God save the mailbag

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God save the mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

19 - 24 minutes

The Queen is dead, long live the King!

Lenzy T Jones: In light of the passing of Queen Elizabeth we’ve been bombarded by “the British Empire was evil! So eff that lady!” discourse. And I’m just wondering what’s your take on this almost “anti” Western view that many progressives and moderates hold that basically the USofA and all the Western European nations (usually excluding the Scandinavian ones) are horrible and dastardly because of imperialism, colonialism or some other past instance of an “ism”, while implicitly saying the other countries are and victims? Now I’m not a Royalist, a fan of jingoism or have any particular issue with people holding realistic views of countries (ie warts and all), but this view seems to not only be simplistic and moralistic in way that almost comes across as patronizing to the rest of the world. Like it gives off a vibe that none of the other countries’ governments or leadership have ever wrong anyone else.

Just in terms of the actual arc of Elizabeth’s life, I thought a lot of this discourse was strange. By the time she became Queen in 1952, the self-governing dominions had become fully independent and so had India. The empire still existed, but everything that happened during her reign was unwinding the empire, not building it or trying to maintain it. Closer to the end of her reign, Britain handed Hong Kong over to the People’s Republic of China, which was probably a necessary diplomatic move but wasn’t particularly welcomed by the residents of the colony and hasn’t ended well for them. So while you can certainly tell a story about the historical crimes of British imperialism, it’s not really a story about Elizabeth or her era.

Stepping back, I am always a little skeptical of takes that make big claims about present-day prosperity based on past imperialism. That’s just because eyeballing it, Britain and France had by far the largest colonial empires, and they’re not the richest European countries today.

Switzerland, as we’ve noted before, has been the richest country in Europe since the 1870s, and it didn’t have a colonial empire. If it was good enough for the Swiss, then why not the French? Germany built its empire late in the game, it was tiny, and it was made up of scraps of territory that the older imperial powers didn’t think were worth colonizing. In the end, all it brought Germany was ill-will from Britain and a push toward World War. So I’m inclined to think the whole thing was a massive crime, but one that enriched specific opportunistic individuals rather than whole nations.

Just say no to colonialism!

Cassandra: Apart from the wild and very online discussion of the British monarchy, are you pro republican movements in countries with a remaining hereditary monarchy? While not a huge political deal given that almost all remaining monarchies have limited to no power, my own opinion is anti-monarchy — it seems quite odd to espouse the ideal of equal rights for all and then elevate a particular person just due to the family they happened to be born into.

My most general point on this would be that I would not advise people to dedicate their time and energy to the cause of republicanism (it doesn’t seem important) and that I wouldn’t want to see a political party I like burn political capital over a trivial issue.

On the merits, monarchy is ridiculous. The good thing about it, though, is that it keeps countries away from the siren-song of American-style presidential systems and the not-quite-as-bad French-style semi-presidential ones. There’s nothing wrong with a parliamentary republic (Germany, Israel, Italy), but they seem relatively rare in practice. I worry that with a republican movement, once you set the wheels in motion politicians are going to want to set up a strong presidency that they can run for, which would be a mistake.

Casey Adams: I work as a legislative aide and most people that call in asking for help are “unsophisticated”. I don’t like the word stupid because there are plenty of things I can’t do like fix a car. One of the main issues I hear from people is that they don’t understand the bureaucratic Mumbo jumbo (their exact words). Annie Lowrey did an interview on The Weeds after you left regarding administrative burden. Do you know of any efforts to reduce administrative hassles in government programs or are technocrats starting to catch on to this issue?

There are a few different aspects to this. One is that, as Don Moynihan and Pamela Herd write about in their book “Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means,” you can make programs cumbersome as a more or less deliberate strategy to deny people access.

A separate issue is what we see in the private sector. When the nature of the relationship is that X is trying to sell something to Y, X has strong incentives to make it easy for Y to buy the thing and the market usually works. But if it’s something where the incentives point in the other direction, like you want to cancel cable or file an insurance claim or send an invoice to someone who owes you money, it’s nothing but pain. The issue here is that designing excellent customer experiences is actually hard. Talent and effort flow to places where there is a large financial upside. And the government doesn’t have that kind of customer relationship with anyone, so things tend not to be great.

Last, though, is the question of basic state infrastructure. Every year, I need to verify with D.C. Public Schools that I live where I live in order to enroll my kid in school. This is usually demonstrated by showing them my tax documents (which come from a government agency) and my water bill (which is a different government agency). This is to say that I am proving to the government that I live where I live by showing them documents produced by other parts of the government. But what the government does not do — for privacy reasons, not incompetence — is maintain an authoritative record of who lives where that is generally accessible to the public sector. If they did, there would be no need for burdensome verification here. I tend to think we overvalue privacy in the public sector. What we see time and again with people’s personal consumption choices is that we place almost no practical value on privacy when giving it up makes things cheaper and more convenient. Denying the government the opportunity to be convenient is bad.

Sean: The Social Security Administration has been forecasting for about 10 years now that it will not have enough money to make promised payments at some point in the 2030s. And currently, SS doesn't have enough tax revenue to make full payments, so it is taking some of the government trust fund IOU money to make up the difference. So, at some point Congress is going to have to do something to prevent an across-the-board large benefit cut in the 2030s. But you keep writing that Democrats should be attacking Republicans for their attempts/desire to cut Social Security. Does this mean you think that the SSA is wrong or is lying about its funding situation? Or is it just the case that you believe that it will politically benefit Democrats the most to attack Republicans over SS as long as they possibly can until crisis hits in the 2030s and Congress has to do something?

Raise taxes! Let in more immigrants! I think you could work some cuts in as part of a compromise, but the GOP plan to avert Social Security cuts entirely by cutting Social Security is dumb, and Democrats should point that out every chance they get.

Greg S: I recall you've talked about your political opinions getting more moderate over the years. I have found that to be the case as well. When I look at what shaped my initial views, what weighed heavily on younger me is history seems to be a horror show of abuses with the heroes being people who helped groups stand up against that. I wanted to see myself as siding with my generation's heroes-to-be. No one wants to think, had they been alive, that they would have been arguing that MLK or Gandhi should be more moderate in their approach. How do you think about this as you become more moderate?

There is always somebody who is too moderate and someone else who is not moderate enough. Did you know that in July of 1964, King called for a halt to demonstrations and marches because he thought they would undermine LBJ’s reelection campaign? Four years later in 1968, King spoke to my grandfather about “opposition — from the timid supplicants and from the ultramilitants.”

But beyond that, something about this era that Barack Obama once said to me is that he thought that if JFK and LBJ had “done the right thing” and called for the repeal of racial intermarriage bans, they might not have been in a position to appoint the Supreme Court justices who eventually overturned them. Obama was speaking while he was still officially against gay marriage, and he was trying to hint that maybe everyone should cut him some slack on this topic. And I don’t think he was wrong. Of course, the people who fought the good fight on behalf of those causes were heroic and correct. But the cowardly politicians who catered to public opinion and practiced the art of the possible were also heroic. It takes both passion and perspective to change the world.

Wigan: I'm with you 100% on certainty of punishment being more important than severity, but given the certainty of punishment that currently exists, do you think punishments are more or less severe than necessary?

I feel “we incarcerate too many people” is taken for granted by most of the Left and even much of the Right, but when I compare our rates of imprisonment per crime to other developed countries it seems right inline with the countries that are assumed to be better. So I'm wondering if you have a different angle or if I'm missing something.

The way I would put it is that a realistic strategy for decarceration in the United States has to involve a substantial reduction in crime. Jennifer Doleac finds, looking at Denmark, that when you make convicted felons register their DNA in a database, they become much less likely to re-offend after release (because they are afraid they will get caught). That means DNA registration is an anti-incarceration policy, since by increasing the odds of apprehension, you reduce the odds of offending and therefore reduce the number of people who get arrested and incarcerated.

If it were up to me, prison sentences would be shorter on average, and we’d be plowing resources into visible policing, investigative work, cameras, DNA databases, facial recognition, etc. We’d be catching more of the people who commit crimes, and fewer people would be doing them. The prisons would be less crowded and less cruel and more focused on things like addiction treatment and mental health. But it all runs through catching criminals.

Bo: What are Matt's feelings on the armed forces draft? Should we bring it back? Is it a possible solution to the crisis of young men not doing much, having little direction and being lonely?

I've always been a fan of some sort of public service draft where you can pick between options of military or civil service. I liked the idea even when I was draft age. I feel like the narrative has become public service is for chumps or rich grifters and that seems bad!

Draft ideas generally strike me as a little half-baked. I think we can acknowledge that shared wartime experiences had some constructive spillovers for social cohesion during World War II without believing that you could achieve the same effect by just conscripting people outside the context of a genuine national crisis. I do think we should do more things to get people engaged in public sector work — I always liked Teach for America, and I think someone should start Police for America inspired by that model.

But are we going to conscript aimless 18-year-olds into doing elder care? It’s hard for me to see how that’s going to work.

Owen Ccccc: Paul Atreides is/becomes the Kwisatz Haderach due to his ability to survive the spice agony and literally talk to his ancestors through his genetic memories. If you could speak to your ancestors, who would you want to talk to and from what era of time? What do you think they would say? Do you think, like Muad’Dib’s, they would howl with rage at your takes?

I just don’t know very much about my family beyond the most recent two or three generations. By contrast, when I was looking into Kate’s family genealogy on Ancestry.com a few years back, you could see generation after generation of Crawfords in a very well-documented manner going all the way back to Patrick Crawford’s arrival in South Carolina from Ulster in the late-18th century.

All my Jewish relatives’ names were mangled by the immigration authorities, so it’s hard to tell who’s who in the records. They often came from villages that don’t exist anymore, and I have no idea what they were up to in the old country. So I’m mostly just curious! I’m aware of all the broad shtetl life tropes, but I’d like to know what they were up to specifically and what motivated them to leave … things like that.

Evan Ball: What is Patrick Deneen actually saying? I have some sympathy for his view on the societal value of strong families. But I have this suspicion that he’s actually envisioning something akin to the Handmaid’s Tale. He sounds a little cagey when it comes to spelling out what he's actually calling for, which seems weird given his rising popularity. What does he want? And what's your take on him?

People on the right in the United States have a frustrating lack of interest in publicly discussing tedious policy details. I find it frustrating both because it’s inherently frustrating and because it has the second-order consequence that I can’t say for sure who is and isn’t a charlatan.

But I mostly think the post-liberal right, to the extent that it consists of anything other than frauds, is playing a very dangerous game. Having decided that politics is downstream of culture, they lack the talent and work ethic to win cultural battles in the cultural arena. So they want to use the pro-GOP tilt of electoral institutions to gain power, and then use some hand-waving about the failures of liberalism to justify state coercion against civil society. The official plan is for this to end with college professors respecting the police and patriotic content on television. But the much more likely scenario is whatever new coercive powers get unleashed are narrowly used to entrench power and avert the exposure of corruption.

Zane Dufour: Am I a bad urbanist for not liking midtown manhattan? A serious follow-up: how strongly correlated are population density and un-cleanliness?

I want to believe that Manhattan's hygiene issues are policy failures (e.g. why the * don't they have dumpsters, poverty + lack of investment in beautification?) instead of an unsolvable fact of life for high-density communities.

It’s definitely not logically related. Here in D.C., in most of the city, the trash gets picked up once a week. But in denser neighborhoods with a higher density of trash, the trash gets picked up twice a week. New York is super-dense, so they should collect trash very frequently. They also ought to store the trash in bins, the kind that can be automatically lifted up by the garbage trucks, so the job isn’t very labor intensive and they can run lots of trucks. My sense is that the Sanitation Department basically knows this, but the problem is that the bins would reduce the amount of street parking. That’s not under their control, and it’s of course a politically explosive topic.

Alexander McCoy: There was some discourse this week on Twitter about pundits being held accountable for being wrong. A lot of people seem to agree that this would be good, but what would it look like to operationalize “pundit accountability” in practice?

I never understand exactly what people mean by this, either. Should Brett Stephens have been fired for falsely predicting that Democrats were blowing it in the 2018 midterms? Should Krugman get sacked for having been too confident in the “transient inflation” narrative a year ago? I don’t think that really makes sense. Krugman has his job because people like to read his columns even though, yes, he sometimes makes mistakes. But I do think that everyone should try to be a little more restrained in their predictions.

Benjamin, J: Does Russia's apparent collapse in Ukraine teach us anything for China & Taiwan, or are they two completely different animals? I fear that we'll think we can just supply weapons to Taiwan and it will be OK. China, I suspect, is more competent than Russia, and Taiwan is not as prepared as Ukraine.

I would urge everyone to remember that it’s hard to know what lessons to draw from Ukraine since we don’t actually know what happened. Not only do we still not know the outcome of the war (obviously), but there is a huge know-unknown in terms of covert assistance provided to Ukraine by the U.S. and potentially other NATO powers. Every time Ukraine does really well, some story comes out somewhere with U.S. officials bragging about the usefulness of their intelligence sharing, and then some more senior officials tell them to shut up. I have no idea what this actually amounts to, and neither do you because it’s highly classified.

Possibly people are puffing themselves up over nothing. Possibly we are providing incredibly useful assistance. Can we provide the same to Taiwan? I have no idea.

Simon_dinosour: You've written some excellent takes on inflation over the past year and something that stands out in your writing is critical thinking about the metrics - are they accurate, what are we actually measuring, is the Fed responding to outdated signals, etc. The Fed, alas, seems less flexible in its thinking and committed to its methodology. Back in your June 23rd article on housing inflation you wrote that it was months away from making a policy mistake due to misreading the data. Do you have an update on this analysis now in September?

I do! The numbers have moved a bit since the June post, but the basic story is the same — spot rent inflation is higher than average rent inflation, but spot rents are slowing while average rents are accelerating. Right now this doesn’t really matter for policy, but it could in a few months if those trends continue.

Or to look at it in historical terms, I think the Fed fell further behind the curve on inflation than it realized (Larry Summers pointed this out at the time), but is now actually somewhat more successful in fighting it than the official numbers show. At the moment, that’s basically all balanced out, but things could change and we are going to keep watching the spot rents.

Max Power: I know your view on Ukraine was that Russia should simply not do invasions, but given the current state of things what's your take on how an endgame could work out? I'm interested in your take specifically because you're not a foreign policy wonk — a generalist view of these things could be insightful.

I’m really not trying to be a dummy or a superhawk with the “Russia shouldn’t do invasions” bit. When I listen to the realpolitickers and the peaceniks, I do agree with them that a negotiated solution would be best, that the United States should be encouraging that rather than writing blank checks for war, etc.

But what is a good negotiated solution? Well, consider this deal:

    Russia removes all its armed forces and returns to the pre-invasion status quo.

    In exchange, Russia gets nothing.

That deal makes Russia better off! The war itself is imperiling their legitimate security interests by wrecking their military equipment, killing their soldiers, and making them utterly strategically dependent on China. By the same token, every week that goes by throttling Europe’s gas supplies does meaningful damage to their long-term economic prospects because it is marking them as an unreliable supplier. Now if you say “we need the war to continue until there is regime change in Moscow,” you sound like a fanatic, and I’m not a fanatic. But it is true that what you fundamentally need is a change of heart in Moscow. Nothing Putin has done over the past 10 years — neither the “successes” like seizing Crimea and boosting Trump nor the “failures” we’ve seen more recently in Ukraine — actually reflect a sensible read on Russian interests.