I’m heading to Boston — well, not exactly Boston, but near Boston — this weekend for my 20th college reunion. It feels like a real landmark in terms of being old. I hope Jared Kushner shows up!
This week’s good news includes a newly approved RSV vaccine, progress on self-driving taxis is real, the debt ceiling deal may have actually expanded SNAP on net (Galen Metzger called this), and school lunches have gotten better. I’m not 100% sure how this translates into policy, but this is a neat study about the value of informal mentoring of students by teachers.
This is not really good news, but the NYC sitcom map brought a smile to my face — I grew up in the Friends District, though actually closest to the setting of Mad About You, which is not on the map.
lindamc: Do you think that you’re more self-aware than the median person (or at least the median take-slinger)? If so, is that something you have tried to cultivate?
I am self-aware enough to know that I don’t really know how I measure up to the median person.
What I do know is that I’m more self-aware than I used to be, and I’m trying to settle into a Middle-Aged Mindset where I bring self-awareness to the party as an advantage.
City of Trees: So happy that this tweet is getting ratioed into the ground, and if I had a Twitter account for shitposting purposes I'd likely pile on with a simple QT that say “This looks...fine to me.” Some day I hope Matt addresses HOAs in more detail, they just continually irk me.
That tweet was absurd, and there’s a lot of absurd stuff happening in HOA-land.
That said, in some contexts, an HOA or HOA-like legal structure seems necessary. I lived for a while in a large condo building, and while you call the HOA of a big building like that a “condo board,” it’s a similar concept and you need it because the condo has common facilities and needs a mechanism to manage and govern them. Now, you still have problems. Meetings are dominated by people tedious and nosy enough to show up, so you often end up with a regime that tilts more in the direction of busybody-dom than is the authentic preference of the median unit owner. But how else are you going to run a building? Later, Kate and I lived in a two-unit structure that we shared with an upstairs neighbor. The “condo association” was very informal, but still existed as a financial entity that was responsible for the roof, the exterior of the building, etc.
Obviously, single-family homes don’t need to have that kind of structure. But if you’re doing greenfield development — even if it’s greenfield development of detached homes — then creating some common facilities is at least a plausible idea. A large shared pool is a lot cheaper to build than two dozen separate small pools, and some people would find it more fun as well. But if you want to have shared facilities, you need a homeowners’ association.
People ask me about HOAs because they want to know about strict HOA rules vs. YIMBY principles. But I think it’s worth stepping back to the minimum case for HOAs just to see that I really don’t think you’d want to do away with this form entirely. Meanwhile, at least one reason that a lot of HOAs are so psychotic is precisely the sentiment articulated in that tweet and the counter-sentiments articulated by its critics. Some people (sickos) have a strong personal preference for living in a community with strict HOA rules and are willing to pay a premium for it. Others find that sort of thing somewhere between pointless and harmful. So you end up with a certain amount of self-selection.
Personally, I do not approve of this lifestyle.
If I found myself moving out into the Great American Sprawl for whatever reason, I would not seek out an HOA-governed community to live in, would not pay a premium to live in one, and would therefore probably not end up in one. But there are lots of things that people are into that I don’t enjoy. I wouldn’t pay a premium to have access to great skiing or surfing and since lots of people would and do, I will probably never end up living someplace like that.
As a policy matter, do we need to ban or restrict HOAs? You could imagine the great wheel of history turning in a direction where that starts to seem like a good idea. But in the real world, I don’t really see it. In Houston, which famously has the most relaxed land use laws in the country, some people use HOAs to achieve some of what zoning proponents want. Nolan Gray argues that this makes the no-zoning status quo politically sustainable since it lets people who highly desire stability get it without them needing to overturn the whole political economy of the city. This does, obviously, constrain housing supply somewhat relative to a world where the zoning stayed the same and the HOAs went away. But my two key points on this would be:
Clearly Houston has, on net, some of the most elastic housing of any city in the country.
Even though Houston has “no zoning,” large swathes of the city continue to have other types of restrictive land use related to minimum lot size, parking, and FAR rules.
So the aggregate Houston policy mix is pretty good for housing supply and you could make the policy mix even more pro-housing without taking the step of scrapping the HOAs. So for the sake of maintaining an intellectually rigorous, consistent, and easy-to-explain posture, I think it’s best to advocate for strict and clear property rights to real estate: minimal non-safety rules about what you can build, but freedom to enter into contractual relationships with neighbors that create community governance mechanisms.
Badger Blanket: Do you think that there's an underachievement crisis among the children of the elite? I'm a recent college grad who grew up in an affluent, upper middle class neighborhood and it seems every time I catch up with one of the kids from my area, they say that they're bartending, or they left school to “figure things out,” or they're just flat-out living at home. These are the children of doctors and lawyers! They have every opportunity for success, but they seem unwilling to pursue any goal related to accumulating material wealth. Is this a real phenomenon, or do I just have an abnormal peer group? If it is real, what do you think is fueling this trend?
From the vantage point of age 42, I don’t actually think this is a new trend. I grew up in Manhattan and went to a fancy private high school that sent almost everybody off to good colleges, but if you caught us at our five-year reunion in 2004, you would have found the class of 1999 up to a lot of nonsense.
You had people pursuing graduate degrees in fields of study that didn’t sound very remunerative. You had people “figuring things out.” You had a lot of people who, had they come from more modest means, would have just sucked it up and gone to law school. But their dad sucked it up and went to law school and became a rich and miserable lawyer, and they didn’t want to be miserable and dad was rich enough that they had the luxury of just sort of coasting. One asshole at that reunion had a low-paying job working for an obscure political magazine in D.C. As we head toward a 25th reunion, you do have a lot of folks who, in the end, wound up doing something remunerative. And you have folks who are sort of hovering around the artistic and non-profit universes in not-particularly-noteworthy ways but hopefully living happy and rewarding lives. One of my classmates who comes from a very wealthy family ended up, somewhat unexpectedly, running IT for the New York Police Department, and is now running the NYC Department of Sanitation and hoping to introduce the Big Apple to the mysterious technology of the garbage bin.
I think you probably want to look at this kind of downward mobility as a positive thing; it’s a kind of social and cultural recycling process that prevents all the wealth and power from being perennially hoarded in the hands of a few great families. Immigrants often work hard as hell at menial jobs in order to get their kids onto the ladder. Their kids or grandkids have the opportunity to attend selective colleges and go nose-to-the-grindstone in terms of seeking out and achieving financial success. But then their kids maybe take things more easy. Ideally, they come up with something civically useful to do.
Every once in a while, of course, the system breaks down and the guy working for the obscure nonprofit political magazine ends up launching a Substack that turns out to be surprisingly lucrative.
Zack Reuss: In One Billion Americans you talk about how a lot of parenting best practices are just selection effects for HSE status parents.
Is this also true about physical punishment? Has anyone actually tried to look at this controlling for SES?
Like most high-SES parents in the contemporary United States, I am against corporal punishment and we don’t use it in our family.
However, I share the concern that the quality of the research base on this is not as good as one would hope. There are a lot of studies showing better outcomes for non-spanked kids, but many of them don’t properly control for the SES confounds and other related matters. That said, there is also neurological evidence that looks directly at the biophysical feedback mechanisms and suggests that spanking is bad. There is also good evidence that parents who spank vary their own spanking behavior for reasons other than the child’s behavior, suggesting that even if some theoretically optimal spanking regime is possible, it’s not what is generally happening in practice. This 2012 research overview cites a lot of studies, including several with plausible research designs for detecting causation, and none of them show benefits of spanking while a bunch show the harms. Here’s a meta-analysis that says the same thing. Emily Oster is a stickler for research quality, and in “Cribsheet” she reaches the same conclusion and urges against physical punishment.
I do think some people have taken this too far and adopted a worldview that emphasizes incredibly lax “gentle” parenting where the kids end up bossing the parents around. I don’t think that’s a good idea at all. Most kids respond well to a rule-based and disciplined environment. I think this primer from Jaqueline Nesi about operant conditioning and disciplining young kids is really good.
I personally struggle sometimes to fully implement these precepts, because to do it really well, you have to maintain total calm which is honestly not my strong suit in life. But the principles she outlines are sound, and they are broadly speaking what our family tries to live by.
Tom: 10 percent of K-12 students nationwide attend private schools, but nearly 40 percent of the student body at elite universities attended private schools. Additionally, private school attendees seem to be disproportionately represented in elite institutions and professions adjacent to the humanities such as journalism, even more than they are in elite institutions and professions in general. Why do you think this is, and do you think that we speak enough about or do enough to correct for private school privilege?
Per the above two posts, I think “private school privilege” mostly reflects parental wealth and socioeconomic status. When you look at how much private school costs, my guess is that spending $50,000 a year on 14 years’ worth of education at St. Albans is actually a very lossy way of transmitting intergenerational wealth. The typical graduate of a school like that is receiving a lot of benefits from having rich parents, but they’d be better off attending a good neighborhood public school and getting the cash + compound interest.
Then in terms of representation in “elite institutions and professions adjacent to the humanities such as journalism,” that’s downward mobility at work.
Michael Adelman: Are you as excited as I am about Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez? Her vote and statement against college debt relief got some attention this week - but I think it's just the kind of attention Democrats need, and other members in frontline districts should be falling over each other to join her. Her messaging includes a lot of (correct!) criticism of college-educated elites juxtaposed with an emphasis on the dignity of real, honest blue collar work, and she has the background to be a credible messenger. How do we help raise her profile and find more candidates with her style?
I like her a lot — I think she, Jared Golden, and Mary Peltola are great models of an updated brand of back-to-basics Democratic Party populism. The thing they get is that doing working-class pocketbook economics requires you to actually pay attention to the specific policies at hand and see what’s going to serve people’s economic interests.
Sometimes that is the left-wing position. But other times it isn’t! You don’t want to just be across-the-board “moderate” (i.e., do whatever lobbyists want), but you also don’t want to line up 100% of the time with Elizabeth Warren, even on the fully economic issues.
David: Early on in 1BA(introduction xvii) you write “We shouldn’t recklessly throw the borders open to just anyone who happens to show up…”.
From a non-politics POV what objections do you have to an open-borders or near open-borders policy?
I don’t think it’s tenable in a modern labor market or welfare state to have the kind of immigration regime the U.S. had back in the 19th century, especially as travel logistics have gotten easier.
That said, you could imagine an immigration regime that didn’t depend nearly so much on border controls. If we had an employment verification system that worked really well, you could let people enter and exit the country very freely with the knowledge that getting a work permit would be subject to more controls. The United States already has visa waiver deals with lots of foreign countries, primarily ones whose residents we don’t think would want to come here to work under the table, and that’s very nice and convenient for everyone.
But I also don’t think you can just separate objections neatly into “politics” and “non-politics.” People who oppose immigration because it will increase traffic jams are wrong, normatively. If you handled traffic jams with congestion pricing, that would be a positive-sum change that leaves most people better off. And having implemented that reform, the traffic jam objection to immigrants would go away. But absent better traffic management (which is a political problem), it is factually correct that unlimited volumes of immigration would lead to bad congestion problems. Similarly, having lots of immigrants come live in D.C. is something that I think would be great. But having lots of immigrants come sleep in tents on the streets of D.C. would be pretty bad. The solution isn’t to keep immigrants out, it’s to improve housing policy. You have to steadily grind away at all the interconnected issues, taking feasible wins where you can find them and continuing to sell the vision.
Part of the solution is smart, managed pathways to increasing migration. J.D. Vance was complaining the other day that immigration pushes up housing costs. But he represents Ohio, which is suffering from population loss. Raising housing demand in places that are currently shrinking — as Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron, Dayton, and Akron all are — would be good. That’s why OBA has a proposal to add place-based visas to let communities who need more people opt in to having them.
Liam Scott: Is there any reason to expect the government to get debt under control? The debt-to-GDP ratio has consistently risen over the last 40 years. To keep debt-to-GDP in check, you would need to cut spending and/or increase GDP. The primary axis of political alignment is strikingly less economic than it was in the past when politics was done in smoky back rooms outside of public view. The Democratic Party is committed to spending like crazy, and the GOP is committed to lowering taxes, and their base is old enough that they will never do the right thing and reform Social Security and Medicare. Is there any reason to expect this to change and allow the government to decrease debt, or are we destined for a world where half of the government is just paying interest?
I think this kind of doomerism is overstated. If you look at the whole history of federal debt service costs relative to GDP, you see that things did get really bad in the mid-Reagan years and we struggled for a while. But there were bipartisan deficit-reducing deals in 1986 and 1990, and then with a partisan deficit reduction bill in 1993, economic growth went up and the problem was greatly diminished. Then throughout the 21st century, there was a lot of behavior that fiscal hawks scolded as irresponsible, but interest rates were persistently low and debt service was easy.
The actual problem only re-emerged this year when interest rates started to go up — and lo and behold, we just got a bipartisan deficit reduction bill.
In the scheme of things, it’s a very modest deficit reduction bill. But I think two things could happen from here. One is that interest rates might stay high-ish for a while, in which case there will be more political pressure to do deficit reduction. Alternatively, I think it’s reasonably likely that once households finish spending down their excess savings, we’re going to see interest rates and inflation collapse and the deficit will seem less pressing again. But the policy mechanisms for deficit reduction are not that hard to grasp, and the idea that it’s politically infeasible seems mistaken to me. It was infeasible during a long span when interest rates were low, so the upside to deficit reduction was small.
Arjun Mokha: Quixotic Anti-inflationary idea. So Australia's superannuation program is essentially a mandated savings program so would a shock introduction of 2-3% sap enough demand to get people to spend less, but also convince people they have money by putting it in a savings account?
I think it’s a totally good idea, but here the politics really are difficult because I think 90% of people would find the idea confusing. But this is a cousin of Simon and Milan’s proposal for a cyclically varying tax to control inflation.
Incidentally, this was one of my big analytic errors about Covid relief. I thought that if prices started to rise in response to over-stimulus, most people would say “fuck you, I’m not paying that much for a table,” restrain their consumption, and just save more. That would mean a burst of inflation as we pulled out of the pandemic, but a pretty self-limiting one. You might even call it “transitory.” But it turned out that people were pretty committed to sustaining discretionary consumption, even in the face of price hikes as long as they had the money.
Ds: With the current concerns (about which you tweet from time to time) regarding AI and the “skynet”/doom concerns, I’m thinking back about 20 years. The hype was that Nanotechnology was supposedly about to take hold - we’d soon have carbon nanotubes revolutionizing material science and enabling us to have space elevators, for example. But the downside potential was envisions as escaped nanobots turning the world to gray goo. The hype/apocalypse pattern seems similar. I would note that we don’t have nanotube space elevators nor a world consumed by nanobots. So is the AI hype/apocalypse pattern the same or different?
I don’t personally recall a nanotech hype cycle 20 years ago, so I can’t speak to that.
In terms of AI, I think the current conversation is kind of running two different debates together. One is an argument as to whether “superintelligence” — something whose cognitive abilities are to humans as humans are to chimpanzees or squirrels — would be potentially dangerous to human life. I think the people who think the answer to this is “no” maybe haven’t understood the question correctly. There’s a reason there are no other hominids on the planet.
The other debate, which is closer to the spirit of your question about a hype/apocalypse pattern, is whether that kind of superintelligence is likely or possible.
Right now, GPT-4 and Midjourney and other AI products do stuff that’s pretty impressive. I sometimes drift into thinking that the image generators are much more impressive than the text ones, but then I remember that’s probably wrong. The issue is that I personally am much better than the average human at writing and much worse than the average human at drawing. So an AI image generator lets me make drawings that I could never in a million years do, while GPT-4 is fast but the work product strikes me as schlocky and unimpressive. This is just to say that current AI models are useful tools for certain people in certain contexts, but they can’t accomplish things that are wildly beyond the capacity of human beings. People, by contrast, can do stuff that chimps can’t do. We can do stuff that chimps can’t conceive of doing. One view is, look, today’s AI is much more impressive than the AI of three years ago and everyone knows computers get more powerful over time. So over time, the AI will get better thanks to Moore’s Law, and that better AI will probably develop better-optimized software and become even better and then eventually you end up with your superintelligence. Another view is that’s not a realistic picture of GPU hardware development and a plateau is likely.
Another view is — are we sure it’s actually possible for anything to be so smart as to stand in the same relation to humans as we stand to chimps? Though of course, a chimp would’ve said that human-level intelligence was impossible.
Bennie: According to US Census data, the average commute time (one way) in the dense, transit intensive New York City area is 38 minutes vs. 32 minutes for the sprawling, car-crazy Los Angeles area. How does this square with advocacy of the "urbanist" model?
I feel like every week I get some version of the question “Matt, you want to make everyone live in a dense walkable city, and yet here is a reason why we should not make everyone live in a dense walkable city — why do you run around insisting that everyone should live in a dense walkable city?”
And every week the answer is the same: “It should be legal to build denser housing types if you want to, and people should be allowed to live in the denser housing that you built if they want to.” That’s it. That’s the proposal.
Zachary Smith: Given the public health impact in the US (and increasingly around the world), why do you think there hasn’t been tobacco-style public health campaigns about the consequences of obesity? How much of it has to do with obesity also impacting children (vs tobacco being an “adult problem”)?
The anti-smoking campaign had incredibly large public health benefits over time, overwhelmingly in the form of benefits to smokers.
But I think if you look at how those campaigns unfolded, the “hook” for making policy was very often concerned with secondhand smoke. A lot of these concerns, to the best of my understanding, were somewhat overstated scientifically. It wasn’t really true, in other words, that ending smoking in bars created huge health gains for non-smoking bartenders. But the health gains were non-zero, and that provided a rationale for addressing it as a labor market regulation. Smoking got pushed out of airplanes, out of offices, out of restaurants and bars and coffee shops all because of the impact of smoke on non-smokers. And obviously whatever the specific health damage of secondhand smoke is, smoke is kind of gross and smelly so non-smokers were genuinely motivated to secure more smoke-free spaces for themselves. Obesity is much more of a case of pure paternalism, which is tougher.
Jeff: What is your hottest Marrianne Williamson take? How about your hottest RFK jr take?
I don’t really have a hot Marianne Williamson take, but I think RFK Jr. would be more electable than Biden.
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