SARS-CoV-Mailbag

SARS-CoV-Mailbag

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 15 minutes

SARS-CoV-Mailbag

Cost-benefit, Long Covid, and building more parks

I’ve been down with Covid-19 this week and not feeling too bad but also not my best, so apologies if the answers are totally incoherent!

Ed: You recently attended the Heterodox Academy Conference in Denver. Is there space for heterodox liberals to take a more prominent and explicit role in the Democratic Party? What policies do you think a heterodox liberal should pursue to gain support?

I don’t really think there are “heterodox policies” that one could pursue.

What I do think is that Democrats would benefit from narrowing the list of “here are the things you need to accept to be a mainstream Democrat in good standing” and try to operate as a looser, bigger-tent coalition. Some of that is just good practice for a party in a two-party system, but some relates to the specifics of Senate geography. You need some people to run and win in states that are way to the right of the median voter, which means you need to run a pretty loose coalition. I think a party like that would, among other things, make the kind of people who join Heterodox Academy happier, but that wouldn’t really be the goal.

Antioch: Per the spirit of your recent piece, if you could invent a totally original holiday, what would that holiday be, and how would people celebrate it?

My first choice would be not to invent entirely new holidays but to kind of bastardize some existing ones in the spirit of how Christmas now exists as a largely secular celebration in parallel to the Christian one. Purim, for example, has minimal actual religious standing in the Jewish pantheon but it’s fun and could be a good holiday for everyone.

Beyond that, though, I think it would be good to have some kind of science-themed holiday — science punches below its weight in mass culture.

Brad: Which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle was your favorite?

In the spirit of increasing the cultural clout of science, we must stand with Donatello.

Paul G: Last week the EPA issued health advisory levels for PFAS substances in drinking water, at levels thousands of times lower (e.g. 4 parts per quadrillion for PFOS) than the action levels issued during the Obama presidency (e.g. 70 parts per trillion for PFOS) , and in some cases, thousands of times lower than the minimum reporting level (4 parts per trillion for PFOS) , a form of detection limit. The levels issued last week are also far below any of the state regulations for maximum concentrations of these substances in drinking water. In its press release commenting on the EPA's action, the American Waterworks Association (AWWA) stated that the EPA's action was not in agreement with the draft advice issued by its Science Advisory Board.

Since the HAL concentrations for PFOA and PFOS can't be measured, and since they are thousands of times lower than the concentration that have been measured in raw water, it is impossible to install and operate treatment systems that would remove PFOA or PFOS to below the HAL levels in water where PFOA and PFOS have been found.

EPA continues to state that it will issue draft rules for PFAS in drinking water later this year and plans to finalize these by late 2023. The relevant statute (SDWA) requires that the final level should have a quantified positive cost-benefit profile, balancing the cost of compliance against the public health benefits.

It seems as if EPA is setting itself up for a very difficult rule-making process. The rules can't really be set below the minimum reporting levels, hence 1000x the HAL level for PFOS. How do you justify setting a legal limit at 1000x the concentration your organization has stated is the harm threshold?

This is a very good but extremely long question, and I need to confess that my potentially Covid-addled brain can’t fully parse the scientific issues here.

But I think the key context is a somewhat underplayed Biden administration drama: it is June of 2022 and he’s never put in place someone to run OIRA, which is the government agency that runs the cost-benefit analysis that an EPA rule on this issue would be subject to. The paralysis here is that progressives don’t like OIRA review and keep wanting Biden to nominate someone who’d be unconformably left-wing. Biden doesn’t want to do that but also doesn’t seem to want to tell them to pound sand. So instead, we have a career guy in that role. This prevents progressives from gutting cost-benefit review, but also means there isn’t a strong voice for cost-benefit review in the administration who would be in a position to do things like tell the EPA not to do things that will clearly flunk. And that in turn seems to encourage agency heads to do things like this, putting out a health advisory that implies the EPA would like to do a rule making that wouldn’t pass cost-benefit scrutiny.

What does it all mean? I’m not sure. But it’s an example of the kind of limbo we’re in where Biden thinks he’s coopting the left and the left thinks they’re doing effective entryism and a lot of things are stuck because it’s a 50-50 Senate.

n8: What's the most likely path to getting a moderate Democrat, like Andy Beshear or Roy Cooper to run in 2024 instead of Kamala?

There’s not really a “path,” someone just has to do it.

I know there are plenty of donors and other influential people who’d like to support someone else if Biden doesn’t run again. It’s possible, of course, that the thing holding folks back is they don’t know that there are people who are looking for alternatives. So if you run into Andy Beshear tomorrow, tell him what I wrote here.

Policy Wank: Why are your favorite movies big budget, middlebrow, action blockbusters? Are you some kind of philistine?

The top two picks on my Favorite Movies of 2021 were “The Power of the Dog” and “No Sudden Move” — those aren’t big budget, middlebrow, action blockbusters! My favorite movie of 2022 so far (and I doubt it will be beaten) is Norwegian (go watch “The Worst Person in the World” on Hulu).

So I think I am innocent! But if you’re a political columnist rather than a film critic, I think the best movies to write about are big budget, middlebrow, action blockbusters because when I write about “Terminator 2” or “Jurassic Park,” I’m not really writing about “Terminator 2” or “Jurassic Park” — I’m writing about AI safety policy or our cultural attitude toward technological progress. The utility of blockbuster movies for those purposes is that lots of people have seen them so they will know what the hell I’m talking about, and the fact that they are popular means I can assert that they reflect important trends in mass opinion.

I actually think “The Worst Person in the World” contains some incidental commentary about cancel culture that’s incredibly insightful, but I don’t want to write a column about it because I can’t reasonably expect that any significant fraction of the audience has actually seen the movie.

Estate of Bob Sagat: Why is the NY Metro much smaller than Tokyo despite US being much larger? Is it all due to public transportion and zoning?

I think it’s pretty clear if you look at the price of housing not just in New York City but throughout the inner-ring suburbs that with different zoning, the population of the region would expand dramatically. That expansion might choke off due to transportation bottlenecks before it caught up to Tokyo, but if we were able to copy Japanese passenger rail operations we could blow past those limits, too.

Daniel: There's a lot of discussion about the ‘lost’ decade of low inflation rates, and the investment that could have happened. What infrastructure or social programs, that were available post-banking crisis, do you think should have been funded? And what do you think the impact would be had that infrastructure or funding happened?

Energy, energy, energy. We should have had a 15 year run of massive buildout of interregional transmission lines, exploratory geothermal projects, offshore wind, next-generation nuclear, etc.

Cameron Parker: Larry Summers just came out and said the US needs 5% unemployment for 5 years (or some more severe unemployment for shorter periods) to break inflation. He seems emboldened by having been largely correct in worrying about inflation a year ago when a lot of people were saying it was transitory. What say you? Is The Fed deluding itself on what needs to be done? Should it abandon forward guidance?

I did not understand his argument about this. Which is not to say that he’s wrong, I just literally did not understand what calculation was driving that conclusion.

The main thing I would say is that the Biden administration has been emphasizing supply-side factors as driving inflation because that exculpates the American Rescue Plan. That’s fair enough as far as it goes. But on a forward looking basis, if everything is ARP’s fault, that’s good news for Biden because ARP is largely over. If everything is supply-side disruptions, by contrast, then you realistically could get a years-long spell of highish unemployment and highish inflation. That would be really bad and the Fed can’t fix it. So what we really need to hear from Biden is a comprehensive, all-in supply-side agenda.

Sharty: Many folks who live financially comfortable lives and have some flexibility in their consumption and spending habits turned to *increased* overall restaurant patronage (albeit carry-out) in 2020, as a modest but real microscale economic buffer in their communities. Keep the service workers employed, etc.

What, if anything, is the 2022 inflationary equivalent? What are some small but concrete actions we can take on a personal level?

This is pretty easy: buy less, save more.

It is particularly helpful to economize on energy consumption. If Ukrainians can fight for their country, you can stick it to Vladimir Putin by air conditioning your house to 76 degrees rather than 72 degrees during the summer for the same cause. But really, anything you can cut back personal consumption spending on helps to reduce inflation. Take advantage of the recent decline in stock prices to buy cheap shares and save for the long term.

Simon_dinosaur: Matt now that you have contracted Covid have your feelings about Long Covid changed at all?

I am against Long Covid. I think it’s bad.

Andy: National Parks and other parts of public lands are exceeding capacity or getting loved to death. The National Park system has started lottery and reservation systems for many of the most popular places and even national forests near urban areas are seeing increasing problems from too much visitation. Add in what's happening in Yellowstone, and the problem gets even bigger.

What is the Slow Boring solution to this? You can't create another Zion or Arches or Yellowstone and carving more roads and parking lots and infrastructure damages what makes these places unique and attractive. Are these and other places only destined for visitation by the lucky and/or rich (Particularly in a nation of 1 billion Americans)?

And what is the best course for less spectacular but overcrowded public lands near urban areas? There is more opportunity for regulation and infrastructure there (which would require federal $$$), but this seems to be a topic the DC pundit class knows and cares little about. Would love to read your thoughts on this, which is an important topic in many parts of the western US.

For starters, while it’s true that you couldn’t “create another Zion or Arches or Yellowstone,” I think that we absolutely can and should create more national parks. Let’s build the Maine Woods National Park!

But I think the issue you are pointing to is just one specific instance of the “overtourism” narrative that was building a lot of steam before Covid-19 put tourism on hold. Basically there are a lot of places that people like to visit. But too many visitors degrade the quality of the experience and at a certain point could actually destroy it. And yet the number of people who can afford air travel is growing, and so naturally the number of people who want to see Cool Thing X is growing for all kinds of values of X. More people want to go to Venice and more people want to go to Yellowstone and that’s good; those are great places and it’s good for people not to be poor.

The solution ultimately has to involve some mix of lotteries and fees, depending on your priorities. For U.S. national parks, I’d like to see some rigorous work done on the distributional impact of higher or lower fees. You could imagine cheap is progressive because it makes the parks more accessible to lower-income folks. But I also wouldn’t be surprised to learn that in practice the income of park-visitors is higher than the national average. You’d need to look at it and do some modeling.

Normie Osborne: Have you seen FOR ALL MANKIND? Any thoughts on the premise that America winning the space race was the worst thing that could happen to the world?

This has been one of my Covid isolation watches, and it’s very interesting.

I don’t think that the literal thesis “getting beaten to the moon by the Soviet Union would have led to a dramatically more progress-oriented public culture in the United States” makes a ton of sense. But the deeper theme that feeling more worried about stagnation and thus more tolerant of risking people’s lives in pursuit of progress would have been better on net is, I think, correct. One of the little things they bury in the opening montage to season three is a newscaster mentioning James Hansen (who in the real world was one of the early voices on climate change) giving congressional testimony in the early 1990s about global average temperature trending downward due to the rise of nuclear power.

And that is correct analysis. If the people of the 1960s and 1970s had been somewhat more tolerant of people losing their lives in nuclear accidents, then nuclear power would be much cheaper and more widespread and it would have saved a bunch of lives on net due to reduced particulate pollution and less climate change.

TB Nichols: Do you feel like you’ve moved to the right on trans issues since moving to substack? I recall you mostly trying to distance yourself from other substackers who started at a similar time on an explicitly IDW, anti-trans brand. But now you’ve made comments about the reaction to Bazelon’s article and seem think trans women shouldn’t be allowed to play sports. How did you arrive at this shift?

I don’t really think this is a fair characterization of what I’m saying about sports, and that in turn speaks to some of my larger frustrations with how the trans rights movement is engaging with the world.

But to back up a little bit, I think it’s actually very important that people be allowed to live their lives as they see fit, including the full array of gender presentation. And unlike cranky right-wingers, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people pushing for linguistic change as part of that. But I think it really endangers people’s rights and personal freedoms and other important values when you start equating the case for those rights with specific factually dubious empirical claims. You see that happening strongly in the sports arena, and to an extent in the youth transition arena where to be on “the right side,” you now need to sign up for very strong and empirically contested claims about the reversibility of puberty-blockers.

Some states are trying to do some really cruel and harmful things to trans people, and those of us who think that’s bad should be trying to fight back against it as a basic question of liberty and equality, not going all-in on questionable science.

Eric H: Lots of road upkeep is funded by gas taxes. Short-term, this is a nice incentive to switch to electric vehicles - but longer-term it seems like that will lead to underfunded road upkeep. Do you have any thoughts on how that shift could best be managed?

We ought to do a vehicle-miles-traveled tax to fund roads, and then separately tax gasoline just for the environmental externalities.

Rana Foroohar: The NY Times' Ezra Klein recently had Rana Foroohar of the Financial Times on his podcast to discuss the state of the economy. She made a quite compelling case for the Fed-skeptic view that in many ways seems the opposite of your own: that the Fed for the last decade has done too much loose monetary policy which caused asset price inflation, which isn't coded as inflation, that has now crept into the broader economy. If you are familiar with her work and views, I was wondering where you agree and disagree with her analysis given your view that the past decade's issues are due to monetary policy not being inflation-dovish enough. What does she get right, and where is she wrong?

I think one really annoying thing that’s happened over the past year is that people who spent over a decade being constantly wrong about inflation have now turned around and claimed to be vindicated about inflation.

But that’s crazy. Since 2020 the developed world has had:

A massive negative supply shock in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic.

A huge — and basically successful — fiscal and monetary effort to stabilize nominal demand in the face of that supply shock.

A second additional negative supply shock from the Russia/Ukraine war.

Of course there is now a lot of inflation. In the face of those two giant supply shocks the only way to avoid inflation would have been to fail to stabilize the economy and drive the wold into a deep depression. Now if you compare the U.S. to Europe, we did more stimulus and we also have more core inflation. So if you want to blame the delta between U.S. core inflation and European core inflation on fiscal stimulus, that’s fine. But inflation is, in fact, distressingly high in Europe because the supply shock situation is just legitimately very bad.

Absolutely none of this in any way validates the people who were standing around a decade ago claiming that quantitative easing was going to lead to inflation. It’s total nonsense. It would be like if an FDR critic said in 1936 “this New Deal is going to generate inflation” and then claimed vindication in 1946 without mentioning that World War II happened in the interim.

Pancake: What's your impression of the quality of discretionary grants announced so far from IIJA? Any standout projects, good or bad?

It’s a little bit hard to say because part of the expansion of discretionary authority in the law is also making the grants somewhat less discretionary. So for example, there is a (small, thankfully) discretionary grant program in IIJA where the grants have to go to passenger ferry projects. This is so misguided as a concept that it’s hard to know whether the discretion is being used well or not.

On the flip side, there is a bigger program to do grants for purchasing low-emission or zero-emission buses. I don’t know enough about bus procurement to say for sure whether the discretion here is being used wisely, but it also strikes me as a very smart place to be investing money, so it’s probably all fine. I’ve been trying to look for grants that are local to me and I might know something about; I see one to improve the capacity at the Port of Baltimore by adding some stub train tracks that seems good. They are making one of the commuter rail stations in Virginia ADA compliant, which is good. I’m not seeing anything that is either egregiously bad or reflective of visionary change, mostly because the grants are all very small.

I think a big future test will be Amtrak’s effort to secure $10 billion to essentially turn Union Station in D.C. into a larger, nicer shopping mall without improving the train service in any way. We know from the Moynihan Train Hall project that in America people say yes to this kind of idea. I would love to see DOT say no way, that you should come to them with an expensive plan to dramatically improve passenger rail transportation in the D.C. area and then have a serious discussion about the money. But don’t spend money on things that have no transportation utility!