Back in the USA mailbag

Back in the USA mailbag

Vacation is over, which is no fun, but there continues to be some good news in the world.

Substack as a whole seems to be thriving and passed two million total paid subscriptions this week. The new Kansas City airport looks really nice. The first solar peaker plant is now under construction. Insulin is getting cheaper, under pressure from new competition and new the Biden administration. Patriots are in control in the Pennsylvania state legislature. Gavin Newsom continues to fight the good fight against his state’s deranged courts.

This is not good news per se, but on the general upbeat theme, I read a really interesting paper about alcohol regulations. The authors note that states have a lot of non-tax regulations in place, the purpose of which is to constrain alcohol consumption, and they argue with charts and graphs and numbers that replacing these with taxes reduces consumption without reducing consumer welfare and generates a huge tax windfall.

On to the questions!

Hilary: Since you mentioned today the debunked theory that the high quality of modern games was a factor in low prime-age male labor participation in the 2010's, I'll repeat my question from a few weeks ago: What's your relationship with video games? Are there any that you enjoy? Did you have a Nintendo as a kid? Are you watching The Last of Us, and do you think it's broken the curse of the video game adaptation?

For a man of my age, I think I have an unusually low level of interest in gaming. I did have a Nintendo and an SNES and a Sega Genesis when I was a kid, but I never bought a more advanced system — I have never owned an Xbox or a Playstation or been a real PC gamer.

My old roommate is more of a games guy than I am, and he had an Xbox when we lived together. I think we played some football stuff on there sometimes, plus the slightly absurd Sid Meier’s Pirates!

But something that I was really into when I was younger and that I appear to have passed on to my son is a love of turn-based war strategy games. My favorites were the Koei games L’Empereur and Romance of the Three Kingdoms along with, of course, Civilization and Civ II. This whole genre as I understand it has basically gone out of style since you can do real-time strategy games with modern technology. But I like the chill-ness of turn-based.

trizzlor: I continue to be surprised at the prominence of Steve Sailer in your twitter community. Today's tweet about your excellent misinformation piece yielded a few thoughtful comments with a handful of likes, as well as a completely dominating reply thread from Sailer that fixated on black crime, garnering >600 likes (more likes than YOUR initial post) and an entire cottage industry of threads about black crime misinformation, culminating in multiple posters praising Derek Chauvin and things of that nature. Given that you frequently advocate for an expansive twitter blocking policy, akin to walking away from rude people at a party you are hosting, what role does Sailer and his Chauvin Boys play at this party?

This is a good example! It turns out that I muted Sailer a long time ago — before adopting my current blocking rules — so I haven’t been seeing these tweets and didn’t realize what a large presence he has in these threads. Now he’s blocked. It’s better to block people who are being annoying.

Justin: To what degree do you consider yourself a journalist / news reporter versus an opinion writer / essayist? Are these meaningful distinctions or categorizations?

I’m clearly not a news reporter. That’s never really been my metier in journalism, and the cadence of the Substack is pretty antithetical to “covering the news.”

I’ve also never in my career worked at a newspaper with an old-fashioned news/opinion section division. In terms of self-conception, I always thought of myself as something akin to a magazine writer. The articles that show up in The New Yorker or wherever tend to have a point of view and they’re “news,” but they are definitely journalism. Of course, I don’t do writerly features. But in spirit, I always thought of my work as a digital successor to magazine journalism. In part that’s because my mom worked in magazines when I was a kid, my dad’s dad wrote for magazines, and my dad’s mom was a magazine editor for a while. And my first two jobs were at legacy magazines (first The American Prospect and then The Atlantic), though my work was overwhelmingly on the digital side. Then I worked at Slate, which was born in the earliest days of the internet and explicitly conceived of as an internet version of a magazine, and was founded by editors with a magazine background.

These days, though, I think Slow Boring pieces more have the general style of a newspaper op-ed column — just longer — and my Bloomberg gig is very much structured like an op-ed columnist job at a newspaper. Bloomberg in general very much has a newspaper-style functional division where Opinion is a specific team. They also own a magazine, but that’s not what I write for. So I guess I’ve kind of slid into a columnist role in life.

Eric Wilhelm: What were you listening to in the late 90's other than Weezer? Stone Temple Pilots, Foo Fighters, Cake, Beck? Is Soul Coughing overrated or underrated?

To contextualize this question a little bit for the youth of America, back in the 20th century, we had a true mass culture. I graduated from high school in 1999, and almost everyone who was in high school in the late 1990s spent a decent amount of time watching music videos on MTV.

So if a given song got heavy rotation on MTV, everyone was sort of familiar with it, even if you weren’t necessarily a huge fan of the band or the song in question. Mass culture was sliced a bit thinner by the question of what radio stations you listened to. I knew that hip-hop and rap music existed, I heard the hit songs and saw the videos on MTV. But I didn’t listen to hip-hop radio stations. That wasn’t my identity or a fandom I really participated in. Instead, I mostly listened to alternative rock radio. Again, not every song that received heavy airplay in that format was a personal favorite of mine. But that was my genre of music, I was the kind of person who, if he was listening to the radio, was listening to alternative rock radio. And so were most of my friends.

Sometimes there’d be a band where you liked some of their singles that you heard on the radio or MTV and then went down to Tower Records to listen to some of the other tracks on the album. Sometimes a band like Harvey Danger would have a huge hit song that everyone my age heard a million times without the album itself being very successful. Except that I, personally, really loved this album and listened to it front to back lots and lots of times.

But also, this was high school and I spent a fair amount of time hanging out with a smallish group of friends at the house of whoever’s parents were out of town on any given weekend. That meant certain albums I heard a ton of times not necessarily because they were on my favorite album but because they constituted some kind of friend group consensus. The two Everclear albums from this era, “Sparkle & Fade” and “So Much for the Afterglow” stand out in my memory. I’ve talked before about aphantasia, which means I really struggle to remember what my friends from back then looked like and I can’t really picture the rooms we spent so much time in. But I remember the music, and especially Everclear.

My personal favorite music from the ‘90s, though, tended toward the pop punk stuff. When the singles off Green Day’s “Dookie” started dropping across 1994, I was entranced. I bought the album. Then obnoxious record store guys got me to buy “Kerplunk” and “1,039 / Smoothed Out Slappy Hours.” That was the same year The Offspring put out “Smash.” I don’t think I got into Rancid until “… And Out Come The Wolves” came out in 1995, but that and “Let’s Go” were huge touchstones for me all throughout high school. Because I lived in a big city and had access to obnoxious record store guys, I also ended up acquiring Operation Ivy at some point. And this really ended up being the only genre that I had any real depth of involvement with. I listened to The Vandals, Screeching Weasel, The Queers, and The Mr. T Experience. I learned about older bands like The Buzzcocks and Descendants. I revered The Clash. I wasn’t at any point in my life remotely cool enough to be a real punk rock kid, but to the extent that I aspired to anything, that was it. I’ve been to the Warped Tour. These days I’m a notorious carceral urbanist, but 25 years ago (or whatever it was) I was out at Randall’s Island jumping and singing along to Anti-Flag’s “Fuck Police Brutality” and doing the “Giuliani fuck you” bit off Agnostic Front’s “Police State.”

Again, I don’t want to steal too much valor here as I was definitely on the poser end of the spectrum. But I loved the music.

Stephen: Alternate history thought experimenty: Andrew Cuomo stubbornly rides out his negative publicity from his sexual misconduct scandal. There are no criminal charges filed, eventually everyone just moves on. How many more or fewer house seats in NY do Democrats hold in 2023? I think he might have been more effective at countering the crime narrative at the top of the ticket than Hochul was and would have dragged at least one or two house D candidates across the finish line in Long Island &/or Westchester. Is there anything interesting we can learn from this thought experiment?

I think for this to pan out you need to posit that Cuomo somehow does something different that leads to dramatically lower levels of crime, which doesn’t seem likely to me. It’s at least conceivable that a damaged Cuomo, to survive the scandal, would have found himself going further left on law enforcement and done worse.

Andrew Heine: Lots of people are distrustful of elected officials’ ethics/intentions which often feels like a straw man to me. But then I read about stuff like Abscam and think maybe I’m naive.

How much do you trust congresspeople’s motives, and why? Obviously there is deceit in politics to get re-elected, etc, but is it worth worrying about straight up corruption?

Corruption clearly does occur, and every few years someone gets busted.

But while I don’t want to go into over-contrarian mode and say that Congress could use more corruption, I will say that I think an underrated driver of polarization and dysfunction is that holding political office has become less relatively remunerative compared to other high-status options. The political scientist Andrew Hall published a great book about this recently called “Who Wants To Run?” noting that especially in state legislatures where the pay is often very low, you create a dynamic where basically only grim ideologues want to get involved in politics. The pay in the House is better than that, but it’s genuinely not that high given that the job is kind of a pain in the ass. And besides that, the state legislature gigs are the obvious recruiting funnel. So instead of getting people in swing districts who think to themselves “holy shit, I desperately want to avoid losing this job, I’m gonna pander like hell to my constituents,” you tend to get people in office who have very deep partisan and ideological commitments and a great deal of willingness to deviate from their voters’ preferences.

I don’t want to say that the grim ideologue factor immunizes against venal corruption, but it does tend to militate against it. And conversely, if it were easier to get away with taking bribes, the members would try harder to win reelection.

Caio Brentar: What is your most leftist take in the year 2023?

I support paying higher taxes in order to finance a more generous welfare state.

To me, the bizarre thing about the turns the discourse has taken over the past 10 years is that my whole life, this always seemed to me like the big foundational question in politics — should the United States become a higher-tax country with more generous public services? — and my answer is yes, we should. But nobody talks about this!

Allen: A distinction is often made between misinformation and disinformation. You've written some recently about misinformation but haven't discussed disinformation, at least that I've read. Would you extend your arguments about there being misinformation across the political spectrum to the idea of disinformation, or would you agree with the perhaps liberal consensus view that disinformation has in recent history been a weapon almost exclusively of the right? (Examples: Trump “flooding the zone with shit” in Steve Bannon's phrase; Russia's information warfare with Ukraine as well as their efforts to use social media to sow confusion and discord in other countries including the US.)

I talked about climate misinformation on the left in that piece, and I do think a fair amount of what I discuss there crosses the line into outright disinformation.

Here are some things that are not true:

We already have all the technology we need to build a zero-carbon economy, we just need to apply political will.

The main impediment to implementing climate hawks’ ideas is the financial clout of the fossil fuel industry.

Climate change is an extinction-level threat to humanity.

Absent dramatic policy change, future living standards in the United States will likely be lower than living standards today.

Because the current marginal cost of solar power is low, it would be relatively cheap to deploy a 100 percent renewable grid.

This is all stuff I’ve written about in one form or another. I think it creates a crazy situation where a person who thinks that the negative externalities of burning fossil fuels are a serious problem that is worth investing considerable resources into reducing finds himself constantly at odds with major environmental groups. But that’s because they’ve committed themselves to a bunch of these very, very extreme claims about the issue, claims that are often directly contradicted by the expert documents they themselves cite or that fly in the face of well-established political science or engineering.

And even though I take it that most mainstream liberals don’t, in fact, believe these things — Joe Biden’s policies don’t suggest a 10-year race to avert human extinction — it also seems to be considered impolite to directly challenge them. Ezra Klein is always a gentler, less contentious pundit than I am, but he was once inspired to write about the bizarre climate case against having children, and the mere fact that this idea is out there shows the extent to which disinformation on some of these topics has taken hold. A view that I used to have was that as long as actual policy on climate was less aggressive than I thought it should be, there was no point in pushing back against exaggerated climate-left views. But I’ve come to think that those exaggerated views are themselves a major barrier to progress on the climate issue since they can actually stop people from setting priorities and scoring the wins that are available.

Michael G: Asking from the biased perspective of someone shopping for a house in the NYC suburbs who does not want to buy one that ends up next to an apartment building and causes the house value to go down... where should zoning laws NOT be cut back in your opinion? I'd like to call myself a YIMF(future)BY but NIMJP(just purchased)BY because it's just about not making a bad personal purchase decision while certainly seeing the benefits of cutting back zoning laws and even enjoying those benefits with much more housing wherever I end up living.

In my opinion, every parcel of residential land should have no restrictions whatsoever as to the height of buildings, floor area ratio, setbacks, parking, unit size, or anything else that isn’t related to bona fide safety.

I acknowledge that this is a radical stance, and I’m happy to see people make pragmatic compromises and set priorities, but in principle, I do not think there should be any restrictions of this kind anywhere. I want to emphasize, though, that even if you were allowed to build a high-rise apartment building literally anywhere in the United States, that doesn’t mean people would actually do it. This is a big country, people like lawns, and single-family homes are cheap to build. Even under Yglesian land use anarchy, most people would have detached houses in practice.

Eric P: What states/regions of the country are the most misunderstood by outsiders? I see lots of geographically-rooted takes from people who clearly don’t know what they’re talking about.

Nothing set me off like confusion between Ohio and Iowa. Ohio is 5 times as densely populated as Iowa (denser than California). Iowa is one of the whitest states in the union — Ohio is not. DC is closer to Columbus than it is to Boston. Des Moines is about as far from Denver as it is from Columbus.

People are very bad at understanding things. To me one of the funniest stories to play out in recent years was watching the media get somewhat blindsided by Eric Adams winning, even though it was happening right in their backyard and even though the underlying sociological factors were identical to the ones that gave Biden the nomination a year earlier. But you couldn’t exactly accuse NYC-based reporters of being out of touch with New York City. It’s just inherently hard for anyone to think outside their personal reference group.

What I actually think is funny is the extent to which certain places actually do live up to regional stereotypes.

I remember the first time I went to Texas and being taken aback by the extent to which you really do see guys wearing cowboy hats and boots and driving trucks. I kind of thought “everyone’s wearing big boots and driving trucks in Texas” was a kind of silly, obviously-wrong, broadly drawn stereotype. But while it’s not the case that literally every man in Texas wears boots and drives a truck, there really are a lot of boots and trucks in Texas. There are a lot of dairy products in Wisconsin. Coastal Maine is full of lobster paraphernalia. In Denver, every 10 feet there’s a microbrewery. This stuff is real.

But what I think you’re pointing to in terms of Ohio/Iowa is that a lot of America’s regional concepts are very broad. “The Midwest” takes in a breathtaking array of social and cultural geography. Boston and Presque Isle are both “New England,” but they’re totally different. By the same token, the part of Texas where my wife is from (in the eastern part of the state) and the part where her parents live now (west of Kerrville) are totally different. So what happens to come to mind when you think about “The Midwest” or “New England” or “Texas” can easily end up being badly off-base as a description of a particular place.

David_in_Chicago: Follow-up from last mailbag ... Can you expanded on “dumbest shit imaginable?” Which specific projects / TAs are you thinking about? The Atlanta Streetcar on a surface level looks stupid. It's one line and just four vehicles. But it directly attributed to dense housing development and will be folded into the broader new Marta light rail line so in some sense it was just the starting point.

This was from part of my commentary on Pete Buttigieg, noting that Obama’s transportation secretaries did a much worse job but were good at getting nobody to pay attention to them.

I was thinking in particular of a whole set of mixed-traffic streetcars that were built in a number of cities, including D.C., Cincinnati, Kansas City, and (I believe) Tucson. A mixed-traffic streetcar runs on train tracks with electricity provided by an overhead wire, but doesn’t have dedicated lanes. A lot of these kinds of vehicles existed historically in cities where they were built before the widespread adoption of automobiles. In most cities around the world, those legacy streetcar systems got wholly or entirely dismantled. But you do continue to see mixed-traffic streetcars in many cities, including Philadelphia’s subway-surface lines right here in the U.S. The way these systems work, though, is that they almost always have portions where the trains run in dedicated lanes.

Alon Levy offered this two-by-two typology of different rail systems, showing a tramway can either evolve into a system with dedicated lanes in the center (Stadtbahn) or one with dedicated lanes in the periphery (tram-train) or perhaps ideally all the way into true rapid transit.

But what the Obama-era DOT did was fund the construction of brand-new tramways. There’s just no reason to do this. If a tramway already exists, there’s a case for continuing to run it. And depending on the overall situation, there may be a case for upgrading to Stadtbahn or tram-train. But there is no reason to build brand-new tramways — it is a significant financial investment compared to a bus and offers basically no advantages. A bunch of municipal leaders, construction companies, consultants, and real estate developers convinced themselves that building new transportation infrastructure with no transportation purpose would be a useful stimulus to real estate development. But this (a) does not really make sense and (b) ignores the reality that housing development is constrained in almost all of these cities by zoning. You don’t need to spend money on infrastructure to spark real estate development in D.C., you just need to legalize real estate development. What you need to spend money on is providing useful social services to people so that their lives get better. That could certainly include transportation infrastructure, but it should be transportation infrastructure that is good and attracts riders.

Anthony Foxx also spent time and money touting ferry grants, a form of transit so bad that even the perennially upbeat Jarrett Walker can’t bring himself to identify any actual places in the United States that would benefit from new ferry service.

Again, the key issue here is that the ferry is old technology. It’s not that there’s never a route that can be effectively served by ferry — the Staten Island Ferry is good — but that because ferries have been with us forever, all the promising ferry markets are tapped, and over time we rely less and less on ferries because we build newer, better stuff. Some day, New York should get its shit together and extend the Metro North tunnel south from Grand Central Station, stop in the Financial District, and then tunnel under the harbor to link up with the Staten Island Railroad. When that’s done, nobody will ride the ferry anymore.

And then of course there was also the DOT committing itself to the California High-Speed Rail plan.

Here, at least in the abstract, the idea of “a fast train linking Los Angeles and San Francisco stopping on the way in Bakersfield, Fresno, and Modesto” makes perfect sense. In other words, unlike “a mixed-traffic street car from Benning Road to Union Station,” if you actually built a California High-Speed Rail system people would use it. But the California authorities have totally botched the project, and it now looks like a lot of money will be spent without the actual HSR system ever coming online. This is primarily the fault of people in California, but it was also a significant failure of the federal Department of Transportation to not adequately kick the tires on who was running this and whether their plans made sense in detail.

The big point I’m making about all this is that these were not failures of “optics” or political strategy. They also aren’t just ideological questions. These are boring technocratic failures, which reflect the interplay of bad decision making by the political appointees with the institutional weaknesses of the relevant agencies. Pete Buttigieg has not fixed those institutional weaknesses (it is a difficult problem), but he is aware of them and has engaged in some meaningful capacity-building in terms of trying to make sure that people who know what they are doing are supervising some of the outflows of Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act money, rather than taking the pure path of least resistance.

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