The Twitter takeover, my fake job, and a world without Pearl Harbor
Matthew Yglesias
2 hr ago
28
26
Contrary to rumors, there will be no Boring Company takeover of Slow Boring — we are committed to diversity and competition in the boring space.
Benjamin Howard: With Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter in the news, what do you think is the most important corporate takeover in US history?
That question is probably too hard, because what I think is underrated are influential early-stage acquisitions that you don’t necessarily think of as being a huge deal at the time. When Instagram was purchased for $1 billion, the conventional wisdom was that Facebook was massively overpaying in a clear sign of a tech stock bubble (I was at Slate at the time, and arguing that this was a perfectly reasonable buy was a Slatepitch) while in retrospect it was a very shrewd and influential business move.
Google buying YouTube seems like a really big deal to me since if YouTube were an independent company, I think it would be a company that we talk about a lot.
City of Trees: Last Saturday, Milan and some of us commenters had a robust dicussion on the concept of class. Do you find the concept useful? If so, do you think it should be more in-depth than the typical American understanding that's limited to the amount of income/wealth one has? Should it also include aspects like the Marxist bougie/prole distinction, levels of education, cultural factors, or anything else?
I think it would be interesting to see someone try to sketch out in some detail the class structure of the United States as defined pretty literally in terms of people’s relationship to the means of production — and accounting for the fact that in the contemporary economy, this is more complicated than a dichotomy of “workers vs. owners.”
We have a home-owning majority and a large renting minority. We have a partially overlapping stock-owning majority and a large share-less minority. We have a majority that doesn’t receive any explicit welfare state benefits and a minority who do. And because the welfare state is tilted heavily toward the elderly who also tend to own capital in the form of stock and especially houses, we don’t necessarily have a large block of “capital-less workers who love the welfare state” to be the foot soldiers for a certain style of left politics.
Ryan: Diplomacy, the game. Thoughts? Have you played? What is the best country? What is your preferred first move?
It’s been a while now since I’ve played, but my favorite is to play as Germany. I like the classic F Kie —> Den, A Ber —> Kie, A Mun —> Ruh to start. But of course it all depends on your conversations.
Casey Adams: A lot of people died from COVID. While many of them were older, a lot of people 55+ are/were employed. How much of the current economic issues are related to COVID deaths?
The U.S. has had about a million Covid-19 deaths, of which roughly 75 percent were among people over 65, so I would say 250,000 people is probably the upper bound of missing workers due to Covid-19 death. That’s considerably smaller than the decline in immigration over the course of the pandemic years, so I don’t think the mechanical impact of deaths is a particularly important part of the puzzle.
A bigger deal is that even though most Americans are not highly Covid-cautious, some are. And for the highly Covid-cautious, lots of jobs have not only become more undesirable due to Covid-19 risk, but lots of things you can do with money (eat out, travel, go see a movie) have also become less desirable. That I think is a non-trivial double blow to labor force participation. All that said, I would emphasize that the jobs recovery has been very strong, and fundamentally, I don’t think either reluctance to work or the Covid-19 death toll is having a large impact on current economic issues. The missing immigrants, by contrast, do have an impact in part because they are the people who are generally willing to move to random places in search of work, so they are very helpful at filling gaps.
Jim Barnett: Counterfactual history: what would (or wouldn't) have happened if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor?
It’s hard to know what to say here without knowing why Japan didn’t attack Pearl Harbor. The Japanese were trying to conquer China, and the United States, in an effort to stop or punish them, had put major sanctions on Japan to deny them access to oil and other natural resources. They decided that a good way to get around this would be to take over what’s Malaysia and Indonesia today. Then they either thought that attacking those places would inevitably lead America to declare war on Japan, or else that it was logistically impossible to invade Malaysia and Indonesia without also attacking the Philippines, and attacking the Philippines would mean war with America. Either way, since war with America was inevitable, the attack on Pearl Harbor was a clever idea.
So we have some options:
Attack the Philippines without attacking Pearl Harbor — this doesn’t seem like it makes a big difference to history.
Attack the Dutch and British colonies in Southeast Asia without attacking the Philippines. If you look on a map, this would have left the Japanese in a weird position logistically, which I guess is why the military didn’t want to do it.
Just don’t attack China!
Now obviously the right policy for Japan was (3). The effort to conquer China was totally pointless and even leaving aside the larger war, the Japanese authorities never had a viable way to occupy and administer the Chinese territory they controlled.
But I guess (2) is the more interesting counterfactual because it seems likely to me that the Japanese were just mistaken and the U.S. wouldn’t have done much to escalate for the sake of the Dutch East Indies. We would have continued the pre-Pearl Harbor pattern of progressively increasing assistance to the Allies, and I think ultimately that the USSR and the British Empire could have beaten Germany with Lend-Lease Aid. But the war lasts longer, and post-war Europe is much more Soviet-dominated. At that point, the United States probably needs to reconcile itself to making friends with the Japanese Empire as part of an anti-Communist strategy.
Alec Arellano: Building on last week's question about your connection to Judaism, to what extent/in what way(s) do you identify as Latin? Asking as a fellow Cuban American, and one reflecting on his own identity in this regard.
I feel really torn about this. We have in America (or at least in the urban northeast where I’m from) a kind of standard script for a person to claim a white ethnic identity like Irish or Italian without it necessarily meaning a huge amount.
And that’s kind of the relationship that I would like to have with Cuba and Cuban identity. I feel a certain kinship to Cuban food, am a little disproportionately interested in Cuban history relative to its objective importance, was super annoyed by Samuel Huntington’s assertions of a deep “civilizational” divide between the United States and Latin America, took some personal offense at racist attacks on Sonia Sotomayor, and named my son Jose after my grandfather.
But I also don’t want to be someone who is seen as trying to take up space that more properly belongs to someone else. To put it another way, I think it’s odd that in this era of heightened concern with representation, there are no Hispanic New York Times columnists, and I think it’s doubly-odd that nobody ever talks about how there are no Hispanic New York Times columnists. I feel Latin enough to be annoyed by this but maybe not Latin enough to think that hiring me would address the issue. Even that’s contingent, though. When I was 23, I was invited to be on a panel at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and at the time I thought to myself, “maybe I should join NAHJ and take Spanish classes and really assume the identity of ‘Hispanic Journalist’” but ultimately I ... didn’t do that.
Tracy Erin: Is there any hope that Evan McMullin will beat Mike Lee in Utah? If I would vastly prefer Evan McMullin to be one of the Senators from Utah should I be donating to his campaign or would my money be used more effectively in some other way?
McMullin’s odds are super low just given the national political climate. But if you support the concept of this style of politics where Democrats stand down in non-competitive races and back anti-Trump figures, then I think a McMullin contribution couldn’t hurt.
But in that vein, I would also strongly consider sending some money to Lisa Murkowski, who is in a tough race but has a legitimately good chance of winning. Attach a note explaining why you appreciate her and what you wish she would do to be even more worthy of your support.
Kevin Heller: What are your thoughts on the idea to do school year-round instead of breaking so long for summers. It's an idea that I haven't heard about recently but I remember it from years ago. My understanding is the main purpose is to avoid significant learning loss that occurs during summers, particularly in lower income households. I personally like the idea but I imagine school unions would push back hard. I am not a parent myself and can see it as more of a mixed bag from that angle.
In the abstract, I think it’s clearly a good idea. The issue is that unless you want all your teachers to quit, it’s very expensive to implement. DCPS experimented with year-round schooling for a few years, and my understanding from people who worked on it is that they found there were benefits, just not commensurate with the cost. So they shelved the program and focused on building out preschool availability for three-year-olds.
Nate: Repeat question: what do you actually do for the Niskanen center? What do they expect from fellows?
They pay me $0 and I provide a roughly commensurate amount of labor.
So what’s the point? Well among other things that they do, think tanks try to build intellectual communities and affinity groups. And writers (at least some of us) like to be members of intellectual communities and affinity groups. It’s nice to have a squad, some people you know, a regular happy hour invite, something to put in your Twitter bio, etc.
Brad: You talk a lot here about the need for more housing in a lot of our major coastal cities, zoning for density, and things like that, but one thing I'm not entirely sure of is the size of the change we're talking about here. What would a city like Seattle or San Francisco look like if we actually built enough housing there to meet demand? Would it be closer to converting a few of the city's longer, low-density residential streets into larger avenues lined with condos, or are we talking about tearing down entire neighborhoods of single family houses and turning them into high-rise apartments?
I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that there is no decision-maker who could tear down an entire neighborhood of single-family houses and turn them into high-rise apartments. If you passed a law that said “a high-rise apartment building can be built anywhere in the District of Columbia,” then you’d wake up the next day and find that most people don’t want to sell their homes. You’d also find that a single-family lot isn’t large enough to build a high-rise apartment on anyway; you’d need to buy multiple adjacent lots, and the opportunity to do that is rare.
But over the years a bunch of ADUs would get built, and some single-family home parcels might get turned into rowhouses or duplexes or maybe even a low-rise apartment. Over time, of course, some people would pull things together and build new high-rises. But even though right now there is unmet demand for urban living, it’s not like it’s an infinite amount of demand — the suburbanists are right that all else being equal, most people prefer a detached single-family house. So in some respects I think the aggregate scale of the change might be pretty modest. The key thing is that a small amount of unmet demand can have a disproportionate impact on prices.
Owen Minott: What do you think of the job Mayor Bowser has done as mayor/do you think she deserves reelection?
She absolutely deserves reelection because her main opponent, Robert White, is running on ending mayoral control of DC Public Schools and handing it over to a separately elected school board. The subtext for this is that the teacher’s union wishes D.C. had handled Covid-19 more like the west coast board-controlled cities that kept their schools closed throughout the 2020-2021 school year rather than reopening. They are wrong, mayoral control is good for accountability, and I’ll be voting for Bowser.
Given that, I’d like to cheerlead for her tenure, but to be honest, I think it’s been a pretty uninspired eight years that’s lacked signature achievements. But you could do a lot worse than Bowser, and the guy she is running against specifically is promising to be worse.
Andy D: What's your take on the WMATA fiasco? On the one hand, WMATA is terrible. On the other, is the alleged potentially catastrophic underlying problem actually bad enough to justify crippling service when there was only one incident over like 4 years? What should we hope for here?
There are a number of management issues with WMATA, but on this specific point I really wish we could at least see the cost-benefit math in terms of safety vs. service levels tradeoffs. A lot of people die in car wrecks on highways and we could save lives with a 40-mile-per-hour speed limit. The downside is people would go slower. Part of auto-centric policymaking is that we don’t treat safety as an absolute trump card; we treat people’s ability to get around as important on its own right.
So you take X number of train sets out of service and that gives you some safety benefit. But how much extra driving does it create and how many road accidents do we predict from that extra driving? How many deaths due to air pollution? I honestly have no idea, but I’d like to see decisions made with reference to some explicit math.
KZ: There was a map of available Airbnbs in New Orleans going around recently, with people blaming the company for high housing costs. I'm reflexively skeptical of this explanation because the people putting it forward typically seem to be doing so in an effort to explain why we don't actually need to build any more new housing. However, the basic premise of Airbnb raising prices by cutting into the already constrained housing supply doesn't seem inherently implausible to me, and I can't deny there are a lot of orange dots on that viral map. As a good YIMBY, how should I feel about Airbnb? My prior is that people should generally be able to do what they want with their property, including renting it out if they so choose, but if the effects on prices really are as dramatic as the detractors say then maybe strict regulations make sense in the short term.
If you believe that supply and demand matter for housing (which I do), then I think you have to believe that Airbnb increases housing costs.
That said, suppose New Orleans shut down all its hotels. Well, that would reduce housing costs by crushing the city’s economy. Tourism is a big deal in New Orleans! By the same token, by opening the city up to more visitors, Airbnb is a boon to the New Orleans economy. Does it put more pressure on the housing supply? Sure. But “allow more housing” + “allow Airbnb” generates a virtuous circle of prosperity (construction jobs, tourism jobs, tax revenue, etc.) while “try to stop people from visiting the city” seems counterproductive.
Andrew Robinson: Is there space in the popularism movement for people who dislike overly popular things? Relatedly, when is the last time you waded through the crowds at peak Cherry Blossom? Did you enjoy it?
I’ve actually never been to see them at peak bloom.
But I think this is a really important one. Popularism is a point about electoral politics, but I think there’s actually way too much popularism in cultural criticism in the United States. You get more clicks by writing about stuff that’s popular, and fans of popular stuff don’t like to hear that they are wrong, so there is an objectively strong material incentive to write upbeat fanboyish stuff about the MCU rather than do the traditional work of film criticism. And to me that’s a bad trend; a bug in internet culture rather than a feature.
Stephen F: What ever happened to Terrorism? Not only was it a constant fear throughout the 2000s, it was the subject of the biggest political and culture war debates of the era. Now it's hardly even mentioned in the news, politicians don't run on it anymore, and I can't remember the last time I saw an op-ed about it.
Several other hot debates of the aughts — Stem Cells, Social Security Privatization, Evolution in Schools — seem to have disappeared entirely from the conversation. Even early-2010s issues like Occupy Wall Street or NSA spying appear to have faded away.
So I guess the bigger question is — which of today's issues and debates will be considered irrelevant in ten years?
On the specific question of terrorism, I suspect that the main thing that happened to terrorism is there was a big youth cohort in the Arab world that’s now aged out of its violence-and-mayhem phase. Even at Peak Terrorism, the number of people actually involved in doing terrorism was extremely small, so it just kind of faded away.
The larger point about the shifting issue landscape is correct and I think people forget this. There are always a lot of “what happened to Glenn Greenwald?” takes, but you might as well ask “what happened to the policy debates that were salient when Glenn Greenwald first became prominent in the media?” The news agenda changed a lot! In terms of today’s issues, it’s almost too easy because for the past 18 months a huge dividing line of American politics has been between the vaxxed-and-relaxed and the vaxxed-but-not-relaxed, and we are definitely not going to be arguing about this in the 2028 presidential election. Personally, I am someone who loves being in the mix with events in the news. But I would encourage everyone to try to ground their overall political identity in the enduring axes of political conflict — I am a secular person and a person who believes in the merits of redistributive taxation and the welfare state. The exact prominence of those questions ebbs and flows, but they always come back around.
28
26
Share
Write a comment…
Marie KennedyWrites Post-Woke ·1 hr ago·edited 1 hr ago
Re: WMATA… This TED talk from Mike Rowe (the dirty jobs guy) has always stuck with me. https://youtu.be/IRVdiHu1VCc I think the “vaxxed and not relaxed” could benefit from repeated viewing, along with anyone who can’t understand why Democrats are bleeding working class voters.
1) Safety is never really first. If safety came first, we’d all never leave the house. (Oh, wait….) I’ve worked in manufacturing environments where electrochemical solutions were dissolving away titanium, where metal scraps or powder could conceivably spontaneously combust, or high-powered lasers were micro-welding nickel. If safety were really first, we’d shut the whole enterprise down.
2) Most people who work in these jobs and take pride in getting shit done don’t appreciate conference room lectures from people with desk jobs about how much Desk Job cares about their safety. Nor do they appreciate the mask scolds. Every man for themselves.
Don’t get me started on this “psychological safety” bullshit, either.
11Reply
4 replies
Peter S1 hr ago
I think the decline of terrorism also has something to do with the absolute military defeat and decapitation of Al-Qaeda and ISIS by the US and its Allies.
7Reply
24 more comments…
Ask me stuff
The launch of a new experiment
Matthew Yglesias
Jan 18
593
1,033
The media's lab leak fiasco
A huge fuckup, with perhaps not-so-huge policy stakes
Matthew Yglesias
May 26, 2021
173
500
Tema Okun's "White Supremacy Culture" work is bad
Prestigious universities and worthy nonprofits shouldn't push nonsense
Matthew Yglesias
May 10, 2021
375
381
In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics
Some thoughts on the New York Times' Slate Star Codex profile
Matthew Yglesias
Feb 14, 2021
287
474
Democrats are sleepwalking into a Senate disaster
Business as usual will produce a huge GOP majority
Simon Bazelon
Apr 11
112
380
The "cancel culture" debate is dumb
We ought to argue about substance not process
Matthew Yglesias
Jan 28, 2021
369
517
Meritocracy is bad
America is good at elevating "the best" people; the problem is that's a bad idea
Matthew Yglesias
Mar 16, 2021
259
436
Welcome to Slow Boring
In spite of all!
Matthew Yglesias
Nov 14, 2020
148
243
Mancur Olson at the end of history
The West can win while barely trying
Matthew Yglesias
Apr 7
109
128
What's wrong with the media
The young/urban/educated bubble in an era of growing polarization
Matthew Yglesias
Nov 19, 2020
157
309
See all
© 2022 Matthew Yglesias
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Publish on Substack
Get the app
Substack is the home for great writing
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.