Memorial Day mailbag by Matthew Yglesias

Memorial Day mailbag

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 13 minutes

Memorial Day mailbag

Upvotes, O'Malley, and my scoldy no-fun views on gambling

Hope everyone is looking forward to the long weekend — enjoy some cookouts and maybe a little Top Gun sequel.

Something I learned living in Logan Circle is that the Memorial Day federal holiday was created thanks to the legislative initiative of John Logan, a former general and U.S. senator who was important enough in Gilded Age politics to have a bunch of stuff named after him but who is now quite obscure.

David Muccigrosso: Does Matt select questions based roughly on upvotes? If so, how does he account for the fact that most questions are upvoted in proportion to how soon they've been posted?

I don’t select them that way at all; it’s all about whether I think I have an interesting answer and how the questions work with the flow of the whole column.

Doug Orleans: Have Martin O'Malley's chances been hurt by the unflattering references to him in the show We Own This City?

I do genuinely think that the unflattering portrayal of Carcetti, the O’Malley stand-in in The Wire, made it hard for him to be taken seriously as a politician.

But part of what I like about The Wire is that while it’s obvious that David Simon thinks Martin O’Malley was a bad guy, I think that Carcetti’s actions are totally reasonable and defensible in Weberian terms. Baltimore is a poor city located in a rich state, and it’s simply true that the best way to help Baltimore was to become governor and enact good policies at the state level rather than to “do the right thing” as mayor.

Griffin75006: I am beginning to agree with some social conservative positions (declining marriage and birth rates are bad, etc) and am disappointed that there doesn't seem to be the rigor/specificity in policy analysis and proposals that I take for granted on left issues (good example is hoooowww looong it took Ezra to get Patrick Deneen to say “mandatory year of marriage counseling before divorce” instead of just waving his hands about “centering marriage” or whatever). Why is this? How do we get social conservatives to get more detailed in their policy proposals, or how do we get liberal technocrats who can do this kind of analysis to care about social conservative issues? If I'm wrong, what's a good example of a detailed/specific proposal to increase marriage rates? Or is it just not possible to use subtle policy levers to change cultural trends in the way it is on economic policy?

If you read yesterday’s piece about conservative thinking on marriage promotion in the poverty context, you’ll know I share this frustration.

I think the reality is that with well-educated people tilting so strongly toward the left, the right is drawing on a very shallow pool of talent for its wonkery. There are just literally not very many conservative policy hands who aren’t hired guns for business lobbies. The ones that are out there are covering a broad playing field, they aren’t necessarily highly respected by the audience for conservative politics, and they tend to be somewhat shunned in academic circles. So I think they raise some good points but often end up churning out work that seems a little thin because it’s not enhanced by a thick community of researchers.

Just one quick example: One of the main things that happened during Donald Trump’s presidency was the bipartisan CARES Act, which seems to have helped a lot of people, saved the national economy, and prevented the Republican Party from getting walloped in the November 2020 elections. But where is the conservative policy analysis of this signature Trump initiative? What was good about it? What was bad? What should the conservative movement learn from this episode? As best I can tell, nobody is working on this or a dozen other fairly obvious policy questions because there just aren’t that many conservatives doing this kind of policy work.

bsupnik: Just a general request for coverage of the high price of higher education. I see higher ed costs, medical costs and housing as the three costs for most Americans that have been growing at an out of control rate even before we got real inflation, and medical and housing costs get a lot of coverage and in some cases some pretty clear policy ideas. What's up with college?

The Lumina Foundation used to run this thing called the Delta Cost Project that actually tracked what institutions of higher education spend (separating out by type of institution) as well as what their sources of revenue are. The upshot of this defied easy summary (it’s complicated) but used to be an incredibly useful resource to refer to in order to think about this question. But then they stopped doing the project so the most recent data is badly out of date from 2013. That’s bad. Someone should fund someone to take another look at this!

Luke Christofferson: Does Elon's veer right have a positive or negative expected value in terms of climate change? Any chance that his turn helps climate change by encouraging EV buying from Republicans?

I think clearly it’s good from a climate perspective. Right now there are three big barriers to EV adoption:

A large minority of the population doesn’t have a good charging solution for where they normally park their car overnight.

The charging while on a road trip situation is not as convenient as it could be.

For cars in the “normal person” price range, EVs are not yet cost-competitive.

These are very solvable problems on which meaningful progress has been made and will continue to be made. What would totally ruin it is if “I run my car on gasoline!” becomes a conservative identity marker like family Christmas cards with the AR-47 have become. Musk going GOP helps with that.

Jeremy: After conquering Prussia and visiting Frederick the Great's tomb, Napoleon apocryphally said, “if he were still alive, we would not be standing here.” Putting the merits of this observation aside for now, it shows that Napoleon seemingly belonged to the “great man”" school of historical thinking. What are your thoughts on this, and do you have any good book recommendations that address this issue in detail? And if you have the inclination, I'd also be interested in your particular view as to whether Napoleon was even right in assuming that his armies would have lost to Frederick's armies. Was this just a proto-humblebrag?

I’m a big believer in the power of contingency in history, which is not exactly the same as great man theory but is clearly related. Unfortunately, I think relatively few authors actually confront this question in a square way. But my favorite work explicitly making the pro-contingent argument in a general way is Niall Ferguson’s edited volume “Virtual History.”

As for the specific claim, I don’t know exactly what Napoleon had in mind but he defeated a numerically superior Prussian army at the twin battle of Jena and Auerstedt, which cleared the way for his later march to Berlin. It seems plausible that if the Prussian military were better led, he couldn’t have pulled this off.

Brian T: What are your thoughts on what our policies should be regarding sex work?

This is a somewhat complicated issue. The idea of jailing people for consensual activity should always be regarded skeptically, and it’s hard for me to imagine a situation in which a big prostitution crackdown would be a reasonable use of law enforcement resources. Old-school streetwalkers were a kind of public nuisance but thanks to the internet, that’s much less of a big deal than it used to be. There’s also decent evidence that decriminalizing indoor prostitution reduces the incidence of rape.

But I also think it’s important to acknowledge that while on the internet, legalizing sex work plays as a kind of feminist concept, in actual public opinion women are much more likely to think prostitution is immoral and should be made illegal. Out in normie-land, I think women have a potentially well-founded concern about the consequences of settling into an equilibrium where prostitution is normalized and de-stigmatized. So something like the messy settlement where it’s illegal but the laws aren’t enforced with any particular vigor could be ideal. Speaking of which…

Jackie Blitz: Chicago is in the process of approving a casino to be built near down town, and it’s a much more polarizing issue among my friends than I expected. I personally see very little down side and estimates of $200M in annual tax revenue that the city needs desperately. Curious if you have an opinion on pros and cons of adding a casino?

I don’t see any good reason for Chicago to refuse to build a casino now that legal gambling has been so normalized, but I think that normalization is bad.

The basic problem is that while there’s nothing wrong with a little gambling, the bulk of the revenue in this kind of industry comes from addicts and real problem cases. And when you have a large, overt, legal casino industry, you have an industry that’s dedicated to marketing campaigns that aim to create gambling addicts. When legal casinos basically only existed in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, they were economic development pillars for those two communities. But now that they are everywhere, a marginal new casino doesn’t drive tourism; it’s hoping to derive revenue from a local catchment zone of gambling addicts. Again, that doesn’t mean Chicago should say no — it’s better for the city to have suburbanites gambling in a downtown casino than doing sports betting on their phones — but this is an area where national policy ought to recalibrate.

City of Trees: You hinted at this in the second to last paragraph of Monday's article but how do you square EA/longtermism/consequentialism with popularism, particularly if voters contradict things by prioritizing short term goals for the benefit of themselves and those they're closest to?

I used to be the kind of progressive who was very annoyed by charity and felt strongly that the real solution to problems should be for the government to collect more taxes. It’s great for private citizens to direct their own personal consumption decisions, but putative do-gooding should be subject to democratic accountability, not the whims of those who happen to have money to burn.

Engaging with GiveWell got me off that worldview, in part because I realized it’s just not plausible or realistic to expect a democratically accountable government to ever give as much weight to things like deworming programs or fighting malaria as they objectively deserve. It’s actually asking too much of the political system to be that high-minded. What people want is for the government to do things that make their lives better. And we honestly struggle enough to have a rational policy debate about how to succeed on those terms without bringing the bed nets into it. But that means that there is a large scope for private charity to overperform the public sector if the people participating in charity are well-motivated and reasonably self-critical about what they do with the money. That doesn’t mean that I’m against taxes, but I do see a valuable role for the charitable sector in doing things that governments will never do.

Conversely, I think one reason people resist pragmatic political prescriptions is that educated cosmopolitans have come to ask the political process to do too much work in terms of making them feel like high-minded good people. If what you want is to feel like a high-minded good person, then you should try to tune out of hyper-polarized partisan politics a bit and help buy some bed nets. The reason to engage with the political domain is that some problems require political solutions. But that means you are engaging with the political system for instrumental reasons, and that calls for a spirit of pragmatism.

Eddy Torres: On a more positive note, what do you think are the most underrated accomplishments of the Carter and Clinton Administrations? [i.e. maybe diversifying the federal judiciary for Carter and the Children’s Health Insurance Program for Clinton]

What always makes these questions hard is assessing how things are “rated,” so I’m going to say that NAFTA is underrated because the dynamic of the 2016 campaign — where Trump complained a lot about Hillary Clinton and NAFTA and she didn’t even try to argue that NAFTA was good — made it clear that people are genuinely very down on NAFTA.

But NAFTA was good! It was intended to stabilize the Mexican political system and facilitate a transition to democracy, and it worked. Also, Americans got more avocados. To the extent that there’s a problem with NAFTA, it’s that a few years after implementing it we let China into the World Trade Organization, undoing many of the economic development benefits for Mexico. What we ought to be doing is doubling down on trade with Mexico, Central America, and other nearby countries as an alternative to China.

Allan: You've mentioned a number of times how Democratic politicians should moderate on cultural issues in order to move closer to the median voter. What policies, specifically, are you referring to and what positions do you believe these politicians should take?

These conversations tend to be a little nebulous because everyone is talking about 17 different things simultaneously.

But broadly speaking, I think Joe Biden and other mainstream Democrats have let themselves get on the wrong side of several topics, of which the highest-profile ones that I can think of are restricting domestic fossil fuel production, trans women competing against cis women in sports, the use of race as a factor in college admissions, late-term abortions, and the desirability of a large number of people making asylum claims at the southern border. These are all areas not where “the left” is doing something weird but where the whole party has taken up unpopular stances under pressure from its internal interest group coalition.

I also think the progressive coalition more broadly has developed a habit of describing the United States of America as in some sense a “bad” society that they want to transform into a different kind of society. I support the idea of international comparisons as a useful tool for policy analysis, but as a political approach, I think this kind of “life is better in Denmark” mode of rhetoric is extremely alienating to most people who are patriotic.

briross: In honor of your trip to Paris, what are some ways that the US is more left wing/liberal than their western European peer countries? We usually think of Western European countries more left wing on issues related to social safety net, like healthcare, child care, affordable higher ed etc, but in what ways are they more conservative than the USA?

Milan went to Paris, not me!

The go-to answer is that the Roe/Casey standard for abortion legality is generally more expansive than western European law. But what I would really point to is less a policy issue than a fact of life, which is that the United States is a more multicultural society that is more comfortable on a practical day-to-day level with diversity.

Patrick C: What's the best type of voting system in general, and what voting system would be best for the U.S. (given the limiting factors associated with making changes to the current system)?

I think there is reasonably strong evidence that parliamentary systems are better than Madisonian ones. I also like proportional voting. I think the exact choice of proportional system is not that important, because the virtue of proportional voting isn’t mathematical accuracy — it’s that it generates a less polarized zero-sum vibe.

Matt Cowgill: What are some lessons from the Australian election for the Democrats?

This is not earth-shattering, but my understanding is that under Albanese, the Labor Party ran on a relatively narrow policy agenda.

I saw some of the Australian press compare him to Joe Biden in the sense that he’s not super-inspiring but people liked him as a more restrained personality compared to a somewhat manic right-wing. But this is actually a big difference. Even though Biden was on the moderate side of the 2020 Democratic primary field, he did run on a very wide spectrum of policy changes. The coalition dynamics that lead to that are understandable, but I do think you do better if you promise a small number of carefully chosen policy changes.

srynerson: Matt, what in your view, would be the optimal terms and/or renewal/fee schemes for patents, copyrights, and trademarks under US law?

I’m going to focus on copyrights, which I know the most about. For the typical work, the vast amount of the commercial value of the copyright accrues within a few years, so I think in principle very short copyrights could be workable. To me the main thing is the moral rights of the author — I like a model where as long as the creator is alive, he gets to decide what happens with his creation.

To safeguard heirs’ interests in the case of untimely death, you could say life of the author or 15 years, whichever is longer. For a corporate creator, I think moral rights don't matter, so we could have a short copyright term — maybe 10 years, and then if you pay a fee you can extend it for 10 more. Or for parity’s sake, you might make it longer to more closely match the likely lifespan of a human creator. Honestly, though, now that we have gotten out of the terrible habit of retroactively extending copyrights, I don’t think the terms being too long is that big of a problem. The public domain now grows each year which is how it should be.