Memorial Day Mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Memorial Day Mailbag. By 

Matthew Yglesias

26 - 32 minutes

Summer is starting (sociologically speaking). Time to hit the pool, hit the spray park, and keep subscribing to your favorite newsletter!

The coolest non-weather news of the week has to be a paralyzed man whose ability to walk was restored with some kind of brain implant. I am not going to vote for Tim Scott, but I want to note his entrance into the GOP primary field here because he seems better to me than the other folks in the mix. This is maybe bad news for cruise super-fans, but cruise crowding seems like a strong sign of economic resilience. The headline here is that climate change is “wrecking” rice cultivation, but the text is mostly about human ingenuity, adaptability, and resilience. The Vogtle 3 nuclear reactor in Georgia is now fully operational, the Zaporizhzhia plant in Ukraine is back on, and Oklo is set to build new reactors in Southeast Ohio.

Marie Kennedy: What is with the flagrant disregard for the concept of acronyms today re:YEMBY-ism? Come on, man!

I just screwed up — I meant YIEBY, Yes In Everyone’s Backyard.

Liam Scott: Earlier this month, Scott Alexander posted an entry to his blog to serve as a rebuttal to the long-standing idea that higher housing supply decreases housing costs, noting that: “The two densest US cities, ie the cities with the greatest housing supply per square kilometer, are New York City and San Francisco. These are also the 1st and 3rd most expensive cities in the US.” He goes on to suggest that this may not violate the basic supply and demand of the US housing market because moving somewhere may increase housing costs, because you leave a house behind which increases the supply of the place you just left. He argues that increasing housing supply may increase local prices but always reduces country-wide prices.

I don't strongly agree with the argument made in his post, but my question to you is: Do housing supply increases always reduce prices at the city level?

“Always” is a very strong claim. Empirically, adding housing to San Francisco appears to reduce nearby prices. But there are probably some other situations in which this isn’t true. What I’ve said about this before is that if adding housing increases demand so much as to swamp the supply effect, that just shows that anti-housing rules are extremely costly and you shouldn’t have them.

Robin H: Two articles this week layout the differing views on how to solve the affordable housing crisis. WaPo talks about the revitalization of Calgary, which came about largely via incentives to developers, with few strings attached. The other is a NYT piece about social housing and the Vienna model, which seems to advocate for government-built housing for all – without any income restrictions. Both sides have good points but would love your take on the competing articles.

I had a lot of problems with that Vienna article that I want to address in a separate column. But I’m including Robin’s question because I think it’s relevant to the issue Liam raised above. Washington, DC currently has a bunch of basically vacant land around the derelict RFK stadium site. The city wants to get a new stadium for the Commanders built there. Suppose instead that someone proposes a giant Vienna-style mixed-income social housing development and suppose counterfactually that they have a credible plan for how this is going to be built in a cost-effective way.

Well, that sounds intriguing! But people might still worry about the expense. The money would, after all, have to come from somewhere. Does the case for spending the money get stronger or weaker if evidence comes out that this project is going to be so amazing that its existence will raise the value of real estate citywide? I think the case clearly gets stronger. If it’s true, then instead of looking at a high cost to the taxpayers, you’re actually looking at a revenue windfall that will let the government cut property taxes.

Red: I wonder if you've read Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Micheals’ new book “No Politics but Class Politics,” and if you did, what were your impressions?

Side note: I highly recommend it. I especially appreciated the chapter (by Reed Jr) about the Rachel Dolezal incident; It's worth the price of admission.

I like both authors and am embarrassed to admit that I just didn’t realize the book was out yet. I’ll check it out.

Broadly speaking, I would say that insofar as one frames this as a reductive “identity politics or class politics?” debate, I am heavily inclined to side with class politics. But I also think the concept of “class politics” embeds much more of a zero-sum worldview than is appropriate. Speeding vaccine development or making infrastructure projects more cost-effective or reducing the deadweight loss due to overregulation of housing are ways to make life better quite broadly, and that’s an important goal.

Liz: Going to try and word this delicately: my family owns guns. If we could push a button tomorrow to get rid of the second amendment and confiscate all guns, we would, but for obvious reasons that’s not happening.

If we can’t sufficiently regulate, is the better way to reduce gun violence to fight the culture war by insisting on a more productive gun culture around, say, emergency/crisis skills (hunting, medical treatment, basic self-defense, climate preparation) than just poking holes in the apocalyptic antigovernment cosplay on the right?

I don’t really know that there is, because at the end of the day, the main problems don’t really seem to me to stem from anything related to improper training or use of legal guns. The big issues with widespread legal gun ownership in America are:

    Having guns around the house meaningfully increases the odds of suicide.

    Accidents happen, and accidents that happen with guns are more likely to be deadly than other kinds of accidents.

    Legal gun get diverted into the crime gun market via theft and secondary sale. 

These are all good reasons to think that reducing the number of guns that law-abiding people own would have a positive impact on American public health and crime. But they just don’t relate that closely to the typical gun owner using their legal guns in an illegitimate or untoward way. Guns are just dangerous, and the more of them you have around, the more problems you get.

In terms of culture though, I think there’s a big problem downstream from the level of political conflict around guns. Imagine a world in which zero Americans wanted to in any way restrict the ability of an adult American citizen with no criminal convictions on his record to own any kind of gun. And not only did nobody favor any such restrictions, but everyone knew that nobody favored any such restrictions. Well, in a world like that, I think you might be able to build political support for a really strict system of firearm registration, tracking, and ballistics matching such that any time there’s a shooting, the cops could identify which gun shot the bullet and who is the owner of record of the gun. There could be strict penalties for giving your gun to someone else without properly recording the transfer, and some kind of financial liability for losing your gun or letting it get stolen. Those measures would do a lot of good relative to the status quo. But you can’t pass them today, because gun owners believe (accurately) that liberals believe (again, accurately) that going much further than this in restricting gun ownership would have health and crime control benefits — which makes gun owners resist centralized tracking of guns, because such a system could be used to confiscate guns.

mfs: What’s your POV on the “no homework” philosophy for elementary school children?

For basically every skill, doing some kind of structured practice independently is useful, and I don’t see why elementary school math would be any different. Are there cases where schools overburden kids with homework? Sure. All things in moderation, etc. But I think most teachers know what they’re doing in terms of assigning a little out-of-classroom work.

But more broadly, this movement is a good example of the themes I’ve been trying to get at in my Strange Death of Education Reform series. If you went back in time 15 years, all these reformers were saying we need X, Y, and Z to fix the achievement gap. Then you had a lot of normie teachers who maybe heard — perhaps for bad, selfish reasons — from union leadership that X, Y, and Z were bad. And you also had teachers looking at the kids in front of them and saying “give me a break, Mr Education Reform, I’ve got some kids in my class whose parents — usually highly educated themselves or immigrants — are super-focused on school performance and watch their kids like hawks when it comes to homework. Then I’ve got other kids in my class whose parents are total disasters. And I’ve got parents in the middle who are trying their best but are super-busy because they have no partner or a difficult work situation. There’s nothing that I, personally, can do in my classroom to change the fact that all these out-of-school issues are going to lead to huge differences in outcomes.”

What should have happened was some pulling back from the over-promising on the achievement gap, combined with a renewed focus on the reform policy ideas that made sense. But what happened instead was a lot of insistence that anyone raising these concerns was racist or covering for bad teachers.

That fed a backlash, which created the current dynamic where some people say there shouldn’t be homework because it’s bad for equity — in essence insisting that we level down rather than just temper our expectations about what schools can achieve while still asking them to be organized as effectively as they can be.

Alec Arellano: Charles Fain Lehman and Ross Douthat recently wrote detailed and wonky essays about how marijuana legalization was a mistake. What do you think about their arguments, and the issue more broadly?

I am trying to get a better handle on some of the issues related to increased potency and potential linkages to schizophrenia, so my thinking on this question is currently somewhat unsettled. But I do think two things are clear:

    Any coherent approach to substance abuse issues should include higher taxes and stricter rules for alcohol.

    Inconveniently for the hopes of legalizers, to have a regulated and taxed market in recreational marijuana that functions, you need to keep enforcing the rules against illegal marijuana. 

This second point is a bummer, because part of the case for marijuana legalization is that expending law enforcement resources on trying to arrest and incarcerate marijuana dealers should be a pretty low-priority use of time and money. But unless you want the market flooded with super-cheap, untaxed, unlicensed pot, you need to enforce the rules to protect the legal sellers from being undercut. Which means that even legalizing marijuana doesn’t mean an end to marijuana enforcement.

But that I think is less a fact about marijuana and more a fact about sloppiness in some aspects of anti-carceral thinking. Unless you’re going to embrace anarchy, even “legalization” doesn’t mean an end to rules. Where gambling is legal, there are lots of rules about who can operate a casino and under what terms. Restaurants are legal in every state, but there are lots of rules about restaurants. If you try to open a restaurant in a place where that’s against the zoning, you’ll be shut down. If you break the health rules, you’ll be shut down. If you completely defy those orders, you could end up in jail. In practice, almost nobody is arrested for violating restaurant regulations, but that’s because compliance is high — you don’t have many people trying to operate illegal underground restaurants.

With pot, it’s harder because there are established networks of illegal marijuana dealers. Those don’t just vanish because you make pot legal, and as long as you’re trying to tax legal pot (which you should) there’s a niche for an illegal alternative. So in the short-term at least, creating a functional legal market might require more enforcement activity against illegal cannabis, not less.

Tom: If you were advising a college student with politics similar to but slightly right of yours — perhaps resembling the politics of an Andrew Sullivan (i.e. well-intentioned, intellectually rigorous, and strongly opposed to wokeness) — and who aspired to enter politics, would you recommend that they do so as a Democrat or a Republican? In other words, in which party do you think they could have more success and more impact?

It’s hard to advise a purely hypothetical person, but I do think that a cross-pressured young person interested in a political career should think long and hard about becoming a Republican.

The main thing is that the bench of young, educated Republicans is so much shallower, even as the electoral system is at least somewhat biased in favor of the GOP. Your odds of rising relatively rapidly to a position of influence are much higher on the right. Now, the flip side is that if you’re a man, your odds of getting a date are quite a bit worse if you go Republican.

Nik Gupta: How did we get here on the debt ceiling? I tend to be on team establishment squish, but everyone on the internet, from the most moderate to econ twitter to the hardcore socialists are saying “we were making noise about the debt ceiling for a decade to help you get ready for a day like this,” and they are basically right.

I think a lot of top Democrats came away from the 2011 experience with the view that ultimately the whole showdown played to their advantage, and thus on some level welcomed a renewed showdown with the GOP.

That’s why they gave Trump basically clean debt ceiling increases rather than pushing for abolition. That’s why they didn’t want to surrender anything of substance to Manchin in exchange for getting him to abolish the debt ceiling in 2021. And that’s why Biden didn’t want to take the political hit for breaking out ideas like premium bonds and platinum coins. I actually think if you look back you can see why, ex ante, they thought that this was likely to work out well — that McCarthy would probably fail to keep his caucus together or would step on the rake of Medicare cuts. But it was reckless and risky and it didn’t work out.

Estate of Bob Saget: Is Karen a racial slur?

I think it’s more misogyny than anything else, lightly laundered through a racial lens.

FrigidWind: Many municipalities are too small for effective governance and it shows. Having many small police departments (for example) means they aren’t going to be very well trained or overseen. What can be done to encourage consolidation?

I think the idea that states need to be divided into counties, which are in turn divided into towns doesn’t make sense. There should be one layer of local government below the state. If you think counties are too big a division (or more plausibly, that some existing counties are too big) the solution is to split them into smaller counties, not to subdivide them into nested layers of intermediate government.

ReedM: I just bought a used car from a dealership and it was pretty miserable experience. Why do you think there hasn't been more of a push to allow car manufacturers to sell directly to consumers? It doesn't seem like the car dealership lobby could be thaaat strong (especially compared to home owners associations or other areas of regulatory capture)

No, it really is that strong.

There’s a very widespread misperception that the biggest companies have the most clout in politics, when actually highly fragmented industries like auto dealers have more clout as a collective. Just a small example is that when congress was putting the Dodd-Frank financial regulation overhaul together, Elizabeth Warren rolled the entire financial services industry and got her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created. But to round up the votes in congress, she had to swallow an exemption from CFPB oversight for auto loans because the car dealerships had the clout to demand that.

The key to dealership strength is that there’s a dealership owner (or several) in every district, and they are rooted in the local community — often involved in sponsoring sports teams, visible on local television news, and generally playing a major role as a local influencer. People feel sentimental about local businesses. Republicans like free markets but they love businessmen, so if businessmen want to back an anti-market policy, Republicans are inclined to agree. Democrats are more skeptical of businessmen but less enthusiastic about markets, so it lands in the same place.

Andy: I'm not on Twitter or other social media very much, and I guess I missed this. Not sure there is a mailbag question here, other than I wonder how you are able to keep your cool in a social media world full of raging assholes.

I wish there was less psychotic behavior on social media, because the truth is that I’m not always able to keep my cool, even though I don’t like losing my cool. At the same time, the fact is, I have a wife and a son and we have a great business together and I get to write about things I’m interested in and talk to interesting people, so I feel pretty lucky.

The thing that I want to put out there in the world, though, is that I think it’s a serious mistake to believe that “acting like an asshole on Twitter” is a form of constructive political action. There is a certain pleasure to be had in aggressive speech, violent ideation, fantasizing about the humiliation of your enemies, or whatever else. But telling yourself that this is a way to advance important political causes is self-indulgent and delusional. Acting like an asshole alienates people and makes you look like an asshole.

I’ve said this before, but the fundamental problem with social media is that it’s social but it’s also media. There is a place in life for blowing off steam with your friends at the bar (social) and there is a place in life for writing a newspaper op-ed to try to convince a broad public of something (media), but these are very different things. I always encourage people to try to consider adopting more of a Mindful Posting approach to life, in which you treat social media more like media and you actually meet up with your actual friends at an actual bar if you want to talk shit and blow off steam.

Alan Thiessen: Why does the U.S. economy perform so much better under Democratic presidents than under Republican ones? Why don’t wealthy individuals and corporations, whose wealth depends more on economic growth than on tax rates, notice this and consistently support Democratic candidates?

I think the direction of causation is probably that the public really does not want to see policy change. The thing they hate about Republicans is that Republicans favor policy change in a conservative direction, while the thing they hate about Democrats is that Democrats favor policy change in a liberal direction. But because the conservative minority of the mass public is larger than the liberal minority and because Republicans seem a lot more clownish and unserious about public policy, the default is to prefer Republicans as the lesser of two evils.

When bad times hit, that flips, and voters call in the Democrats. So the Democrats end up with a much better track-record because they start from business cycle low points.

Dan: Joe Biden calls you tomorrow and begs you to join the White House. Which position are you taking? Pretend it's currently unoccupied.

My pitch is to do a new job, Assistant to the President for Posting, where my main job is just to tweet.

Donald Trump, of course, served as his own poster-in-chief, and then for Biden’s first two years, Ron Klain de facto did this while serving as White House Chief of Staff. Right now, Jeff Zients tweets occasionally and of course Joe Biden maintains an official Twitter presence. But both Trump and Klain were genuine posters, and everyone understood their tweets to be “authentic” (to the extent that means anything) social media engagement in a way that Biden’s feed is not. And I think it was a useful function for Klain to play. But it would be crazy to try to force Zients to take time away from his job to contort himself into the personality of a Twitter enthusiast. I could do it, though.

I also have an idea for the White House to create a first-party podcast where every week some administration official whose work is far removed from the white hot political controversies of the day comes on to talk about something interesting they’re working on. It’s really hard to pitch reporters on earnest stories about low-conflict ideas for making people’s lives better, but there is a non-zero level of public interest in this kind of thing and potentially large benefits to publicizing it more. I bet I could do a good job hosting something like that.

But in terms of the real work that the current White House staff does, I’d be terrible at all those jobs.

Chris O.: Any thoughts on Disney sacking Nate Silver only to replace him with G. Elliott Morris (albeit with a significantly reduced staff)? Is this just one more example of this difficulty of making a go of it in the current media landscape or is there something else going on? Why sack Silver but keep the site?

I don’t have inside information on this, but it really seems like 538 was mismanaged from the beginning.

The core thing is that Disney, as far as I can tell, never made any kind of effort to monetize it. Disney is a really big company, and running a mid-sized website is relatively cheap even if you pay its star/anchor/editor a high salary, so it was easy enough for Disney to operate it as a sort of prestige project. But the problem with prestige projects is that things are always shifting, and one day someone looks at the balance and sheet and goes “wtf are we doing here?” And the truth is they weren’t doing anything, business-wise, with the site even though the quality was high. It then seems like they decided they should cut costs, which involved parting ways with Silver. The problem there is that part of the deal Silver made to launch the site was that he — rather than Disney — owns the models.

At that point, I think the right business decision was just to say “we fucked up — we had a strong editorial product here but no business, so we’re going to sunset it and wish everyone well.” But nobody likes admitting error, so Disney is going to let Silver and his models walk while acting like the problems here are on Silver’s side rather than on their own poor business judgment. That requires finding someone who can do basically what Silver did but who they don’t need to pay as much. Morris seems like the right answer there, but it doesn’t address any of the underlying questions like “why are we even in this business?”

Richard Gadsden: You've written a fair amount about how you'd like to improve the Metro in Washington DC and also on improving MARC/VRE commuter rail service in the Washington/Baltimore Metro Area. Do you have any thoughts about improving bus service in and around Washington?

The big blunder with DC area bus service is that the fares aren’t integrated with metro.

Instead, WMATA has the bus set to be strictly cheaper than the Metro — the logic is that the bus is lower-quality than Metro so it ought to be cheaper. The world’s top transit systems tend not to do this because even though the bus is worse than Metro, it’s also more expensive to operate, so it’s perverse to be incentivizing people to ride the 34 (or 70) bus rather than the orange (or green) line. Just as part of fixing MARC/VRE is to integrate fares with Metro, the bus fares should also be integrated. The entire service area ought to be divided into zones and the fare should be a function of the number of zones you travel through — completely agnostic as to the mode of travel and the number of transfers.

Related to that, the primary function of most bus lines should be to feed people to metro stations or to provide circumferential service that complements the radial metro network. You don’t really want to be running lots of radial bus lines all the way through the city. Where radial bus demand is very high, the goal should be to build new metro lines.

Zachary Smith: You recently shared an opinion poll which concluded most Americans see both the right and left as too extreme. As a moderate with an interest in running for office, what am I missing? Why do people like me not jump at this?

There is a tendency for people with more extreme views to be more politically engaged, and/or for people to be most engaged on the topics where their views are most extreme.

As a partial exception to that rule, I should confess that I’m also not that much of an exception — my views on land use are very extreme, they just happen to be poorly aligned with the main axis of American political conflict. So I come across as a rare high-engagement moderate. But most people who are highly engaged in politics have views that are fairly extreme and are aligned with the main axis of political conflict. That means GOP primary voters are more extreme than rank-and-file GOP voters. It means GOP-aligned donors, staffers, and media figures are more extreme than GOP primary voters. And the mirror image is true on the Democratic side. So anyone who’s more moderate and looking to run for office is somewhat swimming against the current.

And as Andrew Hall writes in his great book “Who Wants to Run?” most of the lower rungs of political office don’t pay very well. It’s not like being a state legislator or a county commission member is the worst job in the world or anything, but relative to how difficult it is to obtain these posts, they’re not particularly remunerative so they appeal mostly to ideologues. But getting in on the ground floor of politics like that gives you a big boost in terms of running for higher profile gigs in congress or as a mayor.

David: Building off of your Wemby response last week, in which you said if your team had the first pick, you’d perhaps trade it for assets, if you were handed ownership of team and didn’t still have the responsibilities you got rich off of, would you go full Jerry Jones/owner-GM? Does the more likely success you’d get from someone with experience outweigh that impulse for you? Are bad sports team owners the rich people we’re most pissed at as a society?

I mean, every sports fan thinks he could do way better than the existing owners, right?

I like to think, though, that I wouldn’t meddle too much. What I would try to do is get everyone involved with basketball operations to make explicit quantified forecasts about a mix of basketball and non-basketball questions. A big problem with evaluating sports decision-making is it’s fundamentally hard to tell the difference between a team that’s making smart decisions and a team that’s getting lucky. The Denver Nuggets obviously pulled off a huge coup drafting Nikola Jokic in 2014. But not only did a ton of other teams pass on the best player in that draft, Denver itself didn’t take him until the second round. Maybe it was strategic, or maybe it was good luck. But good luck can take you to the NBA Finals and build your reputation.

My top priority would be to hire a bunch of reasonably experienced basketball guys and then try to promote the ones who demonstrate some ability to predict basketball stuff and get rid of the others. In terms of concrete decision-making, it’s probably better to leave it up to them. I’ve been an NBA fan for a long time and what I’ve learned is I have no particular ability to beat the market with my takes. I’d just want to promote a culture of rigorous thinking and try to get out of people’s way.