Frisco mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

21 - 27 minutes

Matthew Yglesias

6 Oct 2023

∙ Paid

I’m back from a brief trip to San Francisco and am pleased to report that the rumors I’ve heard for years — about how the residential areas of the city are actually much nicer than downtown and not overrun with people suffering from addiction and mental health crises — are true. Nice town!

Some good news: America keeps dominating the Nobel Prizes in part thanks to our openness to immigration. I got out of Twitter profile pic jail. This new Yes In God’s Backyard in California is pretty cool and I bet would work in a lot of states. Gasoline prices are heading back down. Third-quarter GDP growth keeps tracking very strong. Semiconductor plants are getting built.

Before we move on to questions, I want to say thank you and farewell to our longest-tenured Slow Boring team member, Claire, whose last day is today.

Claire joined us in early 2021 and has been scheduling and copy editing posts (no small feat around here), writing articles, and filling in wherever needed ever since. I think we once convinced her to take a few days off, but she has been a steady, behind-the-scenes presence helping to keep things running smoothly every day for over two years. Before that, though, Claire helped us run the outdoor pandemic pod we set up for our son and some of his classmates. At a time when almost everyone was scared and stressed out and just trying their best to get by, Claire stepped up in a major way and helped make sure life was as safe and normal as possible for our child and seven others. We hired her because she could communicate with the monolingual Spanish-speaking parents in the group, but got much more than we bargained for. It was a grueling, emotionally challenging job that had to be done whether it was 20 degrees or 100, but Claire’s determination and resilience helped us all make it through. We’re immensely grateful to her and wish her and her partner Lindsay the best as they embark on their new adventures in NYC.

Now, to your questions.

Leora: I assume everyone saw the fiasco at BU in Ibram Kendi's antiracism institute. It seems completely emblematic of how most of the resources marshalled in 2020 went to bupkus. And you could say the same of the women's march, though that never seemed to be about any particular grievance anyhow, just a primal anti-Trump howl.

How can we leverage these types of progressive “moments” into something reasonable and sustainable? Obviously people shouldn't be throwing money at random instagrammers or unverified GFMs. But giving to BU — where you'd assume there'd be some oversight and standards in place — seems quite reasonable.

I think this sells the Women’s March — not the hastily assembled institution but the actual marches and the people who participated in them — short. Those demonstrations got a lot of people engaged in politics, and that energy and engagement were very important during ACA repeal, the 2018 midterms, and other key moments.

The Kendi thing … I mean it’s unfortunate that his operation seems to have been poorly run and that people are going to lose their jobs. But while I think “Stamped from the Beginning” is an interesting book that’s worth your time to read, “How to be an Anti-Racist” outlines a set of ideas that are really obviously unworkable. At the time the book came out in 2019, Kelefa Sanneh wrote an excellent review in the New Yorker pointing this out, and I don’t recall having read over the next few months any attempt by anyone to explain why Sanneh was wrong. Then George Floyd was murdered, which was bad in ways that do not require any vast conceptual apparatus to explain, and suddenly Kendi and his unworkable ideas were everywhere in the media. And even a really well-managed version of this BU center couldn’t have accomplished anything because the ideas are unworkable!

Benjamin Howard: Every presidential election is discussed as being the most consequential election in history. This makes me wonder, what was the least consequential election in history? Which election would have led to the most similar outcome if the other candidate won?

Obviously it seems silly that everyone says each election is the most important election ever, but I actually think there’s something to that. Because polarization has been secularly rising since 1960, the kind of “baseline stakes” in each presidential election really do seem higher than in the previous election.

But what’s fascinating is that history is really weird and contingent. So even though the 1960 election featured very unclear policy stakes between JFK and Richard Nixon, it wound up being incredibly significant. If Nixon had been in office as the civil rights movement was reaching its peak of mass mobilization, I think it’s reasonably likely that you’d have seen a reversal of the FDR-era realignment of Black voters into the Democratic Party. Nixon would have favored the Civil Rights Act, would have argued that Dwight Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, and that it was Republicans who put the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court in place. All of subsequent American politics might have been totally unrecognizable, even though Nixon and Kennedy weren’t that different programmatically. In some ways, it’s precisely the lack of clear differentiation that made that election so significant because it’s entirely plausible that a Nixon administration would have taken action on civil rights.

The least consequential election was probably the “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” election of 1840 because William Henry Harrison died so quickly and John Tyler turned out to be something of a crypto-Democrat rather than a real Whig. I don’t think a second Van Buren administration would have led to any noteworthy policies or real changes in the direction of American history

Michael Adelman: You noted on Twitter that liberals may worry that the New Right's marriage promotion stuff is a stalking horse for gutting the welfare state. And I agree - at some level, ALL right-wing culture war rhetoric is a stalking horse for gutting the welfare state. But am I wrong to think that this stuff is ALSO a stalking horse for restricting personal freedom? The New Right has hinted at (and in some cases explicitly advocated) using the heavy hand of government to make people live their lives according to conservative sensibilities. So I fear that "more married parents would help kids" is their excuse BOTH to cut SNAP/WIC AND to crack down on women's autonomy, LGBTQ rights, etc. Isn't it pretty clear that the Right's ambitions to remake society are much more sweeping than the early-2000s marriage promotion stuff?

I meant something narrower. There’s a lot of emphasis in the discourse on the idea that conservatives want “elites” to just say the magic words “child poverty would be a lot lower if 100% of children lived with married parents.”

And I think progressives worry that saying those words in high-profile venues will undermine political support for the welfare state because it implies that poor families are poor due to bad choices rather than bad luck. I’m not at all sure saying those words would have that effect, but I think it’s a plausible concern. Now, what conservatives say is that liberals saying those words would cause many fewer solo-parent families to exist, which would greatly reduce child poverty. And I think most liberals (with good reason) are very skeptical not of the fact that “child poverty would be a lot lower if 100% of children lived with married parents,” but of the causal theory that merely saying this would cause it to happen. The concern is that if you say this, nothing changes on marriage rates or non-marital births, but SNAP and EITC and Medicaid get cut and poor kids are worse off than ever.

Another thing I would note is that people make a lot of claims that sound similar but are actually quite different:

    Children raised by two parents in a stable marriage are better off on average than the separate group of human children who are raised by a solo parent.

    The average solo-parented child would be better off had his parents gotten married before his birth and stayed married throughout his childhood.

    The marginal solo-parented child would be better off had his parents gotten married before his birth and stayed married throughout his childhood.

    The average solo-parented child would be better off had his parents gotten married before his birth.

    The marginal solo-parented child would be better off had his parents gotten married before his birth.

    Society would be better off if fewer unmarried women became pregnant.

    Society would be better off if the existing stock of married couples had more children.

I think (1) is clearly factually accurate, and the evidence in favor of (3) is strong.

But a lot of people want to infer something like (4), which is a much stronger claim that is harder to find evidentiary support for, and even (5) is pretty unclear. Something like (6) poses deep philosophical problems. The discourse doesn’t feature much discussion of (7), but because of the way rates work, it’s mechanically true that the child poverty rate would be lower if middle-class married couples had more kids. It’s weird to describe that as a poverty solution since it would literally do nothing at all to help any poor children, but as a question of social statistics it’s true.

Brian Ross: What’s your opinion on Governor Newson announcing that he would only consider Black women for Feinstein’s temporary replacement in the Senate?

The context for this is that people who specifically wanted him to appoint Barbara Lee to Kamala Harris’ seat argued that we shouldn’t have zero Black women in the Senate. But Newsom decided to elevate Alex Padilla to that seat instead of Lee. So then to parry this line, which was really just about Lee, he said he’d find a Black woman if the other seat opened up. That was not a very thoughtful thing to say, which created an awkward situation when Lee started actually running for the Feinstein seat, and then Feinstein died and he still didn’t want to appoint Lee. Just a small example of how opportunistic identity politics ends up backing people into bad situations.

Jonathan Salmans: In many municipalities (including where I live in Pittsburgh/Allegheny County), property assessments associated with recent home sales are higher than those of similar properties that have not sold in a long time. This seems bad to me for a variety of reasons. How to address this issue is a major issue in the current County Executive race. Both candidates want some form of program that protects long-time residents from excessive property tax increases, ostensibly to protect displacement. I can see displacement as having externalities that there is a public interest to avoid, but giving residents who are homeowners and have not moved recently systematically lower property taxes seems to me like a bad way to do it. Although such a program could be a net win if it makes other improvements to our assessment system politically viable. Do you have thoughts/perspectives on this issue?

Versions of this come up all the time, and the basic issue is that longtime homeowners have more political clout than new arrivals or hypothetical new residents.

The idea that you shouldn’t be forced into selling your house because you happened to get lucky and the demand for living in your neighborhood rose sort of makes sense. But of course if you are forced to sell your house due to rising prices, that’s very different than being forced out by rising rents — you get a financial windfall from selling the house! On a technical level, you could address this by doing assessments in a fair-handed way but allowing homeowners to pay part of their property tax bill by handing over an equity interest in the house to the county. That would limit your tax liability, but in exchange if you do sell the house down the road, it would also limit your upside because the county would be entitled to a share of the proceeds.

That, I think, fully addresses the stated concern (displacement) in a way that’s fair and less distortionary. But of course it doesn’t address the real issue, which is that long-time homeowners have disproportionate political clout.

David: This makes me feel like such a rube for raising this, but my understanding of the face-value justification for parking minimums was that people were going to have their cars no matter what, and they’d just take up the limited public parking, like on the street, if the buildings didn’t have parking. Like, in most American housing markets, an insufficient number of people are selecting out of available housing due to a lack of provided parking, so without regulation, the developer or owner won’t provide parking, but won’t lose out on any tenants/buyers, while shared parking is overused by a group who should’ve had their needs met by the market? With the push to remove parking minimums, is the idea that this isn’t actually true or is it that this doesn’t really matter enough/communities should reconsider their land use priorities?

Yes, to be clear, eliminating off-street parking mandates has implications for how you manage the on-street parking.

The official parking reform position blessed by David Shoup is that cities should not only eliminate off-street parking regulations but raise the price of street parking.

I appreciate the logic of that idea, and I think in New York City (which, though just one city, actually includes a large fraction of the American population) and maybe a handful of other places they should do that. But in most of the country, I think it’s wildly idealistic and fails to acknowledge the disproportionate political influence of incumbent homeowners. There are people who, right now, park on the street in D.C., and they don’t want parking reform because they don’t want scarcity of street parking. If you tell them “don’t worry, we’ll manage scarcity with higher prices,” they will say “fuck you, I don’t want to pay higher prices.” What you need to do is not only eliminate off-street parking requirements but:

    Stop issuing new on-street residential parking permits

    Stop charging the incumbent RPP holders money for their permits

    Allow RPP holders to sell their permits if they want to

This creates a financial windfall for incumbent street parkers, and the windfall gets bigger rather than smaller the more new housing is built. It’s not really fair or totally efficient, but it’s a lot more efficient than the current system of development restrictions.

Eric P: The usual explanation about American cultural hegemony is that it follows our post-war economic/diplomatic domination. I used to think this, but now am entertaining the possibility that American cultural exports (music, film, etc.) are just *better*.

I think America has better cultural “raw materials”. Rock music (from which all pop music is descended) exploded in the 1950s and 60s out of European, African, and indigenous musical traditions - a quite fertile and unusual cultural backdrop. This combined with intensely culture-forward cities, a culture of individualism, and a huge domestic market for cultural capital - and it seems quite obvious why American music is so good and popular. 70+ years later little has changed despite America’s drop in relative economic and geopolitical standing.

Is there something to this?

There’s something to this, but the other thing I would note is that America has a lot of “industrial policy” in this space via immigration. “Dune” was directed by a Canadian, had an Australian cinematographer, and its striking score was written by a German. Most of the cast is American, but there are English and Swedish and Spanish actors in key roles. The way the U.S. immigration system interacts with the entertainment industry makes it relatively easy for all the best talent in the world to ply their wares in Hollywood, and there’s no effort to protect good-paying American jobs by preventing Hans Zimmer from writing movie scores or Stellan Skarsgard from acting creepy.

This helps generate tremendous lock-in. The greatest talent in the whole world wants to work in American entertainment because we are the best, and we continue to be the best because the best talent from all around the world moves here.

You could imagine a reality where sometime in the 1980s we decided to protect American talent from the need to compete with Mel Gibson and Nicole Kidman, and in the short-term it would have worked since the American position was so hegemonic. But over the longer run it would have eroded America’s position.

Mitch P: Whats the deal with Jeff Van Drew? He left the democratic party because they were pursing a party-line impeachment and he is now a leading voice calling for one on the Republican side. Is there any prescient for switching parties and immediately swinging past the median member of their new party?

This is pretty normal. Jim Jeffords went from being a moderate Republican to being a liberal Democrat in the 2000s, and in the 1990s Richard Shelby went from being a moderate Democrat to being a conservative Republican. Mod to mod switches are much rarer. Lisa Murkowski wins elections in Alaska mostly thanks to the votes of Democrats, but she doesn’t seem to ever consider becoming a moderate Democrat.

Captain_Mal: Noah Smith recently referenced Matt’s post on declining racial polarization, which also notes that education polarization is up. What do you think is driving the educational attainment divide in politics and are there any implications for Democrats heading into this election cycle?

As a liberal, it’s tempting to reach the self-serving and at least somewhat elitist conclusion that educated people skew Democratic because the ideas on the left are inherently better than those being advanced by the right.

However, it also occurs to me that the education gap by political party may just be a function of Democratic ineptitude at appealing to non-college voters. One of the things I find most frustrating about this incarnation of the conservative movement is the general tendency to portray extremely nuanced and complicated matters as black and white, easily navigable issues. The only reason that everything seems simple to Donald Trump is that he's too dumb to grasp how complicated most things are. But could it be that gross oversimplification is an effective messaging strategy for appealing to non-college voters?

I think the main thing going on with education polarization is that political divides are being increasingly driven by different values on cosmopolitanism.

Contemporary Democrats recognize that the level of chaos currently occurring at the southern border is a problem, and they are sincerely trying to make the situation better, but they also feel very seriously that it would be morally wrong to refuse legitimate asylum claims and are taking the procedural rights of people making such claims seriously. Contemporary Republicans are much more willing to say “if asylum claims are causing a problem, then we need to fix the problem.” You see the same thing on climate change where the fundamental dynamic is that progressives are asking Americans to bear local costs for global benefits and conservatives don’t want to. You see political re-alignment along educational lines in basically every developed country because these topics of immigration and climate are rising in salience everywhere and educated people have more cosmopolitan values.

Why is that? It’s a little hard to say. But I think the most plausible explanation is that the psychological attribute of openness to experience correlates with both enjoying school and with cosmopolitanism as a value set.

But then there are secondary issues. You can’t attribute education polarization to Democratic Party messaging choices because you see the same thing happening everywhere. But it’s also true that as the Democratic Party becomes more and more dominated by educated people, they fall into the trap of forgetting to craft messages that are designed to appeal to the BA-less majority. This does matter at the margin, and I think the people who write speeches for Democrats would do well to remember that they are trying to communicate ideas to an audience whose SAT scores are way lower than the average scores of Democratic staffers. In theory, AI could help with this and you should soon be able to drop a speech into a model that will let you specify a target Lexile level and re-write it for you.

MB: I just started listening to Metric & I enjoy them a lot! What’s your ranking of their albums?

Glad to see someone tackling the big questions! I think my ranking is: Fantasies, Old World Underground, Art of Doubt, Formentera, Synthetica, Live It Out, Grow Up and Blow Away, Pagans in Vegas. But more to the point, the reason Metric is my favorite band is that I think all these albums are really good, except Pagans in Vegas (which was an artistic mistake) and Grow Up and Blow Away (which was a very promising debut, just not really an all-timer).

Luke Christofferson: What happens to the Republican party if Trump loses by double digits in 2024?

I think if Trump were to lose badly, there’s a significant chance you’d see a genuine constructive pivot. Trump is a drag on GOP electoral fortunes. At the same time, establishment Republicans don’t actually want to replace Trump with something more popular than Trump, they want to re-run the 2012 playbook where they nominate a strong candidate on a politically toxic austerity platform. The good news for them is that as a result of “Bidenomics,” the case for austerity keeps getting stronger, so the thing they want to do with the party would actually make sense in the wake of a 2024 defeat, and I believe they could make it work.

But I also think it’s very unlikely that Trump will lose badly.

Nico Dornemann: Four and half years later, how, if at all, have you updated your assessment of the "Great Awokening"? I can see points on either side of a cost-benefit analysis, but it seems like the substantial increase in crime since 2020, while overdetermined, has had something to do with increased hostility toward the police from the left and a change in attitude toward enforcing laws on the part of some prosecutors.

When I wrote the “Great Awokening” piece in 2019, I think I had a clear-eyed view of both the promise and the peril of increased attention to racism and racial justice issues on the left.

What I don’t think I had a clear-eyed view of at all was the extent to which progressives would leap from “racism is a big problem” to “policing is bad.” I think that is a highly non-obvious (and in fact incorrect) idea, and we can see that the depolicing wave of 2020–2021 specifically increased racial inequality in life expectancy and many quality of life measures. There are plenty of things in life you might do to reduce racial inequality that backfire politically because they make white people worse off, but that’s really not what happened here.