Black Friday mailbag

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Black Friday mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

19 - 24 minutes

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Philip Reese: I feel like media outlets should stop writing profiles of mass shooting suspects after they are killed/arrested. I understand that a lot of people want to know about someone who would do something so awful, but I worry that making these assholes famous serves as motivation to future assholes. Not advocating for a new law, or anything - just for media to exercise restraint. Mainstream media already refrain from writing about most suicides, for fear of encouraging that act. Would this be much different? What do you think?

My sense is that most outlets do try to exercise some restraint about not turning these killers into celebrities. Just as a sign of the contrast, I to this day remember the names of the Columbine shooters (though per Philip’s point, I won’t repeat them here) but actually don’t recall off the top of my head the names of more recent mass shooters. The problem with pushing voluntary restraint further is that this is a substantially demand-driven business and to the extent people are interested, there’s strong pressure to deliver what they want before someone else does.

Alec Arellano: You've written compellingly about the flaws in the design of the U.S. Constitution. What, if anything, do you think the U.S. Constitution gets right or does well when it comes to how to set up the structure and powers of government?

If you think of the Constitution as an antiquated document from the late 18th century (which, after all, is what it is), then I think it looks incredibly visionary across a broad range of fronts. The constitution looks bad today largely because it’s a victim of its own success and tons of countries operate broadly within the framework it established.

The upshot is that the Constitution’s good ideas are very non-distinctive these days — what’s truly distinctive is mostly its bad ideas, not because it was written by idiots or anything, but because the world has iterated and improved on the general idea of constitutions.

Marcus Seldon: Prior to the election there was a lot of media hype about Steve Bannon training a bunch Trump supporters to disrupt the election as poll watchers. There were news stories of election administrators being driven out of their jobs with death threats and harassment. Many of my liberal friends were dooming about this prior to the election.

And yet the elections went off without a hitch as far as I can tell. Do you think the media was irresponsible for hyping this up? I feel like I’m hindsight they were manipulating liberal readers into doomscrolling through their articles and videos.

I think that with a lot of this stuff, the issue is that the press struggles to convey the idea that you should worry about a particular relatively low-probability thing because if it did happen, it would be really bad.

So if Bannon does stuff that raises the chance of violence at the polls from “so incredibly small as to worth ignoring” to “there’s a five percent chance this could happen,” it seems to me that’s worth worrying about. But five percent is still pretty low odds; that would be like Saudi Arabia beating Argentina in a World Cup match. But these things do happen.

Andy: If you could no longer live in the US for whatever reason, which country and city would you pick and why?

This is boring, but I’d probably want to live in an English-speaking city that has convenient flights to the main American cities, so like London, Dublin, Toronto, or Vancouver. I’ve never been to Vancouver, but of the other three Dublin is my favorite, so I’m moving to Ireland if they’ll have me.

Rashad: Matt, I'd love to learn more about your early days in DC and how your close friendships/roommates affected your and their career trajectories. I feel like personal network effects are understudied and would love to hear how you think about their impact on your life.

The critical text on this is Ashley Parker’s article about my group house with Kriston Capps (now with Bloomberg) and Spencer Ackerman (now the author of a great newsletter) along with some people who are not really in the game now. When I moved to D.C., Kriston was one of the first people I met because we both “knew” each other from blogging, back then when the blogosphere was a small thing. Another early introduction was to Julian Sanchez, also a pioneering blogger and at the time a writer for Reason, who was friends in college with a good friend of mine from high school.

The house that Kriston and Spencer and I lived in was across an alley from Julian’s house, and Tim Lee (Full Stack Economics) also lived there for a time, as did David Weigel (now at Semafor) and Will Wilkinson (formerly of Cato and the Niskanen Center, now doing something with crypto). Ryan Nunn, who’s with the Minneapolis Fed now but was at one point policy director of the Hamilton Project at Brookings, was also in that house at one point. So you can see just on that block you have what are very much overlapping circles of social, professional, and intellectual interest.

At least one story you can tell about this period is that in the mid-Bush years, a group of young progressives and young libertarians came together on both a social and intellectual level based on thinking that the Iraq War was bad and same-sex marriage equality was good. Those were, at the time, highly salient political issues, but the leaders of both parties took the opposite view. And even though these days nobody talks about Iraq or marriage equality anymore, a lot of ideas and themes that are prominent today emerged out of that encounter. “One Billion Americans” is a book about how we should have more legal immigration, how we should liberalize land use rules, and how we should have cash transfers to parents of young children. If you teleported those ideas back to the mid-aughts, they would have seemed completely alien to the themes of John Kerry’s presidential campaign. But they are very much ideas that emerge from that progressive/libertarian synthesis.

BorgenMorgen: What is your top 5 ranking of the “best” contemporary American politicians? And what criteria do you think makes a “great” politician?

Any junior members of Congress? Governors? Party leaders? Republicans? (Secretaries of Transportation perhaps?)

I dunno … what is best? I would say that Ron Wyden did an unheralded job putting together the bulk of what become the Inflation Reduction Act while also playing a critical role in shaping the CARES Act. But in a very different way, I also really admire the work that someone like Laura Kelly is doing holding back the red tide in Kansas.

To the extent that this is really just a question about Secretary Mayor Pete, I’ll confess to being slightly disappointed by his tenure. He continues to be great at what he’s good at — talking on television in a sensible, compelling way about a broad range of issues — but I’d kind of hoped that he’d really dig in and fix some of the dysfunctional aspects of American transportation policy, and I don’t know how much you can really point to there.

Lost Future: A very popular argument, advanced by both you & David Shor, is that Dobbs hurt Republicans in the midterms. But, a number of governors who signed abortion restrictions into law immediately after Dobbs cruised to re-election, including in purple states. Doesn't that..... totally debunk the argument? Brian Kemp signed I believe a 6 week abortion ban in a swing state and easily beat Abrams. DeWine signed a very strict abortion law- yes Ohio's a pretty red state at this point, but he also won by 63% (10 points ahead of Vance!) Greg Abbott also signed another strict abortion law, and also easily won.

Don't these examples clearly disprove the 'voters were angry about Dobbs' hypothesis? I suspect that a large number of voters are mildly pro-choice and would vote so if it's given as a single issue on a ballot. But, voters are partisan enough that they're mostly not going to switch parties just over abortion.

Whenever you’re talking about the political impact of anything, it’s important to level-set. In any given election, something like 90 percent of people just vote for the same party they voted for last time, so any time anyone says “Democrats won/lost because of X,” you can always retort “the vast majority of people aren’t going to change their mind over X.” And that’s true! But winning and losing are driven by the people who do change their minds.

In terms of Dobbs, I think there’s a pretty consistent story to tell which is that Dobbs hurt Republicans badly in a handful of swing states that have a lot of cross-pressured secular, non-college white voters. That’s basically the old “blue wall” states. In Georgia and Texas, it’s actually the opposite situation, and Democrats normally count on the votes of anti-abortion people of color.

Seffi Kogen: I was recently introduced to a 2013 paper by Jowei Chen and Jonathan Rodden entitled "Unintentional Gerrymandering" which makes the case quite convincingly that in at least some instances (they specifically look at Florida), the claim of gerrymandering is a total red herring and it's the urban concentration of Democrats that's to blame for a (then) 50/50 state electing more Republicans than Democrats. In their simulations, they were unable to draw a single map of Florida that followed a few basic districting parameters that would elect more Democrats than Republicans.

Do you think they were right at the time that gerrymandering was overhyped? Is it still overhyped today?

People argue in circles about this “is disproportionality about gerrymandering or about population geography” stuff, and I find it tedious. It would be better to have a proportional electoral system. It is literally impossible to draw two GOP-leaning House districts in Massachusetts and drawing even one requires extreme effort, but it’s still undesirable for the country that the ~33% of Massachusetts voters who are orthodox Republicans get zero percent of the House seats.

And I think this is undesirable not just as a question of fairness but of the way it intensifies certain kinds of polarization. If at any given time, two to four of the members of the Massachusetts House delegation were Republicans, they would have certain interests in common with their Democratic colleagues from the Bay State. And there’d be one to two Democrats from Oklahoma who’d have certain interests in common with Oklahoma Republicans. Those kinds of cross-cutting pressures are important to making a big, diverse country work, and the current strategy of achieving balance through offsetting gerrymanders (or population geography or whatever you want to call it) is bad.

J. Willard Gibbs: Jeet Heer criticized you pretty harshly for your response to the SBF fiasco. Aside from the merits of his complaint, how do you choose how to absorb or tune out criticism? As a fairly high profile pundit, you get it from a lot of different directions. By the same token, however, I'm sure you would even admit you're not always correct.

Of course, I’m not always correct.

But I actually think it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between someone who respects you as a writer and a thinker and is taking issue with a specific argument you made and someone who’s decided you’re a bad person and just needs to be taken down a peg. Jeet Heer is in the latter camp, which is fine, but “I read this article and I think you’re wrong” is a totally different thing from “I read this article and I think it’s an example of why you’re a bad person.” But since Heer is so smart and knew it was obvious that FTX was stealing customer deposits all along, I wonder why he didn’t write that story and get the scoop!

Macon Fessenden: Has the recent news about SBF shaken your resolve around EA at all? The Bruenigs has a pretty brutal takedown of EA on their podcast last week, pointing out its ends-justify-the-means approach, which I feel is not how I experience EA but is the logical conclusion of earn-to-give and other EA principles. There have also been some unflattering quotes coming out of top EA thinkers/funders like Holden Karnofsky and Will MacAskill. I’ve always been proud of my commitment to EA but it seems almost embarrassing at the moment. You and I seem to have a similar level of devotion to EA (taking the giving pledge and paying more attention to animal rights, but not getting too tied up in the AI/longtermism stuff), so I would love to hear what you think about the future of the movement.

Three points:

    I think the main claims associated with Effective Altruism continue to be true and are not significantly undermined by the revelations about Sam Bankman-Fried — I do think in particular that it’s important to say he wasn’t a meaningful funder of global health or animal welfare activities.

    Contrary to a thousand hot takes, I also don’t think these events should influence our thinking about consequentialism as a philosophy except insofar as they confirm exactly what consequentialists are always saying — doing deceptive schemes “because it will have good consequences” generally fails on consequentialist terms. All the causes SBF claimed to care about are worse off because of this!

    I have significantly less confidence in the wisdom and integrity of certain high-profile EA leaders and the institutions they run (particularly the Centre for Effective Altruism), and I think this is a big blow to EA as a set of human institutions rather than as a set of abstract propositions. 

One take that might be a little bit hot is that I think a lot of people are misunderstanding the relationship between SBF and the idea of “earning to give.” Part of SBF’s rise is that EA leaders started dramatically deprioritizing earning to give as life advice because they felt significantly less resource-constrained now that they had him plus a couple of other early FTX employees.

I think this fiasco underscores what a mistake it was to move away from the idea of a mass constituency of people earning a good living and donating a large share of money to charity. Having a broad base of donors turns out to be intellectually healthy compared to relying on a whale who becomes, in effect, too big to fail. The upshot of this needs to be re-engagement with the older idea that even without giving your life over to full-time work in some special EA cause area, you can contribute meaningfully to making the world a better place by being thoughtful and generous.

City of Trees: Do you have any takes on the ticket industry, now that the Ticketmaster drama from the sale of Taylor Swift's upcoming tour has brought renewed attention?

I’m glad that the DOJ is looking into antitrust violations because on its face, the high Ticketmaster concert fees sure look like some kind of scam based on vertical integration with venues and management services.

But I also think artists with Swift-level popularity should seriously consider charging substantially higher prices to make markets clear more efficiently. If she feels embarrassed to be soaking fans for so much money, she should give the extra revenue to GiveWell’s top charities. I know earning to give is out of style thanks to Sam Bankman-Fried, but to me it still seems like a very important and potentially powerful idea. There are a lot of situations in which people feel like efficient market-oriented solutions would have morally undesirable outcomes. If you take the surplus revenue generated by an efficient solution and give it to life-saving charities in developing countries, then I think you purge yourself of moral taint and get to do the efficient thing with potentially large numbers of lives saved as a result.

Swift, to the best of my knowledge, seems like a thoughtful and well-intentioned person and I think that by adopting this solution for her next tour, she could help thousands of people in desperate need.

Binya: What should be done to alleviate the shortage of Taylor Swift concert tickets currently devastating America?

I would simply create more Taylor Swifts.

No, but again, I think this speaks to the power of charity. Swift is clearly operating at a level of income where even though she could earn a lot more money by playing more shows, she just doesn’t want to, which is too bad for fans who’d like to see her play live. Not only could higher prices balance supply and demand, but the amount of funds for life-saving charities that could be generated might actually be more motivating for her and generate more shows.

myrna loy’s lazy twin: The US produces a lot of con artists who manage to steal a lot of money from their marks — FTX, Theranos, and those are only the ones that were in the news the last week. Even foreigners like Anna Delvey/Sorokin can scam more people. What is it about America that leads to these sorts of cons? Is it our optimism, regulators who don't have enough investigative time or power? Is the frequency of these scams the flip side of some of the things that make America so innovative and if so is there much we could do to reduce the scams without significantly reducing the innovation?

The main thing I think about this is that the U.S. has an overall pretty solid legal and regulatory system. Bernie Madoff went to prison. Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison. I’m pretty sure Sam Bankman-Fried will end up in prison.

In part as a result of this generally well-functioning system, most people assume that high-profile business ventures are not total frauds. Which in turn means that it’s relatively easy to dupe people if you want to. In a country with low trust and a weak rule of law, people will be much more suspicious. In America, you can take a lot of people in on a scam and be very successful with it, but when you get caught, you get punished. So ultimately I don’t think it’s so much that “America is full of con men because it’s also full of innovators,” it’s that one of the benefits that comes from living in a well-functioning society is you can afford to be a little naive in your day-to-day dealings.

Pancake: Why is there a media obsession (and conversation among Democrats more generally) with Biden stepping aside in 2024 after one of the best midterm performances of all time? It seems completely idiotic to me.

I mean, he’s quite old! But beyond that, he was just never the preferred choice of the college-educated Democrats who dominate the discourse.

MikeCD: What advice to you have for a politician who is aware that a policy they view as correct isn't politically viable among their voters (e.g. expanding immigration, universal healthcare, carbon tax, trans rights)? Is there a way to acknowledge political realities without reinforcing misleading talking points (“immigrants are taking our jobs,” “we can't afford it,” “it will tank the economy,” “trans people are a threat to children”), and when is taking an unpopular stand worth the political risk?

You know the old line about how if you can’t think of anything nice to say don’t say anything at all? I’d kind of flip this around. You need to pretend to agree with a position (expanding legal immigration is bad) that you think is wrong, but you don’t want to reinforce wrong ideas. So you need to think of some true stuff you can say that is positive about immigration restrictionists.

So I think I’d go with “look, nobody is going to want to talk about having more immigrants until we can get border security under control, change asylum rules, and show that the government is serious about enforcing the law. Beyond that, I don’t like it when liberals imply that everyone who worries about unlimited immigration is a racist — every country has a right to determine who can and can’t move and work there.”

I think that’s all true. It’s challenging to have a rational conversation about legal immigration as long as there’s so much asylum chaos, and it’s not the case that racism is the only reason people dislike legal immigration — many restrictionists are just wrong about the economics! But you don’t need to say they are wrong about the economics (unpopular) or that they are right about the economics (reinforces wrong ideas), you can just defend them against the racism charge, attack open borders, and kind of see if public opinion evolves.

When is an unpopular stand worth it? When it will accomplish something. Democrats clearly lost seats for the sake of the Affordable Care Act, but they also made a lot of people’s health insurance situation better.