Reading Railroad Mailbag

Reading Railroad Mailbag

By Matthew Yglesias

I drove up to Reading, Pennsylvania yesterday to do an event with the Albright College New Liberals. It’s always cool to see new places (they have a pagoda!) and meet new people. I’m heading home today, but I’m glad to see talks and conferences and in-person events making a comeback.

Speaking of which, I am going to be speaking on April 21 at a fundraiser for Ben Bergmann who is running for D.C. Council in Ward 3 on a pro-housing platform. If you’d like to come, we’d love you to buy a ticket before the filing deadline on April 10. Hope to see you there!

Stefen F: Now that Dune has been done, what other classic fiction or sci-fi book would you like to see be made into a blockbuster movie?

I think the answer has to be “The Caves of Steel,” which for my money is by far the most adaptable Isaac Asimov property — like just a pretty normal murder mystery set in the future and featuring robots.

I’d probably update it by casting some of the secondary characters like Enderby and Fastolf as women and at least one of the Olivaw/Bailey pair as not white, but I think the story basically works.

Evan Ball: Have you changed your tune on easy monetary policy?

I don’t think I’ve changed my mind about monetary policy, but I’ve certainly changed my position.

From the time I graduated college in 2003 up through the winter of 2020-21, the United States of America suffered from a nearly continuous shortfall of demand and it was a really big problem for our economy and society. Then over the course of 2021, we started overshooting in the opposite direction, which is also bad and calls for a course-correction. This experience has made me think I was too blasé about the design problems with the American Rescue Plan (we will have forthcoming coverage of this) but not really that I was wrong about anything related to monetary policy. I’ve supported NGDP targeting for over a decade now, and I think an NGDP approach not only would have helped us avoid such a prolonged era of too-tight money, but it would have helped avert the current overshoot by preventing the Fed from getting too sucked into the “supply chain” debate.

James: David Shor has frequently cited the Obama 2012 campaign as the gold standard for Democratic messaging. However, his formative political experience was working on that very campaign, so he's not exactly a disinterested party here. Do you agree with Shor that Obama 2012 should be the standard for Democrats? Is 2012-style messaging even replicable against an opponent who is not Mitt Romney?

In the past 30 years, we have had eight presidential elections. In four of them, one candidate has secured a majority of the vote. Of those four cases, we had two (2004, 2020) where the winner won a majority while also having the Electoral College biased against him. Then there are two elections where a candidate won a majority of the vote *and* had a coalition optimized for the geography of the Electoral College — 2008, and 2012.

I just think it’s objectively true that Barack Obama’s team was good at their jobs.

Joe Saia: Any travel tips for Austin?

I am far from an Austin expert but I have been there a bunch of times over the years. The challenge of Austin these days is that as it’s grown and prospered, it’s become more of a generic global city where the Eater 38 list of best restaurants includes a Korean restaurant, Neapolitan pizza, Detroit-style pizza, sushi, another sushi place, and an Ethiopian spot. Now depending on where you’re visiting from, you might be interested in that stuff (after weeks in Kerrville I did in fact go to one of those sushi spots), but most people probably don’t want to travel to Austin to sample the Detroit-style pizza, they want some tacos.

And there are lots of good tacos in Austin! Two places that have convenient-for-visitors downtown locations are Veracruz All Natural for breakfast tacos and Asador for other tacos. The other place I like to recommend is Better Half Coffee & Cocktails, in part because I know one of the owners, but it’s fantastic on the merits.

Sam Freedman: What are your views on AI existential risk? Correct me if I’m wrong but you seem somewhat dismissive. Surely Bostrom et al make a good case?

I’m not dismissive of the topic, qua topic, or of the Bostrom/Ord analysis of it.

I think I’ve said before in the spirit of 80,000 Hours that if you’re a young person with technical skills, it’s a good idea to explore a career working in AI safety and AI alignment. Where the AI risk community tends to leave me a little cold is that it’s not clear to me what I, a somewhat influential media figure, ought to do about this. I can argue that Congress should fund the Apollo Biodefense Program and advise people to follow Nikki Teran on Twitter for constant coverage of the bio-risk issue. I can — and do! — attempt to pivot the “lab leak theory” conversation back to the very real issue of lab regulation and gain of function research funding. Everyone should read the Future Perfect Pandemic Proof series that’s running this week for more policy!

I feel like I’m contributing and doing something, whereas on AI … I dunno. I recently came up with an idea for a column and hopefully you’ll see it soon. But I don’t feel like I have a ton to contribute to this issue. That’s not the same as thinking it’s unimportant.

Walker P: In a recent column you mentioned that anti-spoiler culture is “annoying and bad.” I wholeheartedly agree with you but tend to get a lot of flack from my friends when I say it! Could you expand on why you think this is the case?

Two levels of thought on this.

One is just that people get weird about this, complaining about “spoilers” for things that have been out for months or even years. It’s just one of those things where internet subcultures go insane. It’s appropriate that critics who get to go to advance screenings not leak plot twists. But if you’re dying to see something without having heard anyone talk about it, it’s incumbent on you the audience member to go see it opening night. By Sunday midday all bets should be off.

On a higher level, nobody complains about “spoilers” in “Hamlet” or “Crime and Punishment.” Your enjoyment of “The Great Gatsby” will not be imperiled by knowing ahead of time that Gatsby dies and his funeral is poorly attended. In a well-constructed piece of art like “Fight Club” or “The Usual Suspects,” it is in fact more enjoyable to watch and appreciate the skill with which the story is told when you know the twist. It’s actually only by knowing where a story is going that you can appreciate and understand its construction and themes as you go along. Things that genuinely depend on “surprising” you for shock value are just bad.

Nico Dornemann: Do you accept Tyler Cowen's argument in Stubborn Attachments that the social discount rate should be zero? If so, do you accept his argument that maximizing sustainable economic growth should be a limiting factor on the extent of redistribution? If not, what is your model of how much we should redistribute?

I think Cowen maybe gets the implication of the zero social discount rate wrong.

What’s true is that if you use a super-high discount rate, then it looks like redistribution is everything and you shouldn’t worry about growth. Then as you start to discount the future less, this starts to seem wrong — China has achieved much more poverty reduction through the past 40 years of growth than you could possibly have obtained by redistributing the meager resources available in 1982. But when the discount rate drops all the way to zero, I think growth starts looking worse again. After all, as long as growth is positive at all then we will at some point reach the binding physical constraints of the universe. Getting to that end point a million years sooner or later probably isn’t that significant. What’s important is that we avoid extinction, catastrophic civilizational collapse, or total technological stagnation.

More broadly, I’m not really sold on the idea that low taxes on rich people are an important determinant of economic growth or that well-designed welfare states are a hindrance to it.

What is true is that you sometimes see people proposing to do redistribution by curtailing the supply of labor or of housing or some other factor of production. These are really leaky buckets, where the quantity of wealth destroyed exceeds the amount that is redistributed and I think we should avoid that. My basic view is that the best way to maintain a durable pro-growth political economy is to pair it with a well-designed redistributive system of taxes and transfers that ensures prosperity is broadly shared without empowering rent-seekers. Now there is also the Peter Thiel view that the true path to pro-growth politics is to make common cause with dingbat populists and authoritarians in order to sweep away the clutter of bad rules. But this is sociologically and historically implausible.

Populist authoritarians don’t turn around and craft well-designed market economies — they create corrupt systems in which arbitrary power is used to shore up the interests of regime allies. Trump isn’t going to take on rent-seeking by car dealerships and dentists. He’s not going to force YIMBY policies on nervous homeowners. He’s going to try to use exotic antitrust theories to punish technology and media companies that promote hostile coverage and reward those who provide friendly coverage.

Policy wank: You've written in Slow Boring posts that you were helped by Affirmative Action in getting into Harvard and that you were a below average student there. I find both of these very difficult to believe. Are they actually true or is this some kind of false modesty?

I am obviously not privy to the specific choices made on my admissions file, but I am of Hispanic/Latino origin and I believe that it is well-known that colleges give a boost in admissions to such people.

The below-average student thing always plays a bit weird, I guess, but I am smart enough to know that half the students in the Harvard Class of 2003 were below-average. Philosophy is not the easiest major, but it’s not the hardest either. My professors were not urging me to consider grad school — they didn’t think I was showing tremendous promise with it. I worked on a campus alt-weekly paper where I ran the news section one year and then was editor in chief another year. I launched my blog when I was an undergrad. That stuff took a lot of time. During Larry Summers’ brief tenure as president of the university, he led a mini-crackdown on grade inflation, and a professor held up a paper I wrote that got a B+ from the TA as an example of the problem and marked me down to a B-.

Kourosh: How do you feel about the new Amazon Labour Union and how do you think it changes the labour landscape?

It’s a cool story, but I don’t want it to give people false hope — the American pattern of establishment-by-establishment organizing and firm-level bargaining is deeply broken.

Doug Orleans: How far down do you scroll when looking for questions to answer? Do I have any chance if I don't ask within a few hours of the mailbox post?

Far! How far down do you people read the answers?

Dave: One thing Matt has commented that conservatives have that progressives could use more of is message discipline. It would be really interesting to hear an account of how conservatives achieve that and how progressives could do so in the future.

I’m wondering, too, because lately they seem to have lost it and are just running around calling people groomers and pedophiles.

A serious answer is that groups taking action in pursuit of material self-interest don’t demand symbolic validation. What coal companies want is for Republicans to win elections and gut air pollution regulations because that will help them make money. They do not want Republicans to run around talking about gutting air pollution regulations because that would cause them to lose. The Democratic coalition is dominated by idealists who want to be made to feel good about themselves; they want candidates to talk about their issues, and to talk to the public the way they talk amongst themselves.

Labor unions are not like that because they are organized around concrete self-interest, but they are a waning force in politics. The freight rail unions don’t want Secretary Mayor Pete to talk about imposing regulations on freight that lead to inefficient overstaffing — that would be counterproductive! — they just want him to do it.

Nilo: How do we get Secretary Pete and other Biden officials to pay attention to work like the Transit Costs Project, so the entirety of the rail portion of the Infrastructure Bill doesn't go down the drain?

His team is aware of this work. How much difference that actually makes in practice remains to be seen to some extent.

Bob M: Did I miss your “America Has a Free Speech Problem” take? Is it coming?

I wrote and abandoned like four versions of a column on this and couldn’t get it right.

But to make a long story short, I do think there is a problem but I think “free speech” is a very bad way to characterize what the problem is.

Aaron: Matt, what do you think about the concept of “selling out?” Do you buy the idea of a quality curve that is related to a product's exposure to the public? Bands are a classic example, but also consumer goods and take writers. Was taking a job with Substack ‘selling out’ or is going to work for NYT ‘selling out?’ Is it real, is it useful?

It seems clearly true that a person can face tradeoffs between doing quality work and doing work that reaches a large audience and/or makes a lot of money.

“Black Panther” was by far the most seen and most lucrative of Ryan Coogler’s films, but it’s also by far the worst of the three. Not that it’s bad or anything, but working within the confines of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its larger demands prevented him from constructing a story that really said or meant anything the way that “Fruitvale Station” and “Creed” do. The good news about Hollywood is there’s a very robust tradition of artists bobbing and weaving between more commercial and more artistic projects and leveraging commercial success into gaining more creative freedom and control over other projects. So I hope Wakanda Forever is a huge hit, but then I hope Coogler flips back and does one or two more idiosyncratic original projects before returning to the MCU.

The aspect of 1990s “selling-out” discourse that posits some kind of ontological transformation as you go from an indie label to a major label strikes me as wrong. There’s a kind of misguided snobbery in telling people to not even try to throw together an album with a few radio-friendly hits at some point over the course of a career or to treat making a comic book movie as a source of contagion. I’d love to see a Noah Baumbach X-Men or whatever. It’s not that there’s no tradeoff, but part of being a relevant cultural force is trying to walk both sides of the line. Over the course of my lifetime, I think rock music has largely lost its cultural relevance to hip-hop in part precisely because in one community, sellout discourse stigmatized the idea that talented musicians should try to be huge stars, while in the other people strove for success.

I’ve now been off the content treadmill for over a year and am not totally up to date in terms of what’s driving traffic numbers. But as of 2019-20 the tradeoff in this regard was that the route to high audience was to pay close attention to Google search trends and write about things that people knew they wanted to read about, while I think generally the best work comes from writers being weird.

Matt Hagy: Enjoyed your interview with Kathryn Paige Harden covering her research and recent book, “The Genetic Lottery”. (It convinced me to read her book.) Has her work influenced your thinking about government policy for achieving better and fairer social outcomes? If so, how?

For example, KPH’s book seems to challenge our traditional liberal view that expanding education can be used to empower individuals to enter more rewarding career paths and thereby ameliorate poverty. Yet, if there are significant innate genetic components impacting career success in our advanced economy then some people will be inherently disadvantaged in following this path. Further, education and other interventions may not be able to close this gap. In that case we may want to downplay educational expansion as a means to addressing poverty and instead propose more redistribution to directly improve people’s material conditions.

Additionally, do you think KPH’s strong moral argument for society/government to ensure everyone lives a life of dignity without material deprivation due the inherent unfairness of the genetic lottery is productive? I can see how many of us liberals/progressives can easily accept the argument, yet I fear conservatives might use the same scientific facts to argue for a revitalisation of social darwinism. Hence, I worry that drawing salience to these scientific findings in our political arguments could backfire. Would you advise Democrats to embrace KPH’s moral argument?

I’ve been thinking on and off about this topic for a while.

One thing that’s odd about it is that Harden’s most controversial point is that published studies in the academic literature say that intelligence is a bit more than 60 percent heritable in genetic terms. But this is actually very close to the estimate given by the lay public. And I’ve certainly noticed that in casual conversation among parents, people generally expect children to be good at the same things their parents are good at — including, per this survey, perhaps overestimating the extent to which athleticism is heritable.

So in an interesting sense, the heritability of intelligence thesis really isn’t that controversial. But it is often ignored in academic social science where people will ask facts about inequality or social stratification without attempting to consider the obvious confounding influence of the fact that most children are close genetic relatives of the parents who raise them.

To draw out all the policy implications of these genetic insights would take way more space than I have here.

So I just want to note one particularly salient idea that I think has scared people off the whole subject, which is that Charles Murray infamously argued that because intelligence is heritable, all efforts to reduce racial inequality are at best doomed and at worst counterproductive. As I’ve previously written at length, this involves at least a half-dozen logical leaps and fallacies and is directly contradicted by evidence in favor of lots of specific equity-advancing initiatives. Given that the geneticists actual estimate of heritability here is not far off from what laypeople already believe, I don’t think there are substantial political benefits to stigmatizing discussion of the science and it would be better to directly stake the case for egalitarian policies on the basis of the evidence in their favor, which is quite real.