The best season for a mailbag. By MATTHEW YGLESIAS

OCT 13, 2023. PAID

Ozempic economics, my TV pitch, and a defense of Shakespeare

I’ve been a little preoccupied with grim news this week, but good stuff continues to happen. We’ve got a new Spanish rocket company joining the space race, some cool new research into how the immune system fights cancer, and a company seems to have successfully implanted genetically engineered pig kidneys into monkeys. I don’t know that I agree with this super-optimistic take on solar, but it’s interesting. Finally, I was happy to see Claudia Goldin win this year’s Nobel Prize in economics. She has (among other things) brought tremendous clarity to the widely discussed gender wage gap issue, and I really recommend this cartoon explainer Sarah Kliff did years ago for Vox on the subject.

I also wanted to share an update from GiveWell this week. As you may know, part of your paid subscription gets routed to their Top Charities Fund. Most recently, this meant that GiveWell was able to direct $29,073 from the Slow Boring community to the Against Malaria Foundation, buying roughly 4,900 nets and saving an estimated five lives. This was part of a larger $16 million grant to AMF, which was funded by donations in the January-March period and went toward extending the support of their program in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Obviously we want people to subscribe for many reasons, but the ability to help organizations doing direct good in the world is high on that list, so thank you for your support!

Question time!

Lance Hunter: Matt Levine's newsletter today talked about how Ozempic/Wegovy/etc are starting to effect the bottom line of businesses that have typically profited from consumers' poor impulse control. Are you concerned that there may be a cultural backlash against these treatments that is astroturfed into existence by these industries?

I’m not someone who gets super worried about “astroturf,” but I do think we have to look at the incentives here.

There are a bunch of companies operating in what I think of, with a nod to the Greek philosophers, as akrasia industries. These companies are selling stuff that’s fun but that we know is bad for us — cigarettes, booze, junk food, gambling, probably social media feeds as well. A key thing about all of this is that it’s actually totally fine in moderation. If you go to Vegas one weekend, get drunk, smoke a pack of cigarettes, lose a little money playing blackjack, and then eat a bunch of garbage the next day because you’re hungover, that’s just having fun. But if you do it a lot, you’ll end up ruining your life. And basically everyone knows that. But consumption of these kinds of goods is very skewed, and most of the revenue comes from the small minority of customers who are problematic overconsumers. These customers almost always know that they are problematic overconsumers, but almost all of us suffer from weakness of will in at least some areas of life and some companies in some industries are very good at exploiting that.

Normally, our best policy defense against such things is paternalistic public policy.

But with the exception of cigarettes, it’s proven very difficult to defeat the combination of industry lobbying and individualistic sentiments. Theories differ about this, but I think the key reason smoking has been different is that secondhand smoke provided a non-paternalistic rationale for a crackdown on smoking. I think that if you look at it, a lot of the health claims made about secondhand smoke were probably somewhat exaggerated. Yet there’s no denying that cigarette smoke is smelly and annoying to non-smokers, which combined with health concerns became a useful lever for a big anti-smoking push that saved a ton of lives. In other areas, though, individualism wins out.

New medications raise the prospect of an individualist solution to akrasia, which seems great, but poses a question about cost and affordability. Tessie McMillan Cottom had a piece in the NYT recently which was partially about cost concerns, but also seemed to raise a bunch of vague concerns about “medicalization” that were not very clearly stated or argued for. It does seem like the best option available for people in akrasia industries is to try to fan these flames — paint cost concerns as unsolvable, then because they are unsolved, paint using the drugs as elitist, and then try to convince people that the whole idea is somehow bad. My guess, though, is that technology will prevail if the medications really do work in a sustainable way.

Tom Whittington: Alternate History question: is the shape of the GWOT different if the us succeeds in capturing/killing bin Laden at Tora Bora? More broadly, what does a responsible government response to a major terrorist attack look like?

I’m inclined to think that the Bush administration would have taken more of a “declare victory and go home” attitude if bin Laden had been dead. This is a bit beside the point because he was invading Iraq anyway, but in theory, an optimal retaliatory response to 9/11 would have been to get bin Laden and other top lieutenants and provide the Northern Alliance with a critical margin of short-term victory. Those two steps would have made the deterrence point, and the US wouldn’t need to worry so much about the long-term future of Afghanistan.

In general in terms of responses, I think the main issue is you need to think rigorously about what new information you really have in response to the attack.

On 9/10/2001, I think most people would have said that the rise of China was the most important geopolitical issue. Nothing that happened on 9/11/2001 really altered that conclusion, but America’s policy response distracted from it in a very important way.

Steve Botsford: If I were to give you a top tier writing room and full HBO quality budget to create a new series that had to do with politics, what would the show focus on? It could be past, present or future focused.

For example, I would like to see a show about the aftermath of communism’s fall in Cuba. I’d be interested in how the new elected Cuban government would disperse state property with the aim to avoid the oligarch situation that occurred after the fall of the USSR. I would also be very interested on how private property before the revolution was dealt with, specifically for Cubans who fled under Castro.

My show is called TRICKY, and it opens on January 20, 1961 with the inauguration of Richard Nixon as President of the United States.

To be cute, in his speech we’ll have Nixon say the exact words “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty” from JFK’s Inaugural Address. But then Nixon will pivot to repeat a line from his own speech accepting the GOP nomination in the summer of 1960, where he vowed “and for those Americans who are still denied equality of rights and opportunities, I say there shall be the greatest progress in human rights since the days of Lincoln 100 years ago.”

The action then pivots to the fraught question of a same-party cabinet transition.

Nixon likes the incumbent Attorney General William P. Rogers a lot and wants to keep him around. Martin Luther King, Jr., also a leading character in the show and a Rogers fan, very much agrees. By contrast, Nixon does not like the incumbent Treasury Secretary, Robert Anderson. Former president Dwight Eisenhower tried to persuade Nixon to step down as VP in 1956 to serve as Defense Secretary in order to install Anderson on the ticket, and Ike privately urged Anderson to challenge Nixon for the GOP nomination in 1960. Nixon told Eisenhower he would keep him on as part of persuading Ike to campaign for him more aggressively, so now Nixon is stuck with an enemy inside the cabinet. What’s more, keeping on two senior members of the Eisenhower Administration creates a kind of expectation that everyone will be staying in place.

But of course out there in the country, nobody really cares much about Nixon’s problems managing his own administration.

The economy is doing well, but Nixon has raised aspirations around civil rights without any actual plan to get around segregationist control of the key committees. Meanwhile, Nixon’s aggressive backing of the Bay of Pigs invasion successfully overthrows the nascent Castro regime but gets the United States bogged down in a low-level guerrilla conflict in Cuba. Nixon wants to go to the Moon, but Democrats in congress say we should be waging a war on poverty. We could go on with many seasons of this. Think MAD MEN meets FOR ALL MANKIND.

Sharty: Is your home “smart”-ified? You seem to be in the narrow age range that lives between “wow, smart everything is so cool!” and the old yarn of “the only piece of technology in my house is a printer, and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.”

We have Alexas and a Sonos soundbar that can be controlled via Alexa, but beyond that haven’t really gone “smart.”

My analysis of how the smarthome market went wrong is that Amazon pretty quickly jumped out to a lead with the best voice assistant, even though of all the tech companies, it’s the one that’s worst-positioned to make money off a small smart speaker. Then on the flip side you have Apple. Everything about Apple as a corporate entity suggests they would be good at designing and marketing a set of smart home devices (either directly owned and operated or licensed) that work together seamlessly in a way that’s intuitive and easy. But Siri has always been a laggard in the voice assistant market. If Siri were great, then iPhone owners would buy HomePods and it would make sense to people to get a whole suite of HomeKit devices for this and that.

GStew: How do you feel about the “tipping culture.” I know some people have gotten mad about it but during COVID I started tipping more out of respect for people who were coming into work (god bless baristas and grocery store workers). I have kept it up because it seems like a decent way to pay it forward a little but it is also kind of an arbitrary way to do this now that COVID lockdowns are largely over.

This is the kind of thing where we all need to try harder to cultivate the mental fortitude to avoid getting worked up about things.

If you don’t want to tip, just don’t. If you want to not tip while simultaneously feeling self-righteous, give to the GiveWell Top Charities Fund and tell the world how much more good you are accomplishing that way.

Randall: Are Democrats going to regret not rescuing McCarthy? How soon?

I think this “Democrats should have rescued McCarthy” take is genuinely insane.

When this arose, I thought:

McCarthy would offer some tiny concession to Democrats.

Democrats would reject it.

My take, as the guy who is always telling Democrats to sell-out more, would be to criticize them for having rejected it.

But he offered them … nothing. So there’s nothing to regret!

Dan Quail: MattY, how are handling the suddenly chilly weather? What happened, it went from the 80s to 50s!

I fucking love fall. I am this guy.

srynerson: Thoughts on SBF's critique of William Shakespeare?

I actually think this is a more interesting question than people make it out to be.

Sam Bankman-Fried makes basically two points about Shakespeare. The first is a “Bayesian” argument that it is statistically very unlikely that the greatest writer of all-time would have been a member of the small, poor, largely illiterate pool of English-speakers that existed in the late-16th century. The second is that his plots are bad — “Romeo and Juliet are incredibly flimsy characters, and the plot is absurd.”

The Bayesian argument, I think, illustrates a kind of category error. If I were to say that Isaac Newton is the greatest scientist of all time, I’m not saying that Isaac Newton knows more science than anyone else in history. He knows less science than I do, and I know less science than Kate does, and we both know less science than thousands of working research scientists around the world. The point about Newton is that his contributions to human scientific understanding were tremendous. And even though contemporary science is drawing from a much larger and deeper pool of scientific talent, contemporary scientists don’t make equivalent contributions because the past contributions already occurred. That’s why it’s not surprising that the Beatles and The Rolling Stones come along early in the history of rock music or more broadly, that we’ve seen the torch of pop music leadership shift rapidly from jazz to rock to hip hop over the past 100 years.

On the stories, it’s true that Romeo and Juliet are sort of thin archetypes, but there are a lot of iconic Shakespeare characters with depth and complexity — MacBeth, Hamlet, Brutus, etc.

Is the plot absurd? There is an infamous lack of realism in terms of the pace of their romance. But I think it’s compelling because of feelings. It feels true to me sitting here right now that I knew Kate was the one from the very first time I met her. I think it is probably accurate to say that in reality, if some huge logistical barriers had arisen right after we met, that probably could have kept us apart. But the story of the “pair of star-cross'd lovers” is compelling because it says something about the nature of love. Something compelling enough that we retell it over and over again, whether as “West Side Story” or as a ballet. I’m a nineties kid who loves movies and doesn’t really understand ballet, so to me the Baz Luhrman version is the best.

Now that said, if you read the post, the main thing SBF was talking about was the United States Constitution.

He was saying that our affection for it reflects an irrational preference for old things, similar to the irrational affection people have for Shakespeare. In that context, I think he’s correct. America’s founding fathers made extraordinary contributions to the world’s understanding of democratic self-government. But just like I know more about physics than Isaac Newton did, later scholars of comparative government have been able to come up with better ideas than James Madison’s. That’s not a knock on James Madison, anymore than it would make sense to dunk on Newton for not knowing about relativity.

Morgan Lawless: Do you find the repugnant conclusion intuitively repugnant?

The “Repugnant Conclusion,” according to Derek Parfit, is the idea that a world with a large number of people enjoying a very low standing of living is preferable to a world with a small population of happy people.

I go back and forth on this whole discussion, which appears in a book that was published in 1984. The main thing I want to say about it is that it reflects a very 70s-inflected “population bomb” / “limits to growth” mindset that is empirically false.

But of course this is philosophy and you can’t just say “well, empirically that tradeoff doesn’t exist.” The question is whether, in principle, aggregate happiness matters more than average happiness. Parfit does not find this conclusion appealing (that’s why he calls it repugnant!) but he says that all the alternative ideas are worse. And I think he’s correct on both counts. But the reason it doesn’t always feel intuitive to me is that from inside my 2020s abundance mindset, the tradeoff doesn’t feel real — I don’t worry in my gut that population growth will lead to lower living standards so I just don’t worry about this.

Secret Squirrel: You say your undergrad philosophy major is useful for understanding AI. How so?

To an extent, I’m joking. The whole deal with majoring in philosophy is that you expect it will never come up.

But the thing about the modern world of AI is that it really brings to life a lot of stuff that you talk about in philosophy classrooms. And the most specific way that comes home to me is that a lot of people have started discussing questions like “are large language models conscious” in ways that make it clear to me that they’ve never really thought hard about what it means to say that humans are conscious. This turns out to be a pretty difficult problem. If you are reading this, you probably feel that you are conscious. And because that’s how you feel about yourself, you are inclined to attribute that same consciousness to others. But what does any of this mean? In philosophy class you spend a lot of time talking about this, which seemed pointless at the time but has turned out to be relevant.

Juan Matute: Have you thought about YIMBYism/permissive housing and renewable energy infrastructure investment as a national industrial policy?

Yes, absolutely, I think the right takeaway from the issues I talk about in “The Industrial Policy Dilemma” is that in a practical sense, the real industrial policy is selective deregulation of sectors you want to promote.

Housing is an obvious one that I’ve written about a lot. In this particular case, there isn’t an international competitiveness dimension to housing, but we know that there are a lot of non-wage costs that go into adding housing. We also know that labor productivity in the construction sector has been dismal, which is at least in part because there’s a lack of regulatory clarity around building. To improve productivity you need easily repeatable projects and clear by-right construction.

And I think it’s increasingly clear that you have a similar situation around renewable energy.

Rob Meyer had a story this week about how there’s overwhelming public support for renewables construction, including renewable projects “in my community,” but support goes way when you get more specific about building wind/solar right nearby. In other words, people are all for new renewables infrastructure just … not in their backyard. As he notes, opposition to new natural gas facilities is even stronger, which is good news for decarbonization as such, but still bad news for energy abundance. The issue for renewables, though, is that wind and solar projects are physically larger than natural gas plants, so NIMBYism hurts them more even if it’s less intense. To build a more prosperous future, we need to create a more permissive regulatory environment that lets this stuff get built.

MB: I’m a bit late for a mailbag question, but what did you think of Eric Levitz’s Tuesday article on the border? You two are usually in sync policy wise, so it’s always interesting when you disagree.

This graf is, I think, the nub of his piece:

And yet, as the Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas has written, there is little reason to believe that harsh deterrence policies accomplish much of anything beyond imperiling asylum seekers’ lives. Simply put, U.S. government policy can’t discourage migration more than an immensely dangerous and expensive journey of more than 1,000 miles does. People who are willing to spend all their savings on a life-threatening trip from Central America or Haiti to the U.S. southern border are unlikely to be deterred by a border barrier or less permissive asylum process. A 2021 review of surveys taken in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico found “no evidence” that knowledge of immigration enforcement policies changed people’s thinking about whether to migrate. This is consistent with a 2018 paper on survey data from Honduras, which found that “the overwhelming motivating factor for emigration” was personal experience with crime and gang violence. Information about the likelihood of deportation did not significantly affect respondent’s plans about whether to seek entry to the U.S.

I don’t like to disagree with Eric or Jerusalem (or my old podcast-mate Dara Lind), but I find these empirical claims really difficult to believe. Can it really be true that asylum claimants are undeterrable? Why would that be?

I do take the point that Dara is always making that you can’t just turn a policy knob in Washington, DC and expect it to immediately filter down to Guatemala or Venezuela in exactly the intended way. People are not only fleeing immense deprivation, those who choose to flee are motivated in part by wishful thinking and encouraged in that wishful thinking by smugglers and others with a vested interest in telling them that they should go. But we should also delve to some extent into the details of these informational problems.

It seems to me that one problem is that there are two political parties in the United States, and one of them is committed, for the purposes of domestic politics, to constantly informing the world that the southern border is totally uncontrolled and that the President of the United States welcomes illegal immigrants. The Greg Abbott stunt of putting people on busses to send them to “sanctuary cities” has been a big political success in terms of making Kathy Hochul look bad and prompting Eric Adams to criticize Joe Biden. But from a communications standpoint, he is inaccurately portraying what it means to be a sanctuary city and deliberately exaggerating the extent to which migrants will be welcomed in New York. Part of any successful strategy for securing the border would have to be coordinated action between the federal government and the border states, with Texas as the key actor both because it’s the longest border and also because it’s the one state with a Republican governor.

To toss out an empirical study of my own, Treb Allen, Cauê de Castro Dobbin & Melanie Morten find that the wall-building that happened in the late-Bush and early-Obama years under the auspices of the Secure Fence Act did deter irregular migration from Mexico. That doesn’t necessarily mean that building a wall across the whole border is a cost-effective idea, their data says:

We spent about $7 per person on those stretches of wall

Per capita income rose about $0.28 per person per year for low-skill native-born American workers

High-skilled American incomes went down

Just judged as economic policy, that’s a pretty crappy intervention and it looks worse when you consider that there is probably diminishing marginal returns to building more and more marginal wall-segments. Immigration — as Eric and Jerusalem and Dara and I all agree — is good and the economics of immigration restrictionist politics don’t make sense.

But I think border chaos is wrecking the politics of immigration (see also here and here) in a way that deserves to be taken more seriously.

The basic Biden formula of trying to create more orderly, legal pathways for people to migrate while also cracking down on irregular migration strikes me as correct. The problem both in terms of politics and in terms of trying to communicate externally is that the administration seems diffident about actually owning this strategy. As Eric mentions in his piece, when the Biden administration resumed wall-building, their public message was that this is just them complying with a legal requirement and they don’t really believe in it. I think as long as you’re building the wall, you might as well try to get credit for it!