Last week of summer mailbag!

 Last week of summer mailbag!

Alternate Gary Hart, The Daily Show, and economic complexity

Milan is starting at Yale, my kid is starting second grade next week — it’s the end of an era.

Leora: It seems like the Dems have finally got it through their heads that, with razor thin majorities, they don’t have a mandate to transform the country and should shoot for a steady stream of sensible, modest legislation that will command majority support. Most of the Slow Boring readership could have told them that on Nov. 4 2020. What took so long? Why did they waste so much time banking on Manchin voting for bills he told them unequivocally from the beginning he would not support?

I think the actual answer here is that Manchin’s willingness to embrace the American Rescue Plan (ARP) sent expectations soaring. I have over and over again defended Manchin against his critics on the left, but it would have been much better for him to voice his objections to the expanded Child Tax Credit (for example) during the ARP debate and killed it then.

Brian T: What are your thoughts on the legacy of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show?

I think the legacy of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show is always going to be his seminal work during the George W. Bush era that was both very funny and, I think, a significant political intervention. It’s hard to convey this to younger people, but in the post-9/11 environment, there was a kind of center-right hawkish hegemony in the media. And it was badly in need of puncturing, which is what a lot of us progressive bloggers were doing, but it was also susceptible to puncturing through satire and comedy, because satire and comedy are powerful weapons against hegemonic sanctimony and pieties.

The specific thing Stewart was doing then just doesn’t work today, because while the political right continues to exert incredible political power, it’s no longer hegemonic.

These days, if you want to skewer cultural pieties and take down sanctimonious people, you are more likely to be punching left. Now there’s a certain kind of person, like Matt Taibbi, who’s so committed to the aesthetics of anti-sanctimony that they’ve realigned to the political right. For me, it just means that political satire is not a large share of my media diet anymore. So I think that’s Stewart’s legacy — a tremendous media/cultural/political intervention that is just not that relevant today, in part because it was so successful.

Stewart himself has pivoted in a more earnest direction as a result, which I think reflects the fact that he’s a smart and perceptive person. But Jeff Maurer has a lot of good posts on Stewart’s more recent work where I think he correctly notes that judged as an earnest political commentator, his work just isn’t good enough. The whole burn pits campaign, for example, has obviously been a huge activist success story. But the actual scientific basis for the burn pits claims seems shaky to me. I don’t particularly begrudge the veterans their extra health coverage, but Stewart’s coverage of the issue has been demagogic and uninformative (and, dare I say, sanctimonious?).

Sharty: Sausage-making questions!

Given how much Slow Boring content is sort of news-adjacent, what does the typical process look like to identify, research, and write up a post? Are several irons in the fire simultaneously, or is this handled in more of a serial manner? Do you have a handful of less-time-sensitive completed posts in your back pocket that you can draw upon if a particular article is having trouble coming together, or is everything so finely tuned that you no longer worry about that?

The basic process is that on Monday morning I deliver a draft of Tuesday’s article to Kate, and then I spend Monday working on the draft version of Wednesday’s post.

We normally don’t plan things out in detail too far in advance (there’s no Friday huddle to map out the week to come, for example), but we do talk about future plans. Last weekend, for example, we talked about the fact that we should find time for a post on the risks of great power conflict. So at any given time I usually have a few partially written drafts lying around. My general experience as a columnist is that the amount of time it takes to actually execute a piece is pretty variable, so I also try to keep a list of ideas that would be fast to bang out that I can pivot to in a pinch if I’m hitting roadblocks on other things.

Wigan: Since video games came up today:

Are you concerned your son will ever play "way too much" video games. What would "way too much" look like to you and what will you do as a parent if that happens?

I try not to give into moral panic that’s just like “all forms of content that didn’t exist when I was a kid are bad.” But, yeah, everything I wrote earlier this week about worrying that our entertainments are getting too good very much applies to kids.

But we periodically assess our current screen time policy and take into account what effect we feel it’s having on our kid. If it seems like maybe he’s spending “way too much” time on Minecraft (the only video game he’s sometimes allowed to play right now), we dial it back. For us, “way too much” mostly looks like whining about wanting screen time or about having to do things that aren’t screen time. When that happens, we try to replace video game time with something else. And like anything, making a decision and sticking to it until there’s a compelling reason to change ultimately makes life easier for everyone.

To say something optimistic about gadgets, though, our kid loves to read, so we recently got him a Kids Kindle with subscription access to a huge library of children’s books. He’s really enjoying the ability to pick out new books and get them instantly, and I am enjoying that the house is not cluttered up with random books.

Lili: One of the things I like best about your column is the writing style. I'm curious if there are other writers who you've modeled yourself after. Also, what other essayists or nonfiction writers have a refreshing and exciting style that you recommend your readers explore (even if they aren't styles that influenced you)?

Thank you!

My columnist style icons when I was in college and early in my career were Jonathan Chait and Eric Alterman, and then I was very influenced by Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan in terms of how to blog. Like a lot of writers of roughly my age, I think I was also influenced by a sort of internet writing house voice that Choire Sicha, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Gould pioneered at Gawker. Last but not least, he doesn’t really write this way anymore for the Times, but Ezra Klein developed certain style concepts at Wonkblog that we then refined and put into place at Vox and that I still use. That means mostly:

Shameless use of bullet points

Freely mixing informality with highly technical terms

A certain willingness to break the fourth wall and address the reader

The idea there is to try to make it feel less intimidating for people to read about things that they think might be taking them out of their depth.

In terms of recommendations, I don’t really know — I’ve never been someone who particularly has a taste for prose style as such, but I think basically all the main columnists and writers for prestige publications are very good writers. The problem is they sometimes have bad ideas!

Luke Christofferson: Are there any areas where we would expect legislation to emerge from a Republican House and Democratic Senate (a situation that is looking increasingly more likely)?

I would not expect a lot from this. House dynamics are very leadership-driven so it would be unusual for an entrepreneurial GOP committee chair to just strike some kind of deal with Democrats and be able to move a bill. And Kevin McCarthy does not seem to be particularly well-respected by anyone (there was this Politico piece about how everyone thinks he’s dumb), so I don’t know that he’d be trusted to undertake daring negotiations with the Biden White House.

If something were to happen, though, I think it might be on immigration — after signaling a desire to break with Trump on asylum issues right at the beginning, the Biden administration seems to have decided they don’t particularly want to welcome asylum-seekers at the southern border. They’re not going to waste a Democratic trifecta on talking about changes that progressives would hate, but if Republicans want to move some kind of bill tightening up asylum rules, I think moderate Democrats might go for that (but note this is not real reporting on my part, I will look into it).

Kade U: Matt, I know you like alternate history scenarios, and this is one I was wondering about that I think also comes into the institutional design questions you are interested in.

Let's say we were to place a series of brilliant, reform-minded people in charge of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. What would have been the most important things for them to do in order to change history and persist rather than dissolving from external pressure? What would Matt Yglesias' policy prescriptions be for the home of history nerds' favorite light cavalrymen?

And, for bonus points, what are the consequences of that persistence, e.g. there is a major power in Eastern Europe separating Germany from Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries.

A lot of American filibuster-haters emphasize Poland-Lithuania’s political institutions, especially the liberum veto. But I think the real issues go back at least to the Great Northern War of 1700–1721. Basically, Augustus, the Elector of Saxony in Germany, got himself made King of Poland and then joined a large coalition in fighting Sweden. The Swedes beat his forces and conquered Poland, but ultimately lost the war to Russia. The whole thing left Poland in a very weak international position. But to become King of Poland, Augustus had to agree to become Catholic. Suppose he’d been more devout and refused to convert and instead François Louis had become King of Poland?

Maybe he stays out of the Great Northern War and is able to lay the foundations of a centralized enlightenment state in the 18th century.

I think the main 19th-century consequences of this are that Prussia is weaker and Austria is more German, so it’s possible you end up with German unification under Habsburg rather than Hohenzollern rule. This still leaves Poland fundamentally vulnerable to Russo-German partition (as happened IRL in the late-18th century and then again in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) but if we want to be optimistic, both empires might think it’s useful to have a neutral buffer state between them.

BD Anders: If you could, via a wish or whatever, instantly be fluent in any three additional languages, what would they be, and if you have a why, why?

I think picking three is pretty easy because after English, the most-spoken languages in the world are Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish, so I’d pick them. The harder question is if I only got one or two, do I elevate Spanish because it’s more practical in the United States? I think I would.

Max Power: In a recent mailbox, Matt mentioned watching For All Mankind and liking it as an alternate history that's not about the Confederacy winning the Civil War or the Nazis winning WWII. I'm curious what Matt thinks of the specific timeline changes they made re who was President and the course of the Cold War and what he thinks 2003 will look like in season 4.

There are some logical failures here, of which the most egregious is Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton being the Democratic Party presidential nominee in 1992 after eight years of Gary Hart in the White House.

I think they pretty obviously did that in order to be able to use the archival footage of Clinton from the campaign, but it violates everything we know about the thermostatic nature of American politics. Even in the less-polarized 1980s, it would have been challenging for Clinton to win re-election in a conservative state with an incumbent Democratic Party president. But even if he did, the whole point of nominating Clinton in Real World 1992 is that liberals were tired of losing elections and wanted to embrace a more moderate approach. If you want to tell a story in which VP Al Gore was successfully challenged from the left for the 1992 nomination, that could make sense, but the Clinton thing is weird.

But even Hart becoming president is kind of a stretch. Hart was a lawyer in Denver who rose to prominence in politics by working at a high level for George McGovern in the 1972 cycle. On the show, Chappaquiddick does’’t happen, so Ted Kennedy runs and wins in ‘72. In that world, I’m not sure Hart wins a Senate seat in 1974.

Long story short, the idea of recycling familiar historical figures into the alternate White House is fun, but I doubt it’s realistic.

Forrest: How do you feel about Substack, as a platform, as a company, and as a decision you made, after all this time? How is it working with them? Do you feel like you're part of the company, in some sense? Do you feel associatively implicated in decisions they make (like persecuting that associate of Spencer's in retribution for his exit post?) Do you ever think about striking out on your own?

I sincerely don’t have a ton of thoughts about Substack “as a platform.”

As a software vendor, as best as I can tell they are offering the best product in terms of my needs. They are also charging a relatively high fee — an unbounded 10 percent of gross revenue is a lot if you have a lot of subscribers. So I have absolutely looked into using a different product to save money, but for now I think the value they provide is worth the price. But I don’t think I’m “part of the company” any more than I’m part of Google or Stripe or any other companies whose products we use. On a personal level, I do like the Substack executives I’ve met, but I feel bad about what happened with Sam Thielman (read his account here), which struck me as petty and also kind of counterproductive on Substack’s part.

At the end of the day, I guess one thing that I feel simpatico with the Substack execs about is that I don’t want the question of “Which subscription newsletter publishing software do you use?” to be a question with big political or ideological stakes. I use an iPhone because I like iPhones, and I find the features to be worth the price. Other people value the flexibility of Android or the ability to get a cheaper phone. That’s not a comprehensive endorsement of everything Apple has ever said or done in the world, but they make the best phones so I buy them.

Romulus Augustus: I don't know if you are in the process of writing a book or shopping one around.

I do feel you would be uniquely qualified to write a book that I think is missing from the popular discourse. I am talking about a book that is a full throated defense of center-left policy, not just the politics.

I say this because as a Democratic committee person in the Philadelphia area, I often hear people who agree with the basic premise of being Shor-pilled, yet they do so under the idea that it would be better if we could get Squad type policies but that it is unrealistic to think we could.

I think we need a voice saying, “No it is not just bad politics to push for whatever the DSA wants. It is actually better policy outcomes to push for Obama/Bidenism.” I think you would be well positioned because you have the background in places like ThinkProgress and could speak that language.

I am not currently shopping this book, both because I feel emotionally exhausted after “One Billion Americans” and also because I don’t think it’s a very commercial idea. But I do sometimes think about the book title “American Liberalism: A Restatement and Defense” that would essentially be this idea — a case on the merits for liberalism-but-not-socialism.

One thing I will say about that, though, is that Paul Starr wrote a book along those lines (“Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism”), and of the four books of his that I’ve read, the other three are all more interesting. That makes me think it’s maybe not just an uncommercial idea, but one that even I find tedious, and I don’t want to write a book that I think is tedious.

Ant Breach: Have you ever engaged with the economic complexity literature? It's essentially the idea that economies are characterised not so much by their GDP/HDI or even the rarity of specific sectors they have, but the rarity of their entire bundle of activity relative to other places.

So, for example, diamond mining is not especially complex, because it is usually found in economies that also mainly produce lots of basic agricultural products - there's not much value-add going on, so the economy is rather simple even if it's prosperous.

Semiconductors are extremely complex, because economies that make semiconductors also usually design and make lots of other rare, highly specialised things like tech jobs and fighter planes — they're complex economies with lots of little ways that value is added.

I'm curious as to whether you think it is a useful way of talking about the economy and places, or if it's, er, too complex in most situations.

I love the OEC website, which has lots of great data on economic complexity, and I think I refer to it pretty frequently.

In terms of engaging with the literature, I will admit that this is a pretty shallow and simplistic view, but I’m not sure that delving deep into the details adds a ton of value beyond the simple observation that “commodity exporters’ growth prospects are hostage to global commodity prices.” So for example, Azerbaijan is richer than Indonesia in the latest per capita GDP stats. But they are basically just exporting oil and gas, so their economy will bounce up and down with oil and gas prices. Indonesia, by contrast, has been moving up the industrialization value chain (increasing their economic complexity) and stands a good chance of continuing to grow as long as they can maintain political stability and so forth.

Ben S: I'm genuinely confused about the so-called “Iran Deal” or JCPOA, and its possible replacement. Everything I've read on that topic seems to sort into two polar opposite viewpoints, where if you're a Democrat, the deal was the best thing ever and getting rid of it was insanity, and if you're a Republican, the deal was the worst thing ever and the people behind it are trying to get us all killed. Weirdly, the actual arguments (on both sides) seem to be without factual basis, and just amount to screaming. Is there anything both sides agree on?

I think the JCPOA issue is actually simpler than you might think. It was an agreement between Iran, the U.S., and our major European allies whose goal was to address our nuclear proliferation concerns. And despite what dishonest people will tell you, it was really good at addressing our nuclear proliferation concerns. At the same time, the whole point of a deal is that all things considered JCPOA, was better for Iran than an active nuclear program — that’s what made it a deal.

Now, if you’re Saudi Arabia or the UAE or Israel, you don’t want Iran to be better off. Iran is the enemy, you want Iran to be worse off! So the whole debate in the United States is: should the United States strike a deal to address nuclear proliferation concerns (Obama’s view) or should the United States prioritize the regional interests of Saudi Arabia the UAE and Israel and keeping Iran as weak as possible (Trump’s view)?

I don’t think this is a remotely difficult question on the merits, but it’s politically tough because these are countries that have a lot of clout. One of my mantras is that doing the right thing is one of the most overrated ideas in politics, and I think you see this to an extent with the Iran Deal. Had Obama gotten this done with broad political buy-in, that would have been a diplomatic triumph. But as a partisan measure, he created powerful political enemies with no assurance that the deal would stick.

Jake: You've written before about your opposition to the building height limit in DC. Have your feelings on this changed at all over time? You are probably aware that height limits aren't uncommon, including in such cities as Rome, Athens, and Paris. Dutch cities (most notably Amsterdam) seem to do pretty well for themselves with similarly squat skylines, although I believe that's a byproduct of the geological conditions of the area rather than their laws. Maybe the Dutch, Parisians, Romans, and Greeks are on to something with their recognition that the ideal form of cities is dense but not overly tall? Pomponi et. al. seem to think so, at least when it comes to life cycle GHG emissions from different urban forms.

From a purely ecological point of view, the optimal thing is for everyone to live in a home that’s really small. And if you have a whole city full of people who are occupying a small number of square feet per person, then you can achieve very high densities without tall buildings. But while I don’t think American cities should ban very small apartments, I think it’s a conceptual mistake to believe that imposing a Paris-style height limit will generate Parisian densities. America is richer than France, it’s much less densely populated than France, and it doesn’t have France’s stock of old buildings.

In general, I think that thinking about old European cities can generate misleading conclusions about urban policy. There is something very nice about the vibe in neighborhoods that were built before cars existed. But cars do exist today, and most households are going to want to own at least one and to drive it sometimes. I am the strongest critic in the world of U.S. planning paradigms that require new construction to include car storage. But it’s something most people will voluntarily pay for. And it means that modern built environments are going to look different. If you rezone Austin for more density, it’s going to look like central Houston, not like Amsterdam. And if we want to add density to the D.C. area, we need to legalize very large modern towers near mass transit stations and in the central business district.

Not because these observations about Paris and Rome are false, but just because the market isn’t going to re-create 19th-century Paris in 21st-century D.C. — we need to work with today’s technology and consumer demands.

Troy a Garrett: Match owns 90% of all dating apps. The only competition is Bumble. I understand they compete with bars but dating apps are like 30% of marriages. This seams important for things Matt has an interest in.

I do find this somewhat concerning. My guess is the technical analysis of this issue would show that there are few barriers to entry in the world of dating apps, so there’s no competition concern. But Match’s evident interest in purchasing putative competitors, along with the fact that the big players don’t seem to want to enter this space, is a little vexing.

The larger odd trend here is that as dating apps have become more mainstream and more elaborate, people have started having less sex and marriage rates have continued to decline. There have been a million articles on what is causing those trends, but I’d have thought that developing sophisticated new tools to sort through large numbers of people and find more efficient matches would lead to more sex and more marriage, similar to how the ease with which you can now find the best ramen or a craft cocktail in a random city contributed to a huge explosion in food niches.

Maurits Pino: Recently, Matt wrote approvingly about public transport in Italy and more specifically about the Milan metro-system. I just spent 5 days in Barcelona and that was impressive in terms of its metro-system. Frequent, 24/day (at least on some lines, not sure), dense network, not expensive.

Spain is absolutely top-notch at train building, and both Madrid and Barcelona have excellent mass transit systems. A slightly odd thing about Spain is that going by OECD definitions of metro areas, both Madrid and Barcelona are larger than Milan or Rome, even though Italy has a much larger population than Spain. So they’re working with really large cities. Part of what’s interesting about northern Italy is they are building out successful metros in relatively small communities like Turin.