An honor just to be nominated for the mailbag

By Matthew Yglesias 

I feel like we got a pretty great slate of Oscar nominees, where even the nominated movies I’m not so high on are mostly in the categories of “didn’t like as much as my friends” (Everything Everywhere All At Once) or “I was mildly disappointed relative to the scale of the talent involved” (Banshees of Inisherin) rather than the wtf zone. Speaking of which, has anyone at all anywhere in the known universe watched Coda in the past six months? Shaking my head.

Some happy stories to close out your week!

Here’s a look at the improvements in the Bronx River over the past few decades, the NRC’s certification of NuScale’s small modular reactor design, a profile of a highly effective focused deterrence effort in West Baltimore, Ukraine getting tanks and addressing corruption, Secret Congress did some good health care stuff in last year’s omnibus, we got good inflation news from the Producer Price Index, the Changing the Odds math program seems to work, and here’s a way to boost giving to highly effective charities.

Tracy Erin: The NYT ran a story on Sunday by Katie Baker about liberal parents with questions about their kids status as transgender feel a bit politically homeless and misunderstood. You seem to have some empathy for this perspective, and based on everything I know about President Biden I would think that he would have some basic sense about this as well, but so far all of his public utterances have indicated that any questioning on this issue is evidence of transphobia. Why do you think this is, and do you think it would benefit his chances of reelection and/or the Democratic party to take a more nuanced and parent sympathetic perspective on youth gender transition?

I’m basically aligned with what Michelle Goldberg wrote about Baker’s story, namely that “progressive taboos around discussing some of the thornier issues involved in treating young people with gender dysphoria” are bad, but on the narrow issue it seems like it makes sense for high schools to respect students’ privacy.

But for Biden, or for Goldberg, or for me, or for anyone else trying to have a remotely nuanced opinion on these issues, it’s difficult. Trans activists set an extremely high bar for being considered a good ally, including commitments to scientifically untenable claims about sports and trying to get everyone to deny the reality that a non-trivial number of people detransition. But if you find yourself outside the circle of activist trust, the right won’t accept you unless you adopt a totalizing and paranoid account of the world in which agreeing to address transgender adults by their preferred names and pronouns puts us on an inevitable slippery slope to disaster. So in terms of totally cold-eyed political analysis, I don’t see real evidence that Biden’s stance on this has cost him anything, and trying to inject some nuance into his position would generate a lot of headaches and maybe not be worth it. On the other hand, if you’re a Democrat running in a red state or district who needs to do something to snag a non-trivial number of crossover voters, then you basically have to take some risks and be willing to alienate some activist groups.

More broadly, I think you see from the ongoing contentiousness of these debates inside left-of-center outlets like the NYT and the Atlantic that the activists have not really won the argument on the sports and youth transition issues.

But as the proprietor of a comments section, I’ve found it very challenging to have a space where people acknowledge the reality that sex chromosomes and associated hormones are a big deal in life without the discourse immediately evolving in a dehumanizing and hateful direction. The whole situation gives me a lot of agita and I can see why a large number of people prefer to just duck it. It’s really gross and unpleasant to be associated with the not-dead-yet bloc of rightists who never reconciled themselves to marriage equality and want gay people back in the closet. There’s also a lot of people whose main interest in this topic seems to be that they enjoy being recreationally cruel to trans adults.

Greg Ellingson: As my state (IA) is about to offer vouchers for every student to private schools without any regulation on pricing, education standards, or admission standards, what are your thoughts on how to break through the arguments about public schools being anti-parent and radical as they are used in red states to achieve long held conservative policy goals?

The great strength that people who believe in public education have always had in these fights is that the vast majority of public school parents are satisfied with their kids’ education.

People who are satisfied with their kids’ education don’t particularly want to use a voucher to go elsewhere, especially given that the other options are probably going to be less convenient. And they really don’t want a minority of malcontents to destabilize the system by draining it of funding. I think this is why the Covid school closures created a big opportunity for conservatives in the education space. Parents who like and value their existing public school really don’t want the school to close. Democrats are supposed to be the party that’s preventing that from happening — investing in school renovations and teacher salaries — while the GOP tries to privatize the school system.

Schools are back open now, and I think Republicans are almost certainly going to overreach and overplay their hand as Covid relief funds run out and GOP politicians need to make hard fiscal tradeoffs. At the end of the day, they want to conserve fiscal resources for low taxes on rich people, not for schools.

That being said, over the last few years of education debates, I think professional class liberals have to some extent lost sight of the fact that public schools are public. They need to be promoting values that the voters find broadly agreeable, and they need to be providing services that parents want. That means trying pretty hard to lean away from engaging in contentious political and cultural disputes and leaning sharply into ideas like “we are trying to teach kids how to read and do math, and if you find what we are doing in that regard to be puzzling, here is a clear and easily comprehensible explanation of why it is we think this approach is good.”

Last but not least, though, I think everyone needs to try harder to not be driven insane by the internet.

There are something like 130,000 K-12 schools in the United States. You could have two stories per week of something bizarre happening in a classroom and that would be a “bizarre incident” rate of less than 0.1%. You often need to ask yourself “Is this happening more often or am I hearing about it more often because local stories go viral these days?” It’s worth trying to pay some consistent attention to a specific set of schools in your community to get a clearer sense of what’s actually happening. As an actual public school parent who talks to other parents, it’s clear to me that Covid protocols were a very real driver of lots of unhappiness, and it was a particularly tough issue for schools because literally any decision you could make around masks, testing, and quarantines would make some large fraction of the population unhappy. Disputes about testing and tracking that you hear about in the national press are also very live issues for parents.

But there’s also lots of interest in “boring” old-fashioned topics like class sizes and whether there’s enough money for good aftercare programs.

So overall, I’d really tend to favor a “back to basics” approach both in terms of actual education policy and also in meta-discourse about education policy. There’s a clear middle ground of like “normal, well-functioning public schools” between faddish radicalism and privatization that I think is open to politicians from either party to try to claim.

Eric Wilhelm: How do Laura McGann and you find #BadTakes to discuss on your podcast?

Just fire up www.twitter.com on any given day and the world of bad takes is your oyster!

cp6: I'd like your take on Ruben Gallego's Senate run. He's got a strong popularist vibe, combining strong-left views on economics with a certain disdain for wokeness. How much trouble do you think a three-way race is likely to be if Sinema doesn't bow out?

I think Ruben is great (full disclosure: I knew him a little in college and a very good friend of mine used to be his Chief of Staff), and I think Sinema’s approach to heterodoxy gives moderate politics a bad name. Her effort to duck a primary and force everyone’s hand by going independent to position herself as a potential spoiler for the actual 2024 Democratic nominee is really bad, selfish behavior. And while I understand the impulse in some quarters to say Democrats should just give into it, I do think this is a situation where you have to think of the game theory and punish people for trying to jam up their own party in this way.

Gallego is a great type of candidate for Democrats to run in general — very solid working-class background, military veteran, knows how to talk to normal people — and I think specifically in Arizona is well-positioned to hold on to Democrats’ new voters while halting or partially reversing some Republican gains with Latinos. You can’t tell all that much from his electoral track record because he’s been running in very safe blue House seats, but he did run two to three points ahead of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in 2016 and 2020 respectively, which is what you want to see. Some House members use safe seats like that to be bomb throwers and cast prudence to the wind. That’s fine if that’s what you want to do (members of the Squad run on average 6+ points worse than a generic Democrat, but none of them are at risk of losing their seats), but Gallego doesn’t do that. He’s personable, he champions mainstream Democratic positions on economic issues, and he tries to represent his constituents. He’s also got good judgment, and his team features Rebecca Katz, late of the John Fetterman campaign, and Chuck Rocha, who was Bernie’s Hispanic outreach strategist in the 2020 cycle.

People get touchy about how exactly you characterize the Fetterman campaign, but I’d say it was a good example of how to run a race that progressive factionalists are happy with while avoiding progressive pitfalls and embracing banal popular messages.

But there are sort of three interrelated challenges facing Gallego:

He needs to establish himself as quickly as possible as the immovable force in the race — the Democratic Party nominee who is either going to win the race and finish in first place, or else a Republican will win and Gallego will be in second. Sinema is a spoiler, don’t waste your vote on Sinema.

He needs to define the campaign as having some texture to it other than “he’s more left-wing than Sinema.” I think that probably means trying to find at least one topic to be in some sense to her right on, even as he can clearly position himself as a champion of mainstream Democratic positions on taxing private equity managers and prescription drug pricing against her plutocrat politics. He’s got the progressive base locked down, but he needs to be more than a factional candidate.

He needs to manage his elite politics — his relationship with Katie Hobbs and Mark Kelly and Chuck Schumer and the White House and the national press — to clarify that he, Gallego, the guy with the D next to his name, is standing up for mainstream Democratic Party positions, not for left-factionalist positions. The stuff Sinema killed from the reconciliation package was Biden/Wyden ideas on taxation and prescription drugs that Joe Manchin supports.

The upshot of all this is that as unrealistic as it sounds, I think a dream goal for a Gallego campaign would be to do something collaborative with Manchin on taxes, pharma pricing, and deficit reduction where they talk about how working-class people have a lot in common whether they’re rural whites in West Virginia or Latinos in southern Phoenix, and the Democrats need to be something more than a party for educated snobs.

We’ll see what happens. But I thought the launch ad was pretty great. My only criticism is that I think they are going to want to drop the framing that he is “challenging Kyrsten Sinema” for the seat. She has vacated the Democratic Party nomination and he is running to (a) get the Democratic Party nomination and (b) defeat the GOP nominee. Sinema is unpopular, electorally doomed, and should just bow out from running and go be a part-time lobbyist, part-time triathlete. If she wants to insist on running an obviously doomed spoiler campaign, that’s on her, but Gallego wants to rally the Kelly/Biden/Hobbs coalition of Democrats, independents, and McCain Republicans against the MAGA forces who’ve taken over the Arizona GOP.

Bill Scheel: I just watched Ex Machina again and enjoyed it as art. Does it tell us anything about real world AI issues?

The AI alignment people I’ve talked to tend to be fussy, technically-minded literalists who don’t like science fiction depictions of AI alignment problems.

As I wrote in “The Case for Terminator Analogies,” I think this distaste is misplaced. When thinking about this issue, I think it’s good to keep two things in mind:

Most people find the rationalist community very off-putting and longtermist ideas to be weird.

Humanistic culture has been considering versions of the AI alignment problem in stories like the Prague Golem, The Monkey’s Paw, and various other forms since long before digital computers existed.

Under the circumstances, I think it’s wise to try to leverage what’s available in our existing cultural tropes and not just sneer at it.

There are lots of elements of Ex Machina that seem totally off or irrelevant to the real world. The isolated, locked-door setting is a cool movie trope, but there’s no reason an AI lab would be working like this. And there’s a big psycho-sexual element to the story which, again, is good filmmaking, but involves tons of technological breakthroughs that have nothing to do with artificial intelligence. But I do think the movie does a pretty good job of illustrating some of the kinds of dilemmas that Holden Karnofsky walks through in “AI Safety Seems Hard to Measure.”

If you are training a black box whose internal processes you can’t directly inspect or understand, it is hard to distinguish between:

I am training the black box to do X.

I am training the black box to be good at tricking me into thinking it is doing X.

It’s easy to just write this down, but works of fiction are good at dramatizing these sorts of problems and making them feel real to people.

Andy: Do you have a general principle regarding what government functions should be done at the federal vs state vs local level.

I think it’s hard to give a principled answer to this because the states themselves are such heterogeneous entities. Texas and New Hampshire are both “states,” but they don’t really have anything in common in terms of geographic extent, population, the kinds of communities they encompass, or anything else.

Sean: Having lived in New York and DC, what type of housing affords a higher quality of life: rowhouses or skyscrapers? And how can this quality of life be used to support YIMBYism?

I wouldn’t say “skyscraper,” but assuming appropriate units were available, then I personally would rather live in a tall building with amenities than a rowhouse. Things like 24/7 security, dry cleaning pickup, on-call maintenance personnel, and other things that are only economical to provide in a big building are very attractive to me. The reason I live in a rowhouse despite that preference is that large, family-sized units are rare in high-rise D.C. buildings, and to the extent they do exist, they mostly seem to be in neighborhoods like the West End that I don’t particularly like and are also very expensive.

Honestly, as a matter of personal preference, I don’t have a lot of use for missing middle housing. I see a lot of appeal to detached houses and yards, and I see a lot of advantages to high-rise buildings. Owning a rowhouse is not really something I want to do in principle. But real-world real estate decisions are about location, square footage, and price, and what works for us is a rowhouse.

Generally, I think people should think less about land use policy in terms of their personal tastes and preferences. The point of YIMBYism is that while markets have flaws and failings, they are specifically extremely good at aggregating disparate preferences and balancing complicated tradeoffs. You need to give builders and buyers more flexibility in terms of what kinds of tradeoffs they are allowed to make.

Badger Blanket: What is the financial value of an elite education over the course of a career? I'm starting law school next fall and am picking between a state flagship school (ranked ~25th on US News) which has offered me a full scholarship, and an elite top-10 Ivy-equivalent private school, which has offered me nothing. After fees and living expenses, I'd expect to accrue about 60k in debt attending the former, and perhaps as much as 300k attending the latter. Which school should I attend? Is the initial debt worth it for the more prestigious degree?

I have never seen research on this question specific to law schools.

But for college, I think Dale & Krueger are persuasive that most of the students who get admitted to Princeton (for example) would do just as well attending a less selective school and thus might as well take the better financial offer. The exception, which is important, is that kids whose parents have a low level of education do benefit from attending the more selective school.

Arjun Mokha: Given that there will likely be low growth (I've seen 0.5%) in 2023 for a bunch of reasons — Inflation, resource constraints, russia, etc — what is the path to a year of mediocre growth (say 1.5%)?

I’ve tried to find a few different ways of saying this, but my basic point would be to urge everyone to look past the specifics of inflation this or supply chain that or Russia this and just try to come to grips conceptually with full employment. For a very long time, the American economy was primarily demand-constrained and the relevant lens for most debates was something like “will this help us shift workers out of being unemployed into doing literally anything else?”

But that’s no longer true. Full employment is good news.

That said, full employment also means that going forward, growth has to come from greater efficiency. Some of that is raw technological improvement — people come up with better ways of doing things, and then as they apply those better ways, the economy grows.

Efficiency-led growth can also come from policy change. The economy has at its disposal so many construction workers and so much construction material. But how many dollars worth of housing a given set of workers can create is a function not only of their skill and access to equipment, but of where they are able to go work. If more jurisdictions change their zoning rules to allow for more construction on the most expensive land, then the productivity of the construction sector rises and the economy grows. If we aligned our pilot training time requirements with the ones in place in Europe, then more Americans could earn higher wages faster and the airline industry could grow.

And even though the U.S. economy is all things considered one of the most high-productivity economies in the world, there are plenty of rules like this.

We of course might get a bad situation where the economy is forced into recession to curb inflation, and then after being depressed for a while, we re-stimulate and get fast demand-led growth. But what everyone is hoping to see is an economy where the Fed manages to constrain demand in a “slow and steady wins the race” kind of way and keeps bringing inflation down without a recession. In that case, though, growth is going to have to come from the slow-and-steady pragmatic application of supply-side reforms. And I think the challenge is going to be that short of “abolish all zoning rules nationally,” there’s no one supply-side reform that makes a really large difference to the economy. So it’s always possible to dismiss any one possible change as more trouble than it’s worth. But if we settle for that, we’re not going to get any growth at all. We need different agencies to look really rigorously at their rules on the books and see which ones don’t stand up to scrutiny on the merits. And we need bipartisan coalitions in Congress to look at the Jones Act and the use of so much agricultural land for biofuels and the NEPA regime and everything else.

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