Third anniversary mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

22 - 28 minutes

It’s not the third anniversary of the mailbag columns, but still — it’s been a thrilling three years running this site, and I always love answering your questions.

Some good stuff happening this week. A Thanksgiving dinner will cost less in 2023 than it did in 2022. US-China talks led to some agreement on renewables deployment. Brookline is going to allow more multifamily housing. Home sales are up in general. Wages have risen faster than prices since the pandemic, and inequality is down. The Consumer Price Index was flat in October, and the Producer Price Index was actually down.

I also wanted to flag a candidate of interest. Janelle Bynum is a member of the Oregon House who is running against Republican incumbent Lori Chavez-DeRemer for the OR-5 seat in congress. Bynum beat Chavez-DeRemer in two separate state legislative races, but Chavez-DeRemer was able to get into congress in 2022 after progressives knocked off the incumbent Democrat in a primary. I honestly did not love the incumbent Democrat in question, Kurt Schrader, but I’d much rather have had him than LCD, who’s replacement-level Republican. Bynum can win this seat. She’s endorsed by the UFCW, the Congressional Black Caucus, the New Democrats Caucus, and Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and I’d consider throwing some money her way a good investment in factional partisanship.

Onwards!

Roberto: Thanksgiving (and a presidential election year) are upon us. Any advice on handling political / current event discussions at family gatherings? My typical approach recently is the WarGames strategy: the only way to win is to not play the game. I try not to take the bait from my conservative family members and steer conversation toward less charged topics. But while disengaging is probably best for my sanity, most of my family members seem to be (conservative-leaning) moderates in a key battleground state, and it can feel like I'm squandering an opportunity.

As a highly trained professional political pundit, I’m generally loathe to get involved in arguments with amateurs.

A few weeks ago, a casual acquaintance started firing-off flaming hot takes on the Israel/Palestine conflict on the playground, which I thought was an odd life choice. I also wasn’t going to get into an argument with him about it, though, so another professional comms parent and I just tried to deflect. But I live in DC and don’t have much interpersonal reaction with residents of swing states. “Relational organizing” (i.e., talking to people you know) can be a powerful technique, and while I don’t think you should try to browbeat family members into voting for Joe Biden, it is probably worth arming yourself with some key facts and talking points so that you’re able to nudge people in a constructive direction.

Now of course, I don’t know what your family members think! But my general sense is that most conservatives are highly motivated by a dislike of the far left and tend to exaggerate the extent to which the Democratic Party is influenced by the left and, to an extent, get confused about cause and effect.

It’s probably useful to point out that under Biden, American oil production is at an all-time high, as is American natural gas production. Police funding is up, and the homicide rate, which rose very sharply during Donald Trump’s presidency, has now fallen below that Trump peak. You might also want to remind people that Trump spent the fall of 2020 worrying that if Biden won the election, the rioting that afflicted America’s cities during Trump’s presidency would intensify and the country would return to hard Covid lockdowns, but neither of those things happened. Biden has defied the immigration lawyer lobby to crack down on people who cross through Mexico before making asylum claims in the United States. Biden has been widely praised by Jewish leaders for his policy toward Israel.

None of that is to say that conservatives have no legitimate beefs with him. Many people want to make abortion illegal, to enact large tax cuts, to see Russia to conquer Ukraine, and to dismantle the public school system in the United States. Biden does not want to do those things, and if you do, it’s perfectly reasonable to vote for Trump. But I personally think it’s striking that Republicans (and Fox News) rarely campaign in those terms. They instead campaign against a made-up version of the Democratic Party that has AOC on the right flank and Stalin on the left.

Belisarius: My youngest kid’s preschool tuition rate just went up again, and is literally 50% higher than it was when she was born in late 2020.

I know it isn’t Biden’s or Democrat’s fault, but...this sucks. It is a very difficult to look at the numbers, and be rational, and overcome the feeling that the economy is just awful.

Separate from any questions about Biden or “the economy,” the number one fact about the world that I wish was more broadly appreciated is this: In a healthy economy where wages rise faster than prices, the relative price of labor-intensive services goes up, and it goes up faster the healthier economic growth is.

Sometimes that fact is just a curiosity. It sounds paradoxical that the richer world of 2023 is less able to afford intricate hand-crafted decorative architecture than the world of 1823, but when you ponder the economics, it actually makes sense. But some labor-intensive sectors like childcare, elementary school teaching, police work, and elder care have critical social functions. Your expectation should be that if you have 20 years of healthy economic growth, then either the tax burden to support your teachers and cops will rise or else the average quality of policing and the school system will decline. The only alternative to those dynamics is to find good ways to make these sectors less labor-intensive. With policing, for example, we can rely more on surveillance and facial recognition software. That’s controversial, but I think the controversy stems in large part from people not really thinking hard enough about the underlying economic fundamentals. On childcare, it seems like we’re still pretty far from robot nannies, so if we want it to be affordable to people in the long run, we' need higher taxes and more subsidies.

Scott Spitze: How do Democrats fight the meme that Republicans are good on the economy? It seems to be the main thing keeping the GOP afloat with the average voter. But it's not actually true: short-term economic output has little correlation with the party in power (and the government has little control over the economy in general) and many GOP policies are not exactly priming long term growth. Is this just something where voters say they care about the economy but really only care about marginal tax rates?

My interpretation of this is that voters are thinking in terms of pretty crude tradeoffs.

They always say they like Democrats more on climate, on the environment, and on various tender-hearted issues related to helping poor people and social justice. A naive person could read that and think “oh the voters are crying out for massive welfare state expansion and huge curbs on fossil fuels.” But then you see that voters like Republicans more on “the economy.” Basically, Republicans are the party that will go for growth, even if it means screwing people over or trashing the environment, whereas Democrats take a more balanced view. That’s a pretty crude caricature of the parties and an oversimplification of how policy tradeoffs work, but as a simplification, it’s not terrible. In terms of what Democrats can do, I think it’s find ways to say “here is a thing we did to address Economic Problem X [which today would be high prices] that isn’t just a way of achieving Progressive Social Goal Y.”

Secret Squirrel: You were joking about how, since they brought David Cameron back in the UK, Biden should make Obama the Duke of Honolulu and appoint him Foreign Secretary. But what should Obama do all day? He's 62, enormously talented, still popular and I assume pretty bored.

By all accounts, he’s having a great time being a kind of random celebrity and doing sporadic high profile political events.

The thing that I, personally, would love to see him do is a series of super-secret trainings and seminars with young elected officials where he delivers some real talk about his life and career and the art of pandering. There is a way you go from holding down a safe state legislature seat in Hyde Park to becoming President of the United States, and it is not doing the whole progressive advocacy group checklist or fully aligning yourself with the hopes and dreams of your personal social peers.

Sean O: Assuming Trump was not a factor, which Republican primary candidate do you prefer, and which do you believe would win the primary?

Of the people who got in the race, I think Chris Christie would make the best president because he’s the most moderate. But by the same token, he’s too moderate to win.

The sheer volume of the Ron DeSantis Hype Train at its peak makes it look foolish in retrospect now that it’s deflated, but I think we had clear signs that he would have been the favorite if Trump had decided to step away from electoral politics.

David_in_Chicago: When is the last time you changed your mind? Question inspired by this r/EzraKlein thread but wanted to broaden it.

I change my mind a lot! I know I have this reputation for being an uber-generalist who runs his mouth about everything, but I have tons of unsettled views that I mostly don’t write about. For example, last week I was reading something that was mostly about meth users but it incidentally mentioned a guy who runs a needle exchange program. It occurred to me that I had broadly positive views on needle exchange, but that my knowledge of the issue was driven by research that was done a while ago. And over the course of my career, the treatments for HIV have gotten a lot better, while the problem of opioid addiction has gotten a lot more serious.

So I wondered, has the balance of considerations shifted? I searched around, and found this Analisa Packham article suggesting that yes, in the fentanyl era, these programs may do more harm than good. My mind changed! But I also wasn’t going to fire off a 2,000-word column based on one paper. I may see other things that change my mind back.

Pat Thomas: Now that it’s a two person race, do you prefer either Angela Alsobrooks or David Trone in the Democratic primary for Senate in Maryland?

Speaking of things I don’t have strongly held opinions about, I keep not finding a clear basis for making a choice in this race.

Trone is white and represents suburbs west of DC (plus conservative areas farther west) while Alsobrooks is Black and represents suburbs east of DC. Looking at their endorsements patterns, it mostly seems to follow geographic and racial lines rather than any clear ideological split. Trone has been a totally unremarkable House member who doesn’t stand out in any positive or negative way to me, while Alsobrooks has been the best person on housing in PG County politics, but that’s an extraordinarily low bar. If one or the other wants to come out as a champion of land use reform or education reform or nuclear energy or something else I care about, then I’ll hop on that person’s bandwagon, but so far neither has. They both seem like they’d be fine, and they don’t seem that different.

I do like that Alsobrooks actually talks about her work as a prosecutor and reducing violent crime, while Trone just wants you to know he’s a good progressive who cares about reform. There isn’t really a policy contrast, but Alsobrooks’ message is better, so if I had to vote tomorrow, that’s my thin basis for preferring her. But my endorsement is very much up for grabs in this race if someone wants to try to impress me.

StrangePolyhedrons: Now that history has cooled just a little and we can look back without it being a current political hot potato, did the United States make a mistake not signing up for the Trans Pacific Partnership? Would our economy be in better or worse shape if we had? What was your take at the time and have you changed your mind?

There are, I think, two different questions about the TPP.

    Was it a good idea for the United States to pursue a multilateral trade agreement with the bloc of countries involved in TPP?

    Was the specific content of the TPP trade agreement good or bad for America or the world?

I think the answer to number one is a clear “yes,” while number two is much more of a mixed bag. I defended TPP’s financial services chapter against its critics and thought the complaints offered about its government procurement chapter were mostly wrong. But what I wrote at the time was that while the abstract national security case for TPP made sense, the specific design of the deal didn’t really follow through on that concept.

Broadly speaking, TPP offered foreign countries better access to the American market. In exchange, we asked them to do things, primarily open their domestic markets to American banks (a fine idea but hardly a huge win for the average American) and copy bad American intellectual property rules. A truly “strategic” TPP would have asked for fewer favors for American businesses and insisted on stronger supply chain rules to ensure that Vietnam (or whatever else) wasn’t just being used as a cutout for products that were largely Chinese. At the time, I thought sinking TPP was fine because the same basic idea could return in a better form. But then Trump became president, which I was not expecting in 2015, and just this week Biden’s efforts to do TPP-but-better collapsed due to opposition from congressional Democrats. If I had known that future history, I would have thought that getting some form of TPP done and trying to improve it from the inside was probably the better option.

Thomas L Hutcheson: Since blocking any specific fossil fuel producing or transportation project (what I sort of unfairly call McKibbin-ism, although I’ve even seen John Quiggins defend it in the much larger context of exporting coal from Australia.) will, because of substitution, result in very little CO2 emission avoided but at the cost of the lost project benefits and political costs to the Democratic Administration that goes along, why is this such a popular “activist” tactic?

The skeleton key for understanding a lot of activist behavior is that activists believe strongly in activism, so the proximate goal of almost any activist campaign is to build activist movement strength rather than accomplish policy goals.

To that end, the Generic Activist Playbook works like this:

    Demand something.

    The object of your demand needs to be someone who can grant your demand.

    The object of your demand needs to care what you think about him. 

This is why student debt cancellation became such an important talking point. It does literally nothing to improve the long-term trajectory of American higher education, but precisely because it’s a random unilateral one-off you, can “demand” that Biden do it. McKibben’s great insight about Keystone is that because it required State Department sign-off in a way that is outside the normal cost-benefit regulatory framework, Obama had the power to block it, so you could unleash the GAP on it. It’s true that it wasn’t important in terms of reducing emissions, but the goal of climate activism isn’t to reduce emissions, it’s to build climate activism and Keystone was GAP-able.

GAP is also why the initial instinct of a lot of left activists was to respond to the Dobbs ruling by getting mad at Joe Biden for not issuing enough emergency declarations. The question of “what will help protect abortion rights?” literally does not arise because that’s not how activists think about things. Then people like Ashley All (and her donors!) came around with the abortion rights initiative strategy, which has helped preserve freedom for millions of people. That’s great, but it mostly underscores that “activism” as a category of human activity is badly overrated by contemporary progressives.

Aaron: Privatize Amtrak!

At first I said this as a troll but then… why not? I’m a transit novice so I’m sure I’m missing something, but Japan and Italy have had varying degrees of privately owned train companies, with obvious success. Privately owned train companies would seem more likely to prioritize ridership/money spent than Amtrak has been. They would probably be more willing to hire foreign experts. It might be easier to focus on northeast corridor if it’s not seen as government jobs program. Hell, Republicans might even support it as a means of “shrinking government. So what am I missing?

There’s nothing wrong with privatizing Amtrak, but I caution enthusiasts that doing so wouldn’t magically solve anything. A private passenger railroad would still be a heavily regulated entity (freight railroads are regulated) that asks for government subsidies for basic infrastructure (freight railroads and airlines do this and obviously car companies do not pay for highway construction), and so the quality of the political decision-making is still really crucial.

The case for privatization would have to be that it changes the political dynamic, which could be true. But part of the Japanese story is they reformed governance before privatizing in order to maximize the value of the asset. In the UK, where they kind of thoughtless sold-off poorly managed rail assets, they just ended up with some bad rent-seeking private railroads.

Dave: It seems like some parts of the country are clearly over-extended in terms of available resources or climate vulnerability. For example Arizona doesn’t have enough water and many places in Florida will just keep getting devastated by natural disasters. Do you think government should use zoning laws or similar restrictions to prevent further over-extension as climate change gets worse?

The idea that Arizona “doesn’t have enough water” to accommodate its population growth is a serious misunderstanding. What happened is that people realized that the desert is a good place for farming since it’s so sunny, but that only works if you have a source of water that is not the rain (this is why Egypt was a major cradle of civilization), so a lot of water is sent to Arizona for use in agricultural irrigation.

And there’s nothing wrong with that! Bringing water to Arizona to irrigate crops is a reasonable thing for a modern industrial society to do. But the United States tends to let farmers use water at a discount price, which leads to overconsumption and to residential users facing a zero-sum scramble for an unreasonably scarce resource. What Western states need to do is price water appropriately. In terms of Florida, though, I have to admit I don’t really understand their insurance issues and need to learn more about this.

Tom Hitchner: In your column marking 3 years of Slow Boring, you wrote that today, just as when you launched, you thought that “Donald Trump is a corrupt, authoritarian menace whose term in office ended up going much better on a practical level than it might have, but whose fundamental lack of shame or principle risks inflicting massive long-term damage on the country.” I certainly agree with your assessment but I'm surprised to think you thought that at launch, since at that time Trump had just been beaten and it wasn't obvious (at least to me) that he would even run again, let alone that he'd still be the unquestioned head of the party. Thinking back to mid-November 2021, what did you think was going to happen with Donald Trump over the following few years? Do you think there was a plausible timeline in which Trump ends up on the sidelines?

I’m not a super-prescient person, and I didn’t anticipate the violence and drama of January 6. But I thought it was clear from the moment that Trump refused to concede that he was executing a power move on the GOP.

Normally if a presidential candidate loses, different factions immediately start explaining why the incompetence and failure of the candidate proves the party needs to move in the direction of Faction A or Faction B. Trump — from the moment of the election — was extremely effective at combatting this natural evolution, and everyone in the establishment just kept hoping they could somehow ride it out. Then 1/6 happened, which was alarming enough that some Republicans made a fitful effort to ditch the guy before mostly giving up. But what was striking to me in November 2020 was that a non-violent refusal to admit he’d lost was something everyone was happy to go along with.

Monkey staring at a monolith: How should the US change its asylum policy?

I'm struck by the fact that current US asylum policy combined with a long wait time for asylum cases has created a de facto visa procedure that is attracting people from as far away as Asia to travel to Mexico, cross the US border, and wait to be detained by Border Patrol. This seems really sub-optimal.

My gut instinct is that asylum simply should not be available to anyone caught inside the US illegally or to people who travel through an intermediate nation on the way to the US, but I assume there's some reason this rule is not in place.

Just to review the actual policy trajectory, in May the Biden administration imposed a new rule that banned people from claiming asylum if they passed through other countries without making asylum claims there first. Border crossings did, in fact, drop in response to that. But a district court judge issued a stay against that rule in July, and then in August a circuit court lifted the stay. Despite the circuit court rulings, though, in August and September we saw record crossings and then a big drop in October as the administration sent more personnel to the area.

Maybe the numbers will keep falling, and we’ll look back and decide that this policy change fixed things.

But that seems unlikely. Historically, policy changes at the border do result in an initial drop, but then people figure out that the most fundamental reality of the situation is unchanged — if a ton of people are apprehended by Border Patrol all at once, there is no logistically tractable way to detain them all or process them instantly. You can say “well, the rule is you can’t apply for asylum since you passed through Mexico without applying there.” But a rule is not a procedure for implementing the rule. That’s how you wind up with authoritarian musings, like Trump’s idea that the Border Patrol should shoot migrants on site.

In practice, what successful enforcement regimes (including the one Trump eventually landed on) seem to rely on is externalization of enforcement. Basically, instead of having the Border Patrol be capricious and cruel in its policing of the US-Mexico border, you try to get the governments of Mexico and Central America to do the dirty work. That fundamentally is what Trump pulled off, at least temporarily, by 2019. Europe has tried this for a while with Turkey and various countries in North Africa, and I think their experience (beyond human rights concerns) is that effort can wane over time.

Nicaragua is currently deliberately facilitating migration from Haiti, Cuba, and Africa to the United States because they’re mad at sanctions the United States imposed over Daniel Ortega’s attacks on democracy. It’s conceivable that an administration more fanatical about reducing migration would just make a deal with Ortega instead of imposing those sanctions. Is that would Trump would do? Well, on the one hand, he is more fanatical about migration. But on the other hand, he (like most Republicans) is generally more fanatical about being hostile to leftist Latin American regimes.

All of which is to say that part of what the United States needs here is more consensus as to what our actual priorities are. If Democrats and Republicans agree that the number one most important thing is to block migration, we can probably achieve that. But you then can’t turn around and say “oh he’s gone soft on communism” or whatever, and there will probably be consequence for a range of other priorities including fentanyl and trade.