Mediterranean mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

Mediterranean mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

July 14

Greetings from the French Riviera, where we’re closing out our summer vacation but still finding time to answer some questions.

Some good news: Turkey has flip-flopped and agreed to Sweden joining NATO. Scientists’ ability to predict volcanic eruptions is improving, permitting reform is back on the congressional menu for later this summer, WMATA ridership is recovering, and a recession is becoming less likely. This is not per se news, but I found it charming to learn that Mark Rutte, who’s been prime minister of the Netherlands for the past 13 years, teaches social studies once a week at a high school in The Hague as a hobby and his plan now that he’s stepping down is to teach more. Relatedly, K-12 school funding in the United States has become more much egalitarian over the past 20 years.

Taylor: Does Eric Adams being a huge dumbass spell trouble for the sensible, moderate wing of the Democratic party?

It’s not ideal. A highly effective, moderate African American mayor of America’s largest city would have been a great thing for the cause of common sense Democrats, and instead we’ve gotten an administration that’s a bit of a shambles. It’s worth recalling that while the NYC mayoral race did feature some big-time progressives, the actual second-place finisher who Adams beat, Kathryn Garcia, was another moderate but with more of a technocratic bent.

I supported her going way back to when she was an obscure longshot, and I think she would have been the better choice.

That said, there are some genuinely good aspects to the Adams administration. He’s bringing garbage bins to the city that never sleeps because there’s trash everywhere. Murders and shootings are in fact down, and the effort to return to more coercive treatments of severe mental health impairments has had some success. He says the right things on housing. The unfortunate aspect of Adams is that judged from a distance, he seems to have the right mix of pro-business and pro-labor credibility to reassemble the urban growth machine and build a robust pro-housing political coalition. But in practice, he has very much not done that and just seems to have limited effectiveness as a politician or an administrator.

Sam: What’s your Grand Unified Theory of January 6? A few weeks back you wrote: “ What happened that day was less a real effort to seize power in a putsch than a bit of kayfabe that got out of hand because the crowd took the shoot too seriously.” What did you mean by this? Was it a sui generis event whose circumstances couldn’t be easily replicated, or are we going to have to worry about violence every time Republicans lose a national election?

It’s maybe easiest to explain this by way of contrast. On vacation, I’ve been reading my friend Matt Quirk’s new book “Inside Threat” which is a thriller about (to avoid spoilers) a plan hatched by political insiders to use violence and subterfuge to seize power in the United States of America and subvert the constitution. The plot involves, as thriller plots tend to, a lot of complexity and moving parts and misdirection. This is going to happen and then that’s going to happen and then this is going to happen, and it’s all been gamed out in advance, except they didn’t count on one thing — our hero, of course.

And what I’m saying is that January 6 was not that. There’s no knife’s edge moment where if things had gone slightly differently, the autogolpe would have succeeded and Trump would have clung to power. And that’s because there was no plan in place that made any sense — starting with the fact that the people who breached the Capitol weren’t armed in the way you’d be if you were seriously trying to pull off targeted assassinations of members of Congress. I think when people start making these points they often end up going down the road of making it out to be a totally innocuous occurrence, and next thing you know you’re Tucker Carlson talking about the grave injustices allegedly being perpetrated against the breachers. That’s not where I’m at by any means. It’s appropriate and necessary to punish this kind of conduct rigorously lest you encourage more of it. But analytically, it’s relevant that there wasn’t some kind of small commando strike force mixed in with the mob, ready to carry out a clear plan. There weren’t field commanders in touch with Trump’s top lieutenants.

I don’t know exactly what Trump was thinking would happen on that day, but my guess is that the mob he summoned successfully breaching the Capitol Police perimeter wasn’t particularly on his radar as something to game out. He just always wants to align himself with the maximally pro-Trump position, which in that case turned out to be people who battered their way past a bunch of cops and into the citadel of constitutional authority.

I would urge people not to be complacent about the possibility of renewed violence, but it is not high on my personal list of fears. In terms of probability times severity, I think the bigger issue by far is the boring non-democratic aspects of the American institutional firmament. There’s a clear risk — one that has not yet materialized thanks to the heroic 2018 electoral performances of Jon Tester and Joe Manchin — of a minority of the electorate seizing quasi-permanent control of the United States Senate and through it the unshakeable domination of the federal judiciary. And we see through things like Leonard Leo’s program to match conservative Supreme Court justices with conservative billionaires who shower them with gifts — gifts that would be terminated if the justices in question ceased to be Federalist Society allies in good standing — that ideological conservatives are developing tools of party discipline to apply to incumbent federal judges. A semi-pluralistic autocracy entrenched through malapportionment and judicial supremacy seems much more plausible to me than a strongman seizing power suddenly with violence.

Mike: Meta says they don't want Threads to be all about politics and news in the way Twitter was. How successful do you think they'll be? That is, is “this site's chock full of politics” a demand-side phenomenon, where users inevitably gravitate to those topics if you don't moderate them out; or a supply-side one, where the purveyor of the platform can market/design it in such a way that it steers toward other focuses?

The smartest thing they’ve done to make this aspiration a reality is launch Threads as a spinoff of Instagram.

At first I didn’t understand this launch strategy, but after a week or so in the trenches, I think it was very clever. As a Threads user, the Instagram connection has no apparent relevance. But the practical impact of it is that anyone who was very popular on Instagram as of July 2023 has a huge first-mover advantage as a Threads user. A lot of these visually focused influencer types are not very good at writing and won’t end up being prominent or influential as Threaders. But even if only 10% of prominent Instagram influencers try Threads and only 10% of them are any good at it, that still means every really big Threads account at launch is run by a successful influencer. That is going to skew the whole ecosystem away from politics. Not necessarily away from news, but toward the kind of news topics — sports news, entertainment news, science news — that influencers with large initial followings are likely to find interesting.

I feel okay about that.

To me, one troubling aspect of 21st-century American life has been the tendency of politics to swallow the idea of news. As best I can recall, back in the 1990s politics was just one aspect of the news. CNN had a show, Inside Politics, that was about politics because CNN’s programming was not about politics. Now of course I write primarily about political topics, but I frankly always enjoy it when it’s possible to do economic or policy coverage with a less political framing. And Meta’s ambition is for Threads to be much larger than Twitter, and the only way to achieve that would be for politics to be a smaller share of the larger pond.

Michael Tolhurst: As a practical matter, and small business person, how does the disruption of the Twitter ecosystem effect your business and planning for the future? For example, you've noted in the past that Twitter has been a good intake funnel for getting new subscribers. What kinds of contingencies and alternatives are you considering based on where the future of Twitter goes? While you don't get paid to Tweet, it seems to have been super useful for getting Slow Boring started!

Twitter has been very good for me professionally, both as an acquisition funnel and also in the sense that I know a lot of important people in media and politics follow me on there, so I do not welcome changes and disruption in that space.

That said, if there is anything I’ve learned in 20+ years of digital journalism, it’s that shit is always changing and you need to adapt. There is now a Slow Boring Facebook page and a Slow Boring Instagram account. I’m posting on Threads. If BlueSky regains momentum, you’ll find me there, too. Maya keeps threatening to make me do some Reels, and I should probably listen to her about that.

Y. Mandelbaum: What's your take on the recent Federal court ruling that the Biden administration can't work with social media companies on issues of misinformation and the like? I think the recent Collins and Stephens post on the NY Times nicely summarizes the two sides but they didn't go beyond opening arguments.

I don’t think “the First Amendment prohibits the government from jawboning media companies about their coverage” works at all as a doctrine, and it honestly makes me depressed to see how many conservatives can’t see past the specific facts at issue here and reach the correct conclusion.

Imagine something boring and old-fashioned, like a local news reporter covering the hunt for a serial rapist in 1993. He gets what he thinks is a scoop about the investigation and calls police headquarters seeking comment or confirmation. The department says “look, if you print this it’s going to blow our best chance at catching the guy, so we would really like you to hold off.” The reporter says the public has a right to know. There is an exchange of implicit threats (you’ll lose all access to the department if you fuck us) and bribes (you’ll get an exclusive interview with the lead detective when the case wraps up), and the journalist agrees to hold the story. That’s not a First Amendment issue and it’s not censorship. Censorship would be if the reporter says “fuck you, I’m doing the story” and the department says “no, fuck you, you’re going to jail.” You can’t do that, this is America.

Relatedly, it’s worth asking what problem we’re worried about on a forward-looking basis.

Do conservatives think that the Biden administration is so cozy with Elon Musk that they’re going to successfully censor conservative ideas? That’s absurd. The legitimate conservative concern was about a specific management approach formerly taken by Twitter that pissed off enough people to generate a massive overhaul of the company. Facebook is bigger and hasn’t had such an overhaul, but Mark Zuckerberg has said publicly that he thinks Meta’s approach to this during Covid was bad and that he doesn’t want to repeat that. Note this is not Zuckerberg speaking after the fall of the Biden Regime, trying to get into the good graces of the new powers that be. With Joe Biden sitting in the White House, social media companies have moved thermostatically against Biden’s position. In the case of Elon, Twitter moved so far in the opposite direction that it may break the network.

But that’s just to say that I think the system basically works, and we don’t need a set of somewhat loopy First Amendment doctrines.

BorgenMorgen: Have you found that visiting Europe ever persuaded you to change an opinion on policy? Past trips or current vacation?

I don’t think travel per se should ever change your mind about anything, but I find all forms of travel — including vacation travel — to be a great source of questions to look into and hypotheses to explore.

But the key thing is you have to actually do the research. I know a lot of Americans who visit Europe, enjoy the superior mass transit and intercity rail service, and then decide that Europe must be funding mass transit and intercity rail construction much more generously than the United States. The actual source of the differences is somewhat complicated and includes path dependence, population density, urban geography, policy responses to the oil crisis of the 1970s, and lots and lots of detailed operational and planning differences that really add up. But money per se is not a major factor.

Another example: I’ve been to France many times before but never in the summer, and I was struck that it seemed like every shop had a sign in the window advertising summer sales. Then I saw articles talking about how the summer sales season was extended to help businesses recover from the rioting that happened just before I arrived. That seemed weird. Things get discounted all the time, of course, and sales can be extended for various reasons. But whoever heard of the government telling stores to extend their sales? Well, it turns out that in France, discounting is illegal outside of specific designated winter and summer sale periods, so the government can extend the discounting period as an emergency measure. That sounds, frankly, like a really stupid idea to me. But it’s so stupid-sounding that I’d never heard of it as a policy option. I should look into it; what’s the case for this? Is there any logic to it at all?

JC: It's concerning to me that the US and all of Europe combined is apparently not able to produce enough artillery ammunition to keep Ukraine adequately supplied for a year. What's the best way to build up our defense industrial base so we have at least a reasonable shot of deterring China?

My best idea is to go back in time to circa-2002 and instead of spending all that money on invading Iraq, make the capital investments necessary to maintain excess ammunition capacity so that we could ramp up in an emergency. But we didn’t do that.

At the moment, this is an issue I’m trying to educate myself about, and I don’t have any incredibly firm conclusions. But I will say that a general feature of government contracting that definitely applies to the industrial space is a tendency to issue overly prescriptive requests that only one or two contractors can then meet for any specific system and that, moreover, only a handful of established players with deep expertise in government contracting can even consider bidding for anything in the defense space. We need to try to move to a world where a larger set of companies are at least in a position to fill defense needs by making more abstract asks with performance-based payment rather than hyper-detailed specifications and cost-plus payments.

Max S: Last Thursday marked 10 years without a fatal commercial plane crash in the U.S. Meanwhile, per the Politico piece linked below, Congress's FAA reauthorization bill is held up due to disagreement over potential changes to pilots' required training time (reduced) and retirement age (raised), which some think would increase the risk of crashes.

This struck me as an interesting (perhaps rare) situation: for one mode of transportation, the policy status quo has contributed to (or at least not prevented) the maximum possible good outcome on what many would consider the most important metric -- preventing plane fatalities. At the same time, I'm sure there's some combination of policy changes -- perhaps including those above -- that would substantially increase the number / accessibility of flights and therefore the number of people who fly rather than drive. And it seems plausible that those changes would be expected to result in, say, at least one fatal plane crash over the next 10 years (against a baseline of zero) but a much larger reduction in car deaths, for a substantial net reduction in transportation deaths.

In general, I think you want the government to use a holistic cost-benefit assessment for this kind of thing.

It’s similar to what I’ve said many times about nuclear power, where the naive critique is that nuclear is unsafe, the smart critique is that nuclear is too expensive, and the truly wise viewpoint is that nuclear is actually too safe. A regulatory standard that makes it cheaper to operate a natural gas plant than a nuclear plant undermines human health by exposing people to excess particulate emissions and the non-trivial risk of gas explosions. The regulatory framework shouldn’t minimize deaths due to nuclear accidents, it should minimize overall deaths by incorporating knowledge of the health benefits of affordable zero-mission electricity. And by the same token, the airline regulatory framework should not only consider the economic cost of averting airline deaths but the safety benefits of encouraging people to fly rather than take long road trips.

Mike H: How do you think the right pandemic approach would have differed for a virus that was significantly more deadly than COVID-19? While it was plenty bad enough, we were fortunate in that many people and children in particular were pretty safe from it even pre-vax.

Imagine Virus X. Virus X kills kids at about the rate that Covid kills elderly people. And Virus X kills elderly people at about 1,000 times the rate that it kills kids.

I think a very strict public health regime would have been warranted, but I also think the endogenous social response would have been very different, so the entire context would have been different. In that world, I think the most pressing public policy question isn’t “how do you discourage people from spreading the virus?” It’s “how do you make sure essential staff keeps showing up for work at the nursing homes?” That’s the big dog that didn’t bark during the SARS-CoV-2 era — we had exhortations to sacrifice personal consumption or leisure activities for the sake of the public good but we didn’t really need to do much exhorting of people to run risks with their personal health for the sake of the public good. In a more severe pandemic, I think the balance of considerations flips and the question of how do we keep the lights on becomes much more dominant.

Evan Bear: What's the best thing you've eaten in France so far.

Honestly this take-out rotisserie chicken place right next to the apartment we rented in Paris was fantastic. I would not schlep out to Ménilmontant specifically for that purpose, but if you happen to be interested in the nearby Edith Piaf Museum, check it out.

But the general deal with France is that the basic quality of the ingredients is very high, labor is expensive, and there are tons of tourists. There is nothing wrong with eating a touristy meal if it suits your needs — we had a delightful picnic of sandwiches we bought from a kiosk right outside the Louvre — but your best deals are all going to be relatively simple fare from random places that serve repeat customers, and if you’re traveling with kids you’re not going to be sampling much fine dining.

Karl Lehman: If the Republican and Democratic parties were dissolved and new parties were able to fill in the void, could a European-style Christian democracy party have success here in the US?

I doubt it, as those parties are all currently ailing in their European homelands.

My view is that broadly, we should probably understand FDR’s political coalition as a kind of U.S. version of Christian democracy, focused on the pro-social reorientation of capitalism but with a continued understanding that businessmen would play the leading role in the economy. One important commonality is a strong preference for somewhat arbitrary curbs on business size that neither free marketers nor real socialists support.

Lance Hunter: Any thoughts on the Roland Gutierrez v Colin Allred democratic senate primary in Texas? Both candidates seem to be focusing their message on being "a real challenger to Ted Cruz" (and thus trying to get that anti-Cruz money from around the country), but everyone I know in the state is extremely pessimistic about either of their chances.

I don’t know that much about those guys.

But look, here’s the situation in Texas: Ted Cruz is very dislikable, and the underlying political trends in the state are favorable to Democrats. But you’re still looking at a place where the median voter backed Trump twice, has been voting R for governor since the mid-1990s, and thinks “put Democrats in charge” means “make Texas more like California” and does not want that. The person who will give Cruz a real run for his money is the person who has the guts to wade into a Democratic Party primary with the message “we’re not going to beat Ted Cruz with a conventional Democrat, you the dem primary voter may not agree with me about Conservative Stance A, B, or C, but the voters we need to beat Cruz do agree with me, so you should pick me.” If someone with that message does win the primary, then he can turn around and face the general electorate and say “hey guys, give me a chance — I get it.”

What should A, B, and C be? I have my thoughts and you can probably guess what those are. But strategic moderation is more effective if it doesn’t look strategic, so it also really depends on who the candidate is and what they think. But it’s got to be something, and something meaningful.

Braden: I'm a young professional considering a move to a bigger U.S. city for the amenities and social/professional opportunities. Chicago had been on my list, but your writing about the city makes me more nervous to build any roots there. Looking at the top ~10-20 cities in the U.S. right now, which places are you the most optimistic about for the future?

Chicago honestly seems like a great place to live if you’re a young professional with family and social connections in the Midwest. I am pessimistic about the long-term trajectory of the city, but it’s a very fun place to be right now with a lot of opportunities.

Hf: If you were alive for all of us history, which parties and presidents would you vote for over time? E.g. when would you switch from republican to Democrat? Which party would you vote for prior to 1860?

I love thinking about this. One question I wonder about is whether the Mugwumps were right to ditch the GOP in 1884 over James Blaine’s alleged corruption.

The historiography I grew up reading wasn’t so invested in Dunning School narratives that it painted Reconstruction as bad, but it was very skeptical of Stalwart Republicans and very sympathetic to Gilded Age civil service reformers. I’m honestly not entirely convinced that this stance was even correct on the merits, much less worth breaking with the party over.

But I think I’m inclined to vote Bryan in 1896 — he was right about the Gold Standard, the McKinley Tariff was bad, and even though Bryan was bad on racial justice, by this point McKinley wasn’t supporting anything good on this either. Bryan’s anti-imperialist stance in 1900 also seems correct to me. But Teddy Roosevelt was good, and I’d have voted for him and for Taft and then Progressive in 1912. Charles Evans Hughes seems clearly superior to Woodrow Wilson in 1916; this was one of the electorate’s real blunders.

Another interesting one is Al Smith in 1928. The anti-Catholic stuff that hurt him so badly only makes me like him better. And the Democrat’s 1928 platform — written before the Depression — complains that “we expend vast sums of money to protect our people against the evils of war, but no governmental program is anticipated to prevent the awful suffering and economic losses of unemployment” and says there should be a countercyclical public employment scheme. They also praised the creation of the Federal Reserve but say it “must be administered for the benefit of farmers, wage earners, merchants, manufacturers and others engaged in constructive business.” This makes me think a Smith administration might have combatted the Great Depression much more effectively than Hoover did. Obviously given the real-world conduct of the Hoover administration, I’m backing FDR in 1932. Might have gone for Eisenhower in 1952 or (especially) 1956, but a solid Dem after that.

David: We sometimes have situations about headlines and the common answer is that reporters don't write the headlines to their pieces? Why is that? Is it good?

If you think about the classical construction of a print newspaper, then the page layout is a little bit like a jigsaw puzzle. Standard text comes in a standard type size, and you just flow the copy into however many columns you need. The articles are also deliberately written in an “inverted pyramid” style so that if you need to lop off the last graf or two or four they are deliberately inessential. But the headline actually varies in size across multiple dimensions, and how much space is available for the headline depends on where exactly in the paper the story appears, and that depends on what other stories are running that day.

So it wouldn’t make sense, as the top editors are rearranging the page and trying to incorporate all the latest news into the report, to track down every journalist who worked on a story and workshop headlines with them. Instead, headline writing was a distinct function performed by a different group of people.

In the modern day, though, I think it serves mostly as a crutch. Someone can write a clickbait headline, and then if people complain the journalist can say “well, I didn’t write that.” Which I don’t think is good. In a well-functioning organization, editors should have a lot of input on headlines, but the author himself should decide what he’s comfortable going with and take responsibility for it.

Mike Wiley: Is there such thing as a Pareto-improving policy the US could enact? If not, what comes closest?

Genuine Pareto-improvement that makes literally everyone better off is a really hard bar to clear, and I don’t think it’s worth spending too much time worrying about it.

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