Karma mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

20 - 25 minutes

I’m obsessed with the right-wing conspiracy theories about Taylor Swift, none of which I endorse. That said, if Trumpworld really does go through with their plan for a “holy war” against Swift, one piece of oppo I’d like to see is that I’m pretty sure her song “Karma” from the most recent album contains an uncredited interpolation of a part of the 2006 song “Music is My Hot Hot Sex” by CSS. I’ve seen this discussed on one Reddit thread and in one brief TikTok video, but the mainstream media doesn’t want to talk about it.

Just saying!

This week in good news: A look at Medicaid expansion in the South, the first image of newborn great white sharks, the labor market is now appropriately balanced for sustained growth, and in Phoenix we saw a transit construction project actually get done on schedule and on budget. The new tax bill seems pretty good to me — CTC expansion! The American Journalism Project is making some big grants for local news. And a new ADU bill dropped in Colorado.

Meanwhile, of course, the most important news of the week is this analysis of Taylor Swift’s travel schedule, outlining how she can make it back from her show in Tokyo to see the Super Bowl in Las Vegas.

TheElasticStranger: What can be done to remove the blight of vacant gas stations that presumably lie vacant because no one wants to assume the liability of cleaning up whatever might have happened during operation? Guessing there would be federal and state rules at play that makes this difficult. Should cities take on this task?

This is a fun topic because the name for the process is LUST (leaking underground storage tank) remediation, so you get reports like “Let’s Talk About LUST” from the Bipartisan Policy Center in 2019. Cities (and states) not only should take on this task, they in fact do take it on, largely with money provided through the federal LUST Trust Fund which was established in 1986 and modified in the 2005 energy bill.

According to the BPC report, there used to be some big problems with how LUST Fund money was managed that tended to make it hard to actually clean up and use these sites, but it’s been substantially improved over the years.

One thing that I have noticed in discussing local real estate issues is that a lot of citizens assume LUST remediation issues are a barrier to redevelopment when that’s not actually the case, perhaps repeating outdated information from an earlier era of LUST rules. Nicholas Decker, for example, named the former gas station by the Key Bridge in Georgetown as an example of this problem. But in fact, even though any project on that site would need to do remediation, the remediation costs are not the barrier to redevelopment. It’s just normal infill regulatory bullshit. Here’s a story from October 2022:

    Altus Realty has submitted a plan to build a structure that would house around 50 graduate students. The project plans were recently given to the DC Historic Preservation Office for construction. PGN Architects, who designed the potential structure, envision the building in line with previous concepts for 3601 M St. NW. 

    Over 10 years ago, Eastbanc had submitted plans for a 35-37 unit, five-story development while the Exxon station was still open. The plans went through design iteration after iteration, with size changes off and on over the next few years.

I don’t want to go off on another long rant about historic preservation, but for the record, we are talking about a derelict Exxon station here. There is no question of pulling down a historic structure and replacing it with a modern one. The issue is tearing down a derelict Exxon station that happens to be near some historic structures and replacing it with a modern one.

Even weirder, at the time the gas station closed back in 2018, Councilmember Jack Evans complained that “we’re running out of gas stations in the city.”

His idea wasn’t that we need policy solutions to promote the redevelopment of gas stations into higher value uses, it’s that we needed the government to prevent gas stations from going out of business. DC actually used to have a law that said you needed the approval of a government regulator, the Gas Station Advisory Board, before you could close a gas station. It was putatively illegal for a gas station to go out of business. Of course there was no way to actually make that work. If the station has no customers, it’s going to close. But there are essentially two reasons a business might close. It might be that sales don’t cover operating costs and you need to shut down. But it also just might be the case that it’s more profitable to turn the plot of land that your business is located on into something else. And the city really does have rules in place designed to discourage this from happening to gas stations.

There’s been lots of litigation and wrangling about these rules, but that’s the basic shape of the policy in Washington, DC. It’s true that to convert a gas station into apartment buildings or whatever else involves some remediation costs. But over and above those market forces, the city is specifically trying to discourage gas stations from closing and being turned into housing.

Cal Amari: What are some dumb, half-baked, but objectively fun ways to improve the functioning of congress and improve our health of our body politic?

I like the idea of building classic shared-room college style dormitories that Senators and Reps are required to live in while Congress is in session. Roommates would be semi-random (different genders on different wings, maximize bipartisan rooms, most senior members can be on the ground floor). This policy would discourage super wealthy/senior candidates who can't stand spartan living conditions, encourage friendships, build social capital, and produce wild parties among reps from different sides/regions producing a less partisan, more effective legislature. It satisfies the elitist in me who wants more congressional action/cooperation, and it satisfies my populist id who thinks it will be funny if politicians have to overcome shared restrooms.

I like this, but my main idea for improving the functioning of Congress is the very not-so-fun idea that politicians should get better pay and better staff.

An underrated piece of this doesn’t even relate to Congress, but to state legislatures, which serve as a kind of farm system for congress. A key argument of Andrew Hall’s book “Who Wants to Run?” is that when political officeholding is a low-paying job, only grim ideologues (or the corrupt) actually want to do it. What we want is to live in a world where a Republican candidate who figures out how to win a D+3 state legislative seat actually reaps substantial material rewards. In any given state, there are lots of individual human beings who voted for Donald Trump or Joe Biden in 2020, but who see themselves as ideologically somewhere between Trump and Biden. People like that could be running and winning in purple seats, but they tend not to run at all, in part because being a state legislator just isn’t that great of a job. In turn, reduces the pipeline of future Jared Goldens and Mary Peltolas.

For Congress, though, I think staff resources are probably the bigger issue than member pay, per se.

It’s not that there are not talented people working in Congress at the current pay rates. But they do tend to be young, and they tend to be more ideologically extreme than even primary voters, because they are people who place a lot of intrinsic value on the job. The relatively low pay itself is also, I think, a source of psychological distortion. Objectively, Sherrod Brown’s staff is probably better off if he loses and they have to go do something else. But also, if you’re working on the Hill and sincerely moderate, I think you face strong incentives to go work in the private sector where that would be welcome.

So, yes, members in a dorm. But also, replace the current relatively cramped congressional office buildings with giant gleaming towers. Hire personal assistants for the members.

Bring back something like the Office of Technology Assessment, complete with the ability to hire a limited number of people at salaries that are competitive with major tech companies. Make sure members can hire at least a few senior staffers at pay rates that make being a key staffer on Capitol Hill a better job than being a former key staffer who now works at a law firm. Pay the members themselves at a rate commensurate with that. I know that people hate these ideas. But I sincerely think that a Congress full of professional politicians, many of whom came up by winning tough races earlier in their career, and whose teams reap substantial rewards for winning and penalties for losing would end up doing a way better job of making their constituents happy.

Lost Future: Why did either the British or their colonies invent All The Sports? The Brits invented (or popularized the existing ruleset for) soccer, rugby, golf, boxing, cricket, field hockey, and tennis. The Americans invented/popularized basketball, baseball, and volleyball. (I'm skipping slightly less popular sports like American football and MMA here). The Canadians invented hockey. That covers every single major global sport- in looking at Top 10 lists, I couldn't find a major sport that *wasn't* invented by the Brits or their colonies. How did such a small % of the world's population invent literally all of them?

I think the story here is something like the British invented the idea of sports.

Lots of cultures around the world have some games that involve kicking a ball around. But it was British boarding schools (“public schools,” in their jargon) that decided it would be a good idea to have standardized rules for rugby football and association football that would be the same across schools and could be the basis for inter-school competition. That idea then starts getting applied to other things. English people did not invent the idea of playing a ball game on ice skates, but they did publish the first set of formal rules of bandy. Something broadly resembling field hockey is attested into ancient times but it was, again, 19th century British public schools that published a formalized rule code.

This habit — not so much inventing sports as promulgating formalized rule codes for sports — followed British colonists as they took over most of the world. Lacrosse is based on Native American games, but it was Anglophone colonists who created the rules of lacrosse, because creating standardized sets of rules for sports is a British idea.

The history of gridiron football starts in the late-19th century when McGill, Harvard, and Yale wanted to create a standard set of rules that all three schools could use for intercollegiate games. There’s some sense in which sports are a very ancient human tradition that is visible across all kinds of cultures. But the idea of young men traveling around and competing against each other in ruled-based games is both relatively modern and distinctly British. It’s both a somewhat arbitrary idea with links to the peculiarities of Anglophone elite education, and also something that arguably didn’t make much sense in pre-industrial societies, which just didn’t have the population scale or transportation infrastructure for it to have much application. But the idea, once it exists, turns out to be highly viral, and lots of people all around the world love the idea of formal sports leagues with common rulebooks, even if they differ in exactly which sport they play. The result, though, is that almost every set of formal rules reflects an Anglophone standardization process, regardless of what people were doing earlier.

Eddy: What do you wish you could change about the public high school curriculum that students conventionally receive for American government and US history? Whether in the substantive material covered or just how it's approached more broadly in its goals/framework? Or more specifically, how do you want your son to learn about or be taught American government/history as he gets older?

I sincerely think the highly politicized history curriculum battles that people enjoy talking about on the internet are one of the most overrated features of the American education system. My son is actually very interested in history, reads history books for kids, listens to history podcasts for adults, and is annoyed that his school’s third grade curriculum doesn’t include very much historical content. And I hope he gets his wish for more school history in the future, because it would make him happy.

But if you take your average student who, I think, doesn’t really care about history, I don’t think you can just fill their head with certain crucial historical facts and thereby produce good outcomes.

Something that I’ve written about a few times is that there’s a school of academics who seems to believe that if you tell people modern prosperity was based on slavery, that will make them have left-wing opinions and support reparations. Realistically, though, that set of facts seems just as likely to convince white kids that slavery and racism were really good and the people who agreed to dismantle those systems were suckers. Mainly, what I wish more people realized about history is that while history is a very interesting topic, it is probably not as relevant to explaining the present day as a lot of people are inclined to think.

Consider Poland and Bulgaria, two countries with wildly different histories whose economic situations were pretty similar on the day the Berlin Wall fell. Since that time, Bulgaria has prospered, but not nearly to the extent that Poland has.

Why has Poland grown so much faster than Bulgaria? I don’t think you’re going to find the answer by learning about the Jagiellonian dynasty or the Treaty of San Stefano.

What I’m saying is that I am both a history fan and something of a history skeptic. I like to read books and articles about history, I spend time perusing random Wikipedia articles about the past, and I’m always a little sad that huge swathes of human history rarely get the kind of popular press treatment that you see for World War II or the Civil War. But I also think there is a broad intellectual tendency to say (or claim) that the answer to present-day problems can be found by studying the past, which I don’t think is always true.

For schools, though, I really want them to teach kids how to read and write and how to do math. Part of learning to read and write, I think, is that kids need to be given reading material that they are interested in. For some students, that will be historical topics, which is great. And they should learn how to read and explore and how to write essays critiquing other people’s writing and so forth, but I don’t think it really matters what specific history they learn.

MB: To steal the question from the end of Ezra’s show: What are three books that have greatly influenced you?

I’m always changing my mind on this kind of question because which topics seem important is always shifting over time.

I read Francis Fukuyama’s book “The End of History” a long time ago, went through a span when I didn’t think that much about it, except as an artifact of 1990s culture, but I now think it’s really important and insightful about the current situation. I would put Susan Moller Okin’s “Justice, Gender, and the Family” as a kind of all-time classic intellectual influence, not just for its specific content, but for the idea of trying to inject consideration of gender roles and family life into Big Ideas conversations about political theory. Last, I’m going to put up Ed Glaeser’s “Triumph of the City” as an important work shaping my all-around views on urban issues.

Andy: I recently listened to a Jonah Goldberg podcast where be briefly mentioned the old days of blogging in the oughts and how everyone had sharp elbows back then. I guess you and him went some rounds, which he mentioned in passing. Anyway, he said he doesn't hold grudges and has retweeted you a few times recently and it got me thinking about two things:

1. Do you hold any grudges against Goldberg or other opponents from the glory days of sharp-elbowed blogging?

2. Do you see any room for a strategic alliance between people like you and people like Johah Goldberg and the Dispatch folks when it comes to Trump this election year? Obviously you have a lot of philosophical and policy disagreements with those in the Dispatch orbit, but if America, Free France and the UK can ally with Stalin for the greater good, surely the MY YIMBY slow-boring left, Dispatch Right and Andy eclectic commenter types (me) can try to focus our energies better? Is that a pipe dream?

I definitely do not hold any grudges about the olden days.

I do sometimes feel guilty about some of the elbows I threw back then. But then when I feel bad, I look back at the policy debates of that era and I feel like I was, in fact, correct. But there is a group of people on the left who looks at the set of conservative intellectuals who were enthusiastic about Bush and skeptical of Trump, and wants to just bash them over Bush-era stuff. That is not my mentality. I do find it a little bit vexing that the way the factional politics shook out, the conservatives who are most sensible on Trump are precisely the ones who were most excited about Bush’s nuttiest foreign policy ideas. But it is what it is, and I think we should try to get along in the present day.

In terms of a strategic alliance, I definitely want this to be possible.

If the United States had a proportional representation system, I would be thrilled to have the Dispatch Readers Party be the junior partner in the Biden coalition rather than the Jacobin Readers Party. But that’s not how American political institutions work. Part of how American political institutions work is that most bills need to be bipartisan. And on that level, the Biden White House has been way more successful in negotiating bipartisan deals with sensible Republicans than I ever thought possible or conservatives give him credit for. But that doesn’t generate the same kind of political dynamics as a coalition government in a multi-party system.

My broad view is that people who are genuinely torn between the two partisan coalitions need to try to think rigorously about how actual existing American institutions function.

The institutional reality of American politics is that the Supreme Court is overwhelmingly likely to tilt further right in the period between 2025-2028, and the Senate is also very likely to tilt right in the period of 2025-2028. Under the circumstances, the practical possibility of left-wing overreach is pretty constrained compared to the possibility of right-wing overreach. The specific area where executive branch discretion is at its maximum is in foreign policy, where Dispatch type people don’t even particularly agree with Trump. So in a practical sense, I would say President Joe Biden plus Chief Justice John Roberts plus a narrowly divided Congress is, in practice, a kind of centrist coalition government. In my view this is a bad, clunky set of institutions that generates bad vibes. But they are the institutions we have.

Sam: Thoughts on the Tracingwoodgrains FAA expose? Seems incredibly damning and really sad that a random blogger (a really good one though) had to do the legwork on something like this.

I basically agree with his take, though I am trying to use my somewhat-less-random-blogger status to get the Department of Transportation to comment.

Charles Ryder: I'm seeing endless talk in the discourse about the increasing unaffordability of cars in the US. Not just new cars, but also used cars (the price of the former must affect the latter). These high prices also have an effect on auto insurance, which feeds into operating costs. It's a real hardship for a lot of people living in a country not exactly known for quality transit. So, my question is: should the US consider importing cars from China? I'm pretty sure this would a politically untenable move at present, but what about the intrinsic merits of doing so, if the politics were to change?

I don’t have any big takes on the wisdom of importing cars from China, but I do think it’s worth noting that, factually, the price of used cars peaked in January 2022 and has been drifting downward ever since.

Now obviously if you last bought a car in 2015 and now go shopping for a car at 2024 prices, you will experience sticker shock and not be appeased by the knowledge that prices have fallen slightly over the past two years. But as a policy problem, I do think that this is basically solved. The price of new cars exhibited a more moderate increase that lasted longer and peaked in July of 2023 but has been falling for the past six months. Nominal incomes have continued to rise. So, barring some new negative shock to the world’s ability to produce automobiles, the affordability of cars and trucks is going to keep improving.