Veterans Day Eve Mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

Nov 9, 2023

Paid

Hey folks, got a slightly off schedule this week. Saturday is Veterans Day, but Friday is a federal holiday in observation of Veterans Day so we’re going to do a federal holiday re-run post tomorrow and a mailbag today.

At any rate, the major good news of the week is obviously the wins for abortion rights in Ohio and for America’s Favorite Moderate Democrat in Kentucky. But we also got some cool YIMBY electoral wins in Maryland. Really bold zoning reform proposal in Milwaukee — would love to see this happen and of course would love to see similar ideas take hold in higher-demand places. I’m excited about the launch of the BluePrint 2024 project, which I think is going to bring a little more sanity to Democratic message-testing. You shouldn’t pay too much attention to quarterly productivity data, but the latest quarterly productivity data was really good. Interest rates are now expected to start falling soon. Gasoline prices have reversed their war scare spike from a month ago. Congestion pricing benefits people at all income levels. ACA Medicaid expansions saved a bunch of lives at a cost of $5.4 million per life or $179,000 per life-year.

Question time!

Emily: What's your DC middle school plan, Matt? Are you going to try to lottery your kid into the same three charter schools as all the other UMC parents who aren't zoned into Hardy/Deal? Is there any world in which you send your kid to your neighborhood middle school? Do you think the widespread dissatisfaction with available middle school options is in any way solvable with parent coordination?

We’re probably going to try to lottery into the same three charter schools as everyone else. We were initially very committed to our feeder pattern, and we plan to stay at our in-boundary elementary school through fifth grade, but I do not think there is any chance we’ll send him to the middle school we are currently zoned for — a very small middle school co-located with Cardozo High School.

I do think the issue is solvable, in my neighborhood, with parent coordination. But unfortunately for us, the locus point for that coordination is going to be the opening of the new standalone Mid-City middle school, which is currently slated to open when our child is in eighth grade. The new school is a good idea and I’m reasonably optimistic about it, but the timing around this is why we’re such doomers about the Cardozo option — given that the middle school we’re currently zoned for is not only bad and shrinking, but is also literally scheduled to be shut down, nobody is particularly interested in investing time or effort in improving it. Which is totally understandable. Objectively, the focus should be on the new school. But the timing is rotten for our family.

Ben Yelin: I live in a suburban community outside Baltimore. The light rail passes through the “downtown” part of our suburb. Currently, there is an abandoned strip mall adjacent to the station. It's an eyesore of a building. Some developers have advanced a proposal to tear down the strip mall and build transit-adjacent apartments.

As you can expect, the neighborhood list-serves are going crazy. NIMBYs out in full force. I'm a proud YIMBY and want to enter the conversation. I think I can make good arguments in terms of economic development, growth etc. But their big talking point is that our schools are already overcrowded and we wouldn't have space for new kids. It is true that our local elementary school is overcrowded, and one of the reasons is that there have been a series of high-rise apartment buildings that went up within our district.

My question: What's the best way to address this argument, from a YIMBY perspective? What would you say at a neighborhood association meeting to assuage this specific concern?

With this kind of thing, it’s important to try to ascertain who your audience is and what’s actually going on. If you’re talking to a parent of a kid who is already attending a crowded school and who just feels, selfishly, that they don’t want to allow anything that stands any chance of making things worse for their kid, then I think you don’t want to be too harsh with them — it’s an understandable concern! But you can just say your view is that what’s best for the town and the county and the state and the country may not be what’s best for one particular family. I would try to talk about the broad benefits of growth, but also try to lower the temperature and acknowledge that people are allowed to be selfish and narrow-minded about their kids.

But as a general argument offered to citizens at large, you should say “don’t allow construction because it crowds schools” is just an obvious conceptual overreach.

If people followed that ethos, there would be no residential communities of any kind anywhere in the country or in any other country. What has happened, over time, is that places experiencing growth have invested in creating public services. And a growing community is, in fact, better able to afford high-quality public services, because when you stagnate, old pension obligations crowd out current operations over time. If you look at a state like Texas whose population has grown much faster than Maryland’s over the past 30 years, it’s not like all their schools are twice as crowded, they just built more schools. Some people are still just going to say that change is bad, and I don’t know how you can convince people that they are wrong. But the point is “oh no, the schools will be too crowded” isn’t a separate argument against growth. You either believe that it is possible for communities to grow and prosper (which it clearly is) or else you don’t. But, yes, obviously part of a community growing is that it will need more stuff.

MB: What is going to happen if Trump comfortably wins a second term? I feel like in liberal circles it’s a bit under discussed because it seems almost too horrible to even contemplate, but if republicans come out of 2024 with a large trifecta, what do you think they’ll do? Specifically, what legislation do you think they’ll try and pass, will Trump’s legal issues affect his presidency, & how will it change democrats and the left more broadly?

Given that Trump is leading in the polls, the brass tacks question of how does he intend to govern the country is the most undercovered story in American politics.

I think well informed people (but not the mass public) are aware of his desire to de-professionalize the Justice Department so it can make sure to focus on selectively targeting his political adversaries while offering impunity to his allies. And I think we have a pretty clear picture of the aspiration to greatly weaken civil service rules and have more cronyism in the federal bureaucracy. The exact implications of that are unclear, but we at least know it’s going to happen.

What I think is really missing is macroeconomic policy. Today’s economic conditions are very different from the conditions of 2001 or 2017, and if Republicans take over and pass the kind of massive tax cuts they are talking about, that will be a lot of upward pressure on inflation and interest rates. That’s going to mean either deep cuts to programs they are promising not to cut, or a serious risk of an out of control spiral. I would really like to see Democrats engage with this debate more clearly, since I think the traditional formula of “make the rich pay their fair share as part of deficit reduction” vs “blow a hole in the deficit with regressive tax cuts and jeopardize Social Security” is a very appropriate debate for contemporary economic circumstances. And, of course, it also plays into the civil service stuff. Is Trump going to respect Fed independence as he bankrupts the country? Is he going to allow the BLS to measure inflation accurately?

Lance Hunter: At the beginning of 2023, a lot of folks were convinced there would be a recession this year. That has now been mathematically eliminated from possibility. Some folks are moving their recession predictions to late 2024, some folks aren't predicting a recession at all in the near future. What's your take? (And how should Democrats be pressing the advantage of the current economy?)

Presumably, a recession will occur at some point.

But on a philosophical level, I don’t think you should ever really expect a recession. The view that you can’t ease demand and reduce inflation without causing a recession never made sense in theory, and we’ve seen over this past year that it’s not true in practice either. So to the extent that policymakers do their job correctly, the only reason a recession should ever occur is a surprise supply shock. That doesn’t mean surprise supply shocks are the only reason recessions will ever occur, of course, but it does mean that when they happen, they are going to be due to policy error. But like supply shocks, that’s not something you can predict by looking at economic variables. So while there absolutely might be a recession next year, if there is it’ll be because the Fed messes up or because a huge regional war in the Middle East disrupts oil supplies or something else that you can’t really predict.

EC-2021: Should people watch more old TV/read more old (un-updated) books to try to get an actual understanding for how much our culture has changed (mostly for the better) over the last 50-100 years? Is that even a good way to do that?

I do think that this is a useful social function of older works of fiction. That’s something I thought about when I was reading this Washington Post article about debates over whether “To Kill A Mockingbird” deserves such prominent placement in school curricula. I, personally, am not a big fan of this book, to the point that over the weekend I said on Twitter that I’d never read it. An old friend of mine reminded me that we did, actually, read it in middle school, but it was apparently sufficiently forgettable that I didn’t remember having read it, even when I read a plot summary on Wikipedia.

And I think the critics who were saying that if you want to assign kids a book about racism and Jim Crow, you should maybe find a Black author (I read “The Bluest Eye,” “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” and “Invisible Man” in high school) are probably correct. But then there was this line of criticism, which seemed to just object to the idea of reading a book about the past:

But Chaitna Deshmukh, a 2022 graduate who was still in school when teachers challenged the book, thinks the novel — while pertinent to the 1960s — fails to address the complex racial problems of the 21st century.

“If you read ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and think, ‘This is what racism looks like,’ then you look at today and you’ll be like, ‘Great, we fixed it,’” said Deshmukh, who is of South Asian descent. “Which is misleading in a lot of ways.”

I don’t particularly want to take a hard dunk on a teenager, but Deshmukh here seems to be rejecting the concept of learning. It’s perfectly fair to say that having addressed some of the glaring issues depicted in an old book does not mean you have fully the problem of racism. But the fact that life in the contemporary United States is very different from what Ralph Ellison or Zora Neale Hurston describe is important information about the world. It’s not “misleading,” it’s true. And the same is true across the board. Anna Karenina has problems that are way beyond mansplaining.

László Sándor: You expressed your worry that home entertainment became too good for people to go out and socialize. Has Slow Boring thought about getting a dog? It is a great commitment mechanism to leave HQ regularly, preferably for nature, and canine vision does not appreciate motion pictures or video games.

I have an eight year-old for this. To wit: Did I particular want to drive 40 minutes last Sunday to go watch some third graders play soccer? No, I could have watched a more fun sporting event from the comfort of my couch. But of course it wasn’t just some third graders, it was my third grader, so I went. And while there I chit-chatted with my fellow increasingly-obnoxious soccer dads and strengthened ties to my community and my interpersonal relationships. And in the long run that makes for a healthier, happier life than one spent narrowly optimizing every minute of entertainment.

Thomas: Having noticed the great divergence in views on Israel/Palestine among young people compared to other generations, what do you think the root cause of it is?

Something that I think older pro-Israel people, especially those who are generally left-of-center, haven’t completely processed is that the 2009 Israeli elections happened 14 years ago. So if you’re under 35, your entire adult life has featured Israeli governments that have no interest (not even a feigned or insincere interest) in pursuing a two-state solution. You can issue whatever complaints you want about woke faculty or Students for Justice in Palestine, but that’s the reality of the political situation young people are dealing with — one in which there is no peace process, just unending occupation and steady expansion of settlements.

I think younger anti-Israel people are missing a lot of context as well, and in particular have decided to ally themselves with what’s basically a make-believe version of Palestinian nationalism. And they don’t know (because it was before their time) what an impression Arafat’s rejection of this Israeli proposal at Taba and the violence of the Second Intifada made on Israeli (and diaspora Jewish) opinion. Any halfway decent person is going to sympathize with the suffering of Palestinians, and people don’t deserve to suffer just because someone else made a bad decision two decades ago. But it’s still true that we could have had an independent Palestine a long time ago if Palestinian leaders had made better decisions.

At the end of the day, arguing about who is “really” to blame for a situation that has involved bad acts on both sides is fruitless. But I think the shifting objective conditions are underrated in explaining the generational divide.

Jack W: Have you ever had to fire someone? If so, how was your anxiety around it?

I have — back at Vox — and it was bad. Management is hard!

Steven Peterson: Crimson Tide is better than The Hunt for Red October. Fight me!

Incorrect take. Look, Crimson Tide is a very fun movie featuring two of our greatest actors going toe-to-toe in some great scenes, and Tony Scott always brings tension and pace.

But it is always my bias, given my dad’s work, to want to point out that screenwriting is very underrated in discussions of movies and these two I think are a great example. The Hunt for Red October features a genuinely crackerjack story. The conception of both the Ramius and Jack Ryan characters is really good, and their actions and interactions reverberate up and down to the Kremlin and the White House in a way that is very well-conceived. Two veteran screenwriters took this great book, and streamlined the exposition just enough so that you have a fun time on first watch but actually uncover more depth on rewatch. John McTiernan brings it to life and his cinematographer Jan de Bont went on to do some cool popcorn movies in his own right as director. But it all builds on a great screenplay built on a great book.

Crimson Tide, by comparison, is just hanging on the charisma of its stars with a story that doesn’t really make much sense.

Ken H: I'm curious what the motivations of progressive funders are. I feel like there's some reading about conservative funders (e.g. Dark Money) but idk if there's any good readings on progressive side.

As I observe some unnecessarily provocative statement/behavior of some of the activist type, I wonder if they genuinely care about the causes and indulge activist types or they, being billionaires, try to sabotage liberal politics by promoting those acts (this is much more conspirational take).

Honestly, I think a lot of people are just kinda dumb. It’s not bad motives.

Brian T: Did you coin the term "sanewashing"? I can't find anyone using the term before you did, and it seems increasingly widely applicable.

I picked it up from this Reddit post.

Jason S: This Coleman Hughes podcast on the myth of Left and Right (the title of the book by the guests) made an impression on me. Do you think this sort of sociopolitical CBT can have a real impact on politics if it propagates enough?

I don’t think the view outlined by these guests is fully correct, but I do think it’s a useful corrective to the alternate viewpoint (see Thomas Sowell for the right-wing version and Cory Robin for the left-wing version) in which all of politics across space and time is a grand conflict between two dichotomous worldviews.

Politics often has a somewhat shifting and arbitrary quality to it. A lot of politics is just interest groups jostling. A lot of politics is just mistakes. I don’t think there’s any “reason” grounded in The Nature of Conservatism that Donald Trump thinks tariffs mechanically increase GDP by increasing net exports. That’s an error. It’s a mistaken causal interpretation of an accounting identity. But a lot of people think this, or convince themselves that their own confusion is some hidden truth that economists are trying to elide. And Trump has had strong opinions about this for a long time, going back to way before he was a Republican. But then for reasons related to immigration and his peculiar racist attitudes toward Barack Obama he did become a Republican, so now his weird accounting identity mixup is at the center of conservative economic policy. When I was in college, though, Greg Mankiw would have given this as an example of a dumbass leftist idea. In truth, it’s just dumb.

Randall: Maybe you’ve written about this and I’ve missed it but it feels overlooked: how do you feel about the work that Lina Khan is doing?

I have somewhat mixed feelings.

The view that anti-trust enforcement had become too lax and the government too willing to accept conduct remedies and special deals rather than blocking mergers seems correct to me. We had, for example, too much consolidation in regional health care markets. The idea that prevailing anti-trust legal doctrine needed revising to consider non-pecuniary harms also seems reasonable to me. When so much business dynamism is around free, ad-supported services, you need a broader view of welfare than just “what’s the price?” that includes things about privacy, control over data, and other things people may care about. So that’s all good and I actually think you could make a case that competition policy, broadly construed, continues to be underrated.

But I have just never understood the view that Amazon is a monopoly, and that view is obviously very core to Khan’s life work. So this is a somewhat narrow disagreement but also a significant one. Personally, I don’t worry too much about it since it seems like the FTC is just going to lose in court (this was the point of Khan’s famous paper about Amazon — that you couldn’t bring a successful case against them), and I do like a fair amount of what she’s doing.

The real problem that arose in this space was a little tangential to Khan herself. It’s that when excess demand created inflation, people saw that profits were rising (which is just a straightforward consequence of excess demand) and decided to label that a competition policy problem called “greedflation.” Nothing bad happened as a result of that in the antitrust space, but it did slow recognition of the need to bring demand back down in a sustainable way.

Jeff: You have said on multiple ocassions that you are trying to avoid writing about Isreal, and yet you have written two [very good, IMO] pieces on it. How about writing a column on Ukraine?

Thank you! I guess maybe I should write about Ukraine. I haven’t felt particular inspired here because nothing that interesting is happening on the battlefield and the discourse doesn’t seem particularly fresh either. To just quickly distinguish it from Israel, though, I would make two points:

The aid qua aid is just much more significant in the Ukraine case, both in terms of its centrality to Ukraine’s military and in terms of how much money the US is spending.

The Ukrainian government doesn’t really do anything that is contrary to America’s interests. Supporting them is somewhat expensive, but there’s no equivalent to how the Israeli settlement project inflicts collateral reputational damage on the United States.

So with Ukraine, I think the debate really is a debate about aid. Is support to Ukraine money well spent, at what margin, compared to what, etc? Which is to say it’s a pretty normal budget debate. With Israel, I don’t want to dismiss the significance of the aid, but it’s pretty clear that the passions inspired by this issue aren’t fundamentally “about” the fiscal cost or the optimal allocation of the foreign aid budget.

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