Kevlar-strength mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

22 - 28 minutes

A couple of programming announcements today: first, Substack is doing a series of Notes AMAs to help build the platform (and have fun), and I’m up on September 27th at noon Eastern / 9 a.m. Pacific. You can register here, and we’ll have a good chat.

For fans of IRL programming, if you live in the Bay Area I am going to do a live fundraising event with State Senator Scott Wiener at 7 p.m. on October 3 at Manny’s (3092 16th Street) in San Francisco. Wiener is the signature champion of the YIMBY cause in the California state legislature, and while he will not be running for Congress this cycle, it’s no secret that he has further political ambitions, and I’d love to see upward mobility for our visionary leaders on these topics. The broader theme is building an agenda for growth and abundance in our blue states, both to improve quality of life on its own terms and to grow the credibility and influence of progressive values.

Hope to meet more of y’all online and IRL soon!

Meanwhile, this week I really want to thank Olivia Rodrigo for releasing an album that’s suited to the musical tastes of 40-something indie rock guys. She’s even wearing a Fiona Apple shirt in this video.

Some other good news — I was glad to see Jeff Ordower from 350.org talking about pivoting to building. Trash bins are really coming to New York City. Automatic Voter Registration is coming to Pennsylvania (note that even though this has become a partisan issue, there’s no particular reason to think it helps Democrats). Possible further innovation on the GLP-1 front. Apple’s anti-tracking default in iOS decreases financial fraud. Great zoning reform proposals from Eric Adams.

Last but not least, scientists put spider genes into silkworms and as a result, they spin fibers “tougher than the Kevlar used in bulletproof vests.” Recall that, by contrast, Spider-Man’s webslinging abilities are an entirely separate technical innovation from his overall spider powers.

Leora: Many healthcare workers I know are drifting towards cadillac care. I know three nurses who have recently left hospital care to give botox injections. Psychologists are heading to boutique, high-paying practices focused on mildly stressed-out SAT takers, not seriously ill people. I have no moral objection to people purchasing whatever elective care they like, but this seems like a worsening misallocation of scarce healthcare resources. Any practical and immediate thoughts on addressing it?

Back in the 1980s, the Reagan administration was facing political pressure to protect the U.S. auto industry, and it ended up coercing Japan into adopting “voluntary” export quotas to limit the number of cars that Toyota, Honda, and Nissan would sell to the United States. In response to that, Toyota decided it needed to find a way to sell more expensive cars, so they invented the Lexus sub-brand and then Acura and Infinity followed in their wake. The same thing happens in cities with excessively strict zoning rules: when you can’t expand supply to meet market demand, you start specializing in the highest-end niche possible and all anyone wants to do is make “luxury” housing.

Because our housing politics is broken and dysfunctional, that’s then set off a series of scrambles trying to force people to build new “affordable” housing. But the right solution is to make housing abundant so we’re not fighting so much about who exactly certain units are for.

In medicine, we’re now seeing something similar. The American population is older, on average, than it was 20 years ago. We’re also richer. Older people have more health care needs, and richer populations grow increasingly interested in investing in discretionary health care services. But rather than increasing the number of newly minted medical doctors to meet the increased demand for health care services, there is a hard cap set by Congress. This cap was mercifully raised in 2021, so we are now due for a small improvement in the situation. But it’s a fundamentally dysfunctional process.

By the same token, we know that American doctors earn a higher salary than German doctors or Portuguese doctors. And if you were in Europe and got sick and went to see the doctor, your friends wouldn’t be like “are you crazy, you got treated by a German doctor?” But we make it extremely difficult for foreign-trained doctors to actually qualify to practice medicine in the United States. Also, many states have an excessively strict scope of practice rules around what nurse practitioners can do — something that needs to be revisited even more urgently in an era when AI is going to greatly enhance the scope of medical knowledge that’s at people’s fingertips.

Long story short, rather than seeing the trend of personnel shifting into concierge medicine as the problem to be solved, we should see it as a symptom of the underlying scarcity problem and address that.

Binya: Is Joe Biden a good President? It seems all I read is whether people think he is too old, with no effort to link this to whether he is an effective President. For the record, I think there's a case he has the best record since FDR: unemployment down from 10% to 3.5% in under 3 years; big investments in infrastructure and climate and science; a bad war ended; and Putin stopped in Ukraine.

“Best record since FDR” seems like an overstatement to me, but I agree he’s been very successful.

For my whole career there’s been a disjuncture between doing the job of being president and playing the role of president on television. George W. Bush was a great Television President, but the actual quality of his decision-making was so bad that it basically destroyed the Republican Party and left Trump to take over the wreckage. Obama wasn’t quite as good at this, but he was very good and made much better decisions. Biden mostly makes good decisions and has accomplished a lot of useful stuff, but he was never someone who seemed like he’d be a good Television President (that’s why he did so badly in the 2008 primary and why people weren’t clamoring for him to run in 2016), and his age has further eroded his efficacy as Television President.

I don’t want to completely dismiss the concerns, because the performative aspects of the presidency genuinely are part of the job — driving a message, defining the terms of the debate, framing the stakes, etc. are all things I don’t think Biden has done very well and that’s a problem. But they are not the most important aspects of the job and he’s done well at the stuff that matters more.

City of Trees: Did you play any sports as a kid or teenager?

And what's your take on youth sports in general? This question came to my mind when I saw you retweet this article about how schools can encourage more students to play sports. Is there anything else you'd endorse beyond what's in that article?

I’m a very unathletic person. I played on a basketball team in middle school but I was no good, and I played a bunch of different sports at a generalist sleep-away camp, but the two things I was best at were the not-really-sports of rifle target shooting and canoeing.

But my son loves soccer, and he’s been playing on a soccer team with a fairly constant group of boys for years now. He’s also a very good swimmer. And I have to say that I find the trend toward very aggressive tracking of young kids onto elite travel teams to be pretty troubling. The system we are hitting on is kind of optimized for the goal of producing the best possible youth athletes. But the social and public health benefits of broad participation in sports don’t actually hinge on optimizing for that, and they are undermined by turning sports participation into something that’s expensive and logistically annoying and hyper-focused on screening. I wish the institutional setup was, from a young age, for everyone to just play for a school team that played against other nearby schools, making the cost/logistical bar to participating as low as possible.

It particularly irks me that we see the academic trends going in the other direction, with more and more emphasis on de-tracking for the sake of being inclusive.

In all walks of life, inclusiveness and the pursuit of excellence are both reasonable values and there is some inherent tension between them. But in terms of the balance of considerations, I think there’s much better reason to err on the side of inclusiveness in terms of youth sports than there is in math education. And yet in practice, we are doing the opposite.

Jake Wegmann: Given the niche you fill within American political thought now, it's interesting to think back and recall that you supported Bernie in the 2020 primary. Have your views on him changed since then? I say this as someone who voted for Warren in my primary (in TX) and now shudder, because while I think she is a great person and a good legislator in a lot of ways, it's also pretty clear that she would have gotten crushed in the general election had she gotten the nomination.

The thing to remember about this piece is that I wrote it in January 2020, before Covid and before George Floyd, when Biden was at or near the bottom of his fortunes.

My idea, which is consistent with what I believe now and what I have always believed, was that Democrats should run against Trump with a message that centers economic concerns and the idea that Trump’s policies are bad, in a concrete tangible way, for a majority of Americans. I thought that Bernie Sanders, of the candidates in the field, was the one most likely to center a material message.

And I thought that a lot of the centrist concerns about Sanders were misguided. Bernie’s primary campaign largely existed in a fantasyland that annoyed political pragmatists, but by that exact same token it was fantasyland and there was no need to sit around worrying that a Sanders administration was going to actually make private health insurance illegal or whatever.

The events that ended up playing out in 2020 played to Biden’s strengths more than Bernie’s, so things worked out well, but that wasn’t knowable at the time. In terms of where my views have actually changed, at the time I wrote the piece I hadn’t done much critical thinking about the progressive climate agenda. I understood that Biden’s climate agenda was on the more moderate side and why, but I didn’t really appreciate at the time that this plan was actually a lot better on the merits than what further-left people were pushing. I also didn’t really appreciate that even though I think Biden’s climate approach is better than Sanders’ and better than the GOP’s, I think he’s actually not as moderate as he should be on this issue. Given that climate (rather than health care) wound up being the center of the Democrats’ agenda, I’m very glad it was Biden in the White House rather than Sanders, whose views on energy issues I think are quite a bit worse.

Joey5Slice: Any reactions to this piece by Josh Marshall?

Summarized briefly, it points out that the leaders of both Russia and Saudi Arabia would strongly prefer Trump over Biden, and working in concert, they have the power to drive significant price increases in international petroleum markets.

Marshall is a little overconfident in his claims about Saudi policy objectives, but I agree with him that this is at least a plausible interpretation of the Saudi approach.

This is one reason I have been urging the Biden administration to really own the fact that U.S. oil production is at record levels and to try to boost production even further. Biden has in place a long-term strategy for reducing U.S. and global oil demand, but that strategy takes time to play out. He also has a foreign policy that involves not acquiescing to Russian conquest of Ukraine. And he has a duty to deliver prosperity to the United States and the free world. Unless there’s a plan to electrify the entire western vehicle fleet in the next 18 months (there is not), the USA needs to try really hard to be a gas station to the free world. It’s no good to wait nine months and then cry if the Saudis try to crash the American economy next summer.

Benson Perry: What's your take on the huge increase in shoplifting in cities like NYC? I feel like I know your stance on general crime enforcement, but curious how it extends to something like shoplifting.

This is a bit of a difficult topic for those of us who like to say things that are correct. Shoplifting isn’t well-measured, so most of the discourse about it is anecdotal. In order to put forward any kind of causal hypothesis, you’d need real statistical information. In general, most of the people trying to anecdotally document shoplifting are people who are trying to document instances of shoplifting happening in progressive jurisdictions in order to make the case that progressive policymakers are at fault. But is that true? How would you tell? You’d want to check and see if shoplifting has gone up in the rare conservative-run cities like OKC or (until the election earlier this year) Jacksonville. But that would require reliable statistics.

A few things I feel reasonably confident about:

    There’s an anti-anti-shoplifting Twitter that insists these incidents are no big deal or all the shoplifting is being done by desperate people trying to feed their starving families, and none of that is correct.

    Shoplifting is at least in part fueled by the ability to resell pilfered consumer packaged goods over Facebook Marketplace and other online platforms, and the FTC ought to try to crack down on there.

    I think we’ve seen learning behavior by criminals, in which it’s long been the policy of most chain retailers that employees shouldn’t physically confront shoplifters, but thanks to social media, more people now know you can get away with stealing stuff in full view of the clerk. We unfortunately can’t squeeze this toothpaste back into the bottle.

    One thing I hear is that “the real problem” is that CVS, Walgreens, etc. are trying to get away with excessively low staffing levels. There’s something to that, but it also underscores the genuine social cost of rampant shoplifting — if it forces businesses to adopt lower-productivity more labor-intensive management strategies, stores will have to close and communities will suffer.

    Social issues are dynamic. If few people are shoplifting, most shoplifters will be “kids up to mischief” who can be discouraged with mild sanctions. But once a community emerges of people who routinely engage in large-scale theft for money, it’s going to take sterner medicine to stop them. 

In general, I think society is under-invested in cameras and other surveillance technology, which keeps getting cheaper even as labor-intensive policing becomes more expensive. It should be the case that the people who get recorded looting stores are found and matched to that surveillance footage and face consequences, even if it’s not possible to stop every shoplifter on the scene. But civic leaders also ought to at least think about whether we should be encouraging third-party or employee intervention, knowing that there are some risks to that. The underlying problem here is that it’s hard to know exactly what costs are worth bearing for the sake of reducing shoplifting if we don’t really have any reliable information on what the trends actually are.

Lorenzo B: What are your thoughts on the city being built in the Bay Area?

I would rather legalize infill but wish them luck with this idea. I personally want to build a new city in the Unorganized Territory of Central Hancock County in Maine.

srynerson: I think a tremendous number of political “psychopathologies” probably occur with roughly equal frequency on both the American left and right, and, to the extent one side has it worse for any particular psychopathology, it's almost always the right. However, I think there is one exception: the denial of the existence of switch voters. I mean, if someone says, “I voted for Romney in '12, but voted for Clinton in '16,” Republicans would denounce that person as a traitor, accuse them of doing it to be popular at cocktail parties, pick up girls, etc., but they would never (IME) claim that person was lying and had really voted for Obama in '12. However, even many “totebag Democrats,” let alone progressives (again, IME), will insist to their last breath that, if someone said they voted for Obama in '12 and then Trump in '16, such a person is a complete liar and it can't possibly be true. This obviously has impacts for political campaigning as you've discussed a number of times before, but do you have any thoughts about why this is (or at least seems to be) more of a left-wing phenomenon than a right-wing one?

There are two ways you can think about this asymmetry.

One is historical. The conservative movement won the battle for control over the Republican Party decisively in the 1980s, so what you see right now is a very conservative party whose conservative leadership has been tested over the years, and has had its ups and downs and its moments of coming to terms with reality. Mitch McConnell is both a true member of the movement and also someone who’s been doing this a long time and is not confused about whether the mass public is fired up about cutting Social Security. On the Democratic side, the Biden administration is really the first time the organized progressive movement has wielded meaningful power, and they do so under the auspices of a moderate president. So they simply act immaturely, denying the existence of tradeoffs and without really accepting responsibility for the political success or failure of the Biden administration because even if Pramila Jayapal’s former chief of staff runs the Office of Presidential Personnel, it’s not their person in the Oval Office.

But the other factor is personal. If you’re a college-educated liberal who lives in a big metro area, then you are likely to personally know Romney-Clinton voters and maybe some GOP loyalists who roll their eyes and groan when you talk about Trump. But you genuinely are not likely to spend much time talking to the kinds of people who voted for Obama despite finding him too liberal on guns and immigration and who eagerly flipped to Trump once the GOP nominated someone who’s squishy on entitlements and hostile to free trade. Those people are out there. I have met them in, if not exactly diners, then barbecue joints in Kerrville, seafood shacks in Bucksport, and even an IHOP in eastern Ohio. But they are not my personal friends or social peers; I didn’t see them at my 20th reunion in college.

Adam: I'm running for school board in an overwhelmingly red community. I'm trying to refocus our district away from the culture wars and toward things that matter like teacher retention and student achievement. Unsurprisingly, a lot of my conversations with voters have revolved around gender issues or books in libraries.

In the vein of pandering to voters, any messaging advice you can offer to signal overt conservatism while keeping the focus away from cultural issues?

I think you need to throw the left under the bus and say you believe in democratic control of the public school system and that decisions on that stuff should reflect the values of the community, not some woke agenda cooked up in education school. But you’re running for school board because you think culture warriors are taking their eyes off the ball in terms of teacher retention and student achievement. You want a back-to-basics regime at the school that asks, as George W. Bush said, “is our children learning?” and keeps a laser focus on that. When you hear conservatives say schools should be teaching math, not gender identity theory, you agree. But then you worry they aren’t always teaching math either or giving teachers the resources they need to do so.

Thomas L Hutcheson: Shouldn’t someone be doing analysis of the efficiency of the incentives in being given by the IRA for the CO2 emissions avoided or atmospheric CO2 removed. I've seen some high numbers but from sources that are opposed to any incentive, so I distrust THEM, but nothing from the “loyal opposition.” In principle we know that the form of the subsidy — for investment instead of zero CO2 emission power generate of actual amounts ofCO2 removed from the atmosphere — is wrong, but principles do not give magnitudes. That requires someone to actually run the numbers incentive by incentive.

This is an underrated topic. American politics is a pendulum and it’s very likely that elements of the IRA will be repealed someday by either a Republican reconciliation bill or as part of some kind of bipartisan deal, and when thinking about those kinds of negotiations, you want to know which parts are most important to defend.

The best way I know to look at this is to consider the Rhodium Group’s estimates of IRA’s climate impact by sector, which shows that the lion’s share of emissions reduction comes from the electricity generation sector. The lion’s share of the uncertainty also comes from this area because of uncertainty about natural gas prices and about the regulatory environment facing clean energy deployment.

Transportation, by contrast, is a much smaller piece of IRA’s impact. If you look at where IRA spends money, the clean electricity provision are about 4.5 times as expensive as the clean fuel and vehicle tax credits. But according to Rhodium’s estimates, the clean electricity provisions provide somewhere between 9 and 50 times as much decarbonization as the transportation provisions. The upshot is that if Biden or some future administration needs to bargain away some of this, it would be much better to make concessions on the EV side than on the electricity generation side.

Now that being said, I don’t think it’s very enlightening to apply this same metric to the industrial piece of IRA. The bet there isn’t so much that IRA is going to lead to cost-effective reductions in industrial emissions.

The bet is that current technology does not give us any cost-effective options for significantly reducing industrial emissions. So we’re going to try to figure something out. It may all be a huge failure, but at the same time I think it’s important to try to push the frontiers of science and technology forward. That’s more comparable to some of the stuff the Obama administration did that kept then-infant Tesla alive (and led to lost money on Solyndra). The bet is about a longer-term payoff, and while we may look back on it as a disaster, I wouldn’t use these projections to judge it harshly on a forward-looking basis. The EV provisions, by contrast, I think are a bit poorly designed because the people most likely to switch to an electric car are people (like me) whose current gasoline consumption is below average rather than people (like my father-in-law) who would generate massive emissions reduction by going electric. Kristin Eberhard wrote a good proposal for Niskanen about how to redesign these to be much more cost effective.

InMD: Now that Daniel Snyder is gone, where in DC should they build an NFL stadium? Assume the answer can't be “nowhere” and all District and federal political obstacles have been overcome.

My real position on this is that NFL stadiums belong in the suburbs because there are so few games in a year. From an urban policy standpoint, combo baseball/football fields are ideal, but I think it’s clear that the leagues don’t like them. The RFK Stadium site strikes me as in many ways the worst of both worlds. It’s in the city and by a metro station, but it’s actually in a pretty peripheral location that’s not super convenient to get to for people on the western side of the city. So my funny observation is that the existing FedEx field is basically the perfect size to fit in the Ellipse south of the White House.

That’s a space that’s centrally located in the city but doesn’t actually attract a lot of use on a day-to-day basis. It’s where the White House Easter Egg roll happens, but you could do that inside a football stadium. Obviously a real football stadium is normally surrounded by parking lots, but the nice thing about this location is that there are tons of garages in downtown D.C. that are basically vacant on Sundays, so there’s plenty of space for people to park.