It's springtime for mailbags. by Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

It's springtime for mailbags

Matthew Yglesias

22 - 28 minutes

My stint going back-and-forth to Chicago is at an end! I’m going to miss the students and faculty and the staff at the Hotel Sophy but will not miss spending so much time in airports.

In other news — evidence that the expanded Child Tax Credit did not reduce labor force participation, we’re getting a 700-mile transmission line, sustainable aluminum, the world has made incredible progress in reducing child mortality, new social cost of carbon estimate just dropped, and letting nurse practitioners do more stuff is good for patients.

On to some questions!

John: What happened to Bad Takes?

Grid got bought by Jimmy Finkelstein’s soon-to-launch media startup The Messenger and they did not want to pick up the podcast, so we’ll see what the future holds for me audio-wise.

loubyornotlouby: Do you have a take on the recent announcement that Substack is allowing writers on the platform to invest at its mid COVID valuation? Are you investing? Ben Thompson at Stratechery seemed to find it pretty off-putting given their "pro writer" public posturing given their current casflow issues (💸💸💸🔥) and the general consensus that many valuations from that era were demonstrably over-priced in the current tech / interest rate environment? His take was this "Notes" feature seems designed cynically to boost a potential IPO valuation (and short term shareholder value) more than it is about making money long term for most writers on the platform.

This did not seem like a compelling investment idea to me.

What I know about Substack is that as a software platform for authoring newsletters, hosting comments, managing subscriptions, etc. it’s very good. But I think to achieve the kind of financial success that the team and its investors are looking for, Substack needs to prove its value as a network — to create a dynamic where it’s valuable for a writer to be on Substack simply because other writers are on Substack and the cross-promotion opportunities generate a lot of extra business. They’ve done some stuff in this regard, they are working on more stuff, and I hope it works out.

I hope it works out for them because I’ve met a lot of people who work at the company and I like them. And I hope it works out for them because I’m on Substack, so it’s good for me if the network gets stronger and creates more value. But for that exact reason, I don’t think it makes sense for me to be a small-time equity investor in Substack. I’m already significantly exposed to the upside of Substack building a powerful network and I don’t need to be putting more of my money on that particular bet.

M Bartley: You’ve mentioned on twitter in the past that you think Rawls’ philosophical outlook has a lot of holes. What are your main issues with his work?

I don’t think “what’s your critique of the central figure in modern Anglophone political philosophy” is all that well-suited to a snappy mailbag answer.

But I did write an article about Charles Mills’ critique of Rawls. And over the years I have often praised the feminist critique of Rawls offered by Susan Moller Okin in “Justice, Gender, and the Family.” You could do lots of other versions of this, though, because the fact is that Rawls’ approach — no matter how strong you may think it is on its own terms — just doesn’t have much of anything to say about huge swathes of what actual political disputes are about. That’s not the most damning flaw in the world, but it does suggest to me that organizing the political philosophy curriculum around Rawls and Rawlsian considerations is maybe something that we should move past.

Jeremy: On climate change, you have pushed back on apocalyptic visions, emphasizing that the outlook for the US is manageable. But my understanding is that the outlook for large and populous countries of the global south is grim — that in densely populated zones of India, for instance, wet bulb temperatures in summer will make life without AC unsustainable. If so, this will be a humanitarian catastrophe and also a political emergency for the global north. So maybe the sky-is-falling folks are right after all. What's your take?

I mean, it’s not my fault that other people decided to set the bar for caring about climate change at the level of “large risk of human extinction” rather than “potential humanitarian tragedy in many low-income countries.”

I think a potential humanitarian tragedy in many low-income countries is absolutely a big problem and absolutely worth worrying about and investing resources in mitigating. We send 10% of our revenue to GiveWell’s Top Charities fund because we believe strongly that averting humanitarian disasters in poor countries is an important cause. We also are in the Stripe Climate program with 5% of our revenue going to carbon removal programs. And given the relatively low emissions footprint of running a subscription newsletter, the fact that we live in a walkable neighborhood, and our rooftop solar panels, I feel pretty confident saying that Slow Boring is a carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative business.

The point I’d make about this, though, is that “I’m concerned that there will be humanitarian tragedies in poor countries in the future” is a very different proposition from the standard climate anxiety narrative, which is more like “I’m concerned that I (or my children) will experience declining living standards due to carbon dioxide emissions.” This anxiety narrative is not what the IPCC reports say, it’s not backed up by the science of economics, and it’s not the same as abstract humanitarian concern for developing countries. After all, there are humanitarian tragedies playing out in poor countries right now that you could be taking action to ameliorate (I will again offer the GiveWell link), and living conditions in the developing world have improved massively over the past 40 years. If you’re a global poverty guy, you should have a very optimistic worldview and attitude.

One thing that’s important to understand about this is that the huge drop in global extreme poverty is a leading cause of climate change.

What first started me on my current climate trajectory was talking to book publishing people about “One Billion Americans.” I got pushback from some folks who said it would be bad to have more immigration to the United States because it would raise emissions. I said it’s true emissions would go up, but emissions would be rising because living standards would be rising, and from an adaptation perspective, it’s clearly better to have more people in the U.S. (much of which is relatively cold) than fewer. But then it turned out lots of people believe we are facing an absolute decline in global living standards such that keeping people poor as an anti-emissions strategy has net benefits. That’s just not true. Reducing emissions has important benefits, but they’re benefits that need to be assessed in a holistic framework that considers other kinds of good and bad things. And that’s really all I’m saying about the climate issue. Rising temperatures are a big problem for many countries, especially poor ones, but they’re not the only problem. CO2 emissions have negative externalities, but the size of those externalities isn’t infinitely large. There are some emissions-reducing measures that are worth the cost, and there are others that aren’t.

James Schapiro: Any thoughts on MLB’s new rule changes?

It seems good! Has me wanting to go to a baseball game.

Jonathan Margolin: Would you say that the freak out about AI since the release of ChatGPT is unprecedented for a new (non-military) technology? I am speaking about the level of panic as well as the speed at which this level was reached. If it is unprecedented, then why is AI different?

I don’t think there is much of a freak out about AI. Not just in the sense that normal people don’t seem to be thinking about it very much, but in the sense that formal government policy toward training and deploying new AI systems involves an incredibly light regulatory touch compared to what I’d face if I wanted to put a roof deck on my house.

The interesting thing about AI concern as a social or cultural phenomenon is that it long predates the existence of digital computers. The word “robot” comes from Czech playwright Karel Capek, who borrowed a Slavic term for “worker” to write R.U.R., a story about an English company called Rossum’s Universal Robots that developed mechanical workers for profit only to see them rebel and seek to eliminate humanity. The story of Frankenstein’s monster is sort of about AI alignment, and Mary Shelley titled her book “Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus,” linking her concerns all the way back to an ancient myth. Some people think Capek’s work was influenced by the stories of the Prague Golem told in the Czech Jewish community. The Golem was a powerful artificial life form that supposedly was created to protect the Jews of Prague. But in some versions of the story, the rabbis are unable to provide it with an adequately clear and comprehensive instruction set, so it goes rogue and becomes destructive — AI alignment, again.

There are versions of this same dilemma told about genies, there’s “The Monkey’s Paw,” there’s basically just a longstanding human concern that you could create powerful intelligent beings for instrumental purposes and then prove unable to control them.

Isaac Asimov said that he invented his “Three Laws of Robotics” precisely because those stories were so widespread and familiar by the 1940s that he found them boring. He wanted to write stories about robots that weren’t alignment problem stories, but people were so hung up on alignment issues that he felt he needed to have a plot device that explained them away. I don’t think the solution he offers makes much sense on a technical level, but as a storytelling device, it’s fine.

And that all actually makes me think there is much too little freaking out about AI, given that in the real world, we pretty clearly have not come up with an equivalent storytelling device. Does that mean we’re on the precipice of literal human extinction, as Eliezer Yudkowsky keeps warning us? Maybe not. At a minimum, there are a lot of leaps from “AI poses a lot of risks, none of which have been solved, and it’s a weirdly unregulated space given those risks” to “AI is likely to kill every single human on the planet.” But as I was saying about climate change, a problem can be worth taking seriously even if it’s not an extinction-level threat. As AI systems become more autonomous (“agentic”), what assurances do we have that they are going to do good things? Or on an even more banal level, does anyone really think that unleashing tons and tons of high-quality pornographic images is going to make the world a better place?

Mediocre White Man: Repost, but timely with the playoffs starting this week: If you owned an NBA team, what would you do with it?

I don’t have a secret path to basketball greatness, but the one real blind spot I feel like I see in team management is that while salaries are constrained by various aspects of the cap and the collective bargaining agreement, there are lots of aspects of non-compensation that could give your team a recruiting edge. Twenty-eight out of 30 NBA franchises use the same Delta charter fleet for team transportation, but you could gain an edge by copying Mark Cuban and having a better team jet.

More broadly, though, my observation of the Wizards and Knicks over the past 20 years is that a lot of NBA ownership groups are probably too focused on first-order basketball questions rather than second-order management questions.

If you’re the San Antonio Spurs, your team is currently bad. But you also know that Gregg Popovich and your off-court decision-makers are capable of fielding an excellent basketball team. You caught a bad break with the Kawhi Leonard situation, things got off track, and now you’re tanking and rebuilding. Fair enough. But the striking thing about the Wizards is that while the team on the court has sometimes been bad and sometimes been okay, the decision-making has never been good. There are no examples of this Wizards management team finding unexpected value deep in the draft or making a shrewd trade or an unconventional free agent signing that turned out well. In other words, the scouting and player evaluation groups don’t seem to be any good. They’re not outperforming what a random person with an ESPN+ subscription could achieve. They’ve also had a string of injury-plagued star players that makes me wonder if their medical staff isn’t somehow sub-par.

A big lesson I learned in management at Vox is that while obviously hiring good writers is an important part of building a good website, it’s borderline impossible to build a good business that way because everyone in the industry can see which writers are good.

Your margin comes from things like having good editors (whose work is harder to perceive) and good systems in place to get entry-level people up to speed (which is hard to copy). The New York Times opinion section can run the “hire the best writers” strategy very effectively because they’re at the very top of the food chain, but everyone else needs to come up with something less obvious.

BostonMom: Following on your observation in Thursday’s post that in a era of deregulation, land use regulation “has actually gotten dramatically more stringent,” I wonder if you see parallels or connections with the dramatic increase in occupational licensing. Both seem to me to function as a way for people who have gotten financially beneficial opportunities to sort of pull up the ladder behind them, creating artificial scarcity to increase the value of their position, and making it more difficult for younger generations and/or previously excluded population segments to get a leg up; and also create a drag on the overall economy.

Yes, I think this is correct.

Officially what happened in the United States is that we shifted away from a quasi-social democratic economic model to a “neoliberal” one. But what I think actually happened in a lot of ways was more like a shift to a neo-feudal set of arrangements. I wrote once about zoning and land reform in 16th-century England, where part of the deep history of the emergence of a liberal economic order was simplifying and regularizing property rights over land. The contemporary American land use regime is not a liberal one with owners who have strong property rights. But it’s also not a socialist one with collective control. It’s a regime of confusing and overlapping property rights, where in exchange for giving away my right to do what I want with the parcel that I own, I have received the right to veto my neighbors’ choices about what they want to do with the parcels that they own. The net result of this slows down the aggregate pace of change. That’s also how, in practice, things like NEPA work. In a left-right paradigm, that codes as a left-wing “big government” measure. But the reality is that the high modernist achievements of the New Deal and America’s dalliance with social democracy never could have occurred under the modern regulatory paradigm.

By the same token, we’ve seen private sector labor unions displaced not in favor of liberal labor market arrangements, but in favor of a proliferation of licensing schemes.

On one level, these perform similar functions by creating barriers to entry that raise wages. But there are also some very important differences. Notably, labor unions tend to compress the wage spectrum and depress the earnings of stars in order to raise the median wage. So we have a labor paradigm that has the efficiency problems of unions without the equity gains — like a return to old-time guilds.

Drew: What’s going on with Elon and Substack? Is there a line that if crossed would make you leave Twitter?

I don’t know exactly what the line is, but if Musk wants to make Twitter a worse acquisition funnel for newsletters while Substack continues to build out Notes, then I am going to try to spend more time on Notes and less on Twitter.

Taylor: What do you think about NPR quitting Twitter over being labeled “state-affiliated?” To me it seems like they’re getting bent out of shape over a really minor thing and they come off uptight and over-serious.

I think Musk picked a fight with them for no good reason and they are now behaving a little bit petulantly.

But I think the larger issue here is that NPR management — and probably the management of a lot of media outlets — feel that to an extent, they are doing Twitter a favor by maintaining Twitter accounts and disseminating news on that platform. And Twitter has traditionally acted like that is the case, courting media outlets and providing certain services. This is actually the origin of the big fight over verification. Twitter traditionally maintained an ongoing relationship with big news brands that included an easy way to get your new staffers verified. So a 22-year-old fresh out of college who nobody has heard of would get a verified Twitter account just by virtue of working as an NPR reporter. The traditional understanding of this in the media and at Twitter is that this was Twitter providing a service to media outlets because Twitter believed that the presence of journalists and media brands on Twitter was good for Twitter and something that Twitter wanted to encourage.

The perception among tech industry rightists came to be that the verification badges were an important signifier of status that was unfairly being provided to media industry workers on a preferential basis. Musk has said from the beginning that he wants to scrap this and turn verification into a paid feature for Twitter users.

Meanwhile, inside media outlets, there have for years been mixed feelings about Twitter itself. A large share of rank-and-file journalists enjoy spending time on Twitter. And many people have successfully built up their personal media brands by tweeting well and tweeting prolifically. But a lot of that journalistic tweeting has done harm to their employers’ institutional brands. Outlets have also had to spend money paying people to run institutional Twitter accounts. And Twitter has never proven itself to be a large or reliable driver of traffic to websites. For a place like NPR that gets its money largely from grants and then from individual stations that receive donations from listeners, it seems unlikely that a Twitter presence drives revenue. So to the extent that Musk being weird gives them an excuse to pull the plug on their investment in Twitter, they may be eager to take it, even if the precipitating event does not seem very important.

Musk, I think, has developed a view that Twitter shouldn’t be a conduit for journalists to reach readers, and that Twitter should actually be an alternative media outlet.

Like, the idea of Substack isn’t that NPR and the New York Times and the BBC are all going to launch newsletters and you’ll use Substack to read those newsletters. The idea of Substack is that individual creators will make newsletter brands using Substack and that reading Substack newsletters will at least partially substitute for consuming traditional news brands. Musk wants to position Twitter that way — instead of reading NYT or NPR tech coverage, you’ll read Jason Calacanis’ tweets. Getting from here to there will be a big wrenching change for everyone, but if that’s how the CEO of Twitter sees Twitter, more brands will inevitably exit.

Matthew: I was complaining on a politics discord a couple of weeks ago that I wish the liberal journalistic sources that I read would give me more insight into the reasoning behind the conservative decisions they are criticizing. Two examples:

    Arkansas made those changes to child labor laws, and I heard a lot about how bad that it. But the Vox article criticizing these actions gave me almost nothing where the legislators explained why they thought this was a good idea and what they hoped to accomplish.

    This recent business where the Tennessee legislators expelled two members for participating in gun violence protest. Lots of “this is bad” very little “this is the justification given and logic invoked.”

I get why liberal sources don't want to carry water for conservatives, but I'd also like to understand what the other side is thinking. I'm willing to believe these things are indeed bad, but why can't more journalists do the thing where you quote the other side's arguments for the purpose of refuting them? I just want to know, “Why does the other side think this is a good idea? What's their logic?”

How can we encourage more of that kind of reporting where I actually understand the reasoning behind the actions being critiqued?

To an extent, I think you’re thinking about this the wrong way. The articles you’re asking for would be much more difficult to execute than just saying “this is bad.”

So as a media outlet, to be worthwhile, those wouldn’t just need to be articles that people read, they would need to be articles that generate a lot more readership than the easier-to-produce ones. Would they? I doubt it. Not because nobody would find them interesting, but because they wouldn’t really find it very interesting. At the end of the day, after all, curiosity about these political events in Tennessee is really just people gawking. Folks who get interested in something for concrete reasons have a lot of capacity to read and research and be discerning about sources, but liberals who don’t live in Tennessee aren’t sincerely interested in understanding all the ins and outs of state politics and gun laws and legislative norms and whatever the relevant history is.

Jim Barnett: Could current NIMBY policies on the coast be defended as an (unintentional) method of generating growth in the poorer inland areas? As it gets more and more expensive to live in Boston or Seattle, people will be forced to move inland to find places they can afford, thus spreading the wealth to Akron and DesMoines. It wouldn't be the best way to achieve this goal, but could it possibly have that effect?

I’m sure that some of this is happening, not only across metro areas but within them. There is a certain amount of housing and investment activity happening in the poorer areas of D.C. on the “wrong” side of the Anacostia River that probably wouldn’t be happening if the city had better land use policies.

But I do think the concept of deadweight loss is important here — you’re not just doing redistribution, you’re doing redistribution with massive losses.

Alex Newkirk: Having recently moved to Pittsburgh for grad school, the city seems to be thriving and is held up as example for the whole region as how to pivot economically. What was the history of this “Eds and Meds” pivot in Pittsburgh, how successful was it, and how replicable would it be for other cities?

Laying my cards on the table, I think Pittsburgh benefitted from a high density of productive research universities which a struggling rust belt city like say Buffalo can't just conjure out of thin air.

I’ve always had a good time in Pittsburgh, and it’s a visually striking city in a way that I think impresses visitors. Pittsburgh has also normally had a lower homicide rate than the other important city in Pennsylvania and comparable “rust belt” cities like Cleveland and Detroit.

That generates good vibes and tends to give it a kind of broadly positive reputation. But I’m always a little bit puzzled by the notion of Pittsburgh as an urban turnaround success story. Pittsburgh had 676,806 residents in the 1950 Census. That fell steadily in the second half of the 20th century to just 334,563 residents by the 2000 Census. And then in the 21st century, while the reinvention was supposedly happening, the population just kept falling at a slower pace, and in the 2021 estimate, there were only 300,453 people left. It’s true that this is a smaller population loss than Cleveland, Detroit, or St. Louis. But it’s worse than Milwaukee or Baltimore and only very slightly better than Buffalo.

I think the main lesson of Pittsburgh is just that it underscores how severe the headwinds are for central cities that have cold winters.