The Fifth Mailbag

The Fifth Mailbag

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 13 minutes

The Fifth Mailbag

Learning from Nizhny Novgorod, Alternate Kennedys, and comparative Matts

I feel like this week’s questions were very serious. February has everyone in a mood.

But I’ve been enjoying doing these, so thanks to everyone who’s participated!

John: Request for reminiscences — Matt was in Perm, Russia for some time a number of years ago (I've been a reader since 2000 — it may have been a *long* time ago!). What does he feel he learned about Russia in this most Russian of cities? Does it affect his views on the current Russia crises?

I was in Perm super briefly but was in Russia (mostly Nizhny Novgorod) for most of the summer of 1998. It’s a little hard to say what I learned specifically from that experience versus from simply knowing some Russian people over the years.

But a thing that I do recall that I wish more Americans appreciated was how shocking normal middle-class Russian people found their late-'90s circumstances to be. The way they saw it, Communism was bad. They were against it, and it got overthrown. That should have been a victory for them. But instead, the economy got worse. And while Czechs and Poles were welcomed into the West as the victims of Communist oppression, Russians just got shat on. America went to war with Russia’s traditional ally Serbia in a way that totally violated international law. We were even siding with Islamist terrorists in Chechnya, just the way we did years earlier in Afghanistan.

A sequence of events that a few years earlier they had seen as the liberation of the Russian people from Communism now looked like an unwise Russian geopolitical surrender. The liberal reformers seemed like dupes for the West at best, criminals at worst. Nobody knew who Vladimir Putin was in the summer of 1998, but everyone wanted to replace Yeltsin with a competent strongman from the security services who would get the country organized and make Russia a great power again.

None of that justifies attacking Ukraine for no reason or any of dozens of other things Putin has done over the years. But it is context that I wish Americans understood — the perception was that the Russian people had been played for fools and betrayed by the West and the liberals.

LJ: What proportion of new apartment/condo construction is three- and four-bedrooms? This seems essential if we want to make family-living in cities a reality. Anecdotally, when my family was searching for a new home, we toyed with the idea of staying in a condo but found three bedroom condos EXTREMELY rare (four bedrooms did not exist) and so expensive that we could buy a single family home (more bedrooms, space, and land) in the same metropolitan area for less. The economics just made no sense at all. Matt - you're such a proponent of building more in cities, but when new construction does happen, it seems not to cater to families at all. Thoughts????

Personally, I grew up in a large three-bedroom apartment and would love to live in one now rather than a row house.

But here’s the issue economically: outside of New York City, you have an oversupply of single-family homes relative to a population that is aging and having fewer children. In D.C. and other central cities, for example, it’s pretty common for single people to be living with roommates in a house that’s built for a family. At the same time, the ability to build multifamily dwellings on expensive land is sharply constrained by the government. So the optimal option under constraint is to build lots of studios and 1brs and a few 2brs, move the childless people out of the single-family homes, and move families into the single-family homes.

To generate meaningful levels of construction of large units in multifamily dwellings, you’d need to massively deregulate so that you can fully meet the shadow demand for people who’d like to ditch their roommates and live alone in a one-bedroom apartment. Once that’s done, the idiosyncratic minority of parents (me!) who like the idea of living in a tall building might get served in the market. But until then, we’re out of luck.

SimonAM: As a follow up I'd like to know how Matt feels when he reads NYT on Biden staff and sees his newsletters influencing trillion dollar bills — imagine it is something like Sideous screaming "unlimited power"???

A Washington Post article said some White House staffers were circulating this column, and while I of course hope it comes true, I think it would be premature to say that I’ve actually influenced anything.

But it’s nice to see! And I think it goes to show that the community here is actually accomplishing things and not just farting around.

Andrew B: In the last mailbag, you said political hobbyism can be very destructive. Is Slow Boring part of the problem? Aren't most of your readers political hobbyists by Hersh's definition?

See how I sequenced that other question to go before this one? That’s because sure, to an extent, this whole project is shot through with hobbyism. But at the same time, this is the world we live in — an era of largely post-material politics in which there are not strong party machines and the views and actions of amateurs and hobbyists matter a great deal. So I don’t think (and I don’t think Hersh thinks) you can just wish some whole other structure of politics into existence.

What you can try to do is urge people to think and act a bit differently. And that’s what I’m all about here: setting priorities, understanding the landscape in a realistic way, and trying to focus on policy debates that have concrete significance for people’s lives rather than just symbolism.

Michael H: What kind of math/problem solving abilities do you think are most important to your work? As a high school math teacher, I'm always trying to think about how to improve students ability to engage with the world, and it seems like you deal a lot with numerical literacy issues, so I'm curious if you have any thoughts on this.

The really basic statistical concepts (normal distribution, standard deviation, regression to the mean, and so forth) all strike me as pretty underrated tools for discussing politics.

For example, I was talking to a technically inclined person about Peter Thiel last week and he said that part of how we should understand Thiel is that he thinks the status quo is really bad so he’s inclined to favor high-variance strategies. There’s another set of rich, politically engaged technologists who think that existential risk is a really big problem, so they are inclined to be really hostile to high variance in politics. And I think this really does explain a lot about why Thiel might think Trump is pretty great and the 1/6 ruckus a price worth paying to unleash the unlimited potential of human progress, while Sam Bankman-Fried thinks Trump is a disaster who threatens to derail the unlimited potential of human progress. But I think it would be hard to get “high variance” into a mainstream media article without a detailed explanation — most people aren’t as familiar with those kinds of concepts as they should be.

Wayne Karol: Last mailbox you mentioned Alternate Presidents. I thought the sequel Alternate Kennedys was even better. What's your opinion?

Alternate Kennedys is fun, but as a non-boomer I just don’t have the generational fascination with the subject.

Mark: What do you think is the best way for an individual to fight back against climate change? Whenever professors are asked this question they always seem to think the answer is to donate to climate advocacy organizations based on the theory that politics matters more than individual action. While I agree with that in principle, I don't see any evidence that climate advocacy organizations work (and the Sunrise Movement seems actively detrimental to these goals), so I would prefer to do something that does not involve lighting my money on fire.

Separate from my concerns about Sunrise, the big problem with “donate to climate advocacy groups” as a way to move the needle on climate change is that climate advocacy is already a very well-funded form of advocacy. Advocacy spending has sharply diminishing returns, so I think that to the extent there are gains to be made on that front, it would be on getting more Republican Party politicians who represent places that don’t have oil and gas extraction industries to be more aggressively supportive of nuclear and geothermal power.

But really, climate is not a lack of advocacy problem so I would not put my eggs in the “do more advocacy” basket. In terms of the most important intervention, I think that varies across the lifecycle to some extent. I said this in the climate anxiety post, but if you’re young, I would urge you to actually go work on a first-order problem related to climate change. Earlier this week the Biden administration rolled out an initiative around decarbonization of the industrial sector, which is where a lot of the really thorny problems lie. Try to go actually work for a company that is trying to bring carbon-free steel or concrete or ammonia to market. Or do academic research that is directly relevant to those problems. Or work on long-term electrical storage. Or use carbon capture to manufacture net-zero jet fuel. There are a lot of technical problems out there that could use more smart people working on them.

Later in life you’re probably looking more at lifestyle changes. But here the most important thing is to support new emissions-reducing technologies, not just engage in conservation. Be the person who’s willing to pay extra for the brand-new clean tech and who therefore proves the market exists for it and helps it come to a broader scale and lower costs. That both helps the technology you’re supporting and also encourages investors to think there’s a future in more green solutions to more problems.

Last but not least, I feel like I say this every week, but posting really is praxis. Do positive messaging around moderate Democrats in tough races. Urge residents of blue states and cities to really prioritize climate over NIMBYism and not just spend their time raging against oil companies and Joe Manchin.

BD Anders: Gut check- what portion of our present inflation is attributable to spending increases, and what portion is attributable to the pandemic's myriad effects on demand? Can they be disentangled at all?

I’m working on a longer piece about this, but I think the framing of this question reflects some of the problems with the way we talk about inflation.

To me, the key thing to know about the demand side of the economy at this point is that total nominal spending is above its trend level, and last quarter at least was increasing at a very rapid pace. As long as you have nominal spending growing at that kind of rate, it’s inevitable that you will run up against supply-side constraints and hit some problems. Now it’s also true that the pandemic is a negative shock to the supply side of the economy, both by taking some workers out of the game and by shifting patterns of demand. One view is that with supply capacity reduced, we should have tried to keep demand low enough to avoid inflation. That, to me, is a recipe for mass unemployment and catastrophe.

The pandemic itself is bad, and not something macroeconomic policymakers can make go away. But they can choose whether to take the hit as inflation or to take it as a collapse in demand. The decision to accept inflation as a price worth paying to stabilize demand was, in my view, correct. But they’ve now overshot the mark. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not so bad. Nobody’s perfect. But they need to admit that they did, in fact, overshoot and that while the pandemic remains a big deal, the overshooting itself is the thing that’s under their control, and they can and should correct it.

Pat: This will never happen, but isn't the NBA the best positioned American league to adopt promotion and relegation like they have in European soccer?

This is something I’ve often wasted time thinking about. A big issue for the NBA is that the better team has a pretty strong tendency to win, so lots of games end up being fairly uncompetitive and unfun to watch.

It would be more enjoyable to watch a smaller league of 20 teams that are all good constantly playing each other with the less-successful teams fighting like dogs to avoid relegation. The other thing that I think works about this is that professional basketball has had a good amount of success in smaller cities like Portland, SLC, Memphis, OKC, and traditionally San Antonio (which has become big but was not when the Spurs launched). With a smaller Tier 1 league but 20 more teams in Tier 2, I’d love to see the NBA return to Vancouver and Newark and expand into places like Austin, Albuquerque, Boise, Virginia Beach, and Omaha.

Simon_dinosaur: Matt, you and Matt Bruenig are two of my favorite Matts who write stuff. What do you think about Bruenig's work what does he get right and get wrong?

I don’t know that he really gets much wrong. And I tend to think that most strong writers mostly get things right.

So Bruenig’s stuff is mostly good, but Ross Douthat’s stuff is also mostly good and so is Jamelle Bouie’s and so is Michelle Goldberg’s. How can all those writers be right about everything when they disagree about so much and also seem to disagree with me? Well, everyone has their own interests and idiosyncrasies and preferred framing devices and personal obsessions.

But I rarely read a Bruenig piece and think “welp, that’s wrong.” And I rarely read a Douthat piece that I think is wrong either. But I do think they both underrate the Democratic Party and its leaders, who I think are good and they think are bad. I think I am normally seen as a critic of “woke” politics and Bouie as a proponent, but I don’t have any particular criticisms of Bouie’s actual work. I think it’s telling that when people complain about the 1619 Project they rarely complain about his contribution to it, because it’s really good. By the same token, if every leftist on the internet did takes as good as Bruenig’s, the leftist internet would be a much better place.

Of course as a sellout centrist neoliberal shill, what I’d really like to do is recruit all these people to my team. But the real point is that all the best people from all teams are underrated.

Dermot Murphy: What are your thoughts on the aggressive takeover and dismantling of local newspapers by Alden Global Capital in the last ten years?

Journalists really like this story so it’s been covered extensively (Atlantic, American Prospect, Mother Jones), but I think it’s worth acknowledging that what Alden is doing to local papers is basically private equity playing its “correct” role in society.

What you have in the newspaper game is a bunch of businesses that continue to generate profits but have essentially no growth prospects. If it were left up to the employees of the papers, they would continue to reinvest profits in the enterprise in order to stay relevant in a changing world, but they would mostly fail. Private equity comes in and insists instead on disinvesting from an ailing sector and sucking the financial capital out so that it can be plowed into more promising ideas elsewhere in the economy.

The critique of Alden really just amounts to the view that local news generates positive externalities for society, so it is bad to have capital rationally allocated away from it.

But it’s a little infantile to express this idea by getting mad at Alden. What you need are some ideas for how to subsidize local news. If you deliver the subsidy, the private equity industry will be thrilled to make the investments needed to capture the subsidy. I personally am not sure I’ve ever heard the optimal strategy for crafting a subsidy scheme that will actually work. But it seems like a reasonable idea if you can pull it off.

All that said, to return to a common Slow Boring theme, to the extent that democracy relies on a supportive media climate, we can also try to align our political institutions with our media. The premise of the district-based system of elected legislators is that people are going to have lots and lots and lots of locally-focused information which is just not true. The typical American has no idea what his state senator is doing on any given day. It would be better to have proportional representation, more centralized institutions, and generally speaking, more authority that aligns with the way contemporary society actually works.

So with that, thanks to everyone for supporting independent media and have a great weekend!