Nothing in here about price controls for candy at movie theatres, which is how you really move the needle, after price controls on beers at Yankee Stadium of course
Red Vines are like what you would end up with if you described Twizzlers to someone with the equivalent of colorblindness for their sense of taste. They’re a textbook example of “ersatz.”
Yeah I can't share Andy Samberg's enthusiasm for them. I wonder if it's a west coast thing, Lonely Island is AGGRESSIVELY west coast for something that came to prominence on an NYC-based show.
You know what I really like, is the super cheap no-brand licorice you can get at a gas station that's like a shoelace. It barely tastes like anything at all. But there's something great about it.
I mean, cheaper beer at Yankee Stadium is kind of funny. But also: every time someone tries to make fun of price controls, yet specifically chooses as their example a product sold by a legalized monopoly, I feel like a free-market economist gets tortured in hell.
In fact, MattY himself had the most succinct and best take on Wu from thr summer:
“It's funny that this is the brand Wu has crafted for herself, when l'd say in practice her political success (which is real, she's very popular) is grounded in the fact that she hasn't really done anything...”
The number one issue boston faces is housing and it is becoming untenable.
Wu has managed to skate on affordability issues with Boston’s safety and relative cleanliness vs other cities.
I live on the west coast and my city (Seattle) is doing better than Boston when it comes to housing. I'm at the point where the best outcome for a progressive mayor is that they just sit in the office and do nothing. And I really struggle to understand how someone an intelligent person can believe that housing policies like Wu's will work. I guess maybe it's a version of motivated reasoning and having an unrealistic view of human nature, but you would think that a smart person would learn from the fact that these policies have repeatedly failed.
It’s willfully focusing first and foremost on coalition management rather than unlocking the prerequisites for housing production.
The electoral success speaks for itself - from her perspective, why should she change?
The only way to compel a different stance is to credibly make her think her housing record is a liability for future office.
On that end, Andrea Campbell, Seth Moulton, and Jake Auchincloss all are far superior for state wide offices and slow boring adjacent people in mass would do well to organize for those types of electeds over a future Wu candidacy
I think Mamdani has more of a pragmatic streak than people think and if reasonable analysis determines that any of his ideas are horrible - and a rent freeze absolutely is, and pretty much zero economists would disagree - he will find some way to adjust, and come up with a less-horrible but thematically similar project. Don't forget that a mayor has a lot of analytical resources that a guy talking to voters on TikTok does not. He doesn't understand (or pretends to not understand) the economics of housing, but he's not an idiot, and when stuff gets laid out for him in black and white I don't think he is enough of an ideologue to offset a respect for empiricism.
It's possible he has known the idea is bunk the entire time but it's just too popular of a thing to say to not say, even if it's going to eventually land in the "broken promises" category. The gimmick was a huge factor in the race - it may have been decisive to his election, even.
NYC Mayor is also not a dictatorial position and much of the council is not ideologically aligned with Mamdani. Those from Manhattan and northwest Brooklyn? Sure. But that's not even half the city. He is not getting a blank check by a long shot.
I could be way off! You probably think that I am and are probably more sure of it than you should be. Time will tell, but if he backs off his worst ideas after minimal pushback it will be to his credit and suggest the next four years might go fine.
I think that Mamdani is more pragmatic than he seems to be at first glance, but I am a bit concerned about how he plans to achieve his goals. I listened to that New Yorker podcast where he said that he was going to prevent an exodus from the NYC public schools by making them the best option. I think that's a great goal, but he didn't have much in the way of specifics on how he would do that. I'm on the west coast so it's possible that he has a plan, but improving NYC's public schools to the point where they're competitive with private schools let alone better is a huge task and it's going to require doing things that make components of his coalition (teachers' unions) very angry.
I was listening to a podcast that pointed out property taxes are exceptionally low on some high priced real estate (Maybe brownstones, I forget exactly what). They said an obvious move would be rebalancing property taxes and using that to increase subsidies on lower value rent stabilized buildings.
NYC property taxes are extremely low on single family homes in gentrifying areas and condos, and extremely high on commercial property and apartment buildings, and pretty high on single family homes in left behind regions (think Outer Queens and Staten Island and the like).
Problem is, taxes are controlled by the state and this has been well known for decades and the people who would be most disadvantaged by a property tax reform are the ones who are most active in the political process.
Sure, but the benefit to someone like Mamdani (or Trump/Obama) is that he can offer to get his base on your side and make a move possible. Mamdani seems pragmatic and Hochul has been making sounds about helping him on some of his agenda so that could be a way to do it.
I’m actually much more cynically optimistic than you. I think the guy is a ruthless power-seeker, and through a combination of path-dependency from college and opportunism, won the mayoralty when all he was really trying to do was build clout within socialist circles. I expect him to ruthlessly say “new number who dis?” whenever the DSA comes calling, and I expect him to initially govern in whatever way maximizes his chances of coming out the other side of his term with a shot at higher office.
(I say initially because literally no mayor has done it since… I forget. Point being, if in 2028 it becomes clear that he’s following the same path as past NYC mayors, I expect him to shift gears and maximize the clout-chasing with the left again.)
I think we see things pretty similarly. I think when you are a pol at Mamdani’s level of ambition and talent you can kind of deliberately snub key constituencies while also being half-honest in saying your hands were tied. Both things are true at once, not just to the observer but to the actor himself. We can see Trump clearly genuinely believing contradictory things all the time, effectively, and Mamdani has been compared to him in terms of his skill to connect with voters,* and his brain is functioning more effectively than Trump’s at the moment.
Very good post, and I’m glad it’s strategically unpaywalled. But this is my first encounter with the “skinsuit” metaphor and it kind of creeps me out.
ETA: this is a very widespread problem. On the transpo and infrastructure projects I work on, there are all kinds of procurement rules as well as rules governing the hiring of consultants like us (eg, a percentage of women- and minority-owned subconsultants on the team). Most people know this—I knew it before I worked in this domain—but to see it in action is truly remarkable, and not in a good way. The problem is so big and so enmeshed in the system that it seems impossible to unwind. Earlier this year, I nurtured a tiny ember of hope that the wanton destruction would open up an opportunity to build a better system, but per this post that doesn’t seem likely.
Matt wrote an excellent and terrible column. Y’all have covered the excellence, and I think lindamc gets at the terrible aspect with this insight:
- “The problem is so big and so enmeshed in the system that it seems impossible to unwind.”
Indeed! That’s because “the problem” isn’t distinct from democracy itself. Interest groups aren’t parasites on politics — they are politics. Some, like the master plumbers, have a revenue interest. Others, like environmentalists, have policy interests. Matt and his readers, including me, are what power brokers used to derisively call “goo-goos”: advocates for good government who weren’t adult enough in their view to confront reality.
By calling out the interests opposed to needed change, Matt does some good. The real work (as Matt often notes in the context of housing) is assembling the coalition which can advance the change. In other words, to push through improvements that require accepting tradeoffs, we will have to ... build a coalition of partially aligned groups which force us to accept tradeoffs on our accepting tradeoffs ;-). The next question is “how do we turn the broad diffuse constituency for General Improvement into an effective coalition of concentrated interests?”
To me, that seems where Mamdani has a chance of succeeding. I don't think he's as beholden to the interest groups. Matt's example of the master plumbers seems like a case where an interest group is lobbying against its own interests. If you want to move away from gas stoves, making it really expensive to install them is a good way to do it.
Being an Old who, from an early age, in Lisa Simpson fashion, read The New Republic when it was good, I was reminded of this aside from a take on the 1988 Iowa caucuses (kids, ask your parents or grandparents who Gephardt was):
"The Big Democratic winner, of course, was Richard Gephardt, a man who puts me in mind, unreasonably to be sure, of an earthling whose body has been taken over by space aliens, I keep expecting him to reach under his chin and peel back that immobile, monochromatic, oddly smooth face to reveal the lizard beneath."
Indeed! It's a good reminder that today's hot political commodity might soon be completely forgotten - *so many* blasts from the very distant past here. I had to look up whether Gephardt is still alive (yes, very old, thankfully retired).
Apropos of yesterday's discussion, though, I can actually see in my mind's eye the typeface and layout of the old TNR (RIP) and how this piece would have appeared back in the day. Admittedly, I've done magazine work and am fascinated by these things so it's less surprising that they would register, but still.
... pfff! I again found roles he pulled off so well that realizing that too was him shocked me, despite me clearly remembering being shocked about the same roles about half a year ago :)
If we're referencing using the terms as negative criticisms, the biggest difference is self deception. If I describe, say, a stereotypical HOA busybody by saying they're LARPing as a politician and police officer, the implication is that I believe their work is unimportant, and they've convinced themselves otherwise. A skinsuit implies a deliberate intent to deceive others, coupled with the observers' feeling of revulsion when they see details indicating this is the case.
LARP are people who wish they could do real world violence but are too weak or too pussy to actually burn down a walmart.
Skinsuit is basically what were called "crypto-X" back in the day. They pretend to be for an issue, but only with enough words and without changing their policy.
this feels unfair to the original LARPers, who just want to dress up as a wizard and throw a orange spray-painted tennis ball at people while shouting "fireball!"
This is why I think the “abundance” movement garnered so much pushback from the left. Abundance and affordability mean efficiency. Unions are anti-efficiency by design. Zero big city dem politicians want to be seen as anti-union. Hence, I am extremely skeptical dems are able to actually enact anything that lowers any costs at a local level. I hope I am wrong.
It's true that zero big city mayors want to appear anti-union. But that doesn't mean that all big city mayors just bend the knee to the unions on every issue. Some do (Brandon Johnson in Chicago). But look at more reform oriented mayors like Mike Johnston in Denver and Daniel Lauri in SF — they've picked some fights.
Likewise there's a real difference between trying beat some big powerful union like SEIU 1199 in NYC in some giant pitched battle and just telling a small group of about 1000 plumbers "no, you can't have even more rent seeking protections, sorry"
Back during the 2016 campaign I used to scoff when Trump said that because he was a billionaire he didn't to pay-off groups to support him. Now I 100% see what he means, especially when he comes from NYC
I found this article depressing because there’s no reason to think Dems will take on unions. If the master plumbers are getting their bed’s feathered 48-1, a great deal of progress could occur and they would still win 27-22
It’s especially frustrating that the pro-union aura extends to plumbers. Plumbers! You know, the people that you, as an individual, hire as individuals. This isn’t a Gilded Age mining concern with monopsony power and Pinkertons and all that, this is you needing a new stove put in. It’s a goddamn medieval guild, not a union!
The unions that have hung on and stayed relevant are mostly attached to fat cash cows. Only a fat cow can produce enough surplus to make capturing it worth all the inefficiency.
Do they? I've hired plumbers twice in the past few years and both times they did jobs faster, better, and with less frustration than I could have. 100% worth paying.
(Installing a new sink and replacing a hot water heater.)
Hochul has no choice but to try, at least to some extent. She scraped by 53-47 in 2022 against the broom puppet named Lee Zeldin. Elise Stefanik is substantially more formidable, and the state has only grown more conservative since - at the exact moment that everyone’s favorite Great Socialist Hope just ascended to the NYC mayoralty, where he can really destroy Democrats’ brand with Long Island swing voters. Hence her supporting the pipeline that’s infuriating the environmental losers. And hence her still not having signed the bill locking in makework for the TWU indefinitely.
Zeldin was not, at the time, tied at the hip to massively unpopular Trump policies. If he ran today he'd be attacked for his appalling record with EPA and lose the same race in the same environment by 15.
Stefanik, likewise, has completely abandoned any guise of moderation to let the Trump freak flag fly. She is in many ways emblematic of the cynicism of soi-disant Republican moderates; all of her supposed commitments have turned out to be fake as soon as Trump put them to the test.
Hochul is going to get a very good election environment for Dems. She's not going to face a serious challenge from the right. Maybe in the primary though
I think you're giving the abundance pusher-backers too much credit by rationalizing their irrationality. They are a clique and reject anyone who doesn't wear pink on Wednesdays, or whatever their in-group signaling measure of the moment is.
Unions are not anti-efficiency by design. Unions are pro-employment by design. If efficiency will increase employment then a properly-functioning union will support it. But it's hardly surprising that you'll encounter union opposition if you try to just bulldoze over them by saying "efficiency trumps all" without actually doing the work of persuading anyone that efficiency will increase employment.
(This is of course further complicated by the fact that the US's lack of sectoral bargaining means some forms of increased employment aren't captured by collective-bargaining agreements and thus effectively "don't count" for purposes of the union's protection of its employees. That issue was discussed on a thread last week.)
Right now you’re talking as though employment trumps all. Efficiency at least has the advantage of counting both costs and benefits of a policy, while employment as a measure mixes together costs and benefits (and is usually discussed as though it is just benefits).
The raison d'etre of a union is to obtain wages and benefits for the employees it represents. So, yes, from the perspective of a union, employment trumps... not quite all (it is theoretically possible to have a change that slightly decreases overall employment but significantly raises wage rates such that the union would favor it), but most.
Efficiency usually increases employment by making a sector more competitive and profitable, stimulating hiring-- and unions can play a big role in that process. (Frederick Taylor, for example, thought unions were key to raising productivity by getting workers to turn theoretical time-study practices into actual improvements.) But, not always. So just saying to a union "this will increase efficiency" is a non sequitur. It's not that it's a BAD thing, as Jackie Blitz wrongly stated; it's just completely orthogonal to what the union is trying to accomplish.
>The raison d'etre of a union is to obtain wages and benefits for the employees it represents
Sort of, sometimes. For example, the UAW famously created a second tier of new workers who were paid dramatically less, received worse benefits, and were frequently outsourced contractors. Many of them didn't receive a pension! The UAW, as a giant vampire squid of rent-seeking, did this so that they could concentrate all of their wages, benefits, and pension on the more senior workers.
Nor is this unique to the UAW- the United Food and Commercial Workers in California has done the same, as have the Teamsters, nurses, and some other unionized manufacturing jobs. As I understand it public education unions often divide workers into 'certified' or 'classified' jobs, so that they can deny more blue collar workers (aides, drivers, security, etc.) membership into the teachers' union. Sort of exposes the lie that unions are 'benefitting' workers- on net, they're really not!
The UAW was strongarmed into creating a second-tier of workers by management over its ferocious objections, and has consistently worked to eliminate that system at every opportunity since then. Eg:
The UAW freely agreed to these terms, as have multiple other unions in the past. It's reasonable to assume that they prioritized more senior workers, seeing as that's universal union behavior everywhere. My point is simply a utilitarian one- unions/guilds don't benefit workers *taken as a whole*. I'm sure they do benefit a very small group of them, like the dockworkers that make $200k a year and shave a few basis points off of American GDP annually. That doesn't actually *benefit workers* at scale, but diffuse costs, concentrated benefits, etc. etc.
The union represents the interests of the specific people who work there today, not everyone who might ever work there or workers as a class. At least as much of what a union captures comes from prospective or actual future workers - its members’ competitors - as from shareholders per se.
Right - you don’t tout efficiency to the union any more than you tout the benefits of competition for affordability to capitalists. Efficiency is instead a message aimed at everyone in society equally - each bit of it costs one group noticeably but benefits everyone else more, such that overall it’s a benefit.
Democratic officials would respond “hey Matt, your examples are category errors; those votes are meaningless. We’re just taking legislature votes that won’t amount to anything as long as the executive governs like an adult.” Leaving aside that this is not at all reliable - see Cuomo passing the 2019 housing price explosion law - I would respond with the SlowBoring commonplace that these votes do register in the background for voters, that they reinforce the Democratic brand of consisting of a bunch of totally unserious people, and that no amount of paid media showing Kamala Harris making constipated faces at the camera while touting her economic centrism can overcome Democrats hammering home the message, over and over and over, to voters that they simply do not live in a reality with material constraints.
Is there any evidence that swing voters are aware of these things? Republicans and most voters are also blissfully unaware of tradeoffs.
Biden got hurt by inflation, but it's not like swing voters said "well the inflation induced by covid-era supply constraints and Trump's stimulus checks wasn't Biden's fault, but the inflation induced by the ARP and IRA is, so I'm voting against him."
People blame the incumbent and like rhetoric--preferably believable rhetoric--about lowering prices. If you can make policy that has swift economic benefits, great!
IMO the most egregious case of this is environmental groups in Maine fighting to prevent Quebec hydropower from being delivered to MA because they had to tear down forest cover. Opposing pipelines I could af least understand as it's "dirty" so they're obviously not going to like it, but hydro is clean!
Luckily it seems to be going ahead anyways, but they're 4 years behind schedule now.
Tearing down forest cover is a direct source of increased de facto climate emissions (technically speaking, it's actually reduced CO2 absorption, but subtracting a positive is the same mathematically as adding a negative), so it's entirely possible to theorize a hydro project that increases emissions through loss of forest cover.
What this specific project actually maths out to, I don't know.
There's no way this actually exists. It's said you would have to plant a continent and a half of trees to actually fully oppose CC. But a dam or dams and electric distribution cables are not land intensive. Each tree is peanuts.
Imagine the absurd hypothetical where if we build out the electric grid enough for clean energy it knocks down so many trees to leave you worse off. Guess every one should have their own home diesel gen to fix CC.
Dams can be extremely land intensive depending on how much land ends up flooded by the reservoir they create.
That said, to repeat, I'm not saying that this specific project is climate-negative. My point is just that deforestation is an obvious cause of climate change and it's annoying when people act dismissively toward it. So do the math!
The thing is, you don't have to do a lot of math to evaluate any particular project. Actual deforestation is bad for many reasons including loss of carbon capture. But deforestation describes something very large scale, not the cutting down of some relatively narrow swaths of forests for transmission lines, or even damns, in a country as de facto responsible as Canada.
When you are looking at a project that is as self evidently not deforestation as this one then misdescribing it as deforestation is misleading and that claim and its claimants should be dismissed.
It’s possible, but the hit to forest cover is one time and most of it recovers. (In fact, if you lock up the lumber in something that doesn’t decay, you might even accelerate carbon capture by returning to high speed catch up growth.)
I'm missing something here. Trees need to be consistently kept clear of power lines. In what conceivable universe is the hit to forest cover one time and most of it recovers? (Maybe a different kettle of fish in urban areas where you can underground the lines, but is that happening here? Seems unlikely, but again, I don't know very much about these projects.)
Here is the problem that environmental groups pose for affordability.
Green Organizations care far more about the planet than humanity. They do not care about the costs to humans.
They think of humans as lint or dust. Something that exists but provides little benefit to the planet. In fact, I have zero doubt that they would prefer to see the extinction of humanity.
The lawyers they employ have one job: to stop everything. Just to shut it down.
I would like to register my disagreement than the Sierra Club wants to kill all humans. They are counter productive, certainly, but let’s not get hysterical.
“We only want to kill 7 billion humans, not all 8 billion of them” is hardly a ringing endorsement
People that are still following crackpot Malthusian principles, and who actually believe that if we just all hold hands and try real hard, we can reduce, reuse, recycle our way to shrinking to 1 billion people, are simply not serious people, and should be treated accordingly.
Please, enlighten me as to how we'd get from 8 billion to 1 billion within any reasonable time frame without a lot of involuntary death. A few more people choosing not to have kids is not going to get it done.
Part of the sustainability mindset is thinking on long and somewhat unreasonable time frames. It's taken 40 years to bring the California Condor from the brink of death to surviving in the wild again. It might take another 100 before the population is healthy.
It's the sort of position that requires a Well-intentioned Extremist supervillain with Social Darwinist tendencies... Does not describe the Sierra Club at all.
OK, I used rhetorical flair. Sue me. They have all read the Population Bomb by Erlich, and they are for closing every national forest unless you can walk in. They would love it if we only used candles and bicycles to work. No more Big Macs, in fact, no meat whatsoever.
You must eliminate all corporations that conspire to kill the planet with carbon for the sake of chasing a dollar. Am I closer?
I can't believe Ben Krauss liked this. Suggesting that issue advocacy groups would "prefer the extinction of humanity" is a text book example of bad forum behavior.
It’s easy to paint characiatures of antis but the world has plenty of moderates everywhere. Not the ones on flotillas in the medeterranian I’ll grant you.
One themes here is how often politicians are bullied by weak and badly funded lobbies. I can understand folding when faced with environmentalists but why fold when pressured by master plumbers?
it very much is, people hate pigouvian taxes. The problem with the approach NYC is taking is that they're forgoing the revenue that pigouvian taxes generate
Only about 25% of plumbers belong to unions. It’s not plumbers in general.
The biggest unions are teachers, government workers, service employees, and then the Teamsters. Blue collar workers are not a majority of union members.
If you have a class-oriented worldview, then why would you take the other side of a (in this case plumber) union? Unions represent the working class, so those opposed to them are inherently on the side of the capitalist oligarchs.
But Marxists (well Engels) also have a concept of Labour aristocratcy to describe exactly this kind of situation where some workers have extra power and use to extract money from the rest of the proletariat.
Right, the political cost of any one of these votes is low. I doubt many voters were aware of this. But these financial costs pile up like sediment, and then Dems are wondering why life is "unaffordable."
The “master plumber” issue in NYC is particularly irritating insofar as many buildings are not wired to accommodate either induction or electric stoves. That eventual mandate will further drive up housing costs and make the city less “ affordable”.
Excellent question. Inadequate answer: I don’t know. But a (never-wrong) (ha) AI response to my inquiry suggests that retrofitting high rise apartment buildings for induction stoves would cost between $4000 and $20000 *per unit*. Do we provide some measure of property tax relief as a quid pro quo? Can NYC afford the associated revenue loss? Or do we just stick it to the landlords (who, in co-ops and condos are the actual owner/tenants)?
I did a bunch of math here and I'm pretty dubious about requiring this, even from a pure environmental perspective.
Say we want to make people completely price in the emission externalities of gas stoves. If you have an 18000 BTU gas burner on for an hour a day, that works out to about 130kg of natural gas a year, yielding 347kg of CO2, which at a negative externality of $180/ton is a social cost of $63.
Use a 2000 W induction stove for an hour a day instead, and at the average carbon intensity of the US power grid you get... 269kg of CO2, for a externality reduction of a grand total of $14 / year. (which makes sense, since the power grid is mostly natural gas burning anyway, and since you can convert chemical energy to heat energy with ~100% efficiency, while converting heat into mechanical or electrical energy is necessarily less efficient thanks to our pal Carnot).
Say you cook twice as much, say you add in another 50% of CO2 equivalent for the natural gas due to methane leaks, and say you wave your hand and totally decarbonize the power grid. Under these rather bold assumptions, you reduce externalities by ... $189/year. The NPV of saving $189/year in social cost for the next 40 years is $3240 (at a 5% discount rate). That sounds like a lot less than what I'd have to pay to upgrade my kitchen wiring from the 2400 W that will currently flip my circuit breaker to the 5000+ W I'd need to run an induction stove. So either obligating me to do it, or kicking in enough of a subsidy that I wouldn't mind doing it, would be a negative from an economic perspective.
The current issue is the need to hire a (rare) master plumber for any gas range or similar appliance installation, including replacements of old or broken appliances. This will add several thousand in costs associated with both labor and necessary permitting. The “new construction” issue is separate (and I agree that there is no retrofit concern in that case).
Would your alternative be longer runway to introduce the induction requirement (kicking the can down the road to avoid the trade off) or subsidies to encourage? Or neither?
"Bharat Ramamurti, a very smart economic-policy guy who worked in the Biden administration and for Elizabeth Warren, says that “targeted price controls, alongside aggressive measures to boost the supply of things like housing and clean energy, may be the least worst option out of the cost-of-living crisis we’re facing.”
Er... if he were _very_ smart he woud know that price controls by supressing supply _increse the costs of the controlled good or service. Has he just ignored the experisnce o NYC's 70 year experiment witn rent controls?
This is a good example of "affordability" eating itself, why "affordability" is a good excuse for good policy (like scrapping RPS's) but a poor guide for policy.
the article seems to view price controls as a second-best policy measure in a world where voters have to be appeased in order to expand supply.
argument seems to be that voters demand short-run insurance against price shocks, and in a supply-inelastic world subsidies won't do a good job providing that since suppliers eat up all the surplus, so you need huge taxes to pay for it. but in a supply-inelastic world price controls are less costly, right?
price controls also arent very good as SR insurance against price shocks but have a different downside of shortages rather than high prices. voters might find this preferable for some reason? certainly ones who expect to pay tax in subsidy-world but also expect to be costlessly allocated goods in price-control-world will be happier with price controls. in the context of rent control for existing apartments this might reflect a pretty powerful bloc of voters.
>>price controls also arent very good as SR insurance against price shocks but have a different downside of shortages rather than high prices. voters might find this preferable for some reason?
I think this is at least pseudo-rational (particularly in view of the fact that voters are, by definition, geographic incumbents). In supply-inelastic world the shortages are intrinsic to the supply limitation, so someone's ox is getting gored no matter what, and at least price controls give you a lottery ticket's chance at both finding the good and preserving your surplus, whereas in a market-based world you're still kicking a lot of people out, just via the price rather than via some other allocation, and while the market price does a better job matching perceived utility to demand (which is efficient and abstractly desirable), it also has the practical effect of transferring surplus from renters to landlords (or buyers to sellers) despite the latter not having done anything to earn it, which people not only don't like in general but also doesn't make much economic sense relative to just keeping the price floor but taxing the economic rent instead of treating it as a transfer payment.
You'd still need a reason for why the efficiency match isn't still an improvement over the status quo in and of itself, but I expect this is because many or most people think of subjective housing utility as relatively undifferentiated or homogenized: buyers all generally like the same stuff and while their subjective utilities will differ (e.g., families with kids will benefit from rooms and floor space), they'll differ in predictable and systematic ways instead of reflecting a system in which 4-person family A will get radically more or less out of an Upper East Side apartment than 4-person family B.
Ramamurti is coming from exactly the Warren-staffer background often maligned here as the behind-the-scenes force pulling policy leftward in the Biden administration. He was a literal Warren staffer who went into the Biden administration, as Matt points out.
His statement here is promising! The price controls are only "targeted" while the supply side measures are "aggressive." That's a big evolution and shows abundance ideas getting some traction. You can't expect a complete 180.
“Politicians are interested in policies that sound like they can bring costs down purely by sticking it to unsympathetic actors, but this is rarely the actual situation.”
At the peak of Inflation Discourse, I’m pretty sure people angrily posting about $100 chicken soup thought you could bring costs down by abolishing people who study and report on inflation indicators.
And this is why an abundance set of policies is hard politically. Just about every policy lever for lowing costs does it by lowering someone's income, taking away someone's sinecure, ceasing to give someone a cut of whatever building or work is done, etc. And every one of those people who are losing out will fight like hell to keep their particular bit of rent-seeking in place.
I mean, the trope namer here is housing abundance, which is actively against the interests of many current homeowners because more housing supply means lower housing costs and their house is their biggest asset and the thing that they're counting on to fund their retirement.
But many things you can do to lower costs involve taking money from some small but very focused interest group who is *very* dedicated to keeping their cut.
With a certain amount of despair, I note that our admirable matt continues to ignore the actual solution for the energy problem in the northeast. It comprises the following: importing power from the north and the west through improved powerlines; creating an economic incentive in the west, and the north for renewables to be connected to the grid; yes, invest in nuclear, but stop talking about it as if it were going to deliver electricity tomorrow; offshore wind; electric transportation; willingness to use natural gas to replace fuel oil and an aggressive program to eliminate fuel oil; an offshore connector line for offshore wind that stretches from Maine to Virginia with many sea to land connections so as to maximize the availability of wind across the region; distributed storage with incentives for long-haul storage; solar on the roofs of every municipal and commercial building, connected through community, solar projects. Generally be aware that other nations at even more northern latitudes are able to move to renewables. Stop repeating the cant to the contrary.
Reed, I would love it if the environmental community were laser-focused on achieving the kind of federal legislative changes that would make the long-distance transmission projects you're talking about possible. Because you're right, this is clearly doable from an engineering standpoint.
But it's not actually something that the governor of New Jersey or New York is able to accomplish since it's a complicated multi-state issue with significant federal jurisdiction.
The problem is that the environmental movement is obsessively focused on blocking fossil fuel infrastructure and at best indifferent to trying to increase utility-scale renewable deployment and transmission while often actively hostile due to land use concerns.
The environmental activists have been their own enemy for decades. I agree. The reasons lie inter alia in their need to obtain dues paying members and seek philanthropic grants. The road to bad policy is paved with such compromising factors. RGGI otoh is a success story but grossly underutilized as a tool for regional efforts to lower e prices from their terrible heights. The relevant grid managers are even more important than governors and also are not brought into the deal in a productive way. It's a scandal that PJM has a long interconnection queue for renewables, just to cite one example. So you are right to point out that consumers and clear thinking climate concerned people do not seem to have a voice.
Can you write something about FERC Order 1000? Talk to someone like Steve Cicala, you'll get a furious summary of how it prevents interregional transmission projects.
Perhaps there are a few Marjorie Taylor Greene's in the environmental groups. That is, they're breaking away from the catechism yet are still solidly in the camp. It might be useful to highlight them and help them become more prominent rather than just focus on the obsessive groups.
Start with Dave Roberts and Bill McKibben and go from there.
I see the issue as downstream of the failure of both political parties. The Republicans have left reality on growth and fiscal responsibility and the Democrats are too parochial. Everyone says the right thing but no one is willing to actually take some action that might go against their priors.
In red states, and currently at the federal level, this becomes a lot or cutting off of one's nose to spite the face over increasingly crazed culture war signaling. In blue states politics devolves into a negotiation between executive and legislature over goodies and/or spoils for favored constituencies without regard for the underlying growth that makes goodies possible. In a highly polarized environment no one is ever held to account and there is no healthy push and pull. My gloomy prediction is that all of this will get worse before it gets better.
I am starting to get very frustrated with union politics. Obviously Matt is too, and a lot of my frustration is his views rubbing off on me (or, you could say, Matt writing persuasively), but I've had some bugaboos for quite some time. There is a real "magic bullet"/"underpants gnome" aspect to the idea of unions on the left, where they are allegedly the key to improving the standard of living, but nobody knows how to go about doing that at all.
Unionization is not a solution for raising wages across the board. And the union dynamic for the last 30-50 years has mostly been labor protectionism for a narrow band of industries. (And the nature of that protectionism has often run counter to "equity"-type goals - plenty of discrimination and old-boy networks.)
And now, the unions cause us all these policy problems, and while we enjoy their cash their memberships don't even vote for us. Unions were essential at the time they formed, and fantastic vehicles for spreading wealth, and in many cases still are - for their members. But on a macro level it's a crumbling system of labor regulation that can't be brought back. Unionizing Starbucks isn't going to do shit - a similar impact, perhaps, to the two cents a gallon that drill, baby drilling the hell out of the ANWR would've gotten us in 2008. If unionization rates fell from 35% to under 10%, is getting them back up to 15% going to somehow reverse the trends associated with that fall? Especially if the jobs being unionized are low-wage jobs that people tend to do for just a few years in their 20s-30s?
The way to increase wages for jobs like that is to tighten the labor market. Now, as it happens, tightening the labor market is ALSO inflationary (and was a large part of the reason for post-Covid inflation). Voters might want to get their heads out of their asses and realize that "affordability" = "low wage growth."
Then again, the 80s were a time of falling inflation and stagnant or falling wages and everybody thought it was the bee's knees, apparently, so maybe that is what people want?
Union membership was one of the few groups that actually moved left from 2020 to 2024; if you look at the trend rather than the absolute swing, they were WAAAAY to the left of the country as a whole. The notion that unions are somehow dispensable for Democrats to win elections is ludicrous. They are the circulatory system of left-wing politics-- the mechanism by which left ideas are actually transmitted to the working class. Being a union member is causally linked to having more left-wing political views than you otherwise would, all else being equal-- even though plenty of union members are right-wing.
In some sense, then, paying unions to do political organizing would be a valuable tool for Democrats even if they had no impact whatsoever on wage rates in society at large-- but of course they do; union workers consistently earn higher wages than nonunion ones, so it's hardly necessary to resort to that kind of logic to understand why unions are good.
"Union membership was one of the few groups that actually moved left from 2020 to 2024; if you look at the trend rather than the absolute swing, they were WAAAAY to the left of the country as a whole."
This is very much driven by public sector unions, though, no? Public sector unions are a pretty different thing from private sector unions, I don't think they are a major current source of union expansion. Public employees are pretty much already all unionized in any jurisdiction that would consider for half a second allowing them to be.
I dunno. How long am I supposed to sit around and wait for unions to fix anything about the labor market and wage distribution? They've made zero progress in my entire life. At some point there has to be accountability for the movement. I'm fine with giving them support legislatively and rhetorically, and I loved Biden joining a picket line. It's worth trying to keep the erosion of union influence as gradual as it can be, and in terms of framing left wing economic ideas for a mass audience you can't do better. But they should be moved a few spots back in priority when we are making the kind of tradeoffs Matt is talking about.
No. Private sector union members are consistently more left-wing than identically situated private sector employees who are not union members. There's all kinds of political-science research on this topic.
I don't know what else to say on this topic. Trying to do left-wing politics without unions is trying to make bricks without straw.
Thanks for the info about private sector union leanings. I am probably too caught up in the “hard hat” paradigm that people associate with unions more than they should. If you have a link to any of those studies I’d appreciate it - no pressure though, obviously I can look them up myself.
Like I said, not kicking anyone out of the coalition. And I don’t think unions are going to go running to the party that openly wants to destroy them. I just think the long term vision for shared prosperity does not center around them and may not even include them as a key feature. The inextricable link between labor and basic survival is something we want to erode, in my opinion - unions do nothing for people who can’t work, so at the very least, it’s not enough.
This is a matter of adjusting a bearing on a ship by a couple of degrees to put us in different place 100 miles from here, not jerking the wheel. And what that adjustment looks like is what Matt describes - remaining generally supportive, but telling them “no” if their demands are undermining the entire point of a popular policy.
You may be illustrating why Matt’s model for the party isn’t viable. Everybody will want somebody ELSE to make the tradeoffs; their priorities are sacrosanct.
As far as I know, even very expensive NYC new build apartments will often have weird expensive through the wall “PTAC” machines that are like the ones in motels (except the NYC ones often attach to steam boiler systems with all the predictable fun that brings). Best as I can tell New York is the only place that uses these and they are very expensive. They are not efficient compared to more modern systems (on the cooling side they are basically a large window air conditioner). From what I gather, they are used because permitting and getting building designs through planning approval are much easier without attempting modern HVAC systems.
Jersey City also has these which is weird, the whole advantage to being in Jersey City is that you don't have to deal with NY City/State regulations and taxes.
I think the infrastructure of the PTAC is around NYC metro area, all the companies appear to be there. It may be a historical local NYC metro thing. The only advantage I can think of that it has is that you don’t have to site a compressor like you do for a modern system like a mini split, so I guess it is useful for retrofits and maybe beautifies facades or back sides of buildings compared to a ductless system.
Gonna do a little self promotion here and drop my piece in Vital City about how Mamdani might tackle some of these issue: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/zohran-mamdani-michelle-wu-and-brandon-johnson
Nothing in here about price controls for candy at movie theatres, which is how you really move the needle, after price controls on beers at Yankee Stadium of course
This is a problem that's been known about since the Bloomberg administration and NOBODY HAS DEALT WITH IT.
A primary source, from 2005:
"Yo, stop at the deli, the theater's overpriced.
Got a backpack? Gotta pack it up nice.
Don't want security to get suspicious.
Mr. Pibb and Red Vines equals crazy delicious."
Red Vines are like what you would end up with if you described Twizzlers to someone with the equivalent of colorblindness for their sense of taste. They’re a textbook example of “ersatz.”
Yeah I can't share Andy Samberg's enthusiasm for them. I wonder if it's a west coast thing, Lonely Island is AGGRESSIVELY west coast for something that came to prominence on an NYC-based show.
You know what I really like, is the super cheap no-brand licorice you can get at a gas station that's like a shoelace. It barely tastes like anything at all. But there's something great about it.
It's artificially flavored shoe rubber and it is delicious.
Super Ropes (mostly available at school sports concession stands) have roughly the same texture and flavor profile.
See also how the Movie Monopoly exploits tragedy and ruins relationships for profit! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuoQe1q79O8
Break up Big Movie!
I mean, cheaper beer at Yankee Stadium is kind of funny. But also: every time someone tries to make fun of price controls, yet specifically chooses as their example a product sold by a legalized monopoly, I feel like a free-market economist gets tortured in hell.
This whole thing reminds me of Obama's Tan Suit and how everything has just spiraled out of control
Love vital city Ben, but the read on Wu by pirate wires is more accurate.
https://www.piratewires.com/p/is-boston-cooked
In fact, MattY himself had the most succinct and best take on Wu from thr summer:
“It's funny that this is the brand Wu has crafted for herself, when l'd say in practice her political success (which is real, she's very popular) is grounded in the fact that she hasn't really done anything...”
The number one issue boston faces is housing and it is becoming untenable.
Wu has managed to skate on affordability issues with Boston’s safety and relative cleanliness vs other cities.
That was actually a takeaway in the article!
I live on the west coast and my city (Seattle) is doing better than Boston when it comes to housing. I'm at the point where the best outcome for a progressive mayor is that they just sit in the office and do nothing. And I really struggle to understand how someone an intelligent person can believe that housing policies like Wu's will work. I guess maybe it's a version of motivated reasoning and having an unrealistic view of human nature, but you would think that a smart person would learn from the fact that these policies have repeatedly failed.
Wu isn’t Brandon Johnson.
It’s willfully focusing first and foremost on coalition management rather than unlocking the prerequisites for housing production.
The electoral success speaks for itself - from her perspective, why should she change?
The only way to compel a different stance is to credibly make her think her housing record is a liability for future office.
On that end, Andrea Campbell, Seth Moulton, and Jake Auchincloss all are far superior for state wide offices and slow boring adjacent people in mass would do well to organize for those types of electeds over a future Wu candidacy
I assume by tackle you mean make them worse
I think Mamdani has more of a pragmatic streak than people think and if reasonable analysis determines that any of his ideas are horrible - and a rent freeze absolutely is, and pretty much zero economists would disagree - he will find some way to adjust, and come up with a less-horrible but thematically similar project. Don't forget that a mayor has a lot of analytical resources that a guy talking to voters on TikTok does not. He doesn't understand (or pretends to not understand) the economics of housing, but he's not an idiot, and when stuff gets laid out for him in black and white I don't think he is enough of an ideologue to offset a respect for empiricism.
It's possible he has known the idea is bunk the entire time but it's just too popular of a thing to say to not say, even if it's going to eventually land in the "broken promises" category. The gimmick was a huge factor in the race - it may have been decisive to his election, even.
NYC Mayor is also not a dictatorial position and much of the council is not ideologically aligned with Mamdani. Those from Manhattan and northwest Brooklyn? Sure. But that's not even half the city. He is not getting a blank check by a long shot.
I could be way off! You probably think that I am and are probably more sure of it than you should be. Time will tell, but if he backs off his worst ideas after minimal pushback it will be to his credit and suggest the next four years might go fine.
I think that Mamdani is more pragmatic than he seems to be at first glance, but I am a bit concerned about how he plans to achieve his goals. I listened to that New Yorker podcast where he said that he was going to prevent an exodus from the NYC public schools by making them the best option. I think that's a great goal, but he didn't have much in the way of specifics on how he would do that. I'm on the west coast so it's possible that he has a plan, but improving NYC's public schools to the point where they're competitive with private schools let alone better is a huge task and it's going to require doing things that make components of his coalition (teachers' unions) very angry.
I was listening to a podcast that pointed out property taxes are exceptionally low on some high priced real estate (Maybe brownstones, I forget exactly what). They said an obvious move would be rebalancing property taxes and using that to increase subsidies on lower value rent stabilized buildings.
NYC property taxes are extremely low on single family homes in gentrifying areas and condos, and extremely high on commercial property and apartment buildings, and pretty high on single family homes in left behind regions (think Outer Queens and Staten Island and the like).
Problem is, taxes are controlled by the state and this has been well known for decades and the people who would be most disadvantaged by a property tax reform are the ones who are most active in the political process.
Sure, but the benefit to someone like Mamdani (or Trump/Obama) is that he can offer to get his base on your side and make a move possible. Mamdani seems pragmatic and Hochul has been making sounds about helping him on some of his agenda so that could be a way to do it.
Sure, would be great, but this is like in California saying "just fix Prop 13".
I’m actually much more cynically optimistic than you. I think the guy is a ruthless power-seeker, and through a combination of path-dependency from college and opportunism, won the mayoralty when all he was really trying to do was build clout within socialist circles. I expect him to ruthlessly say “new number who dis?” whenever the DSA comes calling, and I expect him to initially govern in whatever way maximizes his chances of coming out the other side of his term with a shot at higher office.
(I say initially because literally no mayor has done it since… I forget. Point being, if in 2028 it becomes clear that he’s following the same path as past NYC mayors, I expect him to shift gears and maximize the clout-chasing with the left again.)
I think we see things pretty similarly. I think when you are a pol at Mamdani’s level of ambition and talent you can kind of deliberately snub key constituencies while also being half-honest in saying your hands were tied. Both things are true at once, not just to the observer but to the actor himself. We can see Trump clearly genuinely believing contradictory things all the time, effectively, and Mamdani has been compared to him in terms of his skill to connect with voters,* and his brain is functioning more effectively than Trump’s at the moment.
*albeit different voters, in a different way.
Oh cool, ChatGPT cited this in a conversation I was having with it - didn’t realize I was effectively talking to you!
Quod licit iovi, non licit bovi? :)
Naturally
Very good post, and I’m glad it’s strategically unpaywalled. But this is my first encounter with the “skinsuit” metaphor and it kind of creeps me out.
ETA: this is a very widespread problem. On the transpo and infrastructure projects I work on, there are all kinds of procurement rules as well as rules governing the hiring of consultants like us (eg, a percentage of women- and minority-owned subconsultants on the team). Most people know this—I knew it before I worked in this domain—but to see it in action is truly remarkable, and not in a good way. The problem is so big and so enmeshed in the system that it seems impossible to unwind. Earlier this year, I nurtured a tiny ember of hope that the wanton destruction would open up an opportunity to build a better system, but per this post that doesn’t seem likely.
Matt wrote an excellent and terrible column. Y’all have covered the excellence, and I think lindamc gets at the terrible aspect with this insight:
- “The problem is so big and so enmeshed in the system that it seems impossible to unwind.”
Indeed! That’s because “the problem” isn’t distinct from democracy itself. Interest groups aren’t parasites on politics — they are politics. Some, like the master plumbers, have a revenue interest. Others, like environmentalists, have policy interests. Matt and his readers, including me, are what power brokers used to derisively call “goo-goos”: advocates for good government who weren’t adult enough in their view to confront reality.
By calling out the interests opposed to needed change, Matt does some good. The real work (as Matt often notes in the context of housing) is assembling the coalition which can advance the change. In other words, to push through improvements that require accepting tradeoffs, we will have to ... build a coalition of partially aligned groups which force us to accept tradeoffs on our accepting tradeoffs ;-). The next question is “how do we turn the broad diffuse constituency for General Improvement into an effective coalition of concentrated interests?”
Sounds like we need an Anti-Group Group to do our politics!
The Coalition Against Coalitions.
Call it the Groucho Marx club.
SPLITTER!!!
Once they're in charge, we'll finally have a CACistocracy!
...wait a sec...
To me, that seems where Mamdani has a chance of succeeding. I don't think he's as beholden to the interest groups. Matt's example of the master plumbers seems like a case where an interest group is lobbying against its own interests. If you want to move away from gas stoves, making it really expensive to install them is a good way to do it.
So much of politics of the 2010s was straight up trojan horsing.
Iliiac equestrianism?
What's the different between"skinsuit" and plain old fasioned LARPing?
LARPing = dress up as someone else
Skin suit = kill someone, peel of their skin, wear it so you look like them
That’s why, as lindamc pointed out, the skin suit metaphor is creepy!
Being an Old who, from an early age, in Lisa Simpson fashion, read The New Republic when it was good, I was reminded of this aside from a take on the 1988 Iowa caucuses (kids, ask your parents or grandparents who Gephardt was):
"The Big Democratic winner, of course, was Richard Gephardt, a man who puts me in mind, unreasonably to be sure, of an earthling whose body has been taken over by space aliens, I keep expecting him to reach under his chin and peel back that immobile, monochromatic, oddly smooth face to reveal the lizard beneath."
Source (quite interesting as a historical relic): https://newrepublic.com/article/98505/campaign-diarist-first-returns
Interesting metaphor because that piece now reads like a dispatch from another planet.
Indeed! It's a good reminder that today's hot political commodity might soon be completely forgotten - *so many* blasts from the very distant past here. I had to look up whether Gephardt is still alive (yes, very old, thankfully retired).
Apropos of yesterday's discussion, though, I can actually see in my mind's eye the typeface and layout of the old TNR (RIP) and how this piece would have appeared back in the day. Admittedly, I've done magazine work and am fascinated by these things so it's less surprising that they would register, but still.
Skinsuit just makes me think of lovable ol' Vincent D'Onofrio in Men in Black.
... pfff! I again found roles he pulled off so well that realizing that too was him shocked me, despite me clearly remembering being shocked about the same roles about half a year ago :)
!! No idea! Thanks
LARPers have pretensions to power and authority, skin suits are trying to lower defenses and infiltrate.
Skin suit is a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing, and LARP is a sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing.
If we're referencing using the terms as negative criticisms, the biggest difference is self deception. If I describe, say, a stereotypical HOA busybody by saying they're LARPing as a politician and police officer, the implication is that I believe their work is unimportant, and they've convinced themselves otherwise. A skinsuit implies a deliberate intent to deceive others, coupled with the observers' feeling of revulsion when they see details indicating this is the case.
LARP are people who wish they could do real world violence but are too weak or too pussy to actually burn down a walmart.
Skinsuit is basically what were called "crypto-X" back in the day. They pretend to be for an issue, but only with enough words and without changing their policy.
this feels unfair to the original LARPers, who just want to dress up as a wizard and throw a orange spray-painted tennis ball at people while shouting "fireball!"
This is why I think the “abundance” movement garnered so much pushback from the left. Abundance and affordability mean efficiency. Unions are anti-efficiency by design. Zero big city dem politicians want to be seen as anti-union. Hence, I am extremely skeptical dems are able to actually enact anything that lowers any costs at a local level. I hope I am wrong.
It's true that zero big city mayors want to appear anti-union. But that doesn't mean that all big city mayors just bend the knee to the unions on every issue. Some do (Brandon Johnson in Chicago). But look at more reform oriented mayors like Mike Johnston in Denver and Daniel Lauri in SF — they've picked some fights.
Likewise there's a real difference between trying beat some big powerful union like SEIU 1199 in NYC in some giant pitched battle and just telling a small group of about 1000 plumbers "no, you can't have even more rent seeking protections, sorry"
That's Daniel Lurie in SF. :-)
Back during the 2016 campaign I used to scoff when Trump said that because he was a billionaire he didn't to pay-off groups to support him. Now I 100% see what he means, especially when he comes from NYC
I found this article depressing because there’s no reason to think Dems will take on unions. If the master plumbers are getting their bed’s feathered 48-1, a great deal of progress could occur and they would still win 27-22
It’s especially frustrating that the pro-union aura extends to plumbers. Plumbers! You know, the people that you, as an individual, hire as individuals. This isn’t a Gilded Age mining concern with monopsony power and Pinkertons and all that, this is you needing a new stove put in. It’s a goddamn medieval guild, not a union!
The unions that have hung on and stayed relevant are mostly attached to fat cash cows. Only a fat cow can produce enough surplus to make capturing it worth all the inefficiency.
Plus *everyone* hates paying for plumbers.
Do they? I've hired plumbers twice in the past few years and both times they did jobs faster, better, and with less frustration than I could have. 100% worth paying.
(Installing a new sink and replacing a hot water heater.)
Not having to stress out while water gushes everywhere is 100% worth it. Plumbing is an honourable trade.
Honorable, sure, but at a quarter the price
I'll not defend master plumber rent-seeking but sometimes the public just doesn't understand the value of skilled labor. They're miserable bastards...
Hochul has no choice but to try, at least to some extent. She scraped by 53-47 in 2022 against the broom puppet named Lee Zeldin. Elise Stefanik is substantially more formidable, and the state has only grown more conservative since - at the exact moment that everyone’s favorite Great Socialist Hope just ascended to the NYC mayoralty, where he can really destroy Democrats’ brand with Long Island swing voters. Hence her supporting the pipeline that’s infuriating the environmental losers. And hence her still not having signed the bill locking in makework for the TWU indefinitely.
I will take the under on Stefanik as a candidate with statewide electoral appeal.
Especially in 2026.
How did you feel about Lee Zeldin?
Zeldin was not, at the time, tied at the hip to massively unpopular Trump policies. If he ran today he'd be attacked for his appalling record with EPA and lose the same race in the same environment by 15.
Stefanik, likewise, has completely abandoned any guise of moderation to let the Trump freak flag fly. She is in many ways emblematic of the cynicism of soi-disant Republican moderates; all of her supposed commitments have turned out to be fake as soon as Trump put them to the test.
With Trump in the White House, Hochul will win regardless and it won’t be close.
Hochul is going to get a very good election environment for Dems. She's not going to face a serious challenge from the right. Maybe in the primary though
I think you're giving the abundance pusher-backers too much credit by rationalizing their irrationality. They are a clique and reject anyone who doesn't wear pink on Wednesdays, or whatever their in-group signaling measure of the moment is.
Sorta. The abundance movement got pushback from the left because they don't make corporations villains. Pretty much full stop.
This is because a lot of the "left" has been captured by populism. Which requires a villain that you can attack.
If America has an abundance of anything these days, it’s villains!
Unions are not anti-efficiency by design. Unions are pro-employment by design. If efficiency will increase employment then a properly-functioning union will support it. But it's hardly surprising that you'll encounter union opposition if you try to just bulldoze over them by saying "efficiency trumps all" without actually doing the work of persuading anyone that efficiency will increase employment.
(This is of course further complicated by the fact that the US's lack of sectoral bargaining means some forms of increased employment aren't captured by collective-bargaining agreements and thus effectively "don't count" for purposes of the union's protection of its employees. That issue was discussed on a thread last week.)
Right now you’re talking as though employment trumps all. Efficiency at least has the advantage of counting both costs and benefits of a policy, while employment as a measure mixes together costs and benefits (and is usually discussed as though it is just benefits).
The raison d'etre of a union is to obtain wages and benefits for the employees it represents. So, yes, from the perspective of a union, employment trumps... not quite all (it is theoretically possible to have a change that slightly decreases overall employment but significantly raises wage rates such that the union would favor it), but most.
Efficiency usually increases employment by making a sector more competitive and profitable, stimulating hiring-- and unions can play a big role in that process. (Frederick Taylor, for example, thought unions were key to raising productivity by getting workers to turn theoretical time-study practices into actual improvements.) But, not always. So just saying to a union "this will increase efficiency" is a non sequitur. It's not that it's a BAD thing, as Jackie Blitz wrongly stated; it's just completely orthogonal to what the union is trying to accomplish.
>The raison d'etre of a union is to obtain wages and benefits for the employees it represents
Sort of, sometimes. For example, the UAW famously created a second tier of new workers who were paid dramatically less, received worse benefits, and were frequently outsourced contractors. Many of them didn't receive a pension! The UAW, as a giant vampire squid of rent-seeking, did this so that they could concentrate all of their wages, benefits, and pension on the more senior workers.
Nor is this unique to the UAW- the United Food and Commercial Workers in California has done the same, as have the Teamsters, nurses, and some other unionized manufacturing jobs. As I understand it public education unions often divide workers into 'certified' or 'classified' jobs, so that they can deny more blue collar workers (aides, drivers, security, etc.) membership into the teachers' union. Sort of exposes the lie that unions are 'benefitting' workers- on net, they're really not!
The UAW was strongarmed into creating a second-tier of workers by management over its ferocious objections, and has consistently worked to eliminate that system at every opportunity since then. Eg:
https://worldatwork.org/publications/workspan-daily/uaw-contract-will-eliminate-the-two-tiered-pay-system
If you're going to lie you should lie better.
The UAW freely agreed to these terms, as have multiple other unions in the past. It's reasonable to assume that they prioritized more senior workers, seeing as that's universal union behavior everywhere. My point is simply a utilitarian one- unions/guilds don't benefit workers *taken as a whole*. I'm sure they do benefit a very small group of them, like the dockworkers that make $200k a year and shave a few basis points off of American GDP annually. That doesn't actually *benefit workers* at scale, but diffuse costs, concentrated benefits, etc. etc.
The union represents the interests of the specific people who work there today, not everyone who might ever work there or workers as a class. At least as much of what a union captures comes from prospective or actual future workers - its members’ competitors - as from shareholders per se.
Right - you don’t tout efficiency to the union any more than you tout the benefits of competition for affordability to capitalists. Efficiency is instead a message aimed at everyone in society equally - each bit of it costs one group noticeably but benefits everyone else more, such that overall it’s a benefit.
Goes without saying this was a great post.
Democratic officials would respond “hey Matt, your examples are category errors; those votes are meaningless. We’re just taking legislature votes that won’t amount to anything as long as the executive governs like an adult.” Leaving aside that this is not at all reliable - see Cuomo passing the 2019 housing price explosion law - I would respond with the SlowBoring commonplace that these votes do register in the background for voters, that they reinforce the Democratic brand of consisting of a bunch of totally unserious people, and that no amount of paid media showing Kamala Harris making constipated faces at the camera while touting her economic centrism can overcome Democrats hammering home the message, over and over and over, to voters that they simply do not live in a reality with material constraints.
Is there any evidence that swing voters are aware of these things? Republicans and most voters are also blissfully unaware of tradeoffs.
Biden got hurt by inflation, but it's not like swing voters said "well the inflation induced by covid-era supply constraints and Trump's stimulus checks wasn't Biden's fault, but the inflation induced by the ARP and IRA is, so I'm voting against him."
People blame the incumbent and like rhetoric--preferably believable rhetoric--about lowering prices. If you can make policy that has swift economic benefits, great!
IMO the most egregious case of this is environmental groups in Maine fighting to prevent Quebec hydropower from being delivered to MA because they had to tear down forest cover. Opposing pipelines I could af least understand as it's "dirty" so they're obviously not going to like it, but hydro is clean!
Luckily it seems to be going ahead anyways, but they're 4 years behind schedule now.
https://oilandenergyonline.com/articles/all/hydro-electric-line-quebec-can-proceed-against-voters-wishes/
"Luckily it seems to be going ahead anyways, but they're 4 years behind schedule now." [In Bart Simpson voice] See, the system works.
Tearing down forest cover is a direct source of increased de facto climate emissions (technically speaking, it's actually reduced CO2 absorption, but subtracting a positive is the same mathematically as adding a negative), so it's entirely possible to theorize a hydro project that increases emissions through loss of forest cover.
What this specific project actually maths out to, I don't know.
There's no way this actually exists. It's said you would have to plant a continent and a half of trees to actually fully oppose CC. But a dam or dams and electric distribution cables are not land intensive. Each tree is peanuts.
Imagine the absurd hypothetical where if we build out the electric grid enough for clean energy it knocks down so many trees to leave you worse off. Guess every one should have their own home diesel gen to fix CC.
Dams can be extremely land intensive depending on how much land ends up flooded by the reservoir they create.
That said, to repeat, I'm not saying that this specific project is climate-negative. My point is just that deforestation is an obvious cause of climate change and it's annoying when people act dismissively toward it. So do the math!
The thing is, you don't have to do a lot of math to evaluate any particular project. Actual deforestation is bad for many reasons including loss of carbon capture. But deforestation describes something very large scale, not the cutting down of some relatively narrow swaths of forests for transmission lines, or even damns, in a country as de facto responsible as Canada.
When you are looking at a project that is as self evidently not deforestation as this one then misdescribing it as deforestation is misleading and that claim and its claimants should be dismissed.
It’s possible, but the hit to forest cover is one time and most of it recovers. (In fact, if you lock up the lumber in something that doesn’t decay, you might even accelerate carbon capture by returning to high speed catch up growth.)
I'm missing something here. Trees need to be consistently kept clear of power lines. In what conceivable universe is the hit to forest cover one time and most of it recovers? (Maybe a different kettle of fish in urban areas where you can underground the lines, but is that happening here? Seems unlikely, but again, I don't know very much about these projects.)
I assumed there was a big clear cut for construction, and then a small area kept clear for the line, with the rest allowed to recover.
Here is the problem that environmental groups pose for affordability.
Green Organizations care far more about the planet than humanity. They do not care about the costs to humans.
They think of humans as lint or dust. Something that exists but provides little benefit to the planet. In fact, I have zero doubt that they would prefer to see the extinction of humanity.
The lawyers they employ have one job: to stop everything. Just to shut it down.
I would like to register my disagreement than the Sierra Club wants to kill all humans. They are counter productive, certainly, but let’s not get hysterical.
Matt Yglesias' utopia is 1 billion Americans. Sierra Club's utopia is 1 billion humans. Certainly not zero humans, though.
“We only want to kill 7 billion humans, not all 8 billion of them” is hardly a ringing endorsement
People that are still following crackpot Malthusian principles, and who actually believe that if we just all hold hands and try real hard, we can reduce, reuse, recycle our way to shrinking to 1 billion people, are simply not serious people, and should be treated accordingly.
Who said anything about killing? Births are already below replacement in lots of places.
Please, enlighten me as to how we'd get from 8 billion to 1 billion within any reasonable time frame without a lot of involuntary death. A few more people choosing not to have kids is not going to get it done.
Part of the sustainability mindset is thinking on long and somewhat unreasonable time frames. It's taken 40 years to bring the California Condor from the brink of death to surviving in the wild again. It might take another 100 before the population is healthy.
It's the sort of position that requires a Well-intentioned Extremist supervillain with Social Darwinist tendencies... Does not describe the Sierra Club at all.
OK, I used rhetorical flair. Sue me. They have all read the Population Bomb by Erlich, and they are for closing every national forest unless you can walk in. They would love it if we only used candles and bicycles to work. No more Big Macs, in fact, no meat whatsoever.
You must eliminate all corporations that conspire to kill the planet with carbon for the sake of chasing a dollar. Am I closer?
Turning every National Forest into a designated Wilderness area would be awesome. That’s the most exciting political proposal I’ve heard in years.
But it would also provoke massive blowback and would be a net negative to the environmental movement, so sadly I’d say you’d have to let that go.
I can't believe Ben Krauss liked this. Suggesting that issue advocacy groups would "prefer the extinction of humanity" is a text book example of bad forum behavior.
No one’s claiming they want to force the outcome. They want humanity to voluntarily come to a peaceful end.
It’s easy to paint characiatures of antis but the world has plenty of moderates everywhere. Not the ones on flotillas in the medeterranian I’ll grant you.
ChatGPT informs me that the classical definition of a moderate is 'a person who declines to participate in a flotilla.'
One themes here is how often politicians are bullied by weak and badly funded lobbies. I can understand folding when faced with environmentalists but why fold when pressured by master plumbers?
I think because this is actually a pigovian tax on gas stoves wearing a pro-labor skinsuit.
it very much is, people hate pigouvian taxes. The problem with the approach NYC is taking is that they're forgoing the revenue that pigouvian taxes generate
That's a good point. And also I posted before reading Matt's column asserting that plumbers really were behind it. Could be.
Only about 25% of plumbers belong to unions. It’s not plumbers in general.
The biggest unions are teachers, government workers, service employees, and then the Teamsters. Blue collar workers are not a majority of union members.
If you have a class-oriented worldview, then why would you take the other side of a (in this case plumber) union? Unions represent the working class, so those opposed to them are inherently on the side of the capitalist oligarchs.
But it isn't just or mainly Marxists backing the plumbers, even Republicans supported them.
fair point!
Northeastern republicans are arguably the worst political faction we have in this country.
I think we would be much better off if we could get way more North Eastern Republicans and more Southern and (non Chicago) Midwestern Democrats.
I think NYC, New Jersey, Illinois and Missouri have the worst politicians of all stripes in the US.
And school board members in the Bay Area!
Marxists explicitly theorize class conflict, but it’s also an idea many people fall into intuitively in an us-vs-them worldview.
But Marxists (well Engels) also have a concept of Labour aristocratcy to describe exactly this kind of situation where some workers have extra power and use to extract money from the rest of the proletariat.
Masters plumbers aren't workers. They are capitalists, worse guild masters.
well yes I'm not endorsing that worldview, I'm just trying to describe it
Have you seen Moonstruck?
I don’t think the typical person thinks as highly as you suggest about plumbers in particular.
In their minds it costs nothing, keeps the unions on their side, and it’s the mayor’s job to actually govern like an adult.
And then Democrats wonder why paid media with Kamala Harris looking constipated isn’t enough to convince voters to vote for her party!
Right, the political cost of any one of these votes is low. I doubt many voters were aware of this. But these financial costs pile up like sediment, and then Dems are wondering why life is "unaffordable."
The “master plumber” issue in NYC is particularly irritating insofar as many buildings are not wired to accommodate either induction or electric stoves. That eventual mandate will further drive up housing costs and make the city less “ affordable”.
"The rent seeking is too damn high" is a phrase that applies to a broad range of local and national political issues.
Excellent question. Inadequate answer: I don’t know. But a (never-wrong) (ha) AI response to my inquiry suggests that retrofitting high rise apartment buildings for induction stoves would cost between $4000 and $20000 *per unit*. Do we provide some measure of property tax relief as a quid pro quo? Can NYC afford the associated revenue loss? Or do we just stick it to the landlords (who, in co-ops and condos are the actual owner/tenants)?
I did a bunch of math here and I'm pretty dubious about requiring this, even from a pure environmental perspective.
Say we want to make people completely price in the emission externalities of gas stoves. If you have an 18000 BTU gas burner on for an hour a day, that works out to about 130kg of natural gas a year, yielding 347kg of CO2, which at a negative externality of $180/ton is a social cost of $63.
Use a 2000 W induction stove for an hour a day instead, and at the average carbon intensity of the US power grid you get... 269kg of CO2, for a externality reduction of a grand total of $14 / year. (which makes sense, since the power grid is mostly natural gas burning anyway, and since you can convert chemical energy to heat energy with ~100% efficiency, while converting heat into mechanical or electrical energy is necessarily less efficient thanks to our pal Carnot).
Say you cook twice as much, say you add in another 50% of CO2 equivalent for the natural gas due to methane leaks, and say you wave your hand and totally decarbonize the power grid. Under these rather bold assumptions, you reduce externalities by ... $189/year. The NPV of saving $189/year in social cost for the next 40 years is $3240 (at a 5% discount rate). That sounds like a lot less than what I'd have to pay to upgrade my kitchen wiring from the 2400 W that will currently flip my circuit breaker to the 5000+ W I'd need to run an induction stove. So either obligating me to do it, or kicking in enough of a subsidy that I wouldn't mind doing it, would be a negative from an economic perspective.
Is anyone proposing forced retrofits? I thought most of the gas stove bans were limited to new construction.
The current issue is the need to hire a (rare) master plumber for any gas range or similar appliance installation, including replacements of old or broken appliances. This will add several thousand in costs associated with both labor and necessary permitting. The “new construction” issue is separate (and I agree that there is no retrofit concern in that case).
It's a ridiculous requirement by the state but as you note it's a different issue.
Would your alternative be longer runway to introduce the induction requirement (kicking the can down the road to avoid the trade off) or subsidies to encourage? Or neither?
Your comment assumes that having 100% induction stove coverage is a necessary requirement, so we “must” take steps to get there.
I don’t think I am alone in very much hating this assumption, and I don’t think it is limited to climate science deniers.
It does. But do you think the juice isn’t worth the squeeze for the state to reducing respiratory illnesses and carbon use?
Or it is but better ways of inducements?
It feels like it does not crack the top 50, or top 100, of problems worth prioritizing, tbh
The carbon effect is virtually meaningless on a global scale, a drop in the ocean
"Bharat Ramamurti, a very smart economic-policy guy who worked in the Biden administration and for Elizabeth Warren, says that “targeted price controls, alongside aggressive measures to boost the supply of things like housing and clean energy, may be the least worst option out of the cost-of-living crisis we’re facing.”
Er... if he were _very_ smart he woud know that price controls by supressing supply _increse the costs of the controlled good or service. Has he just ignored the experisnce o NYC's 70 year experiment witn rent controls?
This is a good example of "affordability" eating itself, why "affordability" is a good excuse for good policy (like scrapping RPS's) but a poor guide for policy.
the article seems to view price controls as a second-best policy measure in a world where voters have to be appeased in order to expand supply.
argument seems to be that voters demand short-run insurance against price shocks, and in a supply-inelastic world subsidies won't do a good job providing that since suppliers eat up all the surplus, so you need huge taxes to pay for it. but in a supply-inelastic world price controls are less costly, right?
price controls also arent very good as SR insurance against price shocks but have a different downside of shortages rather than high prices. voters might find this preferable for some reason? certainly ones who expect to pay tax in subsidy-world but also expect to be costlessly allocated goods in price-control-world will be happier with price controls. in the context of rent control for existing apartments this might reflect a pretty powerful bloc of voters.
>>price controls also arent very good as SR insurance against price shocks but have a different downside of shortages rather than high prices. voters might find this preferable for some reason?
I think this is at least pseudo-rational (particularly in view of the fact that voters are, by definition, geographic incumbents). In supply-inelastic world the shortages are intrinsic to the supply limitation, so someone's ox is getting gored no matter what, and at least price controls give you a lottery ticket's chance at both finding the good and preserving your surplus, whereas in a market-based world you're still kicking a lot of people out, just via the price rather than via some other allocation, and while the market price does a better job matching perceived utility to demand (which is efficient and abstractly desirable), it also has the practical effect of transferring surplus from renters to landlords (or buyers to sellers) despite the latter not having done anything to earn it, which people not only don't like in general but also doesn't make much economic sense relative to just keeping the price floor but taxing the economic rent instead of treating it as a transfer payment.
You'd still need a reason for why the efficiency match isn't still an improvement over the status quo in and of itself, but I expect this is because many or most people think of subjective housing utility as relatively undifferentiated or homogenized: buyers all generally like the same stuff and while their subjective utilities will differ (e.g., families with kids will benefit from rooms and floor space), they'll differ in predictable and systematic ways instead of reflecting a system in which 4-person family A will get radically more or less out of an Upper East Side apartment than 4-person family B.
Ramamurti is coming from exactly the Warren-staffer background often maligned here as the behind-the-scenes force pulling policy leftward in the Biden administration. He was a literal Warren staffer who went into the Biden administration, as Matt points out.
His statement here is promising! The price controls are only "targeted" while the supply side measures are "aggressive." That's a big evolution and shows abundance ideas getting some traction. You can't expect a complete 180.
Why be 180 degrees wrong to begin with? To be praised for 170? :) The vector resolution is still toward more price control not less.
“Politicians are interested in policies that sound like they can bring costs down purely by sticking it to unsympathetic actors, but this is rarely the actual situation.”
At the peak of Inflation Discourse, I’m pretty sure people angrily posting about $100 chicken soup thought you could bring costs down by abolishing people who study and report on inflation indicators.
“Your costs are my income”. Very important reminder - put in on a bumper sticker
And this is why an abundance set of policies is hard politically. Just about every policy lever for lowing costs does it by lowering someone's income, taking away someone's sinecure, ceasing to give someone a cut of whatever building or work is done, etc. And every one of those people who are losing out will fight like hell to keep their particular bit of rent-seeking in place.
I mean, the trope namer here is housing abundance, which is actively against the interests of many current homeowners because more housing supply means lower housing costs and their house is their biggest asset and the thing that they're counting on to fund their retirement.
But many things you can do to lower costs involve taking money from some small but very focused interest group who is *very* dedicated to keeping their cut.
It’s why Dems need to run on imposing all costs on the opposition party.
With a certain amount of despair, I note that our admirable matt continues to ignore the actual solution for the energy problem in the northeast. It comprises the following: importing power from the north and the west through improved powerlines; creating an economic incentive in the west, and the north for renewables to be connected to the grid; yes, invest in nuclear, but stop talking about it as if it were going to deliver electricity tomorrow; offshore wind; electric transportation; willingness to use natural gas to replace fuel oil and an aggressive program to eliminate fuel oil; an offshore connector line for offshore wind that stretches from Maine to Virginia with many sea to land connections so as to maximize the availability of wind across the region; distributed storage with incentives for long-haul storage; solar on the roofs of every municipal and commercial building, connected through community, solar projects. Generally be aware that other nations at even more northern latitudes are able to move to renewables. Stop repeating the cant to the contrary.
Reed, I would love it if the environmental community were laser-focused on achieving the kind of federal legislative changes that would make the long-distance transmission projects you're talking about possible. Because you're right, this is clearly doable from an engineering standpoint.
But it's not actually something that the governor of New Jersey or New York is able to accomplish since it's a complicated multi-state issue with significant federal jurisdiction.
The problem is that the environmental movement is obsessively focused on blocking fossil fuel infrastructure and at best indifferent to trying to increase utility-scale renewable deployment and transmission while often actively hostile due to land use concerns.
The environmental activists have been their own enemy for decades. I agree. The reasons lie inter alia in their need to obtain dues paying members and seek philanthropic grants. The road to bad policy is paved with such compromising factors. RGGI otoh is a success story but grossly underutilized as a tool for regional efforts to lower e prices from their terrible heights. The relevant grid managers are even more important than governors and also are not brought into the deal in a productive way. It's a scandal that PJM has a long interconnection queue for renewables, just to cite one example. So you are right to point out that consumers and clear thinking climate concerned people do not seem to have a voice.
Can you write something about FERC Order 1000? Talk to someone like Steve Cicala, you'll get a furious summary of how it prevents interregional transmission projects.
Perhaps there are a few Marjorie Taylor Greene's in the environmental groups. That is, they're breaking away from the catechism yet are still solidly in the camp. It might be useful to highlight them and help them become more prominent rather than just focus on the obsessive groups.
Start with Dave Roberts and Bill McKibben and go from there.
As a homeowner I threw up in my mouth a little reading about the master plumber vote.
I see the issue as downstream of the failure of both political parties. The Republicans have left reality on growth and fiscal responsibility and the Democrats are too parochial. Everyone says the right thing but no one is willing to actually take some action that might go against their priors.
In red states, and currently at the federal level, this becomes a lot or cutting off of one's nose to spite the face over increasingly crazed culture war signaling. In blue states politics devolves into a negotiation between executive and legislature over goodies and/or spoils for favored constituencies without regard for the underlying growth that makes goodies possible. In a highly polarized environment no one is ever held to account and there is no healthy push and pull. My gloomy prediction is that all of this will get worse before it gets better.
I agree that Republicans at the federal level haven't been great. But overall red states are pretty well run.
I'll take a Texas or Florida over California or New York anyday
I am starting to get very frustrated with union politics. Obviously Matt is too, and a lot of my frustration is his views rubbing off on me (or, you could say, Matt writing persuasively), but I've had some bugaboos for quite some time. There is a real "magic bullet"/"underpants gnome" aspect to the idea of unions on the left, where they are allegedly the key to improving the standard of living, but nobody knows how to go about doing that at all.
Unionization is not a solution for raising wages across the board. And the union dynamic for the last 30-50 years has mostly been labor protectionism for a narrow band of industries. (And the nature of that protectionism has often run counter to "equity"-type goals - plenty of discrimination and old-boy networks.)
And now, the unions cause us all these policy problems, and while we enjoy their cash their memberships don't even vote for us. Unions were essential at the time they formed, and fantastic vehicles for spreading wealth, and in many cases still are - for their members. But on a macro level it's a crumbling system of labor regulation that can't be brought back. Unionizing Starbucks isn't going to do shit - a similar impact, perhaps, to the two cents a gallon that drill, baby drilling the hell out of the ANWR would've gotten us in 2008. If unionization rates fell from 35% to under 10%, is getting them back up to 15% going to somehow reverse the trends associated with that fall? Especially if the jobs being unionized are low-wage jobs that people tend to do for just a few years in their 20s-30s?
The way to increase wages for jobs like that is to tighten the labor market. Now, as it happens, tightening the labor market is ALSO inflationary (and was a large part of the reason for post-Covid inflation). Voters might want to get their heads out of their asses and realize that "affordability" = "low wage growth."
Then again, the 80s were a time of falling inflation and stagnant or falling wages and everybody thought it was the bee's knees, apparently, so maybe that is what people want?
Union membership was one of the few groups that actually moved left from 2020 to 2024; if you look at the trend rather than the absolute swing, they were WAAAAY to the left of the country as a whole. The notion that unions are somehow dispensable for Democrats to win elections is ludicrous. They are the circulatory system of left-wing politics-- the mechanism by which left ideas are actually transmitted to the working class. Being a union member is causally linked to having more left-wing political views than you otherwise would, all else being equal-- even though plenty of union members are right-wing.
In some sense, then, paying unions to do political organizing would be a valuable tool for Democrats even if they had no impact whatsoever on wage rates in society at large-- but of course they do; union workers consistently earn higher wages than nonunion ones, so it's hardly necessary to resort to that kind of logic to understand why unions are good.
"Union membership was one of the few groups that actually moved left from 2020 to 2024; if you look at the trend rather than the absolute swing, they were WAAAAY to the left of the country as a whole."
This is very much driven by public sector unions, though, no? Public sector unions are a pretty different thing from private sector unions, I don't think they are a major current source of union expansion. Public employees are pretty much already all unionized in any jurisdiction that would consider for half a second allowing them to be.
I dunno. How long am I supposed to sit around and wait for unions to fix anything about the labor market and wage distribution? They've made zero progress in my entire life. At some point there has to be accountability for the movement. I'm fine with giving them support legislatively and rhetorically, and I loved Biden joining a picket line. It's worth trying to keep the erosion of union influence as gradual as it can be, and in terms of framing left wing economic ideas for a mass audience you can't do better. But they should be moved a few spots back in priority when we are making the kind of tradeoffs Matt is talking about.
No. Private sector union members are consistently more left-wing than identically situated private sector employees who are not union members. There's all kinds of political-science research on this topic.
I don't know what else to say on this topic. Trying to do left-wing politics without unions is trying to make bricks without straw.
Thanks for the info about private sector union leanings. I am probably too caught up in the “hard hat” paradigm that people associate with unions more than they should. If you have a link to any of those studies I’d appreciate it - no pressure though, obviously I can look them up myself.
Like I said, not kicking anyone out of the coalition. And I don’t think unions are going to go running to the party that openly wants to destroy them. I just think the long term vision for shared prosperity does not center around them and may not even include them as a key feature. The inextricable link between labor and basic survival is something we want to erode, in my opinion - unions do nothing for people who can’t work, so at the very least, it’s not enough.
This is a matter of adjusting a bearing on a ship by a couple of degrees to put us in different place 100 miles from here, not jerking the wheel. And what that adjustment looks like is what Matt describes - remaining generally supportive, but telling them “no” if their demands are undermining the entire point of a popular policy.
You may be illustrating why Matt’s model for the party isn’t viable. Everybody will want somebody ELSE to make the tradeoffs; their priorities are sacrosanct.
As far as I know, even very expensive NYC new build apartments will often have weird expensive through the wall “PTAC” machines that are like the ones in motels (except the NYC ones often attach to steam boiler systems with all the predictable fun that brings). Best as I can tell New York is the only place that uses these and they are very expensive. They are not efficient compared to more modern systems (on the cooling side they are basically a large window air conditioner). From what I gather, they are used because permitting and getting building designs through planning approval are much easier without attempting modern HVAC systems.
Jersey City also has these which is weird, the whole advantage to being in Jersey City is that you don't have to deal with NY City/State regulations and taxes.
I think the infrastructure of the PTAC is around NYC metro area, all the companies appear to be there. It may be a historical local NYC metro thing. The only advantage I can think of that it has is that you don’t have to site a compressor like you do for a modern system like a mini split, so I guess it is useful for retrofits and maybe beautifies facades or back sides of buildings compared to a ductless system.