As a Floridian, my state benefits from the New York City dysfunction you describe. More tourists, more people locating and relocating in Florida, more growth overall.
As an American, my nation suffers when our largest city (and largest State, California) choose degrowth policies that make us poorer. Agglomeration effects and unrivaled natural beauty (CA, not NYC) are being wasted. I hope those places take your advice.
I sometimes ask more left friends of mine what the highest growing states are in the country. They’re always shocked people go to Florida because of abortion policy and natural disasters.
One of my guilty pleasures is reading the NYT real estate section. Without fail, every article about a beautiful house in a red state draws a gazillion “I would *never* live there comments.
The NYT comments section every time someone brings up rezoning, real estate construction, and/or the housing shortage is equally predictable. Most of the NYT's problems are downstream of how its readership is mostly elderly, college-educated NIMBYs who lost the ability to incorporate new information into their worldview sometime in the Clinton administration, and who are very open about the fact that they think they are better than everyone else.
Going to take a wild guess the majority of commentators would agree that $140K is indeed poverty level today.
"Back in the good old days" nostalgia is more endemic in the Trumpified GOP and in general conservative parties are going to marinate in this kind of thinking and policy prescriptions more than left of center ones by virtue of what conservatism is fundamentally, but good god is this thinking endemic among all walks of life including among way too many on the left of center, left and far left.
Yeah never ever read the comments of a NY Times article on housing. It's all weird mythologizing and vibes. The NY Post commentariat is honestly smarter on this topic.
Its readership is too huge to classify that way, except as that’s necessarily a huge chunk of the US population that pay for a newspaper. If you will pay for news, you almost certainly subscribe to the times. Those people are overwhelmingly white college educated liberals, who are overwhelmingly boomers
Oh i definitely oversimplified. It would have been more accurate if I'd used the word "commenters" in place of "readership," because of course the former is a subset of the latter. But I think you can see the influence of the over-50 limousine liberals regardless, in terms of how NYT reporters choose to cover local news (to the extent that they bother to anymore) and the topics I mentioned above. I personally stopped reading the Times a few years ago; I allocate my media consumption budget elsewhere. Not once since then have I felt like I've missed anything important.
I’ve noticed that my super-political friends, family, and associates prioritize red/blue politics as a major factor if not the factor for moving/living in another state, while the vast majority of normies prioritize that very little.
I suspect most people prioritize politics and media in most abstract discussions, but when it comes time to actually consider moving, they start thinking about the substance of actually living somewhere.
I think the problem is at end of the day however much you may want your politics to guide your choices of where to live, you basically have no choice but let personal factors and economic factors completely unrelated to politics be the primary guide to where you live. My sister has talked about moving from Texas to NYC metro (probably northern NJ near where my extended family live if she actually did move). Since she's a social worker so her job skills are basically in demand everywhere. However, my brother-in-law is in software development which is the real reason my sister lives in Austin, TX. NYC actually has a decent amount of tech jobs, but is it the same opportunities as Austin? Add in my nephew is on the sleight autism scale and they've found a very good school that caters to his needs. In northern NJ, there probably is plenty of good resources for kids on the autism scale but boy oh boy would that be a tough move for a kid is age. And then of course the biggie; the cost of a house in a decent school district in northern NJ vs Austin, TX.
There's by the way almost the mirror image going on with the very wealthy who either lean right or the very least don't lean particularly left. How many tech billionaires made all sorts of noises about how SF is dead and Texas is the place to go. Yeah, about that, https://www.wsj.com/articles/austins-reign-as-a-tech-hub-might-be-coming-to-an-end. And right now, you hear about all these billionaires who supposedly are going to move away from NYC and/or move their businesses to FL because of Mamdani. I have no doubt a couple may actually do it and will get tons of coverage on Fox when they do. But yeah, call me skeptical the mass exodus really happens.
NYC tech companies don’t pay well enough to live in New York. Believe me I know. It’s definitely good pay and maybe in a few years after the RSUs vest it might work but off the bat… no
I hate the heat, so keep hoping this trend will make it affordable for me to retire in Chicago or the Twin Cities, but, alas, housing prices keep going up there
I know a couple older colleagues who downsized from the suburbs and moved to apartments in the Loop and they're loving it. Prices are really low and you're walkable to river north and the lake. I bet this becomes a trend.
You are right. The Loop is surprisingly affordable. We were thinking of more of a neighborhood (like Roscoe Village or Albany Park) because that is the sort of community we are used to, but Loop is another possibility, and no snow removal. We have several years, and we would like to see where our kids end up, but maybe. . .
An older friend of mine, who's lived in the suburbs since before I was born, recently got a place in the South Loop because her daughters live in the city.
Readers who missed that article about the new train in Florida are going to be extremely puzzled by the link between your comment and the one you’ve replying to…
I had a zoom meeting with a student last week (before Thanksgiving) who was on a train. I asked him where and when he said Florida, I immediately said "oh you're riding the people eater"? 😂
I was talking to someone about how to some extent tech workers who moved to Austin are moving back to California and Washington. They said "yeah, I bet they don't want to live in Texas with their laws". I was like, no it's because companies are returning to the office and there are just more opportunities in places with a larger share of the tech industry.
The agglomeration effect won out over cheap housing and no earthquakes, but it should have been a wakeup call. Especially for Seattle which doesn't have the Bay Area's nice weather.
Don't a lot of people like Seattle weather? When tons of people were moving there in the '90s, it wasn't all because of tech. It was the whole lifestyle: the natural beauty, the coffee shops, and even the weather to an extent.
I like the weather. But I have had neighbors move out after one winter because "I didn't expect it to be so depressing". It really does depend on the person. As for the natural beauty, it's impossible to overstate it. I think it's a more beautiful city than SF.
I have the exact same experiences. Another manifestation of a certain kind of progressive not being able to imagine others not sharing their progressive sensibilities
I had quite a few in person encounters where these types of people stand in awe at my mundane ability to see the world through perspectives other than my own.
I too absolutely loved Matt's answer to the New York question. It was clear that it got him really riled up, and the answer just kept cascading into all the ways New York is screwing up its growth. And while I don't agree with Matt on everything (just like any other person), I have to say that everything he said to go after all the ridiculous rent seekers sounded great to me.
New York and LA are obviously the key examples but as he mentions lots of other big blue cities are crushed by similar rent-seeking. All of it sucks and Democrats need to be the unabashed in tackling all of it.
I think there's a great opportunity to capture some of the anti-institutional political fervor in the country with it too. Scream at unions if the unions are hurting affordability. Scream at the hotel industry if they are hurting affordability. Scream at the MTA if they are hurting affordability. Tear down every rule standing in the way of building more and better things.
I think whatthe Teamsters are up to is a real opportunity for Democrats to pivot away from catering to their rent-seeking agenda. The Teamsters are an extreme example given what their leadership is up to, but as Matt has pointed out this pivot to Trump is very likely because this is what it's membership really wants. Given what we know about voting patterns, I would bet large amounts of money the majority of union members (outside the Teacher's union) voted for Trump.
The reality is that previously "just stop catering to unions" was politically way way easier said than done because unions really did deliver votes! And also, I will say, my history knowledge being what it is, there's a part of me that knows a lot of benefits I enjoy in my job are result of union workers striking (and sometimes dying) for those benefits. I suspect there is a decent amount of left of center people like me who know this which makes it on a deep level a bit hard to truly pivot to seeing unions like the Teamsters or Dock workers as the enemy.
But now? After the last President bent over backwards to curry favor with unions in a way not seen from a Dem president since probably what LBJ? And for those same union members to then go out and vote for Trump. Honestly at what point do Democrats say to themselves "if you can't deliver the votes, why in god's name are we catering to you?"
Dems might have doing give away's to the unions but they were still looking down on union members culturally, and pushing policies the members disagreed with culturally.
It would require some jujitsu, but it's possible. In some ways, there's more energy these days than ever behind labor. I feel like I'm constantly seeing young people posting online about unionizing waiters or baristas or other workforces populated by young urban progs. The strategy has to be to paint some of these old legacy unions as traitors to the True Union Cause or as white male dinosaurs who time has passed by. People already do this with police unions so I don't see why it isn't possible to similarly turn them against the trades unions or the train conductors union or whoever else.
Affordability and income are two sides of the same well-being coin. Hotels/tourism are an amazing source of money from outside a city being delivered to the residents of the city in the form of income (and taxes). Whether incomes rise and prices stay the same or incomes stay the same but prices fall, people benefit.
Miami-Dade is also weirdly functional, despite the--er--corrupt local political culture. Super pro-growth, new rail, and a government that actively works to free up land for high-density development. What's happened from Brickell through Edgewater is genuinely impressive. I look forward to mayor-to-be Eileen Higgins becoming the next YIMBY champion.
I am glad that places like Miami are picking up the slack of the absolute failures of CA, NYC, etc, but it is unfortunate that the highest growth states are those with high and rising insurance costs...
Some places are corrupt because they're poor and everyone's got their hand in the next guy's pocket, and some places are corrupt because there are massive amounts of dirty money sloshing around and some of it can't help but be put to useful ends.
There are at least two serious problems with Matt’s (useful) “stationary bandits” argument:
1. A first-assume-a-can-opener[1] quality. When Matt writes “reject the underlying economic model of extraction”, the word “economic” is smuggling in Matt’s weakness for selectively ignoring the existence of politics. The bandits are organized voting blocks. What we have is a *political* model of extraction, and defeating it (as Matt has observed elsewhere) requires the tricky and tedious work of organizing the diffuse preferences of the low-motivation majority which in practice means identifying highly motivated small blocks within them, and supporting those blocks on *their* minority agenda — in S.F., see the Great Highway kerfuffle for an example that may torpedo years of effort to assemble a “growth paradigm” majority.
2. Three of the four cities Matt names — “New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, D.C” — are responsible for much of the U.S.’s actual growth![2] As Matt mentions in the full “stationary bandits” column, the bandits take from wealthy cities for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks. The “underlying economic model” of those cities is not extraction but the greatest economic production the world has ever seen, at least in financial terms.[3]
In short, I think there is more analytical work to do in identifying achievable improvements to our political economy.
Related: y’all in this thread should not be discussing Florida’s political economy without noting the double-subsidy from the rich states: when a future snowbird is born, we support them with services through their life, then once they are done consuming tax revenue, send them to Florida and pay their social security stipend with taxes on our working adults’ labor.
P.S. my gratitude to Matt for staying on the gambling-is-a-disaster story
Should we allow politics to be used for people to extract rents from the populace? That's pretty much the definition of corruption and should be pretty easy to resist (unless you get getting kick backs of course)
I do think there's some perverse incentive to have CA not grow *too* much too fast, else it'd come to dominate the Republic by dint of not only population but also economy. Some would think it a point of pride to be powerful enough to consider secession semi-seriously...I'd find it a tragedy, a major blow to the idea of a United States. It's like the reverse attitude from scoffing at "flyover" states for "taking more than they give back" to the nation.
Although it seems fair to share the tech wealth with other states. There's really no physical reason why Silicon Valley has to be here, other than historical happenstance and remote work not quite being good enough yet to truly decentralize agglomeration effects.
I would argue it’s MAGA striking a blow to the unity of the country, not high growth of CA.
It’s becoming less and less clear to me what exactly high productivity states like CA and the northeast states get out of subsidizing poor rural states…
Yes obviously high earning people located in these high earning states send income taxes to the federal government who then send a disproportionate amount to fund highways, crop subsidies and military spending in rural states. And now the Trump admin is selectively cutting federal spending that goes back to the blue states…
I'm not a huge fan of looking at states as donors/recipients.
I live in a donor state (Colorado). I benefit from spending in recipient states like New Mexico and Kansas: goods I consume move on highways in those states, research conducted at Sandia National Laboratories benefits me, military bases like Fort Leavenworth defend the whole country, so on.
...and those red states grow massive amounts of grain and beef and timber and mine minerals, and use those roads to bring those resources to market and industry, and send their boys into the military to protect all of it.
Your argument is an intrastate version of Trump's misunderstanding of trade deficits.
I don’t hate this argument, but I would be interested in seeing a breakdown of natural resources extracted by state political leaning. Not sure it’s so one-sided for the red states as you make out
A lot changes depending on the year, Covid spending, and other factors. The reality is that most states are net recipients because of the high amount of federal deficit spending. The handful of states that are more consistently contributors tend to have many wealthy people but few federal employees, contracts, or grants. This is why New Jersey & MA are consistently among the top contributor states. Contrast that with New Mexico, which gets a shit-ton of federal money not because it's poor, but because it has so many federal facilities and workers. Same with Virginia.
Like John noted above, this isn't ultimately all that revealing because people and businesses pay federal taxes and not states, so it's a kind of category error. On the payments side, most of the money doesn't go to states. Most federal transfers bypass state governments entirely (Medicare, Social Security, military salaries, contractor payments, research grants, etc.). Federal installations (bases, labs, facilities) are counted as inflows in the calculations and can be significant, as seen in New Mexico, Virginia, and DC, but most of these are historical decisions based on geography and other factors.
And these analyses are imprecise because federal corporate taxes are not apportioned by state. The Rockefeller Institute, linked above, which tracks this closer than anyone else, uses a model to estimate how much corporate taxes should be apportioned to states. And again, this is another example of why state-to-state balance of payments comparisons are flawed, the system doesn't work based on states.
You’re technically correct but not directionally. People in CA do not have to support policies that protect redistribution at the federal level and can just choose to have these programs at the state level.
There are real impediments to doing this at the state level. At the basic level, the lack of a central bank, a currency and deep markets for sovereign debt. Redistribution needs to be counter-cyclical and without deficit financing during downturns, the benefits don't work. Not to mention the ability for people and capital to move freely to other states.
None of these are insurmountable. Many states, including CA, have their own programs. People didn’t leave MA when Romneycare was enacted. It depends on the level of discomfort faced by high earners in terms of higher taxes. CA and NY are already very high tax states. It’s not the high earners who are leaving but those who cannot afford to live here.
"People in CA do not have to support policies that protect redistribution at the federal level and can just choose to have these programs at the state level."
Medicaid expansion is heavily federal instead of state funded and elected officials from states like CA have heavily supported that effort.
We’re not arguing about what has been done. If the federal taxes are lowered and social security and Medicare are killed, states have a lot of leeway to enact their own programs. That’s the argument.
And important note that spending is mostly SS, Medicare/Medicaid. Which means that when if people earn money in blue states during their working years, but then retire to places like FL, AZ etc that's going to skew the numbers.
But if you want to cut SS and Medicare/Medicaid just advocate for that.
It actually is that complicated. Tax dollars collected from Californians and spent on the military is for the benefit of Californians, no matter where it is spent. FICA dollars collected in New Jersey that are later spent on former New Jersey citizens who’ve retired and moved to Florida or the Carolinas are for the benefit of those former NJ taxpayers.
It is very complicated. The success of California is heavily dependant on the highway money spent in Kansas. The highway system allows commerce to travel everywhere in the country and every industry in CA or NY is reliant on it to be successful.
You like this egregiously oversimplification because it fits the narrative you want to spin but it doesn't make it true.
Yes, there are many intangibles that California (and other states) benefit from that are near impossible to quantify.
A big one for California is water. California contributes nothing to the Colorado River system, but depends on water produced, managed, and provided by the upper basin states and federal infrastructure that exists outside of California, which allows California businesses to generate tens of billions, and also allows more people to live in Southern CA.
Of course it’s a massive oversimplification but no the success of California and New York is not *heavily* dependent on highways in Kansas. Marginally at best.
12 months ago you could sort of squint and say it all evens out with federal research and public transportation funding but as those get indiscriminately slashed, it looks more and more like tax dollars from blue states getting siphoned off to subsidize red states
I would have set an aggressive over/under on when Freddie would show up to aggressively yell at Matt over his New York takes had he not ragequitted this site.
I know! I know Freddie really really hates it when people tell him he's off his meds or that they're worried about him. But it seems pretty clear that the lack of sleep he's getting from the new baby is not good for his emotional stability.
"Jesus you are pathetic Jesse. They published Sokal without review BECAUSE THEY RESPECTED HIS SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE. This is one of the most profoundly undergraduate pieces I've ever read on this platform.
"Have me on your podcast with your reactionary racist co-host so I can tell you both how you've audience captured in the most pathetic way. You are a right winger now Jesse. That's why your comment section is a hive of right wingers. That's why 'BARPod" comments and events are like Nick Fuentes level cultures. And the worst part is, if anyone else acted this exact way, you would make fun of them."
And Jesse's reply was, first, "What racist thing did Katie say?" followed by "Sure, come on the podcast."
Oh my goodness, this is classic Freddie, alleging that anyone who is just a millimeter to the right of what he, and only he, defines as true leftism, is an extreme reactionary right winger. All of we Slow Borers have gotten this treatment!
And as someone who has kept track of Katie Herzog's fine work going all the way back to her days at The Stranger, it's just hilarious to hear someone call her a reactionary racist. But when it's Freddie saying it, it's of course not surprising...
And of course, the only way Freddie will gain his demand for satisfaction is if you accept his regular challenge for a verbal duel where he can vocally yell at you some more.
It's also funny how he yells at center-left liberals about being obsessed with identity politics, but then feels it's different when he engages in left identity politics (whether or not he's right on the merits).
I used to be a BARPod subscriber, but canceled it during my post-Trump panicked cost-cutting phase prior to finding non-federal government employment. As a result, I have the (as far as I'm aware) unique distinction of having been referred to (multiple times!) on the actual podcast as "that one asshole in the comment section."
So I speak from some position of knowledge when I say that FdB is completely correct about the comment section there. I don't think he's right about Singal himself (if he was, I'd have canceled my subscription sooner!), who seems to have maintained a reasonable level of liberalism to this point, but he's definitely right about Herzog, who is almost unlistenable at this stage and as far as I can tell is experimenting with an identity of joking about the right-wing being correct before she eventually admits that she actually just believes that stuff now. I don't remember the exact racism he's alluding to and am not willing to put tons of time into trying to find it, but she's said some crazy shit on there recently. All "jokes," of course.
Yup, while I have very strong disagreement w/ Signal on transgender issues, he's basically still a normie lib on everything else. His audience on the other hand is basically people who on a Political Compass may come out as liberal, but deeply care far far far more about being on the right-wing side of various Culture War issues - looking at the comment section and the subreddit for the podcast for proof of that.
Herzog is just a nihilistic GenX er who has decided the youth are all weirdos because they're more socially liberal than she is. See also Kat Rosenfeld.
"what’s the deal with Far Left Intellectuals and cultural figures suddenly infatuation with Alt Right figures like MTG, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens?"
Freddie yelled this:
"All right canceling subscription, I can't do this anymore. This is just literally not a thing and not a single 'Far Left' figure is named. There simply is no such horseshoe theory going on and the fact that you published this email and allowed the person who wrote it to make this claim without providing a single shred of corroborating evidence or an actual name of an actual person. Is just going too far. The absolutely obsessive red baiting and hippie punching around here, it just boggles the mind."
What's funny is that of all the things that Freddie has freaked out about on he's kinda right here. Matt's blinders were on with his response (he is a bit too online) and he did kind of create a person to be mad at. There are actually no important leftists that are now supporting MTG.
Yeah he's right here. The problem with Freddie is not that he's always wrong. It's that he's often wrong and always a smug asshole who thinks anyone who disagrees with him has weird conspiratorial motivations.
But if he's anything like me he'll be back. I've ragequit Matt's substack before but substack offered me a free month then by the time access actually cuts off you forget why you were mad.
Over the last ~5 years Matt has really backed off on the hippie punching and "making up a guy" IMO. I was first introduced to him by my reactionary centrist friends who love that stuff, and it's why I didn't subscribe despite really liking some of his stuff. And now I've been here for 3 years!
Yeah, I agree, I'm a subscriber and certainly believe that he gets unfair criticism. Mostly for things he's admitted he was wrong on and has adjusted his opinion. I think Matt would say we don't always have to agree with him. I just think from time to time it shows that Matt is VERY online and this is one of those times.
>>We don’t let people stroll down the street with an open container of beer
I've lived in European countries where this is allowed and, not only did society not collapse, but they had much healthier drinking habits than Americans as a whole.
These laws tend to come up as a roundabout way to prevent drunken bums from doing what they do in public spaces, instead of just enforcing vagrancy laws instead (granted, there used to be restrictions against this out West until SCOTUS finally freed them via Grants Pass v. Johnson).
Laws against smoking cannabis in public would at least make more sense due to the second hand smoke phenomenon that also applies to tobacco. I, personally, am much more bugged by tobacco smoke, but I know plenty of others are the opposite, or just hate both equally.
I think beefed up anti-vagrancy laws would almost certainly be used for profiling and discriminatory practices. I know poo pooing increased law enforcement on those grounds isn't super popular here, but I feel like something that open ended is extremely open to abuse, and the benefits simply don't outweigh the costs.
I hate tobacco smoke as well, but it's easy enough to avoid in open air.
Marijuana smell lingers annoyingly though, and I've heard many stories about dog owners making emergency pet ER visits after their dogs ate discarded joints.
The laws came up because municipalities didn't want to deal with "drunk & disorderly" when they were already disorderly. They wanted to stop it before that happened. They wanted to avoid things like the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival Riot. (Newport banned public drinking the following year.)
But then "being drunk in public" was decriminalised (using the same arguments we later saw with drug decriminalisation) starting with the 1964 Supreme Court decision Robinson v. California and culminating in the 1971 Uniform Alcoholism Treatment Act from Congress.
When it became impossible to arrest people for being drunk in public, states began to simply ban drinking in public. Hence why it was possible to drink in public in the US up until the 1970s. So law of unintended consequences: "arresting people for being drunk in public just wastes valuable police resources, clogs up the court system, and is unevenly enforced against minorities" became a straight path to "no alcohol in public in 94% of the United States".
Here in Silver City, NM, we had a pot shop on the downtown main drag. It attracted homeless drug addicts and some pretty seedy pot heads but the worst part was the smell---a lady actually closed her business nextdoor because of it. The downtown is something a canyon lined with buildings so smells linger. One of the larger property owners now wants to put a new, "more respectable", pot shop on the strip (and have a pot farm in the enormous basement!). The Planning Commission had a meeting over it and the large crowd was about 50-1 opposed to a new store. Part of the problem too is that NM did not regulate the number of pot stores so Silver City already has at least 10 dispensaries which is a LOT for 10K people.
Really, when is "Abundance" good and when is it bad? Greater housing density, yes; more pot shops or a new White House ballroom (or Alcatraz Alley), bad.
Maybe so; I'm just trying to understand the logic.
Residents don't like the smell of pot around these shops. NIMBYs don't like the congestion and shutting off of sunlight that tall buildings bring to their neighborhoods. Why should we care more about the former's concerns while dismissing those of the latter?
Now if the pot shops bring a somewhat elevated crime rate, that would be something to take seriously. But it wouldn't surprise me if building lots of lower cost apartments brings a somewhat elevated crime rate to the neighborhood. In both cases, it's all a matter of tradeoffs, isn't it?
Pot shops really need to actively stop customers from smoking in or right outside their stores. There's a big difference between a liquor store that has a clean inside and outside and it looks like a part of a community and one whose outside is covered in broken bottles and urine.
Especially here where mining will be becoming less a part of the economy as time goes on and new businesses and tourism need to ramp up. Doesn't take much first impressions to chase folks away.
I remember walking around NYC a decade ago and getting constantly assaulted by sewer smell every block. When I visited recently, it was pot smell. The current equilibrium is worse.
When it gets down to it the USA didn’t have two massive wars that removed 99% of the drunken bum/anti social asshole producing process out of the gene pool.
My sense is they like the trade they get. Bland food, a real rowdy underclass, and malaise in exchange for one or two unbelievably brilliant linear algebraists who somehow ended up in MIT’s econ PhD program
Yes, I was puzzled by this also. Laws against public *drunkenness* make sense, but how am I harmed by a guy strolling down the sidewalk next to me while sipping beer from a can? Smoking pot next to me, in contrast, harms me, because the smell is disgusting.
I suspect it’s just easier to have the law triggered by the presence of an object that can be identified easily, rather than by the person’s inebriation. (Though if one trusts cops to make that judgment, that would be the better Target, just like with “reckless driving”.)
How on Earth do you separate those cleanly? If the guy walking down the sidewalk drinks so much that he ends up publicly drunk, then you've still got the nuisance. On the other hand, banning it prevents that whole chain.
How likely this is to happen, I can't say, but it's not illogical to prevent people from drinking publicly to minimize how many people start stumbling around drunk in public.
I wish some people in power somewhere had the capability to exercise sound judgement and make good decisions. But everyone sucks, so we wind up with a government designed around the least common denominator.
Not on popular trails; get that out of here. The biggest upside to marijuana being illegal at the federal level is that I can escape the smell of pot by heading to my nearest National Forest or National Park.
The worst thing about the slow boring community is that you guys are a bunch prudes. Let the people gamble, smoke and vape. It’s crazy how American liberals can’t get passed their puritan roots.
Idk what to tell you guys, but being a weirdo prude is actually not cool or liberal. Liberals are supposed to be the cool degenerates historically!
I think the problem is that it’s too easy to fall into being either a prude or an enabler. What you really want is to let people smoke, vape, and gamble if it’s what they actually want to do, but also give them help resisting the siren call if they’d rather have that help. It should be possible to respect someone’s decision to say “please help me stop doing this” rather than respecting their momentary lapse of judgment.
"Allowed by discouraged" is the framework I think is best. Those things are allowed, but they're heavily taxed, advertising them is basically banned, and there are location-based restrictions (no smoking in public, gambling only physically in casinos, so on).
Why? These are addictive behaviors with clearly harmful effects to the person who engages in them. They also have effects on the vibes of a space - if you see a bunch of people drinking, smoking, vaping, whatever in public, that space is going to seem less welcoming.
I'm not advocating for a ban on private setting behavior because I think it's a good Shelling point for how to regulate this stuff. But in public? I think you can absolutely argue that we shouldn't have those kinds of behaviors.
You know what I’ll give you that. Matt seems to like to answer these types of paternalistic questions quite often so it could just be a selection effect that is skewing my perspective of the broader community.
It's probably no longer a problem since Gen Z doesn't drink as much, but in my 20s the US had a huge problem with binge drinking. Part of the reason for that is that if you were going to go out, and you were on a student's budget, you wanted to get your drinking done before leaving so you condensed that into an hour.
If you could carry it with you then people would've consumed the same but over a longer, healthier, timespan. Or they could do as my italian friends did, and just go out to a plaza with a bottle of wine and hang out there instead.
It's very hard for me to believe that a primary contributor to binge drinking is the 30 minute walk from one location to another, as opposed to the several hours spent at the frat party.
In my college people had to take a shuttle from our suburban location to the nearby city, then take public transport to the area with bars. Took 75 mins minimum.
Our Greek life also sucked.
So that's my experience, but happy to admit it may have been different elsewhere.
It's a difference of scale. Cramming twoish hours of drinking into one is essentially meaningless, in terms of dangerous binge drinking. If anything, it makes it less dangerous-a faster intake of alcohol is more likely to result in vomiting, which reduces the risk of alcohol poisoning.
Think of it this way-early in my time in a subculture of heavy drinking, someone mentioned a night with roughly 4 beers, 3 shots, and 4 mixed drinks as a moderate night of consumption.
Oh yeah I was just thinking of that. We need more areas of town where you can walk around with alcohol in hand, even as we should probably raise alcohol taxes.
At a minimum, not being so seems inconsistent with Matt’s commitments to positive-sum redistribution. Sure those kids like riding on that rusty rollercoaster in the abandoned amusement park, but is the joy they derive from it really worth the parade of deaths and maimings?
I went to a kids arcade, realized it was all just a gateway drug to gambling, and couldn't unsee it. There were some adults camped out at the coin pusher for like an hour.
I saw an ad earlier this week for an app that lets you bet on things like elections, TV plotlines, and the weather. They were saying stuff like "you're still just putting money on sports?" How do they not feel bad about themselves at all for making such a product? So much of the culture being fed to young men these days is so actively harmful and destructive to them.
Kalshi is a prediction market that has been around for years, and originally had excellent roots in economic theory.
They’ve pivoted towards the thing that will make them more money, which is getting guys in their 20s addicted to gambling on everything. Everything gets worse all the time…
I think people’s opinion after thoughtful reflection on the subject differs greatly than their casual observation from the sideline. Most don’t gamble and think it’s just getting on with reality that espn and others include gambling. Ask them to think an about a second and their opinion often flips. I guess that may mean it is a potential area to educate and alter public opinion?
They should tax it. I have not heard a single convincing argument of why gambling should be illegal again. Some people will lose their ass but that’s their problem. At some point you have to let people do what they want
Not being a doctrinaire libertarian, I think it's bad to operate a business that seeks to induce people into making financial mistakes and engaging in self-destructive addictive behavior. That doesn't in itself resolve any policy question but it's the right baseline. I don't want a society that operates according to the principle of "that's their problem."
There's also the question if gambling is a net drain on the rest of the economy. It doesn't really lead to improved economic output in itself like some sectors do, while likely being a leech on money that would be better spent on other sectors.
This can happen with literally every economic transaction on earth. I need to see evidence that this happens at a high enough rate that it’s a major burden on the welfare state.
Gambling is one of the things where the habit-forming signals are quite out of whack with the actual enjoyment people get. While people can overspend on furniture, it’s very rare for people to develop a habit of overspending on furniture, while the random rewards of gambling often mean that people return over and over again even though they’ve decided to quit.
Bankruptcy is a case where I think a compelling argument can be made to tweak bankruptcy law to forbid people from gambling when it caused/aggravated their debts as a condition of being relieved from their creditors.
I don’t think gambling generally should be illegal. But it would be reasonable to say that it can only be done inside physical establishments and that these establishments have to enforce some entry rules (for instance, if someone has in the past declared bankruptcy due to gambling debts, they should be banned, or if a person has put themselves on the do-not-gamble list, they should be banned). It would also be reasonable to tax gambling more, and to restrict advertising in various ways (though this might not be possible given the first amendment as it is written).
Why would you permit humans who are irrational to engage in behavior which has a long and documented history of strongly enticing them to keep going while also causing them serious issues in the long run?
So often, when the question of Airbnb comes up, the answer is that it takes housing units out of the supply so it isn't the answer. I was surprised that Matt also answered in this way. Sure, this is true of units that act as full-time Airbnbs. But the original conceit of Airbnb was that regular people could rent out their apartments when they're traveling. This actually allowed many people to afford homes who otherwise couldn't have AND increased the supply of places to stay for tourists. As a result, Airbnb prices in the early days in NYC were low! I rented my 1bd penthouse in Brooklyn for $125/night when I traveled for work which is obviously so much cheaper than today's hotel prices. So why couldn't the regulation actually be that a housing unit can be rented on Airbnb for x weeks or months total out of the year, ensuring owner occupation the rest of the time?
I just think we have to acknowledge that some people prefer their lodging to be more like their home than like a hotel, and we have to allow the market to be served for all kinds of housing--hotels, short term rentals, long term rentals, and owner occupied dwellings alike.
We tend to pay more for an AirBNB than a hotel at this point but the ability to have multiple rooms for kids to sleep and also the ability to make food is a lifesaver especially if it's something like a ski trip where going out to eat is not a primary goal.
Denver’s AirBNB rule is basically that. You can rent out your primary residence when you’re not home, but that has to be less than half the year (or else it’s not your primary residence!). You can also rent out a room that’s part of your primary residence (including things like a garage apartment or basement apartment). Because of this rule you can’t have an investor owned and operated AirBNB at all, but the original “spare bedroom” use case is fine.
In practice this means there’s a decent number of AirBNBs, and they’re cheaper and more convenient alternatives to hotels in many cases, but there’s no competition from AirBNB buyers when a home goes for sale.
BEtter than a total ban, but I’d allow AB&B w/o limits. They reduce supply to long-term residents only to the extent that they attract visitors and if taxed throw off benefits to LT residents.
I don't want people going through my medicine cabinet or my bedside table. I'm always impressed when people can rent out their primary residence without first doing a huge purge to some offsite storage.
It is one of the most befuddling things I can imagine. I am 2/10 unsettled by letting in a contractor or tradesman in for two hours, and that only in the common areas, while I'm at home watching!
I suppose it’s incentive to declutter. But I’m with you. Also, the horror stories of the AirBNB guests that won’t leave are pretty scary when it’s your house. I don’t really know why anyone would be a landlord of any sort when the law isn’t on your side.
Yeah that’s when I was younger and newly married & had less stuff in general. Now with kids, I’d be less likely but still not totally opposed. Plenty of my NYC friends will still sublet apartments under the table to friends of friends or relatives when they are out of town.
In any normal market I have seen Airbnb prices could not justify removing a normal house/apartment rental from the market and turning it into an str…
To cover seasonality, unbooked nights, turnover, the cost of the additional wear and tear on the house I think you’d want to charge 4-500 bucks a night if the implied nightly rent is 100/night (3k/month) and I don’t really think this is happening most places. New York has a lot of tourists so maybe it’s different. But to Matt’s point unless your housing market is broken a normal landlord would normally be irrational convert a solid long term rental to an str.
And if someone lives in New York but spends 3 months in Maine or Florida, the 30 day restriction isn’t going to get them to put their home on the rental market!
Seems to me that the sensible approach here would be to have two different use classes*, one for a regular home which can be rented for a small number of days/weeks via AirBNB (which is the solution that already exists in many parts of the world), and another for full-time AirBnBs - so they can compete with hotels.
If it's hard to get a change-of-use permit, but much easier to build a new building with 20% of the apartments pre-allocated as AirBnBs, then that's going to incentivise building more housing and (if you get the rules right), AirBnB will effectively subsidise keeping housing prices low.
* Sorry, I don't know what the equivalent term in the US zoning system is. In the UK, a property has a planning use class, e.g. "dwelling", and changing it from one use class to another requires "planning permission for a change of use".
IANAL, but I don't think most (all?) US zoning codes have fine-grained use classes like that. Usually, they only care about whether the structure is used for commercial/residential/industrial purposes, but changing the kind of use inside those broad categories doesn't require any regulatory approval.
They were low for many of the same reasons uber prices were low - people didn't understand the economics.
As an example Marriott has literal rocket scientists working in their pricing algorithms and generally the goal is 70% occupancy. If you're they price to get 100% occupancy your prices are too low to make money, etc. The actual economics will not support selling an apartment size unit for less than a hotel room.
Would think that rocket scientists would be working on rockets. Talk about a bad economy when even they have to hold down two jobs to make ends meet...
Rocket science pays like shit. Turns out being a rocket science takes a ton of statistics and optimization that other industries (CPG, banks, hotels, Disney) pay much more for.
I should have been more explicit. The joke is that if you are working for CPG, banks, hotels, Disney then you are not a rocket scientist. Data scientist sure, but by definition rocket scientists work on rockets.
Reading that question about Your Party just made me laugh about how fundamentally misguided Omnicause arguments like Queers For Palestine are, and how quickly they'd fall apart if it were actually put into a campaign, as we see in the UK. I'll keep that failure in mind, for sure.
At a psychological level antisemitism is linked to paranoia, so whether a movement is on the far left or far right or islamist an antisemitic group will involve constant accusations of secret plotting. It happened to groups as disparite as Abu Nidal and the BNP. Figures are already accusing Corbyn of secret Zionist leanings.
I think that we should re-visit the charter cities concept, but within the USA. I would love to see what could be done with Omaha or Jacksonville or something with a complete regulatory reboot as some kind of benevolent dictatorship.
You say that until he makes owning a pet illegal and quadruples the alcohol excise tax. He doesn't talk about his unpopular opinions very much because, well, obviously.
Quadrupling the alcohol excise tax sounds excellent, that makes sense. The pet ownership thing does not; just crack down on waste enforcement or charge more for registration.
File this in the department of Japanese-Inflected Nevada Takes if you must, but I hate open container laws. People should be able to picnic in the park with a few beers, or buy a drink at a street fair, or what have you, without grief or need to stay in some cordoned-off area with event-specific dispensation. Punish people for actual disorderly conduct, not mere consumption that is feared to lead to it. When I lived in Philadelphia, people had to leave their drinks unattended on the bar to go hang out on the stoop, because bringing it outside the front door would violate open container laws and get everybody in trouble. I have similar beliefs about the wisdom of forcing all bars to close at a specific time of night by law, dumping all the patrons out on the street at once, which causes far more disorder at 2 AM than letting people sip their beer on the sidewalk throughout the night does. I miss the density, but I do not miss that charade. Absolutely ridiculous.
I'm interested in the idea of taking away DUI offenders' license to drink, but it sounds much harder to enforce than driver's license policy. This may be too vindictive of me, but it seems to me that drinking and driving is an open secret in much of American society that props up car-dependent modes of living. I wonder whether people's attitudes toward that would change at all if they were seriously forced to reckon with how to get home from the strip mall sports bar safely.
I welcome self-driving cars, but I think it would be a much better world for us to have them alongside less car-centric development patterns in the large metros where most people live (and where rideshare services tend to operate). The rollout of self-driving cars is slow and tedious and full of caveats, so rather than waiting for them to fix everything, I'd really like to have some conversations about whether it's really a great idea to live too far from any local businesses to walk.
We don't have self-driving cars where I live yet, but we do have Uber, and one thing I'll say anecdotally (because some other commenters are pointing to Uber as an existing solution) is that in spite of that, tacit acceptance of inebriated driving around me remains very high. I imagine that has a lot to do with "people drive places and THEN end up in situations where they need to relocate, so calling an Uber means leaving their car behind, with all the problems that entails" and "Uber is expensive." Other Substack threads I've discussed this in sometimes devolve into "people should just plan all of their drinking outings from start to finish," but I find that a very joyless way to live.
I'm mainly sitting here as an urbanist trying to strategize how to use people's revealed social drinking preferences as a wedge to get them to consider the benefits of denser, less car-centric ways of life.
The business that provide the most utility by dint of locality are grocery stores, as to which car-centric shopping > foot-based shopping for reasons of price, convenience, and time (e.g. checkout wait times and transit and shopping overhead favor fewer, bigger shopping trips), and restaurants (as to which fair cop I guess but also I can't really see myself choosing where to live based on proximity to restaurants as opposed to, like, price / space / quality of school districts). For everything else (i.e., physical good retail) there's Amazon and the like, as to which locality doesn't really mean anything.
I may just be a weirdo in the US context of this, but I want to change some minds. Neighborhood stores probably aren't quite as cheap (then again, neither are cars), but I really do believe small trips to nearby stores offer a better quality of life than big spaced-out trips (and needing to store a week or two worth of supplies in one's house). I guess I'd rather pay to be close to good amenities than for an extra few hundred square feet to store the contents of my weekend supply runs? Buying bulk may be cheapest per unit count, but it's all tradeoffs. Having to carry, store, and manage it drives me crazy. I order a lot from Amazon living here because the alternative is to drive miles to the big box store, but it's annoying having to remember to order things in advance, track/time subscriptions, etc. I wish it were easier to pick up basic consumables on demand from a drugstore in the neighborhood instead. Same with groceries, especially fresh produce. I don't want to fire up the car and make a miles-long round trip after work because I decide I want to cook something with scallions and I didn't plan it out in advance, buy it over the weekend, and somehow keep it fresh over the intervening days.
If you're raising young children and you never go out, maybe it doesn't matter, but I move in circles of that enjoy a degree of nightlife, and it makes me wince to see people driving from bar to bar. Even other people who live closeby tend to find it a little odd that I choose to walk or use "micromobility" and that I refuse to drive anywhere I expect to drink, which informs my feeling that people are just taking The Way Things Are Done at face value without really examining any of the implications. I want more people to reckon with them.
School quality is a whole other thing that I'm less directly familiar with but very interested in. I like what Matt has had to say about the meaning of school ratings for the kind of parents who read newsletters like this one, and his decision to send his own child to DC public schools.
Yeah, can't say I've ever really given a fig about nightlife so it's hard for me to engage with this in a way that's going to find common ground. I find bars needlessly expensive and far too loud enjoy, or even conveniently converse, and have never really understood their appeal. I live a boring life with young children these days but even beforehand I'd have far preferred in person socialization at a residence.
Good conversation bars are out there. I'm also a fan of coffee shops and cafes and the like. More density means more types of places for more types of people because any given business has better odds of finding enough customers who are into what they're doing to survive. House parties are great, too, but I find a world where people are only shuttling around between preordained activity bubbles to be really depressing, and if a car is the only way to get there, you still have to deal with this problem (unless your social scene is teetotalers, in which case, that's just a whole different world). I want spontaneity and serendipity in my life, though, which means things like stopping at my neighborhood bar to see what's going on, or getting invited somewhere, and not hesitating to have a drink because I soon have to get back behind the wheel of a car.
I don't think a "license to drink" would be difficult to enforce. Liquor stores, bars, and restaurants check ID now to confirm that alcohol buyers are over 21. They could check ID to confirm that the buyer's driver's license has an "allowed to purchase alcohol" endorsement or however we show that someone is licensed to drink alcohol.
That's true, though it depends on whether your garden variety person with a drinking problems usually drinks at bars and restaurants or at home. Over-21 people probably won't have a whole lot of trouble getting others to buy for them, either, though maybe some public awareness campaigns or something could help. I'm all for it! I just have some hangups about employing such a policy with the explicit goal of keeping people driving.
Yeah didn't pharmacies already do something similar to limit the purchase of pseudoephedrine? (Google tells me it is a national database called NPLEx.) So if seems pretty feasible.
"I'm interested in the idea of taking away DUI offenders' license to drink, but it sounds much harder to enforce than driver's license policy. This may be too vindictive of me, but it seems to me that drinking and driving is an open secret in much of American society that props up car-dependent modes of living. I wonder whether people's attitudes toward that would change at all if they were seriously forced to reckon with how to get home from the strip mall sports bar safely"
I no longer remember the stats, but drinking and driving has decreased dramatically over the last few decades. There is still some 'young people doing stupid shit' component to it, but a lot of DUI is alcoholics being alcoholics. They drink and are drunk much of the time, and they drive because we all drive. It would be inaccurate to describe it as a non-volitional activity for them, but it's also not a rationally decided choice in the way having one too many at Buffalo WIld Wings is.
Uber is expensive and doesn't scale well. I think people are overly optimistic about automated vehicles, but I'm not opposed to them, and if they end up getting widely deployed in a way that is significantly cheaper per ride than Uber, I guess we'll see. If we're talking about people who only drink on special occasions, that's one thing, but I still don't think shuttling people around in automobiles is a great fit for casual social drinking like happy hours, etc. Drinking is popular, and my hope is that more people over time will rediscover how great it is to wander over to a corner bar with your friends and colleagues without thinking too hard on transportation logistics or whether you really want to spend $20 on a ride or what you're going to do with your car because you drove to work that morning.
Interesting, my anecdotal experience is that Uber has been huge in reducing driving after drinking among my family, acquaintances and random people at bars I’m at. And hasn’t Uber managed to scale pretty well?
I've noticed it, too, and it's great that the option is there, but it's REALLY expensive if you use it more than occasionally. That's kind of what I mean by it not scaling. I can't take Uber to work and back every day. On that note, have any of these ridesharing services managed to become profitable yet? I know for a long time the concern was that these sorts of things weren't sustainable because they were being propped up by venture capital and banking on ubiquitous self-driving cars in the near future to even hope to balance the books.
Lyft was in trouble. Uber apparently is doing very well with their bilateral opacity where they pay the drivers small amounts of the actual fare and they can't really tell - so Uber is getting a lot of margin now AFAIK. Waymo could be a disruptive force, though.
I knew there was research I didn’t know it was so compelling: JAMA article shows drunk driving reduced by 24% after introduction of Uber in Houston (if the Google summary is to be believed). There’s also a paper that argues much more tightly that it CAUSED a 6% reduction in drunk diving deaths https://www.nber.org/papers/w29071
I have a lot of energy for how bad the DC mayoral race field is but this may not be the place.
1. JLG did a really bad job as a council member
2. Kenyan McDuffie (who is probably going to win) has a huge, terrible gambling scandal
3. None of the serious people want to run.
It’s gonna be a real bad time. CFO’s office has been socializing this idea that a few ultra wealthy people are driving DC’s revenue surplus- and that the mass firing of federal workers and contractors doesn’t actually mean all that much for the city’s bottom line. I kinda believe that, but it does mean the next mayor has to figure out how not to rely on the Bessents and Sulzbergers of the world to fund DC.
I will say I think prolonged unemployment was a function of job and title. None of my economist or PhD friends got fired, and many, many of them got picked off because of the litigation consulting hiring war (fortunate for them that a firm doubled industry demand for economists and analysts almost overnight).
People at the low end of the GS scale are getting nailed, I suspect that a decent amount of people at the high end are/were fine.
Mostly you have the youngest people all get fired (under one year of service). There was a huge pile of bullshit because Trump and co tried to fire them for cause (performance) which would preclude them from being re-employed in Federal service.
Then you mostly had people who couldn’t RTO for various reasons and then a bunch of people from senior positions (SES) retire early.
Anyone with less than 5 years at the financial regulators is gone, I think. As in, left or fired.
Some places worse than others- FHFA got rid of their research office which was built by the current OMB chief statistician during the last Trump agency (Russell Voughts agency). It’s straight vandalism in some places.
I think there is a similar age and employment status split at the state department where many of the newer people have been hired to run various programs over the last few years
At many agencies it was under one year of service at the current job; someone who was mid-career but swapped agencies and came in from another part of the federal workforce would also be affected.
I think given the current candidates this is probably right. She’s run out of competent friends to hire to run city agencies, and things are starting to break (eg: the 911 call center is a smoking wreck, DCYRS literally doesn’t bother tracking juvenile offenders, and city services are starting to decline). If only her consigliere hadn’t gotten into a fight in a gym parking lot in Virginia.
Wrt vice industries and free markets, I think the synthesis is the effectiveness of free markets is STILL severely underrated even by its supporters. Sometimes that's not a good thing. If there's consumer demand out there, dammit, the free market will find a way! Sometimes that consumer demand is for weed, porn, gambling, and mindless short form video. But if consumers like that, they're going to get it.
This is in contrast to Matt's answer on NYC hotels which is basically just "let the free market rip," which I think is correct. There's no possible downside to letting the free market build housing, and Airbnbs, and hotels. We're not going to accidentally build too much. Nobody is going to get addicted to buying units for the hell of it.
But yeah, this kind of mirrors my ideological journey. I've become less libertarian, but my awe at the raw power of the market has increased. There are some problems we're should be more trusting of the free market to solve, and other problems the free market directly creates.
To me the corrective is the kind of small-c conservative yet also radical left insight that nothing is totally value free (as in totally clear of personal or societal values). Letting it rip on hotels may have sufficiently positive values and externalities that it outweighs the downsides. My opinion and probably the opinion of most here is that it does. But we still have to use some human judgment, or a part of what the religious call discernment about the world, as it is, and people as they are.
Well the view I left out here is the view that the free market is inept, that it won't serve consumer interests. It's a widely held view, and it's wrong.
"Sometimes that consumer demand is for weed, porn, gambling, and mindless short form video"
Yes, that demand surely exists. But the question then is what to do about it. I don't want to use the police power of the state to go after people providing those products and lock them up.
I'm ok with putting sin taxes on those products to discourage their use a bit. I also think we need to have a strong culture that says abusing those products is bad and you shouldn't do it. Bring back shame.
Yes, that is what I favor. Sin taxes plus time place and manner restrictions. I don't really have a problem with strict limits on mobile gambling, age verification for porn, banning Tiktok, and we shouldn't allow weed use in public. But yeah, I don't want anybody in jail for that stuff (even though I understand, actually going to jail for weed is very rare).
Yeah I think the policy on vice products and services should be “embrace, extend and extinguish.” Make the regulated market good enough that the black market withers away, and then slowly squeeze the life out of it.
The politicians who are robbing 8 million people to buy off a thousand of their plumber buddies or the hotel union are pretty damn villainous. I don’t see any value in mincing words about the level of scumbaggery of the NY electeds.
I was raised to see labor unions as extracting some profit margin from business owners. But as far as I can tell, all forms of organized labor power have this concentrated-benefits-diffuse-costs dynamic with respect to customers and potential competitors outside the union.
In other countries (Germany comes to mind) labor unions and business have a less antagonistic relationship. Rather than making society richer on average, it has resulted in a larger share of investment being directed to those industries and workers at the expense of everyone else, because of course it has.
Villainous scumbaggery might be seen as not mincing words compared to "stationary bandits", but loses some of the precision. If stationary bandits is too bloodless and you wish to capture both their bloodsucking nature and that they are embedded inside the host you may like vampiric tapeworms.
Exactly. Sports betting is a pretty trivial case in the big picture, but this type of law could have ruinous and unfair implications in bigger sectors if allowed to proliferate.
I don't understand how it became conventional wisdom that the Supreme Court ruling (Murphy v. NCAA) was based on a state equality principle. It wasn't. Your second clause is closer. But the reason the federal scheme blew up was the severability ruling, not the anti-commandeering ruling.
I mean... kind of? The ruling in the New Jersey case was probably correct as a matter of constitutional law (you do not in fact want Congress arbitrarily picking winners and losers among states) and regardless of its merits didn't bind us to a dead-hand view of some key public-policy issue, as Congress can simply change the gambling laws whenever it bestirs itself.
That's actually a model for how the judiciary SHOULD behave; if all of the Roberts Court's judicial interventions were like that, I'd have far less problem with what they're doing. Instead they seem determined to use their power to put a partisan thumb on the scale for the Republican Party and insist that the only form of political organization allowed for the federal government is maximally corrupt and dictatorial, and I think it's going to completely destroy the very real institutional value of the federal court system (or maybe it already has; I don't know if it would be reversable at this point, but they're not going to reverse so it doesn't matter).
The severability ruling in Murphy v. NCAA is wrong--indeed, it is indefensible. And it's the severability ruling that caused the problem by knocking out the federal ban on sports gambling.
In the sense that the net result should have been that gambling is banned everywhere and not nowhere? I guess you can make that argument as a matter of pure legislative policymaking, but I don't see how it's legally compelled.
Severability is generally not a very big deal in functional political systems, where you just pass something in response and move on with your lives. It's acquired a bizarre relevance in federal judicial decisions because Congress has ceased to function and thus ~all current federal legislation takes place in the form of judicial "interpretation" of existing laws.
The constitutional problem in Murphy was commandeering--it was not some sort of state equality principle. But the commandeering problem only applied to the part of federal law that barred states from legalizing sports gambling. The same federal law also barred state and private operation of sports gambling schemes. Nobody challenged the constitutionality of those provisions in themselves. But the Court struck them down anyway because it held that Congress wouldn't have wanted a federal ban on sports gambling in the event that it lacked constitutional authority to ban states from legalizing it. This rationale makes no sense: Congress enacted a backstop and the Court threw it out for no good reason.
The prior regime was somewhat arbitrary, yes, but it was a workable compromise. That's not a small achievement, clearly preferable to what we have now, and probably preferable to anything the current SCOTUS would allow.
Congress could pass a federal ban tomorrow and SCOTUS would likely uphold it. But with the genie out of the bottle, the political will isn't there, which is a shame.
Well, Congress always could have done that, but it didn't because it preferred to allow a little gambling. I think this was wise; YMMV. The point is, whatever SCOTUS allows is different from what Congress, in its wisdom, deemed good policy.
It did do that! The Court struck it down, but not because there was any inherent constitutional problem (and not because Congress did some grandfathering).
I think the existence of the internet, and the rise of app-based gaming, had already substantially undermined the "workability" of arbitrary location restrictions on gambling. If your compromise depends for its validity on absolutely nothing ever changing ever, it's not a very good compromise.
A whole lot of the federal government is like that because it's so hard to do anything through legislation.
"It's so hard to do anything through legislation" is a good argument against throwing out legislation for less than very good reasons. And while apps do somewhat undermine enforcement of state laws, that doesn't mean we had to allow incessant advertising.
"It's so hard to do anything through legislation" is a good argument for replacing our system of federal government with a functional one rather than warping the rule of law in order to pretend like our dysfunction is actually expressing the popular will.
Matt's sitcom idea is great I'd just add in the sister having a sort 21st Century version of "Meathead" boyfriend. A well meaning, but oblivious white left-liberal who tries to "live his values" that the sister espouses, but while she realizes doing this could be damaging to her actual relationships with her family so checks herself, Meathead just charges ahead, not out of malice, but well, being a Meathead.
Meathead means well, but he just keeps causing problems where they don't need to be. For example:
-Meathead tries to get the family to refuse to celebrate Thanksgiving and fast for the day instead while reflecting on "the harm caused by colonialism", this doesn't go over well, at all.
-Meathead tries to do a "land acknowledgement" while ignoring the whole Mexican-American War, not as a slight, but because he never learned about it school.
-Meathead styles himself as speaking Spanish, but says stuff like "You estudiar paroto dos anos en mi escuela de la colegio de el Colgate de Nuevoo Yorko", this leads to a running gag of people dunking on him in Spanish when he's not paying attention.
I'd also throw in a neighbor named Bill, who's implied to be very MAGA (like Tom Hanks on SNL's "Black Jeopardy") but it's never overtly stated and finds great overlap with the Grans on philosophical principles. Example: Abuela is excited about her new iPhone and is going to activate the thumbprint and face ID features and Bill, who is over at the home to lend dad some of his drill bits is like "No, no! Don't do that, that's how they get ya!" and the fam is like "This dude is totally right."
Damn this is good. Can we use some of that sweet $1B to hire some crackerjack writers to convert this and Matt’s response for a four-season Netflix run?
Why only criticism for tech billionaires overreaching to the left while trying to eg improve education and none for, say, Bill Ackman, who’s pro defunding science because he’s mad at Harvard? Or Tim Dunn who hates gay people and spends to create a Christian theocracy in Texas? Or the grand daddy of them all, who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Trump, Elon Musk?
I think for Matt, and we his audience, the baseline assumption is those people are bad and generally lost causes. Effort spent even bothering to criticize is just wasted effort, it will have no effect. But talking about left leaning billionaires has at least the possibility that they, or more likely their staffs, will hear and make some marginal change.
It's the same reason he doesn't bother giving advice to Republicans about how and why to moderate. He doesn't spend time trying to convince them to elect more Brian Fitzpatricks or Susan Collinses, while he does spend time advocating for more Jared Goldens and Jon Testers.
The difference is that these left-wing tech billionaires are trying to do good but are misguided, whereas the right wing billionaires know what they’re doing.
More that it’s a waste of time and conceptually uninteresting: people are generally more receptive to the argument that they (or others) are not being instrumentally effective in accomplishing their stated goals. Conversely, “Bill Ackman has different terminal values than I do” is just a complete statement with nowhere to go.
If there is a right-wing billionaire who isn't pro-Christian theocracy, I'm sure Matt would recommend that said billionaire not fund pro-Christian theocracy NGOs. However, are there any right-wing billionaires who aren't pro-Christian theocracy, but are funding pro-Christian theocracy NGOs? My suspicion is that there are very few.
There’s a huge civil war at heritage because the Christian nationalists are taking over what used to be a pretty normal libertarian organization. I mean, they were always a little farther to the right than like, AEI, but what’s happening there mirrors what happened at places like ACLU and SPLC
Most of the big classical republican donors (eg John Paul Jobes) are sad trombone libertarians.
Yes, I'm aware about the fight at the Heritage Foundation (although I don't think the Heritage Foundation has ever qualified as a "pretty normal libertarian organization" -- it's always had a heavy religious component to the best of my recollection), but are there billionaires who disagree with what's going on there who are still donating to it today at similar levels to what they were donating to it in the recent past, let alone making major new donations?
For context, the express starting point of this thread was snarking at Matt for not criticizing billionaires enough for their donations to rightwing NGOs. But Matt's point wasn't that billionaires generically shouldn't give money to leftwing NGOs! It was that billionaires have been donating large amounts of money to leftwing NGOs seemingly based on nothing more than reading the first sentence of the NGOs' "About Us" pages on their websites when an actual examination of these NGOs' activities indicate a high degree of hostility to the billionaires' own otherwise publicly stated interests.
I.e., if a billionaire actually WANTS to support "degrowth anti-capitalism" (in Matt's words), then I think Matt would say that billionaire should accordingly support NGOs that have that as part of their agendas. But from how they conduct their businesses, live their lives, and discuss issues publicly, there seem to be very, very few billionaires who actually want that, yet they end up handing large amounts of money over to those organizations anyway. There does not seem to be any similar dynamic on the right -- billionaires who give money to rightwing NGOs by and large appear to very sincerely be rightwing!
To that last sentence of the first paragraph… I really don’t know. Are the Koch’s still donating like they were? Is Mercer? Are the JPJ’s? I mean Singer got so frustrated he started the Manhattan institute (which I more often than not am a big fan of) but that was a long time ago. That’s a really really good question though.
I don’t think conservative giving is as centralized as liberal giving in an actblue like way- a lot of lefty billionaires are giving money to things like tides who is then disbursing it to the maniacs. I think there’s a push to do that on the right but it’s not mature and I don’t know who it is.
But if the Kochs and Mercers are still giving money to, like, Heritage without thinking than that mirrors the phenomenon on the left, I think. Both those guys are, for instance, anti tariff and pro immigration as best I can recall.
The quote on Wikipedia is this: “On May 18, 2025, Ackman defended President Trump's defunding of science research at Harvard on the grounds of antisemitism on campus during a panel at the Center for Jewish History with Deborah Lipstadt and Leon Wieseltier.[117] “
I find it strange that you are not seeing the same version of Wikipedia but also you can just google Ackman’s remarks around defunding scientific research at Harvard since you find it so hard to believe.
I thought his point was that the billionaires he mentioned are, in his opinion, actually not intending to support the results of the things they fund (eg he gives the climate change example, where they think climate change is bad so they fund big name climate groups without really assessing what they’re going to do with that money, which is de growth policy that doesn’t pass basic cost benefit analysis) and if someone credible sort of pushed them on that, some of them might make different choices. Whereas it seems clear that someone like Musk, for example, is very much intending for his money to do what it helped do (eg elect Trump) and having another billionaire say “hey why are you doing that, you know it helped get Trump elected” would not really change anything and likely be met with a “yea, that’s the point?”
Why do so many billionaires give money to far left lunatics?
It seems odd, there are plenty of right wing and politically neutral lunatics causes. But when ever I see a mad big ticket donation by a billionaire it will be to a prison abolition group rather than say the Moonies or an anti-seatbelt campaign.
I strongly suggest watching that video with Nicole Shanahan. I'm always hesitant to blame large, complex forces on any one particular thing, but I think that probably explains a lot.
But if you can't watch it the TLDR is that the wives of tech billionaires have basically progressive values, see their philanthropic work as an important part of who they are, but also have careers and a million other things going on and end up donating huge sums of money or sitting on boards of organizations without understanding what exactly it is those organizations do/various counterproductive positions they take on day to day issues.
I spend a lot of time in Boulder with guys from the Bay Area who are on their second families, and their first wives have all gone completely batshit spending “their” money on this stuff.
Mind you, these guys aren’t reliable narrators and many of them are sacks of shit but I know their ex wives and it rings true. The Apple show “LOOT” captures a real dynamic
The ways of wealthy tech people and their former or soon to be former wives is as remote to my lived experience as Pluto. But growing up and in particular dating in the larger DC area has introduced to me the type of person that works in NGO space (less Netflix and chill, more Radio Pacifica and smoke pot in the back room of some weird communal row house). I do not hate these people and think any liberal society has them floating around the ecosystem. But whether the cause is climate, racial justice of some kind, womens issues prison reform, poverty, whatever, they all tend to have a particular set of values and particular world view. Some of their observations and criticisms can be quite prescient but I wouldn't trust them to manage anything where I expected to achieve tangible results, and certainly not with a lot of money. My sense is that if you want to give money to a progressive 'good cause' you are giving it to them, no matter the group,, no matter the individuals, no matter the issue.
The same thing that persuaded rich people to sign their land over to the Church in the Middle Ages, “it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven”, the rich today might now believe in heaven but the sentiment remains the same.
Heh now, now, there is nothing inherently sexed or gendered or whatever about the well intended giving of money to someone whose actual goals and methods you do not fully understand. :) I myself made a bunch of small donations to the ACLU during Trump I before I came to appreciate that they were no longer what I thought they were.
And in fairness to Nicole Shanahan she says at the end of the segment that she cares very much about the conditions of Native Americans, and was quite upset to learn that the organizations she was funding were in fact supporting policies that made their situation worse!
All these causes that get donations make a credible case that the cause they are working for is good for the world, that is particularly credible to people with cosmopolitan values. The problems with these groups are mostly about what means will be effective for their goals, while the insane groups on other sides usually don’t have a pitch that is credibly a good cause to people with university educated values. (Some of the gmo and anti vax stuff does occasionally make a credible pitch to someone, like anti nuclear. But religious stuff and anti-immigration really doesn’t.)
"The solid granite monument weighs somewhere between 2,000 to 3,200 pounds. In 1962 a group of students, along with buildings and grounds workers, tested whether the stone itself could defy gravity by digging a large hole beneath it. Thus began a cycle of burying and then digging up the stone, a tradition that continued until the early 1980s."
Having read the article - there were certainly worse ways to spend money than supporting blue-sky scientific research.
Guilt, delusion and fear is a pretty potent combination. But mostly guilt and the need to feel justified in having what you have by being a “good person”.
As a Floridian, my state benefits from the New York City dysfunction you describe. More tourists, more people locating and relocating in Florida, more growth overall.
As an American, my nation suffers when our largest city (and largest State, California) choose degrowth policies that make us poorer. Agglomeration effects and unrivaled natural beauty (CA, not NYC) are being wasted. I hope those places take your advice.
I sometimes ask more left friends of mine what the highest growing states are in the country. They’re always shocked people go to Florida because of abortion policy and natural disasters.
Nope, warm and cheap wins every time!
One of my guilty pleasures is reading the NYT real estate section. Without fail, every article about a beautiful house in a red state draws a gazillion “I would *never* live there comments.
The NYT comments section every time someone brings up rezoning, real estate construction, and/or the housing shortage is equally predictable. Most of the NYT's problems are downstream of how its readership is mostly elderly, college-educated NIMBYs who lost the ability to incorporate new information into their worldview sometime in the Clinton administration, and who are very open about the fact that they think they are better than everyone else.
Yeah, I don't know why I even hate-read them sometimes*. On top of your accurate description, the commenters are *so* smug and self-regarding.
*maybe it's misplaced nostalgia for the days when I had to deal with them at CPC public meetings, an (otherwise) happy time for me...
Going to take a wild guess the majority of commentators would agree that $140K is indeed poverty level today.
"Back in the good old days" nostalgia is more endemic in the Trumpified GOP and in general conservative parties are going to marinate in this kind of thinking and policy prescriptions more than left of center ones by virtue of what conservatism is fundamentally, but good god is this thinking endemic among all walks of life including among way too many on the left of center, left and far left.
Yeah never ever read the comments of a NY Times article on housing. It's all weird mythologizing and vibes. The NY Post commentariat is honestly smarter on this topic.
Its readership is too huge to classify that way, except as that’s necessarily a huge chunk of the US population that pay for a newspaper. If you will pay for news, you almost certainly subscribe to the times. Those people are overwhelmingly white college educated liberals, who are overwhelmingly boomers
Oh i definitely oversimplified. It would have been more accurate if I'd used the word "commenters" in place of "readership," because of course the former is a subset of the latter. But I think you can see the influence of the over-50 limousine liberals regardless, in terms of how NYT reporters choose to cover local news (to the extent that they bother to anymore) and the topics I mentioned above. I personally stopped reading the Times a few years ago; I allocate my media consumption budget elsewhere. Not once since then have I felt like I've missed anything important.
I’ve noticed that my super-political friends, family, and associates prioritize red/blue politics as a major factor if not the factor for moving/living in another state, while the vast majority of normies prioritize that very little.
I suspect most people prioritize politics and media in most abstract discussions, but when it comes time to actually consider moving, they start thinking about the substance of actually living somewhere.
I think the problem is at end of the day however much you may want your politics to guide your choices of where to live, you basically have no choice but let personal factors and economic factors completely unrelated to politics be the primary guide to where you live. My sister has talked about moving from Texas to NYC metro (probably northern NJ near where my extended family live if she actually did move). Since she's a social worker so her job skills are basically in demand everywhere. However, my brother-in-law is in software development which is the real reason my sister lives in Austin, TX. NYC actually has a decent amount of tech jobs, but is it the same opportunities as Austin? Add in my nephew is on the sleight autism scale and they've found a very good school that caters to his needs. In northern NJ, there probably is plenty of good resources for kids on the autism scale but boy oh boy would that be a tough move for a kid is age. And then of course the biggie; the cost of a house in a decent school district in northern NJ vs Austin, TX.
There's by the way almost the mirror image going on with the very wealthy who either lean right or the very least don't lean particularly left. How many tech billionaires made all sorts of noises about how SF is dead and Texas is the place to go. Yeah, about that, https://www.wsj.com/articles/austins-reign-as-a-tech-hub-might-be-coming-to-an-end. And right now, you hear about all these billionaires who supposedly are going to move away from NYC and/or move their businesses to FL because of Mamdani. I have no doubt a couple may actually do it and will get tons of coverage on Fox when they do. But yeah, call me skeptical the mass exodus really happens.
NYC tech companies don’t pay well enough to live in New York. Believe me I know. It’s definitely good pay and maybe in a few years after the RSUs vest it might work but off the bat… no
You should check out what NYC media companies pay.
I consider schools, commute, amenities, and how easy it is to go for a run
I hate the heat, so keep hoping this trend will make it affordable for me to retire in Chicago or the Twin Cities, but, alas, housing prices keep going up there
I know a couple older colleagues who downsized from the suburbs and moved to apartments in the Loop and they're loving it. Prices are really low and you're walkable to river north and the lake. I bet this becomes a trend.
You are right. The Loop is surprisingly affordable. We were thinking of more of a neighborhood (like Roscoe Village or Albany Park) because that is the sort of community we are used to, but Loop is another possibility, and no snow removal. We have several years, and we would like to see where our kids end up, but maybe. . .
An older friend of mine, who's lived in the suburbs since before I was born, recently got a place in the South Loop because her daughters live in the city.
And it is the only place in America where they build railways.
Blood for the bright god!
Skulls for the skull throne!
Readers who missed that article about the new train in Florida are going to be extremely puzzled by the link between your comment and the one you’ve replying to…
I had a zoom meeting with a student last week (before Thanksgiving) who was on a train. I asked him where and when he said Florida, I immediately said "oh you're riding the people eater"? 😂
Is it a purple train?
Brightline must feed!
I'm glad to not be near hurricanes. Or the bugs. F the bugs.
I was talking to someone about how to some extent tech workers who moved to Austin are moving back to California and Washington. They said "yeah, I bet they don't want to live in Texas with their laws". I was like, no it's because companies are returning to the office and there are just more opportunities in places with a larger share of the tech industry.
The agglomeration effect won out over cheap housing and no earthquakes, but it should have been a wakeup call. Especially for Seattle which doesn't have the Bay Area's nice weather.
Don't a lot of people like Seattle weather? When tons of people were moving there in the '90s, it wasn't all because of tech. It was the whole lifestyle: the natural beauty, the coffee shops, and even the weather to an extent.
I like the weather. But I have had neighbors move out after one winter because "I didn't expect it to be so depressing". It really does depend on the person. As for the natural beauty, it's impossible to overstate it. I think it's a more beautiful city than SF.
Seattle has the advantage of a tax structure which is very favorable to high W2 earners, relative to California.
Resting on one’s laurels is how I describe blue state residents.
I have the exact same experiences. Another manifestation of a certain kind of progressive not being able to imagine others not sharing their progressive sensibilities
I had quite a few in person encounters where these types of people stand in awe at my mundane ability to see the world through perspectives other than my own.
Florida is not exactly cheap. But I agree that wam and expensive will almost always beat cold and expensive.
“Florida is not exactly cheap”
The fastest growing parts are.
On reflection, it would have been better to use the word "uniformly" rather than "exactly."
Which is why they're growing.
Warm cheap and well governed
I too absolutely loved Matt's answer to the New York question. It was clear that it got him really riled up, and the answer just kept cascading into all the ways New York is screwing up its growth. And while I don't agree with Matt on everything (just like any other person), I have to say that everything he said to go after all the ridiculous rent seekers sounded great to me.
New York and LA are obviously the key examples but as he mentions lots of other big blue cities are crushed by similar rent-seeking. All of it sucks and Democrats need to be the unabashed in tackling all of it.
I think there's a great opportunity to capture some of the anti-institutional political fervor in the country with it too. Scream at unions if the unions are hurting affordability. Scream at the hotel industry if they are hurting affordability. Scream at the MTA if they are hurting affordability. Tear down every rule standing in the way of building more and better things.
I think whatthe Teamsters are up to is a real opportunity for Democrats to pivot away from catering to their rent-seeking agenda. The Teamsters are an extreme example given what their leadership is up to, but as Matt has pointed out this pivot to Trump is very likely because this is what it's membership really wants. Given what we know about voting patterns, I would bet large amounts of money the majority of union members (outside the Teacher's union) voted for Trump.
The reality is that previously "just stop catering to unions" was politically way way easier said than done because unions really did deliver votes! And also, I will say, my history knowledge being what it is, there's a part of me that knows a lot of benefits I enjoy in my job are result of union workers striking (and sometimes dying) for those benefits. I suspect there is a decent amount of left of center people like me who know this which makes it on a deep level a bit hard to truly pivot to seeing unions like the Teamsters or Dock workers as the enemy.
But now? After the last President bent over backwards to curry favor with unions in a way not seen from a Dem president since probably what LBJ? And for those same union members to then go out and vote for Trump. Honestly at what point do Democrats say to themselves "if you can't deliver the votes, why in god's name are we catering to you?"
I would add AFSCME and SEIU to the teacher's unions, but yes.
Dems might have doing give away's to the unions but they were still looking down on union members culturally, and pushing policies the members disagreed with culturally.
It would require some jujitsu, but it's possible. In some ways, there's more energy these days than ever behind labor. I feel like I'm constantly seeing young people posting online about unionizing waiters or baristas or other workforces populated by young urban progs. The strategy has to be to paint some of these old legacy unions as traitors to the True Union Cause or as white male dinosaurs who time has passed by. People already do this with police unions so I don't see why it isn't possible to similarly turn them against the trades unions or the train conductors union or whoever else.
The Teamsters went hard for Reagan. It's amazing the Democrats catered to them as much as they did for the past 45 years.
The problem is that the hotel industry hurts affordability for visitors, not for locals.
Affordability and income are two sides of the same well-being coin. Hotels/tourism are an amazing source of money from outside a city being delivered to the residents of the city in the form of income (and taxes). Whether incomes rise and prices stay the same or incomes stay the same but prices fall, people benefit.
Good point!
Miami-Dade is also weirdly functional, despite the--er--corrupt local political culture. Super pro-growth, new rail, and a government that actively works to free up land for high-density development. What's happened from Brickell through Edgewater is genuinely impressive. I look forward to mayor-to-be Eileen Higgins becoming the next YIMBY champion.
I am glad that places like Miami are picking up the slack of the absolute failures of CA, NYC, etc, but it is unfortunate that the highest growth states are those with high and rising insurance costs...
Yeah, this discourse may look a bit different if Miami is constantly getting flooded.
Some places are corrupt because they're poor and everyone's got their hand in the next guy's pocket, and some places are corrupt because there are massive amounts of dirty money sloshing around and some of it can't help but be put to useful ends.
There are at least two serious problems with Matt’s (useful) “stationary bandits” argument:
1. A first-assume-a-can-opener[1] quality. When Matt writes “reject the underlying economic model of extraction”, the word “economic” is smuggling in Matt’s weakness for selectively ignoring the existence of politics. The bandits are organized voting blocks. What we have is a *political* model of extraction, and defeating it (as Matt has observed elsewhere) requires the tricky and tedious work of organizing the diffuse preferences of the low-motivation majority which in practice means identifying highly motivated small blocks within them, and supporting those blocks on *their* minority agenda — in S.F., see the Great Highway kerfuffle for an example that may torpedo years of effort to assemble a “growth paradigm” majority.
2. Three of the four cities Matt names — “New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, D.C” — are responsible for much of the U.S.’s actual growth![2] As Matt mentions in the full “stationary bandits” column, the bandits take from wealthy cities for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks. The “underlying economic model” of those cities is not extraction but the greatest economic production the world has ever seen, at least in financial terms.[3]
In short, I think there is more analytical work to do in identifying achievable improvements to our political economy.
Related: y’all in this thread should not be discussing Florida’s political economy without noting the double-subsidy from the rich states: when a future snowbird is born, we support them with services through their life, then once they are done consuming tax revenue, send them to Florida and pay their social security stipend with taxes on our working adults’ labor.
P.S. my gratitude to Matt for staying on the gambling-is-a-disaster story
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assume_a_can_opener
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-us-gdp-concentration-counties/
[3] so much to say about physical production, China, energy, etc.
Should we allow politics to be used for people to extract rents from the populace? That's pretty much the definition of corruption and should be pretty easy to resist (unless you get getting kick backs of course)
I do think there's some perverse incentive to have CA not grow *too* much too fast, else it'd come to dominate the Republic by dint of not only population but also economy. Some would think it a point of pride to be powerful enough to consider secession semi-seriously...I'd find it a tragedy, a major blow to the idea of a United States. It's like the reverse attitude from scoffing at "flyover" states for "taking more than they give back" to the nation.
Although it seems fair to share the tech wealth with other states. There's really no physical reason why Silicon Valley has to be here, other than historical happenstance and remote work not quite being good enough yet to truly decentralize agglomeration effects.
I would argue it’s MAGA striking a blow to the unity of the country, not high growth of CA.
It’s becoming less and less clear to me what exactly high productivity states like CA and the northeast states get out of subsidizing poor rural states…
High earning people subsidize poor people. That is what the Democratic Party is in favor of, rightfully so.
States don't send any money to the federal government for redistribution.
Yes obviously high earning people located in these high earning states send income taxes to the federal government who then send a disproportionate amount to fund highways, crop subsidies and military spending in rural states. And now the Trump admin is selectively cutting federal spending that goes back to the blue states…
I'm not a huge fan of looking at states as donors/recipients.
I live in a donor state (Colorado). I benefit from spending in recipient states like New Mexico and Kansas: goods I consume move on highways in those states, research conducted at Sandia National Laboratories benefits me, military bases like Fort Leavenworth defend the whole country, so on.
Lol beat me to it.
...and those red states grow massive amounts of grain and beef and timber and mine minerals, and use those roads to bring those resources to market and industry, and send their boys into the military to protect all of it.
Your argument is an intrastate version of Trump's misunderstanding of trade deficits.
I don’t hate this argument, but I would be interested in seeing a breakdown of natural resources extracted by state political leaning. Not sure it’s so one-sided for the red states as you make out
Will they be unable to do those things if social security and Medicare go away? I don’t think so.
It's not really a blue-red state thing. Many blue states have the largest balance-of-payments deficits.
You can look at the stats here:
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/rockefeller.institute/viz/shared/DS7C72P5M
A lot changes depending on the year, Covid spending, and other factors. The reality is that most states are net recipients because of the high amount of federal deficit spending. The handful of states that are more consistently contributors tend to have many wealthy people but few federal employees, contracts, or grants. This is why New Jersey & MA are consistently among the top contributor states. Contrast that with New Mexico, which gets a shit-ton of federal money not because it's poor, but because it has so many federal facilities and workers. Same with Virginia.
Like John noted above, this isn't ultimately all that revealing because people and businesses pay federal taxes and not states, so it's a kind of category error. On the payments side, most of the money doesn't go to states. Most federal transfers bypass state governments entirely (Medicare, Social Security, military salaries, contractor payments, research grants, etc.). Federal installations (bases, labs, facilities) are counted as inflows in the calculations and can be significant, as seen in New Mexico, Virginia, and DC, but most of these are historical decisions based on geography and other factors.
And these analyses are imprecise because federal corporate taxes are not apportioned by state. The Rockefeller Institute, linked above, which tracks this closer than anyone else, uses a model to estimate how much corporate taxes should be apportioned to states. And again, this is another example of why state-to-state balance of payments comparisons are flawed, the system doesn't work based on states.
You’re technically correct but not directionally. People in CA do not have to support policies that protect redistribution at the federal level and can just choose to have these programs at the state level.
There are real impediments to doing this at the state level. At the basic level, the lack of a central bank, a currency and deep markets for sovereign debt. Redistribution needs to be counter-cyclical and without deficit financing during downturns, the benefits don't work. Not to mention the ability for people and capital to move freely to other states.
None of these are insurmountable. Many states, including CA, have their own programs. People didn’t leave MA when Romneycare was enacted. It depends on the level of discomfort faced by high earners in terms of higher taxes. CA and NY are already very high tax states. It’s not the high earners who are leaving but those who cannot afford to live here.
"People in CA do not have to support policies that protect redistribution at the federal level and can just choose to have these programs at the state level."
Medicaid expansion is heavily federal instead of state funded and elected officials from states like CA have heavily supported that effort.
We’re not arguing about what has been done. If the federal taxes are lowered and social security and Medicare are killed, states have a lot of leeway to enact their own programs. That’s the argument.
Hence why Medicaid expansion needs killing (plus it's a drain on the federal budget in any case).
And important note that spending is mostly SS, Medicare/Medicaid. Which means that when if people earn money in blue states during their working years, but then retire to places like FL, AZ etc that's going to skew the numbers.
But if you want to cut SS and Medicare/Medicaid just advocate for that.
“high productivity states like CA and the northeast states get out of subsidizing poor rural states”
It’s unclear why you believe they are actually doing that.
Look at where tax dollars are collected vs spent, not that complicated
It actually is that complicated. Tax dollars collected from Californians and spent on the military is for the benefit of Californians, no matter where it is spent. FICA dollars collected in New Jersey that are later spent on former New Jersey citizens who’ve retired and moved to Florida or the Carolinas are for the benefit of those former NJ taxpayers.
It is very complicated. The success of California is heavily dependant on the highway money spent in Kansas. The highway system allows commerce to travel everywhere in the country and every industry in CA or NY is reliant on it to be successful.
You like this egregiously oversimplification because it fits the narrative you want to spin but it doesn't make it true.
Yes, there are many intangibles that California (and other states) benefit from that are near impossible to quantify.
A big one for California is water. California contributes nothing to the Colorado River system, but depends on water produced, managed, and provided by the upper basin states and federal infrastructure that exists outside of California, which allows California businesses to generate tens of billions, and also allows more people to live in Southern CA.
Of course it’s a massive oversimplification but no the success of California and New York is not *heavily* dependent on highways in Kansas. Marginally at best.
12 months ago you could sort of squint and say it all evens out with federal research and public transportation funding but as those get indiscriminately slashed, it looks more and more like tax dollars from blue states getting siphoned off to subsidize red states
A fast-growing California was, and would be, less politically homogeneous than the current verison.
And DC!
Was going to read this, but decided to lay down a few three-game parlays instead.
I would have set an aggressive over/under on when Freddie would show up to aggressively yell at Matt over his New York takes had he not ragequitted this site.
You mean ragelurks.
The other day he showed up on Jesse Singal's substack and screamed at him.
Freddie The Prose Writer needs to tell Freddie The Commenter to cut it out.
Didn’t he unsubscribe because some conservatives commenting in a daily thread?
I posted what finally caused him to quit downthread, in a reply to Tom.
About continental philosophy and the Sokal hoax!
I know! I know Freddie really really hates it when people tell him he's off his meds or that they're worried about him. But it seems pretty clear that the lack of sleep he's getting from the new baby is not good for his emotional stability.
Oh boy. I thought they were friendly?
Here's Freddie's comment:
"Jesus you are pathetic Jesse. They published Sokal without review BECAUSE THEY RESPECTED HIS SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE. This is one of the most profoundly undergraduate pieces I've ever read on this platform.
"Have me on your podcast with your reactionary racist co-host so I can tell you both how you've audience captured in the most pathetic way. You are a right winger now Jesse. That's why your comment section is a hive of right wingers. That's why 'BARPod" comments and events are like Nick Fuentes level cultures. And the worst part is, if anyone else acted this exact way, you would make fun of them."
And Jesse's reply was, first, "What racist thing did Katie say?" followed by "Sure, come on the podcast."
Oh my goodness, this is classic Freddie, alleging that anyone who is just a millimeter to the right of what he, and only he, defines as true leftism, is an extreme reactionary right winger. All of we Slow Borers have gotten this treatment!
And as someone who has kept track of Katie Herzog's fine work going all the way back to her days at The Stranger, it's just hilarious to hear someone call her a reactionary racist. But when it's Freddie saying it, it's of course not surprising...
And of course, the only way Freddie will gain his demand for satisfaction is if you accept his regular challenge for a verbal duel where he can vocally yell at you some more.
It's also funny how he yells at center-left liberals about being obsessed with identity politics, but then feels it's different when he engages in left identity politics (whether or not he's right on the merits).
I used to be a BARPod subscriber, but canceled it during my post-Trump panicked cost-cutting phase prior to finding non-federal government employment. As a result, I have the (as far as I'm aware) unique distinction of having been referred to (multiple times!) on the actual podcast as "that one asshole in the comment section."
So I speak from some position of knowledge when I say that FdB is completely correct about the comment section there. I don't think he's right about Singal himself (if he was, I'd have canceled my subscription sooner!), who seems to have maintained a reasonable level of liberalism to this point, but he's definitely right about Herzog, who is almost unlistenable at this stage and as far as I can tell is experimenting with an identity of joking about the right-wing being correct before she eventually admits that she actually just believes that stuff now. I don't remember the exact racism he's alluding to and am not willing to put tons of time into trying to find it, but she's said some crazy shit on there recently. All "jokes," of course.
Yup, while I have very strong disagreement w/ Signal on transgender issues, he's basically still a normie lib on everything else. His audience on the other hand is basically people who on a Political Compass may come out as liberal, but deeply care far far far more about being on the right-wing side of various Culture War issues - looking at the comment section and the subreddit for the podcast for proof of that.
Herzog is just a nihilistic GenX er who has decided the youth are all weirdos because they're more socially liberal than she is. See also Kat Rosenfeld.
WOW.
Being blocked by him, I missed that! What was the last straw?
https://substack.com/@freddiedeboer/note/c-179637095
In response to this mailbag question:
"what’s the deal with Far Left Intellectuals and cultural figures suddenly infatuation with Alt Right figures like MTG, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens?"
Freddie yelled this:
"All right canceling subscription, I can't do this anymore. This is just literally not a thing and not a single 'Far Left' figure is named. There simply is no such horseshoe theory going on and the fact that you published this email and allowed the person who wrote it to make this claim without providing a single shred of corroborating evidence or an actual name of an actual person. Is just going too far. The absolutely obsessive red baiting and hippie punching around here, it just boggles the mind."
What's funny is that of all the things that Freddie has freaked out about on he's kinda right here. Matt's blinders were on with his response (he is a bit too online) and he did kind of create a person to be mad at. There are actually no important leftists that are now supporting MTG.
Yeah he's right here. The problem with Freddie is not that he's always wrong. It's that he's often wrong and always a smug asshole who thinks anyone who disagrees with him has weird conspiratorial motivations.
But if he's anything like me he'll be back. I've ragequit Matt's substack before but substack offered me a free month then by the time access actually cuts off you forget why you were mad.
He spent all those years tilting at windmills until eventually there actually was a wolf, or something
Over the last ~5 years Matt has really backed off on the hippie punching and "making up a guy" IMO. I was first introduced to him by my reactionary centrist friends who love that stuff, and it's why I didn't subscribe despite really liking some of his stuff. And now I've been here for 3 years!
Yeah, I agree, I'm a subscriber and certainly believe that he gets unfair criticism. Mostly for things he's admitted he was wrong on and has adjusted his opinion. I think Matt would say we don't always have to agree with him. I just think from time to time it shows that Matt is VERY online and this is one of those times.
>>We don’t let people stroll down the street with an open container of beer
I've lived in European countries where this is allowed and, not only did society not collapse, but they had much healthier drinking habits than Americans as a whole.
These laws tend to come up as a roundabout way to prevent drunken bums from doing what they do in public spaces, instead of just enforcing vagrancy laws instead (granted, there used to be restrictions against this out West until SCOTUS finally freed them via Grants Pass v. Johnson).
Laws against smoking cannabis in public would at least make more sense due to the second hand smoke phenomenon that also applies to tobacco. I, personally, am much more bugged by tobacco smoke, but I know plenty of others are the opposite, or just hate both equally.
I think beefed up anti-vagrancy laws would almost certainly be used for profiling and discriminatory practices. I know poo pooing increased law enforcement on those grounds isn't super popular here, but I feel like something that open ended is extremely open to abuse, and the benefits simply don't outweigh the costs.
I hate tobacco smoke as well, but it's easy enough to avoid in open air.
Marijuana smell lingers annoyingly though, and I've heard many stories about dog owners making emergency pet ER visits after their dogs ate discarded joints.
I feel that tobacco smoke lingers more, but it's probably just because I hate it more.
And it always seems that smokers (perhaps of all kinds?) are the worst litterers out there.
The laws came up because municipalities didn't want to deal with "drunk & disorderly" when they were already disorderly. They wanted to stop it before that happened. They wanted to avoid things like the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival Riot. (Newport banned public drinking the following year.)
But then "being drunk in public" was decriminalised (using the same arguments we later saw with drug decriminalisation) starting with the 1964 Supreme Court decision Robinson v. California and culminating in the 1971 Uniform Alcoholism Treatment Act from Congress.
When it became impossible to arrest people for being drunk in public, states began to simply ban drinking in public. Hence why it was possible to drink in public in the US up until the 1970s. So law of unintended consequences: "arresting people for being drunk in public just wastes valuable police resources, clogs up the court system, and is unevenly enforced against minorities" became a straight path to "no alcohol in public in 94% of the United States".
Here in Silver City, NM, we had a pot shop on the downtown main drag. It attracted homeless drug addicts and some pretty seedy pot heads but the worst part was the smell---a lady actually closed her business nextdoor because of it. The downtown is something a canyon lined with buildings so smells linger. One of the larger property owners now wants to put a new, "more respectable", pot shop on the strip (and have a pot farm in the enormous basement!). The Planning Commission had a meeting over it and the large crowd was about 50-1 opposed to a new store. Part of the problem too is that NM did not regulate the number of pot stores so Silver City already has at least 10 dispensaries which is a LOT for 10K people.
Doesn't sound like an "Abundance" result to me.
Really, when is "Abundance" good and when is it bad? Greater housing density, yes; more pot shops or a new White House ballroom (or Alcatraz Alley), bad.
Maybe so; I'm just trying to understand the logic.
Isn't part of the question whether the more abundant thing actually harms people?
Depends on whose ox is being gored.
Residents don't like the smell of pot around these shops. NIMBYs don't like the congestion and shutting off of sunlight that tall buildings bring to their neighborhoods. Why should we care more about the former's concerns while dismissing those of the latter?
Now if the pot shops bring a somewhat elevated crime rate, that would be something to take seriously. But it wouldn't surprise me if building lots of lower cost apartments brings a somewhat elevated crime rate to the neighborhood. In both cases, it's all a matter of tradeoffs, isn't it?
Pot shops really need to actively stop customers from smoking in or right outside their stores. There's a big difference between a liquor store that has a clean inside and outside and it looks like a part of a community and one whose outside is covered in broken bottles and urine.
Especially here where mining will be becoming less a part of the economy as time goes on and new businesses and tourism need to ramp up. Doesn't take much first impressions to chase folks away.
I remember walking around NYC a decade ago and getting constantly assaulted by sewer smell every block. When I visited recently, it was pot smell. The current equilibrium is worse.
When it gets down to it the USA didn’t have two massive wars that removed 99% of the drunken bum/anti social asshole producing process out of the gene pool.
The eye test tells me homelessness in France is at least as bad as it is in the United States.
It’s also gotten worse in Denmark relative to 3 years ago.
The French will tell you those are imports
Hon hon hon, the depravity of French malaise and culture are never to blame for our society’s failings, hon hon.
It took me a minute to read this with the proper nasal French "hon" rather than the Philly use of "hon" as a non gendered vocative.
My sense is they like the trade they get. Bland food, a real rowdy underclass, and malaise in exchange for one or two unbelievably brilliant linear algebraists who somehow ended up in MIT’s econ PhD program
Yes, I was puzzled by this also. Laws against public *drunkenness* make sense, but how am I harmed by a guy strolling down the sidewalk next to me while sipping beer from a can? Smoking pot next to me, in contrast, harms me, because the smell is disgusting.
I suspect it’s just easier to have the law triggered by the presence of an object that can be identified easily, rather than by the person’s inebriation. (Though if one trusts cops to make that judgment, that would be the better Target, just like with “reckless driving”.)
It doesn’t “harm you,” you just don’t like it
Screw that, every citizen's happiness represents a public good that can be harmed.
What's the harm in banning public joints? Oh, you just don't like it?
How on Earth do you separate those cleanly? If the guy walking down the sidewalk drinks so much that he ends up publicly drunk, then you've still got the nuisance. On the other hand, banning it prevents that whole chain.
How likely this is to happen, I can't say, but it's not illogical to prevent people from drinking publicly to minimize how many people start stumbling around drunk in public.
> How on Earth do you separate those cleanly?
I wish some people in power somewhere had the capability to exercise sound judgement and make good decisions. But everyone sucks, so we wind up with a government designed around the least common denominator.
Pot smoking should be illegal in cities but legal out in the woods and maybe in suburban mcmansions.
Not on popular trails; get that out of here. The biggest upside to marijuana being illegal at the federal level is that I can escape the smell of pot by heading to my nearest National Forest or National Park.
The worst thing about the slow boring community is that you guys are a bunch prudes. Let the people gamble, smoke and vape. It’s crazy how American liberals can’t get passed their puritan roots.
Idk what to tell you guys, but being a weirdo prude is actually not cool or liberal. Liberals are supposed to be the cool degenerates historically!
I think the problem is that it’s too easy to fall into being either a prude or an enabler. What you really want is to let people smoke, vape, and gamble if it’s what they actually want to do, but also give them help resisting the siren call if they’d rather have that help. It should be possible to respect someone’s decision to say “please help me stop doing this” rather than respecting their momentary lapse of judgment.
"Allowed by discouraged" is the framework I think is best. Those things are allowed, but they're heavily taxed, advertising them is basically banned, and there are location-based restrictions (no smoking in public, gambling only physically in casinos, so on).
EDIT: "Allowed *but* discouraged"
Gambling is bad, but smoking and vaping are good
Potentially the true radical centrist position to take tbh
> Let the people gamble, smoke and vape
Why? These are addictive behaviors with clearly harmful effects to the person who engages in them. They also have effects on the vibes of a space - if you see a bunch of people drinking, smoking, vaping, whatever in public, that space is going to seem less welcoming.
I'm not advocating for a ban on private setting behavior because I think it's a good Shelling point for how to regulate this stuff. But in public? I think you can absolutely argue that we shouldn't have those kinds of behaviors.
Is this really true for the community, though? Or just Matt?
Given that 20 people liked the comment and no one picked a fight with me over it I'd say most people here would favor public drinking laws.
Matt has a paternalistic strain I often disagree with, but I also don't expect to agree with anyone about everything.
You know what I’ll give you that. Matt seems to like to answer these types of paternalistic questions quite often so it could just be a selection effect that is skewing my perspective of the broader community.
Regardless we shouldn’t embolden the prudes!
Open beer drinking doesn't seem like something that is strongly correlated with problematic drinking.
It's probably no longer a problem since Gen Z doesn't drink as much, but in my 20s the US had a huge problem with binge drinking. Part of the reason for that is that if you were going to go out, and you were on a student's budget, you wanted to get your drinking done before leaving so you condensed that into an hour.
If you could carry it with you then people would've consumed the same but over a longer, healthier, timespan. Or they could do as my italian friends did, and just go out to a plaza with a bottle of wine and hang out there instead.
It's very hard for me to believe that a primary contributor to binge drinking is the 30 minute walk from one location to another, as opposed to the several hours spent at the frat party.
In my college people had to take a shuttle from our suburban location to the nearby city, then take public transport to the area with bars. Took 75 mins minimum.
Our Greek life also sucked.
So that's my experience, but happy to admit it may have been different elsewhere.
It's a difference of scale. Cramming twoish hours of drinking into one is essentially meaningless, in terms of dangerous binge drinking. If anything, it makes it less dangerous-a faster intake of alcohol is more likely to result in vomiting, which reduces the risk of alcohol poisoning.
Think of it this way-early in my time in a subculture of heavy drinking, someone mentioned a night with roughly 4 beers, 3 shots, and 4 mixed drinks as a moderate night of consumption.
Alcohol consumption is criminogenic, you have incentives to keep it in one place.
Oh yeah I was just thinking of that. We need more areas of town where you can walk around with alcohol in hand, even as we should probably raise alcohol taxes.
Yeah, that was a line that stood out to me as well. It's actually pretty weird that we don't allow outdoor drinking in most contexts!
People should be more morally scandalized by gambling.
At a minimum, not being so seems inconsistent with Matt’s commitments to positive-sum redistribution. Sure those kids like riding on that rusty rollercoaster in the abandoned amusement park, but is the joy they derive from it really worth the parade of deaths and maimings?
Read the Wikipedia article for "Action Park."
Sussex County NJ, representing.
I went to a kids arcade, realized it was all just a gateway drug to gambling, and couldn't unsee it. There were some adults camped out at the coin pusher for like an hour.
People should be more morally scandalized by just about everything. Is there anything that even rises to the level of moral scandal these days?
I saw an ad earlier this week for an app that lets you bet on things like elections, TV plotlines, and the weather. They were saying stuff like "you're still just putting money on sports?" How do they not feel bad about themselves at all for making such a product? So much of the culture being fed to young men these days is so actively harmful and destructive to them.
Kalshi is a prediction market that has been around for years, and originally had excellent roots in economic theory.
They’ve pivoted towards the thing that will make them more money, which is getting guys in their 20s addicted to gambling on everything. Everything gets worse all the time…
I think my ideal system would be:
a) Everyone is allowed to lose up to 1% of their annual income gambling on the dumbest crap imaginable, no questions asked
b) If you want to risk more, you have to pass a test on statistics and probability targeted at the level of a slightly hungover college sophomore
c) This also is the rule for being allowed to invest in anything other than an index fund
I think people’s opinion after thoughtful reflection on the subject differs greatly than their casual observation from the sideline. Most don’t gamble and think it’s just getting on with reality that espn and others include gambling. Ask them to think an about a second and their opinion often flips. I guess that may mean it is a potential area to educate and alter public opinion?
They should tax it. I have not heard a single convincing argument of why gambling should be illegal again. Some people will lose their ass but that’s their problem. At some point you have to let people do what they want
Not being a doctrinaire libertarian, I think it's bad to operate a business that seeks to induce people into making financial mistakes and engaging in self-destructive addictive behavior. That doesn't in itself resolve any policy question but it's the right baseline. I don't want a society that operates according to the principle of "that's their problem."
Gamblers losing lots of money is in fact a problem for many non-gamblers. Gamblers have families and gamblers can end up on public assistance.
It's a driver of domestic violence, too.
There's also the question if gambling is a net drain on the rest of the economy. It doesn't really lead to improved economic output in itself like some sectors do, while likely being a leech on money that would be better spent on other sectors.
There’s a paper out there from this year showing it directly pulls from productive investments
This can happen with literally every economic transaction on earth. I need to see evidence that this happens at a high enough rate that it’s a major burden on the welfare state.
Gambling is one of the things where the habit-forming signals are quite out of whack with the actual enjoyment people get. While people can overspend on furniture, it’s very rare for people to develop a habit of overspending on furniture, while the random rewards of gambling often mean that people return over and over again even though they’ve decided to quit.
Here's a study linking the availability of sports gambling apps to a 20-30% increase in bankruptcies, higher among young men:
https://bretthollenbeck.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/hollenbeck_sports_gambling.pdf
Bankruptcy is a case where I think a compelling argument can be made to tweak bankruptcy law to forbid people from gambling when it caused/aggravated their debts as a condition of being relieved from their creditors.
I don’t think gambling generally should be illegal. But it would be reasonable to say that it can only be done inside physical establishments and that these establishments have to enforce some entry rules (for instance, if someone has in the past declared bankruptcy due to gambling debts, they should be banned, or if a person has put themselves on the do-not-gamble list, they should be banned). It would also be reasonable to tax gambling more, and to restrict advertising in various ways (though this might not be possible given the first amendment as it is written).
Why would you permit humans who are irrational to engage in behavior which has a long and documented history of strongly enticing them to keep going while also causing them serious issues in the long run?
I'm fine with saying gambling or for that matter drinking, drug use etc are vices and should be regarded as such.
I just don't want to use the police power of the state to enforce it (I'm fine with taxing them)
So often, when the question of Airbnb comes up, the answer is that it takes housing units out of the supply so it isn't the answer. I was surprised that Matt also answered in this way. Sure, this is true of units that act as full-time Airbnbs. But the original conceit of Airbnb was that regular people could rent out their apartments when they're traveling. This actually allowed many people to afford homes who otherwise couldn't have AND increased the supply of places to stay for tourists. As a result, Airbnb prices in the early days in NYC were low! I rented my 1bd penthouse in Brooklyn for $125/night when I traveled for work which is obviously so much cheaper than today's hotel prices. So why couldn't the regulation actually be that a housing unit can be rented on Airbnb for x weeks or months total out of the year, ensuring owner occupation the rest of the time?
I just think we have to acknowledge that some people prefer their lodging to be more like their home than like a hotel, and we have to allow the market to be served for all kinds of housing--hotels, short term rentals, long term rentals, and owner occupied dwellings alike.
We tend to pay more for an AirBNB than a hotel at this point but the ability to have multiple rooms for kids to sleep and also the ability to make food is a lifesaver especially if it's something like a ski trip where going out to eat is not a primary goal.
Denver’s AirBNB rule is basically that. You can rent out your primary residence when you’re not home, but that has to be less than half the year (or else it’s not your primary residence!). You can also rent out a room that’s part of your primary residence (including things like a garage apartment or basement apartment). Because of this rule you can’t have an investor owned and operated AirBNB at all, but the original “spare bedroom” use case is fine.
In practice this means there’s a decent number of AirBNBs, and they’re cheaper and more convenient alternatives to hotels in many cases, but there’s no competition from AirBNB buyers when a home goes for sale.
BEtter than a total ban, but I’d allow AB&B w/o limits. They reduce supply to long-term residents only to the extent that they attract visitors and if taxed throw off benefits to LT residents.
Completely agree a limit on days makes the most sense, it’s very weird no one talks about this as an option.
I used to Airbnb my apartment when I traveled for more than a week (so probably 15-20 days the whole year) and had a great experience.
DC limits the amount of time you can rent out an Airbnb you don’t live in to something like 30 days out of the year.
When enforced it works great. That “when enforced” can be the problem.
I don't want people going through my medicine cabinet or my bedside table. I'm always impressed when people can rent out their primary residence without first doing a huge purge to some offsite storage.
It is one of the most befuddling things I can imagine. I am 2/10 unsettled by letting in a contractor or tradesman in for two hours, and that only in the common areas, while I'm at home watching!
Sure, your mileage may vary.
Getting paid about $140 a night felt like fair compensation for that risk!
Someone with access to my computer or filing cabinets could seriously ruin my life.
I’m a rank amateur and if you have a Nest thermostat I could ruin your life (smart thermostats are really weak)
I suppose it’s incentive to declutter. But I’m with you. Also, the horror stories of the AirBNB guests that won’t leave are pretty scary when it’s your house. I don’t really know why anyone would be a landlord of any sort when the law isn’t on your side.
The upside is known, and it's a few hundred bucks a day or whatever. The potential downside is almost unbounded!
Yeah that’s when I was younger and newly married & had less stuff in general. Now with kids, I’d be less likely but still not totally opposed. Plenty of my NYC friends will still sublet apartments under the table to friends of friends or relatives when they are out of town.
In any normal market I have seen Airbnb prices could not justify removing a normal house/apartment rental from the market and turning it into an str…
To cover seasonality, unbooked nights, turnover, the cost of the additional wear and tear on the house I think you’d want to charge 4-500 bucks a night if the implied nightly rent is 100/night (3k/month) and I don’t really think this is happening most places. New York has a lot of tourists so maybe it’s different. But to Matt’s point unless your housing market is broken a normal landlord would normally be irrational convert a solid long term rental to an str.
And if someone lives in New York but spends 3 months in Maine or Florida, the 30 day restriction isn’t going to get them to put their home on the rental market!
https://web.archive.org/web/20240117211106/https://www.sightline.org/2016/06/15/why-quashing-short-term-rentals-is-a-zero-sum-game-in-a-hot-housing-market/
Seems to me that the sensible approach here would be to have two different use classes*, one for a regular home which can be rented for a small number of days/weeks via AirBNB (which is the solution that already exists in many parts of the world), and another for full-time AirBnBs - so they can compete with hotels.
If it's hard to get a change-of-use permit, but much easier to build a new building with 20% of the apartments pre-allocated as AirBnBs, then that's going to incentivise building more housing and (if you get the rules right), AirBnB will effectively subsidise keeping housing prices low.
* Sorry, I don't know what the equivalent term in the US zoning system is. In the UK, a property has a planning use class, e.g. "dwelling", and changing it from one use class to another requires "planning permission for a change of use".
IANAL, but I don't think most (all?) US zoning codes have fine-grained use classes like that. Usually, they only care about whether the structure is used for commercial/residential/industrial purposes, but changing the kind of use inside those broad categories doesn't require any regulatory approval.
I believe this is how Denver does it -- it has to be a home you live in.
They were low for many of the same reasons uber prices were low - people didn't understand the economics.
As an example Marriott has literal rocket scientists working in their pricing algorithms and generally the goal is 70% occupancy. If you're they price to get 100% occupancy your prices are too low to make money, etc. The actual economics will not support selling an apartment size unit for less than a hotel room.
Would think that rocket scientists would be working on rockets. Talk about a bad economy when even they have to hold down two jobs to make ends meet...
Rocket science pays like shit. Turns out being a rocket science takes a ton of statistics and optimization that other industries (CPG, banks, hotels, Disney) pay much more for.
I should have been more explicit. The joke is that if you are working for CPG, banks, hotels, Disney then you are not a rocket scientist. Data scientist sure, but by definition rocket scientists work on rockets.
Ha! Though maybe at Disney, they have an actual rocket group as part of whatever they call their moonshot equivalent (google did!)
Yay free market revolution in New York City!
Wouldn't it be nice if, now that the GOP has abandoned it, the Democrats became the party of free markets?!
Reading that question about Your Party just made me laugh about how fundamentally misguided Omnicause arguments like Queers For Palestine are, and how quickly they'd fall apart if it were actually put into a campaign, as we see in the UK. I'll keep that failure in mind, for sure.
At a psychological level antisemitism is linked to paranoia, so whether a movement is on the far left or far right or islamist an antisemitic group will involve constant accusations of secret plotting. It happened to groups as disparite as Abu Nidal and the BNP. Figures are already accusing Corbyn of secret Zionist leanings.
It is funnier than that, the kind of leader boycotted her own conference after her supporters were ejected from the room.
https://x.com/PoliticsJOE_UK/status/1995125890028634243?t=463ITDVHumvIL4kgv3UDWg&s=19
I really wish I could wave a magic wand and make Matt dictator of NY.
I think that we should re-visit the charter cities concept, but within the USA. I would love to see what could be done with Omaha or Jacksonville or something with a complete regulatory reboot as some kind of benevolent dictatorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_city_(economic_development)
This happened in dc when the control board took over after Barry ran the city into bankruptcy
You say that until he makes owning a pet illegal and quadruples the alcohol excise tax. He doesn't talk about his unpopular opinions very much because, well, obviously.
Quadrupling the alcohol excise tax sounds excellent, that makes sense. The pet ownership thing does not; just crack down on waste enforcement or charge more for registration.
More or less than Tisch?
File this in the department of Japanese-Inflected Nevada Takes if you must, but I hate open container laws. People should be able to picnic in the park with a few beers, or buy a drink at a street fair, or what have you, without grief or need to stay in some cordoned-off area with event-specific dispensation. Punish people for actual disorderly conduct, not mere consumption that is feared to lead to it. When I lived in Philadelphia, people had to leave their drinks unattended on the bar to go hang out on the stoop, because bringing it outside the front door would violate open container laws and get everybody in trouble. I have similar beliefs about the wisdom of forcing all bars to close at a specific time of night by law, dumping all the patrons out on the street at once, which causes far more disorder at 2 AM than letting people sip their beer on the sidewalk throughout the night does. I miss the density, but I do not miss that charade. Absolutely ridiculous.
I'm interested in the idea of taking away DUI offenders' license to drink, but it sounds much harder to enforce than driver's license policy. This may be too vindictive of me, but it seems to me that drinking and driving is an open secret in much of American society that props up car-dependent modes of living. I wonder whether people's attitudes toward that would change at all if they were seriously forced to reckon with how to get home from the strip mall sports bar safely.
One of the many big reasons why we need self driving cars is that they will obviate the stealth DUIing that goes on on the roads.
I welcome self-driving cars, but I think it would be a much better world for us to have them alongside less car-centric development patterns in the large metros where most people live (and where rideshare services tend to operate). The rollout of self-driving cars is slow and tedious and full of caveats, so rather than waiting for them to fix everything, I'd really like to have some conversations about whether it's really a great idea to live too far from any local businesses to walk.
Oh I completely agree with that--I was just tackling the narrow case of stealth DUI.
We don't have self-driving cars where I live yet, but we do have Uber, and one thing I'll say anecdotally (because some other commenters are pointing to Uber as an existing solution) is that in spite of that, tacit acceptance of inebriated driving around me remains very high. I imagine that has a lot to do with "people drive places and THEN end up in situations where they need to relocate, so calling an Uber means leaving their car behind, with all the problems that entails" and "Uber is expensive." Other Substack threads I've discussed this in sometimes devolve into "people should just plan all of their drinking outings from start to finish," but I find that a very joyless way to live.
I'm mainly sitting here as an urbanist trying to strategize how to use people's revealed social drinking preferences as a wedge to get them to consider the benefits of denser, less car-centric ways of life.
The business that provide the most utility by dint of locality are grocery stores, as to which car-centric shopping > foot-based shopping for reasons of price, convenience, and time (e.g. checkout wait times and transit and shopping overhead favor fewer, bigger shopping trips), and restaurants (as to which fair cop I guess but also I can't really see myself choosing where to live based on proximity to restaurants as opposed to, like, price / space / quality of school districts). For everything else (i.e., physical good retail) there's Amazon and the like, as to which locality doesn't really mean anything.
I may just be a weirdo in the US context of this, but I want to change some minds. Neighborhood stores probably aren't quite as cheap (then again, neither are cars), but I really do believe small trips to nearby stores offer a better quality of life than big spaced-out trips (and needing to store a week or two worth of supplies in one's house). I guess I'd rather pay to be close to good amenities than for an extra few hundred square feet to store the contents of my weekend supply runs? Buying bulk may be cheapest per unit count, but it's all tradeoffs. Having to carry, store, and manage it drives me crazy. I order a lot from Amazon living here because the alternative is to drive miles to the big box store, but it's annoying having to remember to order things in advance, track/time subscriptions, etc. I wish it were easier to pick up basic consumables on demand from a drugstore in the neighborhood instead. Same with groceries, especially fresh produce. I don't want to fire up the car and make a miles-long round trip after work because I decide I want to cook something with scallions and I didn't plan it out in advance, buy it over the weekend, and somehow keep it fresh over the intervening days.
If you're raising young children and you never go out, maybe it doesn't matter, but I move in circles of that enjoy a degree of nightlife, and it makes me wince to see people driving from bar to bar. Even other people who live closeby tend to find it a little odd that I choose to walk or use "micromobility" and that I refuse to drive anywhere I expect to drink, which informs my feeling that people are just taking The Way Things Are Done at face value without really examining any of the implications. I want more people to reckon with them.
School quality is a whole other thing that I'm less directly familiar with but very interested in. I like what Matt has had to say about the meaning of school ratings for the kind of parents who read newsletters like this one, and his decision to send his own child to DC public schools.
Yeah, can't say I've ever really given a fig about nightlife so it's hard for me to engage with this in a way that's going to find common ground. I find bars needlessly expensive and far too loud enjoy, or even conveniently converse, and have never really understood their appeal. I live a boring life with young children these days but even beforehand I'd have far preferred in person socialization at a residence.
Good conversation bars are out there. I'm also a fan of coffee shops and cafes and the like. More density means more types of places for more types of people because any given business has better odds of finding enough customers who are into what they're doing to survive. House parties are great, too, but I find a world where people are only shuttling around between preordained activity bubbles to be really depressing, and if a car is the only way to get there, you still have to deal with this problem (unless your social scene is teetotalers, in which case, that's just a whole different world). I want spontaneity and serendipity in my life, though, which means things like stopping at my neighborhood bar to see what's going on, or getting invited somewhere, and not hesitating to have a drink because I soon have to get back behind the wheel of a car.
I don't think a "license to drink" would be difficult to enforce. Liquor stores, bars, and restaurants check ID now to confirm that alcohol buyers are over 21. They could check ID to confirm that the buyer's driver's license has an "allowed to purchase alcohol" endorsement or however we show that someone is licensed to drink alcohol.
That's true, though it depends on whether your garden variety person with a drinking problems usually drinks at bars and restaurants or at home. Over-21 people probably won't have a whole lot of trouble getting others to buy for them, either, though maybe some public awareness campaigns or something could help. I'm all for it! I just have some hangups about employing such a policy with the explicit goal of keeping people driving.
Yeah didn't pharmacies already do something similar to limit the purchase of pseudoephedrine? (Google tells me it is a national database called NPLEx.) So if seems pretty feasible.
"I'm interested in the idea of taking away DUI offenders' license to drink, but it sounds much harder to enforce than driver's license policy. This may be too vindictive of me, but it seems to me that drinking and driving is an open secret in much of American society that props up car-dependent modes of living. I wonder whether people's attitudes toward that would change at all if they were seriously forced to reckon with how to get home from the strip mall sports bar safely"
Automated vehicles and Uber to the rescue.
I no longer remember the stats, but drinking and driving has decreased dramatically over the last few decades. There is still some 'young people doing stupid shit' component to it, but a lot of DUI is alcoholics being alcoholics. They drink and are drunk much of the time, and they drive because we all drive. It would be inaccurate to describe it as a non-volitional activity for them, but it's also not a rationally decided choice in the way having one too many at Buffalo WIld Wings is.
Uber is expensive and doesn't scale well. I think people are overly optimistic about automated vehicles, but I'm not opposed to them, and if they end up getting widely deployed in a way that is significantly cheaper per ride than Uber, I guess we'll see. If we're talking about people who only drink on special occasions, that's one thing, but I still don't think shuttling people around in automobiles is a great fit for casual social drinking like happy hours, etc. Drinking is popular, and my hope is that more people over time will rediscover how great it is to wander over to a corner bar with your friends and colleagues without thinking too hard on transportation logistics or whether you really want to spend $20 on a ride or what you're going to do with your car because you drove to work that morning.
Interesting, my anecdotal experience is that Uber has been huge in reducing driving after drinking among my family, acquaintances and random people at bars I’m at. And hasn’t Uber managed to scale pretty well?
I've noticed it, too, and it's great that the option is there, but it's REALLY expensive if you use it more than occasionally. That's kind of what I mean by it not scaling. I can't take Uber to work and back every day. On that note, have any of these ridesharing services managed to become profitable yet? I know for a long time the concern was that these sorts of things weren't sustainable because they were being propped up by venture capital and banking on ubiquitous self-driving cars in the near future to even hope to balance the books.
It looks like Uber achieved net profitability in 2023: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber
Lyft achieved net profitability starting in mid 2024: https://investor.lyft.com/news-and-events/news/news-details/2025/Lyft-Reports-Record-Q4-and-Full-Year-2024-Results/default.aspx
Lyft was in trouble. Uber apparently is doing very well with their bilateral opacity where they pay the drivers small amounts of the actual fare and they can't really tell - so Uber is getting a lot of margin now AFAIK. Waymo could be a disruptive force, though.
I knew there was research I didn’t know it was so compelling: JAMA article shows drunk driving reduced by 24% after introduction of Uber in Houston (if the Google summary is to be believed). There’s also a paper that argues much more tightly that it CAUSED a 6% reduction in drunk diving deaths https://www.nber.org/papers/w29071
I have a lot of energy for how bad the DC mayoral race field is but this may not be the place.
1. JLG did a really bad job as a council member
2. Kenyan McDuffie (who is probably going to win) has a huge, terrible gambling scandal
3. None of the serious people want to run.
It’s gonna be a real bad time. CFO’s office has been socializing this idea that a few ultra wealthy people are driving DC’s revenue surplus- and that the mass firing of federal workers and contractors doesn’t actually mean all that much for the city’s bottom line. I kinda believe that, but it does mean the next mayor has to figure out how not to rely on the Bessents and Sulzbergers of the world to fund DC.
Many Feds can’t afford to live in DC and commute in. MD got screwed by the firings and DRP.
I think this is true for NoVa as well.
I will say I think prolonged unemployment was a function of job and title. None of my economist or PhD friends got fired, and many, many of them got picked off because of the litigation consulting hiring war (fortunate for them that a firm doubled industry demand for economists and analysts almost overnight).
People at the low end of the GS scale are getting nailed, I suspect that a decent amount of people at the high end are/were fine.
Has anyone done a study of who actually got laid off? You’re right that it would be pretty interesting to see where the axe actually fell.
Mostly you have the youngest people all get fired (under one year of service). There was a huge pile of bullshit because Trump and co tried to fire them for cause (performance) which would preclude them from being re-employed in Federal service.
Then you mostly had people who couldn’t RTO for various reasons and then a bunch of people from senior positions (SES) retire early.
Oh and no backfilling of vacant positions.
Anyone with less than 5 years at the financial regulators is gone, I think. As in, left or fired.
Some places worse than others- FHFA got rid of their research office which was built by the current OMB chief statistician during the last Trump agency (Russell Voughts agency). It’s straight vandalism in some places.
I know some EPA air quality scientists who were laid off
I think there is a similar age and employment status split at the state department where many of the newer people have been hired to run various programs over the last few years
At many agencies it was under one year of service at the current job; someone who was mid-career but swapped agencies and came in from another part of the federal workforce would also be affected.
Bowser fourth term was the best option.
I think given the current candidates this is probably right. She’s run out of competent friends to hire to run city agencies, and things are starting to break (eg: the 911 call center is a smoking wreck, DCYRS literally doesn’t bother tracking juvenile offenders, and city services are starting to decline). If only her consigliere hadn’t gotten into a fight in a gym parking lot in Virginia.
Wrt vice industries and free markets, I think the synthesis is the effectiveness of free markets is STILL severely underrated even by its supporters. Sometimes that's not a good thing. If there's consumer demand out there, dammit, the free market will find a way! Sometimes that consumer demand is for weed, porn, gambling, and mindless short form video. But if consumers like that, they're going to get it.
This is in contrast to Matt's answer on NYC hotels which is basically just "let the free market rip," which I think is correct. There's no possible downside to letting the free market build housing, and Airbnbs, and hotels. We're not going to accidentally build too much. Nobody is going to get addicted to buying units for the hell of it.
But yeah, this kind of mirrors my ideological journey. I've become less libertarian, but my awe at the raw power of the market has increased. There are some problems we're should be more trusting of the free market to solve, and other problems the free market directly creates.
To me the corrective is the kind of small-c conservative yet also radical left insight that nothing is totally value free (as in totally clear of personal or societal values). Letting it rip on hotels may have sufficiently positive values and externalities that it outweighs the downsides. My opinion and probably the opinion of most here is that it does. But we still have to use some human judgment, or a part of what the religious call discernment about the world, as it is, and people as they are.
Well the view I left out here is the view that the free market is inept, that it won't serve consumer interests. It's a widely held view, and it's wrong.
"Sometimes that consumer demand is for weed, porn, gambling, and mindless short form video"
Yes, that demand surely exists. But the question then is what to do about it. I don't want to use the police power of the state to go after people providing those products and lock them up.
I'm ok with putting sin taxes on those products to discourage their use a bit. I also think we need to have a strong culture that says abusing those products is bad and you shouldn't do it. Bring back shame.
Yes, that is what I favor. Sin taxes plus time place and manner restrictions. I don't really have a problem with strict limits on mobile gambling, age verification for porn, banning Tiktok, and we shouldn't allow weed use in public. But yeah, I don't want anybody in jail for that stuff (even though I understand, actually going to jail for weed is very rare).
Yeah I think the policy on vice products and services should be “embrace, extend and extinguish.” Make the regulated market good enough that the black market withers away, and then slowly squeeze the life out of it.
The politicians who are robbing 8 million people to buy off a thousand of their plumber buddies or the hotel union are pretty damn villainous. I don’t see any value in mincing words about the level of scumbaggery of the NY electeds.
I was raised to see labor unions as extracting some profit margin from business owners. But as far as I can tell, all forms of organized labor power have this concentrated-benefits-diffuse-costs dynamic with respect to customers and potential competitors outside the union.
In other countries (Germany comes to mind) labor unions and business have a less antagonistic relationship. Rather than making society richer on average, it has resulted in a larger share of investment being directed to those industries and workers at the expense of everyone else, because of course it has.
Villainous scumbaggery might be seen as not mincing words compared to "stationary bandits", but loses some of the precision. If stationary bandits is too bloodless and you wish to capture both their bloodsucking nature and that they are embedded inside the host you may like vampiric tapeworms.
A reminder that our current sports gambling free-for-all didn't just happen; it was another gift from our only Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court did not create the current gambling scheme. That was the states.
No, all it did was throw out the old gambling scheme, creating a collective action problem that incentivized the states to do exactly what we've seen.
It threw out the idea that some states are more equal than others and that the federal government can force states to enforce federal law.
Exactly. Sports betting is a pretty trivial case in the big picture, but this type of law could have ruinous and unfair implications in bigger sectors if allowed to proliferate.
I don't understand how it became conventional wisdom that the Supreme Court ruling (Murphy v. NCAA) was based on a state equality principle. It wasn't. Your second clause is closer. But the reason the federal scheme blew up was the severability ruling, not the anti-commandeering ruling.
I'm glad you're happy. Enjoy the hell out of the new laws.
I don’t gamble and don’t recommend that anyone else does.
I mean... kind of? The ruling in the New Jersey case was probably correct as a matter of constitutional law (you do not in fact want Congress arbitrarily picking winners and losers among states) and regardless of its merits didn't bind us to a dead-hand view of some key public-policy issue, as Congress can simply change the gambling laws whenever it bestirs itself.
That's actually a model for how the judiciary SHOULD behave; if all of the Roberts Court's judicial interventions were like that, I'd have far less problem with what they're doing. Instead they seem determined to use their power to put a partisan thumb on the scale for the Republican Party and insist that the only form of political organization allowed for the federal government is maximally corrupt and dictatorial, and I think it's going to completely destroy the very real institutional value of the federal court system (or maybe it already has; I don't know if it would be reversable at this point, but they're not going to reverse so it doesn't matter).
The severability ruling in Murphy v. NCAA is wrong--indeed, it is indefensible. And it's the severability ruling that caused the problem by knocking out the federal ban on sports gambling.
In the sense that the net result should have been that gambling is banned everywhere and not nowhere? I guess you can make that argument as a matter of pure legislative policymaking, but I don't see how it's legally compelled.
Severability is generally not a very big deal in functional political systems, where you just pass something in response and move on with your lives. It's acquired a bizarre relevance in federal judicial decisions because Congress has ceased to function and thus ~all current federal legislation takes place in the form of judicial "interpretation" of existing laws.
The constitutional problem in Murphy was commandeering--it was not some sort of state equality principle. But the commandeering problem only applied to the part of federal law that barred states from legalizing sports gambling. The same federal law also barred state and private operation of sports gambling schemes. Nobody challenged the constitutionality of those provisions in themselves. But the Court struck them down anyway because it held that Congress wouldn't have wanted a federal ban on sports gambling in the event that it lacked constitutional authority to ban states from legalizing it. This rationale makes no sense: Congress enacted a backstop and the Court threw it out for no good reason.
The prior regime was somewhat arbitrary, yes, but it was a workable compromise. That's not a small achievement, clearly preferable to what we have now, and probably preferable to anything the current SCOTUS would allow.
Congress could pass a federal ban tomorrow and SCOTUS would likely uphold it. But with the genie out of the bottle, the political will isn't there, which is a shame.
Well, Congress always could have done that, but it didn't because it preferred to allow a little gambling. I think this was wise; YMMV. The point is, whatever SCOTUS allows is different from what Congress, in its wisdom, deemed good policy.
It did do that! The Court struck it down, but not because there was any inherent constitutional problem (and not because Congress did some grandfathering).
I think the existence of the internet, and the rise of app-based gaming, had already substantially undermined the "workability" of arbitrary location restrictions on gambling. If your compromise depends for its validity on absolutely nothing ever changing ever, it's not a very good compromise.
A whole lot of the federal government is like that because it's so hard to do anything through legislation.
"It's so hard to do anything through legislation" is a good argument against throwing out legislation for less than very good reasons. And while apps do somewhat undermine enforcement of state laws, that doesn't mean we had to allow incessant advertising.
"It's so hard to do anything through legislation" is a good argument for replacing our system of federal government with a functional one rather than warping the rule of law in order to pretend like our dysfunction is actually expressing the popular will.
Matt's sitcom idea is great I'd just add in the sister having a sort 21st Century version of "Meathead" boyfriend. A well meaning, but oblivious white left-liberal who tries to "live his values" that the sister espouses, but while she realizes doing this could be damaging to her actual relationships with her family so checks herself, Meathead just charges ahead, not out of malice, but well, being a Meathead.
Meathead means well, but he just keeps causing problems where they don't need to be. For example:
-Meathead tries to get the family to refuse to celebrate Thanksgiving and fast for the day instead while reflecting on "the harm caused by colonialism", this doesn't go over well, at all.
-Meathead tries to do a "land acknowledgement" while ignoring the whole Mexican-American War, not as a slight, but because he never learned about it school.
-Meathead styles himself as speaking Spanish, but says stuff like "You estudiar paroto dos anos en mi escuela de la colegio de el Colgate de Nuevoo Yorko", this leads to a running gag of people dunking on him in Spanish when he's not paying attention.
I'd also throw in a neighbor named Bill, who's implied to be very MAGA (like Tom Hanks on SNL's "Black Jeopardy") but it's never overtly stated and finds great overlap with the Grans on philosophical principles. Example: Abuela is excited about her new iPhone and is going to activate the thumbprint and face ID features and Bill, who is over at the home to lend dad some of his drill bits is like "No, no! Don't do that, that's how they get ya!" and the fam is like "This dude is totally right."
Damn this is good. Can we use some of that sweet $1B to hire some crackerjack writers to convert this and Matt’s response for a four-season Netflix run?
Hey Matt, I'm available!
Didn't even need to click that link to know what it was, and to reflexively upvote.
Oh great now Ben's really going to strike me. Thanks City :(
Why only criticism for tech billionaires overreaching to the left while trying to eg improve education and none for, say, Bill Ackman, who’s pro defunding science because he’s mad at Harvard? Or Tim Dunn who hates gay people and spends to create a Christian theocracy in Texas? Or the grand daddy of them all, who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Trump, Elon Musk?
I think for Matt, and we his audience, the baseline assumption is those people are bad and generally lost causes. Effort spent even bothering to criticize is just wasted effort, it will have no effect. But talking about left leaning billionaires has at least the possibility that they, or more likely their staffs, will hear and make some marginal change.
It's the same reason he doesn't bother giving advice to Republicans about how and why to moderate. He doesn't spend time trying to convince them to elect more Brian Fitzpatricks or Susan Collinses, while he does spend time advocating for more Jared Goldens and Jon Testers.
The difference is that these left-wing tech billionaires are trying to do good but are misguided, whereas the right wing billionaires know what they’re doing.
Don't assume evil intentions. The vast majority of people on the left and right are doing what they are doing out of sincere moral convictions.
Thus they shouldn’t come in for any criticism because their values are bad?
I took it as more that the left-wing ones presumably share Matt's values, and are therefore more persuadable.
Are you saying Matt hates waffles? Why is he avoiding talking about Palestine?!
More that it’s a waste of time and conceptually uninteresting: people are generally more receptive to the argument that they (or others) are not being instrumentally effective in accomplishing their stated goals. Conversely, “Bill Ackman has different terminal values than I do” is just a complete statement with nowhere to go.
The question was literally "what if a billionaire with your values..."
The issue is that they don't put any thought into their spending and fund discredited and often mad causes.
As opposed to the completely logical cause of Christian theocracy
If there is a right-wing billionaire who isn't pro-Christian theocracy, I'm sure Matt would recommend that said billionaire not fund pro-Christian theocracy NGOs. However, are there any right-wing billionaires who aren't pro-Christian theocracy, but are funding pro-Christian theocracy NGOs? My suspicion is that there are very few.
There’s a huge civil war at heritage because the Christian nationalists are taking over what used to be a pretty normal libertarian organization. I mean, they were always a little farther to the right than like, AEI, but what’s happening there mirrors what happened at places like ACLU and SPLC
Most of the big classical republican donors (eg John Paul Jobes) are sad trombone libertarians.
Yes, I'm aware about the fight at the Heritage Foundation (although I don't think the Heritage Foundation has ever qualified as a "pretty normal libertarian organization" -- it's always had a heavy religious component to the best of my recollection), but are there billionaires who disagree with what's going on there who are still donating to it today at similar levels to what they were donating to it in the recent past, let alone making major new donations?
For context, the express starting point of this thread was snarking at Matt for not criticizing billionaires enough for their donations to rightwing NGOs. But Matt's point wasn't that billionaires generically shouldn't give money to leftwing NGOs! It was that billionaires have been donating large amounts of money to leftwing NGOs seemingly based on nothing more than reading the first sentence of the NGOs' "About Us" pages on their websites when an actual examination of these NGOs' activities indicate a high degree of hostility to the billionaires' own otherwise publicly stated interests.
I.e., if a billionaire actually WANTS to support "degrowth anti-capitalism" (in Matt's words), then I think Matt would say that billionaire should accordingly support NGOs that have that as part of their agendas. But from how they conduct their businesses, live their lives, and discuss issues publicly, there seem to be very, very few billionaires who actually want that, yet they end up handing large amounts of money over to those organizations anyway. There does not seem to be any similar dynamic on the right -- billionaires who give money to rightwing NGOs by and large appear to very sincerely be rightwing!
To that last sentence of the first paragraph… I really don’t know. Are the Koch’s still donating like they were? Is Mercer? Are the JPJ’s? I mean Singer got so frustrated he started the Manhattan institute (which I more often than not am a big fan of) but that was a long time ago. That’s a really really good question though.
I don’t think conservative giving is as centralized as liberal giving in an actblue like way- a lot of lefty billionaires are giving money to things like tides who is then disbursing it to the maniacs. I think there’s a push to do that on the right but it’s not mature and I don’t know who it is.
But if the Kochs and Mercers are still giving money to, like, Heritage without thinking than that mirrors the phenomenon on the left, I think. Both those guys are, for instance, anti tariff and pro immigration as best I can recall.
I am not a supporter of Christian Theocracy and have no opinion on its internal consistency or effectivness of donations.
“…Bill Ackman, who’s pro defunding science…”
I doubt very much that is true.
It’s literally on his Wikipedia page. He is in favor of defunding science as long as it hurts Harvard.
“It’s literally on his Wikipedia page”
I just checked and it’s literally not.
Look for May 18 2025
Are you saying someone edited the page to make a ridiculous claim and then it was later removed by other editors?
The quote on Wikipedia is this: “On May 18, 2025, Ackman defended President Trump's defunding of science research at Harvard on the grounds of antisemitism on campus during a panel at the Center for Jewish History with Deborah Lipstadt and Leon Wieseltier.[117] “
I find it strange that you are not seeing the same version of Wikipedia but also you can just google Ackman’s remarks around defunding scientific research at Harvard since you find it so hard to believe.
I thought his point was that the billionaires he mentioned are, in his opinion, actually not intending to support the results of the things they fund (eg he gives the climate change example, where they think climate change is bad so they fund big name climate groups without really assessing what they’re going to do with that money, which is de growth policy that doesn’t pass basic cost benefit analysis) and if someone credible sort of pushed them on that, some of them might make different choices. Whereas it seems clear that someone like Musk, for example, is very much intending for his money to do what it helped do (eg elect Trump) and having another billionaire say “hey why are you doing that, you know it helped get Trump elected” would not really change anything and likely be met with a “yea, that’s the point?”
Why do so many billionaires give money to far left lunatics?
It seems odd, there are plenty of right wing and politically neutral lunatics causes. But when ever I see a mad big ticket donation by a billionaire it will be to a prison abolition group rather than say the Moonies or an anti-seatbelt campaign.
I strongly suggest watching that video with Nicole Shanahan. I'm always hesitant to blame large, complex forces on any one particular thing, but I think that probably explains a lot.
But if you can't watch it the TLDR is that the wives of tech billionaires have basically progressive values, see their philanthropic work as an important part of who they are, but also have careers and a million other things going on and end up donating huge sums of money or sitting on boards of organizations without understanding what exactly it is those organizations do/various counterproductive positions they take on day to day issues.
I spend a lot of time in Boulder with guys from the Bay Area who are on their second families, and their first wives have all gone completely batshit spending “their” money on this stuff.
Mind you, these guys aren’t reliable narrators and many of them are sacks of shit but I know their ex wives and it rings true. The Apple show “LOOT” captures a real dynamic
But why is it always the same causes?
What are the Moonies and every other insane group doing wrong?
The ways of wealthy tech people and their former or soon to be former wives is as remote to my lived experience as Pluto. But growing up and in particular dating in the larger DC area has introduced to me the type of person that works in NGO space (less Netflix and chill, more Radio Pacifica and smoke pot in the back room of some weird communal row house). I do not hate these people and think any liberal society has them floating around the ecosystem. But whether the cause is climate, racial justice of some kind, womens issues prison reform, poverty, whatever, they all tend to have a particular set of values and particular world view. Some of their observations and criticisms can be quite prescient but I wouldn't trust them to manage anything where I expected to achieve tangible results, and certainly not with a lot of money. My sense is that if you want to give money to a progressive 'good cause' you are giving it to them, no matter the group,, no matter the individuals, no matter the issue.
What is their secret sauce that persuades rich people to donate to them?
They never have any evidence, dislike practical strategies and they hate billionaires, yet they are the people who get the donations.
The same thing that persuaded rich people to sign their land over to the Church in the Middle Ages, “it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven”, the rich today might now believe in heaven but the sentiment remains the same.
Flying a little close to Helen Andrew here, aren’t we? (I kid.)
Heh now, now, there is nothing inherently sexed or gendered or whatever about the well intended giving of money to someone whose actual goals and methods you do not fully understand. :) I myself made a bunch of small donations to the ACLU during Trump I before I came to appreciate that they were no longer what I thought they were.
And in fairness to Nicole Shanahan she says at the end of the segment that she cares very much about the conditions of Native Americans, and was quite upset to learn that the organizations she was funding were in fact supporting policies that made their situation worse!
All these causes that get donations make a credible case that the cause they are working for is good for the world, that is particularly credible to people with cosmopolitan values. The problems with these groups are mostly about what means will be effective for their goals, while the insane groups on other sides usually don’t have a pitch that is credibly a good cause to people with university educated values. (Some of the gmo and anti vax stuff does occasionally make a credible pitch to someone, like anti nuclear. But religious stuff and anti-immigration really doesn’t.)
The inventor of parking meter used his wealth to launch a moral crusade against gravity.
https://now.tufts.edu/2015/04/08/defying-gravity
"The solid granite monument weighs somewhere between 2,000 to 3,200 pounds. In 1962 a group of students, along with buildings and grounds workers, tested whether the stone itself could defy gravity by digging a large hole beneath it. Thus began a cycle of burying and then digging up the stone, a tradition that continued until the early 1980s."
Having read the article - there were certainly worse ways to spend money than supporting blue-sky scientific research.
I'd guess because the ones you are thinking of live in California and are embedded in that social circle. Texas billionaires don't do this.
Guilt, delusion and fear is a pretty potent combination. But mostly guilt and the need to feel justified in having what you have by being a “good person”.