeton/Yale are harder to get into than the other five. But it’s absolutely not true that the weakest Princeton student has stronger academic qualifications than the strongest Columbia student. And that’s not just a function of affirmative action or athlete preferences or anything else. Even if you look exclusively at white non-legacy athletes at Princeton and Columbia, it’s not the case that the Princeton students are strictly superior to the Columbia ones. These are private institutions and they are given discretion to “shape” their classes in various ways and for whatever reasons. This ends up getting into some really cringe aspects of American elite insider-dom, but these schools all have slightly different personalities and they are looking for slightly different things in their admits, and the prospective students are also looking for slightly different things from the schools.

That’s a consequence of the United States having a very competitive higher education space. Schools hustle to attract the best applicants and to yield the highest share of their admits. That’s one reason American colleges attract so many international students — they are vigorous competitors, not dreary public services. And the fact that the schools provide a broad high-quality consumption experience is also one reason college has become so costly.

Part of that is, for whatever reason, Harvard wants to have a good football team. And you can’t accomplish that without recruiting some football players. Should that be illegal? I’m skeptical. At the same time, if a billionaire was asking me whether he should write a huge check to Harvard to support undergraduate education, I’d say no that’s insane. But it would be insane no matter how they tweak their admissions policy.

Bernie Gordon: Mark Rutte's stepping down got me thinking about how foreign leaders seem to age better than American presidents (think about Bill Clinton's heart problems or how much Bush & Obama aged). Obviously running a country with the size and power of the US is going to be easier than being PM of the Netherlands, but Biden seems to be having a very effective presidency despite a much lower profile. Do you think there are structural forces pushing towards a more “active” presidency that presidents ought to resist on effectiveness grounds even if they're physically able to be that active?

I think I’m a pretty clear supporter of the Biden administration, but I think his low approval ratings do indicate that there’s a real cost to his minimalist public profile. Just because people got exhausted by Trump’s deranged tweets doesn’t mean there isn’t a lurking desire to see the president “doing stuff” paired with the reality that a responsible president needs to do tons of off-camera, unseen stuff. So at the end of the day, I really do think it is ideal to have a 40-something or 50-something president who’s working punishing hours.

I would say that The Netherlands is not only a lot smaller (17 million people), but their whole institutional setup is different. They have this very fragmented party system and a proportional unicameral parliament. I bet Rutte really burned the midnight oil when putting his various coalition agreements together, but once that work is done it’s done. It would be actually very problematic for the prime minister to be out working the bully pulpit and advocating for stuff that’s outside the bounds of what’s already been agreed to.

Seth Chalmer: You've written about how the problem with bad/salacious/oversimplified journalism comes from the demand side, not the supply side. How does this play out in the world of art and how works of art approach politics? Do you agree that “good politics makes for bad art?” Whether or not the generalization is true, what are the best individual works of art in terms of exploring the real complexities of politics?

I initially thought you were going in a different direction with this question, and I was going to say that one thing I really appreciate about the world of arts criticism is that people feel (or at least have traditionally felt) a right to be at least somewhat snobbish and blame the audience for things. Like, I think we all understand that movie studios are not engaged in an organized conspiracy to keep cranking out sequels; they are cranking out sequels because the risk-adjusted return on investment in sequels is positive. Journalism is not the same as entertainment, but a lot of media criticism goes awry in treating it as more distinct than it really is.

The decision-making about what to air on MSNBC has a lot of structural similarities with the decision-making that led NBC to produce two seasons of “The Office” without Steve Carrell — they’re trying to put on stuff people will watch without spending too much money on it.

Closer to your actual question, I think it’s complicated.

One view is that if you’re trying to do political propaganda, you want really simplistic messages that compromise quality art because great art requires the full nuance and complexity of the human experience. So you might say that “The Wire” got worse over time as David Simon got more interested in strong-arming the plot to fit his political hobbyhorses. But another view is exactly the opposite: that great narratives tend to have a heroes-and-villains quality that’s gripping to the imagination but does a disservice to the nuances of politics. “Star Wars” is a classic in part precisely because of its heavy invocation of blunt archetypes — an evil empire vs. a noble order of knights, a villain in a black mask and a princess in a white robe, etc. — but this is very deliberately not a realistic portrait of the world.

In terms of art that does political work, I think that efforts to do message pieces (like “Don’t Look Down”) generally end up failing both aesthetically and artistically. But that art has a tremendous capacity to engender empathy and broaden perspectives in ways that can do tremendous work. I think the broad increases in gay rights over the course of my lifetime were largely secured by works of fiction that got heterosexual Americans to step outside the bounds of their own perspectives. Telling stories about people can be very politically powerful without a ton of didactic messaging.

Michael Adelman: Per a recent Gallup poll, acceptance of same-sex relationships dropped sharply last year. It appears that the anti-LGBTQ demagoguery from politicians like Ron DeSantis and media figures like Matt Walsh has been pretty effective in creating a flywheel of escalating rhetoric, more discriminatory policies, and reduced public tolerance. This is a sort of evil inverse of the flywheel of the prior ~15 years, and it's not obvious to me that tactical retreats by liberals on edge-case issues are sufficient to head this off. For those of us who care about LGBTQ rights, how do we reverse the flywheel and persuade the public to stay on our side? It seems like we need some popular way to counter the demagoguery but I have no idea what that looks like.

I just want to flag that there’s a lot of room for disagreement about the exact causation here and delve into the public opinion a little bit.

You’re referring to the June 2023 edition of a Gallup polling series where they ask people whether various things are or are not “morally acceptable,” and the results showed a striking seven percentage point decline in the share of the population that believes gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable. But to contextualize a little, even after the drop, the 64% who find this acceptable is bigger than the share of the population who say the same about having an abortion (60%), teenagers having sex with each other (43%), or pornography (39%).

On its face, you might think there would be a big national movement to ban teen sex or porn when that’s clearly not the case. At the same time, back in May they polled about the policy question of marriage equality and found it’s more popular than ever.

To me, legal marriage rights polling ahead of the basic moral acceptability of gay relationships seems a little odd, but I think it reflects the fact that the meaning of the morally acceptable polling is itself odd.

PB: Given how close DeSantis' margin of victory in the 2018 Florida gubernatorial election was, would he have been elected if the Dem nominee was a bit less progressive than Andrew Gillum?

It’s hard to know for sure, but I think it’s possible that the decision of Tom Steyer and George Soros to invest so heavily in Gillum’s primary campaign was a big Sliding Doors moment for American politics. It was, for starters, just very eccentric. As Steyer said in that article, “you can see we don’t often get involved in D-on-D,” and he doesn’t actually provide an explanation of why they made an exception in that case. Gillum was, at the time, third place in the polls, and frontrunner Gwen Graham had the most endorsements from elected officials and was backed by both the police union and the teachers union. Why not just stay out of it?

Gillum only lost by 0.4 percentage points, so I think it’s very plausible that Graham could’ve won and DeSantis would have been seen as just another stinker foisted on the GOP by Trump. The interesting question is: what happens next?

Given Florida’s tourism-oriented economy, I think it’s inevitable that any governor there would have pursued a more Covid-dovish policy than Democrats in New York and California. But Steve Sisolak in Nevada wasn’t able to navigate that imperative successfully and wound up being the only incumbent governor who lost in 2022 — maybe Graham would have ended up the same way. Except I doubt it. Given GOP control of the legislature, I think she would have gotten a big boost from Dobbs, been re-elected, and exist in kind of a Gretchen Whitmer Zone of “wouldn’t it be better if she were VP?” idle speculation.

Mark Robert: Regarding your article this week on high speed rail - how likely is this to ever happen in the Northeast? We have a professed lover of Amtrak in the White House but there’s nothing innovative going on! Yes the Gateway project seems to be making moves which is good! But that’s just basic infrastructure upkeep which should be what we shoot for at a minimum. I’m impressed with Brightline’s activity in Florida. Private industry seems much more able to work on HSR right now.

Brightline is great, but that’s not high-speed rail — they’re functioning at existing northeast corridor speeds or worse.

I think some good things are happening at the Federal Railroad Administration to try to get Amtrak to spend their IIJA money wisely, but the jury is very much still out as to whether that will happen.