Fellowship of the mailbag

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Fellowship of the mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

18 - 23 minutes

This week was the first of four weeks during which I’m spending time in Chicago as a fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, mostly talking to undergrads but also doing some other university-related stuff as well as seeing some of what the city has to offer.

That includes hopefully meeting up with some Chicago-area readers at a happy hour — Wednesday, March 29, 5:30 p.m. at Radio Room, 400 North State Street.

Also: Some good news! Europe has gotten its shit together on a deal to send a bunch of ammunition to Ukraine, the U.S. is accelerating deliveries of Patriot missiles, and the training is going well. Hannah Ritchie lays out the case for climate optimism. People are pretty good at estimating their Social Security benefits but a bit too pessimistic. Electric cars are getting cheaper thanks to lithium abundance. Some healthcare providers are proving better than me at putting chatbots to practical use. And YIMBYs win in Arlington.

Let’s do some questions.

Tom Hitchner: This might sound like a question from your worst enemy, but seeing you say on Twitter that you were wrong to defend "noble lies," it occurred to me that you have a bunch of old takes that people have been using to rake you over the coals for decades, even though you recanted a bunch of them. Any interest in a clearing-house post where you put all your recantations together? Or would that be a fruitless exercise? Also, have you noticed any pattern in what's led you to make takes that you later regret?

I don’t really see a need for a big list. Here’s the main thing I think about the Rogues’ Gallery of Bad Yglesias Takes. Since leaving Vox, I’ve been publishing six articles per week on a typical week plus one podcast. While I was there, it was more like three articles a week plus two podcasts and a ton of tweets. At Slate, I wrote more than one Moneybox blog per day. And before Twitter, I was churning out blog posts at a pace of like a dozen per day, plus various more formal articles. I’ve written two and a half books.

The fact that a lot of people are really hung up on a half dozen things I’ve said over the course of a 20+ year career of high-volume writing is a sign that my take batting average is pretty good!

In terms of patterns, I’d say the biggest way to go wrong is to write things out of a sense of irritation. I think I’ve used this line before, but one of the perils of social media in particular is that it blurs the distinction between writing for public consumption and blowing off steam with your friends at the bar. The latter is a totally valid thing to do, but part of the point of that kind of thing is that you’re very explicitly not really pushing yourself to think critically and make sound coherent points. It’s expressive speech and it’s healthy and normal. But it’s best kept out of writing and not sent around to be consumed by hundreds of thousands of strangers who don’t have the context or necessarily care about your feelings.

lindamc: Do you have a take on (in-person) hanging out? There's a new book out on the subject, I haven't read it but as a person who really enjoys hanging out, I'm happy to see it out there. It seems as if hanging out — which is hard enough for middle-aged adults — has become even more difficult, what with so many people working from home on extremely variable schedules, among other anti-hanging-out dynamics.

In an era of starkly increasing introvert/extrovert polarization, I’m decidedly an averagevert. I definitely favor hanging out, and while I haven’t read Sheila Liming’s book about it, I did enjoy Dan Kois’ positive review.

Obviously the pandemic was a big disruption to people’s socializing routines, but I think there’s a lot of evidence that friendship was on a downswing even before Covid. As I wrote last summer, I worry that this is an area where technology is having some perverse impacts. Over the course of my lifetime, spending time at home alone has gotten steadily less boring. And while there’s a lot that’s good about our improved breadth and depth of entertainment options, you can easily imagine it having certain bad consequences as well. For a while I lived with three to four roommates in a big house and we just had the one television in the living room. That meant that just chilling out watching TV tended to be a social experience. From a narrow consumer standpoint, that’s inferior to everyone just sitting in their bedroom watching the exact show/movie/video/whatever they want to watch. But from a long-term life satisfaction perspective, the time spent watching television together was an investment in friendships and relationships, some of which have waned but many of which endure to this day.

By the same token, I know that one move in the remote work discourse is to worry that with less time in the office, people will socialize less. The counter-move is supposed to be to say it’s lame to depend on being in an office with people for your socializing.

But I think the counter-counter-move is that we are weak and fallible creatures. The fact of the matter is that it’s way more natural to get up and go grab lunch with some folks who are working alongside you in an office than it is to schedule regular meetups with people. Now as a big believer in hanging out and grabbing lunch, I really do make an effort to do this several times in any given week. It’s not like remote work means it’s impossible to have lunch with people or go to happy hour any more than the existence of streaming video means you can’t sit around with your friends and watch HBO together. Human beings are weak-willed creatures, though. If you bring a bunch of cookies to the meeting, people will eat the cookies, even though it’s not like they would have starved if they’d had to attend a cookie-less meeting. Many of the cookie-eaters will be happy about it later, but many others will beat themselves up for once again failing to achieve their healthy eating goals.

So I think we’re in a period where the typical person is now constantly surrounded by the temptation to let friendships slide and subsist on high-quality digital entertainment, but you’re a lot better off if you manage to resist that.

One thing I will say is that while parenting is obviously in many ways a logistical impediment to socializing, it’s also a forcing mechanism. Kids have birthday parties and soccer games. You see other people there. Fellow parents end up in schedule jams where they need someone to watch their kid for a bit. You help out, then you have someone who can help you out when you need it. Because most yuppie parents make at least some effort to constrain our children’s screen time, we have to come up with things to do outside the house, many of which involve other people. Probably most of us would be better off if we were subject to the same kind of limits that we place on our kids.

John E: You've been pretty supportive of empowering executives in the past in order to create a more clear line of responsibility between the public and their elected representative. I'm curious if Macron pushing through pension reforms strengthens or weakens your opinion on that?

I find the Fifth Republic constitutional setup in France to be confusing. But as I understand it, the president can legislate unilaterally under Article 49 of the constitution, then parliament has the ability to check that with a no-confidence vote. So just mapping it out logically, this doesn’t actually seem like an unusual level of executive power. Parliament had the ability to block Macron, they just chose not to use it. Why didn’t they use their power if they opposed him on the pension thing? I can’t read minds, but it seems like a certain number of parliamentarians don’t really disagree with Macron that strongly on this, they just don’t want to take responsibility for voting to raise the retirement age.

And looking to the U.S., I feel like that’s often the situation.

It superficially seems like presidents have seized control of foreign policy, but I think it’s more correct to say that members of Congress have deliberately chosen to duck responsibility for national security decisions. Members like having the optionality of ducking hard questions and then blaming the president if something goes wrong.

But long story short, I would not recommend other countries adopt this strange Article 49 process, not so much because it empowers the executive too much but because it obscures lines of authority. The point of this game is to make it seem like Macron forced an unwilling parliament to swallow these pension reforms, but is that really what happened? I’m skeptical.

FrigidWind: I recently read an article about how 47% of black students in SF are below grade level for reading. Bluntly, this is a catastrophe that sets them up for failure. You are doing a series on “education reform”. What are your thoughts and potential solutions to this?

I assume you’re talking about Darrell Owens’ article, but the core fact he’s highlighting is actually worse than that — he says “47% of Black students in SFUSD that are high school juniors don’t even come close to meeting English-language proficiency,” a lower bar than grade level. And also that this is above-average for a California school district!

As you say, I am working on a series about the strange death of the education reform movement precisely because this kind of thing troubles me. I do think one upshot of the series, as you continue reading, is that there is not some super-obvious easy-to-scale solution for the failures of the education system. But I do think a good first step would be to refocus on the reality that a non-trivial slice of American students are doing very, very poorly. If you listen to adults yell at each other about which books should be assigned in school, there’s a kind of shared presumption that everyone can read books and the really important question is which books can they read. Unfortunately, that’s not true.

AW: What are your thoughts on removing the $250k cap on the FDIC insurance limit? It seems like one of those things that would look like it requires a lot of money on paper, but in practice it would permanently end all bank runs, thus never actually requiring a dime to be spent.

I agree that one shouldn’t worry too much about the fiscal cost of universal deposit insurance.

The way it would work would be that the deposit insurance fees charged to banks would be modestly higher and the Deposit Insurance Fund would be modestly larger, but in practice the fund probably wouldn’t be tapped very much. The issues with this are twofold:

    You’re essentially talking about taxing risk-averse bank management in order to subsidize irresponsible bank management.

    From the bank’s point of view, depositors already treat them as if deposits are fully insured, so extending deposit insurance coverage would involve higher fees for no upside. 

I think the merits of the proposal depend on your sense of the balance between (1) and (2). Banks whose lobbyists believe (2) will tell you (1), because if (1) is true, that’s a good reason not to do it, whereas if (2) is true we actually should expand deposit insurance. The events of this month have me leaning more toward (2) and thinking it’s a good idea. But I do think it’s a somewhat difficult question.

bill: You like alternative histories. Could North America have been settled by Europeans peacefully? Or was the genocide essentially preordained? What could any of the parties done differently that might have resulted in a win-win? Or at least a better outcome for the native Americans.

“Could” is a pretty weak criteria; I think the question is what would need to have been different to generate a substantially different outcome.

The obvious one is pretty deep in history: the balance of pathogens. It just happened to be the case that Eurasia was full of diseases that were super-deadly to the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. The Western Hemisphere did strike back with syphilis, but syphilis isn’t nearly as transmissible as smallpox, so it didn’t have the same devastating impact on the population. Now obviously just pointing to the impact of infectious diseases is abstracting away from a lot of specific history and specific crimes, but we’re talking about astronomical death tolls from smallpox to the point where 20% of the indigenous population of the Hudson Bay area dying in 1781-82 is considered a low estimate. It looks like about 30% of the population of the Pacific Northwest died of smallpox in the 1770s. And those 18th-century death tolls are low compared to the true first contact epidemics of the 16th century.

As I understand it (roughly rehashing what I remember of “Guns, Germs, and Steel”), the basic issue here is that there were more domesticable animals in Eurasia which led to more infectious disease zoonosis, which eventually led to this incredibly asymmetrical death toll from contact.

In alternate history terms, then, this is the kind of thing where you’re talking about a very large change since the whole history of pre-Colombian Eurasia would have been different without cows and pigs and horses. Smallpox in particular is thousands of years old, and measles — which, though not quite as deadly as smallpox, also wreaked a horrible toll on the indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere — evolved from a cattle disease sometime in the first millennium. All of which is to say that I think if you’re trying to be rigorous about it, it’s hard to construct a story in which anything resembling the European civilizations we know come to the Americas without unleashing devastating epidemics.

Now if you do somehow assume the epidemics away, I think the history of imperialism elsewhere in the world suggests that the scale of population displacement seen in the United States was pretty unusual. In other words, England conquered India (and France Vietnam and the Netherlands Indonesia, etc., etc.) and ruled it with an eye toward English interests but didn’t try to eradicate the population. Conversely, in Australia where you have a similar level of displacement and settlement, you also have extremely deadly smallpox epidemics. There’s obviously more to the conquest of North America or Australia than the mass death unleashed by infectious disease, but I think they are very closely linked on a practical level.

Mark: What would the effective altruist (i.e. non-US-centered) take on the Bush presidency be? The Iraq War was really bad both here and abroad, with a lot of negative spillover effects internationally as well as domestically. But PEPFAR is more significant on a global level than it is in terms of US politics, and has saved more lives than most of our international aid projects. I don't think it makes Bush a good president, but it might improve his standing to below average instead of awful.

I’m somewhat resistant to this method of evaluating presidents, but it’s definitely true that PEPFAR reflects the core insight Elie Hassenfeld explained in our interview, which is that well-designed public health interventions in Africa save lives for extremely small amounts of money relative to the cost of interventions in the United States. Leaving aside the pandemic year emergency, PEPFAR is a $6-7 billion a year program that saves tons of lives. By contrast, the federal government spends about $14 billion per year on job training programs that are mostly not evaluated at all for efficacy.

So I think Bush deserves enormous credit for pushing Congress to create this program, and we should all acknowledge not only the achievement but also the larger point that public health programs in poor countries are enormously valuable.

But the fact is, in terms of the core job of the President of the United States, Bush made terrible decisions like invading Iraq and missing the incredibly perilous financial situation that eventually blew up at the end of his administration.

Alex H: Do you support eliminating zoning as it relates to use restrictions (e.g. turning a residential property into a hotel or office)?

I try to draw a distinction to some extent between my personal preferences and the policy ideas I think are so important that they should be forced on recalcitrant neighborhoods.

So in terms of personal preference, I enjoy a mixing of uses. I live half a block from a major commercial corridor and more-or-less directly across the street from an Amazon Fresh store. If the Zoning Commission or my ANC wants my opinion, I’d be thrilled to see an expansion of commercial uses into more of the residential parts of the city. I’m about a block and a half away from The Coffee Bar, which is a non-conforming business whose ability to operate on S Street is grandfathered in, and I think everyone likes The Coffee Bar. It’s a beloved neighborhood institution, not a nuisance.

That being said, if I ran the city government I’d be happy to continue local control over this question; I don’t think there’s any major citywide interest in forcing coffee shops on people who say they don’t want them. Expanding the housing supply has much larger citywide — or statewide, in places that have state government — implications, and I think it’s important to de-localize that. Whether you like to have mid-block commerce or see it restricted to select corridors really is a primarily local concern.

Mike: You've made the argument that climate-interested people should still be in favor of further gas drilling for a number of reasons. Does that extend as far as thinking it makes sense to continue to build out gas hookups to new homes?

Banning new gas hookups seems fine to me as a way to speed electrification.

I would note, though, that the “good climate policy” version of anything that involves stricter environmental standards on new homes is that you need to actually encourage the new homes to be built. If what you’re actually doing is imposing new environmental performance standards as an additional regulatory barrier to new housing, that’s bad. But if you deregulate to allow for a large increase in construction while mandating that the new homes be all-electric, that could be a big win.

Luke Christofferson: If Dems have the political capital for only one bipartisan deal this cycle and the choices are between permitting reform and increased immigration reform, which they should they pursue? From both good of the nation and a 2024 electoral impact perspectives.

It doesn’t really seem possible to answer unless we have some sense of what’s actually on the table.

I would say it is easier to imagine a permitting reform deal getting done because it’s a kind of inherently tedious, technical subject. If the relevant members of Congress want to do a deal on permitting, there’s nothing really stopping them. Immigration, by contrast, is very emotional and lots of people have feelings about it without necessarily knowing or caring much about the technical details of policy. So on that level, I think it’s probably more important to spend time exploring possibilities on permitting than on immigration. But the flip side is that the easiest way to get a permitting reform bill done is to do a deal that doesn’t change very much. So don’t get too optimistic about anything.

Last, I do want to just note that I reject the premise of the question here. With a partisan bill, prioritization is important because the moderates end up putting a cap on how much money you can spend (or if it’s a GOP bill, how much you can cut taxes) so then you need to decide what matters most. With bipartisan legislating, it’s a different calculus. Most likely, McCarthy is just too insecure in his leadership to cut any deals on anything. But if that’s not the case, then dealmaking is really just limited by the number of subjects that members sincerely want to make deals on.