Birthday mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Birthday mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

24 - 30 minutes

I turned 42 yesterday — old! — and the country is teetering on the brink of default, but I’m trying to think positive.

I love all the lens flare in the new Mission Impossible trailer, over-the-counter birth control may be coming soon, Texas is looking at reducing minimum lot sizes, a new shark species just dropped, we’ve finally got an NIH director nominee, the IRS has a new free filing prototype, and Keir Starmer is pledging to side with builders over blockers if he becomes prime minister.

myrna loy’s lazy twin: Have movies and TV shows about police and detectives given the public unrealistic ideas about how crimes are solved? And if so has this led to the public having unrealistic expectations?

This was a big topic of debate in the aughts where it was generally called “the CSI effect,” and there were really two different hypotheses that got bandied about:

    Many prosecutors feel that police procedurals have generated unrealistic expectations about the level of evidence that should be available in a prosecution. So if you have a trial that doesn’t feature DNA analysis, trace fibers, and a dozen other pieces of fancy science, that equals reasonable doubt.

    Many defense lawyers feel that police procedurals have generated unrealistic optimism about the reliability of forensic science. DNA can, in fact, be matched to specific individuals in a reliable way, unless you have a rare case of identical twins. But something like ballistics matching has a much lower level of reliability. 

I’ve tried to look up the research literature on this and it seems pretty mixed. I’m also a little bit frustrated that a lot of the papers on this seem to be interested in the specific question of whether watching certain TV shows has an influence on juror behavior, which doesn’t actually strike me as the relevant issue. I was never a regular viewer of any of the CSI shows, but I was still impacted by their cultural prominence. I also did watch Bones, which is similar to the CSI franchise in that it emphasizes the ability to solve crimes with forensic science but is critically distinguished by the idea that there was one super-elite specialized team who could do this rather than the idea that every urban police department had this kind of lab capacity. I’ve recently been watching old episodes of Cold Case, a show that frequently highlights forensic science but also frequently highlights budgetary considerations as a potentially limiting factor in forensic science — which way does that cut?

All of which is to say, that I think the more interesting question is probably not whether there is a “CSI effect” but what kind of misperceptions the public has about forensic science.

I have frequently voiced my concerns with certain prominent narratives about misinformation that usually center the idea that people are being deliberately manipulated in their views on high-profile political disputes. My friend Emily Thorson has a forthcoming book about a different form of misinformation that she calls “systemic policy misperceptions” — things that often aren’t the subject of much overt political discussion but where people nonetheless have views that may be mistaken in ways that are politically influential. And that’s what I am curious about in this space. Do people know what kind of investigative resources are available to police departments? Do they know how reliable the methods available are? My guess is they probably don’t, and that this probably matters for politics in a multifaceted way — not just jury voting, but people’s understanding of what’s going on with budgets and crime rates and so forth.

Mike: So Dave Roberts and Noah Smith were going back and forth about EVs, and one point they both agree with is that for “sustainable transportation,” EVs need to be paired with densification and transit. But... do they? Even if you like walkable urban cores and transit, is there compelling sustainability/climate logic behind them in a world with EVs powered by zero-carbon electricity?

I find this whole argument to be a little bit misframed —I don’t think anyone really has a coherent definition of “densification.”

But let’s think about Iceland, which has a lower population density than the United States and a rate of car ownership per capita that’s nearly as high. In Iceland, the electricity grid is entirely decarbonized thanks to abundant hydro and geothermal resources. Gasoline is very expensive thanks to both taxes and the logistical difficulties of shipping it to an island with so few residents. As EVs gain market share Iceland’s CO2 emissions will plummet, and I would expect that over time car usage will rise in Iceland since it’s a country where the high price of gasoline is a major deterrent to driving. There’s no “need” to turn Iceland into a country of dense, transit-oriented cities with good subway systems. Those are all good things but it’s extremely hard to say how you’d possibly accomplish that transformation given the country’s geography.

Now at the same time, if you live in an apartment building in central Reykjavik on a block that contains a supermarket, your favorite coffee shop, and two restaurants you like, that is an inherently more energy-efficient lifestyle than if you have to drive a few miles to do all that stuff. If you have zero-carbon energy sources you don’t “need” to promote efficiency in order to achieve decarbonization. But all energy modes involve some environmental impact, and all else being equal, you’d think the regulatory system would tend to encourage low-impact choices. But while I don’t know anything about Icelandic land use policy, I do know that in the United States, we have a lot of rules in place to prohibit the construction of the most efficient building types, even in the places where there’s the most demand for them. That seems bad to me, not in the sense that we have to undo it to meet our environmental goals but in the sense that we generally want to meet goals in ways that are less costly rather than more costly.

Having rules that prohibit dense construction types is in that sense a very bad idea. But it’s certainly surmountable, and to some extent the rise of EVs will make it less of a problem.

eocarlyle: Pre 2020, a lot of American urbanist arguments stressed that transit ridership depended on density, and vise versa. However, work from home looks like it has permanently impacted the number of people who need to commute to CBDs. Does this mean that American urbanists are better off increasing density first and only building more intra-metro mass transit once the metro’s population density can support it?

Per the above, I don’t think “increase density” is really a coherent idea — whether density is going up or down is just going to depend on what scale you zoom in or out to.

But I think land use deregulation is a thing that should happen, unrelated to any considerations about transit.

Karl Lehmann: Currently, I am not registered with either political party, but I live in a closed primary state. Hypothetically, if I were to register as a Republican for the purpose of voting in the primary election next year, would you recommend I voted for the sanest, most moderate candidate or someone more extreme or unlikable who would appeal less to general election voters?

It depends on a lot of the details, but my broad guideline would be that for executive offices, it’s more important to promote the most reasonable person, whereas in legislative races individuals matter less and trying to make the party you dislike lose is a higher priority.

Mark Peckham: In last week’s mailbag you said you thought that Senator Warren’s early influence was good but her more recent influence less so. What advice would you give her to make her influence going forward more useful? With the understanding that simply telling her to “moderate” wouldn’t be constructive, presumably she wants to continue being a factional leader of the left wing of the party. Even if you think the party should hold or moderate on many issues, are there specific issue areas where you think it still needs to be pushed to the left and where factional leaders could focus their attention?

There are a lot of ways of looking at this, but if I were Warren’s life coach or whatever, I would urge her to clear some time off of her schedule and re-read her book “The Two-Income Trap.”

I think the book is chock full of good observations that are a bit askew to conventional progressive politics.

    She criticizes advocacy groups for over-emphasizing identity issues relative to material ones.

    She observes that heavily subsidizing center-based child care can push prices up and can be seen as unfair to families with traditionalist preferences.

    She observes that conventional public education is de facto heavily marketized, just via the mechanism of the real estate market. 

Then I would also urge her to read Matt Bruenig’s critique of the book, which I think is a bit ungenerous but fundamentally correct — it’s just not factually true that having two incomes rather than one creates some kind of “trap” that leaves you worse off. That said, I still think the book raises an important issue, which is that from the vantage point of 2004, a very large fraction of recent income growth was driven by women’s increased labor force participation rather than a rise in productivity. And while the benefits of this were real, they were a lot smaller than a naive look at per capita GDP figures would suggest and that’s largely for trap-type reasons. That, in turn, feeds back into one of the most quietly subversive themes of the book, which is that while to some women, the opening up of career opportunities has been a huge source of self-fulfillment and self-actualization, most women (like most men) don’t have particularly glamorous or lucrative careers and are just trying to make money.

Why bother with all this? Well, just because it’s a reminder of who Warren is.

A progressive person, yes, but also an original thinker who sometimes disagrees with other progressive people about stuff. As I’ve written before, charter schools are very much a mixed bag. But the charter schools in Massachusetts are very good on average and also subject to a very stringent statewide cap. There was a ballot initiative to lift that cap a few years back, and a lot of people were initially optimistic that Warren might be persuaded to support lifting the cap since it was a good idea on the merits and since there is this stretch of Two-Income Trap that very specifically criticizes the tight geofencing of public schools. But Warren instead opted for maximum progressive coalition politics and stood with Massachusetts’ teachers unions to keep the cap in place. Not only do I think she was wrong on the merits, but I think it was an early signpost of switching from a strong intellectual leader to being a kind of enforcer for the progressive nonprofit borg.

Her predecessor, Ted Kennedy, was also a major progressive factional leader.

But something he figured out by the end of his career was that one way to wield influence was to use the credibility he’d built up as a high-profile factional figure to selectively moderate and sometimes say “here’s an issue where we need to go a different way.” I don’t think that’s a muscle she flexes at all, the ability to be the person who might torch you from the left but who also might be able to cover the flank and lend progressive cred to a moderate cause when appropriate.

davie: There's a saying about how “Everyone Needs an Editor,” but how do you, Matthew T. Yglesias deal with being judge, jury, and executioner of your own newsletter? Is there a behind the scenes editor pulling the strings and fixing the typos? Or ultimately, what do you think are the big workflow differences between being a mere staff writer and an immutable self-publisher?

Fake news! My middle name is George. Also, we do have a small staff that keeps things running. In addition to Milan our research assistant, Slow Boring has a copy editor, Claire Cantrell, whose job is to fix the typos (thanks, Claire!). And most of all, Slow Boring has an editor, Kate Crawford, who makes the articles better, talks through the ideas, edits the guest posts, and does all the normal things an editor does.

I think it is probably true that there was a period in the early days of the Web when a lot of editors were value-subtracting. You had a situation where certain writers (like yours truly) were digital native writers but were often reporting to editors whose training and job experience were very influenced by the print world, which gave them certain inappropriate instincts and presuppositions. But by now the web is old enough that normalcy rules and everyone benefits from working with a good editor, not just to “fix the mistakes,” but because the whole purpose of writing is to communicate ideas, so you really need to try communicating with someone else to see if your efforts are having the intended effect.

That’s especially true because really good articles normally involve taking some risks — a non-obvious topic, a provocative framing, something that’s somehow unusual and out there — and it’s incredibly difficult to do that effectively without the help of a good editor. Slow Boring wouldn’t be what it is without Kate.

Nate: What do you know about Victor Wembanyama? What would it mean for the DC region to have a decent basketball team for once?

Kate is a huge Spurs fan, so I am happy for her that they won the lottery. Of course, as a Wizards fan, I wish we’d won.

That said, I think I might be a Wembanyama skeptic.

Now, look, I see what it is that other people are seeing here. He’s incredibly tall and has a gigantic wingspan that makes him a defensive game-changer. And yet he “plays like a guard” (i.e., can dribble effectively) and he can hit free throws. Last year in France he was a .275 three-point shooter, which is not an efficient NBA offensive play. But it’s not awful. And, again, he’s well over seven feet tall. And he’s 19 years old. So you say to yourself: If over the next three years, this guy can improve his three-point shooting and add some muscle, then you’re looking at an era-defining player similar to Magic Johnson or LeBron James. I get the hype.

Skeptically, though, I read he switched from ASVEL to Metropolitans 92 last year because his camp felt he couldn’t get enough minutes on ASVEL to maximize his development as a player. That’s not a crazy calculus by any means, but “he wasn’t good enough this year to get major minutes on a top-notch French professional basketball team” is a cautionary note about how good he actually is right now. And while the ASVEL team Wembanyama played for was good — they won the French league and made the Euroleague competition — they weren’t that good; they finished 8-20 in Euroleague play. That same season, Mets 92 finished sixth out of 18 teams in the French league. Then this year with Wemby on board, ASVEL won the championship again and Mets 92 rose to third. That’s pretty good, but it’s not transformational or anything.

Again, I’m trying not to be too contrarian here. The guy is 19 years old.

Players that young are not at their peak. And the tremendous upside potential is obvious. I just think it’s also true that there’s no guarantee here. In particular, it’s not unusual for guys that tall to end up being hobbled by injury. The very thing that makes him so exciting is his very unusual physical dimensions, but to me that also means a high level of uncertainty. If I won the lottery like this, I’d be tempted to play the winners’ curse game and see if there isn’t some other franchise out there that wants to massively overpay for him. That sounds crazy. But the question isn’t “is this guy a great prospect?” He’s clearly a great prospect. It’s “is there someone willing to overpay for such a widely hyped prospect?” And I feel like there probably is.

Chris: You seem to read and respect both Tyler Cowen and Matt Bruenig. What is the most significant difference between their respective mental models of the universe? What is something they would agree on that they may not realize they have in common?

I think the big difference is that Cowen is on the political right whereas Bruenig is on the political left, so they disagree about whether it’s better for the right to be in power or the left. One thing they both agree on — but where I disagree with them — is that the Democratic Party and its political leaders are bad.

In terms of public policy, I think the two of them could agree on a lot. All three of us could agree on a lot! The world is full of opportunities to make positive-sum policy change, and smart people who are just having lunch together or firing-off blog posts can easily find room for agreement or hypothetical win-win bargains that they’d all approve of. Part of the difficulty of politics, though, is about building coalitions and winning elections and dealing with a world where people care a lot about the question of who exactly wields power.

benghunt: I was excited to hear you bring up Thiel as a serious intellectual instead of confusing rich guy. I find his great stagnation ideas interesting and they're not dissimilar in tone to some of your positions that a biggest problem in America is that building [housing] is illegal. Can we hear more about what you think of him? Historical things you think he gets wrong?

Peter Thiel is a smart guy with some insightful things to say about American public policy.

On the other hand, he seems awfully fascism-adjacent. I don’t think he’s all that forthcoming as to exactly what he thinks about history, but he’s been very clear over the years about his anti-democratic commitments. I, of course, get the appeal of the idea that if we could just install a friendly dictator, he could sweep aside a lot of the messiness of politics and fix everything. But I think the track record of that style of thinking is really, really, really bad. It’s a commonplace belief for successful businesspeople (though they are usually better than Thiel at hiding it), but what an actual right-authoritarian regime does is try to entrench the power of existing capital, which on a practical level ends up being anti-innovation and anti-dynamism.

But I’m not a fan of intellectual cordons sanitaires. Lots of people who I agree with about big important political questions (“you should vote for Joe Biden”) have nothing interesting to say on public policy, and lots of people who I think have bad big picture politics have some insights to offer.

Dave: You recently tweeted “I would spend my billions trying to promote a more realistic public understanding of the role of money in the political process.”

What is a more realistic understanding of money in the political process?

The context here is that Ben Dreyfuss was talking about using his hypothetical fortune to buy the elected officials of some small state and bend the whole place to his will. I was counter-quipping that I think a lot of people very significantly overrate the idea that it’s easy to bribe elected officials into advancing your preferred policy agenda.

This just isn’t what the political science literature says.

I’ve also had the opportunity over the past 20 years to interact at least occasionally with various rich people who agree with me about this or that and who are trying to influence the political process, and the truth is it’s hard. Not because money doesn’t matter in politics but because the status quo is incredibly sticky. It’s sticky enough that you have almost no chance of creating change unless there’s money behind your cause, which means that only things you can interest people with money in have any chance of happening. But it’s so sticky that even if someone spends a lot of money on pressing for change, it probably won’t happen.

Nick Magrino: What do you make of the “whole language” reading instruction debacle? Are there other areas where we're making some glaring mistake that would be obvious to laypeople but it's been obscured by consultants and bad graduate degree programs?

At a very high level, it seems really bonkers that thousands (?) of schools were trying to teach kids how to read by “pointing at the pictures on the page” and focusing on “instilling a love of books” and no one pointed out that that seems like a bad way to teach reading for years or decades until parents saw it during Zoom kindergarten three years ago. (I realize that people have been pointing it out longer than that)

A couple of points on this. I assume from the reference to Zoom kindergarten that you’re influenced in your thinking on this by Emily Hanford’s excellent “Sold a Story” podcast, which has done a lot to popularize the case for phonics recently. But it’s worth being clear that the triple-cueing method that Hanford is taking down there is actually different from the whole language method that was the subject of America’s earlier debate about phonics. I think the fact that we keep seeing efforts to propose something other than direct instruction in phonics primarily reflects the fact that the kind of people who like to teach little kids have personalities that rebel against the level of regimentation involved. They have a strong instinct that something more creative would be better.

I’ll also say that as someone who believes the “science of reading” people have this right, I am continually disappointed by the quality of the social science evidence in favor of their approach. That’s not to say that they are wrong (I think they are right!), but as with everything in education policy, implementation details matter and achieving large scale is hard. The United States is not set up to say “okay, here is the two year phonics sequence everyone in the country is going to receive in kindergarten and first grade” and then hold everyone to that standard. Even most states operate fairly decentralized systems in which there can be big gaps between what the state legislators think they are trying to do and what actually happens. So just offering the take “you should teach kids phonics” is relatively easy; it’s harder to say exactly what set of policy changes will have that outcome. Right now, conservatives’ main idea is that we should further decentralize the school system with privatization while progressives’ main idea is to stand up for teachers’ autonomy as professionals. Neither is very helpful when what we need is something more like a top-down push to use the correct method.

But I didn't really answer your question, which is about what other situations are like that. My guess is that it's actually reasonably common for insular communities of specialists to go off the rails in particular ways that happen to align with their self-interest. Most college professors seem to sincerely believe that student loan forgiveness is a major social justice priority, journalism outlets routinely portray the number of presidential press conferences as a crucial index of democratic transparency, small business owners think cutting their taxes is the cornerstone of prosperity, etc. It all just goes to show that while expertise and personal experience are useful, it's also important to get an outside perspective.

Lost Future: Is there a structural reason as to why the left is sometimes culturally more extreme in the US, as compared to say Europe? I've gone through most of my life thinking that the US is a center-right country, and that's certainly true for economic issues like taxation, a social welfare state, etc. However in the most recent culture war issue, transgender medical treatment for children, as you've documented half of the US seems to have ended up in a more extreme place than say anywhere in Europe, the Nordics, etc. So the lines as to which country is left-wing and which is right-wing seem a bit blurred to me.

To partially answer my own question, I think the 2 party duality system does seem to lead to some more exaggerated views — “if the other side thinks X then I have to think the absolute opposite.” But that doesn't feel like a complete explanation.

Two things at work here.

One is that, as I keep trying to emphasize, the “left” position on puberty blockers and hormone therapy is essentially the “right” position on health care in general — one that emphasizes the benefits of light-touch regulation, patient and doctor autonomy, innovation, and entrepreneurial capitalism. The “right” position, conversely, is much more in line with general European health care norms where you expect centralized decision-making and cost-benefit analysis. If this were some other topic, American conservatives would be looking at Sweden and the UK and saying this is the whole problem with socialized medicine — you’ve got big government bureaucrats telling people that medical treatments they want don’t pass cost-benefit scrutiny so they can’t have them.

In other words, if you ignore the specific content of this controversy and ask on which side of the Atlantic are you more likely to see off-label use of prescription drugs without gold-standard clinical evidence, it’s the United States. There are strengths and weaknesses of the American model, but it’s a significant institutional and cultural difference.

But the other big difference is abortion, an issue that a lot of people feel very strongly about. The United States is much more religious than Europe and has a much more active and politically powerful religious conservative movement that is trying really hard — and achieving a good amount of success — to make abortion illegal. This makes American feminists dramatically more reluctant to publicly break ranks than their British counterparts are, which I think creates an exaggerated sense of consensus in the discourse relative to the actual distribution of opinion.