The Slow Boring Mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Friday, 21 Dec 

21 - 27 minutes

Kevin McCarthy is going to retire, but Slow Boring’s work continues. I really want to once again thank everyone who chipped in for our GiveDirectly fundraiser, as well as Judd and Jill who shared the fundraiser with their readers. We’ll have a final total for you in a few days, but thanks to your generosity, we ended up smashing our first goal and both of our stretch goals. Hoping to rope more Substackers into this next year and raise even more!

In other good news, redwoods are making a comeback. Lead water pipes are getting replaced. Productivity surged last quarter, and job openings continued to normalize even while hires stayed steady — that’s soft landing territory. This year, the “dead zone” in the Chesapeake Bay shrunk to its smallest size on record. New methane regulations represent a sensible, measured approach to climate pollution. Meanwhile, oil keeps getting cheaper, even as OPEC tries to cut production — a win-win for the United States. On the climate front, Lithos has an ambitious new carbon capture program that relies on enhanced rock weathering, but they use the dust for agriculture rather than as beach sand.

On to some questions.

Ryan B: I’ve just settled into my seat at the art house theater. Tonight premieres The Matthew Yglesias Story: No Subtitle Necessary.”

I pick a sliver of un-popped corn from my molar and wonder: what song will play over the montage scene?

It depends what’s happening in the montage! But I think “What New York Used To Be” by the Kills could be a very strong choice.

Or if you want to cover my time living in a basement apartment in DC, you could go very literal with “Basement: DC” by the French Kicks.

Evan Bear: A few years ago when people successfully got The Atlantic to un-hire Kevin Williamson, I believe you were, if not supportive of that effort, at least anti-anti- on the grounds that no one's entitled to a perch at The Atlantic, that being denied one is not persecution, and that Williamson has in fact held some very bad opinions. Would you feel differently about the Williamson controversy if it had happened today? Williamson has written the strongest anti-Trump stuff I'm aware of from an unimpeachably conservative perspective, and I can't think of anyone else who's capable of replicating that. Based on the logic of your Hanania piece from a while back, it might be valuable to society if Williamson's writing had a wider audience. (I get that the two situations are distinguishable since people were trying to get Hanania off the entire internet, not just removed from a perch at a big magazine, but I also think it's hard to dispute that Hanania is worse than Williamson.)

Rather than revisit the specifics of the Williamson case, let me outline two views of mine that a lot of people see as in tension with each other, but that I see as complementary.

One is that on a publication level, I think it’s good for publications to be rather narrow-minded and sectarian. I got my start at the American Prospect, which at the time was a fairly dogmatic labor liberal publication. And we were part of a larger ecosystem of small ideological magazines that included the crunchy liberal Mother Jones, the left-left Nation, the Washington Monthly (which was deliberately heterodox on domestic issues), the New Republic (domestically liberal but hawkish on foreign policy), the neocon Weekly Standard, the paleocon American Conservative, the libertarian Reason, and the fusionist Weekly Standard. I regret that much of the publishing ecosystem has become more generic these days. And I think it’s broadly bad that so many publication inhabit such a scattershot array of ideological stances.

At the same time, I don’t approve of efforts to anathematize writers based on the idea that, well, such-and-such a guy is bad. I’ve read good articles about specific topics from socialists, from racists, from insane neocons, from woke weirdos and from all kinds of other people.

And I think there’s an interaction between the decline of overt sectarianism and the rise of anathematization as a process. If I ran a publication, I would absolutely not hire Kevin Williamson, because I would want my publication to reflect my views and my view is that strident anti-abortion politics is bad. That’s it. Handshake, smile, nice to meet you, but that’s not for us. The problems seep in when publications try to define themselves as broad-minded, because nobody is actually infinitely broad-minded. So when someone comes along who you don’t want to have as a colleague, you can’t have a professional discussion that’s like “I think our editorial line should be X and that’s not compatible with this guy’s views.” Instead, it becomes a quasi-HR issue. Probably the most infamous example of that was NYT writers trying to say that Tom Cotton’s “send in the troops” op-ed was a workplace safety problem rather than just a take they disagreed with.

So tl;dr my main regret about Williamson is having weighed in at all, because my actual view of the Atlantic is about two orders separated from that. I think it’s a very good publication that employs a lot of very skilled writers and editors. But the project of trying to unite all anti-Trump forces but also not disagree with Jeffrey Goldberg about Israel strikes me as kind of conceptually unsound.

If you want a good example of a present-day sectarian publication, I think Bari Weiss’ Free Press shows how it’s done. The project here is essentially to try to get people with moderate opinions on cultural issues to be horrified by the far-left and vote for Republicans. That’s a project I’m profoundly unsympathetic to, even though as a person with moderate opinions on cultural issues I do agree with a lot of the specific articles they publish. But part of how they make that project work is that they never run any articles about abortion. They don’t run pro-life articles and they don’t run pro-choice articles. It’s like one of the most important topics in American politics just doesn’t exist, along with Medicaid expansion and gun control. These are things that would be divisive so they are suppressed.

To craft a genuine broad church anti-Trump publication, it’s not so much that you would need voices like Williamson on staff as that you would need to suppress all discussion of the topics that led people to object to him. I think that would in practice be a very dull publication — the badness of the Orange Man is a real and important thing but a limited basis for a magazine.

Eddy: In hindsight, do you wish that when you co-founded Vox that you guys built it with a paid subscription model? Do you think in that scenario that it would have evolved to be closer to your original vision and expectations for it?

Per the above, if I could live my life all over again, I just don’t think I would have tried to create a general interest internet publication.

At the time, though, I don’t think a subscription model would have made much sense. Investors were willing to put money up for free sites that could demonstrate growth potential, and as a journalist, I want people to read things. Investors wouldn’t have liked a paywall pitch, and I don’t mind if the investors lose money on giving people free stuff to read. But in terms of no-paywall business models, I think two companies have plausible approaches that I wish we’d explored — Semafor and The Ringer, which use free web content as essentially marketing material for an events business and a podcast business. Those two came along later, though.

Mike: Nate Silver made the argument that the “bad economy” vibes come from companies being able to do price discrimination better now, so capturing more of what used to be consumer surplus.

Leaving aside whether this is why people think the economy is bad (I'm skeptical), it does seem that there's more stealthy price discrimination stuff going on, with variable fees and personalized pricing and so forth. This feels bad to me, but is it actually?

I thought that was a bit of an uncharacteristically speculative take from him, but it’s an interesting hypothesis to model out. You assume the economy is chugging along and then there’s a shock in the form of improved price discrimination techniques. This makes companies more profitable and reduces consumer surplus, which is going to make most people worse off. But then the second-order effect should be increased investment to try to capture the newly available profits. In the end, you ought to get a richer, higher-productivity economy with capital deepening. So it should be fine.

Now, in the real world, it’s not clear to me there has been any huge increase in price discrimination.

But what is true about the Biden economy is that while private nonresidential fixed investment is fine, it’s just that … fine. The administration has made a big deal about a boom in factory construction, which is certainly interesting, but that’s not the same as a generalized boom in investment. It’s just partially offsetting the collapse in office construction. This is where I get a little frustrated with the endless rounds of argument about what’s driving perceptions of the economy. Whether you want to characterize the current economy as “full employment yay!” or “everything is awful despite full employment!” the reality is that unemployment rate is very low. When that’s the case, you need an economic policy approach that promotes productivity growth and investment.

Zach Reuss: Your “Obama got most things right” and “It's not just Biden” columns read to me as messages directed at the Admin that regardless of how we got to here (A time where people are annoyed by inflation and deficits matter again), it IS time to switch to a supply expanding productivity focused economic strategy.

I personally find this convincing, but it feels frustratingly at odds with the message Ramamurti voiced in your “The Truth about Bidenomics” podcast episode with him. It was also notable that you weren't making your case for a supply focus very strongly in that conversation. Instead you mostly asked probing questions to get Ramamurti to layout his case for a consumer and jobs first economic policy more clearly.

So, my question is what's the best way to make this case? Are you hoping influential people like Ramamurti inside the admin are reading your columns. Is it a strategic consideration that they might be more receptive to those messages in writing rather than in a more argumentative way in a podcast. Do you share your more prescriptive thoughts before or after the formal podcast conversation?

This is more a question of editorial taste than anything else. I don’t think contentious “hard-hitting” interviews are very interesting or productive. At a minimum, it’s not something that I particularly enjoy doing. What I like to do is try to give smart people a chance to lay out their views, and in this case, I think the points about the benefits of a real focus on the rapid restoration of full employment are very important and things that I agree with.

In terms of a persuasion strategy, I’m really just trying to explain the economic situation to more politically minded people. Biden-era Democrats are putting a lot of emphasis on intra-coalition comity and avoiding infighting. That’s not a theory about economic policy, it’s a politically determined constraint that economic policymakers are dealing with. And I understand the thinking behind imposing that constraint. But what I want the constraint-imposers to see is that they are making it very hard to generate additional economic progress, not because the drive for full employment was a bad idea but because it succeeded. But what comes after success? You can’t just keep creating jobs — you need to turn the page.

Woody Campbell: Roughly what percentage of cops do you estimate are quiet quitting? Since it can often be hard to fire lazy cops, are there any programs you would support that would increase their motivation on the job? Are there any legal issues with some nonprofit providing cash incentives to their local police department (or directly to their local cops) in return for enrollment in one of these programs?

I think the idea that it’s “hard to fire lazy cops” misstates the problem.

To me, the central issue with criminal justice reformers’ thinking about police management is that they’ve been treating the problems they’re wrestling with as more unique than they really are. But just think about any workplace where you have a bunch of employees. When someone fucks up dramatically, they get fired, but otherwise people kind of just chug along and perform their jobs with various levels of quality along various dimensions. Then you decide one day that the current level of job performance is unsatisfactory and you want to raise the bar. You need to ask yourself some basic questions:

    If some of the staff don’t like the new rules and quit, can I replace them?

    If some of the staff don’t follow the new rules and I fire them, can I replace them?

    If some of the staff neither quit nor break the rules, but just act surly and unmotivated in response to the change, can I replace them?

The answer to those questions is going to hinge on the state of the labor market, the hiring rules, your budget, and whether you’re willing to make concessions in other areas. What reformers tried to do with urban policing was simultaneously raise the bar for police officer conduct, reduce the non-pecuniary benefits of being a police officer in terms of social and cultural prestige, and also redirect funds to other municipal services. That doesn’t work. Once you dispense with the fantasy that a city can get by without police officers, it’s clear that substantially changing policing is going to be expensive, not a source of budgetary savings.

I think we need to be thinking much harder and more seriously about the policing talent pipeline. If your message to the public is “cops are racist,” then only racists are going to want to become cops and you’re going to have a huge problem. We need ideas like Police for America to get idealistic people who care about cities to try to actually do the work of making them safe.

Miles Teg: I recall reading that wages and certain people's wealth grew after the black death. Fewer people were around to both own things and to work. Is there any related and measurable effect from COVID? Is part of the post-COVID increased household balance sheet because more people inherited wealth? Is the hot labor market in part downstream of fewer potential workers being alive?

The Black Death took place in the context of a pre-industrial economy where the primary determinant of incomes was the per capita availability of land. When a bunch of people died, the survivors ended up with higher living standards on average than we saw in pre-plague Europe.

A modern service economy doesn’t work like that. And Covid in particular just didn’t kill that many people compared to something like the Black Death. We’re not all sitting around talking about how cheap food is now that there are fewer mouths to fee — the disruptions to world trade caused by the Ukraine War totally swamp that. Even in something basic like post-Covid housing, the dominant issue is that remote work increased demand for square footage among affluent professionals, so housing scarcity is worse than ever, even though life expectancy fell.

Will Thomas: I saw a Twitter thread recently asking why the US doesn’t have a Schengen Area type agreement with Canada, which from my perspective seems like it’d be a win-win for both countries. I imagine many Canadians could benefit from the stronger wage premium they could earn in the United States, while many American cities would probably benefit from easier access to Canada — Buffalo, Detroit, Burlington, Seattle. My thinking is that this might be easier to negotiate in the near future, as we’re likely to have a Democratic President overlapping with a Conservative Prime Minister: my read is that Republicans are allergic to anything that smacks of open borders, while Canadian Conservatives are less concerned about maintaining ‘Canadian Uniqueness’ and care more about opening markets with the United States. Do you think that’s about right? Or more broadly, do you think we have any chance of achieving free movement of people with Canada (or any other country, for that matter), in the near future?

The Schengen arrangement, which is about the lack of passport controls, is actually a somewhat different aspect of the European Union than the labor mobility provisions. The UK, for example, was never in the Schengen Area but EU membership still meant that Romanian plumbers could move over there and work. So with that in mind, the US and Canada actually did have Schengen-type freedom of mobility until 9/11 led to moves to harden the border. But Canadians never had the right to come work in the United States or vice versa.

Personally, I think creating an integrated US-Canadian labor market would be a good idea — I believed I proposed one in “One Billion Americans.”

Lenzy T Jones: You’ve touched on this topic somewhat, but whats your take on why it’s even more prevalent among young-ish (like teens to early 30s) Black folks to be both anti-Israel and antisemitic? I understand historically why a certain segment would be (NOI was popular in parts of Chicago in the 80s and 90s) but it just appears to be even more pronounced now. There’s a viral post that supposedly shows “Jews” saying how much Black Americans are a “threat” to them and it’s so well received that it’s astounding. I can maybe formulate a reasoning but I want to know your take. This is something that kind of frustrates me because my grandfather was involved in both the traditional civil rights movement and the Black power movement but he still held a pretty positive view of Jewish people both in the particulars and broadly. In fact, he seemed to venerate them and actually had a good relationship with my Jewish great-grandfather on the other side of my family. So I was taught to see alliance there and not demonize them in the ways I see online or offline now.

I don’t really know, but if you look at the Hersh and Royden research on antisemitism, they test a bunch of leading theories (it’s about Israel, it’s about anti-whiteness, etc) and find that they are all wrong. Given that context, my hypothesis is that African-Americans are more inclined to believe conspiracy theories in general than white Americans.

If you look at something like DC Councilman Trayon White talking about “the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man,” I’m not sure he even knows or cares that this is a specifically anti-semitic conspiracy theory. And before Kanye West was saying anti-semitic stuff, he was putting out songs like “Crack Music,” which avows a range of conspiratorial beliefs about the US government’s involvement in the drug trade. A 2005 Lancet article finds very high levels of Black belief in various HIV/AIDS conspiracy theories. Back when Hurricane Katrina hit and the U Street area of DC was less gentrified, I heard lots of people talking about how the Bush administration and/or some unspecified white people had deliberately breached the New Orleans levees. Sometimes that was done to prevent flooding from hitting the Garden District and the French Quarter, sometimes it was done to remove the city’s Black population. Us old-timers in DC also know about “The Plan” to make Chocolate City white again.

My theory of the chain of causation is that a long history of anti-Black discrimination leads to low levels of social trust, which leads to high levels of belief in conspiracy theories, which leads to high levels of anti-semitism, since anti-semitism — in a way that is somewhat distinct from most forms of ethnic bias — tends to take a specifically conspiratorial form.

I’d also note that there’s a fairly widespread normalization of semi-positive Jewish stereotyping in hip-hop culture. See, for example, this compilation of rappers talking about their Jewish lawyers.

Each individual instance of this is a pretty harmless and occasionally funny joke, but there’s a reason that this kind of ethnic humor has been broadly stigmatized in mainstream culture.

Matt: Do you support shifting from a fee-for-service to a value-based care model in healthcare reimbursement. Do you think this can significantly decrease healthcare costs?

There are smart takes about how we should do this floating around, and I broadly agree with everything they say, but it all strikes me as wildly unrealistic.

In particular, I think the world underrates how rising educational attainment and improved information technology has shifted the relationship between doctors and patients. If you go back 50 or 100 years when the average level of education in the population was much lower, the gap between the knowledge level of a doctor and the knowledge level of a typical patient was much larger. And before the internet, a patient had no effective way to research symptoms or treatment options. Patients, of course, still want to see doctors and get their help. But they expect to be able to get the treatment that they want. If some cranks on the internet have convinced you that you want to take hydroxychloroquine to fight Covid, you’re not going to let your doctor stop you from getting it — you’re going to go see a different doctor. In the kind of society we have, people are going to want fee-for-service medical care.

John C: Do you share concerns the AGI could pose existential risk in the near term future, and if so, do you have any thoughts on the best ways to mitigate that risk?

I’m not going to let the machines find out what I think, but I’ll leave this link here.

Just Some Guy: You hinted at this on Twitter, but what's your general take on Kissinger?

I haven’t read any of the various Kissinger books, so I sincerely have no idea, for example, how much things like US policy toward Pakistan during the Bangladesh genocide hinged on his personal activities versus broader consensus inside the Nixon administration.

The main thing I’ve noticed as a student of the discourse is that different people tend to talk about Henry Kissinger with very different things in mind. To his left critics, “Henry Kissinger” is a stand-in for the crimes and excesses of American prosecution of the Cold War. But Kissinger’s fans don’t celebrate him as the ultimate tough-on-Communism guy because the real tough-on-Communism guys think he was a squish. To them, “Henry Kissinger” is a stand-in for the idea of bold acts of diplomacy — the opening to China, the shuttle diplomacy between Israel and Egypt. But on some important level, I think the real Henry Kissinger isn’t the one who served at a high level of government in the Nixon and Ford administrations, it’s the guy who spent the next 40+ years making money while always retaining at least the appearance of access to the corridors of power to better sell that access.