A very messy mailbag

A very messy mailbag. 

Lots of Nordic content and the all-important question — would Cory Booker have won?

Matthew Yglesias. 

 Apr 22   

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I don’t really have a take on it (yet) but I’m reading this very interesting speech NEC Director Brian Deese gave on his vision for industrial policy. And of course answering mailbag questions!

Alex Newkirk: Are the Nordic countries socialist? If not, what exactly should we call them?

The policies are what they are, and I don’t really care what people call them.

But here’s what I think people should understand relative to the American discourse. You sometimes hear the Nordics described as if they are actually strongholds of total neoliberalism that happen to have generous welfare states. This is not really correct — the structure of the Nordic welfare state involves massive levels of public sector employment. These countries also have strong unions with sectoral bargaining, and Norway (and to a lesser extent Sweden and Finland) has fairly extensive public ownership of capital. It’s not just a welfare state.

At the same time, whether you want to call this socialism or not, what you don’t see in the Nordics is anti-capitalist rhetoric from the government. These are small countries that, being small, engage in a lot of international commerce and are home to successful multinational corporations. And it’s important to Danish and Swedish and Finnish and Norwegian politicians that this continues to be the case. Bernie Sanders is from Vermont which is a genuinely weird state that isn’t home to any big businesses, while Elizabeth Warren sometimes sounds like she thinks you could have a whole national economy based around people being professors.

Briross: What do you think of the idea that there's a connection between progressive taxation systems and stingy social welfare policy?

What do you think is the implication for the US, where taxation tends to be progressive at the federal level and regressive at the state level? What's the implication for a growing left wing that increasingly is comfortable with large, universal government programs but wants to raise funds for these programs exclusively by taxing the rich?

I think the article linked in the question is a bit mis-framed because it implies that Nordic countries eschew high taxes on the rich, which is not the case. They tax rich people more heavily than the United States does, which is why you don’t see rich people advocating for the adoption of a Nordic social model.

What is true, however, is that the “tax gap” between the U.S. and Northern Europe is smaller for rich people than for the broad middle class. And the reason for that is I think easier to see now that the economy is experiencing inflation. If you tax the unrealized capital gains of billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and use the money to create a huge subsidized child care system, that’s going to be highly inflationary, because it’s fundamentally a real resources problem and not an accounting problem. You need a bunch of physical spaces that are not currently occupied by child care centers to become child care centers, and a bunch of human beings who are not currently child care workers to become child care workers.

Reshaping the pattern of consumption across the whole country like this requires broad-based tax increases. You’re saying “we as a society should consume fewer restaurant meals and consumer durable goods and have more child care and work fewer hours per year.” The way you accomplish that is to have everyone pay higher taxes.

Frank Holland: Many movies could be made an order of magnitude better by editing alone. Don't reshoot anything, don't change the plot points, just break out the scissors and your common sense. I won't lead the witness here and offer my own examples, but which movies do you think fall into this basket?

I am super skeptical of this claim — an order of magnitude is a lot and it’s making me wonder what you have in mind.

This is perhaps just my family bias, but I think by far the area where we see the greatest quality variance in terms of films that actually get made is the plot/story elements of screenwriting. It’s of course possible to make a film with terrible acting, photography, editing, etc. — which is exactly what would happen if you had me do any of those jobs — but in practice I think it’s rare for studios to put out movies with those kinds of problems. But the nature of the franchise/IP era of filmmaking is that we see studios hitting the gas on projects that have fundamental story problems. The bizarre zig-zags of Episodes 7, 8, and 9 of Star Wars are probably the most clear-cut “someone fucked up” version of this. But in general, I think you frequently see true order-of-magnitude quality differences between something like “X-Men: First Class” and “X-Men: Apocalypse” that have a lot of overlap in their creative teams, and it’s because even in the most pop-y entertainment, there’s still a real difference between a compelling story with momentum and a sloppy one.

FrigidWind: How can a campaign recruit staffers closer to the median voter than the current set?

I think the biggest thing to consider here is that it’s an ecosystem problem. Campaign work is very spotty. Presidential campaigns only happen once every four years. Sometimes you have a midterm cycle like 2014 where Democrats were playing defense for a relatively narrow range of frontline seats, and sometimes you have a cycle like 2018 where Democrats were playing offense across a huge battlefield, plus there were frontline incumbents who needed to run for reelection. So in a practical sense, a lot of campaign labor is provided by recent college graduates who expect to cycle into doing something else pretty soon and by more veteran types who cycle between campaign work and advocacy group work. Right now, all the advocacy groups are very progressive, so the campaign workers are, too.

What’s ultimately needed is for moderation-minded donors (of which there are quite a few) to invest in building somewhat wasteful advocacy organizations that can soak up excess labor during slack periods and provide a reserve supply of manpower when campaigns want them. Currently a lot of the best donors tend to channel their money into very optimized work crafting good ads and putting them on the air. And one point I always try to make is that Democrats’ ads are on the whole very moderate and sensible. What the party needs is to bring that same energy into its general communications and governance strategy, which means hiring more people.

longwalkdownlyndale: Everyone seems to hate the Times's opinion section but I've never seen a good idea about how to make it better (other than have more writers I agree with of course)! If you were dictator of the Times what changes would you make (if any)? Personally I'd get rid of regular columnists and just have the staff fill the page with interesting, good pieces that they'd pay writers/experts/important people to write.

I like the Times opinion section and I specifically disagree with that prescription for making it better. If anything, I have the opposite critique — I think they’ve done an amazing job of recruiting a roster of columnists who are good writers that I’m interested in. If Kathleen Kingsbury were to ask me what I think she should be doing differently, it’s that I’d like to push that great roster to get out of their comfort zone a bit more and answer the questions that I am most interested in seeing them answer.

Michelle Goldberg could revisit the interest she used to have in gender-critical feminism before a clear progressive consensus developed that this was the wrong kind of feminism. Has she changed her mind? Was she right all along? Does Ezra Klein think affirmative action admissions policies that discriminate against Asian applicants are fair? Now Kingsbury would probably tell me that this is easier said than done. And I’d tell her that, yeah, I actually worked with Ezra for years and know that it’s hard to needle him into weighing in on nasty fights over topics that he doesn’t necessarily consider to be all that important. But when I did pull it off, the traffic was great — people are really curious to hear what he has to say!

Brian T: Matt, you tend to be pretty dovish on most privacy issues compared to most other commentators. Are there any examples of privacy concerns you think people or lawmakers should take MORE seriously?

I think current approaches to privacy are imposing large costs on the public by making the public sector worse while achieving basically no actual privacy benefits because private-sector data gathering is so extreme. One obvious area for reform could be much stronger penalties for data breaches to improve the incentives facing the private sector.

Steve Botsford: How close do you think GiveWell is at their operational capacity. I ask because I have not seen Sam Bankman-Fried make a massive donation to them yet. Being worth $22b and an effective altruist wouldn't he be more effective by making a massive donation now, increasing the visibility of the charity instantly and saving many lives in the short term. Or do you think his EA leads him to value the future far more thus incentivizing growing his current wealth for future philanthropy.

Somewhat related: If you were to win the current Powerball ($348m with a post-tax lump sum around $150m) how would you go about spending your new found wealth?

The Powerball question is fun but I don’t know that I have a good answer. In terms of GiveWell, they have seen their financial resources grow a lot recently which I do believe created a temporary bottleneck in terms of their ability/willingness to actually disburse funds, but they now have a plan to scale up their spending dramatically.

Part of that is they have a number of job openings to help investigate new areas. But part of my understanding of what they are getting into is more ambitious funding of research. From a starting point of saying “out of all the things people are doing, which are the ones with solid evidence of cost-effectiveness?” they are now ready to move into a space of “what are some potentially cost-effective things that could be tried on a speculative basis with a solid research plan built-in from the beginning?” And I think that’s great.

I do think SBF is primarily focused on his long-term investments rather than here-and-now charities. But that’s at least in part because GiveWell’s financial resources are growing at a good clip right now so there isn’t a stark conflict at the moment. In general, I think there’s a decent division of labor where broadly encouraging middle-class people in developed countries to contribute to GiveWell-style efforts while public-spirited super-rich people focus on more strategic plays makes sense. The great thing about me giving money to the Maximum Impact Fund is that a marginal contribution makes a large difference. But if you’re rich enough to move millions of dollars at a time, it’s smart to look at other ways to change things.

Joel D: Was there a 2020 Democrat who, if elected President, would now be better positioned to stem midterm losses and go head to head with Trump again in 2024? Would President Booker/Klobuchar/Bloomberg have been better able to deal with Manchinema? Or are Biden’s problems mostly fundamental to the economy and to the structure of the party?

You can definitely tell stories where the new administration handles the situation in a way that ends up being more popular. For example, I think Pete Buttigieg probably would’ve gotten rolled by the top brass and avoided the political headaches associated with withdrawing from Afghanistan. But even though I know that many of you disagree, I think Biden did the right thing there!

Rather than dealing better with Manchinema, you could easily make the case that President Mayor Pete might’ve gotten less deference from moderate Senate Democrats around the American Rescue Plan. Without Biden in the White House, it’s easy to imagine a dozen Senate Democrats insisting that Schumer engage with the Romney/Collins proposal for a $650 billion stimulus. Progressives would have experienced that as a bitter disappointment at the time, but it would have left inflation lower (and, to be fair, the jobs recovery slower), and then maybe it’s easier to get to yes with Manchin on a reconciliation bill. Maybe?

But the big picture question is this: if my critique of Biden is that he’s been too in thrall to the power of “the groups,” is there anyone who would have done better? And based on watching the 2020 campaign unfold, I can’t see any evidence that there was someone like that in the field. This is the big problem for people with Slow Boring-style politics. For better or worse Biden is our guy, and if he fails, the dominant interpretation will be that Democrats tried moderation and it didn’t work. So we’d better hope he doesn’t fail. I continue to be surprised that the people in our faction of the party haven’t constructed more of a stab-in-the-back narrative around the odd choice to fire Biden’s campaign manager right after winning the primary and replace him with the architect of the Beto O’Rourke 2020 Experience.

Now here’s a different question. Suppose Cory Booker was able to travel back in time and re-run his campaign, positioning himself as the True Heir to Obama who (unlike Joe Biden) would hew to Obama’s course on charter schools and free trade while (à la Eric Adams) positioning himself as a Black former mayor who understood both the agony of police abuses and the acute perils of under-policing high-crime communities — wouldn’t Booker have won?

Alex Newkirk: I adore the Martian, and I know you're partial to hunt for red october, what are your personal all-time rewatchables?

I think “Hunt for Red October,” “Blade Runner,” “The Bourne Identity,” “Terminator 2,” and the movie we used to call “Star Wars” have to be the ones I’ve seen the most.

Simon_Dinosaur: Matt you wrote in the last mailbag about how it is bad that leftists logroll instead of prioritize. If you were God Emperor of the Left for a day what would you make the top three priorities?

Of the items from the original Build Back Better proposal, the three that were best-designed were the climate tax credits, the preschool matching grants, and the increased generosity of Affordable Care Act subsidies. Doing those three things plus raising taxes by $1.7 trillion would have also decreased the deficit, which is good anti-inflation policy.

Gwyn: What role does Judaism/your Jewish heritage play in your life? Do you partake in/enjoy the customs or being part of the community? Do you find anything interestingly distinct about American Jews compared to other high achieving immigrant groups? Any thoughts on the debates over Jewish exceptionalism? Like, is the apparent achievement level of Ashkenazi Jews remarkable, or is it a bit illusory when you look more closely, or trivial/uninteresting considering historical selection effects like restrictions on professions, etc.?

I’m not very observant and Kate isn’t Jewish, but we did host a Passover Seder last week and I took Jose to the family High Holy Day services from the New Synagogue Project back in the fall.

I’d say that like a lot of secular-ish American Jews, I’m very interested in the Jewish cultural legacy. I’m fascinated by the fact that Zelenskyy is Jewish and, like in the Adam Sandler Hanukkah song, I generally have a large degree of awareness of which people are Jewish. In terms of Jewish achievement in the United States, I think the different hypotheses here are pretty underproven. But the whole situation is part of my resistance to the Ibram Kendi effort to redefine racism in terms of an objective hierarchy of conditions. I want to say that American Jews are doing very well on the whole and not really in need of a lot of assistance, but also that Jewish people clearly are victimized by antisemitic hate crimes and that this kind of subjective bias really is an important issue. In fact I’d even go so far as to say that we are “structurally” disadvantaged in certain senses, like that Christmas always falls over a school holiday so it’s convenient for people to travel to be with their families whereas Passover usually doesn’t.

I don’t see any plausible solution to that structural disadvantage; it’s just a fact of life. But this is a distinct issue from the question of “which groups are richer than which other groups?” It would be absurd to look at average educational attainment and median income among Jewish Americans and conclude that we are taking advantage of the structural oppression of gentiles. Kendi, because he isn’t a crazy person, doesn’t say that’s what’s happening either. But the fact that he doesn’t say it is in serious tension with the whole structure of his account.

lindamc: Are you neat or messy?

Very messy.

Lost Future: Signal boosting because I find this topic fascinating too. Why can't a conservative Democrat try to win in a red state, or a liberal Republican in blue, by meeting the electorate halfway? There has to be some deep structural reason why, with literally thousands of offices contested nationally every year, we see so few attempts. Especially given how weak American political parties are — they can't really control what the candidate says or does, or even who runs.

I think the premise here is sort of wrong; there’s a reason Louisiana and Kansas have Democratic governors while Maryland and Massachusetts have Republican ones.

So we know that this actually works. But a question is why don’t we see more of it? I think one important reason is that, as Milan wrote for us a while back, voters don’t seem to pay any attention at all to who their state legislators are. So Larry Hogan can get elected governor of Maryland, but it’s almost impossible to successfully run for Maryland state legislature as a “Larry Hogan Republican.” If at any given time, the Louisiana State Senate had a half-dozen Democratic Party members who were holding down R+8 seats and perceived as ideologically identical to Jon Bel Edwards, then there’d be a perennial bench of JBE-like candidates for statewide office in Louisiana. Would they always win? Of course not. But they’d win like 30 percent of the time. What we get instead is a situation where even though we know it’s possible for moderates to win governor’s races in mismatched states, the elections frequently aren’t contested meaningfully.

This brings us to the other point that across American politics, I think parties are just not that strongly motivated to win. If you think about a classic political machine, the idea is that the boss makes money by dispensing patronage. To dispense patronage, he needs to control the key offices. And to control the key offices, he needs to win the election. That means balancing loyalty to the machine with popularity to the public in terms of picking who to nominate. Today you don’t have a machine. You have donor networks that are interested in politics primarily for expressive reasons. And if you’re doing expressive politics, you’d rather have a 1-in-20 chance of winning while staying true to your values than a 1-in-3 chance of winning by compromising them.

Max S: What's your take on water-based public transport? I live in NYC and love the ferry system, but I'm not sure how scalable / replicable it is. (Stats show that very few people use it compared to the subway, even though we probably have the ideal city geography for ferries.) Should ferries be a bigger part of American transportation? Which places should invest more in it?

The issue with ferries is that the destination has to be right by the water. Hong Kong is like that; the ferries converge right at the Central Business District. Seattle isn’t nearly as dense as Hong Kong, but it is similar in that downtown is right by the water. The issue in New York is that even though Manhattan is this long skinny island, the far-east and far-west parts of midtown have the least activity — people are trying to get to the middle of the island.

Ferries to the Financial District make more sense, but businesses have been shifting out of there and toward Midtown for decades at this point.

Ace of Bayes: I recently moved to an urban area in the Mountain West after a full lifetime in the DC Metro area. There are many differences between here and there, but this is one of them: the number of working class white people here is large, whereas the number of working class white people in DC is tiny (note: I think this is unique to the DC area in that other coastal "superstar" cities have a lot more working class white people than DC does). How do you think this fact - assuming you think it is true - affects federal policy and politics w/r/t race? I think it may have something to do with the "popularism" vs. donor class dichotomy you write about sometimes: not interacting with working class white folks in DC makes the policymakers and their staffs as well as the think tankers (a) forget such people exist at all; and (b) systematically underestimate their numbers.

It is definitely true that Washington, D.C. is unusual in having essentially no working-class white people, so in a localized context, discussing privilege or justice with a heavily racial frame really does describe the situation well.

That said, I’ve come to think this kind of sociological explanation for people’s blindspots is wrong. A lot of Brooklyn-based writers come across as if they’ve never met someone who preferred Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016 or who backed Eric Adams in the 2021 mayoral race, but Clinton and Adams both won Brooklyn. What’s happened, I think, is that people’s political engagement is overwhelmingly online and there are not a lot of working-class people of any race participating in Twitter debates.

Jacob K: Given your Canadaphilia, have you been following the federal conservative party race? What are your thoughts?

I’m loving the intense YIMBYism from Poilievre and some of the other Conservatives.

But broadly speaking, what makes Canadian politics weird is that while the Liberals can win more seats with fewer votes (as they did in the two most recent elections), it’s also possible for the Conservatives to win a majority while totally blowing off the median voter (as they did in 2011) thanks to Liberal/NDP vote-splitting. So on a certain level, I feel like the Conservatives are mostly hostage to the party alliance dynamics on the other side.

John E: Hipster antitrust or Borkism? Or is there some kind of middle ground that makes sense? I would be particularly interested in thoughts that address the NON-big-Tech parts of the economy.

In terms of non-tech stuff, I am a consumer welfare guy.

What I would say about tech is that traditionally the United States recognized a separate set of concerns about concentration in the media sector that was enforced by a distinct agency, the FCC, and governed by a distinct body of law. I think that most people perceive that Facebook, Google, and to a lesser extent Twitter are not just economic actors but social and political ones. To me, trying to address this with the tools and concepts of antitrust law is a mistake — antitrust is about generating economically efficient outcomes. The right view about tech is that there are concerns about the risks of allowing our communications infrastructure to be dominated by a small number of players that are worth paying an efficiency price to address.

One idea I like is Paul Romer’s proposal for a progressive tax on digital advertising to encourage deconcentration and diversification of business models.

Romulus Augustus: Being that Libs of Tik Tok is a huge recruiting officer for right wing politics, what do the tiny sliver of educators who make these videos about gender theory hope to accomplish? It seems like the site is a classic bit of “nutpicking.” Should professional education associations crack down on social media use by educators?

I’m not exactly sure what policy school administrations should adopt regarding teachers’ social media use, but I will return to an idea I have noted in many a mailbag — the importance of mindful posting.

Social media is in public. And the things you post there could theoretically be seen by a very wide range of people. If you choose to address controversial political topics in that forum, you should try to be thoughtful about how you do it. If you want to vent or get something off your chest to blow off steam, you should go to happy hour with some friends. Get a group text.