End of the mailbag as we know it. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

End of the mailbag as we know it

Matthew Yglesias

13 - 17 minutes

Today’s mailbag is not the last ever, but we are going to be hitting pause on the regular Friday mailbag columns and unveiling a new format that we think will be a little fresher and get a wider circle of people engaged. Watch for full details on how to participate in this Sunday’s thread.

While you wait, here’s some good news: Joe Biden is badly out-fundraising Donald Trump, the ongoing reforestation of the US east coast is delivering environmental benefits, Wisconsin’s egregious gerrymandering has been largely fixed, and lot size reform works. Here’s a good bill from John Cornyn that would create a stronger version of gainful employment rules to crack down on higher education scams.

Meanwhile, the newly funded and aggressive tax police are on the beat, taking on abusive tax deductions related to private jets.

lindamc: Tyler Cowen recently had a crazy or genius take on Casablanca: This was a follow-up to a Twitter thread on the topic “what is a good book or film that charts the trajectory of a profoundly healthy and transformational relationship?”

Cowen’s read is funny, but I think the more conventional read is better aligned with the context of the time. The movie is based on an unproduced play, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” that was written in 1940, and the screen rights were purchased right after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hollywood was very pro-Allies and pro-intervention in the early days of World War II (Charles Lindberg and other anti-semites in the isolationist camp complained a lot about Jewish influence on Hollywood in this regard), and the point of the story really is that Rick and Ilsa choose duty and idealism over comfort and happiness.

What Cowen is pointing to is a plot flaw in the film.

The story hinges on the idea that helping a Czech resistance leader flee Vichy-controlled North Africa and make it to the United States would make an important contribution to the war effort. Everyone in the film — Rick, Ilsa, Strasser, Laszlo himself — acts on this idea. The letters of transit that Laszlo needs work perfectly well as a MacGuffin, but Laszlo himself isn’t a MacGuffin; he’s an important player in a love triangle. And while “saving Laszlo is really important” must have felt like a reasonable story choice in the context of 1940, we have the luxury of knowing the actual history. The Pearl Harbor bombings in December 1941 brought the United States into the war, Allied forces landed first in North Africa, then in Italy, and then in France. Red Army forces would beat the Nazis in the east, and postwar Czechoslovakia would become a Soviet satellite state. The fate of someone like Laszlo would be totally unimportant, and that opens the door to Cowen’s cynical read of the whole thing.

But you could rescue the stakes with a tiny tweak: What if instead of being a Czech resistance leader, Laszlo was a Czech nuclear scientist?

The whole story was written by people who didn’t know how the war ended, so they weren’t able to properly set up the “Laszlo escaping is objectively important to defeating the Axis” story with any detail. But the movie works fine as long as you accept the idea that all the characters, given the situation, believe Laszlo is important.

Nicholas Decker: Cousin marriage is bad for your health. In-breeding reduces lifespan by about three years on average, and one round of cousin marriage reduces mean IQ of the offspring by 2.5-3.5 points . Pakistanis in Britain, who have an extremely high rate of in-breeding, account for three percent of births and one third of recessive genetic disorders.

A map of cousin marriage will simply be a map of the Muslim world (excepting Southeast Asia). Given this, how much of the economic underperformance of that region can be attributable to cousin marriage? And is there a path forward for reform? And could Britain substantially improve the world by banning cousin marriage?

One thing I learned looking into this question is that cousin marriage is much more widely legal than I realized. Not only is it allowed in almost every European country (surprising to me), it’s also allowed in much of the United States, including all three places that I’ve lived and also Maine, where I’ve spent a lot of time. At the same time, per the question, the only places in the world where cousin marriage is actually common are places with large Muslim populations. One takeaway from this is that in practice, the stigmatization and discouragement of cousin marriage globally does not seem to tightly track around questions of formal legal status.

This brings us to a bunch of considerations that remind me the value and importance of “identity politics.”

It seems like it would be good for the world if the Muslim world adopted the conventional wisdom that cousin marriage is bad. And it’s interesting, per Decker’s observations, that cousin marriage appears to be very rare in the Muslim countries of Southeast Asia. So it seems like the most plausible mode of change here would probably involve actual Muslims — perhaps from Indonesia or Malaysia — engaging on this subject and shifting social norms. That might involve legal prohibitions in certain places, along with propaganda, media campaigns, sermons, or whatever else.

But if we’re talking about Britain, then I’m not sure that having a bunch of anti-immigration people suspected of bigotry running around complaining about “inbred” Pakistanis is actually a constructive intervention.

Among other things, it’s 2024, so whatever rules you make around civil marriage are not going to bind actual behavior all that strictly, especially if the new rules are seen as an attack on the community. At this point, we start getting into issues that are way above my pay grade in terms of the nuances of British politics, the state of Islamic teaching around cousin marriage, and a dozen other things. What I do think we can say with strong confidence is that norms against consanguineous relationships are good and we should put that factual information out there.

Bennie: Does the successful mass resettlement of Vietnamese refugees in the 70s offer any lessons for today's immigration problems?

There are definitely lessons, but I don’t know that they are usable lessons. The key thing about the Vietnamese refugee surge is that while it prompted a good deal of opposition, the partisan political system was also very poorly sorted and unpolarized at that time. Anti-refugee sentiment was bipartisan, but so was pro-refugee sentiment, and when you have a kind of cross-party elite consensus, you can get things done.

Monkey Staring at a Monolith: With regard to the UK, I've wondered whether some kind of NAFTA-style US/UK deal makes sense. IMHO this could be a slight negative economically for the US and still a net positive for the US if it made the UK more capable.

There was a lot of buzz around a US-UK free trade deal in the later Trump years because Trump was politically sympathetic to Brexit and thus wanted to help out pro-Brexit politicians by letting them make a show of progress on trade agreements. Joe Biden, by contrast, is anti-Brexit (and vaguely anti-British in an Irish-American kind of way) so he hasn’t wanted to help them out politically with talks about talks. That might change if Biden wins re-election and Keir Starmer becomes prime minister, since they’d be two very aligned figures who would be inclined to want to do photo ops with each other and make happy announcements.

But a big question that’s been hanging over everything since Brexit is what would the UK actually want in terms of a trade deal.

The big thing these deals normally address are “non-tariff barriers” to trade — regulations. So, for example, you normally can’t sell American meat in the United Kingdom, not because of tariffs on American meat, but because UK law (which is based on EU law) bans chlorine-washed chickens and hormone-fed beef for what Europeans say are bona fide safety reasons. You could imagine a world where British politicians reach the conclusion that these safety concerns are, in fact, pretextual and should be dropped in the context of a trade deal that secures offsetting market access wins for British companies. But everything I’ve read in the UK press suggests that British politicians do not think those rules are pretextual and keep insisting they won’t make that concession in a free trade deal.

That could be fine if it’s limited to the meat question.

But as Meredith Broadbent writes for CSIS, there are broadly different regulatory philosophies operating in DC and Brussels, with the American approach generally being more business-friendly and the European approach generally being more of a precautionary principle mindset. Back in the Obama administration, there were steps toward a big Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) that would have sought major US-EU regulatory harmonization, but the parties were way too far apart. Broadbent’s piece is titled “U.S.-UK Trade Agreement: Now Is the Time,” but if you read her text, she isn’t just arguing for an agreement, she’s saying Britain should broadly accept American regulatory standards:

    The USMCA [that’s Trump’s renamed NAFTA] contains strong obligations related to regulation and standard-setting that should be mirrored in a U.S.-UK trade deal. Canada, Mexico, and the United States agreed to respect WTO and Technical Barrier to Trade (TBT) principles for determining a legitimate international standard, which clarified the legitimacy of standards developed with due process in a fair and open manner. The USMCA ensures that U.S. SDOs can propose standards that can be multilateralized. This is a big achievement, as Europe limits recognition to European-dominated standards organizations and promotes that discriminatory view to the rest of the world. However, parties to the USMCA are obligated to consider all standards that satisfy the legitimate objective of a technical regulation or conformity assessment procedure. Including this provision in a U.S.-UK deal will therefore enable technically equivalent standards to be referenced and used, significantly cutting U.S.-UK import/export costs and prices for food, services, and manufacturing inputs.

Broadbent’s argument to the Biden administration is that Britain is in a weak negotiating position, so we should aggressively pursue a deal. I’m inclined to agree with her, but the harder question to answer is does Britain believe that it’s in a weak negotiation position, such that it should make a deal that just consists of caving?

Now, of course, there are probably lots of British people, especially on the right, who just think the American regulatory approach is better on the merits, so they would welcome these kind of concessions. That’s, in fact, often a major subtext of trade negotiations. National leaders make “concessions” that they actually think are good domestic reforms on the merits, and then win parallel “concessions” from foreign partners that are used to sell the reforms in a domestic political context. Is this something British policymakers are interest in? Would it be something that Starmer’s team would be interested in? I sincerely don’t know.

What I can tell you is that this is the big, dumb paradox of Brexit.

The notion of “taking back control” is obviously appealing. But whether in or out of the EU, the UK is just not a large enough country to dictate the terms of the global regulatory environment. Most countries just take this for granted. Britain has a somewhat unique history as a country that was a major world power in the relatively recent past and thus seems understandably uncomfortable acclimating itself to the present situation.

I will say, though, that people are sometimes excessively down on the British economy and its prospects. The problem with the UK is that they have a very bad housing situation, and housing is such an important economic sector that the bad housing situation drags everything else down. But it’s much better to be a country with a single gigantic problem than one with dozens of separate medium-sized problems.

longwalkdownlyndale: Any big theories about Brandon Johnson's struggles? (I think he has a 22% approval rating). Could anyone be a popular mayor of a place like Chicago in this era?

Chicago is at the opposite end of the spectrum. As I’ve said in a couple of different posts, Chicago is facing really serious headwinds that relate to being the de facto “capital” of a large American region that is in structural decline, mostly because of weather. Over and above that, the city was facing a number of significant pre-pandemic challenges, and then it was hit by the specific shocks of the 2020 murder surge and the blow to every city’s tax base induced by remote work.

That means taking over as mayor is an extremely high degree of difficulty job, and I sincerely do not think it is obvious what the mayor of Chicago should be doing.

But more specifically, Brandon Johnson is the local champion of the national progressive movement network, and I think this movement has basically nothing useful to say about the situation facing a city like Chicago. It has a fundamentally distributive analysis of American politics, which captures some very important truths about the national government. As applied to a city like Boston, where Michelle Wu is trying to run the progressive playbook, I think it’s a lot less insightful but still potentially okay. But as applied to Chicago or other lower-demand cities, it just doesn’t make sense. These cities need ideas to promote economic growth and to make the delivery of public services more cost-effective.

A bunch of different candidates in the mayor’s race would have defeated Johnson, because I think most Chicagoans were aware all along that a sharp left turn was the wrong prescription for the city. But due to the vagaries of runoff dynamics, he ended up facing the most-conservative challenger in the field in the second round. And then Paul Vallas turned out to have done stuff prior to his run (like badmouthing Barack Obama on conservative talk radio) that’s obviously politically toxic in Chicago. So you wound up with a mayor whose ideas and background are poorly suited to the job.