Dog days of mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

19 - 23 minutes

The sun is going down earlier but it’s still really hot — not my favorite time of year.

Meanwhile, the big good news political story this week is clearly the victory for abortion rights in Ohio. Kari Lake getting ready to run for senate in Arizona is good news for Ruben Gallego, but I’m not sure it’s really good news for the country. GM’s electric cars will be able to provide backup emergency power in a blackout, while small/cheap electric golf carts can meet many transportation needs. Barbie’s crossed the billion-dollar mark. Semaglutide reduces heart attack risk.

A small example of the kind of projects now moving forward in California thanks to SB-35. In general, apartment construction is hitting new records, which is cool.

M Bartley: What’s your theory behind Biden’s low approval ratings? The economy’s good and improving, COVID is over, he’s not out there tweeting nonsense, republican control of the house means he isn’t pushing any divisive partisan legislation, and yet his approval ratings are still mired in the low 40s, just like they have been for the past 2 years. Why?

Let’s start with the economy. Here, I think, the basic story is that we had a pretty long run of falling real wages that really soured people. That turned around just over these past few months, and consumer confidence numbers have started to improve, as you’d hope. But of course consumer confidence going from “very bad” to “kinda bad” doesn’t necessarily make people like Joe Biden.

What he needs is for the improving trend to continue for three, six, nine more months and for the confidence numbers to keep going up with it. That said, people also don’t obtain direct, unmediated information about the state of the national economy. It matters what they read and see on television. The real wage situation turned around starting in May, and then it was really only in late June that the White House launched its “Bidenomics” push. I think doing it earlier would have rubbed people the wrong way, and this was smart. Positive economic data points, meanwhile, have generated some more positive press coverage of the economy. I don’t want to urge complacency about any of this, because it’s going to be an information warfare dogfight where Fox News will not only invest in forecasting economic doom, but a lot of wealthy business owner types will want to spread negative messaging in hopes of Trump cutting their taxes. But so far, I do think the administration sees the challenge and is taking appropriate action. You, too, can take appropriate action by clicking on and sharing accurate, positive stories about economic trends.

But this gets us to the other challenge for Biden’s approval: Voters keep saying that one of their problems with Biden is that he’s old, and I think we should take them at their word because he is, in fact, old. And not only is he old, he comes across as old — he’s got an old man squint in his indoor appearances (outside in aviators looks way better) and he clearly struggles more to master his stutter than he did 15 or 20 years ago.

But the broader issue here is that while Biden has a lot of strengths as a politician, he’s actually never been a first-rate public communicator. When he was in the prime of life he was known for making gaffes. He had a presidential campaign derailed by a plagiarism scandal. Now, lots of successful politicians aren’t great public communicators. Nancy Pelosi is a genius legislative tactician but she’s not someone you put up in front of the microphone to give a rousing speech. Mitch McConnell is the same way. Biden has been remarkably successful as a legislative leader and policymaker given his thin congressional margin and I think that’s because — not despite — his limits as a public communicator. The public has high expectations of presidential speech-making as a mode of governance but it doesn’t actually work. Biden, wisely, avoids it and gets things done. Making slick television appearances isn’t actually part of the president’s job, and rational people should not see the fact that Biden isn’t very good at it as a big problem.

But making slick television appearances is a huge part of a presidential candidate’s job.

That’s why you basically see two kinds of people winning major party presidential nominations. Either you get someone who is a more charismatic television performer than the average politician (Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Trump) or you get someone who used to be vice president (Lyndon Johnson, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore). A lot of the people on the Veep-to-POTUS pipeline have been good, effective presidents. But the best-loved presidents are the skilled television performers. Trump does not actually have a large age advantage vis-à-vis Biden. But in terms of “who could plausibly host a reality television show?” he’s clearly the guy. That was true in 2005 and it’s true in 2023, and it’s objectively a problem for Biden’s re-election bid even though I don’t think it’s remotely close to being a good reason to vote for Trump.

I also think it’s important for Democrats to come to terms with the fact that nobody else will be walking onto the stage as a nominee in 2024.

I wish that Julián Castro or Cory Booker had the wisdom and foresight to run in 2020 on a Biden-esque message and try to present themselves as the true heir to the Obama legacy. But they didn’t. So we got the nominee who had the best message and the best judgment, even if he’s not as good at playing a politician on television as those guys. I sometimes try to talk myself into the idea that it would have been better if we let the operatives in smoke-filled rooms pick a nominee and they’d picked Steve Bullock. But the fact is if party elites had that power, they would have picked Elizabeth Warren and lost. Biden and his team showed better judgment than the donors, better judgment than the bulk of the top-flight staff, better judgment than the younger politicians, and better judgment than most of the commentators in the press. That’s how he won, and all things considered, “making good decisions” is a pretty important part of the job.

Zachary Smith: Do you think that decline in church attendance can be primarily explained by your thesis that staying home is more appealing than it used to be?

“Primarily” is a strong claim, but I do think people underrate generic time-crowding as an explanation for all kinds of specific phenomena. These days you can watch Bundesliga soccer matches or argue with people on Twitter or fire up obscure art films on the Criterion Channel or scroll through endless viral TikToks, so it follows that people have to spend less time seeking out things to do outside of their homes than they did previously. The opportunity cost of going to church is way up, and that’s surely a factor in fewer people going.

City of Trees: What's your general take on the death penalty? I'm curious after you said that it “seems good” that the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter got the death penalty, and also after you said “true” to a periodic reminder that Jefferson Davis should have been hanged.

I didn’t really think of the Jeff Davis tweet in a capital punishment context so much as expressing a view about Reconstruction.

But as for the Pittsburgh shooter, the headlines reminded me of one of these things that nags on my brain. If you look at polling, a large minority of Democrats (46% in this Pew poll) favor the death penalty and most Democratic Party elected officials aren’t abolishing the death penalty. But I rarely if ever see a left-of-center pundit or public figure say they favor the death penalty. That can’t be because 100% of left-of-center media personalities are against the death penalty. They just must, like me, not have particularly strong feelings about this and don’t want to make trouble. So I saw the death sentence come down for a right-wing terrorist and thought, I feel okay about this and I should say so, because I bet most people feel good with that outcome and it will be reassuring and sanity-building for people to hear that.

In terms of the larger issue, I think anyone who looks at it has to be haunted by the reality that innocent people have been exonerated off death row and that, as applied by the handful of states that genuinely execute meaningful numbers of people, there are surely more innocents in line for death. That’s very bad. At the same time, I do not worry that this Pittsburgh guy (or Jefferson Davis for that matter) has been wrongly accused, so in terms of the news story at hand, I have no mixed feelings.

As a policy question, one interesting issue is whether the death penalty serves as an effective deterrent. Unfortunately, the literature does not give a super clear answer to this question. There are a bunch of studies finding deterrence, but then there are a bunch of newer studies like Donohue and Wolfers (2005) and Heflin (2023) that use synthetic control methods and do not. One particularly grim finding from Katz, Levitt, and Shustorovich is that capital punishment has no measurable deterrent effect, but the in-prison death rate does have a strong deterrent effect. In other words, prison is obtaining some of its deterrent power through the mechanism that incarceration could be a death sentence. That seems strictly worse than trying to deter people through the deliberate application of the death penalty to those who deserve it.

One struggle that I have as a research consumer with these kinds of academic debates is that math and statistical issues are hard. But another issue is that because we are dealing with complicated statistical analysis, the answer you get is sensitive to the exact question that you ask. The Heflin paper, for example, does a synthetic control analysis of death penalty moratoria in Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. These are states that were not doing a lot of executions pre-moratorium. For the sake of social science it would be more informative for Texas, which is actually using capital punishment relatively heavily, to do a moratorium. Even better, they could randomly assign half their counties to become non-death counties and we could see if there are differential crime trends. But researchers need to go to war with the data they have, which tends not to be ideal because it’s precisely the states that are least enthusiastic about executing people that stop doing it.

The other issue I worry about is publication bias and ideology. I strongly suspect that the bar is going to be higher for a paper with a right-wing finding to get into print than for one that finds no deterrent. This is not the fault of any individual scholar, but it’s a collective issue for people doing policy-relevant social science that I wish more professors were more thoughtful about.

In summary, I do not have a clear or comprehensive policy view about the death penalty, but when it comes to someone who is clearly guilty of a grave crime I feel fine about it.

Steve Botsford: What 5 economic policy proposals would you have historical US Presidents implement during their administrations to create the best possible present day economy? Assume that they’re able to pass whatever proposals you offer through Congress. For example I would think implementing a consumption tax instead of an income tax in 1913 or stopping employer provided healthcare packages in lieu of wage increases during WW2.

This is a fun one!

And I agree with you that the World War II health insurance bit is a great choice. For those who don’t know, back during the war we had very extensive economic regulations of all kinds, including pretty far-reaching wage controls. That created a situation where employers were looking for ways to offer valuable non-wage benefits to workers, which generated a huge explosion in employer-provided health insurance. That became sufficiently widespread that it created a path dependence that’s dogged the country for decades. I’m sure the Roosevelt administration had a lot of other stuff on their mind in the middle of the war than the long-term trajectory of American health care financing, but if you could go back in time and get them to deal with this differently, we might be in a much better place.

Another subtle but important one is that as long as Bill Clinton was passing an unpopular gasoline tax increase, he should have indexed it to inflation.

This is maybe not something that any specific president could have done, but I wish that at some point earlier in American history we had normalized land value taxes rather than property taxes as the workhorse of local government revenue.

I wish the Obama administration had gotten the Federal Reserve to adopt a nominal income level targeting framework for monetary policy.

Last but by no means least, aligning with my remarks above about Jefferson Davis, I wish we’d made a real effort at Reconstruction as a political economy project. That would mean, I think, seizing the estates of people who served as commissioned officers or elected officials in the rebellion and then breaking them up, homestead-style. That should have meant the proverbial “40 acres and a mule” for freedmen, but also an opportunity for landless white southerners to acquire small parcels. Comprehensive land reform would have set the southern economy on a sounder footing and created a postwar settlement that had more stability both in terms of property rights for African American Southerners and also by creating a class of new white landowners who’d be literally invested in the success of the postwar arrangements.

Wigan: Is there a smart policy to nudge people to live more often with roommates? I'm all for people doing what they want to do, but as far as housing affordability goes I wonder if there's some low-hanging fruit in terms of people (particularly long-time homeowners) living in dwellings that are bigger than they now need and lonelier than they now realize.

This got me curious — what’s up with roommates? Maya and I looked at the living situations of people aged 25–34 (trying to avoid college students) and found that living with non-relatives has become somewhat more common over time. But whether you look at women or men, this is swamped by the decline in the share of people who are living with a spouse.

The rise in non-marital romantic cohabitation here is also very noteworthy.

I don’t know exactly what kind of roommate policy we should implement. But I do think we should try to nudge adults in committed romantic relationships to get married. An eccentric view of mine is that we should pair a progressive excise tax on lavish weddings with an investment in upgrading the quality of the “public option” for marriage. It’s obviously great for people to have fun weddings. But I think promoting the view that getting married is something people should do if and only if they can afford to throw a very expensive party is bad for society, and objectively, the amount of fun that guests have at a wedding is not really proportional to the expenditures.

Just Some Guy: Do you like beer? If so, what's your favorite?

I definitely drink beer, but do I like it? When I was young and out at bars drinking frequently, my go-to was just Miller Lite, which tastes great and is less filling, and generally speaking I like cheap mass-market American beers just fine.

The first “good” beer I ever had was Pilsner Urquell on a trip to Czechia in 1997. To the best of my limited understanding of the beer world, cheap American beers are a version of that style of light lager beer that’s popular in central Europe and Germany. Perhaps in order to maximize differentiation from mass-market beers, American microbreweries seem to focus on IPAs and other offerings from the “ale” side of the beer family tree. I will absolutely drink that stuff given the appropriate circumstances, but I don’t like it enough to seek it out or pay a premium for it. These days, though, I mostly just don’t drink very much.

Jack W: David French seems crazy to me (I am gay, but I think you would call me “one of the good ones”), but you've defended him numerous times despite him representing a religion you've referred to as “misinformation.” In fact, you've defended him more frequently than a former trans coworker of yours. So, why do you like David French so much?

This seems like a good opportunity to talk about a general issue.

Every single conservative writer, conservative policy analyst, and conservative politician is someone who I — by definition — think is mostly wrong about important issues. If I thought conservatives weren’t mostly wrong, I would be a conservative. If I thought that policy issues weren’t important, I wouldn’t be in this line of work. So if you’re talking about David French or Ross Douthat or anyone else, I mostly disagree with these guys. In some sense, they are all bad.

But I think it is fantastical to believe that the way political change is going to happen in America is that one day the forces of conservatism will be dealt a knockout blow in which everyone decides it’s game over, and all policymaking is now an intra-progressive coalition bargain.

That’s not how life works. And I know that one specific thing French and I agree on, because we talked about it together on a panel once, is that this kind of knockout blow mindset isn’t just analytically mistaken but actively destructive to civic life and American public policy. You need to accept, in a deep way, that both camps are going to continue to exist, that they will continue to alternate in power, and that they will be sharing power in various states at various times. In a world like that, it matters a lot for policy outcomes what conservatives think. It means that the relative weight of different figures, all of whom are in some sense “bad,” is a big deal for the world. And it also means that the outcomes of specific arguments internal to the right are important.

America would be a better place if Republicans thought Operation Warp Speed was a big Trump administration triumph and a model for future success rather than deciding that OWS was a rare Trump failure and the vaccines are bad. America benefits when Republicans think of YIMBYism as good deregulation rather than as bad wokeness. And America benefits when Republicans listen to people like David French who believe in pluralism and the development of neutral legal principles rather than to MAGA types who believe in trying to seize control of the state to deliver a knockout blow to the left. So that’s why I like David French (even while agreeing that he is mostly wrong about things), and that’s why you will sometimes find me promoting various specific arguments offered by various specific right-wing figures. I think the outcomes of these intra-coalitional debates are very important because politics isn’t going to just end one day with all the “bad guys” surrendering.

Alex: In most ways high interest rates only heighten the need to pro-housing policies, but do you worry that it might take the wind out of the sails of the yimby movement? I've heard friends who are looking to buy complain that yimbys aren't looking at the real source of high house prices. They're not right (house prices were rising when interest rates were low) but it does seem like another new reason not to address the housing shortage.

I absolutely do worry about this, but to some extent, there’s nothing you can do about it.

A persistent fact about housing politics is that people keep coming up with different excuses to not reform zoning, and what you need to do in response is keep trying to convince them that you ought to reform zoning. As you say, the reality is that in an environment of rising interest rates, you need to worry about a collapse in the investment side of the economy. Changing land use rules to ensure that even in the face of high rates it still makes sense to invest in housing production is a good idea.