Thankful mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

— Read time: 16 minutes

Thankful mailbag

Argentina, whether news is pointless, and the trouble with the long-term

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It’s a busy week with lots of travel, so I’m going to keep this intro short and sweet. Onward to the questions.

TheElasticStranger: I find the NYtimes to be irritatingly negative in their coverage of Biden. At the same time much of their other coverage and opinion could be viewed as annoyingly left-leaning.

I understand the structural reasons for this as you’ve laid out before, so I’ll just ask, If your aim was to stop Donald Trump from being elected, and your only instrument wasthe NYtimes, how would you change the coverage vs how it is presently structured for maximum impact? Obviously they could be more positive, but you don’t want to be obvious shills either, and it seems to me they could try broadening their audience to include more moderate voters as well.

Abstracting away a bit from the specifics of the New York Times, I think the key to building an optimal propaganda organ is you really want the content to be incredible normie and down-the-middle.

You want a publication that appeals, fundamentally, to moderate and center-right readers. That means really looking incredibly rigorously at your not-so-political content — movie and book reviews, cooking, science, etc. — to studiously excise any hint of bias or anything that would be off-putting to people with conservative sensibilities. Then you want to basically just ignore any story that is primarily about intra-Dem infighting and do a lot of coverage of any story that generates intra-GOP infighting. And in the specific context of the 2024 race, you want to have lots of articles about abortion rights and health care, with plenty of scrutiny of Trump’s policy positions. You’d want articles where frontline Republicans hand-wring about whether Trump’s legal problems will sink them. You’d want stories in which businessmen say “I’m a 100 percent Republican, but these tariffs will make inflation worse.”

Mainstream media tends to do roughly the opposite, letting demographic factors pull the broad tone of their coverage to the left in a way that alienates center-right readers, but keeping their actual coverage of American partisan politics studiously down the middle.

Just some guy: So uhh... Argentina. How do you see that all playing out?

I don’t really have a handle on Javier Milei, who keeps getting shorthanded in the media as a radical libertarian and also as an Argentinian Trump.

This is maybe my small-minded literalism, but whenever I think about this situation, my brain keeps tripping over the fact that these descriptions are wildly at odds with each other.

Trump’s approach to policy, to the extent you can make any sense of it, has always struck me as basically an American form of Peronism — you sideline market economics while also not doing social democracy and instead just try to direct goodies to your favored constituency. I think people are just drawing the Milei/Trump connection based on vibes, and really he’s a more market-oriented guy in his policy aspirations. But the fact that Milei himself seems to encourage these comparisons confuses me.

At any rate, Argentina really could use a dose of right-wing economics. They need to cut spending, and they need market-oriented reforms to raise productivity in non-agricultural sectors. To my way of thinking, it does not seem helpful or constructive to have the basic case for market reform and fiscal discipline be yoked to hard-core libertarian ideology. Milei seems like an extremist who’d be pushing these ideas in any circumstances and who’s probably a less persuasive salesperson than someone more moderate and pragmatic. That said, he won and I hope he manages to get some constructive stuff done.

Will he? Argentina, like a lot of Latin American countries, has a Madisonian political system, so an inexperienced-but-charismatic president with relatively radical rules is going to be facing off against a congress that his party doesn’t control. In theory, that system is supposed to force compromise and moderation in a way that’s constructive. In practice, that kind of setup frequently leads to constitutional crisis and democratic breakdown. We’ll see what happens.

Aaron: Why engage in Virginia Plan erasure when you talk about “Madisonian” separation of powers? In all seriousness, I do think that broader understanding of the Virginia Plan—which was a parliamentary system and almost certainly closer to Madison’s ideal institutional setup than the Constitution—would make more Americans receptive to the idea that there are other ways to run a democracy.

I didn’t know much about the Virginia Plan until I read this question, but you are correct that it outlines something much more similar to a parliamentary regime.

But I dunno, Madison gets the credit (or “credit”) for the system we ended up with, so that’s why people call it a Madisonian system.

Kyle: You and other pundits will often explain Trump’s appeal as the result of his comfort staking out moderate positions on certain key issues such as Social Security and abortion. I think this explanation amounts to post hoc rationalization and obscures reality. Yes, by moderating on these issues, he makes himself more palatable to secular working-class voters, other things equal. But this explanation elides all the very unpopular things Trump does e.g. inciting insurrections, attempting to repeal Obamacare, cutting taxes on the rich, the access Hollywood tape, etc. It offers no explanation for why these unpopular things don’t move people’s votes much. Any attempt to connect a politician’s success to his actions and stances needs to account for all of them, rather than just cherry-pick the good stances and saying that they explain the outcome, no?

I think it’s important when talking about such things to be clear as to the specific question we’re asking. The starting point with Trump is that this guy is not Modi or AMLO. He’s not even Viktor Orbán in terms of winning elections. There’s mostly nothing to explain about Trump’s “appeal” because he mostly isn’t appealing.

The point that I try to make about the role of his positioning on Social Security and Medicare in the 2016 race is that embracing a nominee who moderated on those stance is sufficient to explain why Republicans were able to beat Hillary Clinton.

A lot of people find it vexing that Mitt Romney, who seems like a smart and honorable guy, lost while Trump, who’s a thug and a scumbag, won. This generates a lot of paradoxical explanations of the true nature of Trump’s appeal, plus a lot of whining about the alleged mistreatment of Romney. The basic truth is that Romney was a much stronger candidate than Trump, but he ran on a much less appealing platform. If Romney had run on Trump’s positions, he would have won; if Trump had run on Romney’s positions, he would have gotten crushed. In general, I think people who talk about American politics are excessively knowledgeable about the micro-details of these campaigns, and they ignore the big picture reality that Democrats have been moving left since 2012 and this drives a lot of changes.

N.N. What do you make of the idea (as seen in this book and this podcast among many other places) that people should stop reading the news because it takes a huge amount of time, is largely pointless, and makes them unhappy?

My main doubt about this thesis is that I think most people actually aren’t reading the news. But I do think that those who do choose to read the news would benefit from being a little more thoughtful and a little more self-critical about their reading.

Is there a topic you are sincerely interested in learning more about? Then by all means, seek out news on that subject. But most people already know whether they are going to vote Democratic or Republican in 2024 (or in 2028 for that matter) and actually don’t need to stay up to speed on the latest developments in the national campaign. You could either try to learn about something that seems objectively important and under-covered (the civil war in Sudan, for example) or you could try to learn about something that’s of idiosyncratic relevance to your local life (education policy in the community where you live, for example). And if you want to follow national partisan politics because you think it’s entertaining, that’s also okay. People consume media content for fun all the time. But be aware that’s what you’re doing.

That said, while entertainment is fine, it’s also good intellectual discipline to try not to develop false beliefs. So you ought to be at least a little suspicious of writers who you enjoy because everything they tell you is psychologically pleasing. There’s a real skill to that. To “explaining” to people in your ideological niche why every passing event in the news demonstrates their basic correctness about everything. And that kind of content, well, it can make people really happy. But it’s likely to be misleading.

Jonathan Hallam: I wish everything weren't about Israel and Palestine, but, this question cannot not be asked to the author of One Billion Americans, so: What are your thoughts on offering Palestinians US citizenship? Would this be politically easy, as both pro-Palestinians and pro-Israeli, a true win-win? Or is the context such that it would be viewed as lose-lose?

In the book I call for “ruthless pragmatism” on immigration — i.e., try to find any means of securing higher levels of legal immigration that are politically viable.

This idea doesn’t sound viable to me, though if someone has evidence I’d be willing to consider it. One idea I have toyed with is the idea of creating a special visa program for Middle Eastern Christians, who suffer from various forms of persecution and who I think might be sympathetic in the eyes of some right-of-center voters and politicians. It wouldn’t need to be all Middle Eastern Christians, but basically the idea would be a special program for some number of them (with some conditions) on top of existing visa programs. There is a substantial Christian minority in Palestine (a minority that is disproportionately likely to want to emigrate), though the larger numbers are in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. I dunno if there’d be any juice in that, but I could imagine it.

As a solution to Israel/Palestine, of course “Palestinians should emigrate and enjoy better lives in other wealthier places” is a solution that many people on the far-right of Israeli politics believe in. And it’s clearly true that in concrete material terms, Palestinians could go live in the United States or the in the immigrant-heavy Gulf states and be better off than they currently are. But the way the parameters of the conflict are defined, that would be a total defeat for the Palestinian cause, so it’s wildly unacceptable.

Scottie J: I’m partially repulsed at my own earnestness here but I was hoping you could expound on your frequent contention that “doing the right thing is overrated.” My assumption is that being politically expedient leads to better long term outcomes is essentially what you’re getting at here. Are there any unpopular things that are worth doing because they move the proverbial ball forward? Is there criteria that should be used to evaluate when the policy or vote is worth the political hit?

“Doing the right thing is overrated” ≠ “never do the right thing.”

loubyornotlouby: Can you break down what you feel the public reaction Open AI Board's decision will likely mean for the Effective Altruist / Rationalist movements long term?

Here I think it’s really worth distinguishing between Good Old-Fashioned Effective Altruism (which is about trying to be more effective and empirically rigorous in charitable giving) and the effort to build a movement around “long-termism.”

The idea that we should consider the interests of the future, not just the interests of the present, predates the EA movement and comes up in a wide variety of contexts. A big part of the debate over how to set the social cost of carbon for regulatory purposes, for example, comes down to what “discount rate” you should use when considering the long-term costs of climate change. The standard environmentalist move is to argue for low (or even zero) discount rates while business interests favor higher ones. As a philosophical argument, I think the case for a very low discount rate is pretty ironclad. But as anyone who has ever kicked this idea around in an ethics seminar can tell you, it’s challenging to draw out the practical consequences. One very boring technical issue relates to OMB calculations for cost-benefit analysis, and the Biden administration is, in fact, issuing a new Circular A4 that mandates less discounting. So in that sense, long-termism is triumphing in the seat of power like never before.

But the problem that you see not just with the recent OpenAI board drama, but with the whole lifecycle of OpenAI, is that it’s really hard to say what the long-term consequences of your actions will be.

OpenAI was originally founded as a nonprofit with heavy EA influence, on the theory that AI would be central to the future of humanity and it was important to develop this technology in an “open” way.

OpenAI’s team then decided that openness was actually bad for the cause of AI safety and ditched that founding commitment to openness.

OpenAI’s team then decided that the nonprofit structure was too limiting and they needed to commercialize to gain access to the level of computing resources they needed, so they did a big restructuring and strategic pivot.

A bunch of OpenAI people and other EAs disagreed with the way OpenAI was handling things and founded Anthropic as a rival, even-more-EA AI lab.

Then a while after that schism, a new internal schism emerged at OpenAI between the CEO and the board (I really recommend this summary of events as superior to what you’ll read in the business press), which led to the dramatic showdown.

The board ultimately decided that reconstituting OpenAI with Sam Altman still in charge and a new board would be better, all things considered, than letting Altman and his team walk to Microsoft.

I think you can make the case that not just the board drama, but every step along this ladder — from founding OpenAI to the Anthropic schism etc — has been counterproductive from the standpoint of AI safety. But I also think Altman is completely sincere in his own belief that empowering Sam Altman is the best way to usher in an AI utopia. These questions are just not tractable in the way that trying to estimate which global health programs are most cost-effective are.

Meanwhile, over on the Good Old-Fashioned Effective Altruism side, things seem to be going well. Open Philanthropy just announced a few new programs in areas like developing country lead poising that are badly underfunded and neglected. This is good, important stuff. Obviously if a rogue AI kills everyone in 2037, nobody is going to care very much whether we promoted best practices around car battery recycling. But we have a very high degree of certainty that lead toxicity kills tons of kids and harms many more. And we know that the recycling of car batteries is a big source of that lead. And we know what the best practices are. So if we try to promote policies ensuring safe recycling of car batteries, we may fail, but we will probably make at least some progress and almost certainly not make things worse.

John E: Paul refuses the power to implement the Golden Path, while Leto accepts.

Given the choice, which one would you choose?

Per the above, if I were in Paul’s situation I would talk myself into doubting my prescience and not do it.

Greg Packnett: Are there any policy stakes to the debate about whether the economy is actually good or the stats are misleading? That is, if the anti-Stancil hypothesis is correct (ie the economy is actually bad and data showing that people think it's bad are capturing something normal economic statistics are missing), what sorts of errors are policy makers who think the Stancil hypothesis is correct (ie the economy is good but people think it's bad because of some combination of partisanship, ideology, and regular every day ignorance) likely to make?

As a separate question, usually when a false belief about the economy is widely held, there's a lot of money to be made being among the few who are right. So how should an anti-Stancilite invest? For that matter, how should a Stancilite who wants to make money betting that the economy's strength is underrated invest?

I wish that people would talk more clearly in terms of the policy stakes. To a lot of people on the left, it’s clear that they perceive the policy stakes to be that if we admit the current economy is terrible, then we will see the need for dramatic expansion of the welfare state. That’s fine as a thing to believe, but it doesn’t do anything to explain why perceptions of the economy were so much better in 2018 or even 2013 — it’s not like the country had a more robust welfare state back then.

Conversely, conservatives want to say things are terrible and this shows we need to bring back Trump. But they won’t explain why higher tariffs and a much larger budget deficit would make food prices go back down. Mass deportations would clearly make food more expensive.

So in all these cases, it would be more constructive to just talk about which things are problems right now (interest rates) and which are not (unemployment), and try to say why your proposed ideas would be helpful.

In terms of investing, here’s some back-of-the-napkin technical analysis I did, just drawing a big ol’ line from the stock market peak before the Great Recession to today. These numbers are adjusted for inflation.

It seems to me that the investment community, when voting with its money, thinks the economy is basically fine. Stancilism triumphs. If you think people are really suffering out there much worse than Stancil admits, you should probably bet on a recession coming soon and short the market.

EC-2021: How should the liberal arts argue for their value? Arguing for economic value seems probably true, but (1) it's unclear that will remain true, (2) seems to concede that college is about job training which they don't really want to do and (3) doesn't seem to be believed, regardless of truth.

I've said a couple of times that we need more “public intellectuals” to argue for/demonstrate the value proposition of the liberal arts, but I'm wondering if this is actually true.

I’ve said this before, but I think there’s just a big divergence between what most people see as potentially valuable in the liberal arts and what most humanities faculty think is valuable and important.

But any modern society has a lot of educated professionals. Many of them are technical specialists (engineers, scientists, doctors) and some of them aren’t (lawyers, teachers, middle managers), but they form a sort of collective social elite. And I think it’s not that hard to persuade people that over and above the specific skills members of this elite need to do their jobs, it’s good for them to be inculcated with a sense of the values of American civilization. That involves understanding our American political history, but also the history of proto-constitutionalism in England and the classical republics than the founders looked to as inspiration. A particular sense of religious freedom is an important part of the story of America, and while that’s not a sectarian point (the point is religious freedom!), the fact is also that as a historical matter, the American concept of religious freedom develops out of the specific circumstances of the Protestant Reformation.

So you have an important sequence of historical events — from Greece to Rome to “the Dark Ages” and the Renaissance and Reformation and the founding of America. You have a philosophical lineage from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Locke and Mill and Rawls.

And you have literary and artistic cultures that were informed by these historical and intellectual trends and that also informed them. And you have traditionally had a belief that it is important for important people to be broadly educated in these themes. But while I think that kind of traditional broad liberal education would of course involve some exposure to radical critics of Anglo-American liberal capitalism (it’s good to be well-informed) and perhaps even a smattering of instructors who endorse the radical critiques (it’s good to sit in rooms and listen to smart people with ideas you don’t agree with), the current trends on campus are toward an atmosphere where the radical criticism predominates. And as the critical theories themselves would tell you, there’s no way Anglo-American liberal capitalist society is going to sustain generous financial support for institutions whose self-ascribed mission is to undermine faith in the main underpinnings of society.