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Bill Clinton, pro wrestling, and dredging dredging dredging

Matthew Yglesias

 May 20 

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I turned 41 this week. No more juicebox mafia for me!

Ben Lawrence: I saw from Twitter that you attended the New Japan Pro Wrestling event in DC on Saturday (I was there too). As a longtime fan of the “sport,” I was wondering about your thoughts on both the event itself and pro wrestling in general.

I’m not a pro wrestling guy, but I went at the instigation of a friend who is, and in general I recommend getting out of the house and doing stuff with friends.

As for the show itself, it was pretty great. Nobody is confused as to why action movies can be fun even though they’re “fake,” so I don’t know why people object to it in wrestling. I’m not sure I have the bandwidth in my life to really start following NJPW, but it was fun and I’m open to it.

James M: What do you think of Carrick Flynn's campaign in Oregon? What about the coverage of it? If you were going to give political advice to effective altruists looking at politics, what would your advice be on how to pass good legislation? I was pretty tickled when reading the Politico article about his campaign, it mentioned secret congress and linked to your article!

I want to give the race itself full article treatment next week, but I also liked the Politico article about Flynn. One thing I would say about the race is that although he lost, I think it was actually pretty good for effective altruism as a movement to attract attention in a different sphere. Obviously, you would face diminishing returns on losing more races. But even in defeat, I think the run helped move the movement forward in some important respects.

Daniel Otis: Alex Pareene just wrote a piece in TNR on the failure of the Clintonite New Democrats, particularly on housing policy. I’d like to hear your take on that.

There’s a style of journalism where you prosecute a case the way a good lawyer would in court — only making factual claims but being entirely one-sided about it because you’re trying to win the case rather than present a balanced view. I think Pareene’s piece on the Clinton legacy is a good example of a well-executed version of that kind of journalism. Right before I read Pareene’s piece, I read Bill Galston’s Wall Street Journal op-ed praising Bill Clinton’s legacy, which I thought was also a well-executed version of prosecutorial journalism. If you read the two stories back to back, you’ll find that even though they have totally different takes on whether Bill Clinton was good or bad, Pareene and Galston rarely have a square disagreement. Pareene talks at length about the failures of Bill Clinton’s approach to public housing, which Galston just doesn’t mention, while Galston is preoccupied with the success of macroeconomic policy under Clinton, which Pareene doesn’t really talk about.

Pareene is channeling a new book by Lily Geismer. I haven’t read it, but I did read and enjoy her previous book “Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party.”

One issue that I have with a lot of leftist commentary is that it starts with the correct observation that an influx of suburban college-educated professionals has changed the Democratic Party in ways that make it less effective at fighting for the interests of the economically marginalized, but then doesn’t seem to note that it’s the left-wing faction of the party that is most dependent on the votes of college-educated professionals. To me, the key to building a party that can more effectively fight inequality isn’t to refight old battles about Bill Clinton; it’s to push the party to adopt more moderate positions on cultural issues in order to win more votes from non-college-educated voters.

Sean: Is the rising cost of college tuition really due to states cutting back funding for public universities? Or do university operating costs just keep increasing because of cost-disease related reasons? Or something else? I see a lot of takes online about how states used to properly fund universities with tax dollars but don't anymore. But if that is true, we should only see large increases in tuition at public universities, not private ones, or large increases in tuition in states with low taxes compared to high tax states. But from what I know that is not the case.

If you look at the CBPP information on funding and the data on tuition trends, I think you see that tuition hikes are in fact related to funding cuts, but it’s a pretty weak relationship. Some states really did cut spending so much that it’s hard to see how they could have avoided tuition hikes. But plenty of states increased nominal spending, and they all raised tuition anyway. So my first cut at this would be that spending cuts are part of the story, but there is a larger question about what states are trying to achieve and why.

David K: In hindsight, should DC be the nation’s capital? If you could choose a new capital today, without considering all of the network effects, where would you put it?

I don’t think it really matters where the capital is, but the original idea of D.C. was that it was sort of the middle of the country. Today the mean population center is in south-central Missouri and the median population center is just north of the Illinois/Indiana/Kentucky intersection. So by the numbers, St. Louis might be a good spot.

Aaron: During your Vox years you fairly regularly gave voice to comparative politics scholars’ critiques of the US system. I haven’t seen as much of that at Slow Boring. Why is that? Comparative politics scholars and even American politics scholars have become more interested in institutional reforms: multi-member districts with a more proportional electoral system, stronger protections of voting rights, increasing the size of the House, adding states, reducing the power of the Senate, adding seats to the judiciary, adding term/age limits to judicial appointments, among others. Why do you spend so little time on these (despite occasionally plugging Taylor et al.’s excellent A Different Democracy? Is it because they have no chance of being adopted? Is it because you think some or all of them are bad ideas? Is it because you fear they are unpopular with pivotal voters and so you avoid talking about them as a part of your broader popularity project (though I guess you couldn’t admit to that even if it were true)?

I think I talk about this stuff more than you give me credit for, but the customer is always right, so I won’t dispute that I do less work in that area than I used to.

And it’s largely because I don’t see anything, in particular, happening on this front right now. This isn’t to say that I think it’s inconceivable; the political landscape can sometimes shift very suddenly. But nobody seems interested in prioritizing structural reform to the American political system, so it kind of is what it is. In terms of popularity, I sincerely have no idea what the polling on “let’s shift Ohio to a unicameral state legislature with proportional representation” would look like — as far as I know, nobody is actually polling on this. I think in recent years reformers have sunk a lot of effort into ranked-choice voting schemes for no particularly good reason, and I would urge them to look at proportional representation instead.

Brendan: I'd like to see a more fully fleshed-out take of why you like John Fetterman and what distinguishes him from other progressive candidates. With the frightening news of his stroke, what does he need to do to win in November? Is his personal brand enough or should he moderate on some issues?

There are two things that I like about Fetterman:

He seems like a smart guy who avoids falling for dumb activist tests and just acts like a 100 percent normal establishment Democrat in his issue positioning.

Progressives give him a pass on all of it because they like him.

He’s running in a slightly red state in a brutal national political climate, so I think that to actually win he needs to pivot further to the right. I think he absolutely should do this because per (2), the left will give him a pass on it. A lot of people are chalking the mysterious pass-getting quality up to “vibes” but I think it’s pretty clearly just that he endorsed Bernie in 2016.

And in general, I think the Democratic Party would be in a much healthier place if both sides did their factional politics on that basis — Hillary-endorsers would stop adopting left-wing ideas to try to appeal to leftists who really just find Hillary-endorsers to be personally untrustworthy, and Bernie-endorsers would stop pretending that it’s smart politics to embrace unpopular ideas. I was for Martin O’Malley, so I’m objective on this.

Nathan: During summers 2020 and 2021, there was a lot of talk about education, the cost of remote learning, and the long-term cost of lost education. Now seeing it play out, it seems worse and even more shocking than I expected, and I was quite pessimistic. Do you and your crack team have thoughts the current state of public schooling and how to recover when young adults are missing foundational classroom/social/self-management skills? Am I in a bubble or does it seem like the public is not paying enough attention to this issue? As bad as crime and social issues are now, I’m really worried about the long term consequences of students missing huge parts of middle and high school, not being prepared for the content, and possibly graduating without sufficient reading, math, and social skills.

I feel like we really compounded the problems associated with school closures by not owning up to the problems fully.

Kids had very different experiences during closures due to very different home situations. We should have done re-entry assessments and then re-sorted students based on ability level, so that kids who learned a normal amount of reading during kindergarten would be grouped with kids who learned no reading during virtual 1st grade rather than with kids who learned no reading during virtual kindergarten. Instead, we’re making teachers’ already difficult jobs harder.

Graham: Douthat's latest column has me thinking... what is the optimal Ukraine-Russia endgame in your opinion, and what do you think the administration is working towards?

Optimal? I mean obviously, it would be great if Putin’s regime collapsed, Russia became a friendly democracy, and then Crimea was returned to Ukraine with a great deal of local autonomy and also a mutual understanding that the Russia/Ukraine border is going to become less significant since both nations will be joining NATO and the EU soon.

I think the question is what’s realistic. The American media often frames this as Ukraine having an interest in pushing things very far, so it maybe doesn’t make sense for us to give the Ukrainians a blank check. I think that’s kind of wrong. Ukraine suffers much more than the United States of America from the ongoing hostilities, and Ukraine has a large interest in reaching a deal with Russia that reopens their Black Sea grain exports and gets Russia to stop attacking them. The people who really like to see the war ongoing are Poland and the Baltic countries who are currently living the dream of seeing their enemy, Russia, fought with Ukrainian blood and American gold.

Now if you’re Ukrainian, you love these countries right now. It’s Poland and the Baltics who’ve pushed for more sanctions on Russia and more guns for Ukraine in the face of vacillation from France and Germany. If I were an American policymaker, the point I’d be trying to convey to Kyiv is that they shouldn’t think of these countries as the most pro-Ukrainian countries in the world, but rather as the most anti-Russian countries. And it is not in Ukraine’s interests to forever serve as the pointy end of Estonia’s spear.

Pat Thomas: Any takes on multilingualism? Do you happen to speak any languages aside from English, Matt? What languages would you suggest someone learn at this point in time? Do you think learning another language is worth it for a native English speaker?

I don’t really have any “takes” on this. I did many years of French in school and as a result I guess I can kinda sorta read French.

For most Americans it seems like the language to learn would be Spanish because if you did speak Spanish well, there are plenty of people around you could speak to in Spanish; aside from that, it’s always useful to learn a major world language like Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, or Arabic. Kate knows Arabic pretty well and is currently learning Spanish, so she would probably be better situated to speak to the merits of language learning as self-improvement.

[Editor’s note: I also don’t have any strong takes on this! Compared to Arabic, opportunities for Spanish conversation and media consumption are really easy to come by in my life, so learning Spanish has been a much easier process, beyond its greater similarity to English. So my only real advice is that if you’re thinking in terms of practicality, try to be realistic when you consider how much effort you’re willing to put into finding opportunities to actually use the language, otherwise it’s a lot of work for a skill that can fade without practice. But it’s also totally fine to learn something impractical just for pleasure! Even though I don’t get to speak Arabic much in my daily life right now, it brings me a lot of joy to be able to chat with people when the opportunity arises (even if I’m a bit out of practice), and I find the language itself to be incredibly interesting.

If you’re in the D.C. area and looking to learn or practice a language, I’ve had a great experience with private lessons through Spanish Tutor D.C. and have also heard good things about their group classes. I really enjoyed my time with an Arabic conversation partner through NaTakallam.]

David Vine: I’ve seen a number of takes from people saying something along the lines of “I was on team ‘going big on stimulus and overshooting is the preferred direction we want to err in’ and I was wrong” now that there’s been some serious inflation after the huge stimulus, but were those takes actually wrong? I get the argument that too much stimulus contributes to inflation and inflation is bad, but what were the actual smaller alternatives that were passed on and is there evidence that they would have resulted in a better outcome today?

I think there are basically two lines of argument here that I embrace:

Fiscal stimulus should have automatic, conditions-based triggers, so we would have spent more than ARRA did in 2009-2010 because the recession turned out to be worse than expected. But we would have spent less than ARP did in 2021 because the labor market was growing very rapidly that whole time and there was no real need for that much stimulus.

As long as Congress was going to enact $1.8 trillion in new spending in 2021, it would have been nice for less of it to be low-value, short-term stuff ($350 billion in one-off funding to state governments) and more of it to be high-value long-term stuff ($350 billion over 10 years in tax credits for zero-carbon energy production).

Aaron Maenpaa: Should we repeal the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906? Zvi Mowshowitz argues that it significantly hurts the productivity of American ports by limiting which who and with which equipment they can be dredged, while also being sufficiently low salience that repeal should be tractable. Do you concur? If so, what do you think would be the best way to actually get it to happen?

Like Mowshowitz, I listened to this episode of Odd Lots about the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906 and found it convincing. The one cautionary note I would offer about Mowshowitz’s treatment of the issue is that when it comes to regulatory clusterfucks, the specifics often matter less than the political coalitions.

In other words, if you simply deleted this law from the statute books but left everything else the same, I think the same actors who currently prioritize picayune job protection over efficient ports might be able to find some other legal or regulatory tools to block cost-effective dredging. So I recommend Scott Lincicome’s piece on the whole nexus of bad policies that have kept American ports in a primitive state.

Best way to change things? Mike Lee has a bill on this — the DEEP Act. That’s a good start. The problem is Lee has zero cosponsors and doesn’t sit on the relevant subcommittee. If a good bill only has seven cosponsors, that reflects the short-sightedness of the author’s fellow senators. If a good bill has zero cosponsors, I think that reflects a senator who is more of a showhorse than a workhorse. The way to get this done would be to convince Deb Fisher (the ranking Republican on the right subcommittee) and Roger Wicker (the ranking Republican on the whole committee) that they should care about this. Then the Biden administration could indicate that they agree reform is a good idea. Then hopefully Secret Congress could do its thing.

Jack F: What do you think would be the most effective way to reduce car ownership in cities? Even transit-rich cities like NYC and SF have a large portion of car-owning households (42 and 54% respectively). At least among people I know, it feels like the cars are almost always for destinations out of the city, which is a much tougher nut to crack than improving intra-city service.

I actually think that reducing car ownership should not be a policy goal.

Both NYC and SF impose a lot of restrictions on building new housing. One of those restrictions is minimum parking regulations. If you deregulated, there would be more housing in those cities and a lower ratio of off-street parking spaces to dwelling units. That would have the effect of reducing the car ownership rate, but it’s not good policy because it reduces the car ownership rate — it’s just good policy. By the same token, congestion pricing would make driving in San Francisco more expensive but also faster. It would make riding the bus in San Francisco faster, but the price would stay the same. If both modes got faster but only one mode got more expensive, that will shift people at the margin toward less driving and more bus-riding. But it’s not good policy because it has that impact, it’s just that congestion pricing is good policy.

Brendan: My extended family is from Maine (both inland rural and small-town coastal areas) and interestingly in the past few years, since the pandemic-fueled migration to Maine, the areas they live in have started to grapple with land-use and population issues in a way that hadn't previously been the case, at least for a while. You have a lot of insight into big-city land-use policies and have even on occasion shared some interesting articles from local Maine papers, but I was wondering if you had any specific thoughts (or academic papers to point out) concerning land use restrictions in these types of areas and what types of policies make sense to implement in — for example — Rumford or Rockport to encourage population growth (assuming you think we should be encouraging population growth in Maine).

One of the leading academic theorists on zoning is William Fischel, whose takes I often find a little bit oddly framed because he’s a Dartmouth professor who often seems to implicitly assume that small-town New England is a typical situation for American governance. But if you’re interested in Maine and are annoyed that political pundits often implicitly assume that big northeastern cities are a typical situation for American governance, you should definitely read Fischel.