Episode VII: The mailbag awakens

Episode VII: The mailbag awakens

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 19 minutes

Episode VII: The mailbag awakens

Ducks, private school, things to do in D.C., and of course war

It’s been nice to be back on the job. I’ve been looking forward all week to the mailbag!

Antioch: What's the maximum number of ducks you think you could take in a fight? The ducks are normal but they absolutely will not give up.

Assuming that we are talking about a wild duck with good mobility, then I think fighting against determined ducks would be pretty challenging.

The basic issue is that since they can fly and are pretty fast, they’re ideally suited to hit and run tactics — pecking at you from behind and flying away as you try to hit them while other ducks swoop in from the other side. Ducks aren’t very big, so someone who actually trained for man-vs-duck combat could probably figure out some tactics for kicking ducks in a way that snaps their neck or something but that’s not me. I’m a pretty big guy and in better shape than I used to be, but I don’t think swinging wildly and trying to punch ducks would be very effective. And if there’s anything I’ve learned from reading Jack Reacher books, it’s that unless you know how to take opponents down efficiently, you’re going to tire out fast. So I’m pretty pessimistic about this … maybe a dozen ducks?

Steven Greene: Love getting hints of the more personal stuff. In that vein, who you are your favorite fiction authors/favorite novels? Specific genres that you really love/dislike?

I’m a bit of a philistine in terms of fiction. My favorite fiction authors are kinda lowbrow thriller writers like George Pelecanos, Lee Child, and my friend Matt Quirk.

To some extent, though, I wonder if this is because my brain has been fried by the internet. Back before smartphones existed, I was the kind of person who always had a paperback book in his bag to read on the subway/T/Metro or while stuck waiting somewhere. And back then I was an intelligent person who read, like, “War and Peace” while commuting to high school and “The Brothers Karamazov” sitting around in a waiting room for jury duty.

In terms of my rare forays into contemporary literary fiction, two novels I’ve really enjoyed are Lauren Oyler’s “Fake Accounts” (about being extremely online) and Elif Batuman’s “The Idiot” (about being a Harvard undergrad who’s into 19th-century Russian literature). It probably speaks poorly of me that this hews so closely to my personal biography but I guess it’s better than only reading books by and about men.

Eli: You've expressed distaste at journalistic writing that presumes to know what you think, as in [made-up example] “Why does Putin want to invade Ukraine? The reason isn't what you think.” What other stylistic or semantic pet peeves do you have? Maybe give us a top-ten list of your least favorite journalistic tropes?

I don’t think I have 10, it’s really just an aversion to almost all forms of the journalistic second person — it’s not what you think, here’s what you need to know, etc. You don’t know who I am! You don’t know what I think! Just tell people what the article says!

ReedM: I've been following Dave Ramsey's baby steps plan to pay off my debt, and while Dave is a pretty far right-leaning guy who seems to think individual responsibility is a substitute for government assistance, a view I disagree with, I think he does have a point about how many people are financial illiterate (many of whom complain about their student loan debts from poorly-chosen majors). Do you think governments have any responsibility to educate people on making better financial decisions, or to regulate our financial tools so they're more comprehensible?

Per this Annamaria Lusardi paper, the low-hanging fruit of financial literacy is just basic math education. Lots of people unfortunately lack the basic numerical competency to make sound financial decisions, and I think the government obviously does have both an obligation and an interest in improving math education.

But broadly speaking, I read the argument in the other direction. We need to acknowledge the basic limits to people’s understanding and the limits of our ability to conduct really effective financial literacy education and embrace regulation of financial products — acknowledging that stricter regulation may reduce some forms of credit availability and simply accepting that this may be a good thing.

Peter M: Like you, I am a product of private education from K-12. However, for me, the experience produced an absolute preference to send my own children for private schooling (income-permitting). But you seem to encourage parents in a similar position to consider public school. Can you expand on why, except for the obvious reason of cost?

To me, it really is mostly about the money, which I think is in some ways underrated.

I remember meeting another moderate Democrat in D.C. who, like me, grew up in New York and went to private school and then married someone from the rural south who went to public school and has strong political objections to private schooling. This woman’s kid is younger than mine and she was expressing anxiety about the public school route and saying, “you know, I get the politics, but don’t you want to give your kid every advantage possible?”

And I do! But the alternative to spending huge sums of money on private K-12 schools isn’t building a huge pile of $20 bills in the backyard and setting it on fire. In the limiting case, you could simply hand a dump truck full of money over to your kid when he reaches an appropriate age. That would be pretty advantageous. A private education has to clear the fairly high bar of being not just advantageous relative to a public school education, but being advantageous relative to a public school education PLUS a giant sum of money. That’s a tough one. And since the woman in question happens to be an accomplished social scientist who’s published papers using sophisticated causal inference methods I asked her (sincerely, in the spirit of curiosity) whether she was aware of any solid research that documents clear benefits to private K-12 schools.

There is not a ton out there that I am aware of. Some papers look at the benefits (or lack thereof) of school voucher programs. But that’s not the relevant question here. What we want is a study that looks at whether rich kids benefit from their parents sending them to private school rather than going to public school and the family using the money for something else. David Figlio and Jens Ludwig did a study over 20 years ago and found “evidence to suggest that religious private schooling reduces teen sexual activity, arrests, and use of hard drugs (cocaine), but not drinking, smoking, gang involvement, or marijuana use.” It was frankly not my experience that (secular) private school is a cocaine-free atmosphere, but your mileage may vary on that.

The most relevant findings I’m aware of are the ones I talked about in my affirmative action newsletter where, controlling for SAT scores, attending an elite college appears to be beneficial to poor students but not to rich ones. The causal mechanism there is a little unclear, but it’s maybe that poor kids benefit from the networking while rich kids already have family networks.

So I’m not a fanatic on this question and I do reserve the right to change my mind in the future. But the high school I went to is now charging $57,970 per year. And I think if anyone is trying to sell you something that costs that much money, they should be able to provide some kind of evidence of large benefits relative to the alternative.

Myrna Loy’s Lazy Twin: Real estate seems to be a common way to launder money. London, New York and Miami all have a reputation as cities where money laundering is driving up housing prices. How much of an effect on housing prices does the use of real estate have on housing prices? Is it just some cities? Would cracking down on money laundering have much of an effect on housing prices?

One pretty good thing about prep school is that I don’t think these institutions are under much regulatory scrutiny and you can probably pass them dirty money relatively easily.

By contrast, laundering money through real estate has gotten more difficult in recent years through a multi-step process starting with the Bush administration becoming more intolerant of international financial opacity after 9/11. Then we had the Obama-era Operation Chokepoint, which extended that counterterrorism logic into a broader set of organized crime and tax evasion concerns and was ultimately carried forward by the Trump-era Treasury Department. I heard at the time from career Treasury people that Steve Mnuchin thought that the national security/intel/law enforcement side of the Treasury operation was fun, so he leaned into it, sort of contrary to the ideological predispositions of the Republican Party (an instinct that served him well when negotiating the CARES Act). Then right at the end of the Trump administration, secret Congress enacted sweeping anti-money laundering legislation that was modeled on Obama-era proposals that Republicans had resisted at the time.

Mnuchin was a player in getting that done, and my understanding is that Marco Rubio kind of got religious on this topic and decided it was net-net bad for south Florida to have a lot of money laundering.

This has all happened in parallel to the rise of cryptocurrency as a potential vector for money laundering. So without trying to go too deep down the crypto rabbit hole, we’ve had both a tightening of the screws on real estate and also the creation of a whole new asset class to compete with real estate, which I think adds up to a significant decline in the amount of laundering you’d expect to see coming through this way.

And the net impact of it all on housing is — not that much.

In general, whether people are talking about money laundering or billionaires holding property vacant for sporadic use or whatever else, I think there is a tendency to forget how small a share of the housing stock is located in central cities. Even in the New York City metro area, the vast majority of the population lives in the suburbs, mostly in owner-occupied single-family homes. Other sources of demand are pretty marginal.

Tom: Relevant to the Ukraine situation: how should we think about the way we engage with hostile nuclear powers? Obviously we have to keep escalation risks in mind with every action we take. And by EA-style utilitarian logic, even a small % point increase in X-risk is really, really bad. If you take that seriously, then standing up to Russia seems really bad. Yet if you carry that logic to its conclusion, you'd end up surrendering the whole world to Putin (or any other nuclear-powered dictator who is unafraid to threaten nuclear war). What guidelines ought we follow in order to find the right balance?

I think the dilemma is even harder than you say, because even if you do think “always appease Putin” is the right policy, it’s obvious the voters don’t think “always appease Putin” is the right strategy. So if we interpret EA thinking as requiring universal appeasement, then politicians with EA leanings will lose, staffers and policy experts with EA ideas will be marginalized and ignored, and fundamentally the existential risk environment gets worse rather than better.

By the same token, if America’s treaty allies around the world decide that President Longtermist is actually not going to uphold any of our commitments, that could be very destabilizing and generate a lot of undesirable wars and nuclear proliferation.

So fundamentally, when you bring the whole picture into view, I think a longtermist lens on foreign policy ends up cautioning prudence in your approach to great power conflict but also prudence in your approach to domestic politics and willingness to upset the diplomatic apple cart. Which is why at the end of the day, I think this is a situation where the biggest value is in getting a large swathe of elites (elected officials, senior staffers, high-ranking military officers, diplomats, think tankers, foreign correspondents) to be 15 percent more longtermist in their outlook rather than in creating a small core of hardcore effective altruists. You need to try to pull the whole system along. Right now, for example, the biggest threat isn’t that the median policymaker isn’t full longtermist — it’s that a non-trivial number of elite actors like Richard Engel are out there making irresponsible calls for dramatic escalation.

The hardest question for me here is really about democracy promotion. On the one hand, it’s extremely destabilizing to signal to the leaders of Russia and China that the United States views their states as fundamentally illegitimate and seeks regime change. But on the other hand, it’s genuinely true that the best thing for avoiding great power conflict over the long run would be for Russia and China to be democracies with free speech and a skeptical press and viable opposition parties. I’m not sure I have a great off-the-shelf answer that easily explains how to thread this needle. But I think the current war is a reminder that the whole great power conflict space has been a little under-emphasized in EA circles.

MoMo: I'm running to be my precinct's Democratic party precinct captain next week. If I were to approach this in a popularist way, what points should I organize around in my purple-ish blue-collar area in a purple-ish state (Colorado) for the near future and midterms? What recent Democratic accomplishments and goals should I highlight?

I honestly think the biggest difference between popularism and conventional practice in this regard is just to try. Like at all. Which is to say I don’t think that Democrats’ biggest problem is that they are attempting to guess what fiftysomething white suburbanites with no college degree want to hear and then guessing wrong, I think they are mostly just not trying. If you try to run things through that intuitive filter, you won’t be right all the time but you’ll do a lot better.

In general, though, Democrats’ best lines of argument tend to be in favor of moderate levels of increased government spending on things like health care and education and clean energy. The kind of class-first, bread and butter politics that you heard from Bernie Sanders in 2016, except you want to turn down the volume by 50 percent. Nobody wants “socialism” or a dramatic transformation of the economic system. Do they want the rich to pay their fair share? Sure. Common-sense investments in health, education, and transportation? Why not? A decent wage for hard-working people? Of course! Less pollution? You got it. But on any one of those topics, imagine trying to persuade someone who is generally skeptical about the idea of “big government” that this particular thing you are talking about is a good idea.

John Chandler: This is obviously not what you want from an AMA but FWIW. As an Irish guy, originally politicised by the West Wing, visiting the US & DC for the first time in a few weeks, unfortunately for only about 24 hours, what’s the best thing not on the usual tourist track to do?

Honestly, I welcome more questions like this!

The main thing I would say is that “the usual tourist track” in D.C. is actually really good because the main attractions are all concentrated in a defined geographic area and they’re also basically all free. So while obviously everyone wants to be a beautiful unique snowflake, there is a real advantage to doing what everyone else is doing.

But one non-obvious thing about D.C. that you will not learn from The West Wing is that our metro area is home to the world’s largest Ethiopian diaspora and thus the best Ethiopian restaurants. My personal favorite is Zenebech in Adams-Morgan, but Dukem on U Street, Chercher in Shaw, and Ethiopic on H Street are all really good, too (there are also great spots in the suburbs but not worth the trek in this time constraint). The other thing that I would say about this is that while the main Mall-adjacent tourist corridor is great, it makes me sad when that’s all people see of the city simply because it’s so atypical of what D.C. is actually like. So one nice thing about all those Ethiopian restaurants is that none of them are downtown. They’re instead located in three major nightlife areas of the city. So I’d go out to dinner, walk around a bit, grab a drink or two at a bar or three and see some of D.C. beyond its official side.

Jack F.: Now that you have given us your hot takes on the Austro-Hungarian Empire when are we going to get your Holy Roman Empire takes? Is the HRE analogous to the European Union?

I don’t really know anything about it.

I have this reputation as a guy who just mouths off on every subject on the planet, but there are actually tons of things I don’t know anything about and hesitate to express a view on. The only period of HRE history that I have any knowledge of is very late in the game, the Seven Years’ War through to its abolition by Napoleon. But by then it was basically a defunct dead letter. I’m not sure how far back in time you need to go to get a reasonable counterfactual going about it evolving into a kind of durable European federalism

Jeffrey Adams: In one of the last Mailboxes, you were asked about the merits of incrementalism vs radicalism, using the example of the Civil Rights movement. You gave a good example of how US parties weren't polarized on the question of race, and so any amount of attention gained by the Civil Rights Movement was beneficial because whoever was in power at the time had to "deal" with it. What about slavery/the Civil War? I know that "freeing the slaves" wasn't exactly a main goal of the Union at the time, but would you consider this period a win for the "radicalism" argument?

I really don’t think so.

There was, obviously, an abolitionist movement in the 1850s. And at the time the party system was very open and flexible and they could have run spoiler candidates against the Republicans, in which case Stephen Douglas would have won in 1860 and slavery would have lasted longer. Or the Republicans could have nominated an abolitionist in 1860 in which case, again, Douglas wins the election and slavery lasts longer.

That’s not to knock abolitionists. Abolitionists were right on the merits, and they deserve our praise. But it was sensible of Republicans not to run as abolitionists, and the sensible abolitionists voted Republican. Politics is a two-stage game of persuasion, in which some people try to change public opinion and other people try to win elections by catering to it. Building up anti-slavery views was a very good thing to do. Demanding that elected officials adopt unelectably extreme views would not have been good.

Rory Hester: Do you think that the viral social media supports for Ukraine has had concrete effects? I’m talking specifically about how many countries have donated weapons and money. How Switzerland enforced sanctions. And how countries that we expected to avoid commenting, came out against the war.

I do think so.

You do want to get the order and hierarchy right, though. The resistance of the Ukrainian people and the boldness of their leadership has been the primary factor, with the Biden administration’s careful diplomatic conduct to get the sanctions lined up as the number two factor. But if you want to look at stuff like neutral Finland and Sweden hopping on the bandwagon of donating money, or Apple ceasing the sale of its products, or Switzerland needing basically no cajoling to get on board with sanctions, then yes, I think we are seeing the emergence of a “global public” fueled by social media. It’s basically the same trend as American rightists getting fired up about the Canadian convoy protests or the way that the George Floyd protests went global in the blink of an eye.

In this specific case, I think it is probably narrowly good in the sense that it’s helped to overcome some potentially thorny coordination problems. But it’s also a little disturbing how fast opinion cascades can break and could potentially put us in a very dangerous situation either during this war or some future conflict.

Ed: If given the choice between locking in Mitt Romney as the next President or letting the process play out, what would you choose to do? Why?

So figure Republicans have a 52 percent chance of winning in 2024 (because of electoral college bias) with an 85 percent chance that the nominee is Trump. So that’s a 100 percent chance of Romney versus a 44 percent chance of Trump… I think I want to roll the dice and let the process play out.

James: Do you think that a successful YIMBY movement would be sufficient own its own to create a more sustainable housing equilibrium in the US*, or do those regulatory changes need to be accompanied by broader cultural shifts in attitudes towards housing? In particular, do we need to actively try to shift away from the idea that the "correct" place to raise a family is a detached single-family house with a yard? Or do you think such a cultural shift will naturally follow if we increase the supply of more housing types?

I’m not big on shifting attitudes. In Germany, 27 percent of the population lives in single-family detached houses with 56 percent in apartments and the remainder in (I guess) townhouses and duplexes. But Germany has six times America’s population density, so naturally they have a dramatically larger share of people living in apartments. If we went to one billion Americans, of course we’d need a ton more apartments. But even so, we’d only have half of Germany’s population density. So I think it’s perfectly natural that Americans mostly live in detached houses, and I don’t think better policy will or should change that.

But a zoning change would cause shifts on the margin to more apartments and more townhouses, and that would help solve a lot of problems.

Konstantin Bätz: I hope this does not come across as hostile, I promise its a good faith question. I have listened to your recent podcast appearance on the 80000 hours podcast and greatly enjoyed the FP segment. That being said, what would have to happen in Afghanistan for you to say that, with the benefit of hindsight, the US troops should not have left? To put the question differently, what is the level of suffering that would have justified the costly US troop presence there?

What would make me reconsider is less so Taliban actions and more the performance of Afghan troops.

From a political standpoint, the rapid collapse of the Afghan government and super-fast fall of Kabul was a bad look for Joe Biden. What would have made him look good would’ve been for the Afghan National Army to lose some ground but then stabilize and then the fighting season ends. Then they lose some more ground in the summer of 2022, and then there’s another pause. Then by the summer of 2023, the media has totally moved on but the ANA collapses.

But substantively, the fact that after 20 years the ANA had essentially zero independent combat ability strongly suggests to me that the whole mission was worthless, whereas if they’d had some ability to hang on without us, that would suggest that maybe sticking around another year or three could have accomplished something useful.

Mark LeBel: How do you decide how deep to go on a particular policy question? To take an example, I personally work on utility rates and solar policy, so I have paid attention to your interest in residential solar, particularly the permitting and land use aspects. Have you paid attention to other issues with solar energy, like the debate over net metering reform in California?

I don’t have much of a process to be honest.

One of the nice things about living in D.C. is you meet lots of people who are knowledgeable about some area of policy or another and can learn from them pretty casually. There’s a cliche that people here are obsessed with asking each other “so… what do you do?” but personally I am often very interested in the answer to that question. Just chatting with other elementary school parents, I’ve met people who make mathematical models of climate change impacts, antitrust regulators, global public health specialists, people who make ads for political campaigns, specialists in renewable energy financing, and much more.

All that being said, I don’t know much of the details about the net metering issue. But I think that it is broadly part of a set of issues that relate to the fact that the marginal cost of solar power is really low right now when the grid has very little solar on it, but as you get more and more solar, the marginal costs go up a lot. That’s one reason I am at this point obsessed with the non-financial barriers to solar deployment, because I think renewables are getting to a scale where pushing them further with more subsidy is going to be challenging, but jurisdictions that want to promote renewables still have a ton of permitting tools at their disposal.