Mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

22 - 28 minutes

These five weeks between Thanksgiving and the New Year always feel like dead space on the news calendar to me, but it’s about ten percent of the total year which is kind of a lot. So I’m gonna try to think of some good articles to write.

Kicking off this week’s good news, we are incredibly grateful to everyone who’s helped raise money for GiveDirectly this week. When we mentioned them briefly in our Giving Tuesday post last year, Slow Boring readers gave more than $15,000. This year, we thought a stronger pitch, made by more than one newsletter, would get us five times that amount, if we were lucky and people were feeling generous.

But we hit our 5x goal in just four hours, and the campaign has so far raised over $180,000 — and that’s not even counting the donations many of you made toward GiveDirectly’s matching goal. If you’ve been meaning to give and haven’t had a chance, the fundraiser will be open for four more days (through Tuesday, a full week) and we would love to hit $200,000. The village we aimed to fund is fully funded, but more money will let GiveDirectly expand to more villages.

Donate to GiveDirectly

More good news: We’ve got new jobs coming to former coal communities courtesy of the Energy Department, we’ve got third quarter GDP growth revised upwards to be even better, the hostage exchange is happening in Gaza, and NASA found six new planets. Apparently the past five years have been the five best years for book sales ever. And American life expectancy is rising again.

I also wanted to shout out the Niskanen Center’s new online mag Hypertext, which has a really cool symposium up talking about Milton Friedman’s vision of a free market welfare state centered on a Negative Income Tax. There are a lot of interesting technical issues around the workability of NIT, but I think the larger themes here are fundamental to Niskanen, and to my own thinking, in terms of how to create sustainable inclusive liberal institutions.

Finally, questions!

lindamc: Last week I went to my local running store to get new shoes. The ones I got were new to me — I'm recovering from a stress fracture, and was looking for more stability — so when I got home, I looked up reviews to see how others like them. I looked at several sites, including the one for the store (part of a national chain), where I saw that the shoes were 25 percent less on the website than in the store of the same company.

Do you have a take on this? I get that it's more expensive to have a store than a warehouse full of boxes, but 25% seems huge.

Maybe I'm a weirdo, but I prefer to buy things in person (among other things, it makes me more conscious of the fact that I'm spending money) and I like living in an urban environment with actual stores. A world in which people just stay home all the time, consuming entertainment on screens while ordering everything they need/want to be delivered, sounds very bad to me, and this seems like a meaningful step in that direction.

Ten years ago, I was constantly worrying about this. My neighborhood had gone from being full of vacant storefronts and shady used car dealerships when I first moved in 20 years ago, to being full of bars and restaurants but still almost no actual stores where you could buy things. That combined with the rise of online shopping made me think neighborhood retail as we knew it was maybe dying. But now, as of 2023, the stretch of 14th Street between Rhode Island Avenue and Florida Avenue has a bike shop, a Sephora, a Madewell, a separate Madewell men’s store, a Lululemon, a bookstore, a Commonwealth, a running goods store, a Backcountry, a Shinola, a Marine Layer, and a bunch of furniture stores, along with the cell phone places, liquor stores, banks, and marijuana dispensaries that you see everywhere. So I do think the demand for retail still exists, especially where there’s enough residential density to support it, plus enough zoning for ground floor retail that it isn’t all occupied by banks.

But this is a reason not to be dismissive of the signs of rising shoplifting and retail theft in some cities. Companies can and will invest in countermeasures to safeguard their warehouses, but anything that raises the cost basis of running an urban retail store will mean that at the margin you get fewer of them. And that will mean a less competitive marketplace and higher prices. My sense is that enforcement of the rules against this sort of thing has in practice always been pretty lax, but people didn’t necessarily realize how easy it was to get away with shoplifting and smash-and-grab jobs. Now the word is out and we need to take countermeasures.

City of Trees: What screen and device rules do you have for your son, and what rules do you have planned as he gets older? From what you've learned so far, is there any advice that you'd give to other parents in this regard?

Even though we use the phrase “screen time” for a lot of this stuff, the actual policies in our house are much more about content than about screens.

He has a Kindle, for example, which is definitely a “screen,” but we don’t limit the amount of time he can spend reading books. Even within the virtuous sphere of book reading, though, his absolute favorite thing in the world is to read these kind of trashy Minecraft fan fictions that are churned out on Kindle Unlimited. We never tell him he can’t read that stuff, or force him to read something that he doesn’t like, but we do sometimes make suggestions and encourage him to read other things that are more challenging (and he’s usually pretty open to that). On the other end of the spectrum is YouTube, which we limit to two hours per weekend and a handful of pre-approved channels that we feel okay about. We don’t really sweat it if he wants to watch TV or play iPad games on the weekend, but he’s not allowed to play multiplayer games with strangers on the internet. He’s a big fan of turn-based historical wargaming — he especially likes a series from EasyTech — and he’ll play various games on Switch with me or with his friends.

On school days, he’s not allowed to use his iPad or Switch, but he loves Nova and we’ll occasionally watch an episode of that (or another documentary) as a family on a weeknight.

The main thing I would say about all of this is that the multiplication of devices and entertainments has been a real godsend for parents in certain situations — it’s way easier to take a kid on a plane in 2023 than it was in 2003 — but it creates a lot of complexity around this issue. It used to be that you could let your kid watch cartoons on Saturday morning, but then on other days the cartoons just weren’t on. There didn’t need to be a special rule about it and then disputes about the terms of the rule. It’s also a bit harder to sort of “upsell” a kid on watching things that you as a parent are interested in (NBA basketball, for example) because there’s always more kiddie programming streaming 24/7.

Heading into the future, I think the main thing I worry about with kids and screens is exactly what I worry about with adults and screens. It’s never been less boring to sit alone in a room at home, which is a huge win in a lot of situations but also means we spend less time engaged in face-to-face interactions with other people. When I was new in DC, I met some fellow bloggers and a bunch of us ended up playing on a pub trivia team together. There’s nothing particularly virtuous about pub trivia as an activity, but those interactions created friendships that helped support me emotionally when my mother passed away. I don’t think online gaming has the same effect.

And this to me is mostly a fact about “online,” not about “gaming.” When I was a kid, I had an SNES and my friend Brian had a Sega Genesis, so he’d come to my house and play F-Zero and I’d go to his house and play Warsong. But then we’d also go get pizza and get to know each others’ parents and so on. Or at my friend Jeff’s house, we’d play Tie Fighter on PC, but that was also where I heard “The Chronic” for the first time. Obviously on a technical level, the ability to do this stuff remotely is an improvement, and AI will probably make “virtual multiplayer” gaming better and better. What makes people happy in the longer run, though, isn’t really fun games, it’s solid relationships with other people. Traditionally, a lot of us have forged friendships by doing stuff together — some of which is screen stuff and some of which isn’t — and as the technology supersedes the need to do things together, it’s important to be mindful of the central importance of that togetherness.

cp6: What is the one piece of parenting advice you would most like to give to someone who is expecting?

It’s hard to give people advice because everyone is different and everyone’s situation is different, but in my experience almost every human being (adults and children alike) benefits from getting a good night’s sleep, and I’m a big proponent of sleep training as early as possible. This is a rare thing that really does work if you do it right, but requires some focus and self-discipline to implement.1

Bigger picture, though, to borrow a point from Kate often made when our son was younger, basically all of dealing with little kids is a series of tradeoffs. If you do something a little bit more challenging in the short-term (make the kid learn to sit at a table at a restaurant without an iPad), then you get a medium-term benefit (kid who can come out to restaurants and act normal). Sometimes prioritizing the short-term is necessary, but it’s good to make those decisions intentionally. People often get too hung up on truly long-term stuff, when I think the variation in plausible parenting strategies for middle class Americans just isn’t going to meaningfully influence outcomes for adults. But medium-term stuff really does make a difference to your quality of life as a parent, and to your child’s quality of life. If you give a five year-old what he wants when he whines a lot, you’ll end up with a very whiny six year-old.

Nate Meyer: What science fiction/fantasy property that has not yet been converted into a major TV Series or Movie would you like to see?

The one I’ve always wanted to see is “The Caves of Steel.” It would be a tricky adaptation because the book is dated in a lot of ways, but it’s also high on my list of things I’d really love to see visualized.

Some folks in the comments mentioned “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” which would be a very cool choice and which has kicked around Hollywood for a while. At one point, the Coen Brothers were working on a movie adaptation but that didn’t come together, and then in 2019 Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman sold a spec script for a prestige TV series based on the book, but evidently that hasn’t come to fruition. Unfortunately, we’re now in an era of content retrenchment, and I think it’s less likely that these kind of things will get done.

Ben A: What's the deal with slow EV sales? [Jerry Seinfeld voice]

The idea that EV sales are slowing seems wildly overstated to me. What’s true, though, is that we’ve moved from a world in which EVs were selling about as fast as companies could actually manufacture them to one in which, if you wanted to buy an electric car tomorrow, you could definitely do that.

This is a big business problem for car manufacturers, because there’s not room in the universe for all the traditional automakers (Ford, GM, Toyota, Honda, “Stellantis,” Hyundai, etc.) to all succeed as EV manufacturers while Tesla and Rivian and BYD also thrive. Either a bunch of EV startups need to fail, a bunch of entrenched incumbents need to sink, or some combination of the two. It’s not going to just be gravy for everyone, but that’s fine — that’s capitalism.

The tricky thing for public policy is that while I agree with the take that EVs are going to win, they are not going to win fast enough to meet climate advocates’ preferred emissions timelines. So there is going to be considerable political push to get regulators to accelerate EV adoption and ferocious pushback from consumers against that. I think this is a great example of an area where it would be better to actually price the externalities than to do weird regulatory hacks.

Shawn Barrow: What are your thoughts on the Laffer Curve?

I think it’s telling that when the Kennedy administration made a Laffer-style argument in favor of cutting the top tax rate (which was 90 percent at the time!), they were an administration that actually favored higher levels of spending as a matter of policy and ideology and were making a good-faith effort to figure out how to do that.

Phil: What impact will the bureaucratic initiatives regarding supply chains, that Biden announced today, have? The rhetoric around it seems appropriate, but I can't help thinking that they're tweaking things around the edges, rather than truly seeking to direct agenda-setting toward lowering costs for consumers on their major purchases (housing, education, childcare, etc.). This executive order maybe only helps with cars and medicine in the medium term.

The initiatives are totally good, but as you say, they are aimed at what they claim to be aimed at — increasing the resilience of the supply chains for a few key things — rather than at dramatically increasing the productivity of the American economy.

They’re not even really aimed at increasing the productivity of American shipping, which would require looking at things like automation of container ports and the Jones Act. Biden and his team seem to basically know which direction to go in (they’ve done a bunch of these initiatives around housing supply), but they tend to be timid about it, with boldness reserved for foreign policy initiatives (which is the president’s main passion point) and stuff that was part of the progressive advocacy agenda circa 2019.

Jeff F: Which practices or beliefs that are currently widespread among Americans do you think are most likely to seem unthinkably outrageous a century from now?

I think we all know that current livestock practices aren’t humane, and I imagine that as technology improves in the future — whether that’s lab-grown meat or some kind of super productive agriculture — the incentive to engage in the kind of practices that are widespread today will diminish, and our descendants will look on us as barbaric.

Ben Frustuck: How would you characterize Angela Merkel's legacy? Is her legacy for Germans substantially different than it is for Europeans overall? Was her asylum policy worth the political backlash across Europe? What about her treatment of Greece during its debt crisis?

I was never a fan of Merkel (this was very mean), so I’m glad that more and more people are coming around to the “Merkel is bad” viewpoint. And in fact, I would defend her, to an extent, on the asylum issue. There was a backlash, but that’s fine, it’s not like European policy went in some terrible direction as a result of the backlash. And it’s also not as if post-Merkel leaders have managed to handle the migration situation in a way that voters find satisfactory.

But Merkel’s budget politics, her Russia policy, and her energy policy — and particularly the nexus of the three — were really bad. It was the perfect opportunity for a center-right leader to do some Military Keynesianism and make Europe’s defenses and economy more resilient, and she just blew it in ways that were incredibly foreseeable at the time.

Marcus: You've recently argued that Trump’s proposed policies would worsen inflation and thus people mad about inflation shouldn’t vote for Trump. During Trump’s presidency, there was lots of hand-wringing about the inflationary effects of his tax cuts and tariffs. Nothing meaningful materialized. When Biden was running for president, nobody worried that he would pass legislation partially causing the worst inflation in a half-century, but he did. My point isn’t to defend Trump or say he would be better than Biden. But, do you really think it’s worth arguing against a presidential candidate by forecasting the macroeconomic effects of his campaign policy proposals, which will probably differ from the legislation that is actually passed?

A lot of people complain that pundits aren’t sufficiently careful in the predictions we make, but one frustration I have is that the audience tends to traffic in these kind of generalizations and not reward people for being restrained and correct.

I didn’t say that Trump’s tax policies would be inflationary. In fact, I criticized Democrats for being unreasonably worried about Trump deficits and said the media was exaggerating the economic harm of the trade war with China. And in the 2012 cycle, I said a Mitt Romney victory would be better for the economy because Republicans would pursue expansionary fiscal policy, which would be good, while Obama would mean more austerity.

So I think I have a decent track record of playing it fair on these questions. I was genuinely surprised by how aggressive Biden’s fiscal stimulus proposal was and even more surprised that moderate senate Democrats went for it (my notes on my briefing call about the proposal say OPENING BID in giant letters because I took for granted that it wouldn’t happen). So it’s certainly possible to get things wrong. But Trump has given no indication that he wants to respond to changed macroeconomic conditions by reversing his proclivity for expansionary fiscal policy. And George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan also pursued expansionary fiscal policies in office, so I think this is pretty deep in the GOP’s DNA. Meanwhile, Trump’s trade and immigration policies are straightforwardly bad for productivity. It’s a while until the election, so Trump certainly has time to roll out a serious plan to address inflation. But what he’s put on the table will make things worse.

The Elastic Stranger: It’s sometimes mentioned in the context of criminal justice issues that court backlogs may contribute to poor enforcement of important rules. Do you have any thoughts about how the productivity of the legal system could be raised, presumably using technological advances? For example, could court reporters be partly replaced or augmented with recordings? Can increasing the use of video conferncing increase the supply of judges and attorneys, perhaps even across state lines? Other ideas?

The ugly reality of our current system is that it implicitly relies on large-scale plea bargaining to function, and I don’t really see a lot of scope for productivity improvements as long as we want defendants to have trials with human judges and juries.

Seth Chalmer: Along the lines of your general advice to be politically moderate and normal to drive sustainable and real positive change, do you think a group like Strong Towns might have more success building a mass movement for (some forms of) housing density, compared with groups like YIMBY Action? Shouldn't YIMBYs be exercising message discipline and playing on folksy nostalgia for walkable town squares in a simpler time rather than publicly yearning for space-age skyscrapers that lots of normies don't like?

My answer to this is the same as my answer to all forms of concern-trolling about the YIMBY movement, which is that it is the most successful policy reform effort of our time, and other people should be asking what they can learn from YIMBYs rather than vice versa.

I don’t think it’s actually true, for example, that YIMBYs are “publicly yearning for space-age skyscrapers” and I also don’t think it’s particularly true that the public has a strong preference for mid-rise versus skyscraper construction typologies. The relevant difference is that while skyscrapers have their place in a modern city, their construction costs per square foot are high so the economics mostly don’t support building them under any zoning regime.

In terms of YIMBY Action in particular, different YIMBY groups position themselves somewhat differently, and they strike me as clearly positioned to market YIMBYism to people with broadly progressive worldviews and concerns. That’s a valid strategy to pursue in some jurisdictions and less so in others. But YIMBY Action is just one of several YIMBY-themed institutions in the world — there’s the rival Welcoming Neighbors Network, there’s Up For Growth, there’s the Parking Reform Network. What I think is most important is to remain a broad church that has room for libertarians and leftists and moderates of all stripes.

The thing I keep saying YIMBYism needs next is better analytic capacity to assess the actual impact of specific policy changes on housing outcomes. Right now, I think advocates are to an extent flying blind in terms of which things are really worth fighting for and which are less important. It’s also not always clear exactly which side deals that get cut to pass bills are true win-wins versus which ones give away the store. Advocacy institutions need to form working relationships with elected officials and other legislative stakeholders, so they are not always incentivized to take a really frank look at the merits of things. We need more investment in credible (probably separate) analytic institutions that can help inform the world more clearly.

Matt Cowgill: What's the best evidence to point to to convince skeptics of ‘filtering; in the housing market?

If you just go to a place with elastic housing supply, it’s easy to see the filtering happening — in San Antonio, an old house is cheaper than a new one.

But the skeptics don’t live in those places, so what you have to show them is anti-filtering. Our family lives in an old rowhouse that was relatively cheap rental housing before we bought it from the landlord, gut renovated it, and moved in ourselves. That’s what happens when a neighborhood becomes more desirable, but the supply of dwellings does not expand. In a different land use regime, the money we spent on an expensive construction project could have built a brand new unit, and the place we bought could have just hung around being dingy-but-habitable.

SS: You often write about how political strategy has to align with the electorate we have. But how do we get a “better” electorate? That's how we create enduring, durable change. For example, modern public opinion guarantees that no one is going to bring back slavery, regardless of messaging choices or candidate strength — in contrast to the public opinion of a couple hundred years ago.

Persuading people is underrated!

Now how do you persuade people? I don’t know exactly. Sometimes people persuade me of things. But probably fictions and works of art are more persuasive than columns. Harriet Beecher Stowe was a big deal in antislavery politics.

Effy: Online I see a lot of leftists defend their extreme positions by saying something to the effect of “a lot of people were against the civil rights movement too, and they were on the wrong side of history.”

What’s your top X list of bad policy ideas that thankfully went nowhere but nevertheless were championed by American historical figures or movements who are viewed favorably today?

The best examples of this aren’t really ideas that “went nowhere” (because it’s hard to know whether those ideas might have worked), it’s things like eugenics and coercive sterilization that had their moment in the sun as forward-thinking progressivism that we’d now all rather forget.

Or maybe it’s something like alcohol prohibition, a progressive cause in its era that actually did have some significant benefits, but also had a lot of downsides and didn’t prove politically sustainable. These days lots of people agree that “seventies-style environmentalism” made a lot of mistakes that have become counterproductive in terms of addressing climate change, but clearly at the time these ideas seemed extremely compelling to people.