I want to flag the recently announced congressional bid of Paige Cognetti, the mayor of Scranton who has a cool launch video. I’ve talked to her at a few post-election gatherings, and I think she’s smart and sees the field accurately.

She’s facing an uphill battle in Pennsylvania’s Eighth Congressional District. Obama won this district handily in 2012, but Trump flipped it in 2016, held onto it in 2020, and had his best race yet there in 2024. Realignments start at the top and filter down ballot, so in 2016, Democrats carried it in all the non-presidential statewide races. Fetterman carried it narrowly in 2022, but McCormick won it pretty comfortably by 2024. All those ancestral Dem voters mean it’s winnable by a savvy, appealing Democrat like Cognetti, but it won’t be easy. It’s a huge recruiting coup for Hakeem Jeffries and the D.C.C.C. to get her to gamble on a race in a district where Trump won 54 percent of the vote rather than position herself for something like state auditor.

We hope Slow Boring readers will consider throwing some money her way, not only to help win but also to show the world that we’re paying attention to the question of how to beat Republicans in red districts, not just win primaries in New York City.

Donate to Paige Cognetti for PA

David Olson: What do you make of sports becoming nerdier and more analytically driven than ever at the same time that regard for expertise and empirical rigor has collapsed everywhere else?

If you think about the famous scene from “Moneyball” where Billy Beane is trying to pitch his new analytics-based strategy for player acquisition to the room full of old-fart, know-nothing scouts, it’s important to understand that from the standpoint of baseball conventional wisdom those guys were the experts. The Peter Brand character, played by Jonah Hill and based largely on Paul DePodesta, is the guy who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The real DePodesta studied economics at Harvard rather than at Yale, but more to the point, the real DePodesta played college baseball and football. That’s not the same as the pro baseball experience of the old farts in the room, but it’s something. The filmmakers, to heighten the point, transform DePodesta into the plainly unathletic Brand to emphasize the contrast. This guy doesn’t know the first thing about playing ball!

And artistic liberties aside, that is sort of the story here. Bill James is a kid from Kansas who did a brief stint in the army before getting degrees in English and economics from the University of Kansas. He’s an obsessive baseball fan who starts putting his quantitative skills to work to assess player performance and writing articles about it for a very small audience. One of those early readers is Daniel Okrent, a Jewish journalist who invented Rotisserie League Baseball but was never a high-level athlete. Okrent touts James in Sports Illustrated and James’s work becomes well known to the nerdier cohort of baseball fans. For example, my dad bought the mid-eighties “Baseball Abstracts” and I loved to read them when I was a kid. Eventually, that cohort of nerdy baseball fans grows up and start becoming the next generation of people who write about sports and (in cases like DePodesta) actually get management roles.

Because the analytics revolution succeeded, we now think of listening to people like that as an example of caring about expertise and empiricism.

But I think it’s crucial to understand that thirty years ago that’s not at all how it was understood. James was a successful and well-known writer by the mid-1990s and I’m sure an actual room of baseball decision-makers would not have been as slack-jawed and incredulous as the guys in the movie are depicted at the assertion that on-base percentage is the most important thing. It’s not that they never would have heard of these ideas. It’s that they would have heard of these ideas and rejected them as the fantasies of smart generalists who fundamentally didn’t know what they were talking about. The idea that you shouldn’t draft a player who has an ugly girlfriend because that bespeaks a lack of confidence that will make him unable to hit major league pitching is played for laughs. And it’s funny. But this kind of armchair psychology is not totally insane. It’s easy to imagine an experienced baseball hand who played professionals and has been around professional ballplayers all his life feeling really deeply and profoundly that some stathead cannot possibly comprehend the pressure you are under up there at the plate with the lights on and the crowd roaring.

It just turns out that this is mostly wrong. Smart nerds who don’t know anything about how to play baseball can nonetheless be very good at assessing baseball players.

My guess is that if you asked the DOGE guys, they’d say they’re big fans of “Moneyball” and see themselves very much in this mold — smart outsiders who can do a much better job than the entrenched group of insiders provided they get the strong backing they need. Donald Trump in the Billy Beane role does not personally need to be a smart quant; he just needs to be willing to be a bit of a jerk — as Beane certainly is in the movie version — to make sure that the job gets done.

Now obviously there are also a lot of differences, notably including the fact that DOGE completely failed. One question that raises is what are the circumstances under which a bunch of smart outsiders can outperform “the experts” and what are the circumstances where domain knowledge and experience matter. Another question, though, is whether a genuinely “Moneyball”-esque approach to something features openness about the possibility of failure, a willingness to experiment, but then also a willingness to learn from failure and adjust one’s models. This is easier to do in sports or finance where you either win or you lose. In politics, there are strong incentives to use bluster and spin to cover up for failures and I don’t see any sign that DOGE-enthusiasts have been willing to look in any remotely serious way at what they got wrong. Obviously Elon Musk does not handle rocket development in the same cavalier way. Some of the launches fail, but he works hard at fixing problems.

But then you get the even bigger asymmetry. There is a fine line between “empower smart outsiders to question the power and credentials of insider experts” and “empower idiots.” The DOGE guys really were a smart and impressive bunch who sadly lacked the patience to learn anything about the federal budget. Guys like R.F.K. Jr. and Peter Navarro are not smart outsiders kicking the tires on public health and trade theory, they’re idiots.

Dan: What's the alternate history where Germany, France, Italy, and Benelux (and Switzerland?) are a united polity?

A. Western Rome that persisted?

B. Carolingian Empire with different inheritance laws?

C. Napoleonic era?

D. Post WW2?

E. Possible future?

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I wrote my first article for The Argument this week. It’s about pets and private equity and my half-assed political philosophy, which is that we should have a strong (but not insurmountable) presumption of freedom — that you should have a really good reason, not “this is annoying to me” or “I read one empirical study that says this is bad,” before interfering in people’s voluntary decisions or mutually agreed-upon commercial transactions.

While I was working on the piece, I read something that didn’t make it into the article, but that stuck with me. This article by Greg Lukianoff and Angel Eduardo documents that a certain kind of cliché that was common in my youth, like “it’s a free country” or “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” has become much less common today.

That’s a little bit different than what I’m talking about in my Argument piece, which in turn is different from the national panic about the Cracker Barrel logo changing, but I do think these things are all loosely related. We’re becoming a society in which people struggle to remain adequately indifferent to things that don’t actually impact them. We all have our different points of nostalgia but one of the things that I miss about my experience of the late 20th century was people not caring about stuff.

Robert: You’ve written about how nostalgia for the 1950/60s is a conceptual dead end, but what about nostalgia for the 1990s? It was an era of dramatically better housing affordability (which you always argue is the most substantively important policy issue), greater social cohesion due to shared liberal protestant values, lower political polarisation, and better mental health.

The changes post 1995 have mostly been a revolution in entertainment and communications technology (which we now mostly agree is on net bad) and dramatically falling prices of manufactured goods. Meanwhile cost disease and social decay has shredded middle class family life.

I know you had a CHH guest post on this topic in Jan, but I found she hand waved away the problems with social media and smartphones and didn't touch on declining religiosity. I would love to get your personal take on 90s-stalgia.

Nostalgia is always a funny thing because if necessary you can switch frames to maintain it. So for example in 1999 when I graduated high school, New York City had nine murders per 100,000 residents. In 2021, at the peak of the post-Floyd spike, it had six murders per 100,000 and it’s been falling since then. If I told someone in 2021 that I had nostalgia for a city that had 50 percent more serious violent crime that would have sounded insane. But it’s relevant that in 1990, New York had 31 murders per 100,000. So even though the city was much more dangerous back in the nineties, my lived experience as a teenager was of a city that was becoming dramatically safer year after year.

We had greater social cohesion back then? Maybe. We also had the beating of Rodney King videotaped, a jury acquitting the clearly guilty officers, and $1 billion in property damage resulting from the subsequent rioting. Sixty-three people died.

Beyond the specifics of those riots, the recession and oil shocks in the early part of the decade were no joke. And Southern California in particular had a very rough time of things, with the general recession compounded by the negative impact that the end of the Cold War had on the local aerospace and defense industries. This part of the nineties is commemorated in movies like “American History X” and “Falling Down” that continue to be pretty well-known today, but they don’t form the dominant cultural understanding of what “the nineties” was. When people talk about the nineties they are referring to the late nineties of full employment, rapid productivity growth, and rising wages. This period of time really was a kind of local optimum. The whole period of 1995-2007 was the best productivity performance the United States has had since the early 1970s. But the 21st century portion of that period had the war on terror hanging over it like a menacing shadow and the labor market was pretty weak.

Where I think nineties-talgia really shines, though, is that it was a time of tremendous optimism about the prospects for liberalism.

The Soviet Union had collapsed, important parts of Central Europe were clearly consolidating as democratic regimes, China had embarked on a program of economic reform, the decolonization process was complete, we got the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and the Oslo Accords in the Middle East, and it felt like these trends were all self-reinforcing. Bad things still happened, of course — the Rwandan genocide and the subsequent first and second Congo wars are some of history’s most horrifying events — but I think it seems reasonable to believe that the world was on a kind of glide path to chillness. Over the past 25 years, that’s all really unraveled. China has prospered without political liberalization, politics in the United States have become more illiberal, Europe’s clout on the world stage has diminished, Russia emerged from the disasters of the 1990s as a revanchist authoritarian power, the Israel-Palestine conflict is more brutal than ever, and even the Congo-Rwanda conflicts just keep happening.

And what’s especially unfortunate is that people seem to widely view the retreat from liberalism as self-justifying — like we were deluded to ever be optimistic, and therefore correct to pull back from the values and practices that led to happier outcomes. But these trends have all been bad and it would in fact be desirable to return to the path of enlightenment and progress.

Lindamc: Are you surprised/annoyed/frustrated by how often you have to write posts explaining things that should be blindingly obvious to any sentient observer? I’m thinking of takes such as “winning elections is good,” “when things are going well you shouldn’t try to introduce big changes,” reminding people of recent (21st century) events, and so on.

No, this is good — it makes the job a lot easier and more tractable.

Brian: Regarding Buttigieg’s low (nonexistent) support among African American voters, you recently said that it’s not a law of nature that AAs’ preferred candidate wins the nomination, even if that has been the recent pattern. I agree, but I think the problem is that if you have no AA support, then you need to clean up with white Democrats. And because white Democrats are the most progressive Democrats, cleaning up with them requires being a progressive firebrand, which Buttigieg is not. So I think he has limited upside. Thoughts?

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So for starters, I think the 0 percent Black support poll is a little bit misleading, because that sample also featured Kamala Harris, Jasmine Crockett, Cory Booker, and Stephen A. Smith as options.

What’s true, I think, is that if Kamala Harris runs for president there is not going to be an opening for a white Biden-administration cabinet official to beat her. But I think that she probably won’t run (nor will Crockett) and that if she doesn’t run, that opens a lane for Pete Buttigieg to get some of the blah-normie-partisan-establishment support, both Black and white, that is currently going to her.

Luke Cohler: A friend is running in a critical House race in a purple district; he’s an attractive candidate from a variety of perspectives, a moderate who’s aligned to Yglesias-thought. (And currently the front runner in the primary.) Despite not knowing specifics, what advice do you have for him? Particularly as pertains to the gauntlet of the primary electorate vs. the general electorate?

There’s a working paper from Jacqueline Colao, David Broockman, Gregory A. Huber, and Joshua Kalla that is very relevant to this question.

One key thing that they find is that contrary to myth, it’s not really the case that primary voters (at least in House elections, which is what we’re talking about here) are particularly extreme compared to normal partisans. Democratic Party primary voters are more liberal than the population as a whole for the boring reason that none of them are Republicans, but the primary electorate is genuinely not dominated by hard-core leftists or anything. What’s true, though, is that primary voters don’t have much actual information about candidates’ positions on the issues. And Democratic Party primary voters tend to be favorably disposed to Dem-aligned advocacy groups. So winning an endorsement from the Sierra Club or the A.F.L.-C.I.O. or any other name-brand advocacy organization can make a big difference.

A big problem with his dynamic is that primary voters don’t actually “look through” the endorsement to see what the endorsement was about. So if the National Resources Defense Council demands that you be anti-nuclear and you refuse and they endorse your opponent, that can hurt you badly even if primary voters don’t agree with N.R.D.C.’s anti-nuclear stance.

The upshot of this is that while I think you want to stay as vague as possible during the primary and preserve maximum flexibility to run to the center in the general election, you kind of do want to go hat in hand to the dreaded groups and try to convince them privately that they should back you or at least not back your opponent. That means trying to appeal to their own sense of pragmatism that partisan control of the House of Representatives is extremely important to everything that they care about and that the way to do this is to work together to run a campaign based on talking about the issues that are bad for Republicans (the cost of living, health care, tax fairness) rather than talking about an interest-group laundry list.

In terms of your public message to Democratic Party primary voters, you want to stay squarely on “the Orange Man is bad and I am going to hold Republicans accountable.” Rank and file Democrats care a lot about beating Trump. Saying that “democracy is on the line” is not a good message to swing voters but it’s a very good message to Democrats when you are trying to appeal to their sense of pragmatism.

Brian T: Why does left-wing social media (Bluesky, vintage Tumblr, etc) seem to negatively polarize people so much more than right-wing social media?

I think you have to look at the dominant discursive strategy that’s used in these left-wing spaces, which is to essentially punish people for heterodoxy by greatly exaggerating the extent of disagreement.

So you’ll say, “I think it’s good to have a well-funded police department that arrests criminals” and the retort will be “You’re racist.” Or you’ll say, “I think only cisgender girls should play on competitive girls-sports teams” and the reply is “You hate trans people.” These styles of argument work because most people have a stronger commitment to second-order progressive values — racism is bad, we should be inclusive of L.G.B.T. people — than they do to specific policy ideas. So you can convince 50 percent of people that reserving certain sports teams for cisgender girls is bigoted and 35 percent of people that even if they privately disagree they should shut up about it. But what about the other 15 percent? The problem is that the left is not just saying to those people “Look, we disagree with you.” They are telling them that they do not belong in the left-of-center political coalition and they ought to adopt a new social identity and a personal self-conception as anti-trans.

Now I want to be clear. Everyone is responsible for their own actions and their own choices. I think Donald Trump is bad, I think abortion rights is important, I believe in progressive taxation and a more expansive welfare state, I think racial discrimination against Black people is a significant problem in American society, I think trans people should have freedom and dignity, and lots of other normie, mainstream liberal views. No matter how many times the Revolving Door Project says I’m a crypto-MAGA agent of the oligarchy, it’s my responsibility to keep a level head and continue to believe what I believe.

But it is still true that the dominant rhetorical strategy of the left is to tell anyone who is somewhat less left-wing that they should go become Republicans. And some people find this convincing!

Right-wing social media is often extreme, bigoted, or otherwise gross. But it very rarely consists of telling Trump voters who agree with Republicans about 70 percent of issues and who are to the left of Democrats on 100 percent of issues that they are actually secret leftists who love Chuck Schumer.

Dan Schroeder: In his new book Here Comes the Sun, pages 42-49, Bill McKibben accuses you of telling climate activists to “shut up and let things take their course, because they scare normal people and create a political backlash.” I don’t think you’ve ever said or written anything that could be reasonably summarized in those words, though please correct me if I'm wrong. McKibben does include some direct quotes from your writing, but in my opinion he distorts your views by omitting context.

Will you be responding to McKibben? And more generally, how can we lessen all the infighting among left-of-center people who mostly share the same goals but become preoccupied attacking each other, exaggerating and misrepresenting their disagreements? Am I making things worse just by bringing up this incident and asking this question?

I have not read the book so I can’t respond in detail to it. But the way I would phrase my own view of this is just that “climate activism” is not on the whole a very productive form of activity.

When McKibben launched the big activist campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline, climate had already become a partisan polarized issue on which Democrats were systematically more interested in emissions reduction than Republicans. When that’s the situation, the best thing you can do for your cause is be good citizens of the partisan coalition and help your people win elections. Instead, activists successfully pressured Democrats to abandon the successful “all of the above” energy message of Obama’s two campaigns. But they did not successfully persuade the voters in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Alaska that this was a good idea or the voters in Michigan that they want to shut down the conventional automobile industry or the national electorate that they want to make short-term sacrifices to their living standards for the sake of the long-term benefits of emissions reduction.

If you persuade the party that is already on your side to adopt new, less moderate positions without persuading the voters to back those positions what you end up doing is making it harder to win elections and enact useful policies.

There are plenty of broadly climate- and energy-related things that people could do that would be useful. That starts with actual technical work on problems like low-carbon steel or concrete, better batteries, new forms of energy, or things like electric boats or carbon capture. But there is also advancing policy on solar deployment, promoting nuclear and geothermal energy, spreading accurate understanding of climate and agricultural issues, advocating for and developing technical work on alternative proteins, and doing a million other things. The climate issue is a hard enough problem that there is genuinely no risk of running out of useful things for people to do with their time or money. But that’s what makes it so perverse to be spending time and money on things that are politically toxic and counterproductive.

Estate of Bob Saget: Rank the following: IHOP, Cracker Barrel, Dennys, Waffle House

Cracker Barrel > IHOP > Denny’s > Waffle House. But my favorite of the chain restaurants is Chili’s.

Grigori Avramidi: Would the dems be better or worse off if they had a genuine primary before the 2024 election?

If you are a Democratic Party officeholder, aspiring elected official, or staffer then you absolutely should say that it was a crippling error of Joe Biden not to stand down earlier and for the party not to hold a proper primary election. This is clearly a thing that most people believe and the people who don’t believe it are hardcore Democratic Party partisans whose votes you don’t need to worry about. What’s more, “Dems should have had a real primary” is also a kind of horseshoe position that both leftists and swing voters agree with. Since Democrats need to do more to appeal to swing voters but also would benefit from at least minimizing the extent to which leftists feel sour and angry, it’s really important to find opportunities to do things like that. Saying “Biden should have stepped aside earlier so we could have had a real primary” is a smart move.

But is it true?

It’s definitely true that Democrats should have nominated someone who was not tied at the hip to the unpopular Biden administration. The Liberal Party of Canada showed us that it is very possible to slot in a new guy, make one or two high-profile policy changes, and dramatically alter the public’s perception of the incumbent governing party. What’s more, doing this in Canada required the slightly odd move of parachuting in a political-neophyte central banker. Mark Carney turned out great, but a reasonable person might have worried about his lack of electoral experience and skills.

In the United States there was no need for any such worries. Rather than Biden or Harris, Democrats could have easily slotted in the governor of Michigan or Pennsylvania or even just the more popular and verbally adept secretary of transportation. Literally nobody on the planet believed that Kamala Harris had more appeal in the decisive swing states than Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro and it was completely absurd to nominate her rather than one of those two.

But would holding a primary have led to a different outcome? I’m kind of skeptical. After all, nothing about the actual sequence of events prevented Whitmer or Shapiro from saying, “I think I would be better-suited than the vice president to win swing voters in the key battleground states and the convention ought to nominate me instead.” The reason Harris became the nominee isn’t that there was no primary, it was that nobody ran against her! If Biden had opted not to run for re-election earlier, I think roughly the same bandwagoning around the V.P. would have occurred for roughly the same (bad) reasons. You might have gotten a primary challenge from the left that would have made it harder for Harris to pivot to the center, and/or a more extended discussion of why Biden wasn’t resigning and letting Harris assume office — neither of which would have been constructive.

Long story short, when people say “should have had a primary” I think what they mean is “should have had a different nominee.” And I agree. But I think putting the blame for that on Joe Biden’s timing is a little too pat. There needs to be more scrutiny of what habits of mind inside Democratic Party elites led them to nominate a Harris-Walz ticket rather than successful swing-state politicians. Democrats ironically let identity politics considerations get them both coming and going, putting Harris on the ticket in 2020 even though she was unimpressive and then just assuming you could solve all problems by “balancing” the 2024 ticket with an equally unimpressive straight white man.

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This will be my final Maine mailbag of the season, just as the Senate race is getting a little bit interesting with the entry of military veteran, oyster farmer, and non-politician Graham Platner into the race. I don’t know that much about him, but I have had his family’s oysters several times this summer and they’re quite good!

I know the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee really wants to recruit Janet Mills into this race, but I think Susan Collins is so hard to beat that you need to make moves that increase variance, like nominating someone unorthodox.

I also want to remind anyone interested in helping improve federal mass transit policy that the deadline for submissions to the Institute for Progress Transit Policy Playbook is this Sunday, August 24. You can learn more here or submit your idea here.

At any rate: Some questions!

Brendan: Given your advocacy for embracing popular positions, is it time for Mainers to abandon the inferior Maine-style lobster roll (cold, drowned in mayonnaise) and embrace the superior Connecticut-style (hot, buttered) lobster roll?

A good Maine lobster roll is served lightly mayo’d and not at all “drowning.” If you’re on the Blue Hill Peninsula, I recommend the Fish Net in downtown Blue Hill or (for a better view at a higher price) L.D.I. Lobster on Little Deer Isle.

If you want to eat a hot lobster with warm butter, have yourself a proper lobster dinner and crack some shells.

PhillyT: What are your thoughts on this article by Eric Levitz in which he argues against John Ganz’s recent column, “Against Polling?” You are mentioned in it briefly. That is why I asked.

I agree with basically everything that Levitz says.

But I guess if I were writing the piece, I would say that I have more sympathy for the anti-empiricist sentiments in Ganz’s original article. Where I think he and frankly a lot of younger progressives go off-base is in actually misreading the history of polling and empiricism in Democratic Party politics.

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I’m going to take the opportunity to offer a niche complaint here.

D.C. Public Schools recently released its schedule for the 2025-26 school year, and during the final week of school, there is class on Monday, then Tuesday is a day off, then Wednesday is the scheduled last day of school, then Thursday is a records day (meaning no school for students), then Friday is Juneteenth. If the kids need to make up days due to snow, they’ll return the following Monday and Tuesday.

This just seems transparently like an effort to encourage families to skip those final days and head out for summer a week early. This happens to annoy me because it will be my son’s last year of elementary school at a school he’s attended PreK-3, and I’d love for everyone to actually be together and say goodbye. But it’s also really bad to be cutting the number of instructional days. With all the problems of post-pandemic educational recovery, the absolute most basic thing we can do is actually have kids in school. That means setting normal, feasible schedules and encouraging everyone to show up. Not whatever this is.

Common Margins: It seems like we are in a bad equilibrium where we either have to accept police doing nothing (pre-Lurie San Francisco) like the social justice reformers want or allow police to commit overtime fraud and violate traffic/parking laws with impunity (New York City). How do we get to a better place where cops are empowered to arrest bad actors but are not allowed to milk the taxpayers while the cops think of themselves as above the law?

What policies and programs would you implement to go about doing this?

Seems like you would you want to break the police unions while maintaining the support amongst the rank and file. Something like your Police for America, higher starting salaries especially for junior officers, a robust training and oversight program, combined with cracking down on overtime?

Whatever the solution, how would you advise a blue city/state executive leader to do it in a politically feasible way?

I think talk of “breaking” police unions is wildly premature. What I think almost everyone who is left of center and reality-based needs to do is start thinking of urban police management as more of a boring, normal management and human resources question.

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Hope we all had a fun close-out to 2023, let’s kick the New Year off with some questions to contemplate as we all nurse our hangovers.

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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.

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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.

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Before we get to those, some good news for the week: The writers strike is over! Plus, North Carolina expands Medicaid access, a big new affordable housing project opens in Minneapolis thanks to the IRA, and a breakthrough in lase…

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Some better news is that living standards have gone up by more than official data indicates when you account for improved food quality. Congratulations to Philip Jefferson on his confirmation as Fed Vice Chair. Analysts now think China’s GDP may not overtake America’s after all, good news for the world, albeit slightly bad news for “One Billion Americans” book sales. Trump is liable for defamation. Microchip factory construction is underway in Kansas. Fresh Covid boosters are coming.

Before we get to the questions, I want to flag that in recent weeks, a small number of people have been posting in threads with questions that read as kind of hostile — a sort of “debate me, bro!” tone — and that’s not a great strategy for getting your question answered. I don’t mean to be too negative; we had tons of great questions this week and I honestly just didn’t get to all of them because I went so long on this first one. Be nice is all I’m saying :)

Jeff: What is your alternative history of what would have happened if the Iraq war had not occurred? Is Sadam still in power now? Has a US fighter plane been shot down? Did the Arab Spring occur? What do you believe is the likely state of Iraq, the wider region, the world, and the US?

You guys know I love alternate history, but this is a tough one because it depends on exactly what counterfactual we’re describing. There are a lot of possible American policies toward Iraq that amount to “not invading Iraq” and they have different upshots. We could be asking “what if Al Gore had been president?” for example, in which case I think he loses in 2004 to John McCain and we get an alternate version of the Iraq War from the McCain administration.

But let’s imagine instead a narrowly different counterfactual. Things play out very similarly, including the congressional vote to authorize the use of force, Saddam backing down and letting more inspectors in, and the inspectors not finding anything.

But in this alternate reality, instead of Bush concluding that this shows the inspections aren’t working, the skeptical intelligence agencies at DOE and State manage to get through to the White House with the message “you should consider the possibility that they’re not finding the nuclear weapons program because there isn’t a nuclear weapons program.” Bush has a moment of doubt. He gut-checks with Tony Blair and other members of the coalition of the willing. President Kwaśniewski of Poland assures Bush that Poland will stand by the United States if they want to go to war, but clarifies that in his mind, this is about the Poland-U.S. relationship and not a strong judgment about the underlying merits of the policy. His personal preference is that the U.S. remains focused on great power competition, but if the U.S. does want to invade, then Poland will stand with us.

Bush realizes that he may have somewhat misunderstood the situation and calls his father for advice.

Dad says he doesn’t want to tell him how to run his administration but that, yes, he should understand that countries are supporting him based on strategic considerations that have nothing to do with the particulars of Iraq and he can’t take that diplomatic context too seriously. Colin Powell tells him that, as a former top general, he can tell Cheney and Rumsfeld are trying to box him in with assertions about the operational necessity of starting the invasion that aren’t strictly true. There’s nothing wrong with delaying for a week or two. So they do, and the inspectors keep not turning anything up. Blair comes to D.C. and says — look, I’m good to go if you are, but isn’t there a way that we can spin this as a huge political triumph for both of us where our toughness and resolution got the inspectors back in with no bloodshed? And we’re the great heroes of the day? After another week, Saddam is really getting nervous and puts it out there — look, guys, there is seriously no nuclear weapons program here. The reason I’ve been squirrelly about it is that Iraq is in kind of a tough neighborhood, and maintaining some ambiguity about your military capabilities is a strong deterrent. Ariel Sharon tells Bush that he’s worried invading Iraq under these circumstances would accelerate rather than deter an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Blair reiterates that this is arguably a huge success story for their agenda. And so Bush decides to take the win.

In this world, I think Saddam is not still with us in 2023 — he died of old age, succeeded by one of his sons.

When Iran’s secret nuclear activities are revealed, U.S. coercive diplomacy is more successful because with no troops bogged down in Iraq, the threat of force is more credible. But the Iranian regime is also less paranoid about the need for a nuclear program. Bush is more comfortable and confident with himself as a diplomat and forges an interim deal with Iran in 2004 that sets talks into motion. With no war actually occurring, there’s no groundswell of support for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. John Kerry doesn’t come across as a flip-flopper; he’s just a guy whose equivocal view of the situation was vindicated by events. Kerry wins the nomination more easily, but Bush is more popular and beats him more easily — Social Security privatization still flops, though.

With no war issue to wield against Hillary Clinton, Obama doesn’t challenge her. John Edwards does surprisingly well in Iowa and New Hampshire as a left-insurgent, but Clinton’s rock-solid African American support crushes him. The Clinton-Obama ticket wins in 2008, but she’s not as popular as our Obama and this version of Bush isn’t as discredited by the end of his term. As a result, Democrats don’t do nearly as well down-ballot in 2008 and there’s no Affordable Care Act. Instead, they do a stimulus bill that includes a permanent program to automatically enroll all kids in Medicaid and then proceed to a torturous negotiation with Republicans about financial regulation.

Finally — the Arab Spring.

The Arab Spring still happens since, I think, that was driven largely by commodity prices, media dynamics, and longstanding discontents that would have been in place anyway. But the whole context is different.

But in this version of the Arab Spring, the Clinton administration does not intervene militarily in Libya because the successful diplomacy with Iraq and Iran underscores the importance of upholding the spirit of the Libyan disarmament agreement. Without the precedent of armed rebellion leading to NATO intervention, anti-regime forces in Syria are much more cautious about shifting to armed struggle against Assad and he brutally and relatively quickly puts down the uprising. The conventional wisdom in this reality is that Clinton’s decision to let the Libyan rebels get crushed was a huge mistake, that she choked off a promising efflorescence of democracy. Only cranks like me are saying that overthrowing Gaddafi and encouraging a civil war in Syria might not have turned out nearly as well as the optimists think.

The upshot of all of this is that America just gets less and less engaged in the Middle East over time. The diplomatic alignment there is more chaotic, featuring a Saudi-Iran-Iraq triad of mutual suspicion and a Syria that’s not perfectly aligned with any of them. With Iran less powerful, the Saudis and Gulf states are less eager to mend fences with Israel (though still more eager than they’d like to admit) so Israel is under a bit more practical pressure to care about Palestinians (though still not enough pressure to make them actually care). American oil and gas production keeps ramping up, and by the time Obama is in the White House, American policy is to just not care that much about this part of the world. The main priority is to try to play different players off each other to prevent OPEC from coordinating with Russia on global energy prices.

Harry W: I'm not sure if you've been asked this before but more than once you've suggested it as an underrated what if so, how do you think Reconstruction (and beyond...) would have gone had Hannibal Hamlin been Lincoln's running mate in 1864 and then Lincoln's assassination happened?

Having just done a really long counterfactual about Iraq, I’m not going to try to fully write out a Hamlin one. I’m sincerely not sure what I think and I’d love to read more about it from historians and people who are knowledgeable about the issue. That being said, here’s a few thoughts:

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