Maximilian I, Emperor of the Mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

19 - 25 minutes

We’re going up to Maine next week for a big family vacation — we’ll keep producing content, but for the sake of traditional values, we are going to take a rare day off and not run a new post on Wednesday, August 23.

In terms of good news, I think it’s cool that Inflation Reduction Act investments are primarily flowing to poorer and less educated communities. This looks like a potential breakthrough in the supply of organs for transplant. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model is currently projecting incredibly strong real growth this quarter. There’s a new song out from Metric, my favorite band. Last but not least, can’t head to Maine without checking out the local news, where it seems like a new space company is going to start launching rockets from a former military base in low-income rural Aroostook County.

Zirkafett: How do you think about “greed” in the discourse (i.e., “the corporations were greedy so we got inflation”, or “Bernie Madoff got away with his ponzi for so long because his victims were greedy”, or “we could all have health care if the rich and corporations stopped being greedy”)? Whenever I hear an invocation of “greed” I tend to lose the plot because “greed” seems an imprecise (and perhaps obfuscatory) stand-in for something else, though I’m not sure what.

Perhaps a different question: Do you think greed qua greed is the proper object of politics? Of policy? Of moral concern?

As I’ve written a bunch of times, I don’t think it makes sense to broadly condemn corporations as “greedy” for charging market-clearing prices during a time of high aggregate demand. There are certainly times when companies make what at least feel like unethical decisions. And while there’s probably not enough room in the Mailbag to really dig into the differences, I do think taking advantage of short-term emergencies (like a hardware store that jacks up prices of flashlights during a blackout) is bad.

But at the end of the day, a business is going to respond to incentives and so to some extent there’s no sense in getting outraged when that’s what they do. On another level, though, precisely because businesses respond to incentives you might thing it’s vital to get outraged. If managers think “well, if we price gouge during this blackout that will generate tons of bad publicity for us and not be worth it,” then their incentive is to ration flashlights rather than charging market-clearing prices, and that’s probably a better outcome for everyone. So it’s important to actually do the moralistic condemnation precisely in order to shift the incentives.

The place where I think greed is a really vital concept, though, comes in bigger-picture decision making.

Kate and I like money, and we are running a business here. But we also have integrity. We’re not going to start publishing articles that we think are wrong or harmful just to make more money. That would be greedy. We want to make smart decisions about our headlines, about where the paywalls are located, about when we do discounts, about how we do promotions, and about other things that are related to maximizing revenue. And of course business considerations are relevant to the larger editorial strategy. But first and foremost, the editorial strategy needs to have integrity. We are making a good living here, and I think it would be really wrong (greedy) for us to compromise that for the sake of money.

And I think it would be good for society to promulgate more of an ethic of anti-greed in that sense.

If you go back and look at Donald Trump before he was a politician, a lot of what he did was avaricious. He wasn’t just making money by doing good real estate development projects. He was ripping people off with things like Trump University or by stiffing his subcontractors. He briefly ran a publicly traded company, the whole purpose of which was for him to fleece his own shareholders for personal profit. I think it is a big problem with contemporary American society that in an era dominated by Milton Friedman’s dictum that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” the distinction between a guy who gets rich selling a quality product at a price people are happy to pay and a guy who gets rich running scams has completely collapsed. And to me, greed is a relevant concept there. Making a product people like is good. Charging the price at which supply and demand balance can be extremely lucrative, but it’s also in most circumstances a pretty sensible way to allocate who gets the product. And that’s actually pretty different from behaving like a greedy person with no integrity.

Thomas: Is there a stupider Twitter Discourse than the shoplifting discourse that comes up every now and then? It sure seems like “retail theft is fine, actually” is a very dumb look for the left and one that will turn off voters, and that shoplifting and vehicle burglaries are how the median voter experiences “crime” which makes it a dangerous thing to downplay.

It’s definitely dumb. At the same time, I would urge everyone to draw a distinction between “dumb Twitter discourse promulgated by real actors in the political system” and “dumb shit said by total randos.”

The other day on the right, I saw someone doing a whole bit about how if a man ever changes his baby’s diapers, that’s a sign of deep problems in the marriage.

To me, that sounds insane and it completely undermines other more valid social con ideas, like “on average men and women are different” or “kids are normally better off with two parents.” No political movement is going to be able to enforce ironclad social media discipline, though, so the best you can hope for is to not have your advocacy groups, politicians, and high-level pundits out there saying insane shit.

Estate of Bob Saget: How much would the Saudis need to offer you to move there?

They’ve got to make me an offer first, that’s how you negotiate. Then we’re going to have to shop around. Kate used to live in the UAE, and I know has a lot of affection for Abu Dhabi, so maybe they’d beat the Saudis.

Greg S: In 1942, according to the American Institute of Public Opinion, 93% of Americans thought the country was doing the right thing by "moving Japanese aliens (those who are not citizens) away from the Pacific coast" and 59% thought American citizens of Japanese descent should be moved as well. Today Japanese internment is properly seen as an enormous moral crime.

Should legislators who knew better but wanted to remain in office to do good and practical things looked at those numbers and stayed quiet? How does Yglesias Thought on wielding power strategically intersect with issues of strong moral importance?

These are the bullets that nobody wants to bite. But I think about a guy like veteran congressman Emanuel Celler who joined the House in the 1922 midterms. From that perch, he argued unsuccessfully against the big immigration crackdown of the 1920s. He tried, again unsuccessfully, to get more Jewish refugees admitted in the 1930s.

But then in the 1950s, he successfully advocated for Hawaii statehood over the objections of various racists. As chair of the House Judiciary Committee, he was not the main actor on civil rights legislation — the Senate was the tougher fight — but he was intimately involved in the drafting of all the various civil rights bills of the 1950s and 1960s. He’s also the co-author of the Hart-Celler immigration law from 1964, which, while conceptually the descendent of his 1920s fights against efforts to restrict migration from Eastern Europe, in practice mostly served to open the doors to immigration from Asia.

I can’t find any record of what Celler said or did about internment, but given his unblemished record of opposition to xenophobia and advocacy for Asian American interests, it seems likely to me that he was privately opposed but didn’t want to stick his neck out. Was that cowardly? Yes. Was it the wrong thing to do? I don’t know. I think the calculus that the country would be better off with a strongly pro-immigration, anti-racist House member from New York continuing to gain seniority and run the judiciary committee rather than it falling to some Dixiecrat was pretty compelling. After all, what would have been accomplished by taking a dive over an issue with lopsided public opinion, one that wasn’t in House jurisdiction?

I like to joke that doing the right thing is overrated, but I guess to be serious about it, you need to do some calculus about the odds of success.

You look at a guy like Pete Meijer who blew up his congressional career by voting to impeach Donald Trump. In some ways, that’s too bad. He’s a lot more thoughtful about public policy than your average Republican, and I can see the case that we’d be better off if he’d just kept his head down and acted like Secretly Reasonable Todd Young. On the other hand, the situation as of January/February 2021 was actually pretty unsettled. Mitch McConnell seemed to be trying to knife Trump. The Senate Republicans who voted to convict didn’t end up detonating their careers. Going against Trump was a longshot, but it seems to me that it wasn’t obviously doomed. That was a good time to take a principled stand.

Secret Squirrel: What does Matt think the world would be like if Napoleon III's various schemes had succeeded?

I think the consensus among historians at the moment is that the Mexican Empire project wasn’t crazy and almost succeeded (the Battle of Puebla could have gone either way, and the American Civil War ended a few months too soon for Emperor Maximillian). If Mexico became a French dependency and France had prevented German unification, wouldn’t France, not Britain, have been the #1 world power at the turn of the twentieth century? Would that reality's version of WWI have been fought between the USA and France?

Let me say at the top that I enjoyed Alan Strauss-Schom’s biography “The Shadow Emperor: A Biography of Napoleon III,” and I also learned a decent amount about Napoleon III in college when I took a seminar Patrice Higonnet taught while he was working on his book about Paris during the long 19th century. I don’t want to say he’s “underrated,” exactly, so much as an interesting character who Americans don’t know much about — I think there are some interesting parallels to Trump in his rise to political power, for example.

In terms of the question, while I accept the premise that the Mexican Empire gambit could have worked, I’m not sure what follows from this.

The deal here is that Maximilian I was the younger brother of the Habsburg emperor, and though he initially had some high-ranking posts in his brother’s government, he got fired from those gigs. So a plan was hatched to establish him as Emperor of Mexico, supported by conservative forces inside Mexico itself and by the nation of France abroad. I do think it’s plausible that this could have more or less worked out; if France had won the Battle of Puebla in 1862, Maximilian’s regime might have been stable enough by the end of the American Civil War that the U.S. was willing to recognize it.

But I’m a little skeptical that success in establishing a French proxy state in Mexico would have accomplished very much that was actually useful for France — we’d have ended up with a big Franco-American rivalry across the Caribbean Basin that would have been costly for both countries.

To me the bigger hypothetical here is German Unification. Napoleon III just completely mishandled this situation. First, when Prussia went to war with Austria and most of the independent German states, he stayed out of things, expecting Prussia to lose. Then when Prussia won, he antagonized by trying to demand territorial concessions. Then when Bismarck tried to bait France into launching a war with Prussia, Napoleon underestimated them again and fell into the trap. It seems likely that if he’d seen French interests more clearly, he could have backed Austria and insisted on the continued independence of Saxony and the Southern German states.

I don’t think this necessarily means France is the #1 world power by the turn of the century, but it does probably mean that the whole alignment of European politics is different. You’d have had Austria allied with France against Prussia rather than aligned with Germany. Which in turn probably means that Prussia allies with Russia. In that scenario, the Anglo-Russian Convention never happens and Britain and Russia continue to be at odds over Persia and Central Asia. This could potentially have led to a version of World War I breaking out where Prussia, Russia, and Italy are fighting against France, Austria, Britain, and the small German states. If Franco-American tensions in the Caribbean are still running high, maybe the United States ends up joining the war on the Russo-Prussian side — fighting for freedom of the seas against British blockade efforts.

Just some guy: I guess I'll kind of just ask you the question proposed in your column this morning as a two part question.

1. Do you think it would be a net positive for Americans to get married more and become more religiously involved?

2. If your answer to the first question is yes, are there any policies that you think would actually accomplish this?

The religion one is tricky. Religious people are happier and religious observance seems to have a lot of benefits. And I think it’s easy to see why sincerely held belief in the existence of a higher power who commands ethical behavior and will reward or punish us based on that could be beneficial for society. At the same time, I think one of the main reasons for the decline of religious observance is that it’s not true that there is a higher power who commands ethical behavior and will reward or punish us. The cat, to an extent, is out of the bag on this one, and the information has been filtering down from educated elites for some time.

Marriage is different and I do think there are a bunch of nudges around the margin — from eliminating marriage penalties in the welfare state to more efforts to promote a fun, low-cost “public option” for weddings — that could make a difference. But I do feel like you’re probably rolling up a pretty steep hill in terms of the social forces leading to the decline of marriage. That said, I am looking forward to Melissa Kearney’s book “Two Parent Privilege” coming out this fall and Brad Wilcox’s “Get Married” coming out next February. They might have convincing ideas.

Kc77: What is the most positive impact of the Democratic Party’s shift leftward in the last decade?

The American Rescue Plan was flawed in a bunch of ways, but the really firm commitment to full employment that it represented is great and a huge improvement on where we were in the Obama administration.

I said this in an interview elsewhere but I should say it here, too: I think the whole problem is that Democratic Party elites decided that Obama made lots and lots of errors when he actually just made one big error. It’s not just that ARRA was smaller than optimal, it’s that for a whole stretch of 4+ years they kept under-estimating the potential to improve the economy with more stimulative fiscal and monetary policy, and that impacted their approach to a whole bunch of different things that landed on their desk. That was a serious error, but it really was just one error. The Roosevelt Institute idea that the lesson of the Obama years is that we need to abandon “the twin failures of neoliberalism and racial liberalism” strikes me as a huge mistake. The actual lesson is that we need to pay more attention to age-adjusted employment-population ratios and less to the unemployment rate. Contemporary Democrats have learned that lesson and it’s a big change for the better. But they’ve also thrown out too many other ideas.

Paul: Tourist advice time: we're visiting DC with our 8 year old son in October, staying near Logan circle and relying on public transport (including taxis). What unheralded things should we make a point of seeing? Are any of the famous sights - at a pinch - skippable? Where should we eat with a (fairly omnivorous) child.

I think I've said this before, but for better or worse, I do think D.C. tends to be a “what you see is what you get” kind of city from the standpoint of tourist attractions — the big museums on the mall are all good and they all do more or less what they say on the tin. Your family is probably capable of ascertaining its relative level of interest in the American Indian Museum vs the Sackler Gallery.

I normally like to recommend families with kids visit the sculpture garden outside the Hirshhorn Museum but it’s closed for renovation right now. The non-Smithsonian Planet Word is fun for kids, and conveniently located across from a small playground at Franklin Square. I’ll also say that the Portrait Gallery, which is a bit afield from the main hub of museums, is probably underrated and has a courtyard that’s good for kids.

Two casual-but-delicious Logan Circle places that kids might like are Chicken & Whiskey (which serves chicken) and Red Light (Detroit-style pizza). But my eight-year-old, like Scott Pruitt, is a huge fan of Le Diplomate.

Red: I've read some speculation that, should Biden falter, someone from a west coast state, say a governor with very nicely coiffed hair, might step in the breach and run in Biden's stead.

This fills me with dread. California democrats are usually way to the left of normie flyover state dems. I think it would be a terrible idea to elevate this particular person. (though, he does have really nice hair, did I mention that?)

Who would be your choice if not Biden?

There’s no way Gavin Newsom is going to be the Democratic Party nominee in 2024 or 2028 or at any other time — his prominence in this discourse reflects people not knowing what they’re talking about.

In some sense, I think obviously the best ticket for Democrats would involve red state governors — Laura Kelly, Andy Beshear, or Roy Cooper. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana is anti-abortion, which is politically appropriate for his state but is also a rare example of a politician triangulating so much as to be counterproductive in national politics. But any two out of the Kelly/Beshear/Cooper three as the POTUS/VPOTUS nominee would be great. The next tier would be folks like Gretchen Whitmer, Jared Polis, and Josh Shapiro who are governors of swingy Biden states.

John: You recently speculated that Italy and Spain may be less obese with longer life expectancy than the US because they are poorer, but not too poor. How is this complicated by the fact that both countries have higher median wealth per adult than the US? (Source: Table 3-1)

I’m glad I got this question because it illustrates an underrated notion I’ve only occasionally written about: “wealth” is really weird.

The canonical example is that a recent graduate from dental school is going to have dramatically less wealth than the median American, because he’ll have considerable student loan debt and few of any assets. But not only will he have less wealth than the median American, he’ll have less wealth than a homeless person whose wealth is $0. That’s odd. But it’s a reality of the world.

And student loans aren’t the only example here. If we eliminated Social Security tomorrow — every single person’s benefits drop to $0 per month — and in exchange gave each currently retired person a nickel, then wealth would go up. Because being legally entitled to a future stream of Social Security benefits is not wealth, but five cents in your pocket is.

More relevant to the specifics of Spain and Italy, these are countries with very low birth rates and rapidly aging populations. People tend to accumulate more wealth as they age (paying off the mortgage, for example) and then if you have few children, that wealth is efficiently passed between generations when you die. When people say “X country is richer than Y country,” I don’t think they normally mean “X is full of old people who own un-mortgaged homes and nobody has kids.” But living in a $200,000 home that you own free and clear does make you wealthier than a guy who just put 20 percent down on his $750,000 home.

There’s a statistic called Actual Individual Consumption that tries to measure how much stuff people, well, actually consume taking into account taxes, transfers, and in-kind benefits. The source I found on this only did the top 25 countries for highest AIC so Spain didn’t make the cut. But here’s the U.S., Italy, and some places that are in-between.

Now, you can always quibble with this kind of analysis because it inevitably involves a lot of statistical interpolations. But if you go to an Italian person’s house, you’ll see they have somewhat smaller cars, smaller dwellings, and worse appliances than Germans and much smaller than Americans. It’s a very nice country in lots and lots of well-known ways and has many underrated strengths, but the fact is it’s relatively poor.