Roosevelt Island Mailbag

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Roosevelt Island Mailbag

The Jones Act, shaming, and alternate Covid-19

Matthew Yglesias

 Sep 23

 

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I’m on a very quick trip to a conference on Roosevelt Island in New York City, where I’ve never been despite having grown up in NYC. It is of course best known to the world as the setting of “Dark Water” (2005), a screenplay by Rafael Yglesias.

Kate Hall: What needs to happen before we can finally get rid of the Jones Act?

Mike Lee is the main Jones Act repeal guy in Congress, and while I think Lee sometimes hops on good issues (this is a good issue, for example), I don’t think he has much of a track record as a workhorse who actually gets things done.

What it would take for it to happen is for Lee to add at least one mainstream-to-progressive Democrat and one moderate Republican (the kind of person who makes deals) to his coalition. Then you build from there. It’s a natural conservative issue (deregulatory, most of the support is from unions), and moderate Democrats love to be on bipartisan bills so suddenly things are happening. So if you’re looking at Democrats, who might be interested in this? The most logical candidates are:

The delegation from Hawaii, which gets really screwed by this since obviously maritime shipping is important to islands.

Nydia Velázquez and AOC provide a kind of “virtual representation” to Puerto Rico in Congress and for similar island reasons should be interested in this.

Due to a lack of good pipeline infrastructure, New England relies on a lot of boat-borne fossil fuels for its energy. Traditionally this came from abroad so Jones wasn’t relevant, but now that the U.S. has more domestic production than ever, it matters more.

Now, Joe Biden is very, very deferential to labor, so it’s possible that even if a real bipartisan coalition for repeal were in place, he’d block reform. Which would be unfortunate. But normally this is the kind of thing White Houses are happy to quietly support if there is momentum for it in Congress. Conversely, I think any administration that took it on in a prominent way would be inviting backlash and gridlock. So I think w have to look to congress as the locus of action here.

Tom Hitchner: Why don't you like Kill Bill? And what are your favorite Tarantino movies?

There are a lot of cool scenes in “Kill Bill,” but to me the movie(s) as a whole is a bit of a long, joyless slog. I wish he had had less clout at the time those films came together and had been made to keep working on the screenplay until it was down to the length of a single movie.

Now that I’m old, I think “Jackie Brown” — which is probably the least “teenage boys think this scene is awesome” of Tarantino’s movies — is the best. It’s an outlier because he’s adapting someone else’s story, and that ends up giving him characters who are a little realer and more well-rounded. But he’s just a really good filmmaker. “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” are obviously incredibly influential. And “Django Unchained” and “Inglorious Basterds,” while much too weird to be influential, have I think much more to say than his other movies. But then there’s “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood,” which is just so mature and well-crafted. So now I’m at six favorites! “Jackie Brown” is the answer, though.

Casey Adams: You’ve traveled all over the world. Compared to America, what are some of the most interesting cultural differences that you’ve noticed? I recognize this question is vague, but I like traveling places and noticing little details like customer service at German restaurants and ice cream shops isn’t very good. They also don’t serve water for free.

Sometimes it’s just amusing how accurate stereotypes are. People in Ireland are extremely friendly and pleasant and little banal interactions with Irish people are nice and make you feel happy. In Switzerland, people are very punctual! I remember being in a meeting there and when we got to the end of the appointed time, the guy in charge stood up very decisively and said “well, we’re out of time!”

But the main thing is that just like a fish doesn't know he’s wet, after you visit a bunch of places you start to recognize what American culture is. You’re saying the customer service at German restaurants and ice cream shops isn’t very good. I would say it’s that the customer service at American retail establishments is extremely good compared to almost anywhere else in the world — part of American culture is high expectations around these things.

The other thing is that Americans really do have a strong cultural belief in a can-do spirit and a sense of “a better world is possible.” This sometimes leads us astray, like when people get entranced by the idea of a hyperloop instead of just copying existing best practices for how to build and run trains. But on balance, I think we benefit from that kind of restlessness and novelty-seeking that probably results from wave after wave of restless foreigners moving here and becoming American.

M.: Why does the commentariat seem so laser-focused on Dobbs being the reason that the “conventional wisdom” re: thermostatic midterm swing possibly not coming to pass? Obviously, that decision is a huge deal, but isn't January 6th and the whole anti-democracy agenda of the GOP also a big deal? January 6th/election stealing etc seems to get short shrift as a factor. But maybe I'm not reading the correct Take merchants.

I think the simple explanation is that we did see strong movement against Biden earlier in his term, and it halted and reversed around when Dobbs happened. It also looks to my eye as if Biden’s numbers have started ticking down again over the past week as the focus has shifted to immigration. So to me, the tidiest explanation is that we have been seeing broadly normal thermostatic effects, except with the unusual caveat that there was a very important, high-salience rightward shift in the policy status quo, which is an unusual thing to happen with a Democratic Congress and White House.

Lenzy T Jones: As someone who followed you to Substack from Vox, I’ve always enjoyed your, sometimes contrarian lol, views on things and always felt that you had a perspective that I called progressive-realism. So why do you think some Progressive take-makers have such a negative view of you? I was just listening to the podcast “Know Your Enemy” and they referred to you in a way that definitely felt dismissive and negative. Basically, why the beef?

I think beef needs to be mutual. I’ve never listened to that show, but I’ve read articles written by the co-hosts and I think they’re pretty smart guys.

The way media works is that there is a lot of upside to “punching up” and criticizing people who are older/better known/better paid/whatever than you in hopes of catching their attention. The downside is that it can be risky to piss off people who hold institutional power. Over here on Substack Island, I have basically no institutional power but I continue to be pretty prominent, so I think I’m a good person to take potshots at.

Rusty: Doesn't the Martha's Vineyard stunt illustrate that there are acute costs to immigration flows from our Southern border that stress local systems, but also that if dispersed properly there are many people/places willing to accommodate them? Something like people who claim asylum are sent cities that volunteer around the country where they can live/work for the years while their asylum request is processed.

I think it definitely illustrates that there is some value to local choice in immigration since as I wrote in Tuesday’s post, the localized impacts of immigration are a bit of a mixed bag.

But this is all somewhat contingent on a national consensus about what we’re doing here. It seems to me that conservatives have spent years urging the adoption of sanctions on Venezuela, the whole point of which is to harm the Venezuelan economy, with the rationale that the Venezuelan regime is bad. A reasonable person might follow that by saying that we should be relatively welcoming to (properly vetted, etc.) people fleeing Venezuela. And then you’d probably want to try to place Venezuelans in some places like Provo, Minneapolis, and Burlington that have ultra-low unemployment right now. But you’d want to do that with the affirmative consent of the governor and mayor and in an organized way.

Nate: You often make the point that urbanism is a minority interest, usually in the context of NIMBYs saying YIMBYs want to turn the whole country into Manhattan. Given that urbanism is a minority interest, it will remain a minority constituency, and their policy preferences may be ignored. Are there any “concessions” urbanists could make to the majority who prefer more suburban living to enlarge their tent, so to speak, to make it less of a minority interest and therefore gain more political power?

I think the concession — and it’s an important one — is that everyone should have the right to build a single-family detached home with ample parking on any piece of land they own.

And I would go further. If a developer buys up a big swathe of land and wants to construct it as a single-family neighborhood that has some kind of co-op structure or mandatory HOA, they should be allowed to do that. I’m an urbanist in the sense that my personal preference is to live in a walkable city. But on a policy level, I am someone who thinks we should have a lot of freedom to build what we want. I know lots of urbanists who aren’t YIMBYs. The historic preservation people who won’t let me install modern energy-efficient windows would tell you that they are urbanists and that their whole mission in life is to protect traditional urban forms against hooligans like me. And personally, I agree with them that cutesy 19th-century neighborhoods are nice. But I think that as a matter of public policy, it’s a mistake to lock built environments in place over and above what their owners want. Freedom, though, includes the freedom to build suburban subdivisions.

Gabe Stanton: You grew up in NYC but have spent almost your whole adulthood in DC, so which sports teams do you root for? Knicks or Wizards?

Wizards!

Matt Hagy: Enjoying your new podcast and am asking a question about a topic discussed in the obesity episode. In the episode, you both agreed that shaming is a counterproductive way to promote healthy eating. And in discussing public policy proposals you explored analogies with stopping smoking. Yet I feel that developing a public ostracization of smokers was a key part of reducing the incidence of smoking. I say that as a former social smoker who quit primarily to avoid shame.

Why can’t shaming unhealthy dietary habits help similarly in the fight against obesity? E.g., would it not be useful to develop a social conscience that ostracizes someone who takes a donut with their morning coffee in the same way we currently feel disgust about someone that takes a cigarette instead?

The direction I would take this is that we should try to establish more of a social norm against providing unhealthy food as a routine adjunct to social occasions.

If you want to buy a donut, then buy a donut. But why bring donuts to share to the meeting? It’s true that if you bring them, some people will eat them. But how many people who have a donut at the meeting are going to say later that day “boy I’m really glad I ate that donut?” My guess is that the number of people who struggle with avoiding donut-related temptation greatly outnumbers the number of people who struggle with objective financial barriers to buying their own donuts.

Andrew Robinson: In alt history where either Biden or Hillary defeated Trump in 2016 but congressional outcomes mostly unchanged, who is president now? Surely Dems lose 2020 after virtue signaling their way to 100% pandemic and associated recession ownership. Doesn’t Trump just run again and win, making this alt history less interesting than it seems at first blush?

I think this is an interesting question: how much did the ideological polarization around Covid-19 reflect some underlying fundamentals versus just Trump?

If you’d just asked me in 2015 which side is likely to react more fearfully to a new infectious disease, I think I would have said conservatives. If you further told me that the objective risks were concentrated in the elderly and that the economic harms of countermeasures were concentrated in central cities, I would have definitely said conservatives. And if you look at January 2020, I think conservatives were more worried about Covid than liberals. But then as concern started to become more mainstream, Trump went out of his way to downplay the pandemic because he was trying to be nice to Xi Jinping to get a trade deal done. Then when Covid came to America, Trump deliberately stifled testing to keep the number down. So “Trump is fucking up Covid” became a big progressive talking point (because he was), which led “Covid is no big deal” to become a big conservative talking point (which was dumb).

But that March/April debate — should the federal government be trying harder to deal with this pandemic, or is it no big deal? — turned into a super-polarized thing where being freaked out about Covid became constitutive of left-wing politics and vice versa. I don’t think it’s obvious that would have happened if someone else had been president.

Glibdem: Why do you think the political climate in California has shifted in favor of YIMBYism, while no such change seems underway in New York?

I don’t know that there’s a deep structural reason for this. Sonja Trauss started doing YIMBY organizing in the Bay Area before anyone else in the country, I think, and that got some tech people interested in funding YIMBY stuff, so more people started working on it and some of them did a really good job.

CA YIMBY seems like a well-run, effective organization, and Laura Friedman and Scott Wiener are good state legislators. But if you look at the fact that both the Bay Area and San Diego have significant YIMBY political power, while in Los Angeles all the elected officials are NIMBYs, you see that even within the state there is a big element of contingency in determining how these things go.

Josh Sunshine: The population of Lakewood, NJ, a predominantly Orthodox Jewish town increased by 41,415 (45%) between the 2010 and 2020 census. The population of New Jersey as a whole increased by 5% during the same period. The community has a very high birth rate, families with 6+ children are the norm, and they build an enormous number of houses and schools to accommodate the growth. What, if anything, should mainstream society learn from Lakewood?

(Note: Lakewood is a Litvak/Yeshivish community so their schools are not in the recent NYT article about Hasidic schools. For example, most Lakewood schools teach primarily in English not Yiddish.)

The main thing about these heavily Orthodox towns, housing-wise, is that the communities have a very strong capacity for collective political action. So they ask themselves “are we all better off with a policy that makes it easier to build housing on every parcel or are we all better off with a policy that makes it harder?” And the answer is “easier is better.” Normal town governance just doesn’t ask that collective question. It assumes it is better to have lots of local voices, and then when that voice is exercised, it is inevitably exercised to block things.

Forrest: You've famously written about ABUNDANCE in the context of energy, Americans... any other spheres where you think an abundance agenda is especially ripe?

Housing!

Andrew Robinson: Is there any alt history where Haiti doesn’t end up a complete mess?

My sense is that the popular answers here tend to date back to the deep history of Haiti, and look at the brutality of the war with France, the incredibly cold treatment the new country was given by the United States, or the unfair indemnity ultimately extracted by Paris. But when I look at the numbers, while it’s true that Haiti in 1950 was incredibly poor, the fact is the vast majority of the world was incredibly poor back then. As poor as Haiti was, it was richer than China or South Korea.

So while Haitian history is very interesting, I don’t know that it can bear the entire explanatory weight that’s sometimes put on it. The Duvalier dictators succeeded in creating a stable political regime, but they didn’t pursue effective economic policies, so the country stayed extremely poor. Since then, Haiti has suffered from all these bouts of incredible instability that’s made it hard for anyone to even try to pursue good policies. But the Duvaliers could have, they just chose poorly.

Kenan Anderson: On Twitter you've been more pessimistic than many about the odds for Democrats to break the midterm curse and hold on to the House or Senate. I think there's definitely some partisan boosters who are lost in the polls, but even more empirical journalists like the Nates have been dealing a little bit in hopium.

What's your current view of the midterms and are you willing to give us an updated formal prediction compared to where you were at the end of last year?

To be clear, there are degrees of hopium.

If you’d told me a year ago that Democrats were going to be more likely to gain a seat in Pennsylvania than to lose one in Colorado, I would have said that was a very optimistic forecast. But I think it’s now clearly true that Democrats have a better chance of gaining a seat in Pennsylvania than of losing one in Colorado. At the same time, the polling that says Democrats have a solid shot at picking up a seat in Wisconsin seems a bit dubious to me both because of past Wisconsin polling error, but also because there has been very little polling in Wisconsin and it would just be historically very odd for an incumbent senator in a red-leaning swing state to lose a midterm without some huge scandal. I pray every day for Mandela Barnes and the Wisconsin Democratic Party (I also donated to his campaign, and you should consider doing so, too, if you can), but characterizing this race as a true toss-up the way the 538 model does strikes me as a fentanyl level of hopium, whereas I’m offering Tylenol with codeine.

I would note that the hopium itself makes me a little more pessimistic. If I were Barnes, I would be trying to do some stuff that gains me a reputation as more conservative than the average Democrat on at least a few issues. If I were Tim Ryan, I’d be trying to get Joe Manchin to campaign with me and telling people “I’m a Joe Manchin Democrat.” But Dems in these longshot-but-not-unwinnable races seem to me to mostly not be running as if they are longshots when the best way to win a longshot race is to take some risks.

Last December, I put 90% odds on Republicans winning both houses of Congress. Right now, Metaculus has that at 43 percent. I am super-duper torn between stubbornly insisting that the real odds are more like 60 percent and the meta-rational thought that it seems like a bad idea to bet against Nate Silver and a bunch of superforecasters. But dammit, I’m stubborn and I’m going with 60. Go prove me wrong.

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