Room temperature mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

19 - 25 minutes

Donald Trump getting indicted is obviously the big news this week, but I’m not sure I have much value-add commentary on this. I hope you won’t take my failure to write a column about it as slighting the significance of this event; I just don’t know what to say about it exactly.

In terms of positive vibes, I don’t know that I put enough stock in this LK-99 superconductor buzz for it to qualify as good news, but I do think it’s interesting that this hasn’t been knocked down yet. Other things I’m looking at include Martin O’Malley getting a Biden administration post and learning that the condition of America’s bridges has improved markedly over time. The life expectancy for people with cystic fibrosis has also gotten much better.

M Bartley: How likely do you think a Joe Manchin 3rd party presidential run is? If it were to happen, how big of an impact do you think it would have?

It seems very unlikely to me.

In terms of impact, it’s difficult to say. The conventional wisdom is that Trump has an unshakeable MAGA base and anything that divides the non-MAGA vote is per se good for Trump. There’s something to that, but it also seems a little simplistic to me. It depends on who, specifically, runs and what they say. Like for example, something that would be really bad for Trump would be if Mike Pence ran a third-party bid whose message was “we all know Trump is a crook, a liar, and a maniac, and he is going to lose — vote Pence (and vote GOP down ballot) to send a message that this was a personal loss for Trump and not an ideological victory for progressives.”

Would a lot of people vote for a Pence campaign that ran on that message? Of course not. But if he got 1%, it would be 1% out of Trump’s base. And if Trump tried to moderate on policy, Pence would be out there to make trouble for him.

But a Manchin campaign almost certainly wouldn’t have that quality. Defecting from the Democratic Party to launch a third-party presidential bid would almost certainly be paired with an anti-Biden message that hurts Biden and helps Trump. Which is why I don’t think Manchin will do it. If Manchin wanted to help Trump, he’d have switched parties in 2018.

Now, what I’ve said before is that if Manchin is interested in third-party politics, it would make sense for him and Lisa Murkowski to try to form a new third party in the Senate and then recruit some new members (maybe Susan Collins and Jared Golden) and new candidates. But the “run a presidential campaign or bust” vision of third-party moderate politics doesn’t make sense to me.

Matthew S: Do you have any thoughts on whether children's educational outcomes are more reflective of the quality of the school system versus the SES and educational attainment of the parents? Obviously it's a mixture of both to some degree, but just wondering if you have thoughts on which factor has the stronger effect?

It’s important to be precise about what we’re saying. If you do a statistical decomposition of kids’ educational outcomes, you’ll see that variation in parental socioeconomic status explains much more than variation in the quality of school attended.

A big part of the reason is that high-SES parents are capable of detecting deficits in their kids’ education (they are highly educated) and also capable of filling in the gaps (they have financial resources). So high-SES kids who attend schools that don’t use proper reading instruction methods get reading tutors for their kids who teach them phonics. This greatly reduces measured school effects, not because school doesn’t matter, but because high-income kids receive supplemental schooling over and above their other advantages in life.

Wigan: Do welfare / social safety net / redistribution programs focus too much on “giving men (and women) fish” and not enough on “teaching men (and women) how to fish?” I’m struck by how different certain patterns of behavior are at lower vs higher SES levels and how some of those patterns directly lead to cycles of poverty. Smoking cigarettes is one good example. Another is having children as a single parent or at a younger age.

So in other words I wonder if you think more energy could be directed towards changing behaviors that lead to lower SES levels rather than trying to build more safety net for when people have already landed in poverty.

I think this is a bit of unrealistic blank slate-ism from Jesus Christ.

It’s absolutely true that if you could teach the people in the bottom 20% of the income distribution to have all the mental skills and habits of the people in the top 20%, that would do a lot of good. But… can you do that? I don’t think you can. Some people take this logic too far and assert there’s nothing at all you can accomplish through the education system, which is totally false — schooling and school quality do matter. But to take this a little bit too literally, the correct critique of “give a man a fish” is that along with fish distribution, we have to think about the overall quantity of fish that we have. It’s certainly possible, given the prevailing level of skills, technology, and capital in Jesus’ time, that the best way to increase the amount of fish was to teach more people to fish. But that’s not at all true under modern conditions — we have plenty of fish. So we should try to do what we can to teach people math and reading, to reduce toxic lead poisoning, and to encourage responsible behavior. But we absolutely should just give people more fish (indeed, if low-income kids ate more non-tuna fish, that would be good), and then we should think about what kind of policy changes would generate large increases in economic growth.

Chris Brandow: Kevin Drum seems fairly dismissive of the housing crisis. Given that his analysis is usually quite reliable and you are both oldhead bloggers, have you noticed any of his comments and if so, do you have thoughts about what he is missing? I’ve been reading both of you for nearly 20 years.

Out of deference to Kevin’s level-headedness and penchant for good points, I try really hard to avoid rhetoric about a “housing crisis” or even a “shortage.” I just retreat to the basic point that when you impose a quota on the production of something, you generate a lot of deadweight loss relative to the size of the market for that thing. Since housing is (by far) the largest component of the household budget, the extensive deadweight loss induced by extensive regulatory constraints on housing production is (by far) the largest regulatory drag on the economy. Since housing constraints also uniquely constrain childrearing and agglomeration effects, I think they also impose a large strain on the economy’s capacity for dynamic growth.

My experience is that most people who are smart and not yet YIMBY-pilled — which includes people on the left, on the right, and in the center — are usually letting themselves get distracted by weak man arguments where they focus on the dumbest things annoying people say rather than on the core of the issue.

And it’s absolutely true that lots of things are said on YIMBY or urbanist Twitter that are overheated or insensitive to other perspectives. But it’s also true that deregulating homebuilding — not in the sense of eliminating bona fine safety rules but in paring back arbitrary quantity restrictions — is the biggest thing we could do to speed economic growth. And it also happens to be mostly egalitarian in its distributive impact.

Part of what makes this issue difficult is that people have strong personal/aesthetic preferences about neighborhood types. It’s awfully convenient for someone like me who grew up in Manhattan and lives in Logan Circle to run around saying it would be a boon to the national economy to allow more housebuilding and we should just address people’s traffic worries with congestion pricing. After all, I’m the guy who doesn’t leave his dense urban neighborhood, even when remote work makes the convenient commute less valuable and rising crime makes the neighborhood less pleasant. This is my sincere preference. Lots of people have different preferences, though, and they are naturally going to be suspicious that people like me are just trying to impose our preferences on everyone else. That’s why I try to go out of my way to be critical of efforts to mandate cutesy walkable neighborhoods (“New Urbanism”) and to emphasize the broad benefits of housing abundance. A single giant tower of small one-bedroom apartments housing single 20-somethings who like living close to bars and restaurants can free up many, many detached houses for families rather than roommates.

But at the end of the day, the economic fundamentals are what they are. If we arbitrarily capped the number of pieces of footwear people could buy, that would be a costly undertaking, even though there wouldn’t be a “shoe crisis” in the sense of widespread barefootedness. The market for housing is just a lot more important than the market for shoes.

Paul S: You recently discussed Deadweight loss as specifically zoning and other land use regulations. I'm sympathetic to the idea economically, but as a trained Urban Planner, I can't wrap my head around it in the day-to-day land use process and decision-making of agencies, planners, land use lawyers, etc.

Is there a way to incorporate dead-weight loss thinking micro decision-making? I'd appreciate it as a longer post too!

Two quick points: one is that the upshot of these deadweight loss points is mostly just that we should have less planning, less litigation, and less “micro decision making,” and more “let people do what they want.” That’s something the profession isn’t going to want to hear.

But the other is that the country could badly use more economic modeling of land use rules. There’s currently a push to get states to create comprehensive zoning maps, so people can even see what the land use rules are. The next step is to have state-level CBO equivalents or local university scholars try to model the costs of those rules. Right now we have some very broad national estimates of the aggregate cost of land use regulation, and they add up to trillions of dollars — much larger than the growth impact of any other policy change I’ve heard of. But we need the ability to bring this modeling down to smaller levels and more concrete conversations than “what if there were no rules anywhere?”

David Karger: You write a lot about YIMBYism as an important way to approach our homelessness crisis. But I don't think I've ever seen you discuss the option of just building new cities in convenient places. When we visited Israel in 1990, someone pointed at a big empty region we were passing and said “they decided to put a city here.” It took them 4 years. That city, Modi'in, now houses 100,000 people I think it's considered a rather boring bedroom community, and everyone still wants to live in Tel Aviv, but it seems a pretty big win over homelessness. Could some city in the US just head out 20 or 30 miles in some direction and set up a satellite city? Does this just not make sense in America?

The U.S. has a wholly different history and population geography than Israel, but I think if you look at American metro areas on the scale of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, it’s not uncommon for them to sprout big new subdivisions in the exurbs or “edge cities” like Tyson’s Corner. Another thing that happens pretty frequently in the United States is that a small town vaguely near a larger city ends up getting incorporated into the growing metro area and becoming a little pocket of density inside an expanding wave of sprawl. The example that comes to mind first for me is Leesburg, Virginia, but there are a lot of canonical cases in Greater New York.

This is a totally fine thing, but it’s not a fully adequate substitute for infill for a bunch of reasons.

One is that our biggest cities get so big that it’s logistically impractical to sprawl further. But the other is that as you see in places like Austin that have pretty unconstrained frontiers, there is still unique value to being closer to the center. Sprawl into Virginia has kept the D.C. metro area more affordable than Greater New York or Greater Boston. But it’s still the case that lots of people would like to live specifically in Arlington County or near the Metro stations in Montgomery County or on Capitol Hill or in the rich D.C. neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park or in my neighborhood that’s very close to downtown. It’s great that people can get a house in Upper Marlboro for not as much money, but it’s still very costly to refuse to build in the specific places where there is demand.

Adam: Do you think we should expand ROTC programs? It seems like it would be a positive for more Americans to have both military experience and college degrees. How could we prestige this path?

I’m pro-ROTC, but I’m not sure what the relevant constraint is that would be alleviated by “expanding” them.

But similar to my Police for America idea, I think it would be good for progressive-minded adults to send the message to progressive-minded young people that pursuing careers in the “guns and uniforms” field is a good idea. I’ve been telling college students for the past few years that they should look at the examples of Pete Buttigieg and Ruben Gallego — it’s not a coincidence that the most politically influential guys I went to college with are the ones who served. It’s a credential that will serve you well in anything adjacent to politics and public policy.

Stasi Call Center: The cover of the latest New Yorker got me thinking, will constant climate apocalypticism backfire at some point? I can't imagine there are many New Yorker subscribers still skeptical about climate change so what is the point of putting such a (forgive the pun) overheated image on the cover?

As everyone knows, I find this apocalypticism frustrating. It’s just not what the IPCC reports say. And don’t take my word for it, ask the new head of the IPCC who is explicitly pushing back against apocalypticism.

Not only is it false, but it’s doubly frustrating because:

    Greenhouse gas emissions are genuinely harmful and there are a lot of steps we should be taking to mitigate climate change.

    None of the smart people doing political work in the climate movement seem to believe that overstated apocalypticism is actually helpful. 

But this is the problem. The apocalypticism isn’t coming from the scientific or political leaders of the movement. It’s emerged somewhat endogenously from the muck of media competition. It’s coming from magazine cartoon covers. I saw an offhand reference to looming climate-induced human extinction in a movie review recently. I’ve seen it on TikTok. I wish everyone would stop. But I can’t make them stop if it sells.

KH: In the past you've said you are not optimistic about the future of Chicago. When you see a place like Phoenix have 31 straight days of 110 degree weather, combined with the fact that they are running out of water, does that change your mind? To the extent that places like Phoenix continue to see increased temperatures like we've seen this summer and face issues with their water supply do you think we'll see a reverse migration to Chicago and other places in the midwest with milder climates and ample supply of fresh water?

I do think climate change may put a crimp in the long population boom that Phoenix has been enjoying.

In terms of Chicago, warmer average temperatures should help them a little. But Chicago in January is still going to be unpleasantly cold in a warmer world. And it’s not like Chicago and Phoenix are the only cities in America. There are always going to be cities getting a boost from climate optimum, but I don’t think that’s going to be Chicago.

The water issue is real, but it sort of illustrates what I’m saying about Chicago pessimism. Arizona has a very big public policy problem where the state depends on imported water and is committed to allocating the majority of that water to agricultural uses. It could (and should) force residential and agricultural uses to bid against each other for water, which would lead to a more efficient allocation of the scarce resource and allow for more growth. This is evidently politically challenging since lots of western cities are making the same mistake. But it’s a real mistake that’s glaring and obvious to outsiders, just like D.C. could improve itself a lot by rezoning for more market-rate housing in expensive neighborhoods. Chicago, by contrast, does not have some single Big Obvious Policy Mistake that you could just come in and fix.

Eric Wilhelm: Was Petrarch correct in calling the Early Middle Ages (roughly the 5th through 10th centuries) “the Dark Ages?”

I’m a philosophy major so I don’t know anything about Medieval Europe.

But that itself illustrates the success of Petrarch’s propaganda campaign against Medieval intellectual life. I did take two history of philosophy classes, and the history of philosophy — as taught in many departments — basically skips right from classical philosophy (the class I took was on the early Platonic dialogues) all the way to guys like Hugo Grotius and Descartes in the early 17th century. I don’t think any classes on medieval philosophy were offered. And as I understand it, that’s basically a victory for Petrarch’s view of the world — medieval scholarship was worthless and we need to return to classical learning and have a humanist revival.

Now in terms of the blog post you linked to by the authors of “The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe,” I think that both they and their antagonists (two economists who I like) are being very rude and uninformative in their debates with each other.

The anti-Petrarch point to make is that he really was doing propaganda. Intellectual life in the early Middle Ages wasn’t absent or “dark,” he just didn’t like it and apparently the people who organize the history of philosophy curriculum at Harvard agree with his low estimate of the quality of the work. But people were writing and reading and copying books throughout this period. Intellectual life existed. The fall of Rome and the rise of “Barbarian” kingdoms did not actually extirpate learning and scholarship. And in particular, the overall state of technology kept advancing during this period — the frontiers of human knowledge moved forward.

That said, what the Medievalists are sweeping under the rug in their argument with historians is that as best we can tell, living standards really did regress. Rome created an integrated trading network with roads, security, and no internal barriers to commerce that facilitated specialization, economies of scale, and gains for trade. Post-Roman Europe had more knowledge, but also much more fragmented markets, and people were generally worse off. Retrogression in living standards is noteworthy and bad, even if we shouldn’t fully buy into post-Medieval propaganda about “darkness.”

Mark Peckham: If Governor Andy Bashear is successfully re-elected this year should we be considering him as a high tier potential Presidential nominee in 2028?

Yes.

PW: In NYTimes The Tilt newsletter today, Nate Cohen says “In the half century of modern presidential primaries, no candidate who led his or her nearest rival by at least 20 points at this stage has ever lost a party nomination.” By my math, a half century of modern presidential primaries refers to somewhere between 12 and 24 primaries (counting Democrat and Republican primaries separately and not including other parties). Let's assume 24. In no scientific field would a sample size of 24 be considered sufficient for any substantive analysis. Why do we act like this small sample size is sufficient when discussing election trends? Is the answer simply “We work with what we've got?” If so, is that a good answer? Do most people reading Nate Cohen think, “Well, of course we're a blind man just touching one part of the elephant?”

I agree with the narrow point that the sample size here is small so the weight of the historical evidence is not all that high.

On the other hand, we are here trying to understand the world on the basis of the evidence that exists. I think Cohn is correct to contextualize his poll results with historical information. To see why, just imagine if the precedents were different. Suppose that about a third of the time a candidate with a Trump-scale lead at this point in the calendar ended up losing. You would definitely want a poll write-up to include that information. Not because it would allow you to make a precise point estimate that Trump has a 33% chance of losing but because it would tell us that, all things considered, it’s not unusual to blow a huge primary polling lead.

Given that reality, I think Cohn is obligated to tell us that the opposite is true in this case — a lead this large has never been blown in the past.