Matt, I highly recommend that you start as a regular practice writing captions and adding legends to all figures.
For example, it is not voter what the the map of San Antonio is plotting. I assume from context it is plotting a shift between 2016 and 2020, but it’s not clear, nor is the scale of what different shades on the map mean.
There’s a reason that nearly all publications add a caption and legends to figures, and it would really help provide clarity to the reader.
I appreciate that not only did Matt answer my question, he also agreed with my pre-existing feelings on the issue, but most importantly provided a paper showing that he and I are right. :)
Actually I'm thinking more about the YIMBY section of the answer with regards to the gun control question... I think Matt's answer is right (even if the majority of the population wants gun control -- which I'm not sure they do -- votes are distributed in such a way that nothing high profile will get passed anytime soon and Ds shouldn't spend their political capital on it). But I'm wondering if this is a case where "secret Congress" can do something under the radar by horse trading something incremental (like a ban on bump stocks) for something Rs want. Probably not since this is an issue on which GOP politicians have no incentive to compromise...
To the extent there's possible compromise on guns here's the cards actually on the table:
Gun Control:
Enhanced/Universal background checks
Federal Red Flag law
Universal licensing
Gun Rights:
National CCW Reciprocity
Remove Silencers/SBRs/SBSs from NFA
So the grand compromise is something like a federal semi-auto purchase/carry permit using the NFA background check process that's good in all 50 states, includes non-machinegun NFA items, drops the NFA tax stamp/registries for those items, and includes a "red flag" license suspension process.
IMO disparate impacts are almost always downstream of lingering housing segregation. Ideally, YIMBY will help alleviate some of that, because statewide laws like the increasingly popular zoning preemptions simply don't discriminate the way that municipal planners can.
That is to say, even if historical patterns of discrimination continue to create differential development rates, it's not going to *hurt* blighted minority communities to legalize them building duplexes and traditional mixed-use Main Street style buildings (IE not 5-over-1's) and legalize local uses like corner-stores or daycares; since THOSE can provide the bedrock of prosperity ANYWHERE they're built. And that in turn is WAY upstream of crime; over time, the disparate impacts will lessen.
The problem with this argument is that grand 'compromises' can never be permanent. You can't prevent a future legislature from altering the terms. So from the pro-gun side, you're just making a bunch of concessions (licensing, background checks, etc.), and then a future Democratic administration & Congress can simply go ahead and outlaw say CCW reciprocity or the NFA rules. No Congress can prevent a future Congress from altering a law. Even if Dems who vote for this sincerely believe in the compromise, you don't know that elected Dems in 5 or 10 or 15 years won't feel differently. This is why compromises don't happen
It'd be a lot easier for people to accept even temporary compromises if it weren't so damned hard to pass the law to fix them later, or to undo the other side's mistakes.
I just want to say (repeat?) that while I don't agree with every one of your gun takes, I do appreciate how deeply knowledgeable you are about the subject, which has been a good challenge to me to learn more
I was at an entertainment industry event this week and met a fellow gun owner/hunter and we struck up an instant friendship by virtue of the fact that so few people in this industry own guns or enjoy using them for sport. It was distressing seeing my fellow libs in our circle gradually back away as they mentally categorized us as "potential gun weirdos/maga/something else". I'm big lib squish!
These people crack me up, I don’t know what it is but every self-proclaimed “liberal gun owner” has a rifle that looks like the second attempted Trump assassin’s. I think it might have something to do with the fact that you’re not allowed to be mean or suggest people buy expensive things there (high-quality gun stuff is not at all cheap).
I’ll just enjoy my 5 grand rifle setup that actually shoots straight, in peace, away from these political clowns.
As a Pennsylvanian, not being concerned with becoming an accidental felon by taking a wrong turn into NY/NJ/Maryland is worth quite a lot, but for sure it's a concern that varies substantially with geography.
This is true, but "blue states" is maybe a slight overgeneralization. A lot more blue states than the <10 or so clinging to those laws in the face of SCOTUS.
This is where the strong enforcement of illegal possession comes in. I’m much more worried about the person carrying an illegal firearm around New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, etc than a licensed, background checked, law abiding Pennsylvania or Virginian.
A deal for reciprocity for vigorous law enforcement sounds really good to me.
I would like to add insurance. Like smoking, your health insurance bill goes up for owning guns. And like car insurance, it's required to have insurance for it at all times.
The insurance idea is incoherent. Insurance doesn't pay out for crimes.
It would only cover, like, bizarre, super rare accidents and the premium would be infinitesimally small. Less than a dollar a month. It doesn't already exist because it serves no purpose.
Now, there have been attempts to sell CCW insurance that purports to cover your lawyer in a self defense shooting, but that's also super rare and the product is of dubious legality in several states.
I would never support any type of universal background check without at least a constitutional amendment guaranteeing AR-15, regular capacity magazines etc won't be banned.
Something REALLY explicit so that if SCOTUS ever becomes Dem dominated again they don't kill the right to bear arms.
Assuming SCOTUS sticks to Heller and finds AR-15s and 30 round mags are arms, I think that if you get the opportunity to federally legislate lawful carry off semi autos in all 50 States you have to take it.
I still cannot understand how 'may issue' cities can possibly be constitutional. If you want to own a gun in Boston or Cambridge MA you have to fill out an application asking for permission (!) and include personal references (!) The state will then take several months to get back to you, to let you know if you then qualify for the firearms safety test, which may (!) then lead to your being allowed to own a gun.
If I were the SC I'd be tackling these laws before anything else they have on the docket
Can you explain why this is important? I can’t wrap my head around needing to own AR-15s and being this invested in an individual having a right to own them.
The first and most important thing to note is that there's nothing special about an AR-15. An AR-15 is a conventional semi-automatic rifle. It's round is basically the same as a .223 (another standard hunting rifle).
The only differences are cosmetic.
The round is also less powerful than many other hunting rifles (say a .30-06 (thirty odd six)
The AR-15 (or .223) is a great small varmint gun. For example, taking out ground squirrels or maybe coyotes.
Depending on who you ask an AR-15 is probably even a bit underpowered for deer hunting. That or you might need a 2nd shot.
What about for non hunting purposes, how about self defense? An AR-15 "might" be a good choice then depending on the circumstances. For example, when multiple people are breaking in, the AR-15 might be a good choice.
The AR-15 is no different than really any other semi-automatic gun. It's going to be really good in some situations, less ideal in others (don't try and hunt bears with it)). But there's nothing especially deadly about it.
I’m not sure if this is what you’re suggesting but you could layer this as a federal option on top of existing state regimes, as in you can pick to register your gun federally and then there are some rules but also some benefits, or you can stick with your state laws. You pick! Over time maybe more people go federal.
“…even if the majority of the population wants gun control -- which I'm not sure they do…”
They do, it’s just that no one defines “gun control” the same way. If “gun control” means strong law enforcement efforts to ensure that actual criminals do not possess firearms, most folks are for “gun control.” If it means that, as in Massachusetts, people can go to prison for 10 years if they possess an 11-round magazine, the support for “gun control” drops off a lot.
I think a lot of this goes to the distrust those on the right feel. For 90 years we've been in seen ever increasing "common sense" gun control regulation, but each new regulation doesn't top the process there's just a push for more regulation.
See for example the push to ban the most popular rifle in America (the AR-15) and common sized magazines (which are erroneously called high capacity).
If we could actually get an agreement to lock in the status quo (maybe even do a new constitutional amendment making it clear). then you could probably get some movement on other things like red flag laws.
Maybe there is a political win by losing on a effort to pass an anti-crime gun regulation, like traceability. It woud certainly be helpful if DC detectives knew how murderers and carjackers were getting the guns they use to commit their crimes.
“It woud certainly be helpful if DC detectives knew how murderers and carjackers were getting the guns they use to commit their crimes”
If you mean that there should be better law enforcement funding so that detectives have the resources they need to properly investigate illegal gun trafficking, yes it would be helpful. If you instead mean passing laws to make it easier to track firearm ownership would make detectives’ jobs easier, that’s not going to fly in many places.
Yep, I oppose universal background checks and anything else that allows government to make a gun registry. Because I do believe there's a sizable segment of the Democrat coalition that wants to ban the guns
Your comment is making me wonder how things stand now. I live in NY State, and our county sheriff has recently started stating where guns confiscated in crimes are traced from in public records. (Always from southern states.) Many of these were reported stolen, so maybe they match records that way, but I am not sure.
Pretty amusing that the answer about Yglesias taking over HUD or Amtrak came in the same mailbag as the "people want regular guys to come in to Washington and get shit done" answer. I know the actual answers weren't diametrically opposed, but the thought experiment kind of came off as exactly the opposite of what Matt says people want (which is politicians who do nothing)!
People do not really want politicians who do nothing, but, in general, for any given thing that a politician does, about half of the people will dislike it. And of course, for each "thing", the half that doesn't like it is a different set of people. This overall leads to a general inability to "do things" without pissing off a lot of people.
I think the real misconception here is not about how things work ("guy can pull up their sleeves and get shit done"), but rather the idea that there really is some broad platform of ideas that "most everybody" will like. There just is not. The list of truly "common sense" "shit to get done" simply does not exist. Consensus on *anything* is really, really rare.
To the extent that these things exist, they are not at all obvious to the public. Repealing the Jones Act, for instance, would probably have a huge number of positive consequences that almost everybody would like... but only nerds like us even know what the hell the Jones Act is. And every time someone tries to make it salient, someone talks about the union that would be affected, and then --- OOPS, there you go, now we are talking about "Unions" and half of us don't want to do anything again.
Overall agreed. But it's also true that when both parties actually work together and compromise they can usually still make the majority of voters happy even if there will always be some unhappy parts of the base.
A lot of good partisans will just follow where the party leads.
You beat me to this comment and the post hasn't even been up an hour! But yeah, not to say that bringing a European train exec over wouldn't potentially be good, but kind of a "folk theory of Amtrak" going on here...
Transportation secretary isn't quite the same as Amtrak chair but I get your point. Wasn't this supposed to be a launching pad to show what Mayor Pete could do on a national scale? He hasn't been bad, just... low profile.
Pete's absolute number one value above replacement skill is his communicative prowess. Conditional on Tuesday going poorly, if Pete wants to be president, he should pursue zero additional formal political job and simply become a regular guest on fox, cnn, etc and be as ubiquitous as he was in 2020 primary and then announce his campaign in late 2026 post midterms. Him simply being everywhere with a cogent theory of the case of why Harris/Biden failed and he could win would be enough. I think voters have demonstrated that "experience" isn't terribly important or predictive as an electoral qualification even though I opine for the days of mid to large state governors with a penchant to make deals.
Becoming a viable presidential candidate by appearing a lot on Fox is one of the more in the bubble takes I've seen.
I'll grant that it might help him in the "secret primary" that helps elevate your name among the chattering classes and activists, but you still have to win over primary voters. Being ex-Transportation secretary won't take you very far. You gotta be governor of Michigan.
This is both facially true and also its not remotely obvious this problem is itself resolved by being the governor of Michigan as suggested above. HUGE tail side risk if a particularly salient problem happens on his watch. If the pure goal is what elevates Pete to the white house, I don't see how another interim position pre 2028 advances the ball. If Harris wins, he should obviously take a higher profile candidate role, but at that point in all likelihood he is looking at 2032 at the earliest, and even later if Kamala were to win her own reelection.
Could work tho if he used Fox/Barstool/Rogan to build up a solid bro following. "Come vote in the Democratic Primary for me, Pete! I may be gay, but I'm not a wussy like most of my liberal friends. I know what it's like to be a young man struggling to succeed. And being a man doesn't HAVE to look like MAGA."
The secret of Fox (and right-wing propaganda) is that even though it still has a relatively small audience out of the entire population, it's achieved incredible diffusion of its talking points throughout the population, especially into the mushy middle.
The Pete play would be that since, what, 95-99% of the Obama-Biden-Harris coalition could be expected to vote for him, he'd need to dig into the right-wing propaganda crowd. Sure, large chunks of the Republican coalition still wouldn't vote for him, but if he even gets 1 in 20 right-wingers to at least give him a look, that's most of the ballgame right there. Name recognition alone with the other side's voters is simply a huge advantage as far as diffusion goes.
The diffused vibes end up looking like some overbearing 56-yo white male dickhead pontificating from his bar stool, "Y'know, most of them durned lib'ruls annoy the shit out of me, and I don't agree with that little f***y Pete on everything, but dadgummit if he doesn't hold his own! I'd be half tempted to vote for him for shits and giggles if I was a leftie". And those diffused vibes mean that maybe someone in the center-right or mushy middle who was on the fence and sees themselves as more enlightened than THAT guy, ends up voting for Pete.
It's a solid play, IMO. If he pulled it off, I'd consider it an even more epic leverage play than Trump's own takeover of the GOP. Turning your opponent's propaganda network into your own platform? *chef's kiss* molto fuckin bene man.
Why only focus on the fox part of it? If Pete is seen everywhere on all networks as he did in 2020, when the mayor of the fourth largest city in Indiana won the Iowa caucus? I just think Pete being a prominent figure in the early shadow primary helps him far more than, idk, responding to school budget fights in Michigan, assuming he gets past claims of being a carpet bagger coming in from out of state quite clearly for his own ambition.
I don't think just knowing how to govern ``in theory'' are good enough qualifications for a politician to become a presidential candidate. And, spending the next two years just hanging out, positioning yourself to announce running for president instead of doing something useful, is not a good look. It might work for celebrities who might want to get into politics, but not for actual politicians.
Honest question, Did Joe Biden know how to "govern"? He obviously had a front row seat to the White House and year's of government and politics experience. But did he or anyone else truly know how to operate behind that desk on day one? Did Hillary Clinton? Surely Barack Obama did not. I just think slow borer types overrate experience when even maybe the most analogous possible position, big state governor, is still JV football vs the Super Bowl of the White House. In the absence of that, might as well just try to be popular and likable and competent in the eyes of voters.
I definitely think so. All three of Biden, Obama and HRC did. A senator has a large office with lots of staffers. They have to represent their constituents, write laws, sit on committees, give occasional press briefings, etc. It is different from a governor, but still a very large operation. Biden was vp in addition to that, so he was exposed to the whole machinery of government for eight years. Hillary was sec. state which is also a big office.
I have no idea what the impact of a few competent pragmatists would be and I really want to know. I suspect it is high variance. Some complex systems collapse with improvements others are easy to improve.
I have to disagree with Matt’s take on the question of US economic over-performance. (Especially the idea that the question is some sort of conservative conspiracy theory that all intelligent people would immediately dismiss out of hand.)
The way I’d phrase the question is “does the large post-covid fiscal stimulus in the US account for the fact that the US economy’s recovery was stronger? If so, does this stimulus have potential costs in the future?”
1. The idea that US fiscal stimulus drove higher demand and inflation post-Covid has some pretty good evidence behind it (although maybe still debatable). Lots of papers about this.
2. Perhaps it’s true that there are some economic illiterates that think debt issuance has future costs because of the “household tightening its belt” model. Matt uses this as an excuse to dismiss the idea of future costs altogether. Instead, he makes the remarkable claim that *all* costs of the additional debt issuance have *already been incurred*.
Despite the fact that there are bad reasons why people might think debt has future costs, there are also good reasons! Increasing debt today risks debt sustainability issues in the future. If a country issues too much debt that it’s unwilling to back with future taxes, it’ll either face increased default risk or a future inflation. It’s not true that all inflation resulting from fiscal stimulus has necessarily already happened.
How big are these future costs? Most economists agree that nobody really knows whether a country’s debt is sustainable or not. (If investors agreed that debt wasn’t sustainable, a crisis would’ve already happened.)
3. The discussion about the effect of deficits at full employment and what Trump would do are irrelevant to the question. These are about the marginal effect of larger deficits today, not about whether Biden’s post-Covid stimulus was worth the additional debt.
(Besides, Matt talks as if there’s some universal consensus that there’s some magical “full employment” point where debt provides no further stimulus, whereas below full employment debt provides stimulus but no inflation. People like Gauti Eggertsson have models of this, but it’s *very* debatable.)
I think this misses the point. If our current high growth is caused by stimulus from deficit spending than we're getting growth, but likely at a high future cost.
If the deficit spending is not increasing growth as Matt suggests, and we would be getting this kind of gdp growth without it, then it makes the rationale for such large deficits even more suspect.
I also can't wait for Trump to lose so that every discussion of how bad something a Democrat is doing won't immediately turn to Trump will/is doing it worse. I agree!!! But that doesn't make the Harris plans good!
If Harris pursues deficit-increasing policies, even I will agree that's bad. We need to lower the deficit with the aim of reducing interest payments and interest rates. If she can do that, I don't think we'll pay much of a price for the stimulus-induced high growth, if any. WW2 spending did wonders for the economy but during and after the war, despite the very high levels of debt incurred (see also, Great Britain during and after the Napoleonic wars).
If we actually have deficit curtailment and an overall decrease in government debt to gdp, then I think this surge could matter very little. I just see extremely limited appetite for any of the actions needed to accomplish that.
I agree with you about the marginal effects of debt issuance today. What I was trying to say is that I interpreted the OP’s question as “to what extent was *past* stimulus responsible for the US’s good economic performance from 2020-2024?”
I think (1) it’s pretty clear that stimulus helped the immediate bounce-back from Covid, and (2) it’s even possible that the massive stimulus is still having some knock-on effects keeping growth high today. That is, I think a valid question is “absent the massive stimulus in 2020-21, would we be seeing 3% growth in 2024?” Maybe, maybe not.
You can point to 2020/21 as Covid deficit spending, but what about 22-24? If this is not creating GDP growth, then we have added 17% of GDP to the national debt in three years and gained no appreciable growth from it. At a time when the economy is strong enough we should be reducing the debt instead of increasing it, its just bad.
Weird how having more deficit spending by percentage of GDP than most of the rest of the world somehow led to lower inflation than almost everybody else.
Isn't the idea that global inflation was mostly about global rises in prices for things like grain and natural gas and also supply chain disruptions?
Since we produce our own grain and natural gas, and have an unusually large internal market that doesn’t rely on seaborne shipping, I think it makes sense that we’d have less inflation than most.
So it could still be the case that our inflation could have been even lower with better policy.
"That is, I think a valid question is “absent the massive stimulus in 2020-21, would we be seeing 3% growth in 2024?” Maybe, maybe not."
The more relevant question is, "absent the massive stimulus in 2020-21, how far off the growth trendline would we be now in 2024?" If we're far below where we had been heading, then even 3% growth in 2024 would be a paltry reward for avoiding that massive stimulus.
The one thing I'd add that I think is the key thing Matt's missing it's that government issued debt works by distorting prices. The increased economic activity comes from inducing investments that aren't justified by conditions. This introduces a ton of opportunity costs and waste in the economy. "Full employment" through badly misallocated labor is smoke and mirrors, not really economic productivity.
I think the point is that stimulus has benefits (additional activity) and costs (misallocation), right? Sometimes the tradeoff is worthwhile, other times it’s not.
If the government stimulates with a crash program of direct spending, that creates a pretty high risk of misallocation.
If you make an effort to stimulate while minimising misallocation, e.g. by cutting taxes / providing cash rebates, does there need to be a lot of misallocation?
The US has exited the worst pandemic in a century with GDP well above the pre-pandemic forecast and you think it proves your point that stimulus is bad?
The US also exited the worst war ever with GDP miles the pre-war trend BTW
Because FDR prolonged the depression not fixed it. Other depressions of a similar magnitude had acurred before but were relatively brief in duration.
For example, the "Panic of 1893" was -37.3% but only lasted 1 year, 5 months.
Note this isn't to say I'm against counter cyclic spending (for example unemployment insurance). But much of the stuff FDR did was counter productive.
"In 1931, the year before Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, unemployment in the United States had soared to an unprecedented 16.3 percent. In human terms that meant that over eight million Americans who wanted jobs could not find them. In 1939, after almost two full terms of Roosevelt and his New Deal, unemployment had not dropped, but had risen to 17.2 percent."
The fact that unemployment was 23.6% in 1932 the year before FDR took office (the use of 1931 is a tell of poor faith or reasoning by the author) 3.5 years after the crash makes 1892 seem like a poor comparison.
Plus I would be interested to know what Hayeking magic was applied to economy to lower the unemployment rate to 9.9% in 1941 and 4.7% in 1942
Assuming efficiency in allocation by private actors and inefficiency by public ones is silly. Allocation of labor is a product of choices made by people, full stop. Private actors make inefficient choices all the time that destroy value or misallocate resources based on factors other than “pure” profit or efficiency (“I want my kid to take over”; “I want to own Twitter”), and there just isn’t great evidence that the market imposes rigorous discipline on those choices except in the long term. Moreover, actors in private markets actively create inefficiency and misallocation out of a desire to capture the misallocated resources. Trump University was a thing in the world.
Mostly we muddle through. But to claim that government inevitably induces “investments that aren’t justified by conditions” with the unstated corollary that private investment does not is, at a minimum, to simplify the economy into non-understanding.
If an industry has enough players, significant inefficiencies will be punished pretty quickly. If a shirt manager at McDonalds is getting 20% less productivity out of his workers than peers (and he isn’t the owners nephew) he probably doesn’t last long.
Some private actors don’t have to be efficient. I lunches with an attorney Wednesday who helpfully explained to me how my firm could easily gross $1.5 million if I’d just join some consortium that handles my marketing and commit to working 30 hours a week. The thought of giving up my manly independence and working 30 hours on boring cases 50 weeks a year made me want to vomit. I’d rather hunt squirrels on my own than hunt bigger game as part of a consortium.
I mean, that isn't actually true. It's incredibly telling that you had to qualify your own statement with, "assuming he isn't the owner's nephew," because nepotism IS one of the most common sources of inefficiency, and you see it all over the place. The hyper-efficient market you are describing is actually more the exception than the rule, in part because creating inefficiency and harvesting the misallocation is a great business strategy in a lot of industries.
Your actual lived experience--choosing inefficiency because you have other, non-profit motivations--is actually the one that is telling you the most here. Markets have a middling level of efficiency with long tails on either side, just like any process involving human decision makers.
But that same nepotism occurs in the public sector AND it's worse because it's with other people's money.
See for example giveaways to unions, or farm bills, or where military bases should be, or bridges should go etc etc etc
The private sector has competition to ensure efficiency over the long term. The public sector has no such thing. Just a lot of uninformed voters and politicians promising them they can have rainbows and unicorns for everyone and someone else will pay for it.
The claim that the public sector is noncompetitive three days before election day is...an interesting claim.
Like, you can make all kinds of critiques about HOW we manage public sector competition, and I would probably agree with you, but the public sector is, if anything, hyper-competitive to a fault. I would go so far as to argue that a lot of the dysfunction is directly downstream of the hypercompetitiveness, because it incentivizes strategies based on efficiency destruction.
I'm not making a public/private distinction. I'm saying free money distorts the real costs of investment relative to the environment. Whether it's keeping the doors open at a marginal business or individuals who now have a big expensive office desk in their house they either don't use or have used as an excuse to be less productive by not going back to the office, they're misallocated resources.
My hot take on WFH is that it's a false equilibrium created by 40-hr work-week labor laws and full-time benefits requirements/incentives, heading up against the fact that we've finally achieved Keynes' leisure society.
If we can get away with 8 hours of real work per week from most knowledge workers by simply having those 8 hours be REALLY productive -- which is the sanest read of why the internet didn't insanely raise productivity on net (because people used the time efficiency to slack off while doing the same amount of work) -- then that's a MIRACLE of modern technology. Because it means that for the first time in history, we can afford not just a small idle nobility class (<5%?), but ENORMOUS chunks of the workforce living lives of idle comfort (20-40% is my ballpark estimate, but could be more).
The only question going forward should be how we can deliver cushy email jobs to most of the rest of the workforce, since it's not really fair to have some professions enjoy the leisure and not others.
But ARE they misallocated resources? Like, if keeping the doors open at a marginal business makes the owner happy, how is that a misallocation of resources? The resources are being allocated by humans to improve human well-being.
Right, but that's not actually how it works in many of those marginal businesses you are describing. What happens instead is that they limp along, not quite "running out of money" and surviving in various ways as a house of cards. The classic version of this is for the owner to put in nonsensical (from a profit standpoint) labor hours. The stack doesn't get knocked over until the owner gets sick, or the neighborhood changes, or insert your exogenous factor here. You see a lot of this in small-town Texas, where I grew up. You also see it a lot in the small / family restaurant business.
This is why I say that market efficiency is a long-run factor, rather than a short-run one. You are describing a simplistic, Econ 101 version of the market, and I don't disagree with you about it. But in a world governed by human decision makers, that simplicity develops a lot of inaccuracy because humans are demonstrably governed by a lot of competing impulses and constrained by problems of information and cognition. Those factors put sharp limits on the analytical value of your model, especially when, as I pointed out above, you constrain your definition of efficient allocation within the four corners of revenue and profit.
David Abbott, above, gives us a good example of this in his choices about customer base and his own time allocation. You could argue that he is misallocating resources, but I would say that he seems to be allocating them well: he is making choices based on his sense of what will produce greater well-being in, you know, David Abbott. That's only an inefficiency if you tighten your definitions too much to fit in his stated real-world decision making matrix.
I "liked" this. However, "Running out of money" is at least partially defined by the interest rate (money availability). Nothing is ever as black and white as we wish it was.
Indeed, there's a lot of ruin in a nation, including its economy. Mark Zuckerberg spending $10 billion on the metaverse turned out to be ill-advised. Governments waste a lot of money too. One could say that, as David Abbott rightly points out, in competitive market inefficiency is punished (and implies that's not the case with government), but "efficiency" is defined very differently in business and government goals and actions. Governments pursue goals that private firms don't have to worry about.
This reminds me of a Twitter discussion I saw between Chris Hayes and David Roberts. They were basically saying “How do these idiots not realize how wonderful INDUSTRIAL POLICY has been? We’ve spent XXX billion dollars and created XXX thousand jobs!”
Industrial policy can be good or it can be bad. There's no platonic ideal. China's bouts of industrial policy have by and large created a far more prosperous economy. Tariffs in a burgeoning industrial economy can be very good for a limited period of time whereas in a mature and large economy like our present one they can be disastrous.
I completely agree. I just think some commentators have gotten way over their skis with the assumption that Industrial Policy is an unalloyed good. (Argentina does plenty of "industrial policy" as well, and look at how that's turned out.) I find the phrase to be a way of circumventing arguments about whether a specific market intervention is good or not.
>The increased economic activity comes from inducing investments that aren't justified by conditions. This introduces a ton of opportunity costs and waste in the economy.<
In a near full-employment economy, sure. You're not saying this is the case when the economy is depressed, are you?
Inflation is an obvious reason. If they are making stuff that people want then the price on that item doesn't go up (because more is produced). Whereas, if they are making stuff nobody buys then their paychecks are inflationary.
Why would they be making stuff no one wants? Firms that benefit from the dynamic whereby the government pumps money into the economy are unlikely to focus on products no one wants.
Au contraire, mon vieux. Production stimulated by the government is by definition uneconomic. If it were economic, it would be produced without stimulus.
Case in point? Solar panels. If solar panels made economic sense, people would buy them. They don't, so they have to be subsidized. People aren't so afraid of global warming that they'll pay full price for the things.
Would this apply to, say, government debt incurred for building the Interstate Highway System? Or to be more current, debt incurred under the IRA and CHIPS laws? Are we building too many microchip fabs and solar farms?
Specific government investments can and should be individually evaluated, unfortunately I haven't heard much to give the impression that the US microchip Fabs are being setup in a manner particularly concerned with productivity.
If they can produce chips at a competitive price, we’ll probably have our answer. And this is in addition to the national security reasons for pursuing the policy, which takes us some ways away from the economic efficiency debate.
Not necessarily. I'd like to see us make semiconductors again -- and not just the most advanced types, but the "glue chips" that surround advanced types, feed data in and out and supply power to them. Also the heavy-duty types that control motors, power transmitters and control electric transmission. I'm not convinced the CHIPS act is gonna do that. From a White House press release dated last Aug. 9th:
"Companies applying for more than $150 million in grants were required to submit a robust child care plan that reflects the needs of their workers in communities where they plan to build."
See the problem? Notice the bland assumption that child care is somehow the responsibility of companies that accept Federal cash. I'll bet the act is festooned with lots more irrelevant requirements, like minority vendors, LGBTQ+ equity, renewable energy (a real nonstarter, since semiconductor manufacturing requires above all else reliable electrical power. A ten-second power burp can render a million dollars' worth of wafers useless.) and so on.
Then, of course, the new plants must be sited in areas of high unemployment (which never correspond to areas where workers with the necessary skills live,) the probable requirement that the plants be built with union labor, and on and on, and it's no wonder that the new plants are being built by Asian semiconductor companies who accept the necessity to make a loss in order to stay inside any likely tariff barrier.
Meanwhile, Intel, the star in our semiconductor crown since Motorola burned to the ground, is struggling and may be bought by Samsung.
We don’t know exactly how much debt a country can carry, but we do know that, in the 1820s, the UK carried a debt load of 250% of GDP while its per capita GDP was around $4000 in todays money. We also know this country manages to return to the gold standard (probably an unforced error) while displaying a world historical level of economic dynamism.
That UK debt came from wars. Which were generally limited in time, saw a massive spike in spending, then a return to fiscal surplus when the war was over and government paid down the debt. Current government debt comes primarily from government transfers which are ongoing and generally increasing over time. So the question is if we hit 250%, what would cause it to change trajectory so it didn't hit 1000%? If its a spending/tax change, why don't we do that before we hit 250%?
I don’t think that your rephrasing of the question is correct. “Are we just experiencing debt-fueled growth?” to me sounds more like, “Are we doing relatively well only because we’re running large and unsustainable deficits?” Or maybe, "Once we stop running deficits, will there be a reckoning and Germany will catch up with us?"
So I think Matt’s response is apposite: “Which is just to say that today’s economy is humming, not because of debt accumulation, but despite it.”
When Matt says, “Which also means that the downside of that debt isn’t occurring at some hypothetical time in the future, it’s happening right now.”
I don’t think that means that the debt will have no future downside. He’s saying it’s not only net bad in the future, it’s actually net bad already. So you can’t say that our larger deficits are why we’re doing better than Germany.
> But he’s English. England doesn’t have high-speed rail, and none of Byford’s previous jobs have involved high-speed rail
But do you not want someone who has experience trying to deal with the most insane planning system on Earth to try and get it built in the US? Sure you could get a French expert but most of the challenges facing high speed rail in the US are going to be the kind facing the UK rather than the kind facing France where they can force their way past opposition.
Correct take IMO. Better to have a guy who speaks the language, both in the most literal sense and also in the sense of being conversant with dealing with big legal and professional services consultants.
Well said. Would an Italian or French high-speed rail know how to maneuver through the bureaucratic and political thickets that clog our ability to build HSR? I'm sure they have great technical skills, but I'm not sure that's our highest priority. Maybe hire the guy in charge of California's HSR. It's such a disaster that maybe he learned some valuable lessons. Fail upward!
"Because the point here isn’t that “phones” per se are a hazard, it’s that social media apps are a hazard."
Joke's on you! I spend all day on the calculator app!
Anyways, on the gun thing, I think the best way to get anything useful accomplished is to drop the "gun control" framing altogether and focus on the measures in isolation that are shown to be effective, and frame them as "tough on crime" issues. For instance, I'm cautiously optimistic about gun violence restraining orders. If you're advocating those, just talk about those, and talk about preventing domestic partner violence (because that's probably the majority of cases a GVRO would prevent if ever effective). Instead, right now we have a debate that starts with the question "how do you feel about guns?" And then policy details flow after that, which doesn't make much sense. There's no one policy out there called "gun control," so any time the issue comes up, I get why the gun people get frustrated. The "control" side rarely brings anything productive to the table besides the observation "we've got a lot of guns." Yep, we do. Sounds like you want to reduce the number of guns in circulation, which would involve confiscation. "I never said that." Ok then what do you actually want?
Tldr; come out of the gate with the policy prescription you have in mind and just drop the "gun control" framing entirely.
Every single article about violent crime in the newspaper ends with a paragraph going through the guy’s rap sheet where it mentions that he’s previously been arrested multiple times for being a felon in possession of firearm. We have some gun laws already, and they’re not really being enforced.
This link has information about how states restore gun rights to felons. Some don't do it at all, some make it hard, some do it automatically. And if your state gun rights have been restored, the feds won't prosecute; see 18 USC 921(a)(20) (it's complicated, to say the least).
Also, bear in mind, prohibition on felon firearm possession doesn't kick in until the felon gets caught with the firearm, which is generally when they use the firearm to commit a new crime.
Oh, the only gun control fix for mass shootings is making guns that are capable of being used in them unavailable - which means a lot of confiscations.
If you have a one-in-a-million chance of becoming a mass shooter, then you have to be prevented from getting a semi-auto rifle. That could only be achieved by putting semi-auto rifles onto NFA-style regulations. And that means mass-scale confiscation.
That being said, a LOT of the mass shooters seem to send up numerous red flags. Thus I could see red flag laws (with suitable due process protections) potentially doing some good if people know about them and use them
I don't think this is a bad idea, but we WILL catch a TON of weirdos who have no intention of doing anything.
That seems worth it to me because depriving guys who are merely creepy of their gun rights is not high on my list of civil liberties violations that bother me. But I do think the signal to noise ratio on that is probably pretty bad.
Honestly, I think we should make people liable if their guns are stolen and later used in crimes. Double penalty if you didn't report your gun missing.
Force everyone to cover massive insurance to protect against a catastrophic event, or be really, really careful about securing them.
There's another account on here who appears every 6 months to make this same recommendation. The main problem with this idea is that there's no centralized database of guns & gun serial numbers, so there's no way to know that Gun X actually came from Joe Smith's possession. You wouldn't even necessarily know that Gun X was used in a crime unless it was literally dropped at the scene there too, right? The criminal might just run off with it.
And the vast majority of gun owners would simply ignore the new insurance requirements, plus now you're incentivizing people not to report gun thefts. That's 3 reasons why this wouldn't really work in practice.
I'm also pretty skeptical that 'holding people liable for how their stolen property was used by the thief, or a guy the thief sold it to, or a guy who sold it to a guy who sold it to a guy' would pass judicial review in our legal system
Most insurance is for catastrophic events. You need enough high profile cases to scare people into getting it, eg, parents getting charged for allowing children access to their guns which are then used in school shootings.
You need to shop jurisdictions for a friendly court. But send tons of lawsuits at the state level and the 9th and see what sticks.
As for lowering reports of gun theft, there's almost no incentive to do so now, nor does it particularly help police, for the hand-to-hand chain you've described. Make it expensive to report a gun theft, and very, very, very, expensive for your gun to show up at a crime scene with no reported theft.
I'll just never forget reading about a gang in Miami that sent kids to try the car doors of every parked car on the block. If the car was unlocked, they'd look for a gun under the seat. Nobody should be that careless with a lethal weapon, but it's apparently very common.
Hmm... "If your gun is used in a crime, you'll face a fine of $X. For that reason, you are required to carry insurance."
Yeah I'm not against it. Idk if it would fly with voters but I'd support it. Hell, I wonder if insurance companies could figure out some way to give "safe gun owner" discounts to people who demonstrate proper safety. Only problem is the insurance company isn't at your house 24/7 so maybe not idk
I think it would be like a car crash. You'd want to file a claim with your insurance company, because you're getting sued / paying a massive fine. Your previous "responsible gun ownership" could be determined by police information, much like your driving record is.
If this ever happens, I assume it will be done the way everything in America is done, by lawsuit. Either DAs will begin to successfully charge people whose guns were used in crimes, or victims will sue them. This will in turn create a market for voluntary insurance.
I think there's an excellent chance he'll still be around in 2028 no matter how this goes. But if Harris wins, we'll at least get a year or two reprieve.
Is there any legal reason why a US citizen lawfully appointed to run Amtrak couldn't hire a "personal assistant" from Italy or South Korea, either out of her own pocket or at the expense of a third party?
I vaguely recall that there's some rule against people other than federal employees attending official meetings (this was a problem when Bill Clinton tried to put his wife on the health care task force). But if there's a workaround it might be a very cost-effective intervention for any philanthropic group or individual that wants better train service.
I honestly think Matt is wrong about this. The issue isn’t that Koreans have some secret sauce that Americans just don’t know. It’s about stakeholder expectations and institutional inertia. And I think a French person or whatever would not be good at this.
I think he's right and he's wrong. The Koreans (or yes, the French) could help us run transit or HSR better. But just one of them wouldn't do the trick. You'd need to clean the deck and employ dozens or more likely hundreds of them, and you'd need to enact various regulations and laws to let them get on with their work. Like, no more unnecessary union hacks to run boring machines. The boring is too slow that way.
I think that what Matt wants is someone who is not prepared to accept the stakeholders and the inertia. My suspicion is that the most likely result would be that the resistance from the institution would push them out, rather than that they'd be able to force through profound institutional change. Alon Levy's "fire the senior managers" bit is fine, but they need to understand that they have to fire the middle managers and most of the junior managers and probably a lot of the union leaderships as well.
Yes, agree. He needs to reckon with the point that none of the countries he's named operate on the English-derived common law system that exists in the US, and also that these countries mostly don't have (certainly don't have the same extent of) the kind of legal and professional services industries that have a vested interest in making these projects as long and expensive as possible for the consulting fees.
Does English common law force Amtrak to make people line up to board at Penn? Or force MNRR to have the worst track maintenance program on earth? You are underrating how bad the status quo is!
“Does English common law force Amtrak to make people line up to board at Penn?”
I haven’t tried this is a while, but you used to be able to bypass the lines by going straight to the track level. It’s doubly easy when on a platform shared with a boarding NJ Transit train.
No, of course not, and I'm sure Amtrak is so badly run there are a few (nearly) free lunches to be had. But not at the scale of 'roll out a high speed rail network'.
I don't think we know either way and either option is possible. It is entirely possible there is some secret sauce and a Spanish tunneling executive could teach Americans to tunnel at 20% of the cost.
I think it’s more like the most an absolutely stellar secretary could achieve is ~20% savings, not 80%. There’s just too much structural BS in America.
A Spaniard or Italian might be better suited than a Korean or Japanese to dealing with the NIMBYism if that was the only part of the problem, but they’d all be pretty baffled by the sheer degree to which we’ve outsourced so much state capacity to expensive consultants — and often even REQUIRED that capacity be outsourced.
Yeah, what they would do is just start hiring people do these jobs and fire all the consultants, and then they'd get sued, and lose, and then they'd quit.
What you need is to change a lot of these laws first.
Exactly. I’m not anti expertise from Europe and Asia but this illustrates where the real problem lies. If you could fix all those things then an American could,probably do a pretty decent job.
My understanding is that it would not have been illegal for Hillary Clinton, considered as a private citizen, to head the health care task force. However, if she was a private citizen (in the event, court of appeals eventually decided that First Lady counts as a government employee) then the health care task force would’ve counted as an advisory committee under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) of 1972. That would have been a problem, because FACA imposes onerous* procedural requirements on advisory committees.
I don’t know that the Amtrak director hiring a personal assistant would have the same problem, though I’m sure they’d run into some other bureaucratic hangups. A 3rd party paying would probably run afoul of ethics rules on gifts.
*“Before it can meet or take any action, a committee first must file a detailed charter, see id. § 9(c). The committee must give advance notice in the Federal Register of any meetings, see id. § 10(a)(2); and it must hold all meetings in public, see id. § 10(a)(1). Under section 10, the committee must keep detailed minutes of each meeting, see id. § 10(c), and make the records available — along with any reports, records, or other documents used by the committee — to the public, provided they do not fall within the exemptions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), see id. § 10(b). Under section 5, an advisory committee established by the President or by legislation must be "fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented," id. § 5(b)(2). The Act also requires that precautions be taken to ensure that the advice and recommendations of the committee "will not be inappropriately influenced by the appointing authority or by any special interest."”
On reconciling do-nothing politicians with wanting major changes, I think the grand majority of people want major changes to a small handful of policies, while wanting to keep the status quo on the majority of things. We just broadly differ on which policies we want changed and kept the same.. I think that factor pairs in well with the factor Matt and Sam observed.
I'm pretty sure that Musk and that Paulsen guy would say that a large lesson from the pandemic is that most Americans are not willing to make major sacrifices for the public good (especially when applied to say the Green New Deal or degrowth). So it is rich to here them apply the same willingness to suffer to tariffs.
"Americans are not willing to make major sacrifices for the public good"
I think this is incredibly simplistic. There was a huge disagreement about which sacrifices would, in fact, improve public goods. Here's a list of Really Stupid (TM) things that we were asked to do for the "public good"
- NOT buy masks
- Certainly not USE masks, they won't help
- Engage in a huge amount of hygiene theatre, like not using physical menus and having staff follow everyone around wiping down surfaces constantly
- Later on, back to YES, use masks! But also, sure, wear masks that provided dubious preventative value because they were basically just sliced up t-shirts.
- Wear masks outdoors
- Refuse to gather outdoors (side note, if I had a nickel for every moron I saw riding a bike with a mask, but without a helmet...)
- Pretend that Covid is deadly for children, when they are by far the least endangered from it (Daily reminder that, since 2020, more kids have died from suicide than from Covid)
And those are just some of the things that are kind of obviously stupid. There is also a host of reasonable restrictions that one might take, but where large portions of the population do not believe in their efficacy. It's unfair to call someone selfish when the motivations for their actions have more to do with ignorance than egotism.
I sort of agree, sort of don't. My friends who objected to masks were angry all out of proportion to what they were being asked to do, and it didn't seem particularly rooted in questions of efficacy.
My psychiatrist friend said it "hit people in a very vulnerable part of their psyche." It really, really seemed to be rooted in a sense of "I'm a grown up and you can't make me," and/or a conviction that it was virtue signaling.
I truly, honestly, did not get it. It was such a simple thing. Obviously in retrospect, the science had to catch up with whether they were helpful, and then public health orgs were even slower than that. But they were *furious* from the very beginning.
I think it's very hard to say because the mask thing became a symbol of partisanship very fast.
For instance "I am a grown up and you can't make me" is not a good explanation for why, in many parts of the country, people get pissed at OTHER people wearing a mask. The only explanation for that is really tribalism. They get pissed off that the mask-wearer isn't going along with the group.
If you rewind to before the pandemic, and someone in Alabama came across someone wearing a mask, they'd have just assumed the person was immunocompromised, or maybe a germophobe, or whatever, and shrugged and moved on. No one really cared that much until it became a partisan symbol of "who's side you are on"
For me, I was absolutely destroyed by Bay Area lockdown policies to the point of needing inpatient hospitalization, and several loved ones died by suicide or late-caught cancer during that period. Seeing people wearing masks pointlessly (cloth masks, masks outdoors, masks under noses) just reminds me of those two years of public health policy that ruined my social circle, physical health and mental wellbeing while all the lefties around me gloated about how great we were because we took Covid seriously, unlike those Herman Cain award winners. When I was in the hospital with severe poisoning from a medication complication that would have been caught in moments had I been able to go to an in-person doctor’s appointment, someone had the audacity to tell me that I should be grateful because at least it wasn’t Covid.
That’s what I think of when I see masks, and it does make me furious. It’s not rational. I try to make myself remember that I don’t know someone’s life story. I’m immunocompromised now so I should be grateful that they’re taking precautions. But it does hit this deep raw psychological nerve and I understand where it comes from.
In my case, I'm talking about Democrats. The people who got super bent out of shape about it were relatively more conservative, but still liberal.
I certainly may be missing something, but in their case, it did seem, uh. Childish? They didn't express well-thought out objections, like "these cloth masks are probably not effective, and I can't make out what people are saying." They are articulate people, and their inability to coherently state their opposition was strange.
And as you said, when mask restrictions loosened, they would get mad about *other* people wearing masks. I'm pretty sure it permanently damaged one friendship. I would wear masks out to dance clubs and it seemed to bother one person a lot.
Masks were performative submission. A-okay when your side is doing the forcing, not so much when it is the other side. Combine that with even a rudimentary understanding of the relative sizes of viruses and the spaces between cloth fibers. The whole thing was emblematic of the conservative disgust with empty progressive virtue-signaling, especially when it is the shallow sentimentality of 'we have do to something, even if that something is not only useless, but actually makes things worse'.
I don't think people who pretend vaccines don't work can reasonably claim their objection was scientifically based. Masks *do* work. They just have to be surgical, or even better, an N95.
However, I appreciate your perspective on why they bothered people.
When it comes to making major sacrifices for a "public good" that I view as evil (such as the Green New Deal or degrowth) yes, I'll balk. And tariffs are a nonstarter.
Matt's amtrak take is setting off alarm bells in my head. Do not, under any circumstances, hire anybody who has had management experience running die Deutsche Bahn!
Truly the third rail of transportation discourse. (Yes, I know S-bahn is a bit different from the national network. Still.)
Agreed that the DB is deterioration, but the S-Bahnen in multiple cities (München especially comes to mind) are just stellar.
Riders’ expectations of cleanliness and punctuality in public transport strikes me as likely a big factor. I’ve received several NYC MTA rider surveys asking why my reviews are middling at best. It’s the overall grime and neglect, not fear that a mentally-ill person will shove me onto the tracks. And Amtrak? Always 15-40 minutes late on the 2.5 hour Penn station to Albany run. Laughable
Heck, the Europeans demand better. And ubiquitous, well-liked public transport should be a critical element of our future HUD secretary MY’s YIMBY housing build-out plan!
(And yes, it was especially bad when they first introduced their 9-euro regional ticket one summer, which eventually became a 49-euro ticket, but it was almost as bad before that.)
Yes, the S-bahn service works fairly well and is reasonably clean, but so is the nyc subway system and, to a lesser extent, the chicago one (south side busses, not so much). BART, on the other hand, is frightening.
Weirdly, ChatGPT shares the stereotype that German trains must be good. I was asking it about travel ideas for this past summer involving trying to figure out which European airport might be a good one to fly into to then travel to Switzerland by train. It had the temerity to say that Frankfurt to Zurich was more reliable than Milan to Zurich!
Maybe the stereotype of german trains being on time is entrenched enough to overwhelm the training data? They were on time in the 90's!
The segment going south from Frankfurt to Mannheim, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Freiburg, entering Switzerland via Basel is really nice and not too overloaded once you get past Mannheim (and train service within switzerland itself is stellar). And, there are fairly frequent Swiss intercity city trains along that route, although they are operated by german crews.
Finally, the big, 40 mile tunnel (gotthard tunnel) going from Switzerland into Italy was shut down for a year (just reopened a couple months ago) because of a freight train derailment, making the southward journey hours longer. Maybe ChatGPT was aware of this?
I actually took both those trains this summer! Not having the Gotthard tunnel was actually a blessing for the tourist because I got better sightseeing! But the German train did have some random delays (though not as bad as when I was traveling between Frankfurt airport and Cologne a year ago).
Cologne to Frankfurt airport is usually very frequent and relatively reliable (it is one of the few ice only segments in the german system, there are a lot of incentives to make that particular journey a predicable 1 hour trip, many of the ice's start in cologne so there are very few reasons for them to be late, etc... the other direction is a bit less consistent). There is also the slow version winding along the rhine (past koblenz, mainz, the germania statue etc) which takes 2 hours longer but is very beautiful.
I think that ICE route was just under repair on the weekend I happened to be traveling, and I was doing it after dark and didn’t get to appreciate the scenery. Also, I had bought my original plane tickets under the assumption I would have a one hour train ride, and was surprised both by the connection from the airport to the airport train station, and by the replacement of the fast train by the slow train.
My guess is Amtrak's problems actually stem from our federal system combined with the activist groups that advocate for it. Both those things push in favor of running long distance trains with highly subsidized dining and sleeping cars (which, in one of the more Orwellian uses of language, get called a "national network") rarher than running short distance corridor trains that are more useful to the public.
FWIW Biden actually understands this and his Amtrak expansion focused on the corridors. But when your advocates are obsessed with the fact the dining cars on overnight trains no longer have waiters and grilled steaks, this isn't good for public policy.
Thank you very much for answering my question! And you came up with most of the states that had come up in my mind, as well--including the tricky potential cases of Kansas and Nebraska. However, your answer demurring makes good sense, and I think it showed with one of the wilder examples that I was thinking of: Utah. It's very white, highly urban, pretty well educated, and after the rise of Trump, there were some hot takes that the added Mormon influence could cause the state to shy away from its Republican dominance. But...that clearly hasn't happened yet after the initial shock.. Vermont is a lesser example on the Democratic side that's even more farfetched to think about.
It’s crazy that we tolerate it at all. Everyone (including me) is up in arms about Democratic backsliding when fact is, the last time my vote for president counted was 2004
Has there been a shift in Asian voting? I thought there has specifically been Hispanic and black shift, and particularly with young men (perhaps just because of a broader trend with young men, but perhaps a specific one in these groups).
I’m not sure if the vote shift will resonate on a national level. It seems more relevant to large city elections, insofar as building a coalition that contains black and Asian voters is a much more difficult task post-2020. That is when bourgeois Asian-Americans realized the modal black American kind of thinks Asian immigration was a mistake.
Isn't that last answer in pretty severe tension with Matt's very public anxiety about housing abundance becoming a partisan issue? Don't get me wrong, as a resident of Massachusetts I am very directly the beneficiary of YIMBYism's recent success parking itself as a mainstream center-left position. I'd just love to better understand the thinking here, since there's obviously an admirable self-reflection on what a pundit can accomplish but Matt also seems very much of two minds about whether his signature accomplishment is actually a net positive.
The hope might be that the center left is the faction whose greatest political power is concentrated in the places where building more housing is most important.
I feel like being a do-nothing Governor as a member of the minority party is the cheat code. Get credit with your base for curbing the other party's crazies, and with the moderates for reaching a couple of bipartisan compromises.
Not sure that path is open to Presidents these days. Maybe if Harris wins with a Republican congress she can have her friend the small business account work out the deficit
Matt, I highly recommend that you start as a regular practice writing captions and adding legends to all figures.
For example, it is not voter what the the map of San Antonio is plotting. I assume from context it is plotting a shift between 2016 and 2020, but it’s not clear, nor is the scale of what different shades on the map mean.
There’s a reason that nearly all publications add a caption and legends to figures, and it would really help provide clarity to the reader.
Noted!
SuperLike
Strongly agree
I appreciate that not only did Matt answer my question, he also agreed with my pre-existing feelings on the issue, but most importantly provided a paper showing that he and I are right. :)
This was a good question!
Actually I'm thinking more about the YIMBY section of the answer with regards to the gun control question... I think Matt's answer is right (even if the majority of the population wants gun control -- which I'm not sure they do -- votes are distributed in such a way that nothing high profile will get passed anytime soon and Ds shouldn't spend their political capital on it). But I'm wondering if this is a case where "secret Congress" can do something under the radar by horse trading something incremental (like a ban on bump stocks) for something Rs want. Probably not since this is an issue on which GOP politicians have no incentive to compromise...
To the extent there's possible compromise on guns here's the cards actually on the table:
Gun Control:
Enhanced/Universal background checks
Federal Red Flag law
Universal licensing
Gun Rights:
National CCW Reciprocity
Remove Silencers/SBRs/SBSs from NFA
So the grand compromise is something like a federal semi-auto purchase/carry permit using the NFA background check process that's good in all 50 states, includes non-machinegun NFA items, drops the NFA tax stamp/registries for those items, and includes a "red flag" license suspension process.
We also need prosecutors who will enforce existing laws, even if it results in some "disparate impact".
Part of the "grand compromise" I really like is it makes it really easy to charge unlicensed possession consistently.
IMO disparate impacts are almost always downstream of lingering housing segregation. Ideally, YIMBY will help alleviate some of that, because statewide laws like the increasingly popular zoning preemptions simply don't discriminate the way that municipal planners can.
That is to say, even if historical patterns of discrimination continue to create differential development rates, it's not going to *hurt* blighted minority communities to legalize them building duplexes and traditional mixed-use Main Street style buildings (IE not 5-over-1's) and legalize local uses like corner-stores or daycares; since THOSE can provide the bedrock of prosperity ANYWHERE they're built. And that in turn is WAY upstream of crime; over time, the disparate impacts will lessen.
Very "Strong Towns". I like it.
"IMO disparate impacts are almost always downstream of lingering housing segregation."
I could see this with a lot of things, but how does it work with gun enforcement?
My point is that YIMBY’s downstream upside for disparate impact is a good concept for selling the policies as a package.
The problem with this argument is that grand 'compromises' can never be permanent. You can't prevent a future legislature from altering the terms. So from the pro-gun side, you're just making a bunch of concessions (licensing, background checks, etc.), and then a future Democratic administration & Congress can simply go ahead and outlaw say CCW reciprocity or the NFA rules. No Congress can prevent a future Congress from altering a law. Even if Dems who vote for this sincerely believe in the compromise, you don't know that elected Dems in 5 or 10 or 15 years won't feel differently. This is why compromises don't happen
It'd be a lot easier for people to accept even temporary compromises if it weren't so damned hard to pass the law to fix them later, or to undo the other side's mistakes.
Abolish the (fucking) filibuster.
I really hope SCOTUS thoroughly crushes AWB/Standard mag bans/"Sensitive Places" maximalism and makes compromise possible.
It could be with a constitutional amendment REALLY spelling tuff out. So a Dem filled SCOTUS couldn't take the right away
I just want to say (repeat?) that while I don't agree with every one of your gun takes, I do appreciate how deeply knowledgeable you are about the subject, which has been a good challenge to me to learn more
I know even more.
In order to make that happen, Democrats who want those things will have to vocally put down the Beto “yes, we’re coming to take your guns” types.
I was at an entertainment industry event this week and met a fellow gun owner/hunter and we struck up an instant friendship by virtue of the fact that so few people in this industry own guns or enjoy using them for sport. It was distressing seeing my fellow libs in our circle gradually back away as they mentally categorized us as "potential gun weirdos/maga/something else". I'm big lib squish!
Check this out!! https://www.reddit.com/r/liberalgunowners/
These people crack me up, I don’t know what it is but every self-proclaimed “liberal gun owner” has a rifle that looks like the second attempted Trump assassin’s. I think it might have something to do with the fact that you’re not allowed to be mean or suggest people buy expensive things there (high-quality gun stuff is not at all cheap).
I’ll just enjoy my 5 grand rifle setup that actually shoots straight, in peace, away from these political clowns.
As much as all of those things are good ideas, they also seem like political suicide in a Republican primary.
What would democrats have to give up to get Republicans to spend that much political capital.
As a Pennsylvanian, not being concerned with becoming an accidental felon by taking a wrong turn into NY/NJ/Maryland is worth quite a lot, but for sure it's a concern that varies substantially with geography.
A constitutional amendment locking in gun protections
This is true, but "blue states" is maybe a slight overgeneralization. A lot more blue states than the <10 or so clinging to those laws in the face of SCOTUS.
This is where the strong enforcement of illegal possession comes in. I’m much more worried about the person carrying an illegal firearm around New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, etc than a licensed, background checked, law abiding Pennsylvania or Virginian.
A deal for reciprocity for vigorous law enforcement sounds really good to me.
I would like to add insurance. Like smoking, your health insurance bill goes up for owning guns. And like car insurance, it's required to have insurance for it at all times.
The insurance idea is incoherent. Insurance doesn't pay out for crimes.
It would only cover, like, bizarre, super rare accidents and the premium would be infinitesimally small. Less than a dollar a month. It doesn't already exist because it serves no purpose.
Now, there have been attempts to sell CCW insurance that purports to cover your lawyer in a self defense shooting, but that's also super rare and the product is of dubious legality in several states.
I would never support any type of universal background check without at least a constitutional amendment guaranteeing AR-15, regular capacity magazines etc won't be banned.
Something REALLY explicit so that if SCOTUS ever becomes Dem dominated again they don't kill the right to bear arms.
Assuming SCOTUS sticks to Heller and finds AR-15s and 30 round mags are arms, I think that if you get the opportunity to federally legislate lawful carry off semi autos in all 50 States you have to take it.
Yep, even with the current SCOTUS, the 2nd amendment really is treated as a 2nd class right.
I still cannot understand how 'may issue' cities can possibly be constitutional. If you want to own a gun in Boston or Cambridge MA you have to fill out an application asking for permission (!) and include personal references (!) The state will then take several months to get back to you, to let you know if you then qualify for the firearms safety test, which may (!) then lead to your being allowed to own a gun.
If I were the SC I'd be tackling these laws before anything else they have on the docket
Can you explain why this is important? I can’t wrap my head around needing to own AR-15s and being this invested in an individual having a right to own them.
The first and most important thing to note is that there's nothing special about an AR-15. An AR-15 is a conventional semi-automatic rifle. It's round is basically the same as a .223 (another standard hunting rifle).
The only differences are cosmetic.
The round is also less powerful than many other hunting rifles (say a .30-06 (thirty odd six)
The AR-15 (or .223) is a great small varmint gun. For example, taking out ground squirrels or maybe coyotes.
Depending on who you ask an AR-15 is probably even a bit underpowered for deer hunting. That or you might need a 2nd shot.
What about for non hunting purposes, how about self defense? An AR-15 "might" be a good choice then depending on the circumstances. For example, when multiple people are breaking in, the AR-15 might be a good choice.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/oklahoma-man-uses-ar-15-kill-three-teen-home-intruders-n739541
The AR-15 is no different than really any other semi-automatic gun. It's going to be really good in some situations, less ideal in others (don't try and hunt bears with it)). But there's nothing especially deadly about it.
This doesn’t answer the question, though. Couldn’t some other weapon have been used in that incident in Oklahoma?
I’m not sure if this is what you’re suggesting but you could layer this as a federal option on top of existing state regimes, as in you can pick to register your gun federally and then there are some rules but also some benefits, or you can stick with your state laws. You pick! Over time maybe more people go federal.
“…even if the majority of the population wants gun control -- which I'm not sure they do…”
They do, it’s just that no one defines “gun control” the same way. If “gun control” means strong law enforcement efforts to ensure that actual criminals do not possess firearms, most folks are for “gun control.” If it means that, as in Massachusetts, people can go to prison for 10 years if they possess an 11-round magazine, the support for “gun control” drops off a lot.
I think a lot of this goes to the distrust those on the right feel. For 90 years we've been in seen ever increasing "common sense" gun control regulation, but each new regulation doesn't top the process there's just a push for more regulation.
See for example the push to ban the most popular rifle in America (the AR-15) and common sized magazines (which are erroneously called high capacity).
If we could actually get an agreement to lock in the status quo (maybe even do a new constitutional amendment making it clear). then you could probably get some movement on other things like red flag laws.
To be fair the 1996 AWB predated mass CNC shop AR stuff.
Maybe there is a political win by losing on a effort to pass an anti-crime gun regulation, like traceability. It woud certainly be helpful if DC detectives knew how murderers and carjackers were getting the guns they use to commit their crimes.
“It woud certainly be helpful if DC detectives knew how murderers and carjackers were getting the guns they use to commit their crimes”
If you mean that there should be better law enforcement funding so that detectives have the resources they need to properly investigate illegal gun trafficking, yes it would be helpful. If you instead mean passing laws to make it easier to track firearm ownership would make detectives’ jobs easier, that’s not going to fly in many places.
Yep, I oppose universal background checks and anything else that allows government to make a gun registry. Because I do believe there's a sizable segment of the Democrat coalition that wants to ban the guns
I just want to ban conservatives from having guns
That would be a great idea, and to the NRA types it sounds like the government registering everybody's guns as a prelude to mass confiscation.
Yea, registration is a non-starter.
Your comment is making me wonder how things stand now. I live in NY State, and our county sheriff has recently started stating where guns confiscated in crimes are traced from in public records. (Always from southern states.) Many of these were reported stolen, so maybe they match records that way, but I am not sure.
Pretty amusing that the answer about Yglesias taking over HUD or Amtrak came in the same mailbag as the "people want regular guys to come in to Washington and get shit done" answer. I know the actual answers weren't diametrically opposed, but the thought experiment kind of came off as exactly the opposite of what Matt says people want (which is politicians who do nothing)!
But seriously, Yglesias for Amtrak chair!
People do not really want politicians who do nothing, but, in general, for any given thing that a politician does, about half of the people will dislike it. And of course, for each "thing", the half that doesn't like it is a different set of people. This overall leads to a general inability to "do things" without pissing off a lot of people.
I think the real misconception here is not about how things work ("guy can pull up their sleeves and get shit done"), but rather the idea that there really is some broad platform of ideas that "most everybody" will like. There just is not. The list of truly "common sense" "shit to get done" simply does not exist. Consensus on *anything* is really, really rare.
To the extent that these things exist, they are not at all obvious to the public. Repealing the Jones Act, for instance, would probably have a huge number of positive consequences that almost everybody would like... but only nerds like us even know what the hell the Jones Act is. And every time someone tries to make it salient, someone talks about the union that would be affected, and then --- OOPS, there you go, now we are talking about "Unions" and half of us don't want to do anything again.
I can't even get my friends to agree that we need fewer licensing requirements. "What if my hair stylist is totally clueless and messes up my hair?"
Overall agreed. But it's also true that when both parties actually work together and compromise they can usually still make the majority of voters happy even if there will always be some unhappy parts of the base.
A lot of good partisans will just follow where the party leads.
You beat me to this comment and the post hasn't even been up an hour! But yeah, not to say that bringing a European train exec over wouldn't potentially be good, but kind of a "folk theory of Amtrak" going on here...
Buttigieg has neither improved my commute nor even gotten much ink in the Atlantic.
Transportation secretary isn't quite the same as Amtrak chair but I get your point. Wasn't this supposed to be a launching pad to show what Mayor Pete could do on a national scale? He hasn't been bad, just... low profile.
Pete's absolute number one value above replacement skill is his communicative prowess. Conditional on Tuesday going poorly, if Pete wants to be president, he should pursue zero additional formal political job and simply become a regular guest on fox, cnn, etc and be as ubiquitous as he was in 2020 primary and then announce his campaign in late 2026 post midterms. Him simply being everywhere with a cogent theory of the case of why Harris/Biden failed and he could win would be enough. I think voters have demonstrated that "experience" isn't terribly important or predictive as an electoral qualification even though I opine for the days of mid to large state governors with a penchant to make deals.
Becoming a viable presidential candidate by appearing a lot on Fox is one of the more in the bubble takes I've seen.
I'll grant that it might help him in the "secret primary" that helps elevate your name among the chattering classes and activists, but you still have to win over primary voters. Being ex-Transportation secretary won't take you very far. You gotta be governor of Michigan.
Pete will always struggle to win a Democratic primary if he doesn't gain the support of the Democratic base Black voters.
This is both facially true and also its not remotely obvious this problem is itself resolved by being the governor of Michigan as suggested above. HUGE tail side risk if a particularly salient problem happens on his watch. If the pure goal is what elevates Pete to the white house, I don't see how another interim position pre 2028 advances the ball. If Harris wins, he should obviously take a higher profile candidate role, but at that point in all likelihood he is looking at 2032 at the earliest, and even later if Kamala were to win her own reelection.
Could work tho if he used Fox/Barstool/Rogan to build up a solid bro following. "Come vote in the Democratic Primary for me, Pete! I may be gay, but I'm not a wussy like most of my liberal friends. I know what it's like to be a young man struggling to succeed. And being a man doesn't HAVE to look like MAGA."
"Brofluencer Pete for President" (lol)
Ehhh... I kinda tangentially touched on this earlier today...
https://substack.com/@thebattleline/note/c-75017097
The secret of Fox (and right-wing propaganda) is that even though it still has a relatively small audience out of the entire population, it's achieved incredible diffusion of its talking points throughout the population, especially into the mushy middle.
The Pete play would be that since, what, 95-99% of the Obama-Biden-Harris coalition could be expected to vote for him, he'd need to dig into the right-wing propaganda crowd. Sure, large chunks of the Republican coalition still wouldn't vote for him, but if he even gets 1 in 20 right-wingers to at least give him a look, that's most of the ballgame right there. Name recognition alone with the other side's voters is simply a huge advantage as far as diffusion goes.
The diffused vibes end up looking like some overbearing 56-yo white male dickhead pontificating from his bar stool, "Y'know, most of them durned lib'ruls annoy the shit out of me, and I don't agree with that little f***y Pete on everything, but dadgummit if he doesn't hold his own! I'd be half tempted to vote for him for shits and giggles if I was a leftie". And those diffused vibes mean that maybe someone in the center-right or mushy middle who was on the fence and sees themselves as more enlightened than THAT guy, ends up voting for Pete.
It's a solid play, IMO. If he pulled it off, I'd consider it an even more epic leverage play than Trump's own takeover of the GOP. Turning your opponent's propaganda network into your own platform? *chef's kiss* molto fuckin bene man.
Why only focus on the fox part of it? If Pete is seen everywhere on all networks as he did in 2020, when the mayor of the fourth largest city in Indiana won the Iowa caucus? I just think Pete being a prominent figure in the early shadow primary helps him far more than, idk, responding to school budget fights in Michigan, assuming he gets past claims of being a carpet bagger coming in from out of state quite clearly for his own ambition.
I don't think just knowing how to govern ``in theory'' are good enough qualifications for a politician to become a presidential candidate. And, spending the next two years just hanging out, positioning yourself to announce running for president instead of doing something useful, is not a good look. It might work for celebrities who might want to get into politics, but not for actual politicians.
Honest question, Did Joe Biden know how to "govern"? He obviously had a front row seat to the White House and year's of government and politics experience. But did he or anyone else truly know how to operate behind that desk on day one? Did Hillary Clinton? Surely Barack Obama did not. I just think slow borer types overrate experience when even maybe the most analogous possible position, big state governor, is still JV football vs the Super Bowl of the White House. In the absence of that, might as well just try to be popular and likable and competent in the eyes of voters.
I definitely think so. All three of Biden, Obama and HRC did. A senator has a large office with lots of staffers. They have to represent their constituents, write laws, sit on committees, give occasional press briefings, etc. It is different from a governor, but still a very large operation. Biden was vp in addition to that, so he was exposed to the whole machinery of government for eight years. Hillary was sec. state which is also a big office.
It’s as if Mr. Smith went to Washington and became a faceless bureaucrat.
If he translates this into becoming governor of Michigan, no one will care what he did as Transportation Secretary.
Wait does he live in Michigan now?
That airline cash refund thing should have kicked in earlier in the administration.
I have no idea what the impact of a few competent pragmatists would be and I really want to know. I suspect it is high variance. Some complex systems collapse with improvements others are easy to improve.
I have to disagree with Matt’s take on the question of US economic over-performance. (Especially the idea that the question is some sort of conservative conspiracy theory that all intelligent people would immediately dismiss out of hand.)
The way I’d phrase the question is “does the large post-covid fiscal stimulus in the US account for the fact that the US economy’s recovery was stronger? If so, does this stimulus have potential costs in the future?”
1. The idea that US fiscal stimulus drove higher demand and inflation post-Covid has some pretty good evidence behind it (although maybe still debatable). Lots of papers about this.
2. Perhaps it’s true that there are some economic illiterates that think debt issuance has future costs because of the “household tightening its belt” model. Matt uses this as an excuse to dismiss the idea of future costs altogether. Instead, he makes the remarkable claim that *all* costs of the additional debt issuance have *already been incurred*.
Despite the fact that there are bad reasons why people might think debt has future costs, there are also good reasons! Increasing debt today risks debt sustainability issues in the future. If a country issues too much debt that it’s unwilling to back with future taxes, it’ll either face increased default risk or a future inflation. It’s not true that all inflation resulting from fiscal stimulus has necessarily already happened.
How big are these future costs? Most economists agree that nobody really knows whether a country’s debt is sustainable or not. (If investors agreed that debt wasn’t sustainable, a crisis would’ve already happened.)
3. The discussion about the effect of deficits at full employment and what Trump would do are irrelevant to the question. These are about the marginal effect of larger deficits today, not about whether Biden’s post-Covid stimulus was worth the additional debt.
(Besides, Matt talks as if there’s some universal consensus that there’s some magical “full employment” point where debt provides no further stimulus, whereas below full employment debt provides stimulus but no inflation. People like Gauti Eggertsson have models of this, but it’s *very* debatable.)
I think this misses the point. If our current high growth is caused by stimulus from deficit spending than we're getting growth, but likely at a high future cost.
If the deficit spending is not increasing growth as Matt suggests, and we would be getting this kind of gdp growth without it, then it makes the rationale for such large deficits even more suspect.
I also can't wait for Trump to lose so that every discussion of how bad something a Democrat is doing won't immediately turn to Trump will/is doing it worse. I agree!!! But that doesn't make the Harris plans good!
If Harris pursues deficit-increasing policies, even I will agree that's bad. We need to lower the deficit with the aim of reducing interest payments and interest rates. If she can do that, I don't think we'll pay much of a price for the stimulus-induced high growth, if any. WW2 spending did wonders for the economy but during and after the war, despite the very high levels of debt incurred (see also, Great Britain during and after the Napoleonic wars).
The problem of course is the big drivers for spending are going to be SS and Medicare/Medicaid.
I've seen zero interest from either party in really tackling that issue.
If we actually have deficit curtailment and an overall decrease in government debt to gdp, then I think this surge could matter very little. I just see extremely limited appetite for any of the actions needed to accomplish that.
I agree with you about the marginal effects of debt issuance today. What I was trying to say is that I interpreted the OP’s question as “to what extent was *past* stimulus responsible for the US’s good economic performance from 2020-2024?”
I think (1) it’s pretty clear that stimulus helped the immediate bounce-back from Covid, and (2) it’s even possible that the massive stimulus is still having some knock-on effects keeping growth high today. That is, I think a valid question is “absent the massive stimulus in 2020-21, would we be seeing 3% growth in 2024?” Maybe, maybe not.
Deficit spending by year:
2020 - 3.1 trillion 14.7%
2021 - 2.8 trillion 12.1%
2022 - 1.4 trillion 5.43%
2023 - 1.7 trillion 6.28%
2024 - 1.8 trillion. 6.9% - current estimate.
You can point to 2020/21 as Covid deficit spending, but what about 22-24? If this is not creating GDP growth, then we have added 17% of GDP to the national debt in three years and gained no appreciable growth from it. At a time when the economy is strong enough we should be reducing the debt instead of increasing it, its just bad.
"then we have added 17% of GDP to the national debt in three years and gained no appreciable growth from it."
and helped fuel inflation
Weird how having more deficit spending by percentage of GDP than most of the rest of the world somehow led to lower inflation than almost everybody else.
Isn't the idea that global inflation was mostly about global rises in prices for things like grain and natural gas and also supply chain disruptions?
Since we produce our own grain and natural gas, and have an unusually large internal market that doesn’t rely on seaborne shipping, I think it makes sense that we’d have less inflation than most.
So it could still be the case that our inflation could have been even lower with better policy.
Depending on which economist you read, our excess deficit was responsible for probably at least half of the inflation, and at least 2-3% of it
"That is, I think a valid question is “absent the massive stimulus in 2020-21, would we be seeing 3% growth in 2024?” Maybe, maybe not."
The more relevant question is, "absent the massive stimulus in 2020-21, how far off the growth trendline would we be now in 2024?" If we're far below where we had been heading, then even 3% growth in 2024 would be a paltry reward for avoiding that massive stimulus.
The one thing I'd add that I think is the key thing Matt's missing it's that government issued debt works by distorting prices. The increased economic activity comes from inducing investments that aren't justified by conditions. This introduces a ton of opportunity costs and waste in the economy. "Full employment" through badly misallocated labor is smoke and mirrors, not really economic productivity.
My understanding is that we're in the midst of a huge surge in productivity.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1xGlS
Looking at the pandemic - present I feel confident saying, "Shit's weird yo."
This is 1930 Herbert Hoover economic thinking that delivered the Great Depression
I think the point is that stimulus has benefits (additional activity) and costs (misallocation), right? Sometimes the tradeoff is worthwhile, other times it’s not.
If the government stimulates with a crash program of direct spending, that creates a pretty high risk of misallocation.
If you make an effort to stimulate while minimising misallocation, e.g. by cutting taxes / providing cash rebates, does there need to be a lot of misallocation?
Covid is a great example of driving up food prices by stimulating the sale of a ton of fancy office chairs.
The US has exited the worst pandemic in a century with GDP well above the pre-pandemic forecast and you think it proves your point that stimulus is bad?
The US also exited the worst war ever with GDP miles the pre-war trend BTW
Friedman/Hayek/etc are a lot more right about the causes and solutions to the great depression than Keynes/FDR.
SuperLike this one because boy did I need a laugh today.
Why do you think that?
Because FDR prolonged the depression not fixed it. Other depressions of a similar magnitude had acurred before but were relatively brief in duration.
For example, the "Panic of 1893" was -37.3% but only lasted 1 year, 5 months.
Note this isn't to say I'm against counter cyclic spending (for example unemployment insurance). But much of the stuff FDR did was counter productive.
"In 1931, the year before Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, unemployment in the United States had soared to an unprecedented 16.3 percent. In human terms that meant that over eight million Americans who wanted jobs could not find them. In 1939, after almost two full terms of Roosevelt and his New Deal, unemployment had not dropped, but had risen to 17.2 percent."
https://fee.org/articles/fdrs-folly-how-roosevelt-and-his-new-deal-prolonged-the-great-depression/
The economy was recovering pretty nicely until 1937 when FDR turned to more restrictive, less stimulating policies, and we had a new recession.
In other words, he wasn't Keynesian *enough.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_of_1937%E2%80%931938#:~:text=The%20recession%20was%20caused%20by,effects%20on%20the%20broader%20economy.
The fact that unemployment was 23.6% in 1932 the year before FDR took office (the use of 1931 is a tell of poor faith or reasoning by the author) 3.5 years after the crash makes 1892 seem like a poor comparison.
Plus I would be interested to know what Hayeking magic was applied to economy to lower the unemployment rate to 9.9% in 1941 and 4.7% in 1942
Assuming efficiency in allocation by private actors and inefficiency by public ones is silly. Allocation of labor is a product of choices made by people, full stop. Private actors make inefficient choices all the time that destroy value or misallocate resources based on factors other than “pure” profit or efficiency (“I want my kid to take over”; “I want to own Twitter”), and there just isn’t great evidence that the market imposes rigorous discipline on those choices except in the long term. Moreover, actors in private markets actively create inefficiency and misallocation out of a desire to capture the misallocated resources. Trump University was a thing in the world.
Mostly we muddle through. But to claim that government inevitably induces “investments that aren’t justified by conditions” with the unstated corollary that private investment does not is, at a minimum, to simplify the economy into non-understanding.
If an industry has enough players, significant inefficiencies will be punished pretty quickly. If a shirt manager at McDonalds is getting 20% less productivity out of his workers than peers (and he isn’t the owners nephew) he probably doesn’t last long.
Some private actors don’t have to be efficient. I lunches with an attorney Wednesday who helpfully explained to me how my firm could easily gross $1.5 million if I’d just join some consortium that handles my marketing and commit to working 30 hours a week. The thought of giving up my manly independence and working 30 hours on boring cases 50 weeks a year made me want to vomit. I’d rather hunt squirrels on my own than hunt bigger game as part of a consortium.
I mean, that isn't actually true. It's incredibly telling that you had to qualify your own statement with, "assuming he isn't the owner's nephew," because nepotism IS one of the most common sources of inefficiency, and you see it all over the place. The hyper-efficient market you are describing is actually more the exception than the rule, in part because creating inefficiency and harvesting the misallocation is a great business strategy in a lot of industries.
Your actual lived experience--choosing inefficiency because you have other, non-profit motivations--is actually the one that is telling you the most here. Markets have a middling level of efficiency with long tails on either side, just like any process involving human decision makers.
But that same nepotism occurs in the public sector AND it's worse because it's with other people's money.
See for example giveaways to unions, or farm bills, or where military bases should be, or bridges should go etc etc etc
The private sector has competition to ensure efficiency over the long term. The public sector has no such thing. Just a lot of uninformed voters and politicians promising them they can have rainbows and unicorns for everyone and someone else will pay for it.
The claim that the public sector is noncompetitive three days before election day is...an interesting claim.
Like, you can make all kinds of critiques about HOW we manage public sector competition, and I would probably agree with you, but the public sector is, if anything, hyper-competitive to a fault. I would go so far as to argue that a lot of the dysfunction is directly downstream of the hypercompetitiveness, because it incentivizes strategies based on efficiency destruction.
Everybody gets a pony and a blowjob
I can't wait until our AI overlords take the wheel to hyperefficiently allocate us to make paperclips.
I'm not making a public/private distinction. I'm saying free money distorts the real costs of investment relative to the environment. Whether it's keeping the doors open at a marginal business or individuals who now have a big expensive office desk in their house they either don't use or have used as an excuse to be less productive by not going back to the office, they're misallocated resources.
My hot take on WFH is that it's a false equilibrium created by 40-hr work-week labor laws and full-time benefits requirements/incentives, heading up against the fact that we've finally achieved Keynes' leisure society.
If we can get away with 8 hours of real work per week from most knowledge workers by simply having those 8 hours be REALLY productive -- which is the sanest read of why the internet didn't insanely raise productivity on net (because people used the time efficiency to slack off while doing the same amount of work) -- then that's a MIRACLE of modern technology. Because it means that for the first time in history, we can afford not just a small idle nobility class (<5%?), but ENORMOUS chunks of the workforce living lives of idle comfort (20-40% is my ballpark estimate, but could be more).
The only question going forward should be how we can deliver cushy email jobs to most of the rest of the workforce, since it's not really fair to have some professions enjoy the leisure and not others.
But ARE they misallocated resources? Like, if keeping the doors open at a marginal business makes the owner happy, how is that a misallocation of resources? The resources are being allocated by humans to improve human well-being.
It should not be in any way controversial that when a business runs out of money it goes out of business.
Right, but that's not actually how it works in many of those marginal businesses you are describing. What happens instead is that they limp along, not quite "running out of money" and surviving in various ways as a house of cards. The classic version of this is for the owner to put in nonsensical (from a profit standpoint) labor hours. The stack doesn't get knocked over until the owner gets sick, or the neighborhood changes, or insert your exogenous factor here. You see a lot of this in small-town Texas, where I grew up. You also see it a lot in the small / family restaurant business.
This is why I say that market efficiency is a long-run factor, rather than a short-run one. You are describing a simplistic, Econ 101 version of the market, and I don't disagree with you about it. But in a world governed by human decision makers, that simplicity develops a lot of inaccuracy because humans are demonstrably governed by a lot of competing impulses and constrained by problems of information and cognition. Those factors put sharp limits on the analytical value of your model, especially when, as I pointed out above, you constrain your definition of efficient allocation within the four corners of revenue and profit.
David Abbott, above, gives us a good example of this in his choices about customer base and his own time allocation. You could argue that he is misallocating resources, but I would say that he seems to be allocating them well: he is making choices based on his sense of what will produce greater well-being in, you know, David Abbott. That's only an inefficiency if you tighten your definitions too much to fit in his stated real-world decision making matrix.
I "liked" this. However, "Running out of money" is at least partially defined by the interest rate (money availability). Nothing is ever as black and white as we wish it was.
Indeed, there's a lot of ruin in a nation, including its economy. Mark Zuckerberg spending $10 billion on the metaverse turned out to be ill-advised. Governments waste a lot of money too. One could say that, as David Abbott rightly points out, in competitive market inefficiency is punished (and implies that's not the case with government), but "efficiency" is defined very differently in business and government goals and actions. Governments pursue goals that private firms don't have to worry about.
This reminds me of a Twitter discussion I saw between Chris Hayes and David Roberts. They were basically saying “How do these idiots not realize how wonderful INDUSTRIAL POLICY has been? We’ve spent XXX billion dollars and created XXX thousand jobs!”
On what?
Industrial policy can be good or it can be bad. There's no platonic ideal. China's bouts of industrial policy have by and large created a far more prosperous economy. Tariffs in a burgeoning industrial economy can be very good for a limited period of time whereas in a mature and large economy like our present one they can be disastrous.
I completely agree. I just think some commentators have gotten way over their skis with the assumption that Industrial Policy is an unalloyed good. (Argentina does plenty of "industrial policy" as well, and look at how that's turned out.) I find the phrase to be a way of circumventing arguments about whether a specific market intervention is good or not.
Weren’t most of Argentina’s problems caused by World Bank meddling and the Chicago Boys?
>The increased economic activity comes from inducing investments that aren't justified by conditions. This introduces a ton of opportunity costs and waste in the economy.<
In a near full-employment economy, sure. You're not saying this is the case when the economy is depressed, are you?
Why not? How is it better to pay people to make stuff no one wants during a recession than during a boom?
Inflation is an obvious reason. If they are making stuff that people want then the price on that item doesn't go up (because more is produced). Whereas, if they are making stuff nobody buys then their paychecks are inflationary.
Why would they be making stuff no one wants? Firms that benefit from the dynamic whereby the government pumps money into the economy are unlikely to focus on products no one wants.
Au contraire, mon vieux. Production stimulated by the government is by definition uneconomic. If it were economic, it would be produced without stimulus.
Case in point? Solar panels. If solar panels made economic sense, people would buy them. They don't, so they have to be subsidized. People aren't so afraid of global warming that they'll pay full price for the things.
Multiplier effect.
Of course, whatever they make constitutes a waste of resources. Just give 'em the money as welfare and save the materials and energy for later.
Would this apply to, say, government debt incurred for building the Interstate Highway System? Or to be more current, debt incurred under the IRA and CHIPS laws? Are we building too many microchip fabs and solar farms?
Specific government investments can and should be individually evaluated, unfortunately I haven't heard much to give the impression that the US microchip Fabs are being setup in a manner particularly concerned with productivity.
If they can produce chips at a competitive price, we’ll probably have our answer. And this is in addition to the national security reasons for pursuing the policy, which takes us some ways away from the economic efficiency debate.
Yep, chips act is good regardless.
Not necessarily. I'd like to see us make semiconductors again -- and not just the most advanced types, but the "glue chips" that surround advanced types, feed data in and out and supply power to them. Also the heavy-duty types that control motors, power transmitters and control electric transmission. I'm not convinced the CHIPS act is gonna do that. From a White House press release dated last Aug. 9th:
"Companies applying for more than $150 million in grants were required to submit a robust child care plan that reflects the needs of their workers in communities where they plan to build."
See the problem? Notice the bland assumption that child care is somehow the responsibility of companies that accept Federal cash. I'll bet the act is festooned with lots more irrelevant requirements, like minority vendors, LGBTQ+ equity, renewable energy (a real nonstarter, since semiconductor manufacturing requires above all else reliable electrical power. A ten-second power burp can render a million dollars' worth of wafers useless.) and so on.
Then, of course, the new plants must be sited in areas of high unemployment (which never correspond to areas where workers with the necessary skills live,) the probable requirement that the plants be built with union labor, and on and on, and it's no wonder that the new plants are being built by Asian semiconductor companies who accept the necessity to make a loss in order to stay inside any likely tariff barrier.
Meanwhile, Intel, the star in our semiconductor crown since Motorola burned to the ground, is struggling and may be bought by Samsung.
We don’t know exactly how much debt a country can carry, but we do know that, in the 1820s, the UK carried a debt load of 250% of GDP while its per capita GDP was around $4000 in todays money. We also know this country manages to return to the gold standard (probably an unforced error) while displaying a world historical level of economic dynamism.
That UK debt came from wars. Which were generally limited in time, saw a massive spike in spending, then a return to fiscal surplus when the war was over and government paid down the debt. Current government debt comes primarily from government transfers which are ongoing and generally increasing over time. So the question is if we hit 250%, what would cause it to change trajectory so it didn't hit 1000%? If its a spending/tax change, why don't we do that before we hit 250%?
I don’t think that your rephrasing of the question is correct. “Are we just experiencing debt-fueled growth?” to me sounds more like, “Are we doing relatively well only because we’re running large and unsustainable deficits?” Or maybe, "Once we stop running deficits, will there be a reckoning and Germany will catch up with us?"
So I think Matt’s response is apposite: “Which is just to say that today’s economy is humming, not because of debt accumulation, but despite it.”
When Matt says, “Which also means that the downside of that debt isn’t occurring at some hypothetical time in the future, it’s happening right now.”
I don’t think that means that the debt will have no future downside. He’s saying it’s not only net bad in the future, it’s actually net bad already. So you can’t say that our larger deficits are why we’re doing better than Germany.
> But he’s English. England doesn’t have high-speed rail, and none of Byford’s previous jobs have involved high-speed rail
But do you not want someone who has experience trying to deal with the most insane planning system on Earth to try and get it built in the US? Sure you could get a French expert but most of the challenges facing high speed rail in the US are going to be the kind facing the UK rather than the kind facing France where they can force their way past opposition.
Correct take IMO. Better to have a guy who speaks the language, both in the most literal sense and also in the sense of being conversant with dealing with big legal and professional services consultants.
Well said. Would an Italian or French high-speed rail know how to maneuver through the bureaucratic and political thickets that clog our ability to build HSR? I'm sure they have great technical skills, but I'm not sure that's our highest priority. Maybe hire the guy in charge of California's HSR. It's such a disaster that maybe he learned some valuable lessons. Fail upward!
"Because the point here isn’t that “phones” per se are a hazard, it’s that social media apps are a hazard."
Joke's on you! I spend all day on the calculator app!
Anyways, on the gun thing, I think the best way to get anything useful accomplished is to drop the "gun control" framing altogether and focus on the measures in isolation that are shown to be effective, and frame them as "tough on crime" issues. For instance, I'm cautiously optimistic about gun violence restraining orders. If you're advocating those, just talk about those, and talk about preventing domestic partner violence (because that's probably the majority of cases a GVRO would prevent if ever effective). Instead, right now we have a debate that starts with the question "how do you feel about guns?" And then policy details flow after that, which doesn't make much sense. There's no one policy out there called "gun control," so any time the issue comes up, I get why the gun people get frustrated. The "control" side rarely brings anything productive to the table besides the observation "we've got a lot of guns." Yep, we do. Sounds like you want to reduce the number of guns in circulation, which would involve confiscation. "I never said that." Ok then what do you actually want?
Tldr; come out of the gate with the policy prescription you have in mind and just drop the "gun control" framing entirely.
Every single article about violent crime in the newspaper ends with a paragraph going through the guy’s rap sheet where it mentions that he’s previously been arrested multiple times for being a felon in possession of firearm. We have some gun laws already, and they’re not really being enforced.
This link has information about how states restore gun rights to felons. Some don't do it at all, some make it hard, some do it automatically. And if your state gun rights have been restored, the feds won't prosecute; see 18 USC 921(a)(20) (it's complicated, to say the least).
https://ccresourcecenter.org/state-restoration-profiles/chart-1-loss-and-restoration-of-civil-rights-and-firearms-privileges-2/
Also, bear in mind, prohibition on felon firearm possession doesn't kick in until the felon gets caught with the firearm, which is generally when they use the firearm to commit a new crime.
And that's ordinary run of the mill crime. Usually "gun control" is brought up in the context of mass shootings, which are harder to predict.
Oh, the only gun control fix for mass shootings is making guns that are capable of being used in them unavailable - which means a lot of confiscations.
If you have a one-in-a-million chance of becoming a mass shooter, then you have to be prevented from getting a semi-auto rifle. That could only be achieved by putting semi-auto rifles onto NFA-style regulations. And that means mass-scale confiscation.
That being said, a LOT of the mass shooters seem to send up numerous red flags. Thus I could see red flag laws (with suitable due process protections) potentially doing some good if people know about them and use them
I don't think this is a bad idea, but we WILL catch a TON of weirdos who have no intention of doing anything.
That seems worth it to me because depriving guys who are merely creepy of their gun rights is not high on my list of civil liberties violations that bother me. But I do think the signal to noise ratio on that is probably pretty bad.
Honestly, I think we should make people liable if their guns are stolen and later used in crimes. Double penalty if you didn't report your gun missing.
Force everyone to cover massive insurance to protect against a catastrophic event, or be really, really careful about securing them.
There's another account on here who appears every 6 months to make this same recommendation. The main problem with this idea is that there's no centralized database of guns & gun serial numbers, so there's no way to know that Gun X actually came from Joe Smith's possession. You wouldn't even necessarily know that Gun X was used in a crime unless it was literally dropped at the scene there too, right? The criminal might just run off with it.
And the vast majority of gun owners would simply ignore the new insurance requirements, plus now you're incentivizing people not to report gun thefts. That's 3 reasons why this wouldn't really work in practice.
I'm also pretty skeptical that 'holding people liable for how their stolen property was used by the thief, or a guy the thief sold it to, or a guy who sold it to a guy who sold it to a guy' would pass judicial review in our legal system
Most insurance is for catastrophic events. You need enough high profile cases to scare people into getting it, eg, parents getting charged for allowing children access to their guns which are then used in school shootings.
You need to shop jurisdictions for a friendly court. But send tons of lawsuits at the state level and the 9th and see what sticks.
As for lowering reports of gun theft, there's almost no incentive to do so now, nor does it particularly help police, for the hand-to-hand chain you've described. Make it expensive to report a gun theft, and very, very, very, expensive for your gun to show up at a crime scene with no reported theft.
I'll just never forget reading about a gang in Miami that sent kids to try the car doors of every parked car on the block. If the car was unlocked, they'd look for a gun under the seat. Nobody should be that careless with a lethal weapon, but it's apparently very common.
Hmm... "If your gun is used in a crime, you'll face a fine of $X. For that reason, you are required to carry insurance."
Yeah I'm not against it. Idk if it would fly with voters but I'd support it. Hell, I wonder if insurance companies could figure out some way to give "safe gun owner" discounts to people who demonstrate proper safety. Only problem is the insurance company isn't at your house 24/7 so maybe not idk
I think it would be like a car crash. You'd want to file a claim with your insurance company, because you're getting sued / paying a massive fine. Your previous "responsible gun ownership" could be determined by police information, much like your driving record is.
If this ever happens, I assume it will be done the way everything in America is done, by lawsuit. Either DAs will begin to successfully charge people whose guns were used in crimes, or victims will sue them. This will in turn create a market for voluntary insurance.
Hard to do that without a gun registry (which I’m for, but still)
Right, but that's politically DOA, so probably best to work within the realm of the possible.
"Yep, we do. Sounds like you want to reduce the number of guns in circulation, which would involve confiscation. "I never said that."
except a lot of them have said yes they want to ban guns, or at least a large subset of them (see AR 15's)
Yeah, some say that, a bigger number try to have it both ways, and voters see through that.
I don't want to think about this election any more. I don't ever want to spend any mental energy on Trump any more.
Me too. Let's hope the universe provides, but I'm nervous.
I think there's an excellent chance he'll still be around in 2028 no matter how this goes. But if Harris wins, we'll at least get a year or two reprieve.
Is there any legal reason why a US citizen lawfully appointed to run Amtrak couldn't hire a "personal assistant" from Italy or South Korea, either out of her own pocket or at the expense of a third party?
I vaguely recall that there's some rule against people other than federal employees attending official meetings (this was a problem when Bill Clinton tried to put his wife on the health care task force). But if there's a workaround it might be a very cost-effective intervention for any philanthropic group or individual that wants better train service.
I honestly think Matt is wrong about this. The issue isn’t that Koreans have some secret sauce that Americans just don’t know. It’s about stakeholder expectations and institutional inertia. And I think a French person or whatever would not be good at this.
I think he's right and he's wrong. The Koreans (or yes, the French) could help us run transit or HSR better. But just one of them wouldn't do the trick. You'd need to clean the deck and employ dozens or more likely hundreds of them, and you'd need to enact various regulations and laws to let them get on with their work. Like, no more unnecessary union hacks to run boring machines. The boring is too slow that way.
(Sorry!)
Cut and cover cut and cover cut and cover
There's not a secret trick but skills and experience executing well are also real, as we see in every other field of endeavor.
I think that what Matt wants is someone who is not prepared to accept the stakeholders and the inertia. My suspicion is that the most likely result would be that the resistance from the institution would push them out, rather than that they'd be able to force through profound institutional change. Alon Levy's "fire the senior managers" bit is fine, but they need to understand that they have to fire the middle managers and most of the junior managers and probably a lot of the union leaderships as well.
Hence my comment above about clearing the deck.
Yes, agree. He needs to reckon with the point that none of the countries he's named operate on the English-derived common law system that exists in the US, and also that these countries mostly don't have (certainly don't have the same extent of) the kind of legal and professional services industries that have a vested interest in making these projects as long and expensive as possible for the consulting fees.
Does English common law force Amtrak to make people line up to board at Penn? Or force MNRR to have the worst track maintenance program on earth? You are underrating how bad the status quo is!
“Does English common law force Amtrak to make people line up to board at Penn?”
I haven’t tried this is a while, but you used to be able to bypass the lines by going straight to the track level. It’s doubly easy when on a platform shared with a boarding NJ Transit train.
No, of course not, and I'm sure Amtrak is so badly run there are a few (nearly) free lunches to be had. But not at the scale of 'roll out a high speed rail network'.
MNRR track maintenance practices is 30 minutes of a 3.5 hour trip!
Gochujang is da bomb, tho!
Gochujang is the new sriracha.
Doubanjiang is the new Gochujang
I don't think we know either way and either option is possible. It is entirely possible there is some secret sauce and a Spanish tunneling executive could teach Americans to tunnel at 20% of the cost.
I think it’s more like the most an absolutely stellar secretary could achieve is ~20% savings, not 80%. There’s just too much structural BS in America.
A Spaniard or Italian might be better suited than a Korean or Japanese to dealing with the NIMBYism if that was the only part of the problem, but they’d all be pretty baffled by the sheer degree to which we’ve outsourced so much state capacity to expensive consultants — and often even REQUIRED that capacity be outsourced.
Yeah, what they would do is just start hiring people do these jobs and fire all the consultants, and then they'd get sued, and lose, and then they'd quit.
What you need is to change a lot of these laws first.
Just get grad students at the local civil engineering grad school to do the consulting for free as part of their thesis
Exactly. I’m not anti expertise from Europe and Asia but this illustrates where the real problem lies. If you could fix all those things then an American could,probably do a pretty decent job.
My understanding is that it would not have been illegal for Hillary Clinton, considered as a private citizen, to head the health care task force. However, if she was a private citizen (in the event, court of appeals eventually decided that First Lady counts as a government employee) then the health care task force would’ve counted as an advisory committee under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) of 1972. That would have been a problem, because FACA imposes onerous* procedural requirements on advisory committees.
I don’t know that the Amtrak director hiring a personal assistant would have the same problem, though I’m sure they’d run into some other bureaucratic hangups. A 3rd party paying would probably run afoul of ethics rules on gifts.
*“Before it can meet or take any action, a committee first must file a detailed charter, see id. § 9(c). The committee must give advance notice in the Federal Register of any meetings, see id. § 10(a)(2); and it must hold all meetings in public, see id. § 10(a)(1). Under section 10, the committee must keep detailed minutes of each meeting, see id. § 10(c), and make the records available — along with any reports, records, or other documents used by the committee — to the public, provided they do not fall within the exemptions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), see id. § 10(b). Under section 5, an advisory committee established by the President or by legislation must be "fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented," id. § 5(b)(2). The Act also requires that precautions be taken to ensure that the advice and recommendations of the committee "will not be inappropriately influenced by the appointing authority or by any special interest."”
On reconciling do-nothing politicians with wanting major changes, I think the grand majority of people want major changes to a small handful of policies, while wanting to keep the status quo on the majority of things. We just broadly differ on which policies we want changed and kept the same.. I think that factor pairs in well with the factor Matt and Sam observed.
I'm pretty sure that Musk and that Paulsen guy would say that a large lesson from the pandemic is that most Americans are not willing to make major sacrifices for the public good (especially when applied to say the Green New Deal or degrowth). So it is rich to here them apply the same willingness to suffer to tariffs.
"Americans are not willing to make major sacrifices for the public good"
I think this is incredibly simplistic. There was a huge disagreement about which sacrifices would, in fact, improve public goods. Here's a list of Really Stupid (TM) things that we were asked to do for the "public good"
- NOT buy masks
- Certainly not USE masks, they won't help
- Engage in a huge amount of hygiene theatre, like not using physical menus and having staff follow everyone around wiping down surfaces constantly
- Later on, back to YES, use masks! But also, sure, wear masks that provided dubious preventative value because they were basically just sliced up t-shirts.
- Wear masks outdoors
- Refuse to gather outdoors (side note, if I had a nickel for every moron I saw riding a bike with a mask, but without a helmet...)
- Pretend that Covid is deadly for children, when they are by far the least endangered from it (Daily reminder that, since 2020, more kids have died from suicide than from Covid)
And those are just some of the things that are kind of obviously stupid. There is also a host of reasonable restrictions that one might take, but where large portions of the population do not believe in their efficacy. It's unfair to call someone selfish when the motivations for their actions have more to do with ignorance than egotism.
Don't forget that while going outside was deadly it was ok if part of BLM protests
I sort of agree, sort of don't. My friends who objected to masks were angry all out of proportion to what they were being asked to do, and it didn't seem particularly rooted in questions of efficacy.
My psychiatrist friend said it "hit people in a very vulnerable part of their psyche." It really, really seemed to be rooted in a sense of "I'm a grown up and you can't make me," and/or a conviction that it was virtue signaling.
I truly, honestly, did not get it. It was such a simple thing. Obviously in retrospect, the science had to catch up with whether they were helpful, and then public health orgs were even slower than that. But they were *furious* from the very beginning.
I think it's very hard to say because the mask thing became a symbol of partisanship very fast.
For instance "I am a grown up and you can't make me" is not a good explanation for why, in many parts of the country, people get pissed at OTHER people wearing a mask. The only explanation for that is really tribalism. They get pissed off that the mask-wearer isn't going along with the group.
If you rewind to before the pandemic, and someone in Alabama came across someone wearing a mask, they'd have just assumed the person was immunocompromised, or maybe a germophobe, or whatever, and shrugged and moved on. No one really cared that much until it became a partisan symbol of "who's side you are on"
For me, I was absolutely destroyed by Bay Area lockdown policies to the point of needing inpatient hospitalization, and several loved ones died by suicide or late-caught cancer during that period. Seeing people wearing masks pointlessly (cloth masks, masks outdoors, masks under noses) just reminds me of those two years of public health policy that ruined my social circle, physical health and mental wellbeing while all the lefties around me gloated about how great we were because we took Covid seriously, unlike those Herman Cain award winners. When I was in the hospital with severe poisoning from a medication complication that would have been caught in moments had I been able to go to an in-person doctor’s appointment, someone had the audacity to tell me that I should be grateful because at least it wasn’t Covid.
That’s what I think of when I see masks, and it does make me furious. It’s not rational. I try to make myself remember that I don’t know someone’s life story. I’m immunocompromised now so I should be grateful that they’re taking precautions. But it does hit this deep raw psychological nerve and I understand where it comes from.
In my case, I'm talking about Democrats. The people who got super bent out of shape about it were relatively more conservative, but still liberal.
I certainly may be missing something, but in their case, it did seem, uh. Childish? They didn't express well-thought out objections, like "these cloth masks are probably not effective, and I can't make out what people are saying." They are articulate people, and their inability to coherently state their opposition was strange.
And as you said, when mask restrictions loosened, they would get mad about *other* people wearing masks. I'm pretty sure it permanently damaged one friendship. I would wear masks out to dance clubs and it seemed to bother one person a lot.
Masks were performative submission. A-okay when your side is doing the forcing, not so much when it is the other side. Combine that with even a rudimentary understanding of the relative sizes of viruses and the spaces between cloth fibers. The whole thing was emblematic of the conservative disgust with empty progressive virtue-signaling, especially when it is the shallow sentimentality of 'we have do to something, even if that something is not only useless, but actually makes things worse'.
I don't think people who pretend vaccines don't work can reasonably claim their objection was scientifically based. Masks *do* work. They just have to be surgical, or even better, an N95.
However, I appreciate your perspective on why they bothered people.
When it comes to making major sacrifices for a "public good" that I view as evil (such as the Green New Deal or degrowth) yes, I'll balk. And tariffs are a nonstarter.
Matt's amtrak take is setting off alarm bells in my head. Do not, under any circumstances, hire anybody who has had management experience running die Deutsche Bahn!
Truly the third rail of transportation discourse. (Yes, I know S-bahn is a bit different from the national network. Still.)
Agreed that the DB is deterioration, but the S-Bahnen in multiple cities (München especially comes to mind) are just stellar.
Riders’ expectations of cleanliness and punctuality in public transport strikes me as likely a big factor. I’ve received several NYC MTA rider surveys asking why my reviews are middling at best. It’s the overall grime and neglect, not fear that a mentally-ill person will shove me onto the tracks. And Amtrak? Always 15-40 minutes late on the 2.5 hour Penn station to Albany run. Laughable
Heck, the Europeans demand better. And ubiquitous, well-liked public transport should be a critical element of our future HUD secretary MY’s YIMBY housing build-out plan!
Deterioration is putting it mildly: they are delayed close to 40% of the time: https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/db-delays-worst-in-10-years-report-reveals
(And yes, it was especially bad when they first introduced their 9-euro regional ticket one summer, which eventually became a 49-euro ticket, but it was almost as bad before that.)
Yes, the S-bahn service works fairly well and is reasonably clean, but so is the nyc subway system and, to a lesser extent, the chicago one (south side busses, not so much). BART, on the other hand, is frightening.
Weirdly, ChatGPT shares the stereotype that German trains must be good. I was asking it about travel ideas for this past summer involving trying to figure out which European airport might be a good one to fly into to then travel to Switzerland by train. It had the temerity to say that Frankfurt to Zurich was more reliable than Milan to Zurich!
Three things:
Maybe the stereotype of german trains being on time is entrenched enough to overwhelm the training data? They were on time in the 90's!
The segment going south from Frankfurt to Mannheim, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Freiburg, entering Switzerland via Basel is really nice and not too overloaded once you get past Mannheim (and train service within switzerland itself is stellar). And, there are fairly frequent Swiss intercity city trains along that route, although they are operated by german crews.
Finally, the big, 40 mile tunnel (gotthard tunnel) going from Switzerland into Italy was shut down for a year (just reopened a couple months ago) because of a freight train derailment, making the southward journey hours longer. Maybe ChatGPT was aware of this?
I actually took both those trains this summer! Not having the Gotthard tunnel was actually a blessing for the tourist because I got better sightseeing! But the German train did have some random delays (though not as bad as when I was traveling between Frankfurt airport and Cologne a year ago).
Cologne to Frankfurt airport is usually very frequent and relatively reliable (it is one of the few ice only segments in the german system, there are a lot of incentives to make that particular journey a predicable 1 hour trip, many of the ice's start in cologne so there are very few reasons for them to be late, etc... the other direction is a bit less consistent). There is also the slow version winding along the rhine (past koblenz, mainz, the germania statue etc) which takes 2 hours longer but is very beautiful.
I think that ICE route was just under repair on the weekend I happened to be traveling, and I was doing it after dark and didn’t get to appreciate the scenery. Also, I had bought my original plane tickets under the assumption I would have a one hour train ride, and was surprised both by the connection from the airport to the airport train station, and by the replacement of the fast train by the slow train.
was it during the euro? i've heard lots of horror stories about people trying to get to and from the airports around this time.
My guess is Amtrak's problems actually stem from our federal system combined with the activist groups that advocate for it. Both those things push in favor of running long distance trains with highly subsidized dining and sleeping cars (which, in one of the more Orwellian uses of language, get called a "national network") rarher than running short distance corridor trains that are more useful to the public.
FWIW Biden actually understands this and his Amtrak expansion focused on the corridors. But when your advocates are obsessed with the fact the dining cars on overnight trains no longer have waiters and grilled steaks, this isn't good for public policy.
I dunno I support a fully subsidized HSR network for the US modeled on the Orient Express, affordable for everyone
Thank you very much for answering my question! And you came up with most of the states that had come up in my mind, as well--including the tricky potential cases of Kansas and Nebraska. However, your answer demurring makes good sense, and I think it showed with one of the wilder examples that I was thinking of: Utah. It's very white, highly urban, pretty well educated, and after the rise of Trump, there were some hot takes that the added Mormon influence could cause the state to shy away from its Republican dominance. But...that clearly hasn't happened yet after the initial shock.. Vermont is a lesser example on the Democratic side that's even more farfetched to think about.
Vermont is the sort of state I expect to drift FURTHER to the left this year.
I very much look forward to the NPVIC being implemented so we never have to worry about a "swing state" ever again.
It’s crazy that we tolerate it at all. Everyone (including me) is up in arms about Democratic backsliding when fact is, the last time my vote for president counted was 2004
If the non-white vote shift really grew legs Hawaii could be interesting perhaps?
Has there been a shift in Asian voting? I thought there has specifically been Hispanic and black shift, and particularly with young men (perhaps just because of a broader trend with young men, but perhaps a specific one in these groups).
Have you not seen all the photo's on Truth Social, of MS-13 members hiking across the desert from Mexico to Hawaii? \S
I’m not sure if the vote shift will resonate on a national level. It seems more relevant to large city elections, insofar as building a coalition that contains black and Asian voters is a much more difficult task post-2020. That is when bourgeois Asian-Americans realized the modal black American kind of thinks Asian immigration was a mistake.
Perhaps--it has a unique populace as well though.
Isn't that last answer in pretty severe tension with Matt's very public anxiety about housing abundance becoming a partisan issue? Don't get me wrong, as a resident of Massachusetts I am very directly the beneficiary of YIMBYism's recent success parking itself as a mainstream center-left position. I'd just love to better understand the thinking here, since there's obviously an admirable self-reflection on what a pundit can accomplish but Matt also seems very much of two minds about whether his signature accomplishment is actually a net positive.
The hope might be that the center left is the faction whose greatest political power is concentrated in the places where building more housing is most important.
Just jumping in to say don’t hire Germans to run your trains system, hire Swiss people or Japanese people, German trains are a mess right now.
I feel like being a do-nothing Governor as a member of the minority party is the cheat code. Get credit with your base for curbing the other party's crazies, and with the moderates for reaching a couple of bipartisan compromises.
Not sure that path is open to Presidents these days. Maybe if Harris wins with a Republican congress she can have her friend the small business account work out the deficit