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Bonus mailbag

A little something before an extra column comes out

Matthew Yglesias

 Sep 9 

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Here’s a mailbag for you, but keep an eye out for a special bonus Friday column based on a chat I had with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

Daniel: I'll be in DC for work at the end of the month but will have one day free. Any advice from a local on how to make the most of one day in the capital?

This is a boring answer, but if you have one day in town and haven’t been before, the best thing to do is probably to go to the Lincoln Memorial, then walk east through the Vietnam Memorial and the Reflecting Pool, check out the World War II memorial and the Washington Monument, and then keep heading east to check out some of the Smithsonian museums.

My personal favorite (Air and Space) is closed right now, but they all have good stuff, and it’s really just a question of what you’re interested in. Alternatively, if you hate museums, you might turn south after the Washington Monument to check out the Jefferson Memorial, then stroll over to the fish market and The Wharf. But basically, I’m saying that the obvious stuff on the National Mall is worth your time.

Terry Lau: What's the best way to break the "heterodox" to alt-right pipeline, where people with a mix of good and bad opinions succumb to the twin pressures of being yelled at by annoying left/liberal online people and also being congratulated for their bravery and bold stances by idiot right/IDW online people?

I don’t think there’s any one answer to this, but I think one obvious starting point is that folks ought to interrogate some of their own beliefs about the power of shunning and social media bullying to accomplish the political work that they want.

I wrote this about Joe Rogan and then about Dave Chappelle, but I think it holds in general. When someone says something you disagree with, the right approach is to try to say why you think they are wrong, not to say “that guy is a bad person and anyone who doesn’t immediately cut all ties with him is also a bad person.” We see time and again that the Republican Party as a set of elected officials and governance practices is quite dogmatic, but culturally, the right is more willing to welcome people in based on partial agreement, and that’s smart.

The other thing is basically everyone has at least some heterodox opinions; it’s incredibly unusual to be a down-the-line liberal or conservative. And I think everyone who cares about politics should work the muscle of expressing heterodox views occasionally in a low-key way without being a “contrarian” or a “heterodox thinker.” You’re just a person who, like most people, is not 100 percent aligned with either party coalition.

Loren Christopher: I see you joking on twitter about trying to buy Greenland again, but . . . could we? My understanding is that Denmark's no was more of a "why are you asking us instead of the people who live there?" And there are only 60,000 people living there - couldn't we make them an offer in everyone's interest? Some kind of permanent development fund that worked out to a million bucks a person, for example. At that rate we could buy five Greenlands for the cost of student loan forgiveness.

I think it’s a 100 percent reasonable idea. There are 330 million Americans compared to just under six million Danish people, so we could offer the population of Greenland a subsidy package that would be extremely onerous for Denmark to meet without spending too much money.

Now I could see the Greenlanders resisting this idea because they might worry that free movement between the U.S. and Greenland would turn them into strangers in their own land. But I think it’s worth a conversation. As I wrote when I covered this issue for Vox, prior administrations have tried to buy Greenland — it’s a very reasonable policy idea. It was attempted in the past on a colonial basis and rejected by Denmark, but we should take another run at it as a deal with the people and government of Greenland itself.

Tom Hitchner: On Twitter you wrote that anger about diverse casting is the lowest form of reactionary politics, and I agree it's often petty, hateful, etc. However, in a fantasy context isn't it fair to find diversity distracting in settings where it doesn't seem to make sense from a worldbuilding perspective? When we visit another continent in Game of Thrones, it makes sense that there's a different mix of skin colors; when we go to a small remote village in the new Lord of the Rings show, having people of different skin colors makes it seem less like a small remote village. (On the other hand, I guess it doesn't bother me that everyone speaks English…)

I think your parenthetical on English is to the point.

I’ll talk about Game of Thrones because I’m more familiar with it. Not everyone on the show speaks English, there are foreign languages like Dothraki and Valyrian. But there’s also the Common Tongue which is rendered on screen as English, and specifically as English spoken with a British accent. Because it’s modeled on Medieval England. But they don’t model the speech on what we know of Medieval British dialects, they speak with contemporary British dialects. Why? Convention! And why do the Valyrians get a totally made-up language instead of speaking Latin or something? Convention! There’s nothing wrong with these conventions — I would find it very disconcerting if you had guys in armor with swords speaking in contemporary regional American accents — but they really are just conventions.

And sometimes a show challenges convention. There’s a longstanding convention of depicting ships battling in space as if they were fighter planes battling in the atmosphere. When I first saw Battlestar Galactica attempt a more realistic depiction of inertial movement in zero gravity, I found it very disconcerting. And that can be a valid reason not to do things. I’ve read that some of the historical advisors hired to work on Gladiator told Ridley Scott that real gladiators did product endorsements during bouts, and he considered incorporating that into the movie but decided people would think it was too fake even though it’s real. But ultimately, I liked that Battlestar challenged the convention.

I really do think this basically just comes down to the evolving market. The audience is more diverse than ever, so they are now giving us diverse elves. And why not?

Michael Tolhurst: Both Ross Douthat and Megan McArdle had recent opinion pieces responding to Bidens speech on Trump. They are both smart conservative writers so I wonder who you thought *from a conservative perspective* had the better take? (As an of outside judges of takes)

Ross is a great columnist, but I think he has a bit of a blind spot about his own commitment to the abortion issue, which I think is profound and sincere, but also makes him a basically unpersuadable voter.

If Republicans do poorly in November, this is going to be read as a backlash against Dobbs and will weaken the strength of antiabortion activists inside the GOP coalition. If they do well, it will be read as a sign that they weathered the worst of the backlash and should proceed with plans to make abortion illegal. That’s a perfectly valid reason to hope for a GOP landslide, but it’s actually so valid that it can make you want to believe that there are lots of other good reasons to hope for a landslide.

John B: What do you think best explains the thermostatic effect in politics - particularly in midterm elections when the public generally punishes the president's party? It seems a little irrational.

I think people really underrate the extent to which voters cling to the status quo at their own peril. The most popular Democratic governor in America is Andy Beshear and the three most popular governors are Charlie Baker, Phil Scott, and Larry Hogan. These are all politicians known for restraining the worst impulses of the locally dominant party, not particularly for achieving anything notable.

Walker: It seems you talk more about Midwestern and Eastern cities. What do you think Los Angeles does right and wrong as far as city planning? More than half of of Los Angeles County is outside of the city of Los Angeles which surprises some people.

I don’t think Los Angeles does anything right as far as city planning.

It’s actually very tragic. LA voters passed a referendum raising taxes on themselves to construct an expensive Metro system, and then they passed a referendum raising taxes on themselves to invest in housing the homeless, but LA has terrible transit ridership and a dismal homelessness situation. That’s because you can’t make progress on these issues without aligning land use with your goals.

George Porter: You asked the other day about wood pellet grills. Did you end up getting a grill? If you do (or did) are you thinking of a wood pellet, a propane, or a charcoal one?

I was intrigued by the pellet smoker concept after I saw my father-in-law had one and made some delicious BBQ with it. Ultimately, though, they cost a lot of money and on reflection, increasing my consumption of smoked meat is not really one of my life goals. What I bought instead was an e-bike, which is also kinda expensive but actually does align with things I want to do in life, like be more physically active.

gyozaleaf: Do you know the Dead Milkmen song Born to Love Volcanoes? I’ve been on a kick listening to their 1988 classic Beelzebubba again lately and it occurs to me it’s basically an EA anthem. Is it worth it to donate to PBS when there are bigger problems? Ok, it’s a bit of a stretch but while listening it made me think of your recent tweets about Ineffective Altruism (roasting people who donate to museums etc, as I recall). You’re a few years younger than I am so I feel like this is before your time. It was still moving around in high school during my era.

I do know the song, and I’m very glad that David Koch donates to NOVA.

AddisonBryant: How much do you think polls are overstating Democratic candidates and what confidence do you have in that number?

I think that if you look at the 2018 and 2020 general election results, Dems did about two points worse than they’d been doing in the special elections leading up to the general. So I think if you look at the post-Dobbs specials (which show Dems doing very well) and then discount from there by two points, you have a decent ballpark.

My confidence is not super high, though. Basically, I am assuming that the polling error we’ve seen in the past few cycles is still present. But we are necessarily dealing with a small sample here, and the idea that those errors were just random, which while I think not the best explanation, isn’t totally crazy. If it turned out the public polling is slightly underestimating Democrats, I would find that surprising. But it’s not like it would be inexplicable or anything; polling error is supposed to be symmetrical and what seems off recently is that it hasn’t been.

Dave: I love a good twitter feud as much as the next person, but it feels like it's replaced the classic blog form of “two people who respect each other but disagree.” IIRC you and Megan McArdle used to do this back at the Atlantic. How do we bring that back?

A lot of the old bloggy dialogue dynamic has shifted to podcasts, I think, but is alive and well there in audio format.

David Abbott: What role should inherited wealth play in the economy?

I don’t actually have a comprehensive theory of this, but for a brief post, the observation I will make is that I think demographic factors are an underrated part of social mobility.

Something that’s good about the United States of America is that if you look at the five richest people in America, they’re all people who founded their own businesses. That’s not to say they had no advantages in life, but they’re not neo-aristocrats who are just custodians of inherited fortunes. But while one reason that’s true is the innovation and dynamism of the American economy, another reason is that Sam Walton had four kids. If you aggregate the five different Walton heirs on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, they’re richer than Jeff Bezos and nearly tied with Elon Musk. And of course Bezos himself took a huge hit to his wealth because of a divorce. This is not a policy argument per se, just an observation that under current policy, the main thing stopping us from being dominated by inherited wealth is rich people having relatively large families.

Nathan Kosk: With all this coverage of the UK’s new PM amid looming disasters, can you sum up what you would do if you were PM/Governor of the Bank of England?

You’ve previously said that the UK’s only or predominant long-term problem is housing supply (limiting growth to the exclusion of all else mattering). But what do you do in the short-term when energy costs are spiraling, inflation is double digits, the rest of the system is in its knees since the pandemic; and you don’t have the privilege of being the world’s reserve currency?

Back in “Greedflation is Fake,” I mentioned that during a wartime emergency, you might want to move to a system of price controls and explicit rationing, but argued that wasn’t appropriate to the situation facing the United States.

For the U.K., though, I think it probably is appropriate. I’m not deeply versed in how U.K. utilities are organized. But the basic bargain you want to strike is that every building needs to be uncomfortably cold all winter. But in exchange, nobody needs to go broke, nobody needs to freeze to death, and industry can continue to function.

In terms of reserve currency issues, I think the U.K. and EU need to face the prospect of currency devaluation with equanimity. Russia has unleashed a severe supply-side blow to Europe’s economies. There is no way to live through something like that without pain. Of all the available options, currency devaluation — which essentially spreads the pain around to all sectors of the economy — is probably the fairest and ultimately least painful option.