Slow Boring: Weekend Update, March 27

Weekend Update, March 27

Quick hits to start your Saturday

By Matthew Yglesias

Mar 27

Have a nice weekend, folks.

Making corporate media more corporate

Domino’s Pizza has a job posting up for a data journalist which, naturally, a lot of people in journalism think is funny.

I’ll say that while I don’t have a particularly clear vision for a Domino’s-centric digital publication, I do think corporate loss-leader journalism is a potentially good idea. The basic story of how the internet changed journalism is that it’s made it a lot cheaper to produce and distribute content, but also harder to monetize. That should be an advantage to anyone — be that a pizza chain or a nonprofit — who wants to do journalism for reasons other than a desire to directly monetize journalism.

Like, imagine if Tesla ran a small newsroom covering the electricity and transportation industries from a basic editorial perspective of “solar power and electric cars are good.” It could delve into boring-but-important subjects about how electrical grid regulation works. Coverage of research into the harms of particulate air pollution. Investigations of mass transit and airport boondoggles. Stuff about the energy needs of the developing world and the flaws in the “limits to growth” model. It would be propaganda of course. But precisely because a Tesla News product would be greeted with suspicion, it would actually have a strong incentive to cultivate a reputation for scrupulous accuracy — which today’s ad-supported and SEO-driven news outlets don’t have.

I think that by conventional standards, the vast majority of journalists would condemn something like that as unethical, and people would worry about going to work there lest their reputations be compromised. But it seems to me that all business models have their downsides, shortfalls, and blindspots. And accuracy should be the real lodestar of journalistic ethics. And the great thing about accuracy is that it’s a totally achievable goal, even for a publication that has serious conflicts of interest.

Partisanship and whiteness

Black, Asian, and Hispanic Americans each rate their own ethnic group slightly more highly than the other three. Whites, by contrast, rate all four groups about the same on average.

What’s interesting is this decomposes into a stark partisan split, wherein white Republicans rate white people considerably higher than other ethnic groups, but white Democrats rate white people lower than non-white groups.

Twitter avatar for @drdesante

Christopher DeSante 

@drdesante

I've seen a chart showing that Whites in the 2020 ANES rate all groups equally while other racial groups show bias towards their own group. This first statement is accurate, but the post-racial narrative collapses when you disaggregate the data by partisanship. Image

March 25th 2021

40 Retweets160 Likes

The whole idea of giving a rating to an ethnic group is pretty odd (albeit a fairly standard line of social science inquiry), but this result, while not exactly shocking, does help explain some of the behavior you see on both sides. I guess the main thing I would say is that if you’re a white Democrat, then making public expressions of your dislike of white people may help make you feel better. But in a country where the electorate continues to be pretty overwhelmingly white, this is probably not a good way to win elections. So you should at least consider how this kind of talk is actually impacting the lives of non-white people who you ostensibly want to help.

Remember — intent isn’t what matters; it’s consequences that are the most important thing.

Helping poor kids is good

Will cash benefits for families that don’t include work requirements end up devastating adult labor force participation? It didn’t in Canada:

We investigate whether child tax benefits reduce child poverty and labor force participation among single mothers within the context of the 2015 expansion of the Canadian Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB) and the 2016 introduction of the Canada Child Benefit (CCB). We compare single mothers to single childless women as single mothers have historically had the highest poverty rates. Our analysis indicates that both reforms reduced child poverty, although the Canada Child Benefit had the greater effect. We find no evidence of a labor supply response to either of the program reforms on either the extensive or intensive margins.

Taking the ARP refundable Child Tax Credit, making it permanent, and improving it is the thing Joe Biden could do to cement his legacy.

The antiracism of manners

Kurt Bardella, a Korean-American who used to be a prominent communicator for House Republicans, did an op-ed in the LA Times about “The question every Asian American hates to be asked: ‘Where are you from?’”

I am well aware of the complaints about this question, and thus would never express curiosity about a person’s ethnic background or family history with that phrase.

That being said, I personally get this question sometimes — typically with reference to my last name or to my son’s name, Jose. I remember once a semi-prominent conservative donor asked me “Yglesias with a ‘Y’ — where are you from?” and I reacted to him like I was being asked a racist question by a racist person and said “New York City.” But to be honest, the bulk of the time I get asked “where are you from?” the asker is a working-class Hispanic person who is curious about this white guy and his white son with their Spanish names. So I say “I’m from New York but my father’s family is Cuban” or “he was born in D.C., but he’s named after my Cuban grandfather.”

And based on my recollections of life in the 1990s, it seems this was just a pretty common way to talk in a diverse place like New York where ethnic identity was important to a lot of people. I’m not going to die on the hill of “where are you from?” being an acceptable way to ask “is your family Cuban or Mexican or what?” or “did your ancestors come from China or Korea?” I’ve read enough takes that I know it bothers people, so I don’t do it.

But I do think it behooves us all to recognize that this is kind of like how I know how to tie a bow tie and which fork is the salad fork at a fancy place setting — something you pick up by being acculturated in the right spaces. And I’m honestly very skeptical of this sort of “anti-racism of manners” where you demonstrate your superior moral cultivation by knowing which turns of phrase to use and which to avoid.

Vaccine prioritization revisited

America’s vaccination efforts have gone well in many ways — certainly better than Canada or most European countries. But after a lot of hand-wringing about equitable distribution of vaccines and the adoption of a lot of rules designed to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines, we seem to have largely failed on the equity front.

I find this frustrating, but not surprising. Back when I wrote “Give the Vaccine to the Elderly,” the stated reason for preferring a more elaborate series of criteria is that the elderly population is disproportionately white.

But as I wrote at the time, eligibility criteria that are simple, transparent, and easy to verify are the best thing for equality. I feel okay about having gotten my first Pfizer shot at the mass vaccination center in Baltimore — I am eligible under the stated rules and I don’t think being a vaccine martyr helps anyone. But I do feel terrible about a system that is serving to allocate shots to people with the time and energy to scope out eligibility in different cities, wait on long phone trees, etc.

We should have had a system where first, anyone over 80 could get the shot. Then you lower it to 75, then 70, then 65, then 60, then 55, etc., etc. The idea would be that the eligibility criteria are always tight enough that it’s easy for an eligible person to get an appointment. Age is easy to verify, everyone knows their age, and everyone could just wait their turn. Now it would be one thing if, having rejected this option, I was now hearing folks saying “this rollout has been an amazing triumph of racial and socioeconomic equity!” But nobody is saying that, because it isn’t. So somebody ought to say “we messed this up, we thought using blended health/age/occupational criteria would be fairer, but it turns out it created a system that was easy for privileged people to game.”

This exact crisis probably won’t repeat for a long time, but there’s a valuable general lesson in what happened.

Housing reform works

There are people out there who still think of YIMBYism as some kind of technocratic flight of fancy. But I promise you that California YIMBYs, in particular, have been getting stuff done. It took them a few bites at the apple to get a really rigorous law passed that stops cities from blocking Accessory Dwelling Unit construction.

But it’s done now, and the results are spectacular.

Twitter avatar for @kristoncapps

◥◤.@kristoncapps 

@kristoncapps

California's state preemption law deregulating backyard apartments has set off a solid ADU building boom. 

bloom.bg/3w1kCMn

Image

March 25th 2021

14 Retweets100 Likes

ADUs are not going to “solve housing,” but they can make a big difference. And what the California experience shows is that while people always bitch and moan to an extent about change, this is fundamentally a reform that homeowners can learn to love. And every state with high-cost inner-ring suburbs (looking at you Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and Virginia) should copy this idea.