Annual booster mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

24 - 30 minutes

Personally, I love getting shots so I’m excited about the new Covid boosters — just wish I was old enough for the Covid/flu/RSV triple shot.

There’s been a huge victory over lead-laced tumeric in Bangladesh. Peak fossil fuel demand is now forecast to arrive before 2030. Cool new electric cars coming soon. New trailer for The Killer looks so cool (the old John Woo movie of the same name is also cool). I’ve believed forever that investing in target-date retirement funds is the right strategy for most people, but their growing popularity turns out to have macroeconomic stabilizing effects, too. Modern heat pumps work really well!

Now for this week’s questions.

Shreeharsh Kelkar: Matt, what do you think of Patrick Brown's Free Press piece and his conversation with Rob Meyer? In a way, I was delighted by this conversation because it's so rare to see this kind of frank talk but it's also clear that they are talking past each other. Meyer is more interested in whether there was anything there that could be labeled wrongdoing whereas Brown is more interested in what I can only call "the culture" or vibes or what have you. But it also fits into your theories about activist chum and the way in which scientists see themselves as allied with activists of a certain sort (which is I think what Brown is complaining about). Anyway, curious what you think.

At the risk of falling into a black hole of self-referentiality, I thought Brown’s article and its viral spread in conservative media was itself sort of an illustration of the phenomenon that Brown is talking about.

In other words, there’s a community of people that is really strongly convinced that left-wing bias in academia is a huge problem. If you come to editors in that community with a pitch that purports to demonstrate the problem of left-wing bias in academia, they are likely to welcome it. And one reason they are likely to welcome your pitch is that once it gets published, it is likely to gain lots of kudos and traction in other media. The upshot of all of that, as I think emerged in the interview with Meyer, is that Brown’s piece probably received less scrutiny than it should have in terms of whether it really has the goods.

By the same token, I do personally agree with Brown’s larger point. I think it is probably much easier to get an article published in a scientific journal if it is seen as supporting rather than undermining the progressive consensus on climate policy. In certain circles, anything with the thesis “climate change is really bad!” is like pushing on an open door. But the reason for that is the larger point that climate change is bad is true. By the same token, in certain circles anything with the thesis “academia has left-wing bias!” is like pushing on an open door. And the reason for that is the larger point that academia has left-wing bias is true. So on and on we go.

Mike: You've written that we should have more public goods, and that shared ownership can be highly efficient. You then specifically called for public information and research. Every community is different, but I wonder if there are also any new local services you'd specifically like to see? Should libraries loan out toys to kids? Power tools to adults? Should cities run public laundromats? Gyms? Bring back pay phones? Are there not nearly enough public toilets or water fountains? More benches to sit down? Public wifi? Something else entirely?

Well, let me be clear — I think I’ve been trying to say two different things about this.

One is that a lot of people confuse public services and public goods. A public good is something that’s non-rivalrous and non-excludable, like fundamental scientific research. A particular bugaboo of mine is public statistical information. It’s a great service to the world that the U.S. government publishes regularly updated estimates of things like average hourly wages and the number of egg-laying chickens. That kind of work creates public goods. And I wish the government would do more of it. I wish we had timely information about homicides, for example. I wish that we weren’t learning about poverty in 2022 in September of 2023.

A separate question relates to the kind of public services that are often provided by state or local governments.

D.C. has a nice set of outdoor pools in the summer and some year-round indoor pools as well. Those are not true “public goods” because a pool is both rivalrous and excludable. But it’s nice for a city to have a good complement of public services that includes not only core public services like policing but also “nice to haves” like playgrounds and libraries and swimming pools. These are things that in economic terms are technically called “club goods” — the proposal is essentially to turn a town or city into a “club” and have shared assets rather than leaving everything up to the private sector and excluding the poor.

I think the big issue here isn’t so much that it’s hard to come up with plausible candidates for more public services of this sort as that it’s hard to get anything at all built in the United States, especially by the public sector. So I think on a meta-level, an abundance agenda for public construction is what’s needed more than anything specific.

But given that background, I do think it’s a good idea for civic leaders to try to think about ways to provide more public services that don’t require new construction projects.

Monkey staring at a monolith: Why aren't free textbooks a thing?

It's bizarre to me that K-12 school districts and college students pay large sums of money for textbooks on a regular basis. Especially for topics at the high-school level that change very little over time, it seems that it should be easy to write a textbook for Spanish or Algebra or whatever and just make the PDF freely available for school districts to print out and bind or upload to e-readers or however they want to distribute to students. Why are we relying on traditional publishers for this? Regulatory capture?

This is a good example of something close to pure public goods. It would be great to see governments partner with nonprofits and universities to create un-copyrighted e-textbooks that were free for everyone to use. Collaborating on a project like that would also be a pretty easy way for big tech companies to get some good publicity around an investment in distribution that would be very cheap on their side.

Paul S: What are two strongly-held beliefs that you aren’t able to reconcile?

If you’re not reconciling your beliefs, you’re not trying hard enough!

David Muccigrosso: Here’s a gut check for you, Matt: Is Secret Congress really just “Joe Biden”? Do you really think it will continue to function this well after Biden’s out of the picture?

I think that Biden, as a veteran senator, understands the relevant dynamics better than some of his predecessors, but the reason he understands these dynamics is that they’ve been present all along. The whole point of this is recognizing that Congress works better when you don’t make it about the president. One of the signature Secret Congress actions of recent times was the energy bill that passed during the Trump/Biden lame duck — Biden had literally nothing to do with it! But a lesser politician might have tried to get involved and wrecked it.

J.J. Ramsey: What would be your response to the kind of anti-free speech sentiment here?

This cartoon is offering a version of Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance, but as is often the case with totally abstract arguments about free speech, I think it’s a little unclear what the actual argument is about.

Like what is happening in the first panel? Are we arguing about hate speech rules on an internet message board? On a large-scale social media platform? Are we arguing about the government throwing the guy in prison? About who should have a New York Times column? I think these are all different situations. De minimus free speech is that the government shouldn’t throw people in prison for saying things, which is exactly what is violated in Panel 4. One could imagine this dialogue:

    Guy 1: It should be illegal to say racial slurs, hate speech is bad.

    Guy 2: No, free speech is important.

    Guy 1: But if the bigots who say racial slurs take power, they will govern as authoritarians who trample free speech — we need to stop them. 

But then imagine Guy 3 overhears this conversation and says to Guy 2, “look, Guy 1 over there just explicitly told you that if he gets power, he is going to rescind the First Amendment and criminalize hate speech — we need to rescind the First Amendment to stop these woke totalitarians from seizing power!” But then Guy 1 says that this proves Guy 3 is a totalitarian and we need to throw him in jail. And that, to me, is the utility of a broad social consensus around a de minimus social truce in which nobody is sent to prison. I think it’s harmful for people to put out in the world the idea that we should break that truce because it encourages an escalating cycle of truce-breaking.

Most arguments about free speech, though, are about something wider or broader than that. Or they’re not really about speech at all.

The upshot of the endless campus speech wars, at the end of the day, is that many people think it would be better if universities were friendlier to conservative people and conservative ideas. That sometimes means they want freer speech (no hecklers’ veto of conservative speakers), but it often means they arguably want less free speech (fewer people calling conservatives racist) and sometimes clearly means they want less free speech (no women’s studies professors saying stuff they think is wrong). I think those debates can play out more constructively if everyone on all sides agrees that they aren’t going to imprison anybody and that what we’re actually talking about is the management of publicly funded or publicly subsidized institutions.

Stephen: I’m a college senior interested in pursuing a career in politics or adjacent to politics — perhaps through government or a think tank or journalism. I’m contemplating pursuing graduate school — perhaps a PhD or law school — but worry that it will end up being a waste if I pursue a journalistic career. That being said, it does seem like some form of graduate training has become tablestakes for intellectually intensive jobs including journalism. People like you and Ross Douthat seem to be exceptions. Did you ever consider pursuing graduate school, and do you have any thoughts on graduate school for somebody in my position?

I don’t like to give people life advice without being able to pepper them with lots of additional questions.

But I do think in general that it is a bad idea to go to law school unless you sincerely want to be a practicing attorney. It’s very true that there are lots of people with law degrees who are not practicing law and that the degree has some outside utility, but sort of ambling half-backward into law school is something I’ve seen a lot of people do only to turn out to be either unhappy lawyers or debt-burdened non-lawyers.

For what it’s worth, I do not think it is true that graduate training is table stakes for journalism — it is true that going to Northwestern or Columbia for journalism school may help you get an entry-level job, but lots of people get entry-level jobs without doing that, and I don’t think those programs provide much value beyond help getting that entry-level job.

Without knowing more details about your situation, my generic advice would be that if you’re interested in politics and policy and you’re graduating college amidst a strong labor market, you should try to go get a job in D.C. or a major state capital and just try working. You may find yourself on a path where getting an additional degree seems helpful or where you want to go back to school for a reboot/reset. But you also may not. I know plenty of people who did the mid-career grad school thing and found it helpful to getting ahead, but I also know plenty of people who thought they were going to need to do that but who wound up not needing to.

Sean: After Trump and Biden leave the political stage, how long will it take the Democratic Party civil war over Medicare for All to break out?

I mean, there are basically two possibilities here:

    Biden is re-elected, and there is a 2028 fight between Kamala Harris and a leftist insurgent.

    Biden loses, and there is a wide-open 2028 field. 

I’ve been thinking about Josh Barro’s case for dumping Harris from the ticket, and I do think scenario (1) is something that should give establishment Democrats more pause.

One of the problems Hillary Clinton faced in 2016 is that “hey, let’s be practical” is a much more compelling message when you’re trying to beat a hated incumbent president than when you’re trying to hold on to the White House for a third term. The basic truth she faced is that even if she’d won, there would have been virtually no progressive legislation passed in 2017–2018 and then Democrats would’ve gotten crushed in the midterms. Now, that is also what would have happened if Bernie Sanders had won, but your privilege as a leftist outsider is you can pretend that’s not true while Clinton is stuck with the bummer message “no, we can’t.”

Imagine that same structural matchup except the bummer candidate is Harris and the fun candidate is AOC. Isn’t AOC going to win that race? Is that the outcome you want?

Scottie J: Do you have advice on how I can treat politics less like a team sport? I’m a normie center-left Dem but I would consider myself VERY partisan. You and Barro are both clearly Dems but seem to have this uncanny ability to criticize the Dems and resist tribalism. How can I start to reframe my perspective to be more like that? I usually agree with like 90% of your takes but I will admit the partisan Dem in me initially says “so basically everything is always the Dems’ fault!?!”

I think the key in some ways is to treat politics more like a team sport.

I was mad when the Wizards gave Bradley Beal that absurd contract extension, not because I didn’t like Beal — Wizards fans felt very warmly about Beal at that point — but because as a fan of the team, it was frustrating to see such a short-sighted and sentimental management decision that was obviously going to hamper our prospects for the longer term. If you want your team to win, you want to be clear-sighted.

The other place where I wish people thought more like sports fans is that contemporary politics is too inflected by a spirit of eliminationism. Tons of bad thinking is underwritten by the idea that you’re going to win a knockout blow someday that eliminates all need for compromise and pragmatism, so short-term decisions should be driven by a desire to maximize the odds of the knockout. If you watch a sports rivalry like the Lakers vs. the Celtics, the fans are incredibly passionate and they really want to win. But there’s no supposition that you are going to cause the Lakers to cease to exist or even that such an outcome would be desirable. The point of the rivalry is to keep playing the games — the continued existence of the opposition is a premise of everything you do.

By the same token, it’s just normal in politics that someone is going to try to stitch together a coalition of anti-redistributive economic interests along with sociocultural majoritarian prejudices and someone else is going to stitch together the opposite coalition. Both sides need to try hard to win, to put forward appealing politicians, to manage short-term situations in a way that generates rising incomes, and to try to navigate cultural tensions in a workable way. But there’s not going to be a world where the political rotation ceases and one side just runs the table. The sooner everyone owns up to that, the better we can make decisions.

Jason S: Why is it that I rarely hear about deadweight loss with respect to planning restrictions even though it seems like a really important aspect of the YIMBY case? This is literally only place where I have heard about it. Is one reason because it’s difficult to quantify?

I think there is a strong anti-jargon bias in a lot of quarters, and while I share that sentiment, in this case I do think deadweight loss is such an important idea that it’s worth trying to bring it into the mainstream.

But it’s challenging journalistically. When Milan pitched me the idea of a deadweight loss explainer, I told him I thought it was a good idea. But I told him that part of the way the Slow Boring business model works is that we can drop an article that doesn’t get any traffic just because it makes a point the boss thinks is important. And now that it’s written, it exists as a resource we can refer back to. And I can develop the specific argument about housing and deadweight loss in subsequent columns, and ideally have a loyal audience that is patient and comes along the ride with us. All of which is to say, once again, thank you to everyone who subscribes, and if you feel like paying it forward with a gift subscription, I think that’s valuable not just to the person who reads it but to the entire epistemic community. I hope over time that more people will learn about these ideas and they will spread in the world.

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The other question in my mind is why economists who do teach deadweight loss to undergraduates don’t pick housing supply restrictions as an illustrative example. Just to cite some famous internet economists, here’s Paul Krugman talking about deadweight loss and tariffs and a chart from a video Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok made about deadweight loss and price controls.

These are all good, important points.

And I think there is just a deep tradition of economists thinking of “free trade is good” and “price controls are usually counterproductive” as the classic things that differentiate an undergrad who understands basic economics from one who does not. If you look at the present-day United States, though, the economic distortion from land use regulations is much larger than the distortions generated by all tariffs and price controls combined. If you take that Cowen/Tabarrok chart and ask “what happens if you limit the quantity of gasoline?” you’ll clearly get “higher prices and massive deadweight loss” as the answer. But even though the analytic point isn’t controversial (I know Cowen and Tabarrok agree with me!), it’s not the way the lesson is normally taught.

Aaron: The list of the largest cities in the US in 2020 looked pretty different from the list in 1920. The growth of the West and South is a big factor. Any predictions for what the 2120 list will look like? For specific cities or broader trends?

I think we can predict that demand is going to boom in northerly cities with strong natural amenities — places like Boise, Missoula, and Portland, ME that benefit from remote work and climate change.

But whether those cities will boom quantitatively in terms of the number of people who live there largely comes down to land use politics. The rise of the Sunbelt in the United States is sort of a story about cars, air conditioning, and technology. But it’s also a story about the relevant political leaders in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix wanting to become big metro areas with pro sports teams and giant airport hubs. Do people in Boise want that? I sincerely don’t know.

TheElasticStranger: Actors as a whole are predominantly left-of-center, so in that context do you find it strange that there are a decent number of successful conservative show-biz types turned politicians? (Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Fred Thompson, Sonny Bono, Donald Trump). Is this just a fluke or is there something asymmetric about celebrity political candidates that works better on the Right?

A big part of the issue is that the celebrities tend to live in New York and California, where it’s not like Democrats are hard-up for candidates.

But I do also think that because an actor or a musician having broadly liberal views is a very dog-bites-man story, liberals aren’t that excited about it. I remember the 2020 Republican convention having all these D-list celebrities like the guy from Charles in Charge as speaker and thinking it was kind of sad and pathetic. But that’s the best they could do. And Republicans seemed into it!

Dean Siren: I feel like Americans would be better off by relearning how to agree to disagree and that a big opportunity to practice that is leaving abortion laws to the states. Can both parties agree to do that? If so, are any federal laws or interstate compacts needed to make that work or is the presence of Dobbs enough?

I wish we could have more of a “live and let live” approach to certain things — the fighting over which books are in which libraries or exactly how history is taught in different schools strikes me as good examples of topics on which I certainly have opinions but there also isn’t really a single objective answer. It would be healthier if it were somehow impossible to read an article about school curriculum content in a state that you don’t live in.

But I’m not sure that abortion is a great candidate for this treatment.

One reason, as I keep trying to bring up is that you have conservative judges trying to rule that the FDA needs to yank mifepristone’s availability. I don’t think the Supreme Court will go along with that idea, but they might. And people will reasonably want to know if Trump plans to continue appointing judges who agree with that ruling or if he does not. More to the point, they’ll want to know if he wants to appoint an FDA Director who thinks mifepristone should be legal. Right now, no Republicans on the campaign trail are talking about this topic (because they’re not getting asked about it), but you can’t say that the availability of medication abortion should be “left up to the states” because drug approval is a federal competency.

By the same token, two things happening right now are that House Republicans are refusing to re-authorize PEPFAR because they want the Biden Administration to add more abortion-related restrictions on who can get funded and Tommy Tuberville is blocking the Senate confirmation of military officers because he doesn’t want the military pay for service members’ travel to states where abortion is legal. I think most Americans don’t have especially strong feelings about either of those topics, but obviously anti-abortion activists do.

And that’s because “I think abortion should be illegal” is not a personal aesthetic preference, it’s an ethical and ontological conviction about the moral status of a fetus that has far-reaching implications. The New York Times reported on September 7 that the number of abortions actually rose this year despite state-level abortion bans. That’s because other states relaxed their rules, because the Biden Administration has allowed a telemedicine option for medication abortions, and lots of women seem to have traveled across state lines to get abortions. This is to say that to the extent your policy goal is to prevent abortions, Dobbs and the wave of post-Dobbs abortion bans have not really achieved much success. They are either going to need to try to push into restricting interstate travel (which seems unlikely to me) or else into federal action to curb abortion’s general availability, likely through federal regulatory control over medication. Now maybe I’m wrong and the spirit of federalism will rule the day, but in a practical sense, that would be a large surrender on the substantive topic by the right.

J Willard Gibbs: Have you seen this essay on organizing? Echoes a lot of your themes on popularism, curious as to your thoughts.

Near the top of the piece it says “the forces that oppress us may compete and make war with one another, but when it comes to maintaining the order of capitalism and the hierarchy of white supremacy, they collaborate and work together based on their death-making and eliminationist shared interests.” So it’s pretty clear that the authors are coming from a very different place than I am.

But I think the guts of the article are excellent.

They’re talking about how if you take seriously the concept of organizing, you need to be willing to work with people who don’t agree with you about everything, to prioritize substance over language and presentation, and to be willing to accept real people instead of “launching search parties to find an undiscovered army of people with already-perfected politics with whom we will easily and naturally align.” I also liked this part:

    As we work to build more sustainable movements, we must think hard about our strategies for responding when organizers make mistakes. Social media can often foster a “zero-tolerance” attitude about political ignorance or missteps. Platforms like Twitter have helped facilitate tremendous accomplishments in movement work, but they have also created an arena for political performance and critique that is often divorced from relationship building or strategic aims. For many people, social media is not an organizing tool but a realm of political performance and spectatorship. A trend has emerged in which some organizers will demand performances of solidarity and awareness on social media but then critique or even tear apart those performances when they fall short or are deemed insincere. As with reality television, favorites emerge, and people are sometimes voted off the island.

I think more and more serious leftists are recognizing these basic pathological tendencies (see this essay Maurice Mitchell wrote last fall), which is good to see.

At the same time, the fundamental incentive structure remains the same, and in a lot of ways, that is the problem. If you personally gain from concrete wins, then you have an incentive to develop strategies and tactics that generate concrete wins. But if you are fighting for social media clout (or foundation grants) rather than political wins, you will fight a different way.