Cold November mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

21 - 27 minutes

Quick reminder that we’re having a third anniversary happy hour in DC on November 8, would love to see you if you’re free.

It’s suddenly chilly! And I will whine again about the fact that there is no school today for no clear reason.

Some positivity instead: The Covid vaccines saved over two million lives, generating about $6.5 trillion in value purely from reduced mortality. More investment is coming in to one of the new regional tech hubs that public policy is trying to create. I know the economy is terrible, but the United States has had (by far) the best inflation-adjusted GDP growth of any big economy. I’ve been enjoying watching Victor Wembanyama’s extremely long arms. An important victory achieved in the war on rats. The new Biden executive order on artificial intelligence seems pretty good, given realistic expectations. Worthwhile zoning reforms in British Columbia.

Question time.

BloopBloopBleepBleep: Did you hear Chris Ryan state that his Rewatchables white whale is “The Hunt for Red October”?

Yes, and I wanted to crawl inside my AirPods and yell “pick me, coach!”

Lost Future: So with the benefit of perfect hindsight — what should our Afghanistan policy have been immediately after 9/11? Just overthrow the Taliban, hang out for 6-12 months to at least try to transition the government- then peace out? I mean it would be pretty silly if we got rid of the Taliban only for them to reassert power as soon as we leave, right? But that's what would've happened, no?

To make it fun, let's pretend that on 9/18/01 the Bush cabinet has a meeting with scheduled with time traveler Matthew Yglesias from the year 2023. You'll be stepping through the wormhole to tell them what the ‘right’ Afghanistan policy should be. What is it?

The two biggest missteps don’t even require that much hindsight.

First off, on an operational military level, we tried to conduct the Battle of Tora Bora with a small number of American special forces (augmented by some British and German colleagues), plus a few thousand Afghan militia members. The top CIA guy on the scene asked for a battalion of Army Rangers to help out, the Bush administration said no, and Osama bin Laden got away. That then created a critical pivot point: Either Bush could admit he’d fucked up and let the most wanted man in the world escape, or else he could do what he did and pretend that killing or capturing bin Laden wasn’t really that big of a deal. Bush choosing option number two helped pave the way for an incredibly vague mission in Afghanistan. What you want to do is achieve your core objectives — get the bad guy, do enough damage to the Taliban to demonstrate deterrence — and then, you know, try your best to be helpful in the aftermath. But with no bin Laden, the “aftermath” part became the whole show and there was never a very plausible plan to turn Afghanistan into a wonderful country.

But even within those terms, we fucked it up by adopting a presidential system and then by using the single non-transferrable vote system for the parliament.

Those two things, but especially presidentialism, created a brittle electoral system. Afghanistan was a very diverse and decentralized society that needed a lot of coalition-building and brokerage to function. But because the presidential system lacked the capacity to negotiate those kind of coalitions in formal constitutional terms, the US government kept needing to do informal extra-constitutional brokerage. You get the bad guy, you set up a political system that is primed for success, and then you try to convene a meeting of the countries that are actually in the neighborhood — Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China — and tell them you have no intention of staying in Afghanistan for the long-term and understand that the United States has tense relations with some of those countries, but you hope the four of them can collaborate with each other on regional stability. Be generous with aid money.

Most of all, though, leave relatively quickly with your heads held eye and a threat to come back if people fuck with America again.

Alexander Elkholy: Noah has been saying a lot about China, impending war with them, and our relative military build up. Do you think war with them is inevitable? Do you think the US is in a bad position?

War is not inevitable. Deciding that war is inevitable is a good way to bring it about, so I reject that.

But a perception of weakness can also invite war, and it’s important to be prepared. One thing that I think we have seen in Ukraine is that Russia was surprised by how much money the United States and Europe have been willing to spend on Ukraine’s defense — which I think is in part because we surprised ourselves. If everyone had been readier earlier, it’s possible Russia would have been scared off. The best preparation, of course, is One Billion Americans. But the details of military spending also matter.

Chris Granner: I've been enjoying your slow-motion back & forth with Noah Smith about Andreesen's “Techno-Optimist’s Manifesto” — it's low-key pleasant to witness a measured debate on the merits of an idea. Today, in the column (“5 Interesting Things...”) where he continues that debate, he reiterates a point he's been on about for some time now: China’s military buildup. Here’s where I reveal that I know just enough about this stuff to be dangerous... So I wonder: leaving aside whether you agree with his basic position, it would be the opposite of what you’ve been calling for, fiscally, for us to follow Noah’s advice and crank up the DoD federal spending. But I had the thought that maybe military expenditures, especially those that are intended to build up depleted stockpiles, are the sort of manufactured goods that don't cause other knock-on inflationary effects (because those goods are either stored on a shelf or, literally, thrown “away” at an enemy target and the end result is...a hole where the target used to be). Does that make sense?

Mike J: It seems that a surprisingly urgent need for the US is to improve our Military Industrial Complex. I never thought I would hear myself say that, but it does appear to be quite weak and is straining to compete with the combined output of smaller and heavily sanctioned countries like Russia, Iran and North Korea. How can we incentivize our Merchants of Death to rebuild the Arsenal of Democracy?

I would love to gin up some theory whereby increased military expenditures don’t add to the macroeconomic pressures in the economy, but I don’t think it’s all that credible.

At this point, we are facing significant mechanical impacts of higher interest rates and adding more government borrowing onto the pile is damaging. I agree with the case for higher defense spending, but we also need higher taxes in America (and more changes to Medicare) to make that sustainable. Traditionally, wartimes —or at least times of concern about war — have been an opportunity for conservative political parties to rethink their opposition to taxation. New Speaker Mike Johnson making his first piece of legislation a bill to “pay for” $14 billion in aid to Israel by cutting IRS enforcement so the deficit goes up by $30 million instead of $14 billion is not promising in that regard. But it’s the challenge we have to face.

The other thing, though, is we urgently need to address the productivity in our defense sector.

Even the highest-end estimates of Chinese defense spending put it, at best, on a par with America’s. Nevertheless, they seem to be dramatically outbuilding us on a wide range of military hardware. This is partly that the United States is a richer country with structurally higher labor costs, and that’s just something we need to deal with. But I don’t think it fully explains the problem with American military contracting. IN the space field, we’ve made significant progress getting away from dysfunctional cost-plus contracts and instead using fixed-price contracts. This means a new entrant like Space X can increase its profits by figuring out how to do things for cheaper. Relatedly, the way the Pentagon managed the reduction in defense spending associated with the end of the Cold War was to advise defense contractors to consolidate. They had their reasons for that approach. But it means that all new spending now goes into a sector that is shrunken and uncompetitive relative to what it used to be.

The contracting issue and the lack of competition issue are linked since cost-plus contracts are hostile to new entrants.

So I think we do want to spend more money. But as we put that money out there, we also want to be writing contracts that tempt more companies that aren’t currently defense contractors into bidding for military work and that encourage investors to keep backing new defense tech startups. One bit of low-hanging fruit is to look at what’s happening in some friendly foreign countries. If you look at the world’s top shipbuilding companies, two are Chinese and one is Russian and zero are American. But four of them are Korean. Which means that Korean naval vessels are made by companies that are very successful in the civilian shipbuilding industry, which is naturally more competitive than anything related to military contracting. I think it is probably not a coincidence that Korea’s Sejong the Great class guided missile destroyers cost about half as much as America’s similarly-sized Arleigh Burke class. The Korean ships are built by Hyundai Heavy Industries, which is a successful company in civilian markets. The American ones are built by basically monoline defense contractors. I’m sure the Arleigh Burke has some bonus features that contribute to its costs, but unless it’s genuinely twice as good, it seems like we should be buying the Korean ships. Of course that would mean treating defense contracting as a serious national security effort and not a jobs program.

Last but not least, though, I think we should understand a productivity focus as a necessarily complement to spending more rather than as a way to spend less.

This is a point I’ve been making for years about mass transit. New York City is contemplating spending an ungodly sum of money on a short extension of the Second Avenue Subway. Seoul builds subways for less than a twelfth that cost on a per mile basis. If the MTA could figure out how to be as cost-effective as Korea, that would justify a massive expansion of the city’s mass transit system that would lead to higher rather than lower overall spending. By the same token, one big problem with the extraordinary cost of the Gerald Ford class of aircraft carriers is they are so expensive that the Navy isn’t actually going to build many of them. Ideally, we’d design things that are cheaper on a per unit basis, buy many more of them, and also sell them to close allies.

FrigidWind: Do you think that a central design bureau for infrastructure would help? The issue is that separate agencies such as the MTA, CTA, BART etc aren’t always designing new lines so when they do need a new one they have to contract the design to an EPC to complete it (and this leads to low internal capacity for technical evaluations). Let’s say that the federal government started up an agency who’s job was to design transit, roads, bridges, water treatment plants etc and conditioned infra funding on using this agency to develop designs before contracting out the construction. Do you think this would achieve some savings and avoid the “contractors monitoring contractors” problem that Alon Levy describes?

Yes. In fact, I think not only should the federal government try to set up an agency like this so, should two or three of the larger states.

But the key thing when setting up the new agencies is that the mandate should be to hire people who are not Americans. The United States has two great things going for it: we are a really rich country and can afford to overbid foreign labor markets, and lots of people around the world speak English. We should be hiring Swedish, Korean, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish experts to come over here and build new agencies. It would be good to incorporate a smattering of mid-career Americans who could share some wisdom about local conditions and, of course, plenty of young Americans to build a long-term civil service competency. But it’s not a coincidence that the most successful transit executive in recent history was non-American Andy Byford. The reality, though, is that the whole English-speaking world is terrible at this and we should be looking further afield

Swayze: In reference to your post last Monday (10/23), do you have an alt history take on the road not traveled in the 70s regarding nuclear power/decarbonization (e.g., where the US and global electrical grids would be today, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and the effects of global warming)?

Probably the best way to do this is to look at France, whose GDP per capita is very slightly above the EU-27 average but whose per capita CO2 emissions are about 25 percent lower. The basic story here is that France relied much more on oil for electricity generation (and less on coal), so their electricity sector was more directly hit by the oil embargo, leading them to double-down on nuclear during the decade when the United States abandoned it. And that makes a big difference.

Of course, emissions consistently being 25 percent lower starting in 1990 (and lower by a smaller amount from 1970-1990) does not solve the entire climate problem. But it is a three-fold help. One way it helps is that the planet would be cooler right now in 2023, so the threat of incremental warming would be lower. Another is that the stock of existing atmospheric carbon would be a lot lower, so there would be less future warming baked in. The third is that without the need to invest new dollars in decarbonizing electricity, we could invest very heavily in shifting to electric cars and heat pumps, and since the electricity grid would be cleaner, the impact of electrification of cars and home heating would be higher.

You would still be left with significant missing pieces — industry, maritime shipping, air travel, agriculture — but because of those factors above, addressing those other things would be dramatically less pressing. So I think the anti-nuclear turn was a huge, world-changing error.

James Schapiro: What are your thoughts on Quentin Tarantino’s body of work?

I am a big fan, but I will say that my favorite favorite of his movies is “Jackie Brown” which I think in some ways is precisely because it’s the least ~Tarantino~ of the Quentin Tarantino movies. Cinema is an inherently collaborative enterprise, and in a lot of ways I think the most skilled filmmakers end up going awry when they zip off into pure auteur land.

Race-swapping Jackie Burke (and turning her into Jackie Brown and casting Pam Grier to play her) is a significant change from “Rum Punch” but the screenplay basically just follows Elmore Leonard’s story. And it’s a great story! And then Tarantino uses his chops to turn that story into a great movie. I’ve been thinking about Martin Scorcese and his whole “one for them, one for me” philosophy and I think you’re supposed to think the “one for me” movies are better and have more artistic integrity. But I think his movies are better when he’s more disciplined and less single-handedly in charge. If you want to see the product of a single creative mind working alone, go read a novel.

THPacis: In your lifetime, what's the best call a president made that was considered controversial/brave/surprising at the time?

George W Bush going to bat for PEPFAR was really good, though I’m also not sure it was particularly brave or controversial — definitely somewhat surprising, but it’s not like he ran big political risks over it.

It’s a tough question, because I think doing the right thing is overrated. I recall a couple of bold stands that Obama took that I supported at the time, like pushing Netanyahu for a settlement freeze or doing the nuclear deal with Iran, where in retrospect what happened is Obama paid a political price and didn’t really achieve anything because it wasn’t politically sustainable. I think his effort to resist the pressure to intervene more forcefully in the Syrian Civil War probably qualifies.

But even though my (somewhat unfashionable on the left) view is that Obama was a better president than Joe Biden, all things considered (mostly because he took fewer political risks!), Biden did engage in a really sound and correct act of political courage in leaving Afghanistan. People will be pretending until the End Times that they are only saying he didn’t go about it the right way, but the fact of the matter is that the generals and the national security blob opposed Trump when he made the agreement to leave and they wanted Biden to find a pretext to back out of the agreement. The path of least-resistance would have been to do what they wanted, just as Trump never actually ended any of the troop deployments he promised to end. Biden paid a very very, very steep political cost for this. But if Biden had given in, we would now have a bunch of American soldiers in an incredibly precarious situation given the Russia-Ukraine War — Russia would be funneling assistance to the Taliban, and we would have incredibly precarious supply lines running through Pakistan.

The Bad Blog: What other problems do you think are like Israel/Palestine in that they should be covered less because they are simply very intractable?

To be clear, it’s not the intractability per se of Israel/Palestine that means it should be covered less. My issue is the actual scale. There are more displaced refugees in eastern Congo than the entire population of the West Bank and Gaza combined. But it’s not just that Israel gets more coverage than Congo (there are certainly valid reasons for that), it gets more than 1,000 times as much coverage. And that’s true in both directions: the deaths of Israelis get dramatically more coverage than similar death tolls would elsewhere and so do the deaths of Palestinians.

Tractability is the next phase of the analysis. Is all this attention-paying helping? That would be a good reason to pay attention to something. But it pretty clearly isn’t.

Andy: What’s your take on McCain-Feingold now that we’ve seen what it does in practice?

I was always against it and so, at the time, were my colleagues at The American Prospect, which is not a magazine that loves taking heterodox stands that contradict the liberal conventional wisdom. But it was a really dumb law and people should have listened.

Grigori Avrimidi: Will “a widely read online blogger/author/opinion writer turns out to be an AI” happen before or after 2030? For it to count, 90% of the writing would have to be machine generated.

I asked GPT-4 to give me a snappy, definitive answer to this question and it said: The rapid advancements in AI technology, particularly in natural language processing, suggest that we could very well see a widely read blogger or opinion writer powered primarily by AI before 2030. The key will be the public's acceptance and the ethical frameworks established to govern AI-generated content. While the technology is swiftly evolving, societal and regulatory factors will play a crucial role in determining the timeline. So, buckle up; the future of AI-driven journalism and opinion writing is just around the corner!

Jim: Just saw a live Rocky Horror Picture Show and all the very overt sexuality got me thinking about how incredibly prudish most mass entertainment is now. What happened? Growing up in the 80s I don’t think anyone would have predicted this.

A few different things are in the mix, but I think the biggest is technological and regulatory arbitrages.

It used to be that broadcast television was under a pretty strict regime of formal and informal censorship ,while the rules around movies were much laxer, so there was a lot of incentive to put racy material into movies — it was one of their big selling points. That’s why you used to have the “erotic thriller” as a major movie genre. Later, HBO became a network that would let you put sex on television and a lot of T&A started to migrate there. The Sopranos holds up almost perfectly today, but I would say that relative to modern sensibilities, there are a lot more shots of strippers at the Bing than are really necessary for the narrative. The early seasons of Game of Thrones were, likewise, notorious for their “sexposition” scenes in which semi-nude women would explain what was going on. Over time, though, actual pornography has become much more accessible, which I think has changed the cost/benefit calculus around this kind of thing and generated a more prudish mass culture.

Tomer Stone: I see humanities PhD types on twitter do a lot of complaining about their non-existent academic job market prospects and huge drops in students majoring in history. But I see very little arguing that students are overestimating the wage gap between majoring in STEM vs majoring in history, or what their departments are doing to boost the earnings of students who go through the history major.

Do you think that, deep down, they know they are not teaching skills valued by the labor market and are just mad that students, parents, and administrators expect them too?

There’s a complicated interplay between the very left-wing political commitments of humanities faculty and the shifting economics of higher education.

In terms of this dissonance, I think most of the historians who are vocal on Twitter are pretty sincere anti-capitalists who genuinely don’t think it’s appropriate to evaluate their work on that basis. They don’t think it’s the purpose of the university to serve some kind of instrumental need of the labor market; they think that they are producing social goods that deserve to be subsidized and supported. And on one level, that aligns with a very old-fashioned understanding of higher education. But at the same time, if you were to ask most people what kind of non-pecuniary values they think are important, I think they would come up with a list of values that was dramatically more conservative — more religious and dramatically more patriotic — than the ones that actually existing college professors uphold. I think if you wanted to say, look the world needs to pay us to explain the greatness of the American story to the youth of tomorrow, even if the labor market doesn’t care about that, then a lot of the public would say “yeah, that makes sense.” But historians don’t want to do that job, so they’re left in a difficult corner.