Matt's mailbag

MATT'S MAILBAG

Juneteenth Mailbag

Plenty of water, plenty of revolutions, and plenty of illegitimate criticism

Matthew Yglesias

2 hr ago

30

44

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Denver Happy Hour earlier this week! I’ve had fun doing these and hope to keep scheduling more as travel happens.

Luke Christofferson: What's the most valid criticism you've received recently? And how do you filter out unhelpful (for whatever reason that might be) criticism while still being open to evolution stemming from the valid criticism?

Let’s be real — there are no valid criticisms of me and I am perfect in every way.

More seriously, my experience of being someone who is often criticized is that critics tend to pick one of two registers. There’s a register where the critic acts like they expect their criticism to be persuasive because the target of the critique is a smart, open-minded, honest person who is open to new evidence, new arguments and new ideas. This mode of criticism is often effective at either persuading me that I am wrong about something or at a minimum persuading me that my prior writing was flawed in some important way. Then there’s a register where the critic is simply venting, talking about how I’m a bad person, an idiot, a bad-faith operator, etc. Those kinds of criticisms are almost never persuasive in large part because they’re not written with the intention of persuading.

So I think as the recipient of criticism it’s important to be open-minded and calm, but I also wish that more people who like to argue about things on the internet would generate a larger fraction of their time to attempting to persuade rather than venting.

Matt Hagy: Are you familiar with Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Righteous Mind”? If so, what are your thoughts on his theory that much of our moral and political values follow from intuitive (i.e., subconscious or emotional) thought and that reasoned arguments are post hoc constructions to justify these intuitions? Particularly, if reasoned arguments and empirical facts can rarely persuade people to change their political values, but instead only confirm their prior beliefs, should we all put less time, effort, and money into such endeavors?

I like that book a lot, but my main takeaway from it is less that it’s a waste of time to persuade people than actually that it’s very worthwhile to persuade people about specific policy ideas.

You can think of One Billion Americans as a fully Haidt-pilled book in which I’m trying to take concepts that are near and dear to conservatives — patriotism, national greatness, family — seriously and put on the table ideas that I mostly learned in progressive wonk circles that I believe can advance those values.

Or coming from the other direction, Mitt Romney just put together a proposal to reform federal family benefits in a way that’s simpler and more pro-marriage. A good number of progressives I know say it’s a plan with real merit and I expect Democrats will engage with him in a serious way. That’s because Romney here is taking seriously things that progressives say are important to us. So he’s crafted a plan that will advance a conservative value (marriage promotion) in a way that seems clearly beneficial on net to poor kids even if you don’t put a ton of weight on the marriage issue per se. Where politics goes awry is when people neglect Haidt’s point about the durability of these values and start to think something like “if we just give everyone a copy of Atlas Shrugged they’ll see the welfare state is bad” or “one more column about how all of conservative politics is white supremacy will definitely convince them.”

Tim Flemming: Now that it’s wrapping up, what’s the best ‘season’ of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions? Personally, the Haitian Revolution takes the prize just due to how little I knew about it going in.

My personal favorite is the one about South America, which I genuinely knew nothing at all about. But my kid agrees that Haiti is best.

Mostly, though, I’m sad that the show is wrapping up. I’d love to listen to Cuban Revolution and Iranian Revolution episodes.

Doug Orleans: Do we have enough water for one billion Americans? Are there other solutions besides desalination?

To quote the book: “But America turns out to have 8,800 cubic meters of fresh water per person. If our population tripled, we would have 2,900 — quite a bit less. Yet Spain gets by with 2,400; the UK has 2,200; Germany has 1,300; and the Netherlands has 650. Qata, an admittedly extreme case, gets by with fewer than 25 cubic meters. For the United States to make itself as parched as Qatar seems inadvisable, but we’d need a population of 112 billion, which is obviously a bit extreme.”

The reality is that because people don’t like rain, the trajectory over the past two generations has been for population growth to occur in the most arid parts of the country. That is not ideal and arguably reflects some policy failures in terms of how water is priced in the United States. But the country as a whole is very wet.

Rory Hester: Some say that a taco by definition requires a corn tortilla. If it comes in a flour tortilla it’s really just a unwrapped burrito. Do you agree?

I have personally never heard anyone say this. Kate is a native Texan and thus a partisan of the flour-based taco culture that straddles the Rio Grande, and while personally I do also appreciate a freshly griddled corn tortilla taco in the manner of central and southern Mexico, I can’t deny that the flour tortilla taco is a taco.

Marc Robbins: Many argue that the embedded inflation of the 1970s was driven by COLA clauses in union agreements. As unions are smaller and weaker now, that's far less a driver of inflation. However, unlike in the 70s, Social Security has its own COLA requirements, and there are more than 70 million people on Social Security, fairly close to the percentage of the population in unions back then.Would you advise a (no doubt suicidal) politician to curtail Social Security COLA requirements lest those payments play the same role that union-based wage increases did back then?

On the COLAs specifically, part of the case for creating automatic inflation-adjustment to Social Security benefits was that back in the seventies you had a lot of inflationary ad hoc benefit hikes. The idea was to add some predictability and discipline to the system, which is good.

But it is true that if you completely ignored the political ramifications, one highly effective way to reduce inflation would be to cut Social Security benefits for non-poor seniors. Retirees tend to have low savings rates, so reducing their income very mechanically and predictably passes through to reduced consumption. And you can precisely craft the policy to avoid pushing anyone below the poverty line, whereas the consequences of raising interest rates can be unpredictable. This is obviously not an idea elected officials are going to consider but it would work on a technical level.

THPacis: How do we explain the apparent shift of LGBT advocacy groups and the progressive mainstream to focus specifically on transgender issues post Obergefell? Some would say this is the natural next step but is it? The fact is that the entire LGBT community (cis and trans alike) can still be legally discriminated against e.g. in housing and services in many states (and the situation was even worse pre-Bostock). Wouldn’t a focus on passing the national equality act, affecting the whole community, likely far more popular with the general public, and in which the US is clearly behind many peer countries, have been a more natural next step?

Part of the story is that housing discrimination, though still widely legal, seems to be pretty rarely encountered on a practical level.

At the end of the day, the big driver in all of this is that the LGBT community built big and well-funded institutions to wage the fight for marriage equality and then won surprisingly easily. It’s not just that Obergerfell went their way, but Republicans basically surrendered rather than counter-mobilizing. Groups don’t just fold up shop, they need to look for new issues to fight on. But one thing you saw in the wake of the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling (which went in favor of the shop rather than the LGBT groups but did so on rather narrow technical grounds) is that there just weren’t a ton of practical instances of this kind of discrimination to fight over. If news broke tomorrow about a landlord in Florida refusing to rent to gay couples, I think the advocacy groups would love to take up that cause and talk about it. But there isn’t much there there.

Trans issues are good activist campaigns precisely because they are controversial.

Ben: What are your thoughts on the theories related to Acemoglu et al.'s 2012 paper “Can't We All Be More Like Scandinavians?” i.e. that America's more ‘cutthroat’ capitalism subsidizes the less innovative but more ‘cuddly; European capitalism by creating exportable growth that these less innovative countries can free ride off of (and the arguments with a similar flavor in different realms --- military spending, climate change technology, basic research, etc.).

I think it’s plausible, specifically in the pharmaceutical and medical device realm, to say that European countries are to an extent free-riding off high American prices.

But I don’t think Acemoglu’s view about the US versus Nordic social models and innovation is remotely tenable as a general proposition. To give a really broad view of the differences between the US and Sweden, they have higher taxes on everyone, more generous benefits for the poor, and more direct public financing of things like health and higher education. This makes life very different for the poor (Sweden is nicer) and pretty different for the middle class (Swedes have less stuff but also more vacation time and less stress about paying for certain kinds of things). This would only be relevant to innovation if your model is that, like, Larry Page and Sergei Brin decided to get off their asses and invent Google because the only alternative was a life of dire poverty. But that’s not right.

Now if the US had higher labor force participation than the Nordics, it would be easy to explain that in terms of cutthroat versus cuddly capitalism. But our participation is actually lower so there’s nothing to explain. Sweden, Iceland, and Norway actually have more billionaires per capita than the United States (Denmark and Finland have fewer), so on the high end the Nordic model isn’t necessarily less cutthroat and actually the Nordic countries have lots of innovative companies. I would say the big thing the US has going for us innovation-wise that progressives sometimes neglect is the venture capital ecosystem, which depends in part on a friendly regulatory environment.

Lost Future: Why does the US consistently have a lower workforce participation rate than other developed countries?

This is the weird one because on its face, the structure of the American economy is harsher on non-workers than what you see in Europe. And for a long time, we had higher labor force participation so it all made sense. But over the past 15-20 years we’ve fallen behind and it’s kind of weird.

The gap is larger for women than for men, and childcare seems to explain a big chunk of the gap — Americans have more kids and a less-generous childcare system, so we have a higher share of people taking care of children full-time. But it does not explain the full gap. And here I would say the big problem is we lack effective active labor market policies. Lots of people live in communities where joblessness is widespread, and we don’t really have mechanisms that are effective at connecting them with opportunities in other communities.

I think conservatives have sort of gotten high on their own supply in terms of the idea that making the welfare state really, really stingy will force people to go get jobs and have amazing lives. The cross-national evidence is that even if non-workers are not entirely destitute, most people would still rather work and get extra money. After all, nobody is confused by the idea of an employed person working harder to try to get a promotion. People like money! But we have a decent number of people in the country who genuinely need help getting work in terms of training, relocation, etc.

Antirobust: Got any Denver urbanism takes or impressions?

Like all western cities, Denver contains a comical quantity of land inside the city limits that is zoned exclusively for detached houses — sometimes with minimum lot sizes of 6,000 or even 9,000 square feet.

I really am a moderate and a pragmatist about politics and I one hundred percent understand why politicians and citizens alike are reluctant to say, “welp, the City of Denver ought to drastically alter its land-use policies.” At the same time, every Colorado politician I’ve ever spoken to says that the downside to the state’s tremendous economic boom is extreme housing scarcity. And if you want to make a big change in the housing situation, you need to make a big change in policy. I grew up in Manhattan so I don’t personally understand the idea of wanting to require a suburban-style built environment inside the boundary of the core city.

Beyond banging my head against the table, I guess my only real thought on this is that Denver is a sufficiently purple state that you could maybe imagine a strange bedfellows coalition of rural Republicans + YIMBY traitors passing a state law forcing Denver, Boulder, and a couple of ski towns to upzone while leaving the suburbs untouched.

BronxZooCobra: For Milan — how much would Substack have to pay you to skip Yale?

From Milan: A lot.

Kenny Easwaran: For Matt — what would a better answer than Milan’s be, with the benefit of hindsight on your own educational experience at Harvard?

I think I learned a ton in college despite being a middling student at best. I took a lot of classes on subjects that seemed interesting to me, listened to what the professors said, did most of the reading, and learned. I’m acutely aware that lots of people go to college and then don’t try to learn things, and that seems like a shame to me.

Or maybe the real shame is that kids try to somehow outsmart the system by doing something other than selecting courses on topics that seem interesting to them. Due to a mix of scheduling problems and core curriculum requirements, I ended up taking an optics class that I didn’t care about and I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about what I learned in that course. I wasn’t interested! I just wanted the credit so I could graduate and, indeed, I got the credit and I graduated.

FrigidWind: What can the Democrats do to achieve better funding discipline and avoid situations where millions gets sent to an unwinnable race like the 2020 KY Senate race of the current GA-14 race?

I think this is a little bit overrated as an issue. All the Amy McGrath money was a little bit silly, but every single Democratic senate candidate was well-funded in 2020 — it’s not like giving the money to Theresa Greenfield instead would have put her over the top in Iowa.

What Democrats do need to do a better job of is acknowledging that they need to try to win senate races in Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, and Ohio and that all of these states are meaningfully more conservative than the national average. That means you need nominees who clearly position themselves as more moderate than the national party (i.e., moderate like Joe Manchin, not moderate like Joe Biden) and then you need donors to be willing to open their wallets up to them. That’s a real problem, but I’m not convinced that McGrath is the reason we had that problem. She actually did run on a very moderate platform and overperformed the partisan fundamentals by a good amount — it’s just that she did it in unwinnable Kentucky rather than in Iowa.

Dave: Related to the recent Ryan Grim article “Elephant in the Zoom,” a lot of what I've seen Matt say around the trend of internal ‘wokeness’ debates at progressive groups has centered on the idea that these debates make organizations less effective. Having seen a lot of this stuff first-hand, I agree with that critique. However, there’s also a side to it where employees are essentially demanding better work-life balance and for senior management to be nicer. I’m curious to what extent you see value in improving work-life balance and encouraging managers to be kinder, and how you would balance that with organizational effectiveness.

I’m all for niceness but I’m kind of eh on work-life balance in this context. Of course people need time off for illness, for family obligations, etc. And of course people should get vacation time and unwind and unplug to come to work refreshed. But really if you’re working for a mission-driven nonprofit, you should expect your work to be a very large part of your life.

If you’d rather support a cause in a more low-key way, I think it’s great to go work in the private sector and make some financial contributions. I think a lot of young, progressive-minded people are excessively hostile to the idea of working for a normal for-profit company. Once you get it into your head that corporate work is bad, it leads naturally to a situation where the purpose of the progressive advocacy apparatus is to provide employment opportunities for you. This has gotten worse in DC thanks to a successful effort by Elizabeth Warren to stigmatize the idea of giving executive branch jobs to people with private sector experience. But the point of advocacy organizations is to make progress on issues, not to provide morally pure job opportunities for left-wing young people. And I think that is probably best done with relatively small teams of fanatics who work really hard and are cheered-on and financially supported by a larger cohort of people with normal jobs who broadly align on values but also care a lot about work-life balance.

Like

Comment

Share

30 likes

44 Comments

Write a comment…

Lance Hunter

2 hr ago

·

edited 2 hr ago

I’m always a bit frustrated by the argument “so-and-so used to work for <evil company>, so how can we trust them in a government job regulating <evil company’s industry>!?!”

My typical rebuttals to this argument is asking the person making it exactly how much loyalty they feel to their former employers. Usually if you’re not working there anymore, it’s not because you still put that company’s interests first.

So yeah, not hiring people with industry experience is a very bad plan. Especially because the real risk is people acting in the interest of a potential future employer, not a past one.

14

Reply

Collapse

4 replies

KetamineCal

1 hr ago

Liked by Milan Singh

Wife's family is from Central Mexico but spent a lot of time working ag in the Oklahoma Panhandle where they adopted a taste for flour tortillas. Dust Bowl pushed them back to Mexico then to California, where it's an oddity. But, indeed, younger members of the family that never lived anywhere near Texas grew up in Mexico and California eating flour tortillas. Flour tacos are definitely tacos in the US (especially in Texas) but the bigger question is if they're considered Mexican and if trans-border cultural exchange will change that.

Also, can ask if Baja fish tacos are tempura. Likely is a local fusion food originating from a battered fish dish made by Japanese fishermen around Ensenada. Also note that tempura itself evolved from techniques brought to Japan by the Portuguese.

3

Reply

Collapse

42 more comments…

Failed to load posts

© 2022 Matthew Yglesias

Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice

Publish on Substack

Get the app

Substack is the home for great writing