Don't worry about a mailbag

Don't worry about a mailbag

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 15 minutes

Don't worry about a mailbag

A lot of crime stuff in this one!

Slightly abbreviated mailbag this week since we’re on vacation, but greetings from Jamaica! The only good news the world needs this week is that Jon Tester is running for re-election:

Now we need many, many legislative votes in which Tester owns the libs by standing up for gas stoves.

Max Power: I've been following your twitter arguments about license plate enforcement, and it had me thinking about the trend on the left against enforcement of anything. On the related issue of pedestrian safety, I hear a lot of lefties arguing that street design, not traffic enforcement, is the key. Because big street design changes are expensive, lefties can always argue that pedestrian deaths would decline if only we invested enough in street design changes. I'd be interested in a mailbag answer or a full article digging into this design vs. enforcement question as well as the consequences of lefty anti-enforcement views on a broader variety of topics. And on a related note, is a European-style traffic enforcement system that's mostly done by cameras more or less effective than the traditional American style of traffic enforcement by police physically pulling drivers over?

I did a column this week on the license plate issues, but I didn’t really go into traffic enforcement “versus” street design because it’s a classic false dichotomy.

In the limiting case, something like the really generous bike lines in Copenhagen would have absolutely no impact on cyclist safety if the motorists who broke the rules, drove their cars in the bike lane, and ran people down operated with total impunity. At the same time, even Denmark has highways, and the highways have posted speed limits, and it’s a matter of public safety whether or not people follow the rules.

So while I definitely support improving street design where appropriate, the idea that it’s a feasible alternative to enforcing traffic rules doesn’t make sense. What’s more, while I have no doubt that a majority of license plate scofflaws are “only” trying to get away with speeding, being able to identify vehicles is very important for investigating drive-by shootings, carjackings, organized shoplifting rings, and other instances in which criminals use cars. The D.C. Council has adopted policies severely curtailing police car chases, which has annoyed a lot of officers but which has a real public safety rationale. But especially if you’re not going to chase cars, you need to be able to reliably identify them!

I do think the real issue here is a broad tilt on the left against enforcement of any kind, and it doesn’t really make sense.

For example, I’m not particularly surprised by the latest research indicating that mask mandates in the United States didn’t do much to stop the spread of Covid-19 — nobody was enforcing the rules! Which isn’t to say that I necessarily think we should have tried to have much stricter enforcement of Covid NPIs. But if you will the end, then you have to will the means. Especially in urban areas, there is an inherent conflict between drivers’ intuitive sense of what’s a safe operating speed and what creates a safe environment for non-motorists. If you want to achieve safety, you need to coerce the motorists a bit into driving more slowly than they would like.

Disinterested: Yeah, MattY, can you do a piece on "broken windows" and why it's generally been written off? It was the top trend in policing at exactly the time crime bottomed out.

Obviously the causes of crime are complex, but it's pretty hard to write off this correlation! It's getting a lot harder to go "it was lead, QED."

This is an interesting topic that I should write a longer piece on at some point. For now, though, just let me flag that people refer to three different ideas as “broken windows”:

Allowing visible signs of disorder in public areas signals permissiveness to young men, who then engage in acts of serious violence. Therefore to curb violent crime, we need a harsh crackdown on non-violent sources of public disorder.

To reduce shootings, it’s important that people not be carrying concealed firearms. But because concealed firearms are concealed, you can’t tell who is carrying them. Therefore to curb violent crime, we need a harsh crackdown on non-violent crimes, which creates a constitutionally valid reason to search people for guns.

To reduce shootings, it’s important that people not be carrying concealed firearms. Since shootings are very disproportionately committed by young Black and Hispanic men in a relatively small number of high-crime neighborhoods, it makes sense for police to randomly stop people who fit the profile who are in or near the high-crime neighborhoods and stop & frisk them for weapons.

My view is that (1) is hard to empirically substantiate, (2) is true, and (3) is unconstitutional racial discrimination that rightly angers the victims and their families. I also don’t think it’s a huge surprise that when the NYPD was made to stop doing (3), crime continued to fall because it simply freed up more manpower for (2). But then anti-enforcement activists conflated (3) with (2), pushed for less (2), and shootings and murder went way up. Then there was a political backlash, the NYPD is back to doing (2), and murder is falling again.

I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that despite Ron DeSantis’ posturing, New York City is dramatically safer than urban Florida — even at the 2021 nadir, the NYPD was still much better at deterring gun-carrying than Florida police departments because New York has stricter gun laws and more cops. But in line with the previous question, I think the big takeaway here is that liberals are right that gun laws are an important determinant of homicide incidence, but this only works if you’re willing to do what it takes to enforce the gun laws. In practice, that means arresting people for relatively minor crimes in order to search them for guns.

lindamc: I was just thinking about that post today while hiking in the park and seeing multiple instances of dog poo put in bags but then left on the ground (in the bags). This is something I first noticed during the 2020 lockdown and have since seen over and over again in different parts of the country. I don't understand it.

I have not noticed this personally, but it raises another important dimension of the broken windows theory.

I do not believe the evidence for Broken Windows 1 is very strong. In other words, I don’t think there’s a convincing reason to believe that a crackdown on illicit dog poop will have important benefits in terms of reducing shootings and murders. But the other argument for police crackdowns on “quality of life” infractions is just that they improve quality of life. Strictly enforcing rules and norms around things like dog poop and litter make our public spaces more pleasant, and it’s good to have pleasant public spaces.

The pandemic link, I think, is that there was probably never a time in which cops were heavily involved in dog poop enforcement. Instead, this was mostly a matter of norms. But during Covid, society’s most conscientious and rule-oriented people were spending unusually large amounts of time at home, so the composition of public spaces shifted radically. That would normally call for a stepped-up level of police involvement in ensuring orderly conduct, but instead we had a police pullback and then a big increase in more serious crimes that required police attention. It’s probably going to take a while to fully rebuild pro-social norms. But to my point about the license plates, everyone has a personal role to play in re-establishing norms of good behavior. Go scold someone!

EKG2mdfCWWnO: Matt, you have been making the point recently that the audience is partially responsible for many criticisms of mainstream news. You also frequently like to say things like “Facebook employees should find something more productive to do with their lives.” These two points seem contradictory.

How come Frito Lay scientists and Facebook engineers are morally culpable for the choices consumers make with their products, but NY Times headline writers (who A/B test headlines exactly like social media companies) get to throw up their hands because the audience doesn't want real news? When are people responsible for their own choices and when are they not?

I sincerely don’t understand what the contradiction is.

Every human being is morally responsible for 100 percent of the choices that they make.

People are often interested in the question “why do so many bad articles get published?” and the answer is “the audience does not reward the practice of publishing good rather than bad articles.”

These are not contradictory statements.

What I’ve said about Facebook is that many of the people who work at Meta are very smart, very hardworking people with extremely valuable engineering skills that could be employed at worthwhile companies to accomplish worthwhile things. In other words, the people hard at work to make Instagram slightly more compulsive could also probably be improving the IT available to the health care sector or tackling any number of other socially significant software and engineering problems. This is not really true of the typical bad-articles-writer whose skills are not particularly useful or valuable. So while I think it’s bad to spend your life feeding the audience’s appetite for bad articles, it’s not necessarily as wasteful as expending your tech skills on making smartphone apps more addictive.

That said, I think journalists who have the capacity to write good articles but feel like the structural incentives of the industry compel them to do bad articles instead have an obligation to try to seek out better business models. My aspiration as a Vox co-founder was to do that and build a new, better model for journalism. I think Vox produced a lot of good material over the years (and also some bad), but we fundamentally did not succeed at changing the game — instead, the game changed us. So now I’m on Substack trying something different, writing for a much smaller but more dedicated and actually paying audience.

Jake Mulcahy: Where do you stand on the proper historical assessment of Jimmy Carter’s presidency in the domestic policy sphere? On the one hand there’s Dylan Matthew’s view that Carter’s unfamiliarity with Washington and fiscal conservatism led him to needlessly alienate Congressional Democrats at a time of hefty majorities and squander the opportunity to pass universal health care, a job guarantee and other progressive priorities.

On the other hand there’s the view that by appointing Volcker as Fed Chair and deregulating airlines, trucking, energy, banking (and beer), Carter altered the structure of the US economy more fundamentally than Reagan and in a way that his successor is ultimately given credit for.

I personally think that most of the deregulation, the Volcker appointment and even blocking the job guarantee was good, but fumbling health care and other priorities with such a large majority means he won’t be remembered as a transformative or ‘great’ President.

This is one of those things where “it’s both.”

From the standpoint of the hard left, Carter was almost all bad: he squandered large congressional majorities and failed to achieve any major progressive policy goals but also kicked off neoliberal deregulation in a major way. From the standpoint of the right, I think Carter looks the way George H.W. Bush now looks to some on the left — like a guy who actually did some pretty good stuff and did you the favor of being unpopular and losing. From my standpoint, Carter did a decent number of good things on the regulatory front but also totally mismanaged his relationship with Congress and squandered a chance to achieve good things for the welfare state.

Sam Elder: What is your honest assessment of the job Pete Buttigieg has done as Secretary of Transportation? From the outside, it feels like there have been an abnormally large number of transportation-related crises during his tenure, including the supply chain issues, the threatened rail worker strike, Southwest Airlines’ meltdown, and most recently, the train derailment and chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio. On top of those, there is also the ongoing rollout of funding from the infrastructure deal. Has he handled this unexpectedly high-profile set of responsibilities well?

What I liked about Buttigieg’s appointment is that it ensured people would actually care what the Department of Transportation does and subject its leadership to some scrutiny, while creating a situation in which the DOT leadership had meaningful incentives to do a good job.

And I think this is basically working.

Obama’s two transportation secretaries were, to be frank, awful. They squandered huge sums of money on the dumbest shit imaginable (the streetcar boom!), they approved a really bad airline merger, and they both rotated out to become lobbyists. But nobody cared about those guys so nobody noticed. People do care about Buttigieg, so he’s ended up with a worse reputation despite doing an objectively better job. So in terms of my personal theory of the case, I think it’s broadly been successful. I do feel bad for Buttigieg personally because I think this deal isn’t necessarily working out well for him. But, like, he did not derail the train. And the DOT isn’t the agency responsible for environmental cleanup.

Scott Rada: Many writers such as you have a side-hustle as a cable news contributor. Have you ever done that — or even been approached?

I really don’t enjoy doing TV, and I’m not good at it.

In order to secure a contract as a contributor, you need to spend a long time saying yes to bookers who want you to come on for free. You need to do a good enough job that they keep asking you back, and you need to say “yes” frequently enough that you’re someone the bookers think to call. I gave up the aspiration to get good enough at this to be a paid contributor a long time ago, so now on the rare occasion that I do get asked I usually say no, which in turn means I rarely get asked.

Ant Breach: So it's coming up to a year now since Russia invaded Ukraine, after its initial illegal annexation of Crimea and intervention in Donbas in 2014.

Your foreign policy priors up until then were — to use a very flawed and simplistic American framing — relatively dovish and seem from the outside to have become more hawkish over the past year. How do you think your worldview on foreign policy, the West, Europe etc. has changed over the past year?

I think it’s important to flag here that even though nobody talks about it anymore, Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan was extremely controversial at the time and subject to harsh criticism. I supported it. I also supported Donald Trump when he stepped in to set policy on that course. And prior to that, I criticized Barack Obama’s endless can-kicking on Afghanistan and his military intervention in Libya. So to the extent that I previously had an image as “dovish” and it’s shifted to an image as “hawkish,” it’s largely because the situation has changed.

I’ve actually become very confused by the people who seem to see the Biden administration’s policy as uber-hawkish when he’s actually the first president of the 21st century to not have large numbers of American troops fighting in an active war zone. Imagine if after U.S. troops left Afghanistan, the Afghan National Army had stood its ground and halted the Taliban advance with the U.S. agreeing to keep supplying the ANA with ammunition. Then people would have said Biden’s Afghanistan policy was both dovish and also an incredible success story. After the U.S. withdrawal, people started acting like “but the Taliban is really bad” was a conversation-ending argument about the merits of an open-ended American military presence there. That, to me, was crazy, and an open-ended American military presence in Afghanistan was too high a price to pay for the sake of keeping the Taliban at bay. But the Taliban really are bad! If the government of Afghanistan was able to beat them with just supplies and training, that would have been great. The problem was, they weren’t.

Meanwhile, on Ukraine, nobody is saying that American troops need to go there and fight or that the U.S. government should be providing close air support to Ukrainian soldiers. It’s just that the “hawkish” position on Ukraine (give them supplies and training) is the same as the “dovish” position on Afghanistan (don’t have American troops on the ground or planes in the air).

So personally, I think my views are more consistent than a lot of those flying around in the discourse.

But there is one specific subject on which I’ve changed sides. Back when the conflict was limited to Donbas, my view was that it wasn’t very smart for the United States to give Ukraine tons of military aid. Europe really needs to take primary responsibility for the defense of Europe, and for that to happen, the United States can’t be the perpetual safety net. Republicans criticized Obama for this, and I defended Obama. Then when Trump became president, Democrats were radicalized against Putin because of the email hacking, and there was a bipartisan move to increase aid that I didn’t think was very wise. Based on the way the war has played out over the past year, though, I don’t mind so much that Europe engaged in a lot of free-riding on American military assistance because Europe carried a much heavier load in terms of the macroeconomic cost of the war. So I used to worry a lot about European free-riding with regard to Russia, and I’ve come to worry less about it. Now as we enter year two, though, I think the balance of considerations is shifting again somewhat. Having made it through the first tough winter, the economic cost to Europe should decline, and material assistance to Ukraine needs to shift to becoming a primarily European responsibility over time.

Eric C: I'm convinced by your argument that making smoking more difficult and socially ostracizing was a primary driver of reducing smoking overall. In my opinion, though, what made enforcement work was the messaging around secondhand smoke — it changed smoking bans from a nanny-state-ish ban on individual choice to a public health issue that made non-smokers push for changes.

What's the equivalent messaging around obesity prevention? Is focusing on the impact on healthcare spending too opaque? Should we be attacking food companies more for candy advertising? Should we have airlines enforce passenger size requirements with the same verve they enforce baggage size requirements?

I think that’s exactly the problem.

The secondhand smoke issue was used as a lever to enact public health policies whose benefits were primarily paternalistic. I think this probably involved overstating the health harms of secondhand smoke, but there really are harms. On top of that, secondhand smoke is a bona fide nuisance — it smells bad — which motivated people to crack down. Junk food just isn’t like that, so it’s a harder issue.

Lost Future: Does the US really benefit from the dollar being the reserve currency of the world? I won't try to summarize the arguments that it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but supposedly the disadvantages are that it pumps up the value of the dollar- thus hurting our exports, thus ultimately hurting our industrial base/manufacturing employment/manufacturing technological edge. Michael Pettis, for instance, has made a career out of tweeting some variation of this argument like every single day for years now. Slightly more mainstream folks like Noah Smith have said that, at a minimum, if we had a weaker dollar we'd have a stronger export sector.

Does this argument hold water? Would America be exporting more (and hence building more stuff here in the US) if we weren't the reserve currency? Is this a goal we should be pursuing?

I think this is overstated — American seigniorage increases the trade deficit, but you can have higher or lower export volumes even with the deficit constant. I find that people mix up net and gross a lot in these issues.

WC: How convincing did you find Will MacAskill’s argument in What We Owe the Future that we need to keep enough coal and oil in the ground to allow humanity to rebuild in the case of civilizational collapse? Did his argument affect your views on carbon capture and whether, despite helping with climate change, it enables us to squander one of humanity's lifelines?

With regard to coal, I think it’s pretty convincing. I also think current policies put us on a trajectory to leave plenty of coal in the ground.

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