Weekend update, March 20

Weekend update, March 20

By Matthew Yglesias. 

SlowBoring.com. 

Still no vaccine appointment for me (I am eligible for an appointment, just not yet able to actually get one), but my dad is fully vaccinated and coming to visit next week. My kid hasn’t been able to see any of his grandparents for over a year, and we’re all really excited. It’s nice to see things working.

Press conferences

Controversy raged last week as to why Joe Biden hasn’t scheduled a formal press conference. Then he finally scheduled one for March 25, which is way later into his presidency than any recent president.

The press corps itself tends to get extremely self-righteous about this kind of thing. But a few years ago I read Kathleen Dalton’s book “Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life,” and one thing that comes through clearly from her is that Teddy Roosevelt invented the press conference as a propaganda tool, not out of some desire for transparency. TR was a big believer in the bully pulpit (as in he literally invented the term), and he thought (rightly according to Dalton) that these events would help him set the news agenda.

I watched all of Wednesday’s briefing with Jen Psaki, and you can see if you tune in to one of these things why a modern White House would be skeptical of the benefits of press conferences. The message Biden wants to talk about this week is the American Rescue Plan. But the reporters know that, so almost all the questions were about the situation at the border, which reporters know is trickier for the White House. If I were Biden’s communications director, I would advise that he sit down for a long-form interview with an economics reporter and not do a press conference at all.

Regardless, press conferences stopped during World War I, then they came back, but they used to be way more common than they’ve become.

There is frankly less rhyme or reason to this than I was hoping. At first glance, I thought television induced Truman and Eisenhower to do fewer conferences than their predecessors, but that’s not true — JFK was the first president to do the conferences on camera.

George H.W. Bush is noteworthy for being really the only president to try to significantly increase the number of press conferences. He innovated the joint press conference with visiting foreign leaders and did more solo press conferences than his four immediate predecessors. Then he lost his reelection bid in 1992, which must not have been a very good advertisement for press conferences.

You shouldn’t lie about people

There is some internet drama afoot, the content of which I won’t bore you with, but along the way Jude Doyle named me as one of several “people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.”

I objected on Twitter that I do not in fact hate trans people or women, nor do I argue against their civil rights even sporadically, much less ceaselessly.

Many people agreed with me, which was nice to see since it’s clearly true. Unfortunately, several other people argued that it was fine to write in a public forum that I “argue ceaselessly” against civil rights for women and trans people on the grounds that they find some other thing I did objectionable, or that some other parts of Doyle’s article are true. I reject this. People should write true things rather than false things.

One of the other targets of Doyle’s ire is Glenn Greenwald, and honestly, this has long been my biggest complaint with him. He’ll take an actual disagreement with someone about something specific, and then just go to town about how “the Bad Person is like the worst guy ever, and here come seventeen wild and over-the-top allegations about him.” So I don’t think this habit is unique to any faction of the internet. But it’s a bad habit! Just because someone is bad doesn’t mean you should make stuff up about him.

This paper estimates the long-run effects of childhood Medicaid eligibility on adult health and economic outcomes using the program’s original introduction (1966–1970) and its mandated coverage of welfare recipients. The design compares cohorts born in different years relative to Medicaid implementation, in states with different pre-existing welfare-based eligibility. Early childhood Medicaid eligibility reduces mortality and disability, increases employment, and reduces receipt of disability transfer programs up to 50 years later. Medicaid has saved the government more than its original cost and saved more than 10 million quality adjusted life-years.

As I’m always saying, the welfare state is really good.

Has our capacity shrunk or grown?

As you know, I am very critical of the Congressional Budget Office’s “output gap” calculations. One specific line of criticism that I don’t think I have made before is that according to them, the pandemic and the ensuing slump have reduced the long-term productive capacity of the American economy. I think that’s clearly wrong.

Consider telemedicine. A lot of providers tried it for the first time. So did a lot of patients. I don’t know how much of it will stick for the long run, but the answer is “more than zero.” Our healthcare system was forced to do a lot of learning and experimentation with telemedicine, and this will have benefits going forward for the provision of health care services to people in rural areas or with mobility impairments.

The same is true of remote work. How much less demand for scarce Midtown Manhattan office space will there be going forward? I don’t know. But it’s somewhat less, right? The direction of the change is not mysterious.

And unless we are very unlucky, the success of mRNA technology in producing highly effective COVID-19 vaccines is not going to be a one-off. It seems likely that we’ll have better flu vaccines in the future. And also that at least some people will retain some hygienic practices from this past year that we’ve learned are highly effective at blocking flu. World War II was a huge catastrophe, but despite the destruction and loss of life, it clearly accelerated technological progress in a way that paid dividends for years to come. The pandemic hasn’t been nearly as costly, but in a similar way, it’s been an engine of progress as well as an engine of destruction.