vacation mailbag

Vacation mailbag

By Matthew Yglesias

I’ve been enjoying vacation, but you can’t keep me away from the laptop so here’s some mailbag for you all.

Back with regularly scheduled commentary on Monday!

Ollie Sayeed: Who was the best person of the 20th century in raw utilitarian terms? Deng Xiaoping, Norman Borlaug...?

There’s an interesting big picture question lurking behind this about the causal role of scientific innovators in the world. We have famous cases of very clear-cut joint or overlapping discovery. While calculus is obviously very important, it’s also pretty unambiguous that if you went back in time and assassinated Isaac Newton, Leibniz was waiting right behind him to basically do the same work.

And in a world with no Albert Einstein, someone else probably would have come up with general relativity. At the end of the day, the beauty of a scientific insight like that is it really does solve the problem, so if enough people think about the problem for long enough, someone is going to come up with it.

Politics feels much more contingency ridden to me than science. Vladimir Putin could absolutely have handled the Ukraine situation differently and Barack Obama could have intervened more forcefully in Syria or less forcefully in Libya. Borlaug’s work is a lot more applied than Newton’s or Einstein’s so I’m inclined to see it as in more of a middle ground of contingency. That said, I feel like the rhetorical function of invoking Borlaug is generally to try to raise the status of science relative to politics, making the point that developing higher-yielding varieties of wheat has saved innumerable more lives than any activist anywhere can claim credit for.

But we should also consider the possibility that Mexican President Ávila Camacho’s decision to establish the program where Borlaug did his pioneering work on wheat was kind of non-obvious. Only a small minority of the benefits of this flowed to Mexico and very few at all flowed to Camacho personally. I am not that well-versed in Mexican history, but all-in-all he seems like a pretty solid leader.

I guess what I’m saying is Deng Xiaoping is probably the right answer here.

Normie Osborn: What is the best getting to know you question to ask on dates?

Which Substacks do you subscribe to?

Andrew B: Which would do more to improve health outcomes in the US – a single payer healthcare system or a dramatic expansion in the supply of medical service providers (through some combination of increased immigration, med school admissions, and paraprofessional licensing)?

I hate to duck a question, but I genuinely think this is a kind of a false binary.

If you listen to Bernie Sanders talk about why he wants a Medicare-for-All system, he very clearly articulates the view that there is under-consumption of health care services in the United States. He says he’s fighting not just for the uninsured but also for the under-insured who presumably are not getting into the doctor enough because of copays or deductibles or what have you. And then he juxtaposes this with the money made by insurance company CEOs:

Twitter avatar for @SenSanders

But this is a fallacy that comes from thinking like an accountant. The United States does not have a large stock of unemployed doctors who could be treating the underinsured if we redistributed fiscal resources away from insurance company CEOs. And the insurance company executives are not themselves medical professionals who could be treating patients. If we want to accomplish the goals of the single-payer movement, we clearly need to expand the supply of healthcare providers. The question then is how much of the good of Medicare For All could be achieved purely through the supply-side reforms that would be necessary to make it work.

George Porter: What is your favorite Star Trek series? Original? Next gen? Voyager? DS9? Enterprise? ...

There are stretches of DS9 that probably represent the peak of Trek, but taken as a whole, TNG is the best series and I don’t really think that’s debatable if you’re a Trek fan.

Rustbeltjacobin: Matt you mention that american media coverage is weirdly dismissive of our hemispheric neighbors, in favor of heavily covering europe, the middle east & asia. So. Got any takes on mexican policy or politics for us?

Just for context, I said that as a monolingual American reader of the news, I feel much better informed about the political developments in European countries compared to those in Latin America — even a country like Mexico that is both larger than Germany and also literally adjacent to the United States.

This is odd on many levels, not least of which is the fact that many Latin American events directly impinge on American politics through migration.

But by the same token, I really don’t have many takes on Mexican politics or policy for you; I’m just really staggeringly ignorant. I just think this should be a bigger deal — promoting an atmosphere of public safety and industrialization in Mexico and Central America would be a big win for the United States and deserves to be a high-profile issue that it’s considered prestigious to work on.

Nate: What movies are you most looking forward to coming out in 2022?

My former number one most anticipated movie was “The Worst Person In The World,” which I’d heard great things about from people who saw it in 2021. And it really is good. It’s only February 23, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if no better movie comes out this year.

Beyond that, I always enjoy a “Mission Impossible” movie so I’m looking forward to the new one. I’m not sure I have a great picture in my head of what a movie version of “Killers of the Flower Moon” would look like, but I believe in betting on talent and Martin Scorcese plus Leonardo DiCaprio doing an Eric Roth adaptation of a David Grann book is a lot of talent. The preview for “The Northman” has been incredibly hyped up. “Thor: Ragnarok” is the best of the MCU movies, so I’m eager to see “Thor: Love and Thunder. “

Last but not least, all of Rian Johnson’s movies are at least interesting, so I’m curious to see what happens in “Knives Out 2.”

Sukrit: Does Matt have any thoughts on (Ben + Justin) Smith's new global news venture? The premise is there are 200 million college-educated English-language readers globally not being served by the current news offering. Bullish/bearish on the idea of a single global news source?

Ben and Justin are both very smart, so I’m sure that whatever they do will be good. In terms of its actual business prospects, it’s very hard to say. The only media business idea I’ve ever heard about where I thought “that sounds like a good idea, they’re going to make a lot of money” was Punchbowl, and they are in fact making a lot of money. But that just goes to show I am biased toward pessimism — I underrated Slow Boring’s potential for example.

I will say that as a hot takes guy, I have grown to be more and more appreciative of the virtues of old-fashioned, bland “just the facts” reporting at a time when a lot of high-profile media outlets have started putting more and more spin on the ball with their headlines, topic choice, and framing. The basic issue is that both reporting and analysis/punditry are tasks with a reasonably high degree of difficulty, and trying to do them both simultaneously at a mass scale is, I think, creating problems. There may be an opportunity for a global back to basics brand.

Jonathan Cox: In view of your post on “human history in the long run,” what books or other reading can you recommend on that subject, including human evolution and the development of civilization? I’ve read Scott’s Against the Grain and would love more reading in that same spirit.

“Sapiens” is the book that is really “about” the pairing of evolution and macro-history and a lot of people love it. I thought it was just okay, but I think people who are interested in this should check it out.

Beyond that, I’m sure there are aspects of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and William H. McNeil’s “Plagues and Peoples” that don’t hold up, but they’re both classics of big picture history for a reason. Francis Fukuyama’s “The Origins of Political Order” is a newer entrant into this genre that’s excellent.

Phillip R: Why do you delete your tweets regularly? You normally have a lot of good commentary and links to interesting articles on the site, but every couple weeks you delete them all which makes it hard to reference them later on. Have you ever explained why you choose to delete them so often (which is something that most public figures don’t do)?

I work hard on my columns, my books, and other published writing and am happy to be held accountable for them across the fullness of time. Obviously I don’t always get things right, and I’m happy to take my lumps when I get things wrong.

But while Twitter as a platform has a lot of virtues, I think those virtues are inherently tied to spontaneity. I want to be able to shoot the breeze with people in a casual, conversational manner without having it held over my head for decades if something I say off the cuff isn’t quite right. Obviously there is no way to stop people from archiving screenshots of old Yglesias tweets (and in fact people do this) but routinely mass-deleting signals in a good-faith way that I object to that kind of use of people’s Twitter track record. And while it’s true that most public figures don’t mass delete their tweets, I wish they would. I suspect they don’t in part because Twitter doesn’t make it easy to do it. If they had a checkbox where you could automatically delete tweets after 30 days, I think a lot of people would use it.

Lenzy T Jones: Observing the arguments of someone like Adolph Reed, what kind of arguments would you make to further support his arguments and dispel the idea of his thesis being “class reductionists” and push back against the “race is the basis” of everything argument at the core of woke-culture?

I like and respect Reed’s work, and I think his own piece on “The Myth of Class Reductionism” is a better refutation of that particular idea than anything that I can write.

That being said, Reed was also very critical of Barack Obama’s politics in a way that I’m not because Reed is a socialist, which I’m not. I oftentimes feel like Hillary Clinton’s 2016 primary season gambit of trying to outflank Bernie on the left with identity politics appeals opened up a wormhole we’ve been stuck in ever since. It sometimes seems as if the only alternative people can think of to Democrats talking like a university DEI coordinator (Hillary) is Democrats talking like an aging Marxist (Bernie) or achieving the higher synthesis of talking like a really smart humanities grad student (AOC). But the real trick is to just be 25 percent more normal across the board.

Doug Orleans: Can you respond to Nathan Robinson's interview with anti-YIMBY Dean Preston on the Current Affairs podcast?

One of the joys of podcasting as a medium is that hate-listening to podcasts is extremely tedious so nobody does it. Then as a podcaster, you can just talk in a relaxed way without being defensive all the time. The flip side of that is there is no way in hell that I am going to spend my time listening to a Nathan Robinson interview with Dean Preston.

James: Should we have more formal debates in various areas of society? Sure, we have presidential debates and various political debates, but those are middling at best. Housing? Debate! Public health? Debate! Schools? Debate! I’d love to see some people who aren’t politicians break down issues and address disagreements head-on. Or are debates not worthwhile?

I am very debate-skeptical and almost never agree to participate in a debate. To me, a big problem in intellectual life is people getting too invested in trying to win arguments rather than inform the audience. What’s more useful is dialogue and negotiation where people try to forge consensus on an idea that can advance everyone’s goals even without achieving perfect agreement.

David Mosley: You’ve written on how you think the future of remote work etc may be detrimental to Seattle, are there any other US cities about which you have a strong take about their future prospects?

My basic take is that we should look at tourism. For example, New York City is going to face substantial dislocations as the value of midtown office space plummets and as many people leave town in favor of cheaper housing elsewhere. But New York is also a place that attracts lots of inbound tourists. Plenty of rich celebrities who could live anywhere live in New York. Weird billionaires buy pieds-à-terre there. So the newly vacant space will be occupied by someone.

Seattle, I think, is a place that was really pretty small until recently and that not a lot of people visit as tourists. It’s not without its charms and natural beauty, to be clear, but it shares those charms with a lot of other northwestern places that are much cheaper than Seattle. There’s going to be leveling-down there.

By contrast, places like Miami or Portland, Maine or Charleston, South Carolina are spots where lots of people go and enjoy spending time and then lament that there aren’t necessarily great career opportunities there. But if you can make it in the big time while working remotely, lots of people will choose to locate in spots like that. I think the main reason this matters is that I think the cities that won’t benefit are the ones that most need help: the cold industrial cities of the Midwest and interior northeast. I think people are always searching for reasons to be optimistic about St. Louis and Cleveland and Buffalo and I just don’t see it. Cities like Nashville and Austin and Denver that already had momentum will pick up speed and be joined by a wider set of leisure destinations.

Craig W: I'm curious about economies of scale with respect to local government. It seems like it should be more efficient to deliver services to a larger number of residents. And It seems to be true in at least some cases. But it also seems that larger cities seem to be high tax environments relative to their suburbs or smaller cities. So what's going on here? Is it actually more efficient so people respond by demanding more services? Do large cities at the center of metros get stuck providing services that suburbs then free-ride on? Or is it more of a Mancur Olson thing where cities are good at generating and concentrating wealth and then interests arise to claim some of that wealth?

I think it’s basically the Olson-style point. Suburban jurisdictions tend to be fairly interchangeable, so if the governing class of one particular suburban town starts using tax dollars on useless stuff that people don’t value, it will lose out sharply to other nearby jurisdictions. This offers an imperfect but real check on misgovernment that’s called Tiebout Competition.

But Tiebout Competition is undermined by a place that has unique geographical assets like beautiful beaches or oil wells. And historically, central cities have had unique geographical assets in the form of valuable commercial real estate (this is why remote work is going to be a tough transition), which traditionally gave central cities more running room to be poorly governed.

Separately, though, there are economies of scale issues. It’s very inefficient for Bangor, Maine and Brewer, Maine to maintain separate fire and police departments to serve what’s really just one not-particular-large community. The extreme fragmentation of municipalities that you see in New England (and New Jersey) isn’t great. I’m in general a fan of city-county consolidations like you see in Jacksonville and Indianapolis as a way of addressing some of these trade-offs.

M Hamill: I'm curious if you have thoughts about "end user" solutions to inflation. That is, there has been talk about the recent inflation being at least in part, driven by stimulus and people spending their extra money on goods when there was a lack of services to be had. So then, let's say you have some money lying around and aren't sure what to do with it: In purely inflation management terms, whats the most helpful thing you could do? Buy stock? Put it in savings? Spend it on services like dining or a lavish vacation? Give it to charity? Spend it on maintenance for your old car so you dont need a new one?

There are a few different margins at work here. At the most basic level you want to shift consumption out of areas that we know are constrained (buying durable goods, burning gasoline) and into areas where there’s spare capacity. So go to the movies. Go on vacation. But ideally don’t go to the beach — go stay at a hotel in downtown Chicago or Dallas that’s hurting due to loss of business travelers. Then go see a movie there and eat at downtown restaurants.

A more advanced play is just to consume less and buy stock; increasing the national savings rate helps.

But what we really want are not savings, but investment (and yes I know that S=I by definition in the National Income and Product Accounts, but the ordinary language sense of these terms is different), so the truly optimal thing to do would be to lend your money to someone who wants to drill some oil wells.

Ivan: What did you think about Ezra Klein's interview with Jon Favreau's Offline Podcast and the discussion of popularism. Ezra talked about balancing the popular with the viral to get reach of your message. Want to know how you think about balancing those things?

It’s a fair point. But this is why I emphasize that posting is praxis. If you hit the little heart button on posts that are about Rick Scott’s plan to raise taxes on working-class retirees, then you are making those posts viral. If you hit the little heart button on posts that are about how we need to abolish ICE, then you are making those posts viral. We, as a collective, have the power to influence what is and isn’t viral.

Josh Morrison: What do you think of the "long-termism" trend in effective altruism that prioritizes reducing the risk of human extinction over near-term goals like improving global health in the present day?

People write much longer takes about this than I’m going to attempt here. But for now, I will say that I think most people (most politicians, most journalists, most bureaucratic institutions) would benefit from discounting less and caring about existential risk more. So I am always happy to recommend Toby Ord’s book and cheerlead for longtermism.

That being said, I don’t really think there’s all that much the typical person could or should do with the fact that Ord estimates there’s a 1/30 risk of existential catastrophe from an engineered pandemic versus a 1/1,000 risk from climate change or a 1/10,000 risk from a supervolcano. The estimates are obviously very imprecise and it’s also extremely hard to know ex-ante what is and isn’t going to be helpful in addressing these things.

Part of the appeal of public health work is that we have known interventions with high confidence that marginal investments of money will lead to marginal lives saved and improved. And then beyond that, we have a lot of other ideas that sound promising and a pretty good sense of how to do assessments of those ideas. And there’s a much wider set of people who are in a position to meaningfully contribute to these causes, if for no other reason than this is an area where small infusions of money really do help.

Dmo: Do you play video games at all? If so, which games? What is your history with this medium and do you have any thoughts on it?

We're nearly the same age, but I don't think I ever remember you talking about them.

People keep asking me about video games! I don’t have a lot to say about this. I owned an NES, an SNES, a Gameboy, and a Sega Genesis at different times when I was a kid but never got a more modern system. I used to play TIE Fighter at my friend Jeff’s house when we were in elementary school but I was never really into PC gaming.

The game genre that I have a deep affection for is turn-based strategy games. I was a big Civ II guy in my day. I also liked Koei’s games, especially L’Empereur. More recently my kid and I have been playing European War IV and European War VI. But I’m not a big gamer is what it comes down to — for recreation, I like to tweet.