Nordic alliance mailbag by Matthew Yglesias

Nordic alliance mailbag

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 16 minutes

Nordic alliance mailbag

Norwegian film, "The Snow Man," and Puerto Rican statehood

The inaugural Slow Boring book club meets next week! Join us at 8:30 p.m. Eastern for a discussion with Princeton professor Leah Boustan about her new book Streets of Gold. Buy the book here, and sign up for the discussion here. This event is for paid subscribers.

Finland and Sweden have worked things out with Turkey and are now set to join NATO. I don’t really have an article’s worth of thoughts on this, but I am a fan of both countries so I did want to acknowledge it. Finland is so great I even had fun visiting Helsinki in the dead of winter when it was practically never daylight and everything was insanely cold.

Andrew: What's up with the Snow Man poem? Obviously I understand what it means and the point you're trying to get across when you post/reference it, but it would probably be helpful for OTHER readers if you explained.

This is a Wallace Stevens poem that I like a lot.

I’m not actually really sure that there is that much point in trying to explain it, because obviously it’s a poem and doesn’t have the logical structure of a persuasive argument. Either reading the words Stevens wrote moves you to ponder them or it doesn’t. But I’ve been thinking about this poem on and off since I was in high school. And while it used to signify to me a kind of defiant modernist atheism (as in several of his other poems like “Sunday Morning” and “The Emperor of Ice Cream”), I now see it as more about the subjectivity of the human experience. But while Stevens focuses on the inevitability of reality being refracted in peculiar ways by the human mind in “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” in “The Snow Man,” he’s speaking aspirationally about at least approaching a rational assessment as a regulative ideal.

Sometimes I will express a view on the internet that other people regard as insufficiently emotional, at which point they start lashing out and calling me a ghoul or a sociopath. But Stevens writes here about the “mind of winter,” which is more how I like to think about it. It is sometimes hard to look at the world and see “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” but it’s worth trying.

Chet: What is your favorite airline to fly and why (domestic and international)?

I wouldn’t say I have a “favorite” airline.

If you want to fly internationally from the D.C. area, the best option is to fly on United out of Dulles. As a result, I try to concentrate all my flying on United out of Dulles so that work-related frequent flier miles can be expended on family vacations. This is a bit less convenient than flying on American out of DCA, but I think it works all things considered. One bonus is that United has direct flights to both San Antonio and Bangor, which are our two regular domestic destinations.

Hilary: In the last week, I've twice been the only identifiably-female commenter in Slow Boring threads about topics that primarily affect women. One was about trans women in sports, and the other was about abortion. I happen to have significant personal experience with both of these issues, though only in one case did I feel comfortable sharing that here. 

Obviously, as someone who pays money to read Matt's thoughts every weekday, I would never claim that men shouldn't have or express their opinions on any topic they like. But I'm finding that the discussions get very abstract very quickly in the absence of lived experience. I can't help but think that the quality of discussion on these (and probably also other) issues would be higher if women's perspectives were better represented. 

Do you agree? If so, do you have any ideas for how to increase women's participation? And to what do you attribute the relative paucity of identifiable women in the Slow Boring comments?

I’m of two minds about this, since I think the basic reality is that the vast majority of people of either gender aren’t spending much time in comment threads and I sympathize a lot with that choice. Slow Boring also seems to have a male-skewing audience overall, and I think “arguing on the internet” is a male-skewing activity, so you end up with a very male-skewed space, which probably further turns women off.

That’s not ideal but also not generally the end of the world. But when the topics are ones where women’s experiences are particularly relevant, it doesn’t make for an ideal discussion — I’m open to suggestions but I’m not sure I have a great idea.

[Editor’s note: Thanks, Hilary, for the feedback! This comment was really helpful and led to a long Slow Boring staff discussion. We’re not sure that we have *great* ideas for how to address this, but we do have *some* ideas and will start to implement them this summer. Commenters who’d like to share their experiences, give us feedback, or offer suggestions are welcome to reach out to me directly at kate at slowboring dot com]

Mesfin Teklu: Just watched Avatar, The Martian, and Dune this weekend with my Gf, she’s finally letting me indoctrinate her into the Sci-Fi canon.

What are some of the other greatest sci-do movies that would appeal to people who aren’t totally sci-fi nerds?

See, it seems quite predictable that we have this question in the mailbag rather than a woman asking which rom coms to make her boyfriend watch. Personally, my absolute favorite movie is “Blade Runner,” but my sincere advice to the young men of the world is to not try to push this stuff on the people you go out with. Maybe try asking what they are interested in and getting them to share their favorite content with you?

Marc Robbins: On Matt's recommendation, I just watched "The Worst Person in the World." Apart from its luminous star, my reaction to it was . . . meh. The basic reason was because it so abysmally failed the Bechdel test. After briefly chortling at the heroine's "search" for a career in the first couple minutes, the entire movie was spent totally defining her in terms of her romantic interests -- and the two guys had far deeper lives than she did. I thought we were way beyond that kind of retro stuff; it's not the kind of message I'd like to see passed on to my two daughters of roughly Julie's age. (If you want to see a movie that wonderfully integrates a woman's romantic interests, career ambitions, and pursuit of her higher ideals, go see the far superior "Broadcast News.")

So, Matt, why is this your favorite film of 2022?

I mean, what can I say — I’m a middle-aged man! But in my defense, see rave reviews from Alissa Wilkinson, Clarisse Loughrey, Ella Kemp, Ann Hornaday, Stephanie Zacharek, and Lindsey Bahr — all female film critics. Indeed, the review I’ve read whose take was most similar to yours came from Richard Brody, A Man, in The New Yorker.

I think that there is a slightly tedious mode of thinking about art that has developed on the internet, where we have learned that there is “a trope” called “the manic pixie dream girl” and that this trope is bad, and Julie arguably is a manic pixie dream girl and therefore the movie is bad. But is the movie bad? The star is luminous. The comic stuff is funny. The sad stuff is sad. The characters have meaningful conflicts with each other in which everyone’s point of view seems plausible. That’s good drama! Is the movie excessively centered on Julie’s romantic entanglements or is part of the point of the end that Julie was excessively centered on this?

Benjamin, J: The potential statehood for Puerto Rico receives enormous amount of political attention, but what should the US be doing about its smaller territories? The Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa & the Northern Mariana Islands are all territories of the US, which lack federal representation. What strategy should the federal government take to provide more rights to these territories, or should they seek to jettison them to grant them independence?

Holding binding statehood referenda in all the territories and letting each one become a state if they want to actually polls quite well. By contrast, D.C. statehood, which is the cause that is most embraced by Democratic Party elites, is unpopular.

The real shame of this is that Puerto Rican statehood, which polls well and has a little bit of GOP support in Congress, was sabotaged because of dumb leftist concerns that it’s imperialism. Obviously Puerto Rico should be allowed to opt for independence if it wants that. But there’s no sign that it does, and good reason to believe it would choose statehood in a binding referendum were one to be held. We should do that and should have similar referenda in the other territories (and D.C., too).

Eric Kumbier: Progressives often tout that social spending has a much higher multiplier than tax cuts because it goes directly into the hands of the poor, who spend the money instead of investing or saving it. Does that mean social spending is more inflationary vis a vis tax cuts?

Yes, redistribution is stimulative. If you implemented the original Build Back Better concept of raising taxes on a narrow base of rich people in order to provide major new social benefits, that would be inflationary. The better way to do this would be to create the benefits during an economic downturn, and then pay for them later with broader-based tax increases.

Matt L: You tweeted after Bowser’s win in the Dem primary last week based on broad support from high SES whites that DC politics seem to be reorganizing around ideological lines in a way that haven’t been in the past. Can you expand on that? Is this playing out in a similar way in other big cities?

Let me try to be a little clearer about this. If you look at D.C.’s 2010 primary, you see a stark racial divide in the voting patterns where the incumbent Adrian Fenty is the “white” candidate and Vince Gray is the Black candidate even though both men are African American. Then in 2014, you see the exact same pattern of Gray winning Black neighborhoods and Muriel Bowser winning white ones, but Bowser just does a bit better in some of the upscale Black neighborhoods in Ward 4 and wins.

In 2018 there was no primary. But in 2022 we got a whole new pattern — Bowser won the whitest neighborhoods but she also won the Blackest ones. Robert White’s stronghold, meanwhile, is in the gentrification frontier neighborhoods in the center of the city.

To me this reflects a more ideological organization of politics. White clearly positioned himself as the progressive alternative to Bowser, and he won the votes of a racially diverse group of mostly younger people. Bowser, meanwhile, had something like a Joe Biden coalition of moderate older people of all races. This seems like a healthier way to run city politics.

Casey Adams: Somewhere in the multiverse, Matt is a White House press correspondent. What should boring Matt have asked Trump?

If I could sit down and interview Trump, I’d like to really just do an extremely earnest policy discussion and make him really explain his ideas on Medicaid or whatever.

Hugo Bromley: Thoughts on biofuel? I've never been convinced of its merits on environmental grounds, and with current food prices the UK/Germany push at the G7 for waivers on biofuel mandates seems to make sense to me.

I am very skeptical about biofuels. I think we know that electricity is the vehicle fuel of the future, and the future of electricity is either some kind of massive overbuilding of renewables or else has a hefty element of next-generation nuclear or geothermal power. Biofuels originate, politically, because agricultural interests have a lot of clout and it’s essentially a giveaway to farmers, not a real environmental or energy policy.

Alistair: How do you organize your daily/weekly routine to manage the ordinary responsibilities of parenting (grocery shopping, cooking, wakeup, bedtime, etc.)?

Conveniently, my editor is also my wife, so we have a lot of flexibility to communicate and address these things. My core parenting jobs are bath time, weekend wake-ups, and school drop-offs while Kate does bedtime, weekday wake-ups, most things related to school, and school pickups and after-school childcare. She cleans (we also have weekly help cleaning) and usually but not always cooks, and I do major weekend grocery runs, while we split day-to-day errands. We don’t have regular childcare help outside of core 8:15-3:15 school hours. I work more hours, and Kate spends more time on childcare, an arrangement that we’re both happy with.

In general, I would say the Substack lifestyle is pretty parent-friendly just because it’s work that can be done at pretty much any time of day rather than requiring my presence at any particular moment in time.

TF: You recently said: “Objectively, (Jurassic Park is) probably not even one of Steven Spielberg’s top-five films and arguably doesn’t even belong in the top 10.” Do you believe there are right and wrong answers to questions of art quality? Can you prove that Clue isn't the best movie ever made, and Thomas Kinkade isn't the greatest painter to ever live?

If you read my AI sentience post, you’ll see my argument there is that the really hard question is the superficially easy one — are people sentient?

And that’s the general model for how I think about a lot of philosophical problems. Can I “prove” the truth or falsity of claims about aesthetics? In some sense, no. But can I prove the truth or falsity of any other kind of claim? Not really. I can never remember what Robert Nozick actually wrote down versus just said in class, but one of his points is that we often seem to have an image in our head of some kind of argument being so good that it somehow coerces other people into agreeing with us — rationality compels you! But nothing actually works like that, not about aesthetics and not about ethics and not about anything else.

What I think is clearly true is that as human beings, we can look at things that we like and form judgments about them that involve some self-awareness. I saw “Jurassic Park” when I was 12. My dad took me on opening day. I was very excited about the movie and it hit expectations. That gives me a kind of a relationship to the movie that I don’t have with “Jaws” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” both of which I saw on VHS long after they first came out. So “Jurassic Park” means more to me than “Raiders.” But I can also try to ask myself, how would this look if I try to subtract the happenstance from it? And in that sense, I think “Raiders” is objectively better.

Doug B: With the country being slowly torn asunder, what are your thoughts on instituting a mandatory national service program as a way to provide needed services while simultaneously nation building. After high school, every able bodied student spends one year in the military, in National community service or a small foreign service a la the Peace Corps. I think more good will come out of forced mixing of kids from diverse backgrounds then from any other program I can think of. Put a rural kid from Tennessee, a rich kid from Charlotte, a trans kid from Columbus and a kid from the inner city in a dorm or barrack together with a common goal and I think we will see a far more empathetic nation with a common mission. Plus, we may gain a little bit more mobility and willingness of people to move around the country, benefiting themselves and the country overall.

I totally get where people are coming from on this. In World War II there was this huge existential threat to the country that required the mass mobilization of all kinds of people from all walks of life to cooperate with each other for the common good in defense of commonly held values. And while the war itself was terrible, that spirit of cooperation seems to have had benefits. So it always seems like it would be good to get those benefits — national service! — without the destruction of war.

My sense, though, is you can’t actually fake your way into national unity like that. The war was a unifying experience because the threat was real. You can’t just be like “well what if we all decided that cleaning up litter was as important as beating Hitler, wouldn’t that be good?” I think it would be good. But why would we decide that? It’s not true!

I do think we should try to encourage more fancy college students to volunteer for military service and become the next Mayor Pete or Tom Cotton. I think the Teach for America program did a lot of good over the years, and the country would benefit from a similarly designed Police for America program that challenged elite students to roll up their sleeves and do an important job in a way that is more consistent with their values.

City of Trees: In the spirit of Monday's thread, what are the ten points that you would craft for the Democrats to run on?

The reason I wrote that article is that I think the fact that it was Perry Bacon who wrote the ten points is significant — it’s much better and more credible to let leftist-minded people who find people like me annoying write the list. The role of annoying people like me is to challenge them to set priorities and write down a reasonably brief list of agenda items and then let people be flexible elsewhere.

But if it were me:

A national ban on gerrymandering.

Age limits for members of Congress.

Medicare negotiation of prescription drug prices.

An “all of the above” strategy for national energy dominance.

A federal cap on credit card interest rates.

Free school lunch for everyone.

A federal abortion rights floor; no first trimester bans, there must be meaningful health/life of the mother protections for after that.

A federal crackdown on interstate gun smuggling.

Something like Val Demings’ national initiative to solve more murders.

Enact meaningful barriers to underage kids’ ability to access internet porn — if porn sites cannot logistically come up with a way to do age real verification then they going to be shut down.

Doug Orleans: The two pundits I find myself disagreeing with the least are probably you and Paul Krugman. Do you read his columns and posts regularly? Are there things you disagree with Krugman about?

For any of the strong columnists out there, it is really rare for me to read one and be like, “Aha! That claim is definitely wrong!”

What does happen is that at different points in time there are people whose points of emphasis I tend to find more or less compelling. I tend to think that in the 1990s, Krugman was maybe a little excessively concerned with intellectual boundary-policing on the left, and now in the 2020s he’s maybe a little under-concerned with this, just given that leftist politics is stronger and more influential today than it was 25 years ago.

Shane: Ever considered writing fiction?

Many times since I have so many fiction writers in my family!

Here’s one idea. We are in the alternate reality where World War I doesn’t happen and the Habsburg Empire persists while the United States has slower progress on different forms of social inclusion due to the lack of wartime mobilizations. It’s the 1990s, and America has its first Catholic president, Joseph Biden. The heir to the Habsburg throne and his new wife are coming to visit the United States as part of a diplomatic reversal that will see the U.S. ally with Austria and Germany instead of Britain and Russia. The Biden administration is also making a big push to give up on 30 years of effort to make “separate but equal” a reality and declare that separate is inherently unequal. Russia-backed white supremacists are plotting to assassinate the Archduke, scuttle the alliance, neutralize the Jewish influence over the White House, and Make America Great Again. Our heroes need to foil the assassination plot before it plunges the world into war.

Nicholas Lilovitch: A few weeks ago Matt wrote the following: "People sometimes say that inflation is regressive, which I think is probably not true... " The people I've learned from (mostly at UChicago) mostly thought it was quite regressive. In particular, they'd argue that wealth in the form of assets was generally "inflation adjusted" while income has a lag (not to mention, inflation is often highest in food/fuel). Why do you think inflation isn't regressive?

Because it’s been so long since inflation was a serious concern, a lot of broad ideas about inflation are handed down to us based on features of the economy in the 1960s and 1970s that no longer apply today.

One key is that these days Social Security, SNAP, and other social assistance benefits are indexed to inflation. So while my income has fallen quite a bit over the past 12 months in inflation-adjusted terms, a low-income retiree “living on a fixed-income” is guaranteed against the erosion of benefits. We’ve also seen nominal wages rise fastest at the low end, and (equally important) as a result of the tremendous demand for labor, it is now easier for employed people to get as many hours as they’d like to work, which has not been the case for most of the 21st century. What is true is that scarcity of food and energy hit the poor very hard, so I don’t want to overturn the conventional wisdom there. But I think that in terms of core inflation, the inflationary environment probably hurts the poor relatively less now than it did in the 60s and 70s.