Live your values, and adopt values to live by

Participate in public institutions and support making them pleasant and workable

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day to all who celebrate (or Columbus Day for those so inclined, but in D.C. it’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day).

Something we like to do on these federal holidays is bring an older Slow Boring article out from behind the paywall. This one originally ran last fall, but I think it still holds up.

If anything, I feel even more strongly about this today. One thing that’s changed for our family since I published this article is that rather than walking a block to elementary school, our son, who is now in middle school, takes public transit every day by himself to and from school, which means that my family is using public transit more than ever. I also wrote more here about our decision to stick with our local public school as our kid has gotten older.

Why I send my kid to low-income urban public schools

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I was a little disappointed that so many reactions to last week’s post about crime and mass transit ridership took the form of people saying I’d feel differently if it was my family riding transit.

I don’t take transit quite as often as I once did, because I live within walking distance of both my office and my kid’s school. But when I was growing up in New York, I took the subway every day to high school and all around town to meet up with friends. When I was in college, I was a bit lazy and often stayed near campus, but I absolutely rode the T into downtown Boston or to the North End or out to the movie theater in Alewife or to Jasper White’s Summer Shack. When I moved to D.C., I first commuted to work on the bus and later on the metro. I’ve always lived in transit-oriented neighborhoods. When my son was in a stroller, I learned to navigate the labyrinthine metro elevator system. And just last week, I took advantage of the newly redesigned bus network to hop on the D32 near my office and ride it out to Alamo Drafthouse Cinema to see “One Battle After Another.”

I take mass transit all the time. I care deeply about it, and I’ve taken a lot of time to learn factual information about transit and transit ridership.

Obviously, I do not want to be murdered on the train. I don’t want my friends and family to be murdered on the train. I don’t want total strangers to be murdered on the train. I am entirely, thoroughly, 100 percent against train murder. But, again, precisely because Washington, D.C., is a high-violence city overall, I also don’t want public authorities to lose perspective and misallocate law enforcement resources. I think there’s good reason to believe that the city suffers from significant spatial misallocation of officers and that lives could be saved and bad people put behind bars if the district sent cops where they are most needed.

And conversely, precisely because I do rely on mass transit to get around, I want to see the Washington Metro allocate its own resources effectively.

The agency’s head, Randy Clarke, has done a generally excellent job since taking over. That’s involved a fare enforcement push with significant safety and revenue benefits. But Clarke has also invested a lot of resources in simply improving service levels. Safer is always better, but when it comes to transit ridership, the primary issue is utility. If I need to go to The Wharf, I’ll probably ride the bus, because there’s a direct route from my house and parking down there is expensive. If I’m going to my friend Jonah’s house, I’ll probably drive because the transit route between my place and his is slow and it’s easy to park for free in his neighborhood.

Since I use these services, I want them to be managed rationally. I think it’s people who don’t actually ride mass transit who have their judgment unduly clouded by viral videos of rare events, while basically never thinking about boring stuff like bus bunching or long waits for subway transfers on the weekend because frequency is low.

Personal annoyance aside, though, I do understand why some people level the accusation. It is, in fact, an all-too-common and annoying phenomenon to see elite progressives talk a good game about their commitments but largely opt out of participating in public services or living in diverse neighborhoods. I myself have frequently been annoyed by the number of high-level Democrats I meet who send their kids to private school or who live in Greater Washington’s most exclusionary neighborhoods.¹

Aligning lifestyle and values

When we talked about this piece, Kate (who is both my editor and my wife) and I disagreed a bit about the framing. I think she wanted to exhort liberals to “live their values” by sending their kids to public school and riding the metro. [Editor’s note: At least I got the headline.]

I, a bit more cynical and more of a jerk, was of the view that a lot of the people we’re talking about are living their values and their values are just bad.

I feel particularly strongly about this in terms of the nexus of zoning and criminal justice policy. Back in the heyday of progressive takes on policing, I frequently heard left-wing people cite the light police presence in affluent suburbs as evidence that rigorous policing isn’t necessary to achieve public safety. This is, of course, an accurate observation. If you build a neighborhood where it’s illegal for low-income people to live, impossible to access on transit, and devoid of commercial hubs within walking distance, you can achieve a low level of crime without very much policing. But is that a good model for the country?

I don’t think it is. Yet beyond the take-o-sphere, back in 2020-22 when crime was surging in D.C., I heard more people contemplate leaving the neighborhood for more exclusionary domains than I heard advocating for tough-on-crime policies that would make the neighborhood livable. Luckily, neither the mayor nor the D.C. Council has the option of moving to the suburbs, so they changed course on policy and crime has come down since then.

But the affluent suburban liberal who wants to defund the police and thinks apartments should be illegal because deregulation is bad is, in a way, living his values.

Thinking it over, though, what I guess I really want to say is that I wish I saw more people who care about politics try harder to align their values with their actual life choices.

For some people who are just kind of normie Democrats, that means give your neighborhood public elementary school a try as a first resort. I’m not asking anyone to sacrifice their kid’s welfare for the sake of the collective good. But is a year or two in a school that didn’t ultimately work out really that bad? Educated, affluent parents opting out of public education has, in fact, killed a lot of potentially functional school communities. Public schools only work if people with financial and social capital participate. If you’re the kind of person who would tell a pollster that you strongly support public education, you should try to actually support it by enrolling your kids and attending P.T.A. meetings and pitching in. You might find, as Kate and I did, that you really like your neighborhood school and its community and that it can be rewarding, both for you and your child, to meet people from different walks of life who you might not otherwise get to know.

And on the flip side, I know plenty of people in D.C. who happily send their kids to charter schools (which have incredibly high market share in our very charter-friendly city) but then, in their day jobs working in politics, they have nothing to say about the national Democratic Party walking away from charters entirely. I find that kind of weird. There isn’t one objectively correct way to live life or think about the world, and a little hypocrisy around the margin isn’t the worst possible outcome. But I think it would be broadly beneficial if more people made more of an effort to develop some coherence between their stated political values and their actual lives.

Making public institutions work

Getting upscale liberals to use public services shouldn’t just be a hairshirt exercise. We’re talking about the kind of people who have the ability to make public services better. Some of that (especially in a school context) means engaging directly by giving time and money. But some of it is advocacy and politics. If you’re raising kids in the city and using public parks, you’re not going to stand for the idea that parks should be surrendered to drug addicts or people in a mental health crisis.

Obviously, in an ideal world, cities would come up with really amazing solutions for everyone’s problems simultaneously.

But I’m inclined to say that when push comes to shove, cities should prioritize the interests of mainstream users of public spaces and public services rather than giving strict priority to the most marginalized person.

That’s a moderate (or perhaps even conservative) view that I think derives naturally from an ethic of “I believe in parks and libraries and buses and public pools because I intend to use them personally.” This is also relevant to perennial political-economy conflicts between users of public services and their providers, where, again, the notion that you need to be tougher on public sector unions is sometimes right-coded. But I do think it also raises the question of what the correct and authentically progressive attitude is toward these things. After all, a pool that is appealing to an upscale liberal who can afford membership in a private pool club is also a pool that is doing a good job serving hard-working low-income families who can’t afford a private pool.

Things like schools and parks and libraries and buses and recreational facilities should be for everyone. They are especially there to safeguard the interests of those with modest means. At the end of the day, though, you don’t secure those interests simply by backing high levels of spending. You also need to roll up your sleeves, demand quality, and pitch in to help.

Reflective equilibrium for real life

The great political philosopher John Rawls had a concept that he called reflective equilibrium. The idea is you start with a general principle like “Everyone should have a fair shot in life,” and then you think about what the outcomes of that might be.

Maybe if everyone had a fair shot in life, outcomes for adults would be totally random and completely impossible to predict based on what you know about people when they’re babies or toddlers. Except, no, that’s not right. Because even if everyone has a “fair shot,” they’re going to have different inborn capabilities. So maybe the principle is that everyone’s life outcomes should be a function purely of random chance plus genetics. Except that idea turns out to have some really unsettling implications. A person’s ability to become a collegiate water polo player is in part a function of their innate ability and in part a function of random luck, but also in part a function of whether their parents gave them the opportunity to learn the game. That, in turn, is in part a question of financial resources. But I can also tell you that the “learn to play water polo” clinic that we signed our kid up for last spring is actually one of the cheaper youth sports activities we’ve found. Different parents make different choices and in a free society, that means kids will be put on somewhat different trajectories. On any given Sunday morning, some are doing Russian Math, some are going to church, and some are headed to the Maryland Soccerplex.

If we reject the conclusion that everyone should be parented the exact same way, then we need to revise our conception of what it means for everyone to have a “fair shot.” And that’s the reflective equilibrium. Sometimes you change your views about something specific to align with your general principles, and sometimes you tweak your general principles to make sure they aren’t generating unacceptable conclusions.

And I think that anyone who cares enough about politics to express opinions about it in public should try to do the same. One of my signature contentious takes is that the climate issue is basically a political loser, that Democrats need to take fewer cues from climate-focused donors, and that the donors themselves need to seriously rethink their approach.

But I would also say that I agree with these donors that climate is a big deal! I’m just trying to look at life objectively. But it’s important for that to not just be my “official position” in a meaningless way. I have solar panels on my roof. We switched to an induction stove. When our Prius got too old and needed to be replaced, we got a plug-in hybrid. When our furnace breaks, we’ll get a heat pump.² I agree with a lot of pro-Israel people that humanitarian problems in Palestine attract a disproportionate level of attention compared with humanitarian problems elsewhere. But that’s not just a take — we send 10 percent of our revenue to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund, and we organize an annual GiveDirectly fundraiser to support sending cash grants to desperately poor people in Africa.

It’s of course true that you can’t solve climate change and probably can’t solve global poverty without collective action. But there are individual things you can do to make a difference, and if you’re going to claim to care about these things, you ought to be willing to do some of those things.

Which applies to conservatives, too, of course. If your position is that big social problems should be addressed through private charity rather than higher taxes and spending, it would be nice to see you contributing to solving those problems. But progressives are in some ways more vulnerable to hypocrisy charges and claims of being an out-of-touch “limousine liberal” precisely because we often set higher aspirations. That can feel a little unfair at times. But there is also a real logic to it: If your whole deal is being high-minded, it’s not crazy for people to wonder if you’re full of shit.

To go back to where we started, I’m not trying to make excuses for safety lapses on transit. I’m trying to be realistic that it’s hard for me to imagine any scenario in which I would be a regular user of a low-usefulness transit system like Charlotte’s light rail or lots of these other Sun Belt systems, so I discourage spending money on that kind of thing. But I do believe in spending money on public education and on transit in places like D.C. where it’s actually useful, and that means being willing to participate.

1. Just to, again, demonstrate my bona fides: Logan Circle, where I live, has become very expensive, but we have lots of subsidized housing developments in the neighborhood, unlike out in Ward 3.

2. My understanding is that prematurely retiring appliances that still function is not actually very green, but if someone wants to talk me out of that view, I’ll upgrade sooner.