Dog days of mailbag

Dog days of mailbag

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 24 minutes

Dog days of mailbag

Facebook, vacation, workhorses, and adversarial legalism

I am really not a fan of August weather in general and wish the Inflation Reduction Act had a provision to make this level of heat and humidity illegal.

But until then…

Melinda Crawford: Can you please go on Bill Maher and promote your book? Maher has a lot of interesting ideas but he is completely obtuse when it comes to all things regarding families and children (which is like, the most important issue for most other Americans, i imagine)

I promise you that I am not turning down invitations to go on television and promote my book! It’s all a question of which guests Bill Maher wants to have.

Laurie Clark-Michalek: Hey Matt, I work for FB. I have a few reasons for working there, mostly that my coworkers are great, and the problems are interesting, and the pay is better than you find elsewhere. But beyond those selfish reasons, I do also believe that letting people talk to each other is probably good, and effective advertising is better for the world than ineffective advertising.

You really don't like Facebook. What would Facebook-but-good look like to you?

I want to try to be clear about this: I don’t have any particular dislike of Facebook, but I think that Facebook is pretty trivial compared to some of the things happening in the technology world.

To give an example, I personally like tortilla chips a lot. But if I heard that a really smart, hard-working, and talented friend was going to work for Tostitos to try to help sell more tortilla chips, I’d think that was kind of sad. Because we know it’s actually pretty bad for you to eat lots of highly processed snacks, even if the snacks in question are delicious. If that person told me the reason he wants to dedicate his life to getting more people to eat more Tostitos is that the pay is good, the colleagues are fun, and the work is interesting, I would sympathize — those sound like good self-interested reasons to work in the chips industry. But the fundamental reality is that if someone told you one of their goals for the coming year was to eat less fresh food and more tortilla chips, you’d think that sounded like a pretty bad idea. So if you spend your life working on the problem of how to get people to consume more tortilla chips, you’re dedicating your life to something that’s not great.

I always feel torn about the Facebook question, because the company is subject to a lot of criticism that I think is over the top and unwarranted. But it’s still true that if someone said, “I’m planning to do marginally less sleep, exercise, socializing, housework, cooking, and hobbies next year and more time scrolling on Insta,” you’d think that person was mapping out a bad plan for her life. I think there are a lot of tech companies that are doing more worthwhile stuff.

Sam S: Should the US or state governments mandate employers provide a minimum amount of vacation time, and if so, how much? 2 weeks like is mandated in Canada (and many US jobs already give), or 4-5+ weeks like in Australia, New Zealand, and Europe?

Why hasn't a single deep blue state enacted such legislation, or even come close to it? Compared to a lot of other reforms the left is discussing, I would think it'd be a relatively straightforward and popular thing to do.

Rather than minimum vacation time, as I wrote on Juneteenth I’d like to see more effort on creating federal holidays and deploying policy levers to maximize the number of people who get those days as days off. A vacation mandate is basically a straight trade of more time off for less money. Holidays, by contrast, help solve an important coordination problem — it’s much more fun to have the day off work when other people you know also have the day off. And really only the government can solve that.

Doug B: A few years ago, I sat next to an English partner of mine who had participated in some conference with “Chatham House Rules” (what you say behind closed doors is sacrosanct and won’t be divulged). He sat next to Ted Cruz and came away with the view that Cruz was the most personally repugnant person he’d ever met, and not based just on the substance of what he said. My point is, everyone who has met Ted Cruz, senators, college roommates, etc., with the possible exception of his wife and mother, thinks he is a tremendous asshole personally. Even Donald Trump, I’ve heard, can be (or used to be) charming in certain settings. My point/question is, how does a person who no one appears to like at all carve out a successful political career? Don’t you need supporters, mentors, donors to like or at least admire you? Who exists like that for Cruz, who has done nothing but exhibit raw ambition succeed as a politician to the extent Cruz has? Are there others with no charm or appealing characteristics who have been as successful as him?

I was once on an airplane with Ted Cruz and as we deplaned, you could see he’d left a pile of McDonald’s garbage in his seat. Bad guy!

But he’s also an example of modern, media-focused politics. U.S. Senator was his first elected office, and he got it by beating the Lieutenant Governor of Texas in a primary based on support from out-of-state celebrities like Sarah Palin and Ron Paul, plus money from the Club for Growth. Texas is a gigantic state, both in terms of its population and its size, so presence in the media matters a lot more than retail politics. And for figures like Palin and Paul, backing Cruz was about larger intra-party factional disputes rather than personal affection for Cruz. He’s consistently underperformed as a general election candidate, but Texas is conservative enough that a sub-par conservative politician can keep winning there.

JM: What's your take on youth sports and its impact on broader culture? Compared to when I played youth/high school sports in the 80s/90s, I find that for kids under 8 years old, it's pretty much the same — lots of casual, open-participation leagues. But the specialization and cost starting around age 9 seems to have gotten really out of control. Thousands of dollars for U-10 travel teams in minor sports? And compared to my youth, where kids of all abilities would play together until around age 12 at least, now there seems to be two separate tracks — competitive and casual — leading to significant drop-offs in participation starting around age 10 as the “talented” kids get siphoned off into club teams. I can't imagine this is healthy long-term for sports participation (or professional sports viewership).

I haven’t done a deep dive on this, but the impression I’ve gotten from some of Robert Putnam’s work, reinforced by some of the latest from Raj Chetty and his team on cross-class friendships, is that the rise of travel sports teams is really bad for society.

It both, as you say, seems to reduce the total number of kids who play sports (a good fun and healthy thing to do) but also contributes to social balkanization even in towns or neighborhoods that have reasonable levels of economic integration. Now obviously sorting kids at a young age into highly specialized and relatively resource-intensive sports can have some benefits for cultivating athletic excellence. But that’s ultimately a lot less important for the future of the country than cultivating a broadly fit and active population in which kids have friendships across class lines and parents interact on the sidelines with people they wouldn’t meet through work.

Arthur Bahr: Welcome back from Italy! As a medievalist who loves physical evidence of the past but who also believes in building more homes (I did my PhD at Cal and saw first-hand the suffering NIMBYism can cause), I've always wondered if and how you build historical preservation into your YIMBY vision. I imagine (though I might be wrong, which would be interesting!) that you don't think cities like Rome and Paris should allow their ancient and medieval sites to be developed into housing blocks. So unless you *do* think that, which would make me sad, there has to be some form of historical preservation regime you're okay with. Where and how do you draw that line?

I mostly write about the United States and the U.S. historic preservation regime, which I think is really bad and generates incredibly high costs and almost no benefits.

I do not think that logic applies to Paris or Florence or other European cities that clearly have enormous tourism industries that are driven in large part by the preservation of the historic built environment. Then in Rome and some other places, you have the question of priceless ruins. Long story short, I think in these cities the balance of costs and benefits is clearly different from in Washington, D.C., and the case for preservation measures is strong. Something I did say about Italy is that they do not seem to interpret preservation to mean “new things that are adjacent to old things should be made to look like they are old.” This is a weird idea that is very prominent in American planning but actually has nothing to do with the case for preserving genuine old things.

But in America, none of the stuff we are preserving is particularly old. And beyond that, nobody is coming to D.C. because they want to see the 1880s rowhouses of the Logan Circle Historic District. It just doesn’t play that kind of role in our culture, our society, and our economy. Now if we got to a point where 19th-century rowhouse neighborhoods were becoming genuinely scarce due to redevelopment, it might make sense to flip the preservation switch back on. But that’s not the current situation.

Chris Brandow: What does matt think about the longtermism aspect of EA? To me it seems very vulnerable to the future being hard to predict. The recent Vox article on EA makes me think that in part it is being artificially inflated on the agenda due to excess of $$ in the space. It also seems like another way for liberal, college grads to become further out of touch with normal concerns.

I want to write about this at greater length, but I’m struck recently that the main “longtermist” causes aren’t actually very long-term at all. The main people I’ve read on AI risk, for example, think we more likely than not will have transformative AI within the next 30 years. Now maybe you think that’s wrong. But if it’s right, then the case for worrying about the direction of its development doesn’t depend at all on short-term vs. long-term considerations. In fact the main reason you might want to prioritize AI risk over global public health and economic development is precisely that bringing prosperity to Africa and South Asia is necessarily a long-term project, and the AI safety community doesn’t think we have that much time to waste.

So while I think the prioritization debate is interesting, to me it’s not accurate to see it as a debate about long-term vs near-term thinking.

David Abbott: You’ve begun throwing shade at “adversarial legalism” in recent posts. What is the alternative within a presidential system? If the British House of Commons thinks a minister is not following its laws, it can deny confidence and/or supply. In our system, doesn’t Congress need the federal courts to make executive officers follow laws they don’t like? Aren’t we basically stuck picking some point on a spectrum running from complete executive lawless to mindnumbing adversarial legalism?

Adversarial legalism isn’t about presidential vs. parliamentary systems, it’s largely about the English-speaking legal tradition versus the continental/Napoleonic one.

It is probably true that interbranch conflict within the federal government plays some role in propagating support for the adversarial approach, and it may have some benefits or justification here. But I think it’s more worth considering in the context of federalism. If Congress authorizes a program for the Department of Transportation to make grants to cities to experiment with congestion pricing, and the Secretary of Transportation thinks New York City has a plan endorsed by the mayor and blessed by the state legislature, then does it make sense to have a supplemental round of environmental review in order to ward off NEPA litigation? I don’t think it makes sense. And I definitely don’t think that the right way to characterize the situation is legislatures checking out-of-control executives.

The issue is that the thesis of NEPA is “requiring lots of environmental review before changes happen will be good for the environment.” That partakes of a larger culture of adversarial legalism which holds that, in general, having contentious lawsuits about everything is the best way to arrive at the truth. The reality, though, is that requiring contentious lawsuits before anything can change is a heavy thumb on the scale of the status quo.

Ben Mitchell: Who are the people in Congress, including their staff, who you think do the best job at rigorous policy analysis and legislating? I know there are always many hands involved, including lobbyists, think tanks, etc., but I'm curious who you think are the true “workhorses” in Congress?

No piece of legislation is ever one senator’s work, but the Inflation Reduction Act fundamentally represents years of hard work by Ron Wyden and his team. Now to be fair to all the non-Wyden senators, part of the reason for this is that Wyden is great, but the other part of the reason is that in the modern structure of Congress, chairing the Senate Finance Committee is a much, much more important job than any other role in terms of “workhorse” legislating. So it’s not like, I dunno, Debbie Stabenow or Cory Booker screwed up — they didn’t have the opportunity to shape major legislation in a substantive way. But Wyden did have the opportunity and he seized it.

THPacis: A day before your Monkeypox post the NYT published a long article that seems to me even more damning. It suggests US health agencies dropped the ball on monkeypox response not once but repeatedly, in multiple different ways, and over two months. The mistakes are frustratingly similar to those of the COVID response and suggest public health agencies seemingly chronically unable to perceive urgency or act upon it appropriately. Would you agree with this assessment ? If so, what do you think is the source of the problem? Underfunding ? Bad/outdated structures? Career bureaucrats who are frankly not good enough at their jobs? Presumably it can’t all be on elected officials and political appointees since we’ve now seen ample evidence for failure under both Trump and Biden admins?

In short, what can be done so these mistakes aren’t repeated again for the next disease that may well be far worse?

At a very high level, here’s what I think the issue is. The CDC originated as an adjunct to the United States military, which during World War II was using a lot of bases in parts of the American South where malaria was endemic. The generals wanted to safeguard their troops from malaria, so they created the CDC — that’s why it’s in Atlanta. There were obviously medical doctors and biologists involved in this effort at high levels.

But they were involved in the same sense that physicists were involved in the Manhattan Project — it was fundamentally an operational military project whose purpose was to do things.

If you watch depictions of the CDC in movies, that’s what you always see. The CDC is springing into action and making stuff happen in the real world. But the actual CDC over the decades seems to have evolved into a mostly academic-type institution that has funding silos for various things and publishes papers on different topics. It’s like the kind of institution that the original CDC would hire scientists away from because they needed knowledgeable infectious disease experts and mosquito scientists in order to run their malaria eradication op. But what we no longer have is an operational institution that does things.

Ezra: What will Milan get out of college that he couldn’t get from spending four years in New Haven coffee shops? And to what extent does your answer support the “human capital” model of education versus the signaling model?

I can’t really be objective about Yale, so I thought I’d let Milan answer for himself and he says:

This is all speculation because at the time of writing I have not yet started school, but I think there are two main things I'll get out of going to Yale that I wouldn't just by hanging out in Atticus for 4 years. The obvious one is the social aspect of college — I'll be living in a dorm surrounded a bunch of other kids my age rather than living in an apartment in New Haven by myself. I'm a pretty social guy and frankly after a (very fun) year of mostly living at home with my family I think I'll have a lot of fun and hopefully make some good friends. But the other thing is rigor and structure. If I was sitting in a coffee shop by myself all day I'd mostly be reading about things that already pique my interests; at Yale I'll be forced (in a good way) to expand my horizons. As an example, I've signed up to take Directed Studies in my freshman year, which is basically a Great Books program. If I wasn't in DS, I probably wouldn't read and take notes on books like “The Iliad” or Plato on my own time. And I probably wouldn't have people to discuss the particular things I'm reading with if I was hanging around a coffee shop full-time. I happened to attend a get-to-know-each-other/Q&A Zoom for incoming DS students on Monday night and people were talking about how the book of Exodus illustrates some concepts about nation-building and national identity — that's something I definitely didn't think of when I read it over the summer!

On a more personal level, attending a top school was a dream of mine since the 5th grade, so it's wonderful to achieve that and I like to think my parents are proud of me, etc. And I got a free Class of 2026 t-shirt which is nice.

Tracy Erin: Isn't it time for the progressive pundit class to zero in on one or two likely Democratic presidential nominees and start talking about their accomplishments and getting them more media visibility? Before Amy Klobuchar ran she spent a lot of time going on cable news and NPR and she was top of my hypothetical list for 2020 (until those stories about how she was a mean boss which it seemed very hard for anyone to overcome, but especially a woman because women are harder on other women) but I only knew about the Senator from Minnesota because she was getting booked on national radio and tv. I am fine with picking a purple state Governor as the 2024 nominee, but it seems like it will soon be time to start getting a couple of those folks more airtime nationally so people can gauge if they like them. Gretchen Whitmer seems the most promising to me of the folks you tend to mention because Roy Cooper seems dull and Jared Polis a little too quirky and so I guess I am asking what it takes to start getting her more attention nationally so that we are not stuck with the 2020 field, none of whom seemed well positioned to win the Electoral College vote.

I think it probably is! I will look into it. But it’s also time for the base to temper their expectations. Part of the edge that back-bench members of Congress tend to have is that Elizabeth Warren can assert that she would make “big structural change” while Gretchen Whitmer is stuck with the dreary reality of actually governing, where you tout stuff like zero-tuition community college programs in Grand Rapids.

Justin: I hear a lot that “inflation” for political purposes is synonymous with “gas prices.” Electric car adoption is accelerating. When do you think this trend will cause significant changes to the attitudes and behavior of in US voters and political leaders? And what do you think those changes will be? Of course “fewer short-term voter freak-outs when oil prices go up,” but what are less obvious changes we're likely to see in US politics as more people fill up with a wire instead of a pump?

The main thing is that electricity prices are likely to become a much bigger deal — especially if we electrify everything and have a renewables-heavy grid, the new backlash moment will be when a period of unexpectedly low wind leads to electricity price spikes to try to keep supply and demand in balance.

Sam Jacobson: You recently visited Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. What development/growth ideas do you have for what I would call “satellite” cities… i.e. smaller cities that orbit larger ones (Baltimore - DC, Milwaukee - Chicago, etc.)?

I don’t know anything about Milwaukee, but I’ve written before about the infrastructure investments and operational reforms that would help knit D.C. and Baltimore together better.

Sarah: You talk a lot about how housing abundance creates enormous surplus, which can be shared in a way to make everyone better off. Practically speaking, how can we make this work for the people who currently rent units that should be torn down and replaced with bigger buildings? In theory it is doable with "Pareto improvement" magic, but I'm not sure how, and I have well-meaning friends whose concern for displaced renters takes them in NIMBY directions...

I think it’s important to be clear that preventing teardowns doesn’t prevent tenant displacement — tenants get displaced for the purpose of condo conversions all the time. But I think a smart strategy is to pair more market-rate development with more funding for rental assistance programs like Section 8 vouchers.

M Bartley: How well do you think this post has aged? I remembered reading it when it was released and being heartened by the conclusions, but as a layman, I have recently grown more worried that the fed will need to provoke a real painful recession a La Volcker in the 80s or Greenspan in the 90s to tame inflation. Am I wrong to think that? Has your view on the hydraulic vs expectations theories of interest rate rises changed at all?

I wonder myself. I think the people whose recent inflation commentary has been most insightful are mostly partisans of hydraulic theory and that is nudging me in their direction relative to what I used to think. It also seems to me that the income —> rent mechanism has become fairly prominent in inflation and may require a hydraulic solution. At the same time, five-year breakevens have been falling since March without any big rise in unemployment or even a slowdown in hiring.

The fact that so far the pace of job growth hasn’t slowed at all makes me think it’s premature to throw in the towel on the possibility of a soft landing — we haven’t seen so much as one month of sluggish hiring to evaluate what the impact of that would be, so how sure are we that we’d need a painful recession?

Dave Coffin: I was just listening to Josh Barro's podcast with Adam Ozimek on the impact of remote work on housing. Do you think remote workers moving to low density, affordable property areas poses a new challenge to densifying urban areas? How do you think urban planning plays out in world where home buying is increasingly decoupled from the geography of available jobs?

I don’t think “densifying” should be a policy goal — allowing density should be. I think people should be allowed to build apartments wherever they think there is demand for them. If there’s no demand, then nobody will build, but there’s no reason to make it illegal to build them.

But broadly speaking, I think a big shock to people’s location decisions makes flexible zoning more important, not less. The biggest reason is that remote workers are wanting larger homes so that they can have home offices and such. It’s possible to interpret that as “well, because people want home offices, they want to move to the exurbs where there are large newly-built dwellings.” But it’s possible to construct large dwellings in urban cores and inner-ring suburbs, you’d just need to make it legal to do so. The other is that I think we may see a lot of people wanting to move to leisure destinations — places near beaches, mountains, ski slopes, pretty lakes, etc. — that don’t currently have a lot of housing supply, and we need to make it possible to add units there.

Brian T: There was recently an article in the Atlantic about noise, and the divergence between working class and middle class values on the subject.

What are your thoughts on this as it relates to YIMBYism and urbanism? I'm definitely on Team Quiet myself, but I do admit that there's a real tension here.

The author and I both grew up in New York at around the same time and then went to Ivy League colleges at around the same time, and I experienced essentially the exact same noise norms shift that she describes. Since I grew up in comfortable economic circumstances going to private schools in NYC, I think she’s actually injecting a class element into this that doesn’t exist.

What happened to both of us in college isn’t that we met rich kids, it’s that we met kids who grew up in the suburbs. Then after college, a lot of suburban-raised kids ended up moving to cities. And I think there’s just no denying that cities are louder than the suburbs. Personally, I find it hard to sleep when it’s too quiet — I’m used to noise and I find silence unnerving. But other people have different experiences. This strikes me as an area where it’s probably best not to overthink things too much.

Eric Kumbier: Tyler Cowen posted a partially formed critique of the IRA yesterday. He claimed the minimum corporate tax is basically a tax on investment (since that's what companies write off/deduct) and that some of the buy American provisions are problematic (no current EVs qualify for the tax break because they don't have enough American parts).

He expressed uncertainty about the act and outright skepticism that it would reduce inflation. To me, the biggest benefit of the act is its climate investments, and the biggest problem is that it adds complexity to the tax code rather than eliminating loopholes. By now, I know loosely what's in the bill. What is the likelihood that the bill will do what it claims: reduce inflation and the deficit and spur a massive wave of climate investment and emissions reductions? You've been a huge cheerleader for it, but do you have any doubts?

I mean just between us, I think we can all admit that the Inflation Reduction Act is not optimal inflation-reducing legislation. It’s primarily a bill designed to promote the production of zero-carbon energy that’s then structured so as to be anti-inflationary in its aggregate impact. And I think it clearly will promote the production of zero-carbon energy and it will, at the margin, have an anti-inflationary impact. So I think that’s good.

In terms of Tyler’s take, while I accept the logic of the view that it’s better to tax consumption than to tax investment, I just don’t buy into the idea that taxing investment is really bad. If I did, I would be a conservative like he is. But I don’t. I also think that, frankly, he always holds Democratic bills to a super-high standard of technocratic rigor while setting a much lower bar for Republican ones — to be generous, he maybe does that to counteract what he sees as a prevailing left bias of econ Twitter.

But to me, taxing investment with one hand while subsidizing investment with another is pretty good, especially paired with deficit reduction and permitting reforms. What I do think is true is that the total impact of the bill is going to hinge a lot on what ultimately comes of those permitting reforms. There’s a school of thought on the left that sees this as a painful concession made to secure Manchin’s vote, but I think clean energy badly needs permitting reform on the merits, so following through on this is going to be very important.

J Willard Gibbs: Any response to the investigation into the lab leak hypothesis? Angie Rasmussen twitter thread here:

I’m largely where I have been on this — do you think it’s an implausibly weird coincidence that a lab leaked virus would have experienced its first major spread at an animal market or do you think it’s an implausibly weird coincidence that a zoonotic viral crossover would have happened in a city that had a major virology lab? To an extent, we’re just volleying back and forth at each other based on our priors. The evidence in that paper is clearly consistent with a zoonotic hypothesis, but they don’t have specific evidence of a source animal.

Stephen: Matt's original hometown of NYC is holding primary elections soon, and redistricting has given new yorkers multiple competitive districts- particularly interesting are the 12th (Nadler/Maloney/Patel) and the 10th (no incumbent running, open field). I'm hoping for your help in deciding who to support. Any endorsements or thoughts on these races?

I grew up as a Nadler constituent in what’s now NY-10. Unfortunately, I don’t really have a strong recommendation as to who is best in the NY-10 field. But if you’re uptown in the NY-12 zone, I really think you should give Patel a try. The differences between Nadler and Maloney are just not significant enough to make it worth your time to worry about spoiling, and Patel is a fresh face and a fresh voice that would be a real asset to Congress in terms of thinking seriously about abundance and a progressive supply-side agenda.

Doug Orleans: For All Mankind takes place in an alternate timeline where Gary Hart was president (1984-1992). What do you think would have been the significant achievements of a Hart administration?

It’s worth understanding that 80s/90s politics had a rightward trajectory throughout the western world, including in countries like France and New Zealand where center-left parties were in power or in a place like the United States where Bill Clinton won in 1992 but governed largely within a consensus defined by Reaganism. So I’m sure a Hart administration would have done stuff, but I wouldn’t anticipate any big progressive wins. The main thing is the course of Supreme Court history would have gone very differently, with President Hart replacing Thurgood Marshall rather than Clarence Thomas taking his seat.

Vishal: I'm surprised you're open about your favorite bands (and other culture / taste preferences). Would it bother you if Emily Haines went on Twitter and made clear she was one of your legions of haters? (No idea where she stands on anything, but using that example as you've talked about Metric a bunch recently.)

Well, she last tweeted in June 2018 so I think it’s pretty unlikely that she’s going to do that.

My whole thing about politics is that everyone needs to be more normie, more least common denominator, and less expressive. That’s basically the opposite of what you want in art, so I would never be surprised to learn that a great artist’s instincts about politics run in the other direction.