Back in the USA mailbag

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Back in the USA mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

24 - 30 minutes

Vacation was lovely but it is nice to be back home enjoying all that America has to offer — primarily ice water, vented driers, and spicy food. And of course some spicy takes to complement it all.

dysphemistic treadmil: Does it make it harder for you to recruit guest essayists when your commenters are so ill-mannered and horrible to them?

Sadly, I don’t have access to the counterfactual universe where y’all are nicer, so I can’t say for sure.

Rustbeltjacobin: Let’s say you hit the lottery. Not the “start a blog in 1999” lottery that you did hit, but some unspecified windfall made it so you no longer had to concern yourself with making a living from your endeavors. What project would you do then?

Probably something very similar to what I’m doing now, just without the subscriptions.

If the jackpot was really enormous and I had enough money to start giving out grants, I’d probably try to do more stuff in the YIMBY space.

Jake Mulcahy: What do you think of the macro debate behind the race between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in the UK? Broadly, Sunak believes that deficit reduction now can cool inflation quite a bit and worries about a sharp rise in debt service costs if fiscal policy isn’t tightened.

Truss OTOH sees Britain’s chronic productivity growth as a much greater problem than inflation and thinks a planned rise in corporation tax would dent it further. She also thinks the inflationary impulse of payroll and fuel tax cuts would be muted, and has hinted at some vague form of financial repression to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio.

I don’t know a lot about Sunak’s platform, but Truss’ diagnosis seems broadly wrong to me. The point of low corporate taxes is to make your country more attractive as a net destination for global capital flows, which lowers local interest rates and spurs investment. Current U.K. interest rates are already pretty low, and more to the point, the Bank of England is deliberately raising them to cool inflation. If you’re worried about the impact of higher rates on the investment climate in the U.K. (which seems reasonable), the way to address that is with deficit reduction to reduce the need for monetary tightening. If you do what Truss is suggesting, you’re going to end up with higher rates, not lower.

More broadly, in contrast to Italy’s complicated and hard-to-fix economic problems, I think the U.K.’s economic problems are really simple to diagnose — it’s housing, housing, and housing with incredible unmet demand for housing in London and the Southeast due to a brutal planning regime.

What the U.K. needs to do is first and foremost liberalize housebuilding and, secondarily, improve intercity transportation between London and other centers. Everything else in British politics is a distraction.

Zirkafett: What’s your top summer fiction recommendation?

I really enjoyed Elif Batuman’s “Either/Or.” But this is a book about a Harvard student in the 1990s, complete with detailed descriptions of the UNIX email system we used at the time. Her protagonist is assigned to live in DeWolf Street overflow housing as a sophomore just like I was and applies to write for Let’s Go Russia and gets rejected just like I was. I’m not sure how appealing it would be to someone who hasn’t had this very specific personal biography, but personally, I loved it.

Thomas L. Hutcheson: What does Matt think about Arnold Kling's concept of “enabler” of woke-ism, whether or not he agrees that he is one?

I’m not sure I really believe in “woke-ism” as a real or useful concept, though it is absolutely true that people can be enablers of an ideological or political movement without subscribing to its tenets.

To me, the most clear-cut example of this happening on the left comes from a different corner of the issue landscape entirely: climate change. Joe Biden will every once in a while slip the idea that climate change is an “existential threat” into his rhetoric on the issue. Now there really are people who, wrongly, believe that climate change is likely to bring about the extinction of the human species. They tend to advocate for really extreme climate policies and tactics that would make sense if climate change were genuinely an existential threat but that don’t make sense in the real world, where climate is a serious problem but not genuinely existential. And if you look at Biden’s actual climate policies, I think they are generally very sensible and reflect a sound assessment of the issue. But on this level of broad rhetoric, Biden (like a lot of progressives) is kind of casually enabling a much more extreme view than the view he actually holds.

And I do think this kind of enabling ends up confusing people. Climate change really is a serious problem and there genuinely are bad actors peddling absurd denialism and lobbying for dirty energy interests. So if you hear a debate that’s polarized between denialism and “existential threat,” it’s natural to start thinking the existential threat view is correct and then become puzzled as to why Biden doesn’t try to immediately halt all fossil fuel production in a last-ditch effort to ward off extinction. The reason he doesn’t do that is he (rightly) thinks this would fail cost-benefit scrutiny. But the reason it fails cost-benefit scrutiny is that the downside of three to four degrees of warming, though large, is not “all of humanity goes extinct.”

David H: As you say, it's great for DC if it does all the things you recommended in Monday's column, and for the people who live there. But what are the impacts on the larger region if the central city achieves that kind of upzoning? Not that DC has to worry about it, since unlike say Charlotte or Austin they don't have to worry about a state legislature interfering just for spite. But even if DC grows to a million by 2035, that's an extra quarter million people in a region of (depending on which metro stat you prefer) 5-10 million. Do you project spillover effects into the inner suburbs, or does it end up not mattering much unless Fairfax and MontCo make big changes as well?

The regional consequences of broad D.C. upzoning seem unpredictable to me.

At one extreme, you could say that if Fairfax County were to become the suburb of a bigger and richer central city, demand for Fairfax living would only go even higher. At the other extreme, you could posit there is a fixed quantity of people who want to live in the D.C. metro area, so growth in the core city comes at the expense of suburban demand. The truth is obviously somewhere between the two, where some suburban communities would see demand rise as a result of core city growth and others would see demand fall.

But on balance, I think the impact would be to divert growth not from other parts of the D.C. metro area but from other large metro areas. Some people who in Real World 2025 will end up moving to the suburbs of Atlanta, Phoenix, Houston, and Dallas would instead move to the suburbs of D.C. in the YIMBYtopia version of 2025.

Alex Newkirk: What is political capital actually? Is it fungible across issues? Can it be wasted?

It’s a pretty confused metaphor. Normally when we decide to get fancy and start calling money “capital,” we’re trying to call attention to the fact that if you invest your capital wisely, you earn a return and thus have more capital than you started with. A person who starts out very rich and is reasonably prudent with his money can both live comfortably off his capital income and also reinvest enough of it to continually get richer.

Politics is much more like consumption than investment. You win an election and you start with hopefully a good amount of political support in Congress and among the public. Then as you start doing things, the tendency is to alienate or disappoint people and end up with less support — it’s like spending down a stack of cash. The hope is that you spend it on stuff that’s good and useful rather than stuff that’s pointless. But it’s not really “capital” that’s going to earn returns.

James: You argue that proportional representation would be good for America. It seems to me that the biggest problem with proportional representation in America is that it would lead to the creation of one or more Black political parties. This would be bad for everyone, including Black people, because it would prevent Black politicians from gaining power in mainstream politics. Barack Obama's political career would be impossible, for example, and in an earlier era the Civil Rights movement would have been delayed as White political parties would not have been competing for Black voters. This is not a problem in most European countries because most European countries do not have any demographic group that is really analogous to Black Americans, but it is a problem in Israel where proportional representation has allowed the Jewish political parties to collude informally to exclude the Arab parties from power for decades. Any thoughts on this?

I think this is an overreading of the Israeli situation.

Here’s another example. In Finland, there is a Swedish-speaking minority. Its members generally vote for the Swedish People’s Party (SFP), which tends to get around 5 percent of Finnish MPs. The SFP focuses pretty narrowly on a handful of issues related to the status of the Swedish language and doesn’t really take a strong view on other topics, other than being pro-EU. That makes them a useful addition to pretty much any potential coalition, so they’re almost always in government as junior partners.

In the real world United States, northern Black voters somewhat surprisingly realigned and backed FDR’s reelection in 1936 despite his bad record on civil rights issues because New Deal relief was so important to the African American population. FDR won landslide reelections in 1940 and 1944, but the Black vote was actively contested in the 1948 election (part of the reason Harry Truman desegregated the military), and Eisenhower made real and partially successful efforts to court Black voters in his two campaigns. By 1960, Kennedy and Nixon were both trying to have it both ways, vying for both the Black vote and the southern white vote. It’s a very murky and ideologically confused situation, but multiple pieces of civil rights legislation (not just the big Civil Rights Act of 1964, but its more modest predecessors in 1957 and 1960) emerge from this dynamic.

In a counterfactual PR United States, I think you’d see the same basic dynamic, except instead of Kennedy and Nixon courting Black voters directly, they’d be courting the Black Party as a coalition partner. The Black Party’s weakness would be that it would hold fewer seats in parliament than the Dixiecrat Party. But its strength would be that by 1960, most northern whites clearly favored Civil Rights and found the Dixiecrats to be fairly politically toxic. So ultimately Lyndon Johnson might be the man to break the logjam, leading a small group of southern white moderates into a coalition with northern liberals and the Black Party to pass civil rights legislation, enfranchising southern African Americans, and thereby trying to grow the coalition. Then later you’d see the backlash — the Dixiecrats would give up on re-imposing segregation but return to power as junior partners in the Nixon coalition.

Doug Orleans: Do you consider yourself a feminist?

Reader email1: I initially discovered Matt's writing through the feminist blogosphere, probably via a Pandagon connection. At that time, my sense was that Matt was pretty closely connected to the feminist conversation. I would imagine that Matt still considers himself a feminist (?) but it's not really part of his personal brand anymore! Internet feminism has changed a lot since the mid-aughts, I know. But I would personally be very interested in hearing from Matt about his current relationship to feminism. I would also be really interested to see him engage with some of the interesting stuff coming out of feminist philosophy, e.g. Amia Srinivasan's work.

I do consider myself a feminist. In college, I was fortunate to take courses with the feminist philosophers Melissa Barry and Ti-Grace Atkinson and was introduced to the work of Susan Moller Okin, whose books influenced my thinking and who I got to meet when she was lecturing on “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?”

I guess to the extent that I’ve disengaged a bit from some of the internet debates around these topics, it’s largely because I don’t think the world necessarily needs a man jumping in to explain how feminism ought to work. Part of this is my sense that there are actually plenty of early- and mid-career women doing good journalism and my role should mostly be to promote them. It’s not a coincidence that all but one of the paid freelance pieces on Slow Boring have been written by women or that a majority of Weeds interview guests were women or that we launched Slow Boring Book Club with a woman’s book. It always struck me as kind of non-classy to lampshade this with giant “I AM DOING THIS FOR FEMINIST REASONS” text, but maybe I should say that more clearly?

But if I were to offer my two cents on one feminist-adjacent controversy that I have strong feelings about, I think it was a big mistake to so strongly echo Hillary Clinton’s assertion that misogyny was the key factor in her 2016 defeat. I understand where that came from. And I don’t deny that as a woman in the public eye, she faced misogynistic criticism, but I think this kind of salted the earth against other women in politics. But I think the electability case for Amy Klobuchar was really strong, and I wish I’d seen more people asserting that women can (and should!) be popular and win elections.

Charles Herrig: Do you think the internet has increased or decreased the value of original art pieces?

Has the fact that everyone is able to see any Van Gogh, at any time, anywhere on earth, decreased the value of the originals, by making it unnecessary to see them in person? Or has it increased the value, by making more people interested in them?

I’m not sure I’m convinced that the internet has made a big difference here. Pre-internet, we saw lots of prints of Van Gogh paintings all over the place, and I was familiar with the work of Paul Cézanne from my mom’s book of reproductions of Cézanne paintings.

Walter Benjamin’s classic 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” considers the practical and theoretical implications of the rise of widely available prints and reproductions in books, and it’s a classic for a reason. And I think that correctly dates the relevant hinge point to around a century ago, with the change from mechanical to digital reproduction being relatively minor compared to the rise of mechanical reproduction in the first place.

JC: In your post on Monday, you suggested several measures that YIMBYs should offer in DC to make YIMBYism there more politically feasible-modest inclusionary zoning measures, making parking passes permanent and letting low income neighborhoods opt out. Are there equivalent political compromises the open borders folks should offer on immigration?

My sense of YIMBY/NIMBY issues is that most people’s concerns about YIMBYism are genuinely practical in nature — worries about parking and traffic and property values — and so the upside to addressing those practical concerns is potentially large.

My sense of immigration issues is that this is mostly not the case, and opposition is grounded in a sincere preference for homogeneity and stasis more than any specific practical issue. People’s aesthetic preferences just vary. After two weeks in Italy, I was excited to have a burrito for dinner one night and then ramen for lunch the next because I take routine access to a broad variety of cuisines for granted. Italy is more homogenous than the United States and has less of that. But within Italy, Rome is much more diverse and cosmopolitan than Montalcino, just as D.C. is more diverse and cosmopolitan than Blue Hill, Maine. People who grow up in rural areas and are annoyed by the homogeneity tend to end up leaving, so in rural areas in particular you have electorates that are very hostile to immigration and aren’t going to be talked out of it with charts and graphs.

Still, I do think it’s worth trying to be pragmatic about this simply because the gains from immigration are so large.

The big one where I think we could do better is on the fiscal consequences of immigration. The gains to immigrants themselves are so large that it should be easy to design a system that essentially guarantees immigration is a good deal for the public budget, which isn’t always the case under the current system.

What’s tougher are the “cultural” concerns that people have about immigrants from this place or that. Here’s where I do advocate for just trying to push folks to get to yes. Donald Trump infamously remarked that he wanted more immigrants from Norway instead of from “shithole countries.” So can we work with that? Why not create a special category of unlimited visas for Norwegians? My guess is very few Norwegians want to emigrate to the United States. But if they want to come and Trump wants them to come, why not let them? How about open borders with Canada? The Bahamas is full of English-speaking Christians. Maybe if you’re Bahamian under 45, finished high school, and can pass a criminal background check, you should be able to move to the U.S. if you want. Throw in the rest of the Anglophone Caribbean. I dunno. These are not my cultural hangups, so I can’t really speak to what would satisfy those who have them.

The point is that those of us who favor expanded immigration should be open to expanding it on whatever terms are acceptable to those who are more skeptical. What we should insist on, though, is that we want expansion — add Norwegians to the mix, don’t swap someone else out.

Wigan: Why, when it comes to some sports, are women athletes paid as much, or more than men (I'm thinking Tennis, Figure Skating and Volleyball) but in other sports it's not even close (WNBA vs NBA)? There's also a 3rd category of sports where very few competitors are women, but the females are paid just as well (Nascar and Danica Patrick, MMA and Ronda Roussey, Chess...).

Obviously the single most important factor is audience demand, but I think there are probably some other layers or intersections with current cultural-political arguments ( gender pay-gap, trans athletes, fairness, gender roles, etc..), that leave space for additional takes on why that is or what “should be.”

I don’t think there’s a singular correct explanation for all this. In tennis, I think the root issue is that the sport is somewhat unusual in having professionals and random amateurs play on courts that are the exact same size. The result is that, I think, the pro men overmatch the equipment — like if you were watching Steph Curry shoot threes on a high school court — and the women’s games are more fun. With figure skating, I think the whole sport is seen as “unmanly” (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you have more out gay men in this sport than in others), so there’s a tilt toward celebrating women.

Gymnastics is a bit odd because unlike in most sports, being tall is a disadvantage and the men and women don’t use the same apparatus. At the other end of the spectrum, basketball is a really tough comp for women because being tall is extremely important.

The main thing to remember in terms of big-picture political and cultural arguments is that these are all games that were devised by humans in order to be fun to participate in and watch. In some sports, the pros play on the same court as amateurs (tennis) while in others (basketball) they don’t. In some sports (soccer) the pros play with basically the same equipment as amateurs whereas in other sports (baseball) they don’t. But it’s not like it would be against the laws of nature for MLB to allow aluminum bats or for the NBA to put the three-point line closer. The people in charge have just decided that would be less fun. When the WTA is deciding who should and shouldn’t be allowed to participate in women’s tennis competitions, their only real obligation is to try to maximize audience and sponsor interest in the tour. If people want to see trans women playing against cisgender women, that’s fine. If they don’t want to see that, then that’s also fine.

Barry: You talk a lot about “The Groups”, but I don’t see a lot of journalism out there exploring and explaining who they are, where they fundraise from, and how they exert influence. Why is this such an under-covered part of the way American politics works?

Unfortunately, the nature of the nonprofit-verse is that it is deliberately opaque.

Take the intense interest of Americans for Financial Reform in using financial regulation as a tool to tackle climate change. What I can tell you for sure is that when AFR was originally spun up in 2009 to advocate for stronger bank regulations in the wake of the financial crisis, this was not on their radar. What I have heard is that once it became clear that the Trump administration wasn’t going to push hard for the Dodd-Frank repeal, the progressive donor community largely lost interest in this topic. That left AFR sort of casting about for other angles. The climate advocacy world, meanwhile, has tons of money. So finreg groups got pumped-up with climate money to do what’s really climate advocacy. That’s what I’ve heard at any rate. But I can’t prove it because there’s very little transparency about these financial flows, and also because “so-and-so is a climate funder and not a financial regulation funder” is itself a judgment call and not a legal category or anything.

Another thing that makes this hard is that the funders themselves tend to be disingenuous about the influence they wield. In a January 2022 piece defending the world of progressive philanthropy, for example, former Democracy Alliance chief Gara LaMarche flatly denies that anyone at DA pushed progressive groups to endorse defunding the police. But in a June 2020 blog post, he personally endorsed the defund police movement. Now does that mean he was ordering the recipients of DA money to embrace the defund movement? No. But was there pressure? I think there was. But it’s hard to prove. And what would proof look like anyway? Nobody is going to be so uncouth as to write down a memo that says “embrace the Current Thing or else your grant next year will shrink.”

As for why The Groups matter, I think there are a few means of influence:

    It makes your life easier as a journalist to just kind of pretend that Group X has a real constituency and membership and that quoting its leaders in your stories is adding a valuable perspective. That makes the task of article assembling easier and gives The Groups some real influence over the media.

    The Groups provide a steady source of employment, so being on their good side is a hedge against the highly cyclical nature of campaign employment and the reality that the number of jobs available in Congress or the executive branch varies over time.

    Elizabeth Warren’s successful stigmatization of private sector work as a corrupting revolving door has made people even more dependent on staying in the good graces of the nonprofit advocacy community — not only because the nonprofits provide “clean” employment, but because they can semi-arbitrarily declare that Jonathan Kanter’s private sector work isn’t disqualifying even though private sector work done by someone they dislike would have been disqualifying. 

This should probably be a full article down the road. But I’d also say that Varys’ riddle about power is relevant here — one reason The Groups are influential is that other people treat them as influential.

Paul G: How should the US approach the apparent inevitability of a nuclear-armed Iran? Perhaps we'd promise massive retaliation in kind if Iran were ever to use nuclear weapons against the US or our allies. The idea of going to (conventional) war to prevent Iran from getting the bomb, as Walter Russell Mead suggests in the WSJ today, seems crazy to me. The known downside is that we'd be less engaged and have diminished influence in the Middle East, which seems like not the worst thing to me. A risk would be that Israel and perhaps Saudi Arabia would try to bounce us into military action by staging their own operation. I think we'd need to be clear that they couldn't rely on direct US support. I must be missing something here, because I can't see that that Iran acquiring the means to ensure its annihilation results in a strategic crisis for the US.

The best way to address this was Obama’s JCPOA. Unfortunately, opposition to that from the Republican Party, the Gulf States, and Israel led to its demise, and I’m not surprised it was impossible for Biden to revive it — after all, why would Iran make a deal with us when the next GOP administration would tear it up?

Given that, I don’t really think we should do anything at all about a nuclear-armed Iran. Obviously if Iran were to attack us, we should respond massively. But Iran going nuclear is literally a direct consequence of the policy course that the Saudis, Emiratis, and Israelis favored, and now you have Mead and others saying we should fight a war on their behalf. I think that’s crazy. The purpose of the U.S.-Saudi relationship is that the Saudis are supposed to stabilize world oil prices in the event of a crisis with Russia. They’ve totally failed to uphold their side of the bargain and we should not do anything at all to help them vis-a-vis Iran unless their behavior changes.