La Dolce Mailbag by Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

La Dolce Mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

20 - 25 minutes

Back from Italy soon — it’s been a fantastic trip, but vacation can’t last forever.

BD Anders: Have recent developments changed your prior generous evaluation of Joe Manchin and his negotiation style?

Yes.

Genevieve: Thoughts on the degrowth interview in the New York Times yesterday? “This Pioneering Economist Says Our Obsession With Growth Must End.” Herman Daly is very critical of G.D.P. as a metric.

There are a lot of problems with degrowth as a movement, and I think their obsession with critiques of GDP underscores how conceptually weak degrowth is.

You can come up with a lot of contrived scenarios where GDP fails to track broader concepts of well-being. But if you look at the international correlates of GDP with almost anything, they are very strong. The only important exception to the “GDP is good” rule of thumb is that it doesn’t account for the value of leisure time. So enslaving people is bad and allowing people to retire is good even though an exclusive focus on GDP might not show that. But that’s easily captured by looking at something like “GDP per hour worked,” which doesn’t involve throwing GDP overboard as a concept.

And if you look at the things that cause GDP/hour to grow — innovation, deepening of the capital stock, productivity growth — those things are also the main long-term drivers of simple GDP growth. Conversely, if you look at the kind of harms that degrowthers worry about — shifting weather patterns wrecking agriculture, floods rendering existing capital useless, etc. — these harms absolutely show up in GDP statistics.

Ryan: Do you, Matt, think Joe Biden should run again? And, if the party decides that he should not for whatever reason how should that process look? The presidency and politics has always been tied to some ego, hard to say you can’t do the job.

I unfortunately don’t have direct access to information about Joe Biden’s well-being and mental state. He’s made his share of mistakes, but I think the odds are that if he doesn’t run for re-election, he ends up getting replaced by someone worse — so in that sense, I think he should run again. But that’s contingent on him feeling that he can do the legitimately very difficult job of running the country while also running for re-election.

Tracy Erin: Ok, last week I asked whether the irrational hate you get on Twitter is hard for her to see, but this week I am trying a different angle. I find it odd that you are the target of such intense rage on Twitter from people who are pretty well ideologically aligned with you, and while I think you earn a smidge of it by being too provocative at times, I think most of it is some kind of irrational style over substance reaction and I am wondering if you ever have a similar reaction to anyone on Twitter. When I try and understand the outrage I think about how I am probably ideologically in between Bari Weiss and Elizabeth Bruenig, but for some reason they both have a style that annoys me and makes me less open to what they are saying. Is there anyone on Twitter that bugs Matt the way that he drives a certain kind of progressive takester over the edge?

I think people you are ideologically adjacent to are more annoying than people you are deeply distant from, because you view their bad takes as influencing the persuadable. For this reason, I’m actually not going to share any secret Twitter annoyances because the people whose tweets annoy me most are people who I like and respect and it drives me crazy that they tweet dumb stuff!

That’s all a little bit different from someone like me or Liz Bruenig becoming a Twitter Hate Figure because we have come to symbolize something that people see as larger than any one person.

Jerry: Everyone seems to take "The Rise of China" as a given, but my understanding of their demographic inverted pyramid is that they've arguably peaked pre-Covid, and are in for a very bumpy ~50+ years. I'd be curious to hear Matt's take on this.

I kind of dispute the premise here. When I was working on “One Billion Americans,” I ended up delving into the debates on this, and my take was that there is very vigorous expert disagreement about the outlook for China.

I think that fundamentally, the United States can’t just count on the Chinese economy unraveling as our strategy for strategic competition. But they are not only facing a lot of demographic headwinds, Xi Jinping’s leadership seems increasingly erratic and marred by bad judgment. I don’t think I know enough about it to have an informed forecast but I’d put at least 20 percent odds on “Chinese growth stalls out and they never overtake U.S. GDP at market exchange rates,” but also at least 20 percent odds on “U.S./China per capita GDP continues to converge and China leaves us in the dust in the aggregate.”

Dave Orr: In the private sector, it's rare for old sclerotic companies to change into something dynamic and competitive — instead something new comes along and outcompetes it. In the public sector, we never shut down agencies, they just get older and sclerotic-er. How should we think about that? Should we consider rebooting agencies, creating some kind of competition, or just struggle through trying to reform them because that's the only option?

It’s not actually true that public sector agencies never shut down. The most recent big example that I can think of is that part of the Dodd-Frank overhaul of financial regulation was disbanding the Office of Thrift Supervision and parceling its responsibilities out to other agencies. I thought that was a good idea. But there’s also a negative example from the 1970s when the Atomic Energy Commission was disbanded and replaced with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with what was essentially a mandate to create a new agency that would have a structural bias against licensing new reactors.

That initiative was extremely successful at achieving its policy goal, the goal was just bad. But I think that underscores the point that agency elimination should be in the policy toolkit. The U.S. Secret Service, for example, has fucked up enough stuff at this point that Congress should look at scrapping it. The Diplomatic Security Service could handle presidential protection and the FBI could handle counterfeiting. Obviously expanding the DSS and FBI like that would require them to hire new people, and former Secret Service agents would be plausible candidates for those jobs. But they would have to apply as new candidates.

Marie Kennedy: Freddie deBoer was pretty rude about it, but he had a critique of YIMBY-ism today, namely that YIMBYs can be dismissive of the immediate needs of working class people, especially working class people of color, that can get screwed over in the short term vis a vis gentrification. And that this is anti-popularist in that it alienates would-be allies. Thoughts?

I think a lot of people want to argue that YIMBYism is wrong without actually arguing against the core proposition of YIMBYism, which is “relaxing housing regulation in order to increase supply would be an improvement on the status quo.”

From reading FDB over the years, I know he has a lot of complaints about YIMBYs, about YIMBYism, etc., etc., etc., but I can’t really tell whether or not he agrees that relaxing housing regulation in order to increase supply would be an improvement on the status quo. My view is that relaxing housing regulation in order to increase supply would be an improvement on the status quo. That’s why I’m a YIMBY and why I think YIMBYism is good. Improving things is good! It is also true that any effort to change housing supply dynamics will operate with a pretty long lag, so nobody’s short-term problems are efficaciously solved this way. There are lots of good things we could do in life to help various people in various ways, and YIMBYism has nothing to do with denying that. But I do insist that relaxing housing regulation in order to increase supply would be an improvement on the status quo, and I think this is actually a very important subject because housing is such a large share of the economy.

Brian T: The Afghanistan withdrawal seems to be correlated with a permanent decrease in Biden's approval rating, which I didn't expect. What are your thoughts on that?

Mainstream media coverage is, on average, kinder to Democratic presidents than to Republican ones. But because rank-and-file Democrats care much more about what the mainstream media says than rank-and-file Republicans do, negative media coverage (of Obama on Ebola or Biden on Afghanistan) is much more harmful to Democrats’ political standing.

But I also suspect that the real permanent political hit Biden took around that time wasn’t Afghanistan but the emergence of Delta and the ensuing series of somewhat immune-evasive variants. Biden’s coalition is a mix of vaxxed and relaxed people and Covid hawks. And ever since Delta, the hawks have been annoyed that Biden isn’t shutting down the virus, and the V&R have been annoyed that he continued clinging to various things like the airplane mask mandate. Republicans face a Covid split of their own between a V&R faction and a denialist faction. But the reduced efficacy of the vaccines — and in particular the dramatic reduction of their efficacy at blocking transmission — has reduced the tension between these groups.

I think Biden could have handled this situation better by more fully embracing the V&R worldview. But it was a genuine wedge issue that was not easy to navigate. The virus’ ability to mutate just wrecked a lot of the optimism of early 2021.

Nancy Gale: How should cities and towns in desirable vacation spots deal with second or mostly vacant homes? Clearly one answer is building more housing, but that's a long term solution to a short term crunch. Do you think it's wise to tax vacant or mostly vacant properties to discourage out of state buyers vacuuming up housing? And what about Airbnb?

Vacation homes are a fiscal bonanza to towns because they contribute to property taxes and consume very few local services. If you want to directly plow some of that bonanza into creating subsidized housing for locals, I think that’s great. And you should absolutely zone for more supply.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that if you’re worried too much of your existing housing stock is being converted to Airbnbs, that’s a good sign that you should zone for more hotels. Hotels are also a fiscal bonanza that should always be welcomed.

Eric P: Conservatives talk a lot about squishy-sounding college majors (gender studies, etc.) I don’t agree that this is an issue — I know tons of humanities majors who get lucrative jobs. The thing is that it’s almost never connected to said major, it’s just a corporate job, law, etc. I think this is fine and I think those majors can actually prepare you well for your career and life. But it begs the question - what the hell is the point of a college major anyway? Should college kids just do what interests them and but take the job at BCG or Goldman Sachs? I sort of feel bad for the Ivy League English professors...

Any good humanities course of study teaches you to read complicated documents and produce written and oral analyses of their content. That’s a totally legitimate job skill.

The legitimate concern about “soft” majors is that because the science professors have much more research funding than the English professors, the English professors need undergraduate enrollment much more than the science professors do. That means the English professors have an objective incentive to lower standards and not actually provide a rigorous cycle of teaching, learning, and assessment. That’s not inherent to the idea of studying the humanities, but it’s a feature of modern university architecture that I think needs to be taken seriously.

Nathan Kosk: Hey Matt, what do you make of the argument, made in take circles in Europe and elsewhere right now, that America is “selfishly” fighting inflation too much to the point of causing a recession for the rest of the world? The argument goes that this is primarily due to the Fed raising rates very aggressively.

Marie Kennedy: Well this is maddening. Gonna turn me into a nationalist. It’s selfish to manage our monetary policy to optimize our own economy???

I think this is downstream of the European Central Bank doing such a terrible job in the wake of the Great Recession. The narrative took hold that European domestic economies were critically influenced by the demand situation in the United States. But that was only true because the ECB wasn’t generating sufficient demand at home.

So not only do I agree with Marie that there’s nothing selfish about managing our monetary policy for domestic needs, but I think the globally optimal thing is for each central bank to manage the domestic situation correctly. The U.S. economy would have been stronger had the ECB handled things better 10 years ago. Europe would be in better shape today if the United States had started cooling demand earlier.

Avery James: There's a progressive thread doing the rounds today that made some interesting claims on demography and politics. Without getting into that thread's controversial claims, it reminded me that you tweeted a while back about how the end of the British-Protestant ethnic majority a century ago was a much more consequential majority-minority transition. I think you are correct and I also believe that shift became inevitable basically a century before that (Jackson's "victory" at New Orleans). But I would be very curious for you to expand on that point, as it seems worthwhile for more people to think about.

The basic idea here is that, as I think everyone agrees, race is a social construct and the social category of “white” is not well-defined and has never been particularly stable. It is absolutely true that if we construe people who are partially descended from immigrants from Latin America or Asia (people like me, in other words) as “non-white,” the country will soon be majority non-white. But just as Professor Boustan was saying in the book club, these immigrant groups are assimilating at a pretty rapid pace — including via intermarriage and Americanization of names — and I think ultimately “majority-minority America” is going to be a bit of a nothingburger.

By contrast, the Protestant/Catholic divide had a pretty firm conceptual basis in a world of high levels of religious affiliation.

Protestants would do things like establish a “non-denominational church” on the Harvard campus and decide they have thereby solved the problem of inclusiveness, even though to Catholics (and Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc.), the idea of a non-denominational church doesn’t make sense. Protestants decided to make alcohol illegal even though drinking wine is a religious obligation for Catholics and Jews. Today we of course dismiss fears that Catholics would put allegiance to the Pope over allegiance to the constitution as bigoted paranoia, but it really is true that there is a transnational church bureaucracy that has been in conflict with the logic of the secular nation-state for centuries.

This all worked out in the end. But I think the shift involved in the loss of Protestant domination is much more profound because “being a Protestant” is a much more real and substantial thing than “being a white person.” If you were worried in 1922 that Protestant ideas would lose influence in future America, you were correct to worry — because there actually is such a thing as Protestant ideas that can lose influence.

Trevor Austin: Is the Federation right to ban genetically modified individuals from service? Dr Bashir from DS9 and Number One from Strange New Worlds are fine officers and IIRC neither *chose* to be modified.

The introduction of this genetic modification plotline is one of my real doubts about Strange New Worlds, which I otherwise love.

Story-wise, the purpose of the Federation's ban on genetic modification is to let them tell human stories that are set in space rather than stories about future genetically modified people who due to their modification behave in very different ways from the humans we know. But it doesn’t actually make a lot of sense as a policy measure, and every time it’s foregrounded in a story it just makes you think about how it’s obviously just a plot convenience.

James B: When assessing the relative “extremism” of Trump's candidacy in the 2016, how do you account for the proposed “Muslim Ban”? That seems like a pretty extremist position to me. I can see how his anti-illegal immigration stuff could be viewed as less extreme by moderates who have a “law & order” predisposition, but there's no excusing the Muslim ban. That was the reason that my Dad, a lifelong Republican, said he would never vote for Trump. Was there simply a bunch of latent islamophobia among white working class Obama voters?

The Muslim ban was, in a sense, extreme in that many people had a strong negative reaction to it, including tons of GOP elites — Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, and other influential Republicans denounced it. That kind of thing is always politically dicey and I bet it did hurt Trump on net — it’s certainly telling that he basically walked away from it as president.

That said, when Trump did roll out his much more limited travel ban, it had majority support. I suspect that had there been a significant Islamist terror attack on U.S. soil during the Trump years, his administration might have gone in a very dark direction.

Patrick Benitez: Why aren’t suburban and rural voters or politicians more supportive of (state-level) housing deregulation targeting cities? Would seem like a good way to keep development pressure off currently low-density areas.

I’m just not sure how true this is. The California state assembly recently passed a bill reducing parking mandates, and while its main sponsors were urban Democrats, it got some Republican votes from suburban and rural areas of California. Utah did a zoning reform in 2019. What I don’t think we’ve yet seen is a serious stab at something like having the Texas state legislature preempt Austin zoning. But I’d love to sell Texas Republicans on the idea — they’d doubtless be skeptical at first, but honestly they should do it and I think they might be persuadable.

Mike: The tech sector is tanking right now. Does it come back once we're past the Fed/inflation-induced financial uncertainty, or has it been fundamentally built around a high-unemployment/low-demand world and faces more fundamental obstacles?

When interest rates go up, the value of “I might get $1 billion 10 years from now” goes down as a result of discounting. This means that a depressed, low-interest economy is very good for the valuations of speculative startups and for the general VC business model. Are we currently experiencing just a dip in that model or a structural shift? I’m not sure, but it definitely could be the latter.

I just think it’s worth saying that while the technology industry is closely associated with venture capital and speculative startups, it now also includes companies like Apple and Microsoft that are not even remotely young growth stocks. I feel very confident that making and programming computing devices is going to continue to be an important part of the economy.

Dan: You tweeted earlier today parties should choose from eight ideologies: "Radical left, social democratic, green, social liberal, market liberal, christian democratic, kinda fashy, real deal violent rightist." Looking at the European Parliament, we see this spread across seven parliamentary groups (liberals get smushed together). In this chart, it appears that the social democrats+greens and, separately, the two most conservative groups basically coinhabit the same spaces, getting us down to five.

Do you think these are roughly the five (or seven or eight) ideologies that are destined to emerge in liberal democracy? In Lee Drutman's STV America, do you think roughly the same groups would emerge?

Okay, let’s talk about European Parliament groups.

They have a hard-left group, a green group, and a social democratic group. But then they have a liberal group that contains a mix of social liberals and market liberals. And they have the European People’s Party which contains a mix of market liberals and Christian democrats, then the ECR and EFDD groups on the far right who can stand in for my “kinda fashy” group (or more politely, populist nationalists).

I don’t think it’s a law of nature that these are the only possible ideological formations. It’s just that lots of parties around the world do fit into one of those grooves, and when it happens it’s easy to characterize the party. This came up because I was complaining that Italian politics has a low level of legibility because the Five Star Movement is a key player right now, and their party doesn’t conform to this schema.

My guess about America is that we would fragment into an asymmetrical six-party system. You’d have a populist-nationalist party, a Christian party, a market liberal party, a green party (that would incorporate a lot of the constituency for a social liberal party), a labor party, and a left party. But the nationalists would be a lot bigger than the other parties.