Pre-election mailbag

www.slowboring.com

Pre-election mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

16 - 21 minutes

This was not really something I gamed out when I was thinking about doing this U Chicago fellowship, but it’s been cool to be here at a moment when the city is having the biggest election in the country. The downside is this is the kind of city where it snows in late March and nobody is even surprised.

Meanwhile, yet another bill in the California state legislature would allow more people to enjoy some nice weather if passed. Medicaid expansion comes together in North Carolina. A Rand Paul staffer who got assaulted in D.C. looks like he’s going to make a full recovery. A cool story about the Ukrainian steel industry mobilizing to defend their country. Some people see this as a bad thing, but the news that the IRA may induce much more clean energy than forecasted by the CBO is actually good.

Ben: Who would you vote for in the upcoming Chicago mayoral election, and why?

Chicago is a big, complicated city and there are a lot of nuances to its politics and to the mayor’s race. But as a broad approximation, basically everyone I speak to here seems to agree that you can broadly characterize this as a race between the teachers union candidate (Brandon Johnson) and the police union candidate (Paul Vallas).

From the standpoint of municipal governance, that’s a pretty bleak way to organize political competition, and I think I very likely would have voted for Lori Lightfoot in the first round. That being said, in an imperfect world, you make choices among the options available. I’m definitely pulling for Vallas, but somewhat unenthusiastically. I basically agree with him on education, and while I don’t think “be the cop union guy” is the right approach to criminal justice issues, it seems probably better than Johnson’s approach. More broadly, as I think you can tell from across the broad swathe of topics I’ve written on, I think the urban left political coalition is fundamentally unsound. Vallas has hurt himself in this campaign with some stuff he’s said over the years that’s too right-wing for the Chicago electorate and I think that counts as a mark against him in terms of judgment, but I don’t think a person should actually worry in concrete terms about public policy in Chicago going off-the-rails in a rightwing direction, whereas it conceivably might in a left-wing direction.

Stepping back, every central city in America has some version of the same problem — it is accustomed to generating tax revenue off its office district and has taken a big quasi-permanent hit from the shift toward remote work.

But there are lots of cities (New York, Boston, LA, San Francisco) that had such astronomically high pre-pandemic real estate values that they can take a blow and keep on walking. There are also cities (Dallas, Nashville) that were growing so fast pre-pandemic that they can just slow down. And there are cities (St. Louis, Detroit) that were in such bad shape pre-Covid that there’s nothing particularly new or interesting to say about them. Chicago, though, was on the bubble pre-pandemic, struggling with some municipal problems but also offering a unique combination of urban amenities and affordability. The risk is that the Covid shock to municipal finances pushed the city into a downward spiral that makes it impossible to improve public safety or other city services.

This is an objectively very hard problem, and I would bet against Vallas successfully solving it. But I do think his platform at least exhibits broad awareness of the contours of the issue. Johnson, by contrast, comes from a political faction that I think is just congenitally incapable of acknowledging that the basic progressive formula is not suited to the situation.

Mike G: What do you think of subsidies for sports stadiums? Are they actually useful economically? If not can they be?

I don’t think sports stadiums have particularly high economic value, and cities shouldn’t dupe themselves into thinking that they do. That said, if you are living in Austin and think it would be more fun if Austin had an NFL franchise and would like to see your city exert some effort to make that happen, this doesn’t seem like an absurd policy preference. If we have learned anything from Austin’s growth over the past 30 years, it’s that a lack of pro sports franchises is not a crippling impediment to economic development. But you still might want the sports!

That said, in the economic development context, “subsidies” for X, Y, or Z often take the specific form of agreeing not to tax something.

Cities normally rely on property tax as their revenue workhorse, and then if they want to encourage a particular investment, they will forego taxation on a project for X years or even indefinitely. This then gets written up in the papers by looking at what the hypothetical tax revenue would have been had the project been built without a tax abatement and then saying the project receives such-and-such in tax abatements. People will then confuse this with an actual fiscal outlay when in most cases we’re talking about hypothetical foregone tax revenue.

Now as anyone who’s ever listened to cranks on the internet knows, the policymaker intuition that it’s better to have the investment than to discourage it with taxation is correct. But the right way to instantiate that intuition isn’t with weird subsidy deals, it’s by shifting the tax base from property (i.e., the value of land + structures) to a tax that falls solely on the value of land. That way no new development is ever taxed and you just get a straight question of “build this thing or build some other thing?”

Brian Moseley: Alec from the popular YouTube channel Technology Connections has been IMO a smart commentator on and general proponent of most things having to do with the transition toward greater electrification in the US. So it was interesting to me that in a recent video (on his second YouTube channel, Technology Connextras) he argued against rooftop solar. He described a few different issues that are worth thinking about, but the primary one has to do with the economics of the electrical grid: Rooftop solar, he argued, actually weakens the electrical grid because solar panel users pay less in grid fees at a time when we should be investing in the grid. In order to maintain the grid, which solar users still generally need access to, those increased costs are passed onto others that are less able to pay them. As a solar panel panel owner, I’m very interested to hear what you think of Alec’s criticisms.

To be clear, this is not a problem of rooftop solar per se, it’s a problem of bad utility regulation.

But broadly speaking, I think it’s correct. A number of jurisdictions put in place rooftop solar subsidy schemes that have this property; without it, rooftop solar would be more expensive.

The question, then, is what is the policy rationale for rooftop solar subsidies? At one point, I think the rationale was that these small-scale projects were a good way to create a photovoltaic panel industry and that learning by doing in the panel industry would create cost savings and efficiency improvements in manufacturing. That has now happened, and solar panels have become quite cheap. Mission accomplished! But precisely because panels are now cheap, the installation cost of doing these rinky-dink rooftop solar projects is basically never cost-effective as a zero-carbon energy strategy compared to doing utility-scale projects.

Thomas L Hutcheson: Granted that “cancel culture”/”wokeness” in academia is not the world’s top priority problem but is there anything productive that a good faith Republican state legislature/Governor or clever Democratic state legislature/Governor could do to promote less of an ideological bias in public universities.

I think the Ron DeSantis model of “do a hard-right takeover of one public college and really just go to town on it” actually makes a fair amount of sense. It’s totally reasonable for his progressives critics to be skeptical that his takeover of New College will work out well. But America has lots of colleges run by liberal administrators and professors. Maybe New College will deliver great results! Probably not, but it would hardly be the only college in America with mediocre-to-bad results.

More broadly, I find the scale of conservative whining about American higher education to be very off-putting. There are lots of rich conservatives out there. Go make a better college! Hire some conservatives to teach there. Come up with a curriculum that conservatives think is good. Is Princeton really so great? Is it impossible to do better? Go show me and whine less.

B Schak: How do you rate Andy Byford’s tenure with NYC Transit, and how hopeful are you about him running Amtrak’s high-speed program?

Byford did a good job in New York.

On its face, hiring him to run Amtrak’s HSR initiatives makes absolutely no sense. There are a lot of successful high-speed rail systems in the world, and in a career that’s spanned decades and continents, he has never worked for any of them. Far and away the most reasonable thing for Amtrak to do would be to hire someone with experience in French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, or Japanese high-speed rail.

That being said, relative to the standard mode of thinking at Amtrak, he is an excellent choice. The key thing is that he has experience working in the United States (which makes him acceptable to American transportation’s insular culture), but he also has extensive experience working outside the United States, so he is personally aware of how unusually insular Amtrak is. And he’s a smart, competent guy who’s done well in a number of rail roles in a number of countries. I will note that my specific recommendation was that Amtrak should bring in foreign experts, and I’m glad to see they’re doing that. But by statute, the head of Amtrak has to be an American, and Byford is the next best thing.

Mike: It's obvious by now that generative AI is a real deal transformational technology, but we went through months of dismissive “just fancy autocomplete,” and even now you still see people brushing off the technology as no big deal. Is this just a hangover from NFT-mania or emblematic of a bigger shift in how society views technology?

There are a bunch of different things at work here and, yeah, seeing the crypto world fall flat on its face is a factor.

But I actually think the main thing is that a large share of the population is walking around with incorrect ideas about human intelligence and human consciousness. They look at AI systems, which are new and surprising, and see it’s possible to give what I learned in philosophy class to call a “reductionist” account of how they work. So you can look at an interesting conversation with a chatbot and then say “well you’re not really having a conversation at all, it’s just blah blah blah.” And in my view the problem with that isn’t that it’s false, it’s that you could say the same thing about conversations with humans. Now could you say the exact same thing? No. The human mind works differently from a digital neural network. But you can absolutely give reductionist accounts of human behavior, human cognition, and human emotions. The problem is most people reject reductionist accounts of the human mind for no good reason, but then apply them to digital minds, which creates a spurious contrast between the two.

The other night, though, I had a spirited conversation with Anthropic’s chatbot Claude about neoliberalism in which it wound up arguing that outside of trade policy, Trump was probably more neoliberal than Obama. To me, this was proof that the policy-based definition of neoliberalism that Claude started out with is fundamentally flawed and I’d offered a counterexample to it. But Claude is stubborn and was willing to bite the bullet and just say that people misperceive Trump. I agreed to disagree and found the whole exchange enlightening. You can say Claude isn’t “real” and it’s “just” whatever, but the fact is it does what it does, your interactions are what they are, and everything is reducible to something.

kc77: I recently finished Tim Urban’s Book “What’s Our Problem” after I saw you say you enjoyed the beginning of the book on Twitter. Assuming you finished it, What did you think of the book as a whole? I felt like it worked much better as a defense of reason and liberalism pitched to a bright high school student than it did as an intellectual history of a decade of increasing political polarization.

I agree with this. I don’t think it’s super persuasive as a specific history of the current moment, but it’s excellent as an introduction to rationalist ideas and as a broad defense of a culture of liberalism.

Jeff: Kevin Drum recently argued thst the neocons had no influence in W's administration--that the war was drven by Cheney, etc, & the neocons were only used to give the push for war respectability. It certainly never seemed that way to me. I was following the news about it reasonably closely at the time, but I also have no access to inside players or off the record comments. Are you aware of whether they had real influence?

This turns on definitional issues and factional splits that nobody remembers anymore, but I think Drum sort of has this wrong.

He’s assuming a clearer and more consistent split between sincere idealistic believers in democracy promotion and hawkish realpolitikers than genuinely existed. The key thing about the war is that the people in charge had, I think, really convinced themselves that there were fewer tradeoffs and difficulties than there actually were. So they had all these overlapping objectives and none of them was more “real” than the others. How did they convince themselves of this? Who knows. But it’s my experience that policy entrepreneurs convince themselves of dopey things all the time, especially dopey things that conveniently let them avoid worrying about tradeoffs or intra-coalition hassles.

What really stands out to me about the George W. Bush administration is not that they were unusually stupid or unusually evil but that they wielded an unusual level of power due to the nature of the 9/11 crisis and the temporary surge it induced in both Bush’s popularity and confidence in institutions in general.

Contrast Iraq with a Biden-era screwup where Democratic leaders put a very expensive one-year refundable Child Tax Credit into the American Rescue Plan. The only point of doing this was to lay the groundwork for it to become a permanent program. But it never became a permanent program because Joe Manchin had a fundamental conceptual objection to its design. But somehow Manchin failed to properly convey this to the White House when ARP was being drawn up and then failed to get it removed before Congress voted on the package. So this expensive and inflationary provision was enacted, generated lots of takes, and then ultimately never amounted to anything. It’s a serious screwup of policy design and legislative strategy, and as with Iraq, it came about due to an unusual crisis atmosphere. But it’s just a massively smaller screwup in scale than Iraq, because Biden never had anything remotely resembling a Bush-level of freedom of action.

Dan Diamond: The Chronicle of Higher Education had an interesting article on the Stanford professor helping shape California's approach to math education.

The professor, Jo Boaler, has been mocked on Tucker Carlson and elsewhere for her focus on "woke math." Her defenders say she's been unfairly targeted because she's an outspoken woman and a trailblazer. But the full story seems complicated; there are experts who say that Boeler is misrepresenting their research, for instance. I know Matt's written about math education before, and I'm curious what he makes of it.

I’ve written about Boaler, and I think she’s really off-base. The Chronicle piece goes deeper than I did into her research, and I think further confirms that it’s bad.

But a point from my article that I wish the Chronicle and California policymakers would take more seriously is that California public school performance is really quite bad. Black and Hispanic students, in particular, do considerably worse in California than in Texas or in Massachusetts. So if you’re wondering how California can improve the performance of its Black and Hispanic math students, the natural thing to do would be to take a state that is doing better and copy that state. If I were a California Republican, I would say “we should copy Texas!” If I were a California Democrat who didn’t want to copy Texas, I would say “we should copy Massachusetts!” Copy them how? I don’t know enough in detail. But I would look at a state that is doing better and try to learn from them. The idea that you should call up a controversial Stanford professor and try out new ideas based on her dubious research doesn’t make sense. New ideas are for people who are at the top of the pile — under-performers should just copy.

Matthew Edwards: Now we're a few months into the AI-pocalypse, how are you using new AI tools for work? Are you querying them, using them for writing, for new ideas? Or are you just using them to goof off?

Strictly goofing. I’m at a point where I find the bots impressive but not actually useful. That’s not to say there are no uses for them, but I’m a fast writer and at this point, the time spent on prompt engineering isn’t worth it.