Gone fishing mailbag

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Gone fishing mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

23 - 30 minutes

D.C. Public Schools takes the week of Presidents’ Day off, so the Slow Boring family is headed to Jamaica this weekend. Never fear, we have a full roster of content next week, but expect stories that are a bit off-the-news.

Beyond vacation, some other bits of good news I saw this week: malaria deaths are falling, we’re getting a new Bill Watterson book, the green transition is accelerating, Takoma Park’s first Black mayor says “development is not a dirty word,” and progress continues on a flu vaccine that doesn’t require needles.

Shoshanna O’Keefe: I'm a high school teacher who is asked to write dozens of letters of recommendation for colleges every year. For my own sanity, I cap the number I agree to write, but that always means turning down deserving students who can become increasingly desperate as more and more teachers' dance cards fill up. Even writing my agreed upon number of letters takes the good part of the day for both days of the weekend, sometimes two (we can't all be effortlessly prolific writers like you Matt!) when I already have to lesson plan and grade on weekends. In short, this letters of rec system places burden on teachers who don't feel great about saying no because our students who we care about need them. In addition to the extra work it generates for us overworked teachers, I imagine it also generates an enormous volume of reading for the college admissions folks. My question is: what do you think teachers can do to change this dreadful system and more generally, is there a better way??

As someone who’s written a number of letters of recommendation over the years, I really hate this whole system.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable that someone who’s considering hiring Milan might want to know what I think of him. But the idea that he would be judged on the basis of how skilled I am at writing a persuasive letter seems really bad. I happen to be a professional writer, so I think I’m a pretty solid recommendation writer. But not every great chemistry teacher is also a great recommendation writer. Worse than that, it introduces all kinds of biases into the system. I had an excellent math teacher in college who was also a weird German guy. My guess, just from having heard him talk, is that he was not naturally good at writing letters that college admissions offices would find persuasive or compelling. But he worked at a very expensive fancy private high school in Manhattan, so he was coached by college placement counselors in what he should say. Kate’s teachers in rural East Texas or the teachers in most D.C. public high schools aren’t going to have that kind of backup and may be trying really hard to recommend people without really succeeding.

This whole thing will probably be moot soon thanks to chatbots, but it seems like a really rotten system to me.

atomiccafe612: What are your thoughts on salary transparency?

I don’t have any really detailed opinions about it. In general, I’m pretty skeptical about privacy as a project versus information as a public good, so my disposition is to think that the Norwegian situation where income tax data is broadly available is a good idea.

That being said, the privacy vs. disclosure balance in the United States is currently so far out of whack that I wouldn’t start with something like total tax disclosure, which I concede would be a pretty radical change. We could instead do something basic like allow government agencies to share administrative data with each other, have the Census publish accurate small-area population figures, and maybe even have a national identification system.

Marie Kennedy: YIMBYism is somewhat based on the idea that land owners should have more freedom to do whatever they want with their land. What if they want to tear down a quadplex and build a one-family mansion? How does that square, what am I missing?

I don’t have a problem with this. I think a YIMBY policy regime would, on net, have large economic benefits and make housing more available. There are probably some specific parcels that would be redeveloped to have fewer units, but that’s life.

But you often have areas where existing zoning does let you replace small homes with McMansions or combine flats into a single big condo but doesn’t let you build mid-rise apartment buildings. So then people look at their neighborhood and say “all developers want to do is build McMansions and eliminate cheap units, that’s bad, developers are bad, and we need stricter regulation.” But do we need stricter regulation? Or do we need to legalize apartments?

Adam Gurri: Have you ever read any works by Ernest Gellner and do you have an opinion on him if so

I was assigned some Gellner on nationalism for a political science class on ideologies, and I read some more as research for my senior thesis. Unfortunately I don’t remember exactly what it was I read — it might have been “Nations and Nationalism,” a later book, or some excerpts.

His account, as I remember it, is that we should understand the emergence of nationalism as a product of economic modernization. Industrial society requires mass education to function, and that requires governments to draw hard lines on a map to decide what should be taught in which schools and where. And that in turn creates standard languages. So the government of France runs schools, and the schools all teach a single language — a language that they call French — which creates a uniform national linguistic standard that flattens out and erases a prior situation of many French dialects. That standard national language is paired with a whole national curriculum, a particular way of telling history, a particular literary canon, and so forth, and thus you get a “nation” as almost a byproduct of trying to create a labor force capable of working in factories.

There are clearly a lot of exceptions to this — so many that I don’t think it really works to say “this is how nations are.” But I do think it’s very important as an account of how language works.

Separate from the question of what, if anything, the Belgian nation amounts to, it’s interesting and important that the Francophone school system in Belgium has chosen to teach a Standard French that’s basically identical to the French spoken in France, but the Standard Flemish is meaningfully different from the Standard Dutch taught in the Netherlands. I don’t know anything about the history of that, but these kinds of choices do put societies on different trajectories.

An interesting thing that’s happening now is that in many countries, there is strong pressure on the education systems to teach people to be really strong at English to participate in the 21st-century economy. So I remember talking to a Dutch academic who was telling me that in this day and age, if you’re a Dutch scholar who wants to publish work and have a successful career, you are basically just trying to write and publish in English. So all of Dutch higher education is geared toward making students proficient at writing in English, with the result that — at least according to this guy — his graduate students’ ability to do formal writing in Dutch is really bad, even though it’s their native language. They speak Dutch and text in Dutch, but that’s different from sitting down to write a proper essay. That points to a kind of back-to-the-future situation, a recurrence of the old days when formal writing was all done in Latin and local vernaculars didn’t really exist in a high register.

Jacob Fridman: Thoughts on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's juducial coup and possible U.S. responses?

I have zero understanding of the particulars of this situation and feel okay about that because I’m strongly opposed to the overall Netanyahu project and just strongly side with the opposition.

DMO: Do you think the government should mandate a minimum number of airline routes to smaller, underserved cities?

There are two different issues at work here, and I’m not sure which one this is in reference to:

    One is that there are a certain number of genuinely small, remote communities where the economics doesn’t support regular commercial air service.

    The other is that there are a certain number of mid-sized cities that used to be major airline hubs but aren’t anymore (St. Louis and Cincinnati come to mind) in a way that’s harmful to the local economy.

Situation one is what the Essential Air Service subsidy program is for, and my understanding of ESA is that it’s extremely expensive on a per-passenger basis and probably a terrible idea. The structure of the American political system makes it inevitable that there will be financial subsidies for rural areas. This particular form of subsidy seems to have a bad cost/benefit profile and the relevant politicians should probably rethink what it is they want to do. But it’s also not that big a deal if they want to continue supporting a random boondoggle.

Situation two is something the Washington Monthly has pushed a lot as supposedly a big problem with the Carter-era deregulation of the airline industry, and I think they’re really wrong.

To be clear about this, passenger aviation obviously remains a tightly regulated industry in terms of who is allowed to fly planes and which planes are considered safe to fly and a million other things. But it used to be that if an airline wanted to fly a given interstate route, they needed to obtain specific permission from a federal regulator, which also set which prices you were allowed to fly. Deregulation of routes and prices has mostly served to make airfares cheaper, and the industry more competitive and less profitable. That’s been bad for airline workers and the unions that represent them (fewer monopoly profits to divide), which generates a perpetual chorus of criticism that I find understandable but ultimately wrongheaded.

The idea that smaller cities have lost service as a result of this just seems wrong to me. It’s true that a certain number of declining midwestern cities have lost service. But growing cities like San Antonio, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Nashville, Seattle, and Austin have much more service than they used to. I’m not sure exactly what policy framework you’d put in place to avoid passenger service patterns shifting along with with the national population. But more to the point, I don’t see why you’d want to prevent the service patterns from shifting. The decline of cities like St. Louis is a huge tragedy, but to see that as led by airline route choices seems really off-base. Detroit, for example, has held on as a big-time Delta hub despite the city’s precipitous population decline, which is nice for them but also underscores that having an airport won’t necessarily save your city.

What should we do to address the problems of midwestern population decline? Read “One Billion Americans” to find out!

Estate of Bob Sagat: Have you ever been on a hot air balloon?

Absolutely not. I try not to let fear of heights get the better of me, but I’m not going up in some balloon for no reason.

Tdubs: What do you think the end of the Russia-Ukraine war will look like? It's still very hard for me to imagine what a negotiated settlement looks like even under various different assumptions (Russia's offensives are successful, higher quality weaponry allow Ukraine to advance, etc).

I think if it was clearer what a settlement could look like, the parties would reach one.

To inject one slightly non-obvious point into the dialogue, what makes this really difficult isn’t going to be finding an agreement on the disposition of Crimea or those two provinces in the east; it’s going to be what measures you put in place to prevent the conflict from just re-occurring. To some extent, Russia’s concerns at the beginning of the war were they didn’t want Ukraine to turn into a heavily-armed, militarily-capable, western-aligned country right on their frontier. But just as invading Ukraine caused Finland and Sweden to apply for NATO membership, the war itself has turned Ukraine more western-aligned and more militarily-capable than ever before. Russia is going to want to somehow unwind that, but it’s very hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube unless you completely crush Ukrainian independence, which of course is not a viable basis for a settlement.

Conversely, Ukraine isn’t going to want to end the war on terms that just create a “pause” for Russia to reconstitute its industrial base and then invade again in 10 years.

They are going to want security guarantees. But what guarantees from Moscow would be credible? Guarantees from the west in the form of NATO membership would have a lot of value. We’ve learned during this war that Russia regards Article V as highly credible and does not attack targets in Poland and elsewhere that are being actively used to assist the Ukrainian military effort. But accepting Ukraine in NATO would be a catastrophic blow to Russia’s goals, and they’d have a strong incentive to keep an active war going for the sake of averting that.

To just reiterate the core fact of this war, it really all goes to show that mounting the invasion was a huge fuckup on Putin’s part. Before the invasion, Russia already had possession of Crimea, Ukraine showed no capacity or inclination to retake it, and the western powers who didn’t officially recognize the annexation were still de facto tolerating it. And the hybrid war happening in the Donbas was sufficient to keep NATO membership indefinitely off the table for Ukraine, even in the eyes of the most hawkish NATO states. The strategy, in other words, was working. But by invading, Russia induced northern expansion of NATO, greatly increased western investment in the Ukrainian military, and turned a frozen conflict that was serving their ends into one that’s much more costly for Russia and doesn’t have an obvious endgame. All of which is just to say that it’s Russians and pro-Russian commentators and analysts more than anyone else who should be trying to dig in and think creatively about what they can put on the table to resolve this.

Tracy Erin: Do you feel that Andrew Sullivan’s long standing invocation of your name as a signifier for someone who is not afraid to say something that annoys his own tribe is a badge of pride/honor or chagrin or something else altogether? I confess that I knew what an Yglesias Award was before I knew who you were so I feel positively about the title but if it were my name I might not love it being bandied about without consulting me.

It’s a little cringe, but he means it as a compliment so I take it in that spirit.

Sam Jacobson: What are your thoughts on federalism? If you were rewriting the US Constitution, how would you adjust the interplay between state and federal power?

Redoing the constitution from scratch gets you deep into galaxy brain territory very quickly, so I’m going to talk about two sub-constitutional concepts that I think are relevant.

One is budgeting. Somewhere over the course of the second half of the 20th century, we dropped the idea of distinct spheres of authority in favor of the idea of joint authority over nearly everything. So you have lots of programs like Unemployment Insurance and Medicaid that have a dual character, but then there is lots of primarily state/local stuff like education and highways that have a significant federal funding element. What we ought to have is some kind of overall system of equalization payments that subsidize poorer states’ budgets in a direct and forthright way. Then we could also have some fully federal welfare state programs, with Medicaid operated much more like Medicare. I would then try to not have a federal highway trust fund or New Starts transit grants programs or K-12 school funding stream.

The idea would not necessarily be to change the net balance between states and the federal government, but to make it more distinct.

For a bunch of reasons, that’s probably a pipe dream, but I think it’s right.

My other idea that’s both a little more far-reaching but also maybe more doable is that we should change the way our political parties relate to state government. It used to be that the national Democratic and Republican parties were essentially federations of state party organizations. This was unwieldy and odd in a bunch of ways, which caused the system to change. But that’s now left us with a bad situation in state government. Every state, no matter how conservative or how liberal, contains a range of citizens who have a range of views. Every state has a median voter and has policy disputes. So you ought to have balanced, competitive electoral politics in each state. But while you frequently do get people like a Larry Hogan or an Andy Beshear winning a gubernatorial election, you don’t see the same kind of effects in state legislatures or down-ballot state offices.

That’s because what we really need is for Maryland to have two distinct Maryland political parties, one that’s very progressive and says “this is a blue state, at last we can cast aside worries about electability and pragmatism and really implement our vision” and one that’s moderate. Critically, the Maryland Moderates party would include Republicans, but should also have lots of figures who are enthusiastic supporters of Joe Biden. The parties would, like Canada’s provincial political parties, have brands that are distinct from the national party brands and they wouldn’t be involved at all in elections for federal office. This would not only allow people to have better electoral competition in their state politics, but it would also let people think more clearly about the fact that the state government supervises different issues.

Wigan: Do you have any personal experience with friends / relatives / acquaintances taking advantage of or misusing any sort of welfare or government aid program?

Back when I first lived in D.C., my neighbor got SNAP benefits.

We were both pretty heavy smokers but neither of us smoked inside our houses, so we would see each other on the front stoop pretty frequently. That’s a nice neighborly experience, the kind of thing that makes the nicotine addict lifestyle fun despite the negative health consequences. We got to talking and she mentioned that you can’t buy cigarettes with SNAP but you can buy soda. So I would go to the store and buy cigarettes and trade them to her for Diet Coke. I guess we did welfare fraud a few times before I eventually moved to another place.

I obviously understand the motive for thinking that the federal government shouldn’t subsidize cigarette consumption. But it also underscores the perils of trying to do this kind of semi-targeted provision of specific things — human beings are pretty creative and resourceful traders. And of course it’s not like soda and a dozen other things you’re allowed to buy with SNAP are super healthy. The limitations are one part public health, one part raw lobbying, and one part efforts to inflict petty humiliations on people who need public assistance. A much better system would be to have cash benefits and then systematic use of taxes to discourage consumption (by everyone) of stuff like cigarettes and booze and soda.

PW: Do you have a theory about the leaked Dobbs opinion? Do you think an answer will ever become public? Do you think the Court knows what happened but is choosing not to disclose? Is this a situation where lots of people behind closed doors know what happened but no one will say anything, or is it truly a mystery?

Before the Dobbs case was heard, a commonplace view among court-watchers was that Roe would never get formally overturned but instead the Supreme Court majority would just greenlight more and more abortion restrictions — vitiating the Roe and Casey precedents without ever generating a huge “we just rolled back your rights” headline.

People held that view because they correctly assessed that it would be the most politically savvy way to pursue the anti-abortion cause. I always thought the odds of that happening were being overrated by observers who missed the sincerity with which judicial conservatives believe that Roe was wrongly decided. Conservative justices would, I think, be so proud to clearly and unequivocally overturn Roe that they would throw political caution to the wind. Or, rather, they would do what reckless political activists always do and convince themselves that the thing that feels good is also sound politics, even when it clearly isn’t.

If you look at Chief Justice Roberts’ concurrence in Dobbs, you can see that he is clearly trying to pursue the sneaky strategy for eliminating abortion rights. He is willing to uphold the restrictions that were at issue, but doesn’t want to say that Roe was overturned. And Roberts, I think, is a very savvy, very shrewd politician. He recognizes that the entrenched conservative control of the Supreme Court is a huge deal. He wants to wield that power smartly — to do popular conservative things (banning affirmative action) and subtle things that have a huge political impact — but he wants to minimize backlash.

My personal guess is that the decision was leaked by Roberts or a like-minded clerk frustrated by his inability to convince his colleagues that Dobbs would generate backlash. They leaked it hoping to persuade Kavanaugh or someone else to flip and generate headlines that say “Roe is saved!” even though the substance of its protections would, in fact, have been gone.

K Youngers: I've never been to DC, and my spouse and I are due for a vacation sometime. What's the best time of year to visit DC?

The cherry blossoms in the spring are cool, but they always bring out big crowds so unless you’re a real cherry blossom fanatic, I might suggest a fall trip.

D.C. has muggy, humid summers and winters that are only sporadically cold. That means a nice, gentle descent into autumn with lots of nice clear days and weather that’s pleasant to walk around in, maybe while wearing a sweater or light jacket. And that’s really the key to an enjoyable trip to D.C. You can start at the Washington Monument and then walk to the WWII memorial, the Vietnam War memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Korean War memorial, the MLK memorial, the FDR memorial, and the Jefferson Memorial and have a very pleasant time. But it’s about two and a half miles of walking, and doing it as a stop-start in a vehicle is annoying. If it’s a nice day for a walk by the water, you’ll have a great time. And then you can walk another half mile to the Wharf Jitney in East Potomac Park and take a free boat ride across the Washington Channel and have dinner at one of the restaurants down by the Wharf.

Same deal with the Smithsonian Museums. It’s cool that they’re all packed together around the National Mall, but the mall itself is under-programmed and not actually super interesting. If it’s a nice day to walk around, though, you’ll be very impressed by the long views toward the Capitol and the Washington Monument — that’s really what it’s built for.

That said, I shouldn’t tell people what kind of weather they like to walk around in. My point is really just that D.C. is a fantastic walking city and you should try to visit under circumstances when you feel like that’s something you’re going to be enthusiastic about doing. Of course there is more to life than weather. We went to Rome last summer during a period of unseasonable heat when it was definitely not incredibly pleasant to be dragging around the city. But we did it anyway, and even our somewhat cranky seven-year-old had a great time. D.C. is not quite as interesting as Rome, but our buildings have much better air conditioning!

Lenzy T Jones: Given it’s prevalence in the discourse (even IRL), what is your take on unconscious bias? Do you think it’s as conclusive as some make it out to be or are you a skeptic? As someone who’s spent nearly 2 decades studying sociology, I’ve never been fully sold on it. But I see it’s the foundation for so many discussions today, especially about race.

I’m not 100% sure what you have in mind here. Do I think people have biases that are unconscious? Absolutely. Is this relevant to issues of race? I don’t see how it couldn’t be.

But maybe you’re referring specifically to the Implicit Association Test, which is supposed to measure someone’s degree of unconscious bias? My understanding is that there is very little reason to believe the IAT is valid.

I think the larger issue that we struggle to deal with as a society, though, isn’t conscious or unconscious bias, it’s stereotyping. A person does not want to be discriminated against on the basis of his skin color, and that’s true whether the discrimination is conscious or unconscious. It’s also true whether or not the stereotype is in some sense statistically accurate. I remember years ago hearing someone say it’s a myth that cabbies don’t want to pick up Black passengers because they’re racist — the issue is that they don’t want to drive out to Black neighborhoods because it’s harder to pick up a new passenger there, so in statistical terms, it’s better to keep going. Is that true? Maybe. Is that going to make someone feel better about cab drivers ignoring them? I doubt it. And it’s not just a question of feelings — if people are making snap statistical judgments about you, that can be a big handicap in life.