Back to school mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

21 - 26 minutes

DCPS started back up this week, which is good news for those of us who like routines. It was also good to see that the city’s test scores bounced back last year from their pandemic lows, though we’re still short of full recovery.

In other good news, PEPFAR has saved millions of lives. Cheaper prescription drugs are coming thanks to Medicare price negotiation. Spot rents are now falling. Rudy Giuliani is guilty of defamation. Election deniers take a loss in Iowa. Marijuana rescheduling is moving forward and so is Brightline expansion in Florida. Plus there’s a new Metric song!

Have a happy Labor Day Weekend, everyone!

Tyler G: As someone who relies on social science research, do you have thoughts on the replication crisis? It seems huge deal that much of knowledge we thought we'd gained over the last few decades turned out to be nonsense.

Has this changed your view on anything, or the way you approach academic research? What should the policy implications be? My intuition is that there's been no real accountability — like, whole departments, and maybe institutions, should've been disbanded for neglectfully producing misinformation using public funds, no?

To try to be precise here, the “replication crisis” as I understand the concept refers specifically to experimental stuff done in psychology and related fields. When you do an experiment and report the results, the idea is that it should be possible for other people to repeat or copy (“replicate”) your experiment and get the same result. In many cases this is relatively straightforward, but because experiments on human beings come with a lot of logistical and administrative barriers, there were a lot of psychology results that got published without having been replicated. And then it later turned out that many of these results don’t replicate — the authors were either just reporting flukes or in some cases faking things.

Social science generally doesn’t have this exact problem because most social science results aren’t experimental at all.

That’s mostly bad news in the sense that experimental data would, in principle, give us better evidence than the stuff social scientists need to rely on. In terms of the specific dynamics of the replication crisis, though, it’s good news because no halfway responsible person has ever treated social scientists’ statistical inferences as definitive.

That said, if you roll back time 20 years, I was part of a cohort of young journalists who were trying to infuse the field with more information gleaned from academic research. Part of that was we were maybe more quantitatively sophisticated than the average working journalist. Part of it was that the internet made academic research much more accessible than it had been in the past. Part of it was that blogs made it easy to put charts and maps and tables into your article, whereas in a print workflow that’s challenging and time-intensive. And a big part of it is that career ladders shifted. Instead of covering city hall for a mid-sized daily newspaper and then going to a statehouse and then going to a D.C. bureau and then getting a job at a bigger paper, it started to become the case that people would start out covering national politics and then kind of work their way up the food chain.

I now have somewhat mixed feelings about that whole process, because what I think began as an earnest effort to produce better-informed coverage has devolved somewhat into a lot of sloppy work and over-generalizing from single studies.

The best advice I can give on empirical social science is that precisely because it’s not experiments that you can try to replicate, you really need to try to read literatures and not just individual papers before drawing conclusions. A good example from my recent social science reading: Massimo Pulejo and Pabloc Querubín look at Italian municipal officials and find that when salaries go up, susceptibility to taking bribes declines, but that as a result, the better-paid and more honest bureaucrats are more likely to be murdered by the mafia. That’s a fascinating result and it obviously has implications for things like endemic corruption and organized crime activity in Mexico. But I don’t want to draw any strong conclusions until I see studies of similar issues conducted in several other countries. Otherwise, even if the study is totally flawless, it could just be capturing something about Italy rather than illuminating the general issue.

Entertainment Strategy Guy: What are your thoughts on tinted windows, as a frequent pedestrian? Personally, as someone who walks children to school, I loathe them with a passion. Also, anecdotally, it sure feels like someone with tinted windows is much more likely to be an aggressive driver on the roads. Like illegal plates, most jurisdictions have rules against overly tinted front windows, it just seems like police forces choose to not enforce a easily enforced rule. Thoughts?

I completely share your sentiments that these tinted windows seem bad. But, in the spirit of the answer above, I have to confess that I haven’t seen persuasive research on the subject, so I try to avoid asserting that there’s a huge problem here. I hope more people will study this, and that if there’s anything I’m missing, someone will email it to me.

Danny: You recently tweeted about how post-presidency Obama hasn’t followed his strategy as a candidate of moderating on cultural and racial issues. Do you think this is because he has actually been very progressive on these issues all along — as evidenced by his racial consciousness in his first memoir, the thoughts in his unpublished political manifesto revealed last year, and his ties to figures like Jeremiah Wright and Derrick Bell — and was simply biting his tongue as a presidential candidate and as president? Or is he genuinely the moderate he presented himself as during his presidency and just biting his tongue now to placate progressives?

I don’t really like that characterization, and I think you’re creating a bit of a false dichotomy here.

My read of Obama, which is probably best exemplified by this Timothy Shenk piece on the unpublished political manifesto, is that all along he has been influenced by the somewhat pessimistic views on race expressed by Derrick Bell. Except he rejects Bell’s brand of fatalism and retreat from political engagement in favor of something more like Bayard Rustin’s views. And I think it would be simplistic to see Rustin as offering a “more moderate” take than contemporary progressives. What he’s saying, I think, is that to advance the interests of the majority of Black Americans, you need the kind of large-scale social and economic transformation that is only possible through majoritarian politics. That, to him, meant relying primarily on solidaristic appeals to the self-interest of economically downscale white people. And while Rustin became particularly known for taking this line in the 1970s, it wasn’t unique to him. I have in the past quoted Martin Luther King Jr. on political strategy from “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”

    Within the white majority there exists a substantial group who cherish democratic principles above privilege and who have demonstrated a will to fight side by side with the Negro against injustice. Another more substantial group is composed of those having common needs with the Negro and who will benefit equally with him in the achievement of social progress. There are, in fact, more poor white Americans than there are Negro. Their need for a war on poverty is no less desperate than the Negro’s. In the South they have been deluded by race prejudice and largely remained aloof from common action. Ironically, with this posture they were fitting not only the Negro but themselves. Yet there are already signs of change. Without formal alliances, Negroes and whites have supported the same electorate coalitions in the South because each sufficiently served his own needs.

King’s point here, and I think Rustin’s point more directly, was made most pointedly of all by Obama in his unpublished draft where he complains “those blacks who most fervently insist on the pervasiveness of white racism have adopted a strategy that depends on white guilt for its effectiveness.” I think that’s a little bit of an unfair dig by Obama as written, but it captures the spirit of something that I think is correct, which is that if you take racism seriously as a political force in American politics, that suggests a strategy of not dwelling on racial issues.

By contrast, a lot of what’s contemporarily popular in progressive circles is the idea that basically most white people are extremely kind-hearted, so if you guilt-trip them with facts about slavery or redlining or the Tulsa massacre, they’re going to open their wallets and embrace reparations.

Obama, as a practicing politician, mostly took the advice of Obama the analyst and tried to avoid racial conflict as a topic. Not coincidentally, during Obama’s presidency, his political opponents were obsessed with race. Rush Limbaugh would talk about how the Affordable Care Act was a form of reparations. But Obama studiously tried to avoid talking about the ACA as closing the racial health insurance gap, which is I think exactly what Derrick Bell or Jeremiah Wright or Bayard Rustin or King himself would have advised him to do.

What’s annoyed me a bit about post-presidential Obama is that I wish he’d be a little more forceful in putting out the ideas of Obama-the-analyst in order to create more space for Kamala Harris and Hakeem Jeffries to act more like Obama-the-politician. I am fascinated, though, that one thing post-presidential Obama is doing is serving as a producer on a biopic about Rustin. The film, based on the trailer and on what I know of the screenwriters, seems to heavily focus on Rustin as a gay intersectional figure and not really get into his views on class politics.

But it’s possible that’s wrong and the stuff I’ve been writing about here will be in the movie. Either way, though, it’s clear that Obama is familiar with that side of Rustin’s life and work, and the release of the film is inevitably going to lead to more people publishing Bayard Rustin takes (I will certainly do one) and (I hope) even checking out his collected writings.

Tom: You’ve written or tweeted periodically about how Kamala Harris should revert to her 2000s-vintage ideological roots rather than posturing as a progressive firebrand. This seems like indisputably good advice. Why do you think that she, and politicians in general, act in ways and say things that are so obviously politically senseless and forgo doing things that would be obviously politically beneficial? Is it because they’re just ignorant, or because they’re captive to special interest groups?

Interest group capture can certainly play a role.

There was a hilarious story in Politico the other day about GOP strategists urging Republicans to be more vocal in condemning the Biden administration’s prescription drug pricing moves. This is by far the most popular thing Democrats have done during the past two years. The industry is currently trying to get GOP-appointed judges to toss this out, and of course they are hoping that Republicans will win in 2024 and repeal these rules. Literally the best thing that could possibly happen for Democrats next year would be for Republicans to vocally state their intention to repeal these rules. If you think, on the merits, that Biden is wrong, you should hope Republicans talk about literally anything else, win the election, and then repeal the rules on the sly. So what are the strategists smoking?

Well my guess is that some people in the pharmaceutical industry are worried that even if Republicans win in 2024, they might decide not to expend political capital on carrying water for them.

So the industry has a certain interest in kicking the tires on the GOP’s level of support for them. And a lot of “Republican strategists” who have pharmaceutical clients actually earn much more money from their industry work than they earn from their campaign work, so they are incentivized to give bad advice. On the Democratic side, you see some broadly similar dynamics. If you’re a Democratic pollster, then the odds are that working for actual campaigns is more like a hobby or a passion project and the bulk of your revenue comes from working for progressive advocacy groups. That creates a conflict of interest where principals don’t always get the best advice.

But my guess is that the even bigger issue, beyond interest groups, is just purely psychological. I think you could see during the 2020 cycle that the people Bernie Sanders was most comfortable listening to were the most hardcore Berners — his guys — when in practical terms he’d have gotten better advice from listening to half-hearted fans (like me!) who were trying to get him to address his actual weaknesses. By the same token, now that Harris is a little bit down, the most comfortable thing for her is probably to listen to people who say everything she’s doing is amazing and all her problems are due to other people being unfair to her (many people, including some in the Slow Boring comments, attribute the bad advice to her sister, but I don’t have specific information on that beyond D.C. gossip).

But she should listen to people (like me!) who don’t have any particular relationship to her but recognize that she’s objectively one of the most important people in American politics and would like to see her be more popular and successful.

In these terms, early-career politicians benefit from the fact that they attract less flattery.

PW: Given her now indisputable reign over pop culture, what one policy issue should Taylor Swift spend her social capital on? (a la Bob Barker’s animal rights)

There’s a huge gender gap on views of nuclear energy, so I know advocates are constantly looking for women to put forward as spokespeople. She takes flak for her personal emissions footprint, but I think could easily more than offset this by telling people about the need for reform at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

SS: How would you approach land use and transportation in Bar Harbor, Maine? (And by extension, other seasonal tourist destinations.) The town is extremely crowded in summer and half-empty in winter. Housing is expensive for residents, hotels are scarce for tourists, and businesses have trouble housing seasonal workers. The streets are packed with people and cars in summer. There are restrictions on Airbnbs, a typical mix of zoning, and controversy over how many cruise ships to allow. Would you adjust the YIMBY playbook to preserve touristy charm?

The “charm” and “seasonal destination” aspects of this cut in somewhat different directions. In charm terms, I do think it’s plausible that quaint New England towns generate economic benefit from quaintness and that should be taken into consideration when thinking about land use issues. But Maine is not running short of quaint New England towns, and I don’t think policymakers should apply that specifically to Bar Harbor, which has particular attraction as a tourist destination because of Acadia National Park. And the park itself is obviously a park, so that’s going to be preserved, as is the ocean. The “job” of Bar Harbor, in that context, is to provide ancillary services related to visiting the park and visiting the ocean.

Thinking about this kind of tourist destination just underscores why localism in land use is a bad idea.

It’s also why I’ve never loved the verbiage of YIMBY vs. NIMBY. Because while I personally actually am a YIMBY about my neighborhood and absolutely favor upzoning it, I think it’s unreasonable to ask a resident of Bar Harbor to take a subjectively YIMBY attitude toward the town. What we’re talking about is an upscale coastal community with very few residents. From the standpoint of those residents the current volume of tourism is a nuisance, and welcoming even more tourists would be an even bigger nuisance. The relevant policy issue is that Maine as a whole is a relatively poor state, and Maine would benefit from much more intensive economic development of Bar Harbor. It’s not like it would ever turn into a big city, but it really could be full of medium-sized modern hotels and mid-rise apartment buildings.

Juan-les-Pins on the Mediterranean coast of France is full of this kind of structure, often offered as seasonal rentals. I can 100% sympathize with Bar Harbor residents who wouldn’t want to see their town look like this.

But from the overall standpoint of Hancock County or the state of Maine, having that kind of more intensive economic development would be an incredible boon. Instead of banning Airbnbs, they’d be a source of tax revenue. And the state could use that revenue to invest in the University of Maine or reduce sales taxes or whatever else.

It’s become customary in the United States to think of land use as a local issue, but it’s just not true that the implications of Bar Harbor land use decisions are purely local.

Seth Chalmer: What do you think of Lee Drutman’s “More Parties, Better Parties” paper/agenda?

The problem with a job like Drutman’s is that it’s institutionally inevitable that he’s going to end up overstating his case. So I have a lot of caveats and qualifications that I would want to add to his analysis.

I see evidence of the same basic trends that are afflicting the United States all around, even in places like the Netherlands where the political institutions are completely different. That said, I broadly agree with what he’s saying. In a multi-party system, political leaders have a stronger incentive to make the affirmative case for themselves and less incentive to simply tear down their rivals. After all, even if your criticisms are really convincing, it’s always possible that some other party will benefit.

Proportional representation also makes gerrymandering much less significant, which has a good number of downstream benefits. So I’m for it.

Miles: Did TX Gov Abbott's strategy of bussing migrants to NYC actually kind of work, in a way? Now he's got the Mayor of a very liberal town making lots of noise about needing billions of dollars from the Feds, and that plays right into right-wing arguments about the costs of excessive migration. What's to be done now?

Abbott has been incredibly successful at making his point, but I would say a lot less successful at getting what he wants.

I placed this after the Drutman question because I think that duality illustrates some of the problems with the American political system, one of which is that Abbott’s main idea of how to get what he wants is just “beat Joe Biden” because the two parties are in zero-sum political competition. The flip side of that is that if Abbott were to ask for something specific and then Biden were to give Abbott what he asked for and then Abbott said “hey, this is great, thanks Joe!” that would be seen by the whole Republican Party as a huge betrayal of the larger cause of sticking it to Joe Biden. So it’s actually not 100% clear what Abbott specifically does want and we’re not making any progress on the issue.

Now, what I’ve been saying since March of 2021 is that Democrats should admit they don’t disagree that much with Republicans.

It is just not, in fact, true that Joe Biden and other major figures in the Democratic Party want to see large numbers of people arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border and find asylum here. When border crossing numbers go down, they brag about that. When numbers go up, they worry about their politics. When asylum-seekers are sent to blue cities, the mayors complain. Their view is not identical to Trump’s or to Abbott’s, but it’s honestly pretty similar. And I think it should be okay to say that. Biden and Mitch McConnell have the same views on Ukraine, even as they have very different views on climate change. By the same token, I think Biden and McConnell have very different views on a path to citizenship for people who’ve been living here a long time illegally — even as Biden and George W. Bush have the same view on that.

But I think Biden has been somewhat paralyzed by a post-Trump reluctance to just say “look, I agree with Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell and Greg Abbott that it’s very undesirable to have all these people showing up to make asylum claims and I want to sign a law that addresses that.” It would be kind of divisive intra-party, but it’s clear that Democrats who need to run in tough races are not prepared to say “chaotic asylum arrivals are good,” so they should admit they think this is bad and triangulate.

Michael Adelman: You've been among the people on Twitter calling attention to Republican proposals for lethal military force at the border and into Mexico. Do you think people underrate the probability that this is really going to happen?

This was followed by a bunch of political strategy questions, but the one thing I want to say here is that I find it vexing the extent to which I have very little sense of how serious anyone in the GOP is about this.

Rank-and-file progressives have a lot of flaws, but they really do enjoy hearing people argue about policy proposals. They sometimes enjoy this to a fault, such that Democrats spent the whole 2020 primary campaign arguing about ideas that were fantastical. That said, you could at least tell from watching the primary debate that the ideas were fantastical. Bernie and Warren were arguing about how to pay for Medicare for All, but Amy Klobuchar was right up there on stage saying she wouldn’t vote for Medicare for All. And Amy Klobuchar is not the most conservative member of the Democratic Caucus. She’s not even close. So if you were just idly curious about whether Bernie Sanders was going to pass a $16 trillion tax increase, the clear answer was no.

When it comes to using military force against Mexico, there are very few institutional barriers, so I don’t entirely rule it out.

On the other hand, these guys mostly seem like bullshitters who like the idea of “getting tough” but wouldn’t actually do it. Then again, maybe they would! Most of all, I would like to know which of the people in the field is most likely to actually go through with the craziest fads in conservative politics. But I don’t know how to tell that either.