Professional development mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

19 - 24 minutes

To grievance-monger for a bit, DCPS students had a day off last week for Columbus/Indigenous People’s Day and then Veterans’ Day is coming in early November, followed by three days off for Thanksgiving. Somehow, sandwiched between all these holidays, Thursday and Friday of this week the school is also closed for professional development days.

For us in the Slow Boring family, it’s all perfectly workable. But it’s incredibly inconvenient for people with real jobs and I think an underrated problem in the family policy space. At a minimum, consolidate the days off so people can take trips or try to make arrangements with grandparents.

Sigh.

At any rate, median family income hit an all-time high last year (and, to the best of our knowledge, has continued rising this year), as did median household net worth. I know the economy is terrible and everything, but that seems pretty good! I really liked Sarah Mervosh’s account of the high-performing school system run by the US Department of Defense. Important thread here about the significance of California’s new AB 1633 housing law. I’m excited about “Ferrari.”

Now let’s do some questions.

David Muccigrosso: Settle a debate for me. Does the recent hard-left praise for Hamas represent “the same old antisemitism,” or should it be thought of as a newer phenomenon tied up in overboiled anti-imperialist rhetoric?

It’s a little bit both and a little bit neither. I think the key thing is that American racial politics transmogrifies certain kinds of sentiments that are conceptually right-wing as located on the political left. After all, what is Hamas? It’s a Palestinian nationalist branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a fundamentalist politico-religious movement. Religious nationalist movements are right-wing!

Bibi Netanyahu’s Knesset coalition of religious and nationalist parties represents the right of Israeli politics. And Hamas is the right of Palestinian politics.

Sometimes nationalist parties find themselves birds of a feather who get along great. The claims of Danish nationalism don’t conflict with the claims of Italian nationalism, and Europeans don’t care about Catholic vs Protestant issues anymore, so Danish and Italian rightists can get along great. But sometimes nationalists make overlapping, competing, and incompatible claims. This is what is going on in Israel/Palestine.

But politics isn’t just about ideas, it’s about coalitions. Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote a brief missive about the conceptual alignment between Zionism and the Black nationalist politics he grew up with. And he’s correct that these are, formally speaking, parallel ideas. But because of the way American coalitions are constructed, all Black self-advocacy takes place inside the “left” coalition. So ideas like Black nationalism that would be right-wing in a majority-Black country are de facto “far-left” ideas in the context of the United States of America. And for a bunch of contingent reasons related to Cold War politics, Palestinian nationalism ended up on the “left” of western politics, just like Black nationalism, even though the content and formal structure of Palestinian nationalist ideology is right-wing and over time has become increasingly religious.

Now, to be a Palestinian nationalist is not necessarily to be an anti-semite.

But there are deep affinities between nationalist politics and anti-semitism in all kinds of contexts. And obviously the particular geographic situation of Palestine means a lot of conflicts with people who are Jewish. So if you’re in a nationalist milieu that involves constant conflicts with Jewish people, it’s easy to see how anti-semitic ideas get into that mix. This is very much “the same old anti-semitism,” except it’s on the left for reasons of anti-colonialism and the slightly confused racial politics that codes Israelis as white and Palestinians as non-white in a way that is not reflected by their actual skin tone.

Sharty: The people demand your cubano hot takes. Do you eat pickle-side-up or pickle-side down? Are you a Miami purist or a salamist Tampa heretic? Whither the diagonal cut?

Ninety-nine percent of the places you go you will find that a Cubano is a sandwich featuring pickles, yellow mustard, Swiss cheese, ham, and roast pork served on griddled bread. In a good place, that will be actual Cuban bread or a reasonable facsimile thereof. But in Tampa, they are unusual and the sandwich also has salami on it.

Here, though, I want to insist that even though the Tampa style of serving the sandwich is unusual at the end of the day the Cubano was invented in Ybor City in Tampa in the early 20th century.

At that time, of course, the concept of “Hispanic” or “Latino” ethnic identity did not exist. Instead, the way ethnicity was constructed in Tampa was that Cubans, Spaniards, and Italians were all “Latin” — i.e., not “Black” in a Jim Crow sense but not like regular white people either. The sandwich emerged specifically from that cross-cultural encounter thus, of course, contains salami. You can read about all of this in the works of the great Cuban-American novelist and journalist Jose Yglesias.

BD Anders: Inspired by today's column: Hilary Clinton lost the 2016 election by about 80,000 votes spread over a few swing states. Did her pick of Tim Kaine — a not well known, not very charismatic white guy and “insider” senator from Virginia — sink her? Would a different VP candidate have closed the gap, and if so, who?

It was a very close election, so there are any number of things you could speculate might have made a decisive difference, and it’s certainly conceivable that a different VP pick belongs on that list.

But I wouldn’t put it particularly high. There was nothing wrong with Kaine, he didn’t say or do anything that alienated people in a noteworthy way. And we don’t have a lot of evidence of VP picks moving the needle. What’s more, even though Clinton lost by a very narrow margin in terms of total votes, she would have needed to flip three whole states to win, so you can’t count on a favored son/daughter effect to carry the day.

What a lot of successful candidates do with their VP picks — whether you’re talking about Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump — is pick someone who is more of a DC insider and establishment person as a way of bringing some reassuring ballast to your team. A problem Clinton (and Joe Biden!) had is that when you are a super-experienced insider, you can’t do that with your VP pick, but it’s also really not possible for any VP selection to rid you of that establishmentarian stink. I think the only real lesson there is what I talked about in my West Wing post: The best politicians are “outsiders” but not radicals, people who can say they are not, personally, a part of the mess in Washington and can promise in some vague way that they will fix it.

BorgenMorgen: Do you have any general opinions on endowment-based philanthropy? Compared to capital project fundraising, endowments feel...wasteful? E.g. my alma mater just announced some rich guy’s donation to create a “head football coach endowment.” That seems crazy! Obviously that was a small-scale example, but it feels like there are some big macroeconomic budgetary issues created by this tax policy.

If you’re just interested in the macroeconomics, the way to think about it is that you start with a rich guy. What it means for the guy to be rich is that he has accumulated a lot of savings over the course of his life — probably not a large pile of cash, but a bunch of claims on portions of the country’s capital stock. What can he do with those savings?

Well, he can liquidate them and spend the money on consumption before he dies. That’s a good short-term boost to a demand-constrained economy, but in normal times, it’s worth more for the country than if he continues to save. But if he keeps the savings in place, then sooner or later he will die. When he dies, the pool of capital he owns will be divided amongst his heirs. His heirs can then either draw down the savings to finance consumption, or they can keep letting it ride. But the odds are pretty good that they will either liquidate the savings or else mismanage them, with either option being relatively bad for the national economy.

By contrast, if our rich guy transfers his pool of capital to a charitable endowment, then as long as the endowment is well-managed the capital can in principle remain intact forever. That strikes me as a pretty good deal for the economy. The problem in the case you are pointing to is that the specific cause that the endowment supports seems pretty bad. Having different schools engage in bidding wars for the labor of the most skilled football coaches has zero-to-negative social value.

StrangePolyHedrons: Trying out a theory on why Republicans representatives from moderate swing districts don't exercise their power. Maybe it's because the more moderate your district, the less likely you are to care about policy outcomes versus just wanting to be in office?

I think that Republican Party politics in general is just much less organized around policy ideas than Democratic Party politics is. The difference between Bernie Sanders, Tammy Baldwin, and Joe Manchin really is that Bernie’s ideal policy outcomes are much more left-wing than Manchin’s, with Baldwin somewhere in the middle. Bernie, for example, clearly has strong affinities for leftist political parties in European countries that already have large welfare states.

Republicans generally do not spend as much time doing blue sky thinking about public policy ideas. A really far-right Republican will do things like pretend to believe the 2020 election was stolen, call LGBT people “groomers,” pose for Christmas cards with assault rifles, and engage in quasi-genocidal rhetoric about people making asylum claims in the United States. But that person doesn’t necessarily have further-right policy commitments than a more moderate Republican. It’s largely a question of presentation and affect or, in terms of intra-caucus politics in the House, willingness to embrace radical procedural tactics. That’s not to say there is no policy debate among Republicans. There must be some members of congress who would like to roll back same-sex marriage equality if they could, while others have sincerely decided progressives’ were right about this. But I couldn’t tell you which are which because they don’t really spend time talking about that kind of thing, and they certainly haven’t organized themselves around the question of who has the biggest policy aspirations.

David: I saw you tweet something to the effect that those who have previously deplored cancel culture are hypocritical for now advocating cancellation on behalf of Israel. I disagree. The views on Israel are more extreme and abhorrent than the relatively banal views which have been grounds for cancellation in recent years. Moreover, those advocating cancellation on behalf of Israel may simply want consistency and fair treatment from institutions who have cancelled people for other views. Now, I'm not saying that cancel culture in the Hamas-Israel case is necessarily right. What I am saying though is that advocating cancel culture in the Hamas-Israel case is defensible and not necessarily hypocritical the way you seem to suggest. What do you think?

I just want to be really clear that, as a rule, if you think I am advancing a hypocrisy argument, you are wrong. Calling people hypocrites is, in my view, a dumb waste of time.

I was saying with an extra layer of detachment) exactly what you are saying: What a lot of opponents of “cancel culture” who turned around and decided to do Israel-related cancellations really meant was “the conduct these people are getting cancelled for is just, in fact, not that objectionable, and if someone does say something that I find highly objectionable, then I will try to do cancellations over it.” Which is a totally reasonable thing to believe. But by the same token, that is the exact same thing that the original left-cancellers were saying — that everyone agrees some forms of speech are beyond the pale, and this particular act of speech for which this particular cancel-target is being targeted was egregious.

So that’s fine. People disagree about which things are really awful to say and therefore about which people deserve to be cancelled.

My point, though, is that there are two distinct ideas:

    People on campus these days are too left-wing for my taste: They are too quick to treat right-of-center ideas as beyond the pale and far too-indulgent of leftist ideas that I think are beyond the pale.

    People on campus these days are too intolerant: With all their talk of trigger warnings and “words can be violence,” they are too averse to challenging themselves intellectually and don’t respect the values of free speech. 

I think a lot of people who pretty clearly meant (1) all along have spent a lot of time saying (2) in a way that creates confusion.

A final thought. Recently, my eight year-old was expressing to me his admiration for German speech laws that ban the display of Nazi emblems and similar hate speech. That’s an eccentric opinion in America, but obviously it’s pretty mainstream in Europe and certainly something you could have a polite conversation about in the USA. But he followed up by saying that another example of something he thinks is mean and you shouldn’t be allowed to say is telling people that they will go to hell if they don’t follow the right religion (he’d recently spotted a fundamentalist billboard saying something to that effect). Nobody in the US agrees with that. But logically, if it’s bad to say that Israeli civilians deserve to be killed by Hamas, it’s surely even worse to say all Jewish people deserve to burn in hell for eternity unless we find salvation through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

So how come one is an insane, beyond the pale political opinion while the other is just normal Protestantism? Well, because something we figured out in the 17th and 18th centuries is that for society to function, we need to let people have different religious views and try not to get too mad about it. We have not only constitutional freedom of speech, but a strong social norm that we not run around yelling at each other over our different religious views.

Sunder: What do you think is currently the easier way to expand the US population? Easing immigration restrictions or making it easier for parents who want more kids to have them?

The mechanical impact of immigration policy is a lot faster and larger than anything you can do on family formation. But at the same time, global population trends are all heading in the same direction, so over the long run we are going to run out of potential immigrants and family policy becomes dominant. This is kind of a cop-out, but they are both important.

KN: How would you grade Eric Adams’ tenure as NYC mayor? Did self-described moderates overrate him as a candidate?

The way the race (with instant-runoff voting) and the media coverage of it was structured has sort of led to some forgetting as to what was going on.

But the attention early on was focused on Maya Wiley and Scott Stringer as the progressive options, counterpoised to Andrew Yang (who was famous) as the moderate contender. This newsletter supported Kathryn Garcia, a little-known moderate technocrat. And absolutely nobody was for Eric Adams, whose electoral base of working class African-Americans tends to be invisible in the media. Garcia ended up becoming much better known over the course of the race, finished second in the IRV process, and I think in retrospect exactly what I thought when the race began, namely that she’d have been the best choice.

Adams has an electoral profile that I like (similar to Cherelle Parker in Philadelphia, London Breed in San Francisco, or Muriel Bowser here in DC, except he’s more famous) and on big issues, he is basically correct. His strong pro-housing and anti-crime stands are so close to takes that I am well-known for that it’s easy to forget I didn’t support him! But Mayor of New York City is a very complicated administrative and political job, and I’m not sure you could say he’s put a ton of huge policy victories on the board. That said, he ran as the tough-on-crime candidate for the post-Floyd era and crime really has fallen a lot. And he is saying the right things on housing — if the City Council actually listened to him, that would be great.

Eric Wilhelm: In the Dune universe, what were the enforcement mechanisms and agreements that upheld the Great Convention? What prevented the Spacing Guild from using their technological superiority, navigation know-how, and secure monopoly to openly seize power from political actors, such as the Emperor or Great Houses? Do “thinking machines” help or hinder the durability of such agreements?

My hot take on this is that nothing was stopping the Spacing Guild from seizing power, they just didn’t want to.

Of course, the Guild would need a proxy force on the ground in Arrakis to keep them supplied with spice, but a total monopoly over space travel — including interstellar military transport — should have made that easily possible. I think the Guild didn’t take over because the Guild Navigators didn’t particularly want to take over. Enhanced by spice and by training, they have limited powers of prescience that allow them to fold space safely. But this limited prescience also tends to make them passive. For most of the history of the Corrino Empire, they felt that things were going fine so they didn’t rock the boat.

At the start of “Dune,” though, the long-term Bene Gesserit human breeding program has gone off track. And we learn in Appendix III that the Guild sensed something was amiss:

    When the Arrakis Affair boiled up, the Spacing Guild made overtures to the Bene Gesserit. The Guild hinted that its navigators, who use the spice drug of Arrakis to produce the limited prescience necessary for guiding spaceships through the void, were "bothered about the future" or saw "problems on the horizon." This could only mean they saw a nexus, a meeting place of countless delicate decisions, beyond which the path was hidden from the prescient eye. This was a clear indication that some agency was interfering with higher order dimensions!

At this point they do try to seize control of events. The Corrino/Harkonnen plot to eliminate House Atreides is a flagrant violation of the terms of the Great Convention, but the Guild goes along with it. Per the original question, there’s really no check on their power here and the Convention is sort of meaningless if the Guild is willing to carry out military transports that obviously violate its terms. The fact that they decide when it is and isn’t upheld suggests that, in a very real sense, they are holding power all along and just mostly not using it.

But of course as tends to happen in literary treatments of prophesy, the effort to eliminate the threat of the Kwisatz Haderach brings him into being. And the effort to confront him with the coordinated military power of the galaxy becomes the occasion for him to gain mastery over them all.

Dave Baker: In response to your views about negotiating Medicare drug coverage, lots of folks responded with concerns that this will reduce incentives for innovation in pharma research. Do you have a response to this type of objection?

On the one hand, yes, if the government negotiates bulk discounts for prescription drug purchasing that will make prescription drug sales less profitable, which will tend to reduce R&D in prescription drugs.

On the other hand, the federal government collectively buys a lot of cars and trucks, and it does so through a GSA program called Auto Choice that involves getting bulk discounts from auto manufacturers. If we eliminated that program and had federal agencies pay full retail price for all their non-tactical automative needs, that would arguably help spur innovation in the automobile sector. But I never see anyone propose that — it would be wasteful and arbitrary. As I said both in the piece and in several other pieces that I’ve written over the years, I think the rules and ethics around clinical trials and drug approvals are structured in such a way as to systematically underrate the social value of finding new cures. Making reforms there to lower the cost of discovery and lower the cost of bringing new medicine to market seems to me like it would have very high benefits and almost no cost. Driving innovation by overpaying for the end product, by contrast, seems like a pretty bad deal in obvious ways.