I enjoy Matt’s writing and he is a gifted intellectual.
But I’m here at least 50% for the comments. The level of insight and discussion I read in the comments is just better than most other comments sections. I used to hate “the comments” wherever they existed because it was always a waterfall of bad faith hostility and weirdo cranks.
I’m not a Mensa kid, I was always just a hustler and I’ve done well because of that. Understanding how other people think about complex policy stuff helps elevate my own thinking. So, thanks Matt and thanks to everyone who contributes to the conversation here!
I continue to think Matt vastly underestimates the value of the comment section to his customers. As supporting data, note that the top comment on any post regularly has 30-60% as many “hearts” as the post itself. Hopefully when he, Kate, and Ben are discussing potential topics, they are also asking, “will this generate a vibrant yet civilized discussion in the comments section?”
I haven't really seen a piece that hasn't produced a vibrant yet civilized discussion section. But for sure, reader engagement is always a primary consideration.
Weirdly, I think I end up putting a heart on a majority of the articles. I think it’s a habit that I’ve got a calibrated level of how much I like a comment to put a heart on it, and most of Matt’s main posts get above that level. (Not as common on the other substacks I read.)
And while other comment sections online can of course be cesspools, talking about big issues like this can sometimes be worse among everyday people offline. It's just really easy for people to retreat into their tribes, and focus way too much of people and personalities, and only talk about how the people they hate are so bad. It's so annoying, and boring not in the Slow Boring way--even if I end up agreeing with them.
This place is regularly a breath of fresh air in that regard, and I collectively thank all of you for it.
100%. The comment section here is extraordinary. One of the few places on the internetn where I seek out specific commenters nearly daily to see their responses.
Agree, especially on the substack mobile app. I have a much easier time wrangling the comments on my desktop (threads are more easily collapsible, collapsed threads are remembered when I come back later).
On Android at least it's possible to keep the app and disable takeover. I had to do that because the app doesn't allow thread collapsing. I suspect iPhone has such options too?
I think there was something that briefly convinced me to use the app, and it was such a worse experience that I uninstalled it and went back to chrome mobile. (Weirdly, Substack is an “only on the phone” thing for me - not on the computer.)
I have many years of practice typing on the phone. I remember being proud about being able to touch type on a phone back in the day when you had to tap each digit repeatedly to get the different letters on that key, and being annoyed when T9 undid that ability (even though it was easier to use). But weirdly I can’t remember what I was typing - I think I was a relatively slow adopter of texting, but maybe even slow adopters were already texting then?
In the early days of its chat system, Substack did the most inexcusable version of this that way too many platforms who introduce something new do, which is "not only is this not available on the web, but it's only available on Apple mobile devices!". It was not fun digging out an old iPad to be able to converse in Matt's first chat that he hosted here.
When someone likes or replies a comments two or more replies deep, you can’t click and get to it directly. Booo. I would pay a substantial upcharge to fix that
There’s usually a link also to the comment it’s a reply to - but only one step up, and it’s really hard to find anything two or three steps up (particularly since I’ve usually minimized some of the threads and can’t just search for the username any more).
100% agree. I also pay for Nate Sliver's substack and the comments there are unreadable. I learn from other posters, especially when I disagree.
I'm pessimistic that Substack will invest in this feature, as they seem focused on building more viral social features. But there's still room to improve and I hope Matt pushes for this:
1. A better sorting system that lets you see popular posts and sub-posts.
2. Some sort of super-poster credibility system. I'd start with # of likes per post adjusted for time of day (earlier posts get more, but timing doesn't predict quality). Then let us filter to super-posters
Substackers who are seem as obsessive over anti-woke stuff get almost uniformly either right-wing nuts or weirdos who claim to be left-leaning, but focus only on the stuff they're reactionary on.
See Freddie DeBoer's comment section, who came to him because he made fun of center-left libs they didn't like, then were shocked when Freddie didn't fall down the anti-woke wormhole on other stuff (which I give him credit for, despite disliking many of his 'people I don't like are successful, which proves they're sellouts' articles.)
Matt has said basic things like, "abortion is good, Republican's are bad, etc." that push away the weirdos, both here and especially on Twitter, while not getting obsessive over the anti-woke stuff.
Freddie being Freddie, he's handled his discomfiture with his anti-woke readership the only way he knows how: by launching a bunch of broadsides against woke-skepticism that are totally inconsistent with his previous stances and to which no one is allowed to respond.
It probably helps that Matt mixes in a lot of “Biden is good, actually”, since for some reason a lot of anti-woke people turn this into anti-Biden (and had been anti-Clinton back in 2016).
Because most of those people are basically conservatives now for all intents and purposes, for the same reasons people like Tim Miller from The Bulwark is basically a lib now.
I know this is somewhat controversial, but if you claim to be pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-economic liberalism or leftism, but spend 90% of your time obsessing about Culture War Issue X on the conservative side, then the reality is you're just a conservative, at least in American politics. Especially if you're prominent at all.
Which is why consistently talking like Matt does how, say, Medicaid and Social Security are actually good, the Republican's want to ban abortion and cut taxes to rich people seem to upset these types so much, because they only want to care about what somebody making $40,000 a year writing reviews for TV shows who posts something silly on Twitter says.
Like, there are plenty of non-college educated people in say, Tennessee who don't mind Medicaid or Social Security, but are legitimately pro-life, pro-gun, etc. and would never vote for a Democrat. We don't call these people moderates, because they really aren't, so I don't see why we need to do the same for college educated people in blue areas freaking out over shifting social more and so on.
Note this isn't about say, Jonathan Chait, even if he's more obsessive about all this than Matt, or even Jesse Signal, who I deeply disagree with on certain issues, but the more obvious grifters.
I genuinely don't understand what role political labels serve for you.
When you designate someone as conservative, is the point to identify them as a person that should be ignored or avoided, like Kiwi Farmers saying "don't touch the poo"?
Alternatively, is the point to cast suspicion on everything they write?
I find political labels occasionally useful on specific issues, less so to describe people*, given how truly surprising most people's political opinions are - really surprising and often downright weird if you hew to some party line.
* Though more valuable when used for self-description.
I suspect it's driven by where the writer falls on the liberal-conservative and establishment-contrarian spectrums plus the subject matter.
Both MY and Silver are and are seen to be contrarian, which can pull in a lot of anti-woke people. But many of them won't subscribe to slow boring because MY is actually pretty far left and mostly promotes left-leaning policies. By contrast, Silver viewed as partisan and covers process much more than policy. So, he becomes a more welcoming home for right-wing cranks.
I've been really happy that Matt's readership has included such a diverse set of political views. Also, the comments are really well moderated.
I'm short on substack as a business and hope that writers are planning for alternatives.
1. They've raised enough money that they need to focus on revenue acceleration. Therefore they invest more in things like Notes and Chat, which for me are completely irrelevant.
2. They have done nothing meaningful to accelerate cross-selling across subscriptions. Their biggest advantage is being the biggest site - it's negligent that they can't exploit this.
3. Because ownership of readers is something they used to attract writers, it means the foundation is stable. if a few headline writers bail, the whole thing could crumble.
Re #2: I don't know why they don't just do a "extra article per month" option. There's are only so many writers each person will pay full freight for. When I add up all my media subscriptions - Substack, NYT, Disney+ and about 10 others - there are substack writers I'd like to support but dont't. But I'd pay for something that gives me 5 more gated articles per month.
I subscribed to this substack specifically to challenge myself to consistently read work from a thoughtful writer one or two steps to my Right to avoid getting siloed information only from people who agree with me or are more extreme which is the social media pattern. I have found the comments section here to be much more thoughtful than what I have seen everywhere. Since the commenters range from me to four to five steps to my Right it has been a more extreme experiment to interact here than I first intended but I have found it helpful to challenge my thinking or at least have a more realistic understanding of what that thinking might look like.
I would say that what I do find surprising in terms of what is missing from this comments section that I do in other spaces that I interact with would be (1) interest and respect for religion (2) recognition of the connection between human life and a healthy thriving natural environment (3) more serious considerations about what makes a healthy community beyond just economic vitality. Nevertheless, I do find the conversations here useful enough that I waste more time here than I intend to each week.
Despite the fact I'm likely on the left edge of commenters here (even though the likes I get show there is at least a silent minority of more left-leaning people who don't want to get involved in the comment section at times because they don't enjoy the scrapping as much as I do), I do enjoy it, even though I do agree with somebody downthread that depending on the issue, I can guess the tenor of what the most-liked comments will be.
I like your comments, even if I don't always agree with them and I don't always click the upvote button. Disagreements from your perspective help us sharpen our own opinions.
I mean I forget to do that, even for stuff I agree with.
But, I do think the comment section is to the right of the people reading the articles here. Not in a Freddie DeBoer you're all Crypto-Republican's way, but more a "you're Gen Xers getting older and disliking social change and the more left-leaning views of younger people" way.
Sometimes, in ways that even as an evil social democrat SJW I can see, and sometimes in yelling at clouds way.
I'm Matt's age, so an Xer/Millennial cusper, and I think if we all laid out our views I'm probably somewhat woker than the median Slow Borer. But I do think that several writers have done well to identify a type of ideology that I think is best identified as the "illiberal left" that can have a "my way or the highway" mentality that can get exhausting and tough to support at times. SJW is sometimes another term for that set but I don't think that's a great term--sometimes it's good to fight for social justice!
Ironically, one of the many things that I don't like about the fringe of the Left that I think can be fairly described as the "illiberal left" is their careless embrace of using violent rhetoric and dehumanizing and extremist language to denounce their perceived "enemies" even if those folks might be more accurately described as neighbors and fellow citizens.
But I think it is sort of amusing that moderates does recognized that moderates can have a pretty illiberal element in their midst as well. This whole ill-defined desire to punch hippies and generally demeaning language about progressives is just as off putting as a lot of what turns them off about leftist extremists. It does reduce my comfort sharing in this group.
In my opinion part of what marks someone as an extremist isn't just where they fall along an ideological spectrum but how fixed they are to that point and how unwilling they are to grant respect to those at other points. Folks can be just as problematically dogmatic to the middle as they are to any other spot.
The SJW things is an example of the Right and Middle sharing a snide shorthand that I don't think does them any favors in convincing anyone outside their own silos of anything. I don't know anyone who would call themselves a social justice warrior. I don't run with that egotistical a crowd. But I definitely know people, myself included, who aspire to be social justice advocates or activists. Honestly, that isn't my most unappealing quality and positioning yourself in opposition to social justice is a broad and odd position to want to stake out and not one that makes me more curious or open to that person's point of view.
This formulation is interesting because to me the phase space of social justice activism is not uniformally explored. For example, Falun Gong see themselves as social justice activists, but I bet you don’t. Defining social justice activism as agreeing with MY opinions is artificially narrowing.
I just get so frustrated with the left’s focus on what I consider less important issues and a refusal to do anything about the fact that the rent is too damn high. Suppose that’s why I like this Substack.
Interestingly, I have kind of gone the other way on the comments--I used to read them and comment myself (at tedious length) more often but have fallen off.
Partly I think it is because I just straight up can't look at them on work days in the hospital, but it also feels like right now the discussion kind of goes in a few predictable directions, so it kind starts feeling like a rehash. OTOH, I sort of wonder if that kind of thing is cyclical, with different particular mixes of posters moving in and out year to year. I will be curious to see.
And this reinforces my puzzlement at a site that would not want comments, would not even allow them from non-subscribers. And that is another place that a micro-payment option would help; it would gather income from potential commenters.
There is a definite undercurrent of anti-comment sentiment. Both the DCist before WAMU killed it and the GGW newsletter had and eliminated comment sections. Both seemed to assume that unless intensively monitored the section would become toxic and that that degree of monitoring would be costly (even traumatic for the monitored). This overlooks the benefits and exaggerates the cost.
It's different for you when you're out traveling for work in South America, but otherwise us Westerners have no choice but to do this, because the odds are some advantaged early bird Easterner has already sniped our comment. I definitely don't want to be that guy that ends up being the 4th or 5th person observing something like Matt saying that Bob Dole was from South Dakota when he was really from Kansas.
If you actually see me post soon after weekday morning articles open up, that means I'm either on vacation, or (more likely) I got awoken by something way too early and I can't get back to sleep.
I've been a subscriber since Nov. 13, 2020, and have enjoyed the ride. Thanks.
A suggestion re: covering the Presidential Election: Don't change your tone or approach merely because it is the campaign season. Please don't write posts with obvious political spin. Those are boring, and not in the good sense.
Best $8 a month I spend. I get more utility from my Slow Boring subscription than from my country club membership. And SB has never cancelled pickleball to monetize a wedding.
Unironically I think pickleballers could be one of Matt's core audiences. The slew of neighborhoods banning pickelball because of the noise in public parks feels like a land-use / zoning issue where a lot of pickleballers could see the reason in Matt's takes.
So have I--I just wish I became a commenter before circa New Year's Day 2022, I had a weird hangup about it that I just needed to get over and plunge in. Glad I did.
Trumps "policy" agenda mostly centers on undermining the independence of agencies, not issues themselves. I'd love to see coverage of how this would play out in individual agencies. Interview somebody at HHS or EPA about what range of things could happen if Trump was re-elected.
I'm sometimes shocked at how much things differ between agencies. A friend is an EPA plant inspector. He expects to be sued every single time he issues negative findings and has to work with EPA attorneys on every audit. In healthcare, suing the FDA is considered a suicide mission and only happens in truly extreme situations.* I'm sure that unraveling civil service protections would play out in a similarly variable way.
* An interesting current example is that the firm that makes generic stimulants has sued the DEA about delays in releasing production quotas. Because these are controlled substances, they are regulated by both FDA and DEA. DEA is cracking down -- mostly incorrectly in my view -- which has resulted in a shortage of ADHD medications.
My mother retired early from her US Customs job because of the first Trump presidency. I assume that people currently working for the agencies aren't really allowed to comment on these things, but I imagine there's lots of former feds willing to talk about why Trump led to their departure.
I’m constantly surprised that the niche of centrist Democratic politics is so unoccupied in the media landscape. On the face of it, it seems like the niche where most voters are. A Joe Biden with center-right policies/rhetoric on immigration and crime, plus centrist policies/rhetoric on culture war issues would skate to reelection.
I'm dubious that in our polarized politics, any politician skates to re-election at this point. But agree, that Biden would make against amongst undecided and independent voters if he made a high profile executive move on decision with the rhetoric to back it up.
Sometimes things can seem the same until they suddenly change. From 1964 through 1988 blowouts were more common than close races. Not saying change is due by any means, but it could happen for reasons we can't foresee.
Important reminder ! This actually could be a good mailbag question: it’s 2028 and we are back to a clear dominant vs satellite party model, how did we get there? Or - we back to depolarization with frequent landslides for either party as the new norm- how did that happen? Might be a helpful exercise
Six incumbents (36, 56, 64, 72, 80, 84) had the opportunity to lead their parties to second consecutive White House terms. Not only did five of those six prevail, but every single one was a historically noteworthy blowout. Nixon and Reagan won 49 states. Johnson won the highest percentage of the popular vote in 140 years.
I mean, ironically, because there was a supermajority agreement on basic cultural issues, so it became all about economic stewardship. Every politician outside of the narrow edges was lightly socially conservative to moderate, and had no connection to said issues, so they could sell those constituencies (both sides) out more easily.
Now, I think the current world where Democratic politicians actually care about abortion, immigrants, LGBT people, and so on is better, even if it means we can't win 40 state landslide anymore.
Slavery in the 1800s was pretty big cultural issue, as was Suffrage in the early 20th, and Civil Rights in the 60s. I don't think it is as simple as "politicians ignored culture until recently"
I mean, I think the fact elections were very close in the post-Civil War era is a pretty good example, because the biggest cultural issue - the Civil War - was something that everybodies views on was widely known on. No Southerner was voting for a Republican, no matter their economic views and in many ways, vice versa, at least until the population changed and a bunch of Democrat's embraced immigrant communities.
Part of the reason why the GOP could win landslides in the 60's, 70's, and 80s is unlike today, they were much closer to the center on those hot button issues - there weren't Republican nominees talking about how sexual harassment laws, EEOC laws, and even Nixon did some pretty 'woke' stuff combined with law 'n' order messaging because of the bipartisan consensus on those things allowed him to get the votes of Rockefeller Republican's _and_ Archie Bunker types.
The 2024 GOP version of the Civil Right's era would be all-in on Thurmong/Goldwater-type arguments and even with massive crime increases and the other stuff going on, McGovern might've won or got a lot damn closer, just like we're seeing today with despite high inflation, possibly being too culturally liberal for the median voter, and so on, a lot of Democrat's are winning races, because the GOP is scaring away normies.
I also think as I noted, part of it is more access to information. There's a lot of Civil Right's skeptical voters who voted for Democrat's who were very pro-Civil Rights, because they didn't make a big deal out of it.
I'm not saying there has never been culture war issues before - I'm just saying it's new you know where all politicians stand on said issues, and people are also well aware who you're allying with by voting for each party.
Like, there are a lot of McCain/Romney types who part of their shift to the Dem's is realizing just how crazy the MAGA types more than policy, just as a lot of shifting to Trump voters are over being uncomfortable on the side of protestors, activists, immigrants, feminists, or whomever they see as The Other.
No one is ever truly competent to be President, some just fake it better than others. Ironically Biden is probably the most competent we’ve had in a long time, but he doesn’t project a great image.
It's persuasive to my Trump-deranged brain; but I've found that anti-Trump articles written by conservatives are effective at explaining the decision to withhold the vote from Trump, but ineffective at justifying the step between staying home/protest vote and actually voting for Biden. I think the best article towards that aim is Catoggio's: https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/boilingfrogs/the-state-of-our-union/
My main interest over the next six-months is finding a way to persuade my relatives (father mostly) to withhold their purely partisan-brain vote for Trump - I am resigned that getting them to vote for Biden is not going to happen.
The downside is he would just piss off progressives without getting any credit for the pivot. But I would rather them try some pivoting instead of trying to appeal to young left wing voters that don't really matter that much.
I'm not sure what "center-right" means at this point with respect to immigration. Right-right (ie, MAGA) is so extreme on immigration in 2024, that I suspect center-right realistically means something like "Don't demonize immigrants en route to a draconian reduction in legal immigration inflows." Which is not what the country needs right now. At all. Here's how I break it down:
(1) MAGA-right: immigration is bad, and the country needs to prevent the Caucasian population share from dropping lower.
(2) Center-right: a modest amount of immigration is tolerable, but these days immigration is too high, so, in addition to much stricter enforcement against unauthorized immigrants, we need deepish cuts to legal immigration inflows, at least for en extended period,
(3) Center: legal immigration inflows are at acceptable levels, but we should shift sharply to skilled immigrants, while pursuing tougher border policies. Also, no government healthcare.
(4) Center-left: We really need more immigrants, and ought to increase our inflows by a variety of means. This could translate into things like handing out long term visas to STEM grads; expansion of guest worker programs; reforms to the H1B program; flat out green card expansions; more resources to make our immigration service a more efficient hoover for talent. Also, while strong borders are vital, we realistically need a deal with Mexico; that's the only thing that will make a difference barring a serious deterioration in the US job market. And yes, of course immigrants legally in this country should be eligible for government healthcare programs. Also, build some damn houses.
(5) Hard-left: Borders are inhumane. Also, everyone to the right of me is racist.
I think my shot at defining a center-right position on immigration would be: "Limited immigration is fine and often needed, but immigrants that move here need to assimilate into American society, and especially learn to speak English.".
>...Immigrants that move here need to assimilate into American society, and especially learn to speak English.<
That might make sense in terms of political branding, sure, but AFAIK there's not a shred of evidence that the primacy in America of the English language is threatened, nor is there evidence today's immigrants are learning English more slowly than in previous eras.
We don't actually need the government doing anything to pressure newcomers into learning English. Economic incentives already provide that pressure. Massively so.
Like I said to Jesse, I completely agree with you on this on the merits, and yet it doesn't stop people from yearning for and demanding more homogeneous language and culture.
So, the sane center-right view is immigrants need to do something basically never done before in American history of immigrants (look up how many Polish newspapers there were in 1923), and assimilate in ways never asked of previous generations, since despite freakouts, there is no evidence of actual lack of assimilation among new immigrant groups, even in things like English proficiency by generation.
Yes, I know some immigrant group said something and it's proof they're going to stay in their enclaves forever.
I didn't say that it makes sense, and I certainly don't agree with it. On CR's scale I'm probably like a 4.4 on the merits, but drawing closer to 4.0 when I have to factor in politics.
A center-right position could say "they need to learn to speak English" without making it a pre-requisite of immigration or even as an official language, more a recognized preferred outcome.
I mean, I think expecting a 43-year old barely primary educated migrant from El Salvador to learn English when they're working 60 hours a week is kind of pushing it as something that can reasonably happen.
The thing that's happened with every immigrant group in history - the first gen speaks mostly the mother tounge, it's mixed the second gen, largely English the third gen, and the fourth gen needs lessons in their mother tounge seems fine, I guess? It's not like there's any evidence this has actually changed.
Like obviously, sure, funding to help people and such, but it just seems unrealistic and more people are upset that people are speaking in languages they don't know around them, which again, is nothing new in American history. Maybe not in their North Carolina suburb or whatever.
I mostly agree, but a left-wing emphasis on multiculturalism seems to run directionally against it "there's no need for them to learn English" and I think the center right directionality isn't "unreasonable" even if the expectation of _arriving at that goal_ is unreasonable and holds up as historically unreasonable.
I think the historical status quo you describe is a pretty fair outcome.
The job market has changed since the 1900s, and education and communication are more important than ever. It also builds mistrust when people don’t speak the language. (I learned more German in about two months of living there than in 3 years of classes. It’s about desire to learn.)
It really doesn't seem unreasonable to me. The hypothetical 43 year old migrant's lack of secondary education doesn't mean they're not smart enough to pick up at least a working knowledge of another Indo-European language. And maybe it's just me, but if I'm going to spend the last few decades of my life in a country where 90% of people speak the same language it seems like it would both be beneficial to me and respectful to my new culture to make a serious effort to learn it.
It's kind of amazing how half the people who work at my car wash have clearly never once taken 15 minutes to watch a YouTube tutorial video on basic English phrases. This, despite living in an American city where learning English would be...useful?
General election yes. Primary no. Matt's point that Republicans putting up increasingly worse candidates has allowed Democrats to move left and still win has significant repercussions for both parties and what their political coalitions think is good/achievable.
What's weird to me is that Joe Biden "was" the moderate option in the primary. If the moderate candidate winning the primary doesn't get you moderate messaging and policy then what does?
Because as much as you guys don't like it it, the vast majority of people voting for Democrat's don't have center-right policies on immigration and crime or centrist rhetoric on culture war issues.
Matt tried the whole "Democrat's should moderate on abortion" argument and it actually failed on him.
Like, John Bel Edwards, who signed umpteen pro-gun laws and a six-week abortion ban is to the left of some of this comment section on a certain issue that drives people up the walls for some off reason.
I'm not saying the Democrat's should appease the left only, but the Clintonian thing doesn't work anymore on a national level, because for many voters, the fact Democrat's don't actively hate undocumented, LGBT people, feminist, or whomever their Other is enough to not vote for them, in a way that wasn't true in 1996 because they didn't know any better. There are milliions of Clinton '92/'96 voters who basically didn't know the Democrat's were the party, even then, of gay people, feminists, African-American's and so on. Now, they do.
The Democratic Party can't only exist to appease low-info swing voters in Wisconsin, as much as many people here would love for anybody one inch to the left of them to shut up forever because they think it's the reason Democrat's lose, when in reality, if inflation was 2% and we had 2012 Biden, he could talk about cops being bastards and show up at a BDS rally and probably still win.
"Because as much as you guys don't like it it, the vast majority of people voting for Democrat's don't have center-right policies on immigration and crime or centrist rhetoric on culture war issues."
To win an election, you need swing voters (yes, they absolutely exist).
Also, I am pretty sure what you said just isn't true. If you look at black voters, for instance, they are clearly far to the right of white democrats on both crime and abortion, and this is a block that votes 90% democrat.
"If you look at black voters, for instance, they are clearly far to the right of white democrats on both crime and abortion, and this is a block that votes 90% democrat."
This is highly overstated as a backlash to the idea that all minorities line up with activists on certain issues - on most social issues, most minority voters are yes, more conservative than white liberals, but they're much more liberal than white conservative on these issues.
Also, on crime, from everything I've read, the median view among African-American's seems to be, "crime is bad, but also a lot of cops suck, and sure, we need more here, but can they be less terrible and focus on actual crime instead of bothering my cousin going to work," which again, is the view of basically elected Democrat and most Democratic voters. Which is different than the cop hagiography and defense force I see here in the comments.
Like, the median African-American voter wants more cops in their neighborhood, but also want those cops to have more public oversight, body cameras, and a higher bar to get hired, all things a lot of tough on crime people don't want. See a certain former cop who used to have a Substack who used to pop up here.
There's are also a big age gap here as well - even if younger minorities aren't supportive of defund, they're far less socially conservative than older minorities for the same reasons it's true of white liberals.
On your more general point, the median Democrat is basically where Joe Biden is on most stuff, which is why despite having issues, he has a very high approval rating among Democrat's, still, and there was no big primary challenge from the Left or Right, which honestly, might've happened from the Left if he governed the way some of this comment section wanted form Day One.
Most people in this comment section are pro police reform, I can't say I've seen many comments like you describe that blindly defend cops no matter what.
Graham was one of the more pro-cop people in here of course, but even his view on police reform was much more nuanced than you imply... He did oppose some reforms because he thought they would lead to bad results, but he supported others such as body cameras, discipline matrices, etc. On oversight, his problem with the citizen-led committees many reformers advocate was that in practice, they seem to go easier on bad cops than other cops do.
Everybody here is pro-police reform until crime goes up one percent or one person they think should get a lengthier sentence gets out earlier than they could, then everybody here starts sounding like Buckley running for Mayor.
Honestly, whenever I read Graham on here, he was defending any cop's actions, and then saying he was for "reform", but pooh poohing any actual reform that could get passed, ironically, the way progressive groups stop any reform that isn't perfect to them.
"Everybody here is pro-police reform until crime goes up one percent or one person they think should get a lengthier sentence gets out earlier than they could, then everybody here starts sounding like Buckley running for Mayor"
I've never read anything on here along the lines of "Crime is so high, we need to make it harder to fire cops".
Again, wrt Graham, that just isn't true about reform, and defending every cop's actions. I mentioned two examples of reforms he supported that could and did get passed in many US cities. He supported pretty much all 8 Can't Wait reforms. He also mentioned supporting better policies and training related to positional asphyxia that would reduce incidents like Eric Garner and George Floyd. He wrote a whole Substack piece denouncing people on the right trying to argue Chauvin was actually innocent and explained why they're wrong.
Sure he may not go as you on reform, and disagree with you about the actions of some cops. Maybe it's because I read his Substack instead of just his comments on here, but he had pretty nuanced views and thoughtful posts, I just don't think it's fair to characterize him as someone who thought police could do no wrong and the status quo is perfect in every way.
We don't necessarily have to go back as far as Clinton, though... What about Obama? He cleaned up in the midwest, but can you really argue people didn't know he was the candidate of choice for African Americans, LGBT (despite his initial claim to not support gay marriage), etc?
It seems to me like you're falling into the classic progressive trap of writing off way too many potential voters entirely. Yes there is a hardcore Trump base like you describe who are never going to vote for a Democrat, but many of the people who have defected to the GOP in recent years don't have particularly right wing social views. In many ways these voters the GOP picked up more recently are less socially right wing than traditional GOP voters, as they tend to be non religious.
I mean, there are literally stories of canvassers saying they ran into people saying, "I'm voting for the n-word," while on the trail.
Putting what can be put aside as ancedotal stuff, in many ways, has Matt has talked about on here, on podcasts, and on Twitter, Obama even if it was an act, acted more socially moderate, including like you said, opposing gay marriage, doing a lot of "pull up your pants young kids" rhetorical stuff, and so forth.
Stuff that's harder when even by 2012 standards, we're far more fractured.
Obama was also helped that Mitt Romney was the worst person to run to pick up these type of voters. Frankly, in 2012, Obama might've won by a larger margin if say, Huckabee or Santorum was the nominee, but we would've begun to see the dropoff in these areas sooner.
Remember, the Trayvon Martin "he could've been my son" stuff happened after Obama's reelection, which one can argue when the current rise in wokeness and this version of the Culture War started.
I don't think all Obama/Trump voters are hopeless, and I even think post-Trump, when instead of a charismatic populist who is the most well-known person since Eisenhower to run for President running things for the GOP, it's all of the post-Trump weirdoes, you might see some bounceback in these areas in part due to vote shifting, but also do to a lot of Trump-only voters drifting back in non-voterdom.
But by the same token, Tim Ryan did everything you're supposed to do and lost to a charlatan like J.D. Vance.
I think also frankly, yes, there are a lot of Obama voters who are now more racist or "racially conservative" than they were in 2008 due to 19,000 stories about Black Crime on Facebook and so on. I can easily see a kind of apolitical dude in exurban Wisconsin who voted for Obama because the economy sucked and he didn't like the Iraq War falling down the wormhole of right-wing Facebook and online content convincing him no, black people really are violent thugs and look what they're doing to cities, and so on.
But putting that aside, sure a lot of these voters are less conservative on say, gay marriage or abortion, but they're more reactionary on immigration or other promninent culture issues that are prominent now.
Right, of course Obama acted moderate in a lot of ways - and I think Matt is absolutely right that was key to his election success! He comforted people that he wasn't going to do crazy left wing stuff, etc. But there was still no doubt among anyone that he was the more socially progressive candidate of the two by far. If you were someone who was particularly socially conservative, he was not the person to vote for. I remember reading that anecdote about "voting for the n*****" too, but I would need a lot more solid evidence, to believe that many people racist enough to use that word voted for Obama.
WRT Tim Ryan, midterm elections are just weird and I don't think they're comparable to presidential elections. I also don't think congressional elections can be viewed in a vacuum - if voters think the Democratic party is too radical, one candidate doing the right thing won't cut it.
Interesting hypothesis about Obama voters becoming more racially conservative. I kind of have a hard time believing it just because of how much more racially liberal the American population in general has become in that time (look at the drops in opposition to interracial marriage for instance), but I can't disprove it.
I mean, the "problem" is a lot of Democrat's who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 are dead or are partisan Republican's now and a lot of current Democratic voters are younger and far more liberal than the median Democrat in 2008.
As a result, 2024 candidate can't talk like Obama did on a lot of issues for the same reason Obama didn't talk about immigration like say, Bill Clinton did, which is why Bill Clinton didn't talk or just ignore gay people the way, say Walter Mondale did, who didn't ignore women the way say, LBJ did, and so on, and so forth.
I think as long as left-wing people exist and continue to live in cities and as long as the Democratic Party is largely supportive of abortion rights, immigrants, LGBT people, African-American's who have issues with police overreach, and are generally the party of The Other, 40-45% of the population will always see the Democrat's in radicals, especially when the GOP is now the party of the Anti-Other.
I think a lot of voters have radicalized on various culture war issues so much that moderation will not bring them back over the way people think it will. Like yes, I'm fine with Biden being preformatively pro-cop and I think we got the best political result in that the border bill was voted for by Democrat's, but not actually signed into law, but I think that helps more with wary Biden 2020 voters, not winning over Trump 2016 or 2020 voters.
I think there's some myth that there's some way to toss the left overboard completely, while winning over enough centrist voters to make it up, but I don't think there are that many winnable centrist voters, at least whens that are winnable by moving to the center to center-right on immigration or other culture war issues.
What wins we'll get of former Republican's will be people who are already moderate to liberal on social issues who liked low taxes who finally are sick of the Trumpified GOP, not Johnny, who voted for Obama in 2008, but now wants the border closed.
Like, it was changing by 2008, but I remember a study that's obviously lost in the mist that the first time voters could reliably idenitify the Democratic Party as the party of either minorities or African-American's was either the 2004 or 2008 election.
Which makes sense - even in say, 2000, if you're a low info voter, and only pay attention during election periods, the GOP of the late 90s and early 00s tried to get every non-white face they could get in convention spots and focused on in the crowd, so you might be sure, if you're truly low info.
My larger point is, it's not that the Democrat's are so much to the left than they were in 2008 or 2012. It's that a lot of voters who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 wouldn't have voted for him if they knew the actual positions of the Democratic Party in 2008 even when "moderated", and now they do know, and that's why they vote GOP.
I realize due to the demographics of this comment section, and one could argue the demographic of our host, that many people here wish it could be 2007 politically and culturally forever, but that's almost twenty years ago.
It's like wishing in 1970 to have the politics of 1953 back. Or in 2007 wanting the politics of 1990 back.
Part of the issue for Dems with immigration is that the fundamentals have changed, not just views of voters. Like, there are a lot more illegal border crossings were in 2008, so even if Biden talks a good game about immigration, he will struggle more than Obama did to get people to trust him on the issue. Of course, the challenge is that situation isn't all Biden's fault, as the GOP wants to undermine anything that might make him look good.
Curious, what's your perspective on the best political strategy is for Dems? Do you think there's *anything* they should do differently from now to try and get more centrist voters, or should they just focus on turning out the left?
My only complaint about this article is that it fails to acknowledge that one of the most attractive things about Slow Boring is the comment section. Honestly I pay more to be able to access the intelligent thoughtful and diverse comment section.
Having said that, Matt’s thoughtful writing is what attracts such a great group.
Also, you brought us Milan… the greatest intern ever. (No hate to the current interns)
I'm glad you've found it to be a very positive experience. I am certainly a satisfied customer, and even friends of mine who refuse to subscribe will grudgingly admit it is influential.
As a reader, the utility of Substack has really increased as Twitter has began to decay, and Slow Boring is a big part of that. Twitter used to be a great place to find deeper analysis and bits and bobs from other parts of the internet.
But now that Twitter is sabotaging itself by penalising outbound links and Substack itself, I find that my curated feed on Substack is now where I am getting a big chunk of longer form content from people I'm interested in, and Substack DMs are starting to be a place where I am sharing stuff to other people who use Substack a lot. The content unbundled by the death of newspapers is slowly being re-bundled.
My feed would still be good if Musk didn't put an insane paywall on the API. Now I have to jerry rig things together that get close, but risk me missing a bunch of good replies people have to each other.
I'm curious if you and others think this wouldn't have happened anyway once Substack came along and was successful. The ability to monetize content via Substack compared to Twitter seems like it always was going to dramatically impact the platform - especially longer form content.
I tend to think it has more to do with Musk's management, for a few reasons:
1) The jank factor went way up following the change in management--it feels like there's always something broken, like my feed looping weirdly or video being blacked out or whatever, so using the platform is just kind of low-grade irritating.
2) Elon's politics chased off a lot of the clever / funny feeds I followed where the content itself wasn't really political but the feed was run by someone who cared enough to leave.
3) The new pay-to-play rules seem to elevate a lot of blue-check stuff into my feed that I find weird, dumb, or gross, which presumably is crowding out stuff I would have liked.
To be honest, Substack has not really filled that hole for me; I just flat spend less time on the internet, with old Twitter-scrolling time replaced by other screen activities like video games or reading on the Kindle app. Admittedly, Twitter scrolling was, for me, mostly slotted into little moments of spare time, like right before bed or on the bus to work or on my lunch break.
That's fair. I never used twitter for much beyond following a specific set of people on topics I enjoy and they are still mostly on Twitter so the experience hasn't felt that much different for me. The biggest difference was a few of them gaining enough of an audience to make adding a different platform to monetize worth doing.
Matt’s evolution on climate has brought him closer to my views, so I want to propose some cool topics.
1. The benefits of climate change. In most countries, deaths spike in the winter. People in the US migrate towards the warmer parts of the country. This suggests cold currently causes more human suffering than heat. To what extent will global warming reduce winter mortality? To what extent will making the climate like Virginia more like North Carolina make people happier?
2. Seawalls. We all know the oceans are going to rise. How much would it cost to protect population centers from this? Do developing countries like Bangladesh have the state capacity? Can developing counties do more good through building sea walls or through carbon capture?
3. Air conditioning. To what extend can the harms of climate change me mitigated through air conditioning? How much would bringing air conditioning to poor Indians and Nigerians cost? Can it be done with clean energy?
I understand there are tail risks associated with climate change. However, it’s difficult to have a good understanding of the issue when mainstream media refuses to admit climate change has any benefits and even blames it for blizzards and cold snaps.
I do think we should be thinking about these topics (in fact, the insurance industry already does!), but I would be careful not to frame this as "benefits." The single most important thing to know about climate change is that you're increasing uncertainty. It's not a question of making Virginia more like North Carolina (it's going to be making Virginia more like Florida, btw); it's a question of, are the places where we currently grow our food still going to be suitable for that? And if not, will there be other places? What about the collapse of the food webs in the ocean? What about wildfires? What happens if the ocean currents shut down? What if ancient bacteria get thawed out that we don't have resistance towards? There's way way more.
The point being: Earth is an N of 1. You don't get to run a control experiment and see what happens when you change one of the inputs to the climate. We're running the actual experiment now and we're running models to predict the outcomes, but there's a whole lot of uncertainty that is going to be destabilizing.
I get that there is uncertainty, but there is also a big “cushion.”. The upper midwest, Canada and much of Russia are all regions where the growing season is constrained by frosts. A longer growing season would increase yields in many areas that are now on the northern fringe of agriculture and would extend the fringe further north. Yes, water might evaporate faster but most northern climates have a lot of lakes because water currently evaporates so slowly. Any place with lakes is also likely to have lots of fossil water.
The other thing is we currently grow so much corn that we burn it for fuel. That’s another cushion.
I don't think the "cushion" is as large as you say it is, but I also appreciate that that wasn't really your original point. On that I agree; every climate piece doesn't have to be "here's the doomsday scenario" or "climate change isn't happening and even if it is, we shouldn't do anything about it because China" or "this one weird trick will lower carbon emissions by 40%." I want to read a lot more about "it's coming, and here's how we'll need to adapt."
People also overestimate how large to poles are based on map distortion. There's just more area near the equator.
There's also a nature paper that models pandemic likelihood based on climate change. Tldr it goes up because of climate shifts in the topics, especially with mountains. The poles/midrange attitudes end up being less important.
People say this about the growing season, but what's the topsoil situation like in northern Manitoba? Is this as easy as "well now it's five degrees warmer so I can definitely crow corn"? (I genuinely don't know)
I think some of the problems with opening up new cropland include exactly like you say, no banked topsoil from millions or at least thousands of years of grazed grassland soil building, but also the costs of rebuilding and moving infrastructure, and most of all the unpleasantness of all the wildfires currently converting those areas to grassland or just different forest (the last part is probably hyperbole, it's hard to know how much the wildfires are caused by climate change vs commercial forests planted in single age cohort monocultures)
That is one of the weirdest things about the UK. Like, you’re washing your face in their teeny tiny sink and your choices are “ow ow burning” and “yikes too cold”.
If I remember correctly it's because their houses (historically) have gross hot water tanks and mixer taps risk contaminating the public (cold) water supply
Or, what if as a way of compensating parts of the world more affected by climate change for the U.S. role in contributing to it, and also making progress towards one billion Americans, the United States opened up Alaska, "the Last Frontier" and the state with the lowest population density by a lot, to essentially unlimited immigration for climate refugees from equatorial regions?
Seriously though, while I'll concede there may be some upside in some places, the disruption already being wrought by climate change, as well as the uncertainty mentioned above, just seems like more compelling topics. I'll add that people who live in a place tend to have adapted to the climate they have, with an agricultural, industrial, and economic (e.g., ski resorts) base that rapid climate change will wreak havoc upon.
And, more poetically, and personal to me, is a sense of loss for what used to be. Winter is a gift and a source of wonder for me that I never understood until I moved north from the southern swamp where I was raised. Everything ends, of course, and we may envision a future where the climate is irrevocably altered and humans have adapted, but beyond the actual death and destruction involved in that process, there are these small-scale effects wherein individual people's lives are altered in ways that feel tragic to them.
Immigration is such a benefit to us that I am reluctant to point out how beneficial it is to migrants for fear that this (mistakenly) be seen as zero sum compensation.
But yes the US and other rich countries should massively assist poorer countries to adapt to climate change that they only minimally benefitted from in the past.
You still couldn't have super high immigration levels. Immigration levels need to be slow enough to allow time for assimilation. Otherwise you would be recreating the countries that people are fleeing from which have much lower levels of social capital.
This makes me wonder what California in the 1850s, and other gold rush sites, were actually like, and how they transitioned (though some, like Alaska, may never have transitioned).
I like the terms “Pandoravirus, Megavirus, Pacmanvirus”, but it does sound like most of the people quoted in that article still think that viruses in living animals in the remote tropics are more likely to be relevant than thawed frozen viruses (which is not to say that the latter are zero risk, just not contributing as much even to climate change related viral risk).
Not once they become citizens, but there's no reason Congress can't create a program where admission and permanent residency are contingent on maintaining residency in one state for a limited time until the immigrant qualifies for citizenship.
And similarly, require employers to follow such regulations, too. Compliance wouldn't be 100%, sure, but you probably don't need 100% compliance to make such a system work. The H1B program already has something of this element (wrongly in my view) in that such workers are bound to a particular employer.
I would also love to see some coverage on regenerative farming and how it can store huge amounts of carbon as new top soil while also improving food quality and soil health
On air conditioning, it would certainly help, but people still have to do things outdoors, and if the wet bulb temperature gets to a certain point in tropical monsoon climates, then watch out.
Oh man, this is the problem with the emerging trend of "heterodoxy as a service" -- now a bona fide sector of the gig economy. There are reams and reams of studies on all these issues. The fact that none of them endorse the pollyanna point of view some want is not a reason to dismiss or re-evaluate them or to demand that the media spend more time looking for the pony under the pile.
I'd like to see some sort of enduring "reader bleg" board where people could submit and vote on topics over time. It would work like the feature request tools that software firms use.
I did not know about the winter deaths. I had assumed the opposite, probably because I have lived in northern cities with scarce residential air conditioning for most of my life, so deaths caused by heat are in the news and top of mind. Thanks for a new perspective.
The death increase issue has to do with degree of concentration -- the cold weather death increase is much larger in total volume, but spread over a few months and many of those who die do so in the hospital; heat deaths tend to be concentrated in spikes of just a few days and many of those people die at home, so their deaths are more shocking from a media perspective.
I think we also don’t really have a proper explanation for winter deaths, and we don’t really know how many are caused by absolute temperature vs being caused by just being the relatively cooler time of year locally. As I understand it, the winter surge of deaths is just as large in Florida and Hawaii as in Minnesota and Alaska. This is the whole question we never really learned about with COVID seasonality, and that of other viruses, as well as things like heart attacks.
Re 1, depending on the location, there are real economic benefits to climate change and increased carbon dioxide levels (especially for agriculture), but the "deaths spike in winter therefore warmer weather is good" argument always seems silly. As best I can figure, a lot of extra deaths in winter are from respiratory infections, and while the temperature does have some impact on that, both Alabama and Alaska have flu seasons in the winter. So, even turning Alaska into Alabama won't get rid of the "winter death spike".
Covid was unusual, so I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from it. The flu basically peaks in winter in the whole US. You can see cases by HHS region if you scroll down a bit and set the surveillance area to "Region". The sunbelt is covered by regions 4, 6, and 9.
Your (1) and (3) are linked. If we don't resolve (3), then climate change could reverse (1). That said, there *are* a lot of companies developing cleaner, more efficient cooling systems, including systems better suited to running on renewable power. They're out there, being used and tested, but it's slow going, and for a long time resilience and adaptation have been dirty words in many circle, for a variety of reasons. That seems to finally be starting to change.
(2) Possible, but I think sea level rise in general is overrated as a major risk.
@Allan Thoen: On migrating towards the poles, it's possible, but there is also a question of speed and whether building all new infrastructure in those places is going to be better/easier than trying to adapt-in-place. And rightly or wrongly, even the tiniest efforts to build new things in new places gets shut down for "environmental" reasons without regard for cost-benefit analysis. My take is that by the time enough people recognize the problem as being serious to justify this kind of move, it'll be too late to execute it. I do also think it will be viable to adapt in place. As one example, we may not need polar farmland in the 2080s if by the 2050s we have solar power at 1-2 cents/kWh and energy storage at $50/kWh and mass--produced SMRs and we start to use these capabilities for high-efficiency indoor agriculture (not just lettuce). It may seem far fetched, but I think the longer term development path makes it very likely.
"Hundreds of thousands of people will become climate refugees in places like Bangladesh, but Minnesota will be slightly warmer" does sound like a climate change benefit to most people who care.
I think part of the reason we don't hear much about this topic is that the "benefits" won't really be beneficial "on net" but should realistically be categorized as "mitigating factors."
I think it's more that there just isn't much of an audience for it. To those trying to halt climate change pointing out benefits is counterproductive. To those unconcerned by it pointing out benefits requires acknowledging that it's happening at all.
Climate shifts will be disruptive and disruption is always costly. I doubt anyone has seriously gamed out whether a world that's 2 degrees warmer is a net benefit in the long run.
My two cents on lack of articles about the benefits of climate change is that the benefits are more theoretical and longer term than the harms. E.g., a warmer climate will lengthen growing seasons at higher latitudes, but the topsoil layer (on average) gets thinner and poorer the farther north you go due to historically less dense plant life[1], so the expansion of agriculture in higher latitudes isn't going to offset losses of agricultural land in lower latitudes from desertification, sea rise, etc., for many centuries or more.
[1]: Basically all topsoil north of the 47th parallel in North America and Europe was scrubbed off during the last glacial maximum; meanwhile much of the northern part of Asia that remained ice free nonetheless became a desert due to low humidity levels.
Ah, I just made this same comment elsewhere. This does seem like a big question--south of the Twin Cities is some of the most fertile farmland in the world. You go the other direction and it gets pretty rocky pretty quickly, and by the time you're at the Canadian border it's pine trees sticking out of piles of billion year old volcanic rocks. Not sure if you can grow soybeans in that regardless of temperature.
How much of modern agribusiness just involves pumping some sort of neutral aggregate substance that roots hold onto full of petrochemical derived fertilizers? Seems like that might be able to work just fine regardless of local soil.
Right--but the land I'm thinking of isn't even, like, gravel, it's basically piles of boulders. Maybe you invent a way to turn sand into topsoil (or whatever) but you're going to need to lay it down for tens of thousands of square miles if you want Iowa 2.
But the temperature differential is much worse in cold climates. In NYC you need to increase the temperature by 40-50 degrees F on average to stay sufficiently warm in January. It's more like 10-12 degrees (of cooling) in July.
Cooling and heating are equal in energy usage when you are using a heat pump - the efficiency is exactly determined by the ratio of the warm side to the cold side temperature, expressed in Kelvin’s, which basically means it’s determined by the difference in temperatures in degrees F or C (since we are dealing with at most 30-40 degrees C difference at around 300 degrees C above absolute zero).
Heating does have the advantage that basically every process you do inside the house (including breathing) helps a bit with heating
My slow and boring take on coverage is that I almost think that largely ignoring the entire presidential election might be a good thing. It gets covered to death by everybody else. I'd like to hear a lot more about important down ballot races and issues that otherwise get smothered in the coverage of presidential politics. To be clear, I'm not arguing that the presidential results aren't important. As they say "elections have consequences", but from a point of view of comparative advantage let's discuss things that aren't discussed everywhere else.
Here’s a thing that I don’t think we consider often enough: most of us live in states where our presidential vote is essentially meaningless. Most of us know who is going to carry our state, no matter what they did yesterday or will do tomorrow. All this media hand-wringing about influencing the election? Probably the handful of voters in Michigan who matter are never going to encounter your work. Just tell me the truth please, hold your intellectual integrity dear and trust that it will pay off over time.
For what it's worth, I think MY covers the presidential election in a very refreshing way, and I suspect it gently tugs the national conversation in a healthy direction.
If Matt and team would like help in their brainstorming, I'd like to offer one heterodox topic for a future post : Seven Good Things About the Groups We Like to Punch.
I.e., not about what is good about ideas from the Left (he just did that), but about the The Groups themselves. We here at SB love to beat up The Groups (I do too) but that kind of kneejerk response can make us lazy. They're still bad, but are they 100% bad? I'd love to have Matt shake up our thinking by forcing us to confront cases where, actually, The Groups (and their donors) are right and the rest of us are wrong by too quickly dismissing them.
This would be great! And would help separate the commenters that are here because they like Matt from the ones that are here because they like how Matt hates on The Groups. (This happened in the comment section on that article a few months ago about how antisemitism is really a problem on the right much more than the left.)
That parenthetical is only true if you think antisemitism actually isn’t much of a problem on the left, which many dispute! It’s pretty low to dismiss those who disagree with you as “haters”, esp so when in doing so you yourself by the by the by come out as dismissive of one of the worst forms of hate
I'm not sure I've ever fully understood what is and is not included in "the Groups", but to the best of my understanding they are organizations more-or-less narrowly focused on specific public policy issues and outcomes. On that reading, there are any number of Groups out there doing good work out there.
I’m a longtime subscriber and admirer. However, I’m wondering about the sustainability of this medium in the longer term. With every writer one wants to hear from asking for a paid subscription (and sometimes basically requiring it) I am now subscribed to (at least) a couple of dozen substacks. So, instead of simply subscribing to a few magazines, like The Atlantic and such, and a couple of newspapers, I am subscribing to them but also now paying thousands of dollars a year to read all of the good people I know and then discover all the time who have moved to Substack. I don’t think this is sustainable and I’m wondering what Matt thinks? What I really think must eventually happen (sooner versus later) is for a number of authors to form groups or syndicates to which someone can subscribe “for a discount.” In other words, become more like magazines or journals. Matt, any thoughts?
I'll ask the Substackosphere again, what would be the problem with having a micropayments option. Am I the only person that would like to read -- and for me that means be able to comment on -- a lot more Substacks than I am prepared to pay for? The all or nothing model makes sense for Gym memberships where holding unused capacity has a real cost, but that is not the case with Substacks. I can see that there is little additional revenue for a hugely successful site like Matt's, but why not for others?
But the other point is that a micro pay to comment model would mean that sites would be slightly less bubbly. Again, not with Matt and Noah, but many sites just get comments praising the author for his valuable work! The subscribership does not see any dissent. This does not seem healthy.
No one has ever been able to make the economics work with individual digital purchases. Most people simply find even $1 to be too large of a barrier when there's so much free content online.
Furthermore, publishers don’t want sporadic purchases, but instead the more consistent revenue from subscriptions (and ads). That entails creating a product that is a regular, consistent, novel point of view. Select free articles, as well as publicity on other venues like twitter can convince potential subscribers to consider the product. Customers need to be compelled to commit to a paid subscription.
The tech analyst Ben Thompson has written extensively on the subscription business model for news and opinion publications. He has first hand experience as he’s been running an amazing paid newsletter since 2013. (Substack founders cited him as their inspiration). Notably, see his 2017 article, “The Local News Business Model” [1]
> It is very important to clearly define what a subscriptions means. First, it’s not a donation: it is asking a customer to pay money for a product. What, then, is the product? It is not, in fact, any one article (a point that is missed by the misguided focus on micro-transactions). Rather, a subscriber is paying for the regular delivery of well-defined value.
> Each of those words is meaningful:
> Paying: A subscription is an ongoing commitment to the production of content, not a one-off payment for one piece of content that catches the eye.
> Regular Delivery: A subscriber does not need to depend on the random discovery of content; said content can be delivered to the subscriber directly, whether that be email, a bookmark, or an app.
> Well-defined Value: A subscriber needs to know what they are paying for, and it needs to be worth it.
He has a lot of free articles that cover news and more generally the media industry, particularly how the internet disrupted it. If you find this topic interesting, I bet that you’ll find reading a few convinces you to commit to a paid subscription for $120/yr.
I'm just saying I do not understand why a subscription substack cannot have an additional piece rate module. It would be a two part tariff, extracting some income from the part of the demand curve below the profit maximizing subscription price. Would all of Doomberg's subscribers switch to paying by the peice if he allowed it?
Because if sites like Slow Boring started offering individual purchases, then I imagine fewer free subscribers would convert to paid over time because when readers finally got over their barrier to paying, they can contend themselves with a single article rather than committing to a subscription. Matt and co. would have to regularly convince free subscribers and guest to making purchases, whereas now they just need to get us to click subscribe once.
Furthermore, once we commit to a purchase, we're more likely to read future paid articles that we've already bought. We may even feel compelled to consume to justify our past purchase decision. As we grow accustom to the habit of reading SB, our subscription becomes increasingly sticky.
Your scenario just seems less plausible to me than people discovering sites they like enough to subscribe (at a lower cost/read) plus some income from drive by readers or low intensity readers.
[Although it is not a big concern for me, I'd probably try charging people to read for my priceless opinions if I could test the waters with micro-payments. ]
And adding a micropayment option would be more valuable to Substack as a platform than the sum of the financial advantages to writers.
My fear is that readers paying by the article will push writers, consciously or not, to prioritize clickbaity type articles. Seeing certain articles rake in the bucks while others you lovingly crafted instead crash and burn has to affect their motivations.
I think that per article payment coud be an addition to subscribers. Admittedly I am generalizing from myself. There are a lot of Substacks I will not pay to subscribe to that I would occasionally pay to have access to.
I think you underestimate the differences in business models between paying per piece vs subscription and the dangers of cannibalizing the second if the first is offered. For most writers, the advantage of steady income from subscriptions is far more valued than the ability to get a bit more money through a piece rate model to the extent that you wouldn't want to jeopardize it in any way.
The only way I could see making it work would be to make the piece rate model to be so high that people would only use it if they really only wanted one or two pieces a month. E.g. if you are charging $10-$12 a month, then make the one piece rate price $4-$5 each. But then very few would do the second option so it negates the point of having it.
Maybe so, but people are not really deciding month by month to subscribe. The thing I subscribe to I quite enjoy every post. I would not unsubscribe to pick and chose for a buck or so per article. But admittedly I may be atypical.
Neither would I. Having thought about it more, I also think that people are not likely going to want to exert the mental energy of sifting through articles that much. Better to simply pick the sources/subscriptions that you feel bring higher value and go with those.
I do. But there are many sites that I am not willing to subscribe to that I see posts on that I'd like to read and comment on.
But maybe _I_ am just not a big enough market to be worth catering to. :)
Still, I really suppose that if Substack allowed a option of Subscribe for $X/year or read individual pieces for $X/n each where n = ~ 50 (each poster coud choose their n) the number of Subscribers would be about the same. I can see that if has more overhead cost, so maybe THAT is the constraint.
The flipside is that high monthly subscription prices promote a star system that makes it harder for other voices to gain a viable economic foothold in substackland.
2) People who subscribe, get regular articles, and are able to comment and converse with other regular commenter are buying a different product that someone who buys a one off article.
I mean as compared to $10 for a bundled subscription. NYT all news subscription is what, $17 / month? That's for a vast amount of information and differing viewpoints, etc. Compared to that, the economics of Substack are pretty niche. Most people won't subscribe to 10 substackers at $10/month each.
If only we could bundle all these great writers into a single entity that has columns we read regularly, perhaps on a daily or twice a week basis... someone should create something like that.
There's probably something real to the critique that most business strategy just comes down to bundling / unbundling and centralization / de-centralization cycles.
What I'd like to see Substack offer is a sitewide subscription where you could unlock any article on any blog that chooses to opt in to the sitewide subscription, and that blog would get a cut of the revenue from that sitewide subscription. Ideally I'd like one lump sum of $A for B number of articles, but given what Matt Hagy always says below about publications obsessing over recurring set it and forget it monthly subscriptions, I would begrudgingly accept that too.
My comment was meant to be a bit tongue in cheek... it's essentially the newspaper/magazine model. Kind of like how all of the streaming services are recreating the cable model by bundling again.
Sure, but people have differing overlaps of interest, and it would be cool if someone could invent variable bundles to cater to each person's unique interest.
To some extent, yes, but bundling can be positive-sum.
There are almost certainly people who won't pay $10/month for Slow Boring but would pay $20/month for SB + 10 other newsletters. That increases the revenue pie.
It also can increase the quantity of economically viable content, which can increase demand even more. Think about cable: ESPN obviously subsidizes other channels and has forever, but bundling also opened the door for prestige television and channels like AMC and FX became powerhouses in their own right that drive bundle subscriptions and extra revenue for ESPN.
ESPN worked really, really hard not to subsidize other channels! Their carriage rates were extremely high compared to most other channels and are a major reason why cable got so expensive that people started cancelling their subscriptions.
I understand that the dynamics are different because cable is/was a monopoly, but it's still true that bundling created a big pile of money that enabled lots of high quality content, which in turn drove more subscriptions, and the ESPNs ultimately benefited from that.
Ultimately, there *are* synergies - acquisition cost savings and a larger revenue pie - so there *should* be a positive-sum bundling opportunity, but that would depend on the right bundle, pricing and marketing execution. Who benefits most would come down to negotiation.
Ad-supported is micropayments and shows exactly all the perverse incentives that micropayments create.
You think clickbait headlines are bad now? Just till you see the clickbait incentivised by a micropayment to unlock the actual article.
You hate how articles are spread across 7 pages to maximise ad views? Just wait until you need a micropayment to unlock Part 7 in the article you're reading.
You hate how recipes online always start with 1,000 words of ChatGPT biographical rambling because of ads? Just wait until micropayments means there's an even bigger incentive to pad things out so and split the article into multiple micropayments.
Hate all the content farming by ChatGPT/developing country "content writers"? Just wait for a Cambrian explosion of that, even harder to distinguish from real content, once micropayments make it more lucrative.
Then add in all the NEW issues. You know how Amazon can give a cut for purchases via a referral link? Micropayments could do the same thing. So now you don't know if Matt is linking to some article because it is genuinely great or because he thought it was kind of okay but he gets 20% of any micropayment to unlock it.
Thoughtful piece, but I disagree with "This has created a sort of paradoxical situation in which the NYT remains stridently neutral in its core political coverage, but quite left-wing in other areas." The NYT is left of center politically--it rarely, if ever, has anything positive to say about a conservative politician or policy, while it often explicitly or implicitly praises liberal ones (such as on immigration, climate change, etc).
That said, congratulations on your well-earned success.
I presume you’re a fan of Obamacare, but per your comment, have nothing positive to say about Romneycare, on which it was largely based? Or the individual mandate which was originally espoused by the Heritage Foundation?
The idea Obamacare was largely based on Romneycare is a stretch, ironically pushed by left-wingers who wanted single payer and the 12 reasonable conservatives who wanted credit.
Romneycare had almost none of the regulation changes, no Medicaid expansion, and so on. The only real thing was the worst part of the ACA - the exchanges, while the best part is the parts that tell health insurance companies they have to be less evil and the Medicaid expansions.
Also, the individual mandate was actually bad policy it turned out, and Obama was right to initially oppose it.
The individual mandate was not bad policy, but rather bad politics, which I think is an important distinction.
Agreed that Romneycare and Obamacare are not as similar as some claim, I was reaching for that in response to the commenter above who had nothing positive to say about anything any conservative policy. I think someone who supports Obamacare (a presumption I made about the commenter which may not be true) would be able to find something positive in Romneycare (eg it significantly expanded access to healthcare).
Partly because the other parts were much better (Medicaid expansion, regulatory changes, etc.) and simpler, and because not only were the exchanges not that effective at least at the beginning because of compromises that had to be made toward centrists, they were also the cause of about 90% of the bad stories that went beyond the right-wing fringe of 'death panels' and the like.
This is totally ancedotal, but when I heard normies complain about it back during the initial startup, from what I remember, it's because the costs were way too high, it was confusing what was actually covered, and technology hiccups.
It seems better now, but largely because it's become much closer to being a subsidized private option, as opposed to a pure market. Which as a dirty social democrat, I don't mind, but I also think we could've gotten a better political deal, if possibly, by passing the regulatory changes, expanding Medicaid, then also dropping the Medicare age to 55 and introducing Medicare opt-in for kids or something like that, instead of making Peter who works part-time at a gas station pay $400/month for crappy insurance or face a fine.
Honestly, the part where the GOP basically stopped the IRS from fining people from not getting insurance was a backend political win for the Democrat's.
Thanks. I'm just getting started on the exchanges for the first time, and I do find it frustrating so far that I have to go through one operating as a middleman instead of just doing business straight with the insurer. I can conceptualize the need to build big insurance pools, but I'm encouraged by you saying that there could be a better way.
My main pain point with the ACA is the public option getting killed. Damn Lieberman, even back in the 90s as a teenager I always knew something was not right with him. Especially when he ended up looking like a dead ringer for Palpatine.
The reality is neither side is always right. And society needs both impulses, progressives pushing change and conservatives say slow down have you thought this through.
>>And I’ve come to see the mainstreaming of this fairly extreme approach to climate change as probably the central error of the contemporary progressive movement.
Not to go TOO far off topic, but this is similar to my most heterodox view contra progressivism: I view it as a central error that modern feminism incorporated such an extreme approach to abortion. Not necessarily because I think they should all go to the other extreme, but the degree to which dissent has been rendered anathema and feminism identified EXCLUSIVELY with choice is kind of striking. It's entirely possible to imagine a feminist movement that remained divided on the issue and was more or less "OK" with that status quo.
Although, to their credit, much of the aftermath of Dodd has indeed proved that the hardcore abortion left were correct that the right just wanted to control women. Which IMO doesn't remotely excuse abortion per se, but certainly lends credence to marginal arguments for things like birth control and generous abortion exceptions.
I really didn't want to be the woman who argues with you about abortion today, but your second paragraph negates your first.
The mainstream feminist position that abortion is a private healthcare decision between a woman and her doctors is NOT extreme and, as you almost admit, recent events have proven that. Tragically, publicly, and unnecessarily.
Dobbs has been painful in the short term. But longer term, I can now see within the next five to ten years an end to the bitter and seemingly-intractable abortion debates that have divided our country and warped our politics for my entire life -- and the end is the emergence of a genuine democratic consensus that abortion should be legal. That wasn't possible before Dobbs.
Abortion has often been framed similarly to prohibition, in that the parties staked out extreme positions and demonized the other side. Then when the temperance movement won, it took everyone a few years to realize "oh yeah, this was a stupid idea" and repealed it.
Unfortunately for abortion, a lot of people are going to have some pretty serious health issues before that happens.
The backlash to Roe from the right lasted 50 years. I doubt it will be different now that the shoe's on the other foot, and I expect the backlash to Dobbs to stick around for a while.
Considering that Leonard Leo and crew are pushing to have a national abortion ban enacted either with the next Republican trifecta or with the current SCOTUS, the issue will indeed be "settled." Just very much not in accordance with popular sentiment.
A national ban might happen. But it would be like prohibition, and get repealed in a few years after causing lots of suffering, and later be seen as a misguided step on the way to whatever the eventual consensus is.
It's unfortunate that so many women will have to pay a large price as we make our way to the sunlit upper lands of this hoped-for near-consensus, but all the same I think you're right. Of course, if Trump wins and takes over the FDA, that happy outcome will be all the more painful and delayed.
Yeah and our system makes it so hard to actually "codify Roe". Red states probably can get away with banning abortion forever even if it hurts the broader Republican party.
I just honestly disagree on the merits and don’t think I have anything meaningful to contribute in rebuttal. Cheers.
Ed: Also, FWIW, I harbor no prejudice towards you as "the woman who must make the argument". I get that it's not fun being the stereotype, and I feel as a "choice-skeptical feminist" that it's my duty to give women I disagree with (or anyone else for that matter!) a fair hearing, and not reduce them to stereotypes. It's not my first rodeo having the unpopular, heterodox opinion in progressive spaces, and it's actually brought me to a rather moderate stance relative to where I started out. But thanks for at least helping uphold the value of civility here! I know it's a difficult topic for everyone, least of all myself.
I would say recent events have only demonstrated that the counter position (no abortions or very early bans) is extreme. But I agree with Dave’s point that the extremism in the other direction has also been counterproductive for the feminist cause. Had that movement struck a more moderate note, I think it would have been less alienating to a broad swath of women, myself included.
I think that the mainstream feminist position was that any restriction would be used by people opposed to all abortions as a complete ban to the absolute greatest extent possible, and therefore they had to oppose all restrictions in practice, even if they didn't all actually oppose all restrictions in theory.
That is, they were responding to a practical political world where there was no authority that could be trusted to be given the power to say "no" to an abortion that would not be distorted into saying "no" to all abortions and therefore creating any such authority was not acceptable.
That doesn't mean that they necessarily all believed that every abortion should be a "yes", but, over time, you come to believe your own talking points, so they came to believe that extreme position.
It's possible that some restrictions that will actually be limited to the cases that they are intended for will be able to actually be implemented.
Soomething like a typical European policy: "abortion on demand to 15 weeks, abortion for any significant health issue affecting mother or baby until birth, though if a C-section is an option very late, then you have to do that instead of abortion" requires a body that is capable of deciding if there is a "significant health issue" quickly and which is not subject to being dragged through the courts (by either side) afterwards. I'm not even sure if you can create such a body within the bounds of the US Constitution, but there was certainly no way of doing that pre-Dobbs. In a typical European system, it's some sort of group of doctors, sometimes in a single hospital, sometimes national (which is roughly equivalent to statewide in US terms). I can't imagine US lawyers accepting a system where some body with no lawyers on has the final word.
I think that was rather paranoid and unhinged of them. They didn’t have to assume the worst; maximalism on their part was one of the major factors in the downfall of Roe.
I think the problem was that TRAP had demonstrated that they couldn't get a good-faith compromise from anti-abortionists, and that institutional design is not something that any part of the US political spectrum works at. So they'd seen restriction laws and knew they were just bans, they'd never seen a restriction that actually worked and they'd reached the reasonable conclusion.
The fact is: institutional design is important, is something the US is really bad at, and creating a novel institution to achieve a complex compromise and then tweaking it legislatively several times until it works is something that has literally never happened. Why hasn't the structure of the EPA been modified by a new act of congress every few years to ensure it's achieving its intended goals? Because the US political system is not good at this.
However, I'd just add that what you're describing is a clear case of a distrust spiral.
Which is dumb! This same dynamic is how wars get started! We are presently hotly divided on the Israel-Palestine conflict which is just another example of this dumb dynamic!
IMO, in these cases it's the leaders who are generally to blame. Peacemaking is extremely hard and takes remarkable personal courage, because it means standing up to your own tribe and saying, "We shall not retaliate". Leaders who fall short of this, or worse, happily contribute to the spiral, are the ones primarily responsible for the failure to make peace.
So, if anything, however understandable your explanation is, it's not excusable. NARAL should have done better. So should the pro-lifers. Generations of BOTH women AND the unborn deserved better than this. None of your explanation exonerates any of the leaders involved, it just further indicts their short-sightedness.
Correct. The thing with exceptions for non-viable pregnancies, rape, incest and welfare of the mother is that pregnancy has a very tight timeline and every time you have to seek the input of another body you're throwing up a roadblock and delay, and every time there's a grey area doctors are incentivized to avoid performing the abortion. Because of this, exceptions aren't sufficient, at least not in the United States, because they do effectively force women to carry to term even if technically the woman probably qualifies for the exception. It's too much red tape and government footdragging on a timetable where weeks, even days, matter.
The Norwegian medical panel is obliged to reach a decision within 24 hours and there is no appeal. If, in the attending doctors' opinion, the medical condition is more urgent than that, then they can operate without waiting and the worst penalty a doctor can face if the panel subsequently disagrees is that they can't do abortions thereafter (and they can only be penalised if the panel decides that the abortion wasn't justified at all, not just if they decide that there was time for them to weight in).
That's what an exceptions system looks like. The fact is that no American proposal has ever come close to that. Exceptions are essentially defences the doctor can present in court, which means they can expect to have to defend every abortion they perform in a court case, which is profoundly unappealing.
Thinking about a federal law, I think you could do it constitutionally; you create a new Article III Courts in each Federal District, which, while being courts, the members must be doctors and need not be lawyers. You then limit the jurisdiction of all other courts to the effect that there can be no appeal from an abortion court. Then you require them to, on application from any doctor within their district, select one member of their court to make a decision and then render a decision within 24 hours of the request; failure to respond within 24 hours would result in all the judges on that court being fired (being a failure to reach the "good behaviour" standard in the Constitution) and denied the ability to ever be reappointed and would result in the abortion being approved when the timelimit is met (this prevents running out the clock being a tactic that can be used by either side).
It's a radical reworking of the judiciary to get the rest of the courts out of the way, and it would be enormously controversial procedurally. The Supreme Court would be absolutely furious. But I can't see how anything short of this kind of radical procedural innovation could provide doctors with the legal certainty they would need to make use of an exception in a timely manner.
I think the skeleton key is thermostatic opinion. Various abortion restrictions polled well when Roe was on the books and now that Roe is off the books pro-choice ballot referenda are undefeated in the states.
The abortion politics equilibrium was “don’t make us think about this issue.” Dobbs said “we will disregard standing, precedent, and a reliance issues to explicitly overrule a ruling we just made a few years ago because we now have the political power to arbitrarily make law.”
Now people are forced to notice and the public’s perception of the legitimacy of the judiciary has been (rightfully) damaged.
Right. I know a lot of legal scholars heavily criticize the Roe ruling. I recently read it, and portions of the Casey and Dobbs rulings while reviewing for my con law exam. I don't know, it seems like Roe and Casey struck a good balance between a woman's liberty interests and a state's interest in protecting potential life. As a matter of con law Roe/Casey seemed fine to me? Not a lawyer though.
Just to reiterate, I think that "privacy" was a really shitty peg to hang a right to bodily autonomy on. You really don't see that specific legal theory in any of the other countries that have legalized abortion, except when they've been influenced by Roe itself.
I could have accepted a case based in 13A's explicit right to bodily autonomy, 14A's right to due process, and 3-5A's implicit rights to bodily autonomy. I might have still been of the opinion that in light of the conflicts with the fetus's own bodily rights, 10A (states rights) ought to carry the day, but I'd at least see it as a judgment call based pretty soundly in constitutional principles of bodily autonomy.
But IMO, the right to privacy only guarantees the right against government intrusion on your property. Just because you have a right against the government busting down your door* while you're snorting cocaine, doesn't mean you have an inherent right to snort cocaine.
* Someone always brings up the obvious objection, so I just always add the caveat that conlaw already nullifies 4A rights against unreasonable searches if you're in plain view through a window or whatever; so assume here that all windows and drapes are closed and it's impossible to see inside the house.
I basically agree with your position here. I'm maximally pro-choice, but the "privacy" rationale of Roe was hot trash, as most obviously reflected by the fact that it got applied by the courts to literally nothing else in terms of medical care. I.e., there's a general "right to privacy," but it somehow protects only a very narrow slice of the universe of medical procedures/treatments. My strong preference dating back to law school would be that, if there is to be a federal constitutional right to abortion, it be re-grounded on the Thirteenth Amendment in that banning or significantly restricting abortion compels unpaid labor (no pun intended!) on the part of the mother.
Exactly; and that's exactly the kind of 13A argument I'd have accepted. Like, I might have different value judgments on the exact moral balancing of "unpaid labor", but I can at least understand and accept that someone with different value judgments would indeed feel that 13A demanded some form of legality for abortion.
Personally, I think that given our nation's great diversity, it would still have been a wiser choice for any 13A-grounded "Roe-Like" to leave up to the states the precise balance they'd like to find, but I would find myself hard-pressed to just say, "Well that's not ANYWHERE in the fucking Constitution, WTF".
One other thing I'd say is, I think it's also potentially valid to interpret forced birth as a "taking" under 5A. Setting aside the medical costs, a woman's body is pretty clearly her own private property, and by prohibiting abortion, the state is "taking" from her for a public use.
5A would therefore require the state to compensate mothers if the state finds some compelling 14A reason for violating her 13A right against forced birth. Under this kind of jurisprudence, pro-life states would have to choose between subsidizing mothers (something I think we/they should favor anyways) or allowing abortion.
In fact, if anything, I'd have PREFERRED this kind of jurisprudence for the broader reason that if it sets the mother's and fetus's rights against each other, then they can be *weighed*. Under Roe, the justices presumed to do the *weighing* themselves in advance, and did it too broadly, and then eventually Casey just set up a whole wild goose chase of TRAP laws and such under "reasonable restrictions" to be weighed against a nebulous right of "access" that was itself grounded in privacy -- so, it was basically all Calvinball the rest of the way.
Under 13A's bodily autonomy and 5A's "takings", it all becomes a lot simpler: Which body gets precedence, who gets compensated for the taking/labor/etc.? The law is just better at weighing these kinds of concrete questions than it is TRAP laws.
I'm not sure what you are saying here. The right to privacy on which Roe hinges was elaborated in Griswold, and relies on "zones of privacy" created by the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 9th Amendments, as well 14A liberty / due process interests.. The Constitutional concept of privacy is not a "peg" independent of those amendments, let alone a "shitty" one.
It's a shitty one because it requires inferring something that is not textually there: a generalized "right to privacy." That such a broad right does not plausibly exist is reflected by the fact that the Griswold/Roe "right to privacy" was never extended by the courts to anything beyond: (1) protecting access to birth control and (2) protecting access to abortion. E.g., why doesn't the same right extend to, for example, the right to take non-FDA approved drugs? (Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. von Eschenbach, 495 F.3d 695 (D.C. Cir. 2007) found that there was no such constitutional right.)
Something else for you to consider that hasn't been mentioned yet in the replies below your post here is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg always disliked the rationale of Roe, believing that instead it should be constitutionally protected under the Equal Protection Clause due to pregnancy being a trait uniquely born upon women. Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, I'm guessing should would have written a majority opinion on those grounds if an abortion case came her way before she died.
But I think it's fair to say that Ginsburg (and others) disliked the Roe rationale not because she objected to privacy jurisprudence but because she believed that Roe did not secure the right to abortion unambiguously enough under the trimester-based balancing of interest tests. This fear was confirmed when the court scrapped Roe's test in favor of "undue burden" testing in Casey, which began the long slow trench warfare of "burdening" abortion rights as much as possible.
But you are having the correct reaction to actually reading Roe after a lifetime of hearing about it through the filter of the political warfare that raged around it all your life. It is a measured, rational and nuanced opinion that recognizes obvious facts about the human condition. (Lawyer, son of lawyers, father of lawyers..)
While I broadly agree, I think it’s important to also consider confounding factors. It could be entirely possible that the winning streak owes more to its unpopularity in many states before Dobbs, which motivated trigger laws that obviated the need for referenda that might have broken the streak.
We’ll never know the true counterfactual, but it’s at least important to steelman our own narrative to avoid future strategic mistakes.
Possibly, but some of these states are, like, Kentucky, which is not exactly known for general social liberalism. Message testing I've seen shows that abortion-related spots are the best performing Dem ads this cycle.
The _central_ objection to Progressivism is its failure to link policy to results. Opposing fossil fuel projects in the US does very little to reduce global emissions of CO2 and methane. University protests do little to advance Palestine independence. Defunding the police does not protect "black lives." Today, affirmative action as practiced by elite institutions is not moving us toward a society where minorities are not disadvantaged. Etc.
The argument I've seen is "In order to deal with climate change, we have to leave substantial fossil fuel reserves in the ground. This is an opportunity to leave substantial reserves in the US in the ground, so we should take it: if other countries then take up the slack, we then, separately have to seek mechanisms to get them to leave their reserves in the ground, not compete with them to do our environmental damage over their environmental damage".
I think this misses that the likely mechanism to work in keeping fossil fuels in the ground is people not needing them (see: coal, where there are many mines with huge unmined reserves that have been closed because they can't extract the coal profitably) rather than regulators not letting them be extracted. But it's not as completely incoherent and disconnected from results as some people suggest it is.
If Progressivism is just wanting more equal outcomes in material and status terms then I'm all for Progressivism. It would just be the "inclusive" part of the Neoliberal objective of inclusive growth. I just see Progressives as Liberals who flunked Econ 101.
If that's the case, then they're not really "Progressives". They're just extreme liberals.
My personal headcanon is that progressivism is an actual set of values. However, those values are all in tension with each other -- equality vs. equity, stuff like that. And also, the default human brain-plan is generally more conservative than that; it might treasure one or even a handful of those values, but rarely all at once. Thus, progressive values implemented through a conservative mindset is the only reasonable way to proceed politically: incremental progress, wary of making mistakes, with our progressive values motivating a relentless focus on building consensus.
IMO that's different from liberal progressivism, which basically just asks, "What's the next most forward-thinking thing we can do beyond conventional liberalism? Okay, let's do that". I agree that that's stupid, but it's not because progressivism or its values are inherently stupid. It's just that an overly liberal mindset leads to a form of intellectual laziness where they never stop and smell the roses.
I guess I don't really appreciate enough that people have different visions of what a good society looks like.
But as a practical matter I prefer to argue as if we do not differ much on objectives, just have somewhat different weights on different parts of our objective function but REALLY different models of what moves toward those objectives.
Pregnant 12 year-olds and Texan women who can’t terminate unviable pregnancies and all the women who nearly lost their ability to access IVF would say so.
I can completely understand disagreeing with those positions on the merits, but they are completely consistent with the view that a fetus growing in the womb has all the rights of a person, which is the position of pro-life people. How do you get to the conclusion that the right just wants to control women? It seems like as much of a straw man as the people who claim those on the left just like killing babies.
For the record, I disagree with Lisa’s defense of myself. No shade to her, it’s just a different mindset that I have in coming from the opposite side of the spectrum as her.
I think that post-Dobbs, the pro-life movement has failed to enact even a TOKEN gesture toward supports for pregnant women - whether economic or social. Everything has been focused on punishment and enforcing draconian ideas like the Texas bounty law or wierd attempts to control interstate abortions despite that just being incredibly clearly “Not How Federalism Works, You Idiots, And It’s Rich Coming From The People Who Always Lecture The Left On Federalism”.
Because they are controlling women. Is your issue just with the framing of "just"? "I don't want abortions to exist, therefore I will control women so they can't access them" is still controlling women.
David said, "[T]he aftermath of Dodd has indeed proved that ... the right just wanted to control women." I think it is pretty clear that David's assertion is that control of women is the ends, rather than a means of limiting abortion. I disagree with that assertion, and I don't think the examples you pointed to support that assertion.
I think those on the left have a problem in not trying to make a good faith effort to understand those on the right.
Normally I think "intent isn't magic" is a feeble defense, but in the case of bodily autonomy, the impact of controlling women it for the unborn children or controlling women for the misogyny of it all is identical.
We get that right wingers think it's a baby, but you want to control women to get there - and frankly, the fact that many pro-life people are against birth control and spending on child tax credits or public daycares makes it seem like it's really just for the misogyny. Was there an explosion of pro-life support for the child tax credit that I missed?
All restrictions on certain behavior "control" people.
In another thread, I stated: "Although I would support restrictions like parental notification or bans after a certain point in the pregnancy, I don't trust Republicans would stop with a compromise position when I think they really want to ban all abortions under any circumstances."
Now, you might think my theoretical support for restrictions after a certain point in the pregnancy is "controlling women", but I think that's an uncharitable way of characterizing a position.
This becomes very obvious as soon as you see the venn diagram of people that want to ban abortion and the people who want to make contraception illegal or difficult to access (even though it would reduce abortions). It's not quite a complete overlap, but pretty close.
If you are against abortions, but also the pill, sex education, HSV vaccines, and IUDs, look for the common denominator.
OK, let's look at that Venn diagram. This is something that can be answered by polls. According to one I found at https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/abortion-birth-control-poll/, more Republicans favor condoms and birth control pills being legal than Democrats, although it's overwhelming supported by both. So you are not correct.
Why is it, then, that one only sees outlier (unpopular, I might add) proposed laws to regulate birth control in Republican states?
I think there are plenty of republicans who (privately, probably) are closer to "safe, rare, legal" than they are to "force 12-year olds to have babies" on abortion. This is literally why Dobbs is such a "dog catches car" moment for them. A complete abortion ban has only ever been favored by a pretty far right religious minority that just so happens to be a 100% Republican voting block, so they wield a lot of power, especially at the primary level.
I interpret OP as referring to the extremists who truly want a 100% ban on abortion, with no exceptions. If you spend any time with that group, you will find a lot of folks who also want to prevent sex ed, or reduce access to reproductive health in general. This is absolutely a group that has, at minimum, a disregard for female body autonomy, and it's not hard to see an interpretation that goes all the way into wishing to control female bodies.
Moving further off topic…Trump likely wins and carries a lot more of congress without Roe v Wade being overturned. In an odd kind of way it may be the one thing that stops his reelection or
If he still wins at least a builds up the opposition.
I want to really encourage Matt to write about macroeconomics :) because a) he almost always gets to the right policy conclusions and the wider world ought to hear more of them but b) he gets to them by sometimes dubious paths that _I_ get to comment on.
As an economist myself, I have to say that I’ve been a little disappointed by the macro articles.
I’m willing to entertain the idea that the policy conclusions are correct. But Matt consistently seems unaware of how economists think about the issues he’s writing about.
I’d even be happy if Matt said “economists think X, but here’s why they’re wrong.” But right now in his articles he often seems to be debating straw men or leading readers down a line of argument with little relevance to the matters at hand.
(By contrast, I really liked Milan’s recent article where he actually asked economists with differing views what they thought about secular stagnation.)
Most people have no idea what economists think. So many people think we are the Chicago Boys and are telling Pinochet to throw people from helicopters.
I remember when the first covid helicopter drops came that I was optimistic that this would be the wedge by which universal basic income became a mainstream idea. Unfortunately, in retrospect it seems to have been the dying gasp of UBI, which is now much less a topic of speculation and discussion than it was pre-COVID. (Though perhaps this is actually just a changing phase in the hype cycle, like with self-driving cars.)
Slow Boring is WAY too popular to be a good example of what I want. There is zero chance that Matt's subscribers would all defect to post by post payments. The issue is, are there other more marginal sites that would see pots-by post pricing cannibalsize subscriptions. _I_ think very few, but I can't be sure.
It's true that economists have discussed nominal GDP targeting before. But the arguments he makes in these articles have almost nothing to do with the pros and cons of that strategy. He would've been better off saying "Scott Sumner thinks it's a good idea. I don't quite understand why, but I trust him."
Also, as a bonus, the article in which he claims "background conditions of economic equality" are required for efficiency, which he often references here:
He doesn't even quite understand how economists define (Pareto) efficiency! What he's talking about is maximization of utilitarian social welfare, which is an entirely different matter best left to philosophers. Even in Econ 101, you learn that there are "efficient" allocations that are horrible in a moral sense -- e.g., one person gets all the food and everyone else starves to death.
I appreciate the introspection! Also the Times criticism is spot on. It's particularly poignant since the Times has vacuumed up a lot of the best talent from other publications. I'm glad these writers are getting paid, but there aren't any other legacy publications with the same reach and influence (besides maybe the Washington Post). So it's imperative on the Times to get the big picture right, and they're not.
I will quibble a bit with, "As a reader, I keep wishing that other writers I like who work for bigger institutional outlets had assignment editors who would force them out of their lanes a bit more." Yes, and the examples you gave are good ones. But the writers need to be informed... it doesn't do anyone much good to hear half-baked ideas without understanding the underlying principles.
No of course I’m not saying people should write bad columns where they don’t know what they are talking about. But these are smart people, if they were pushed they could research/report and I’d be interested to read what they come up with.
They could... but far more frequently I've observed pundits or experts pull the "I'm knowledgeable in one particular field, therefore I will opine on unrelated fields" and pass off nonsense opinions.
Btw, this is one of the main reasons I subscribe to your Substack! You're willing to do this AND you're willing to do the research. Even when I disagree, you've clearly done your homework (or at least, your intern of the day has). Of course, there's the notable exception of a lot of the science writing... but that's my field so I'm highly attuned to those issues.
I really love your substack and I’m glad it’s worked out for you, but I kind of feel like Vox had a kind of measured optimistic tone especially in the Obama years that I miss as a niche between utopian fantasy and popular substack’s being a bit harsh feeling.
I don’t think it disappeared. Future Perfect is still that, and I’ve been liking some of their other new features, like Ever Better and whoever is doing a financial advice column. It’s really interesting that they’ve got all those things even as their center is the mainstream media epitome of woke strident doomerism.
I enjoy Matt’s writing and he is a gifted intellectual.
But I’m here at least 50% for the comments. The level of insight and discussion I read in the comments is just better than most other comments sections. I used to hate “the comments” wherever they existed because it was always a waterfall of bad faith hostility and weirdo cranks.
I’m not a Mensa kid, I was always just a hustler and I’ve done well because of that. Understanding how other people think about complex policy stuff helps elevate my own thinking. So, thanks Matt and thanks to everyone who contributes to the conversation here!
Whoo! Best comment section on the internet!
*edit: reading now that this exact sentiment has been expressed by multiple commenters. But wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t express it myself!
I continue to think Matt vastly underestimates the value of the comment section to his customers. As supporting data, note that the top comment on any post regularly has 30-60% as many “hearts” as the post itself. Hopefully when he, Kate, and Ben are discussing potential topics, they are also asking, “will this generate a vibrant yet civilized discussion in the comments section?”
I haven't really seen a piece that hasn't produced a vibrant yet civilized discussion section. But for sure, reader engagement is always a primary consideration.
You obviously haven’t been here long enough for a trans issues article.
I basically never put hearts on the articles. I guess I’m still waiting for one I like!
Weirdly, I think I end up putting a heart on a majority of the articles. I think it’s a habit that I’ve got a calibrated level of how much I like a comment to put a heart on it, and most of Matt’s main posts get above that level. (Not as common on the other substacks I read.)
Rarely occurs to me to do this, either.
Best comment section on the internet, been saying it for years. An oasis of sanity and intelligence.
Actually just had a column idea: how strong is the correlation between the intelligence of a group and the number of Daves in the group?
The Dave-Matt quotient
I think you only need one truly intelligent Dave out of a group of Dave’s. We, of course, know who that specific Dave is here at SB.
Dave checking in.
My uncle David is pretty dim
Which commenter is he? Or is it a family secret?
Oh, he is an antivaxer MAGA. No way in heck he reads anything.
Am not
Yeah, Slow Borers are really good to talk with.
And while other comment sections online can of course be cesspools, talking about big issues like this can sometimes be worse among everyday people offline. It's just really easy for people to retreat into their tribes, and focus way too much of people and personalities, and only talk about how the people they hate are so bad. It's so annoying, and boring not in the Slow Boring way--even if I end up agreeing with them.
This place is regularly a breath of fresh air in that regard, and I collectively thank all of you for it.
100%. The comment section here is extraordinary. One of the few places on the internetn where I seek out specific commenters nearly daily to see their responses.
My only issue is navigating comments. It’s a bit tedious. And some there are so many good threads it’s hard to keep track.
Agree, especially on the substack mobile app. I have a much easier time wrangling the comments on my desktop (threads are more easily collapsible, collapsed threads are remembered when I come back later).
You can use the web on a phone as well. I always do.
It's started to force me to use the app (on my iPhone). I just uninstalled the app after that.
And that's why no one should ever install it.
I've noticed that too, for the last few weeks. When are web platforms ever going to get the message that users like options, and freedom?
On Android at least it's possible to keep the app and disable takeover. I had to do that because the app doesn't allow thread collapsing. I suspect iPhone has such options too?
I think there was something that briefly convinced me to use the app, and it was such a worse experience that I uninstalled it and went back to chrome mobile. (Weirdly, Substack is an “only on the phone” thing for me - not on the computer.)
How are your comments so typo-free??
I have many years of practice typing on the phone. I remember being proud about being able to touch type on a phone back in the day when you had to tap each digit repeatedly to get the different letters on that key, and being annoyed when T9 undid that ability (even though it was easier to use). But weirdly I can’t remember what I was typing - I think I was a relatively slow adopter of texting, but maybe even slow adopters were already texting then?
In the early days of its chat system, Substack did the most inexcusable version of this that way too many platforms who introduce something new do, which is "not only is this not available on the web, but it's only available on Apple mobile devices!". It was not fun digging out an old iPad to be able to converse in Matt's first chat that he hosted here.
When someone likes or replies a comments two or more replies deep, you can’t click and get to it directly. Booo. I would pay a substantial upcharge to fix that
For me, the link in the email takes me right to the comment whatever the depth.
But without even minimal context! (Insert crying emoji)
There’s usually a link also to the comment it’s a reply to - but only one step up, and it’s really hard to find anything two or three steps up (particularly since I’ve usually minimized some of the threads and can’t just search for the username any more).
Every update I'm like, maybe this is the one that fixes this problem.
Definitely.
Only place on the internet where I see people casually reference Spinoza.
100% agree. I also pay for Nate Sliver's substack and the comments there are unreadable. I learn from other posters, especially when I disagree.
I'm pessimistic that Substack will invest in this feature, as they seem focused on building more viral social features. But there's still room to improve and I hope Matt pushes for this:
1. A better sorting system that lets you see popular posts and sub-posts.
2. Some sort of super-poster credibility system. I'd start with # of likes per post adjusted for time of day (earlier posts get more, but timing doesn't predict quality). Then let us filter to super-posters
Somehow Nate Silver managed to optimize his comment section for the most anti-woke readers.
Substackers who are seem as obsessive over anti-woke stuff get almost uniformly either right-wing nuts or weirdos who claim to be left-leaning, but focus only on the stuff they're reactionary on.
See Freddie DeBoer's comment section, who came to him because he made fun of center-left libs they didn't like, then were shocked when Freddie didn't fall down the anti-woke wormhole on other stuff (which I give him credit for, despite disliking many of his 'people I don't like are successful, which proves they're sellouts' articles.)
Matt has said basic things like, "abortion is good, Republican's are bad, etc." that push away the weirdos, both here and especially on Twitter, while not getting obsessive over the anti-woke stuff.
Freddie being Freddie, he's handled his discomfiture with his anti-woke readership the only way he knows how: by launching a bunch of broadsides against woke-skepticism that are totally inconsistent with his previous stances and to which no one is allowed to respond.
It probably helps that Matt mixes in a lot of “Biden is good, actually”, since for some reason a lot of anti-woke people turn this into anti-Biden (and had been anti-Clinton back in 2016).
Because most of those people are basically conservatives now for all intents and purposes, for the same reasons people like Tim Miller from The Bulwark is basically a lib now.
I know this is somewhat controversial, but if you claim to be pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-economic liberalism or leftism, but spend 90% of your time obsessing about Culture War Issue X on the conservative side, then the reality is you're just a conservative, at least in American politics. Especially if you're prominent at all.
Which is why consistently talking like Matt does how, say, Medicaid and Social Security are actually good, the Republican's want to ban abortion and cut taxes to rich people seem to upset these types so much, because they only want to care about what somebody making $40,000 a year writing reviews for TV shows who posts something silly on Twitter says.
Like, there are plenty of non-college educated people in say, Tennessee who don't mind Medicaid or Social Security, but are legitimately pro-life, pro-gun, etc. and would never vote for a Democrat. We don't call these people moderates, because they really aren't, so I don't see why we need to do the same for college educated people in blue areas freaking out over shifting social more and so on.
Note this isn't about say, Jonathan Chait, even if he's more obsessive about all this than Matt, or even Jesse Signal, who I deeply disagree with on certain issues, but the more obvious grifters.
I genuinely don't understand what role political labels serve for you.
When you designate someone as conservative, is the point to identify them as a person that should be ignored or avoided, like Kiwi Farmers saying "don't touch the poo"?
Alternatively, is the point to cast suspicion on everything they write?
I find political labels occasionally useful on specific issues, less so to describe people*, given how truly surprising most people's political opinions are - really surprising and often downright weird if you hew to some party line.
* Though more valuable when used for self-description.
I suspect it's driven by where the writer falls on the liberal-conservative and establishment-contrarian spectrums plus the subject matter.
Both MY and Silver are and are seen to be contrarian, which can pull in a lot of anti-woke people. But many of them won't subscribe to slow boring because MY is actually pretty far left and mostly promotes left-leaning policies. By contrast, Silver viewed as partisan and covers process much more than policy. So, he becomes a more welcoming home for right-wing cranks.
I've been really happy that Matt's readership has included such a diverse set of political views. Also, the comments are really well moderated.
A lot of other sites implement #2, usually called karma points, and I agree that it's surprising that Substack hasn't done that yet.
I'm short on substack as a business and hope that writers are planning for alternatives.
1. They've raised enough money that they need to focus on revenue acceleration. Therefore they invest more in things like Notes and Chat, which for me are completely irrelevant.
2. They have done nothing meaningful to accelerate cross-selling across subscriptions. Their biggest advantage is being the biggest site - it's negligent that they can't exploit this.
3. Because ownership of readers is something they used to attract writers, it means the foundation is stable. if a few headline writers bail, the whole thing could crumble.
Re #2: I don't know why they don't just do a "extra article per month" option. There's are only so many writers each person will pay full freight for. When I add up all my media subscriptions - Substack, NYT, Disney+ and about 10 others - there are substack writers I'd like to support but dont't. But I'd pay for something that gives me 5 more gated articles per month.
They really should read this advice.
I subscribed to this substack specifically to challenge myself to consistently read work from a thoughtful writer one or two steps to my Right to avoid getting siloed information only from people who agree with me or are more extreme which is the social media pattern. I have found the comments section here to be much more thoughtful than what I have seen everywhere. Since the commenters range from me to four to five steps to my Right it has been a more extreme experiment to interact here than I first intended but I have found it helpful to challenge my thinking or at least have a more realistic understanding of what that thinking might look like.
I would say that what I do find surprising in terms of what is missing from this comments section that I do in other spaces that I interact with would be (1) interest and respect for religion (2) recognition of the connection between human life and a healthy thriving natural environment (3) more serious considerations about what makes a healthy community beyond just economic vitality. Nevertheless, I do find the conversations here useful enough that I waste more time here than I intend to each week.
Matt is far enough Left to be interesting, but I'd like to hear more from anyone even farther Left.
Great. Then when I am commenting, I will pretend that I am sharing with just you!
Despite the fact I'm likely on the left edge of commenters here (even though the likes I get show there is at least a silent minority of more left-leaning people who don't want to get involved in the comment section at times because they don't enjoy the scrapping as much as I do), I do enjoy it, even though I do agree with somebody downthread that depending on the issue, I can guess the tenor of what the most-liked comments will be.
I like your comments, even if I don't always agree with them and I don't always click the upvote button. Disagreements from your perspective help us sharpen our own opinions.
I mean I forget to do that, even for stuff I agree with.
But, I do think the comment section is to the right of the people reading the articles here. Not in a Freddie DeBoer you're all Crypto-Republican's way, but more a "you're Gen Xers getting older and disliking social change and the more left-leaning views of younger people" way.
Sometimes, in ways that even as an evil social democrat SJW I can see, and sometimes in yelling at clouds way.
I'm Matt's age, so an Xer/Millennial cusper, and I think if we all laid out our views I'm probably somewhat woker than the median Slow Borer. But I do think that several writers have done well to identify a type of ideology that I think is best identified as the "illiberal left" that can have a "my way or the highway" mentality that can get exhausting and tough to support at times. SJW is sometimes another term for that set but I don't think that's a great term--sometimes it's good to fight for social justice!
Ironically, one of the many things that I don't like about the fringe of the Left that I think can be fairly described as the "illiberal left" is their careless embrace of using violent rhetoric and dehumanizing and extremist language to denounce their perceived "enemies" even if those folks might be more accurately described as neighbors and fellow citizens.
But I think it is sort of amusing that moderates does recognized that moderates can have a pretty illiberal element in their midst as well. This whole ill-defined desire to punch hippies and generally demeaning language about progressives is just as off putting as a lot of what turns them off about leftist extremists. It does reduce my comfort sharing in this group.
In my opinion part of what marks someone as an extremist isn't just where they fall along an ideological spectrum but how fixed they are to that point and how unwilling they are to grant respect to those at other points. Folks can be just as problematically dogmatic to the middle as they are to any other spot.
The SJW things is an example of the Right and Middle sharing a snide shorthand that I don't think does them any favors in convincing anyone outside their own silos of anything. I don't know anyone who would call themselves a social justice warrior. I don't run with that egotistical a crowd. But I definitely know people, myself included, who aspire to be social justice advocates or activists. Honestly, that isn't my most unappealing quality and positioning yourself in opposition to social justice is a broad and odd position to want to stake out and not one that makes me more curious or open to that person's point of view.
This formulation is interesting because to me the phase space of social justice activism is not uniformally explored. For example, Falun Gong see themselves as social justice activists, but I bet you don’t. Defining social justice activism as agreeing with MY opinions is artificially narrowing.
I just get so frustrated with the left’s focus on what I consider less important issues and a refusal to do anything about the fact that the rent is too damn high. Suppose that’s why I like this Substack.
Great comments sections on the Internet are awesome. I agree that this is one.
Interestingly, I have kind of gone the other way on the comments--I used to read them and comment myself (at tedious length) more often but have fallen off.
Partly I think it is because I just straight up can't look at them on work days in the hospital, but it also feels like right now the discussion kind of goes in a few predictable directions, so it kind starts feeling like a rehash. OTOH, I sort of wonder if that kind of thing is cyclical, with different particular mixes of posters moving in and out year to year. I will be curious to see.
And this reinforces my puzzlement at a site that would not want comments, would not even allow them from non-subscribers. And that is another place that a micro-payment option would help; it would gather income from potential commenters.
There is a definite undercurrent of anti-comment sentiment. Both the DCist before WAMU killed it and the GGW newsletter had and eliminated comment sections. Both seemed to assume that unless intensively monitored the section would become toxic and that that degree of monitoring would be costly (even traumatic for the monitored). This overlooks the benefits and exaggerates the cost.
Did the DCist and GGW newsletter limit comments to paid subscribers? Because I've been presuming that helps a lot on Substack.
No. Both were free.
I should’ve read the comments before I posted mine. I basically said the same thing.
It's different for you when you're out traveling for work in South America, but otherwise us Westerners have no choice but to do this, because the odds are some advantaged early bird Easterner has already sniped our comment. I definitely don't want to be that guy that ends up being the 4th or 5th person observing something like Matt saying that Bob Dole was from South Dakota when he was really from Kansas.
Or just be a West Coaster with terrible sleeping habits so you're occasionally awake when Matt posts at 3 AM Pacific time.
If you actually see me post soon after weekday morning articles open up, that means I'm either on vacation, or (more likely) I got awoken by something way too early and I can't get back to sleep.
I've been a subscriber since Nov. 13, 2020, and have enjoyed the ride. Thanks.
A suggestion re: covering the Presidential Election: Don't change your tone or approach merely because it is the campaign season. Please don't write posts with obvious political spin. Those are boring, and not in the good sense.
Best $8 a month I spend. I get more utility from my Slow Boring subscription than from my country club membership. And SB has never cancelled pickleball to monetize a wedding.
Unironically I think pickleballers could be one of Matt's core audiences. The slew of neighborhoods banning pickelball because of the noise in public parks feels like a land-use / zoning issue where a lot of pickleballers could see the reason in Matt's takes.
Agree. And someone needs to bring a sense of rationality to the powers that be in the Democratic Party.
So have I--I just wish I became a commenter before circa New Year's Day 2022, I had a weird hangup about it that I just needed to get over and plunge in. Glad I did.
Trumps "policy" agenda mostly centers on undermining the independence of agencies, not issues themselves. I'd love to see coverage of how this would play out in individual agencies. Interview somebody at HHS or EPA about what range of things could happen if Trump was re-elected.
I'm sometimes shocked at how much things differ between agencies. A friend is an EPA plant inspector. He expects to be sued every single time he issues negative findings and has to work with EPA attorneys on every audit. In healthcare, suing the FDA is considered a suicide mission and only happens in truly extreme situations.* I'm sure that unraveling civil service protections would play out in a similarly variable way.
* An interesting current example is that the firm that makes generic stimulants has sued the DEA about delays in releasing production quotas. Because these are controlled substances, they are regulated by both FDA and DEA. DEA is cracking down -- mostly incorrectly in my view -- which has resulted in a shortage of ADHD medications.
My mother retired early from her US Customs job because of the first Trump presidency. I assume that people currently working for the agencies aren't really allowed to comment on these things, but I imagine there's lots of former feds willing to talk about why Trump led to their departure.
I forget the exact date but I signed up on Day 2 or 3. Here’s to the OGs!
I'd say keep trying to unearth issues and call out the MSM for not focusing on them, to the extent that a remain in business constraint will let them.
I’m constantly surprised that the niche of centrist Democratic politics is so unoccupied in the media landscape. On the face of it, it seems like the niche where most voters are. A Joe Biden with center-right policies/rhetoric on immigration and crime, plus centrist policies/rhetoric on culture war issues would skate to reelection.
I'm dubious that in our polarized politics, any politician skates to re-election at this point. But agree, that Biden would make against amongst undecided and independent voters if he made a high profile executive move on decision with the rhetoric to back it up.
Sometimes things can seem the same until they suddenly change. From 1964 through 1988 blowouts were more common than close races. Not saying change is due by any means, but it could happen for reasons we can't foresee.
Important reminder ! This actually could be a good mailbag question: it’s 2028 and we are back to a clear dominant vs satellite party model, how did we get there? Or - we back to depolarization with frequent landslides for either party as the new norm- how did that happen? Might be a helpful exercise
I'd date it back to 1932!
Six incumbents (36, 56, 64, 72, 80, 84) had the opportunity to lead their parties to second consecutive White House terms. Not only did five of those six prevail, but every single one was a historically noteworthy blowout. Nixon and Reagan won 49 states. Johnson won the highest percentage of the popular vote in 140 years.
1932, 1952 and 1980 were also massive landslides.
I mean, ironically, because there was a supermajority agreement on basic cultural issues, so it became all about economic stewardship. Every politician outside of the narrow edges was lightly socially conservative to moderate, and had no connection to said issues, so they could sell those constituencies (both sides) out more easily.
Now, I think the current world where Democratic politicians actually care about abortion, immigrants, LGBT people, and so on is better, even if it means we can't win 40 state landslide anymore.
Slavery in the 1800s was pretty big cultural issue, as was Suffrage in the early 20th, and Civil Rights in the 60s. I don't think it is as simple as "politicians ignored culture until recently"
Edit: forgot prohibition!
I mean, I think the fact elections were very close in the post-Civil War era is a pretty good example, because the biggest cultural issue - the Civil War - was something that everybodies views on was widely known on. No Southerner was voting for a Republican, no matter their economic views and in many ways, vice versa, at least until the population changed and a bunch of Democrat's embraced immigrant communities.
Part of the reason why the GOP could win landslides in the 60's, 70's, and 80s is unlike today, they were much closer to the center on those hot button issues - there weren't Republican nominees talking about how sexual harassment laws, EEOC laws, and even Nixon did some pretty 'woke' stuff combined with law 'n' order messaging because of the bipartisan consensus on those things allowed him to get the votes of Rockefeller Republican's _and_ Archie Bunker types.
The 2024 GOP version of the Civil Right's era would be all-in on Thurmong/Goldwater-type arguments and even with massive crime increases and the other stuff going on, McGovern might've won or got a lot damn closer, just like we're seeing today with despite high inflation, possibly being too culturally liberal for the median voter, and so on, a lot of Democrat's are winning races, because the GOP is scaring away normies.
I also think as I noted, part of it is more access to information. There's a lot of Civil Right's skeptical voters who voted for Democrat's who were very pro-Civil Rights, because they didn't make a big deal out of it.
I'm not saying there has never been culture war issues before - I'm just saying it's new you know where all politicians stand on said issues, and people are also well aware who you're allying with by voting for each party.
Like, there are a lot of McCain/Romney types who part of their shift to the Dem's is realizing just how crazy the MAGA types more than policy, just as a lot of shifting to Trump voters are over being uncomfortable on the side of protestors, activists, immigrants, feminists, or whomever they see as The Other.
I'm a never Trumper who would definitely have considered voting for Biden if he had actually governed as a centrist.
Instead I will be writing in Nikki Haley
Out of curiosity, does former GA Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan's op-ed hold any power of persuasion for you?
https://www.ajc.com/opinion/geoff-duncan-why-im-voting-for-biden-and-other-republicans-should-too/LFLE5YWCBBA6VDGJAJKMNPCDKQ/
I’m in a similar situation. I however will be voting a split ticket. Biden, then sane Republicans for State Office.
And I hope also for federal House and Senate!
Barring something wacky Republicans are getting elected to those offices no matter how Rory or I vote.
The problem is I want to punish trump and the whole maga movement
But I also want to punish Biden. And the democrats for going so far left
And since I sent both trump and biden are not competent to be president, I will just pass
No one is ever truly competent to be President, some just fake it better than others. Ironically Biden is probably the most competent we’ve had in a long time, but he doesn’t project a great image.
I base his competency on his many, many many policy failures
Afghanistan withdrawal
Unneeded stimulus and huge budget deficits that stimulate inflation
Desire to push build back better
Immigration failures, And lack of desire to fix it until polling showed that he might lose the election
Gutting of due process in sex-related.
Crimes on campus
Refusal to support israel
Giving of billions of dollars to iran to sponsor terrorism
Refusal to put enough pressure on iran to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon
Do I need to go on?
The question is whose bureaucracy do you want running things?
I am a registered Democrat for 50 years, but I cannot tolerate Biden's bureaucracy any more. The Women's Liberation Front explains why:
https://womensliberationfront.org/news/women-outraged-over-regulations-replacing-sex-with-gender-identity-in-federal-civil-rights-laws
So I will be voting for Trump (and for Republicans for all other offices), and hoping Trump follows through on his promises re Schedule F firings.
Fair point
It's persuasive to my Trump-deranged brain; but I've found that anti-Trump articles written by conservatives are effective at explaining the decision to withhold the vote from Trump, but ineffective at justifying the step between staying home/protest vote and actually voting for Biden. I think the best article towards that aim is Catoggio's: https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/boilingfrogs/the-state-of-our-union/
My main interest over the next six-months is finding a way to persuade my relatives (father mostly) to withhold their purely partisan-brain vote for Trump - I am resigned that getting them to vote for Biden is not going to happen.
The downside is he would just piss off progressives without getting any credit for the pivot. But I would rather them try some pivoting instead of trying to appeal to young left wing voters that don't really matter that much.
I'm not sure what "center-right" means at this point with respect to immigration. Right-right (ie, MAGA) is so extreme on immigration in 2024, that I suspect center-right realistically means something like "Don't demonize immigrants en route to a draconian reduction in legal immigration inflows." Which is not what the country needs right now. At all. Here's how I break it down:
(1) MAGA-right: immigration is bad, and the country needs to prevent the Caucasian population share from dropping lower.
(2) Center-right: a modest amount of immigration is tolerable, but these days immigration is too high, so, in addition to much stricter enforcement against unauthorized immigrants, we need deepish cuts to legal immigration inflows, at least for en extended period,
(3) Center: legal immigration inflows are at acceptable levels, but we should shift sharply to skilled immigrants, while pursuing tougher border policies. Also, no government healthcare.
(4) Center-left: We really need more immigrants, and ought to increase our inflows by a variety of means. This could translate into things like handing out long term visas to STEM grads; expansion of guest worker programs; reforms to the H1B program; flat out green card expansions; more resources to make our immigration service a more efficient hoover for talent. Also, while strong borders are vital, we realistically need a deal with Mexico; that's the only thing that will make a difference barring a serious deterioration in the US job market. And yes, of course immigrants legally in this country should be eligible for government healthcare programs. Also, build some damn houses.
(5) Hard-left: Borders are inhumane. Also, everyone to the right of me is racist.
I think my shot at defining a center-right position on immigration would be: "Limited immigration is fine and often needed, but immigrants that move here need to assimilate into American society, and especially learn to speak English.".
>...Immigrants that move here need to assimilate into American society, and especially learn to speak English.<
That might make sense in terms of political branding, sure, but AFAIK there's not a shred of evidence that the primacy in America of the English language is threatened, nor is there evidence today's immigrants are learning English more slowly than in previous eras.
We don't actually need the government doing anything to pressure newcomers into learning English. Economic incentives already provide that pressure. Massively so.
Like I said to Jesse, I completely agree with you on this on the merits, and yet it doesn't stop people from yearning for and demanding more homogeneous language and culture.
So, the sane center-right view is immigrants need to do something basically never done before in American history of immigrants (look up how many Polish newspapers there were in 1923), and assimilate in ways never asked of previous generations, since despite freakouts, there is no evidence of actual lack of assimilation among new immigrant groups, even in things like English proficiency by generation.
Yes, I know some immigrant group said something and it's proof they're going to stay in their enclaves forever.
I didn't say that it makes sense, and I certainly don't agree with it. On CR's scale I'm probably like a 4.4 on the merits, but drawing closer to 4.0 when I have to factor in politics.
A center-right position could say "they need to learn to speak English" without making it a pre-requisite of immigration or even as an official language, more a recognized preferred outcome.
I mean, I think expecting a 43-year old barely primary educated migrant from El Salvador to learn English when they're working 60 hours a week is kind of pushing it as something that can reasonably happen.
The thing that's happened with every immigrant group in history - the first gen speaks mostly the mother tounge, it's mixed the second gen, largely English the third gen, and the fourth gen needs lessons in their mother tounge seems fine, I guess? It's not like there's any evidence this has actually changed.
Like obviously, sure, funding to help people and such, but it just seems unrealistic and more people are upset that people are speaking in languages they don't know around them, which again, is nothing new in American history. Maybe not in their North Carolina suburb or whatever.
I mostly agree, but a left-wing emphasis on multiculturalism seems to run directionally against it "there's no need for them to learn English" and I think the center right directionality isn't "unreasonable" even if the expectation of _arriving at that goal_ is unreasonable and holds up as historically unreasonable.
I think the historical status quo you describe is a pretty fair outcome.
The job market has changed since the 1900s, and education and communication are more important than ever. It also builds mistrust when people don’t speak the language. (I learned more German in about two months of living there than in 3 years of classes. It’s about desire to learn.)
It really doesn't seem unreasonable to me. The hypothetical 43 year old migrant's lack of secondary education doesn't mean they're not smart enough to pick up at least a working knowledge of another Indo-European language. And maybe it's just me, but if I'm going to spend the last few decades of my life in a country where 90% of people speak the same language it seems like it would both be beneficial to me and respectful to my new culture to make a serious effort to learn it.
It's kind of amazing how half the people who work at my car wash have clearly never once taken 15 minutes to watch a YouTube tutorial video on basic English phrases. This, despite living in an American city where learning English would be...useful?
God I wish there was a good representative for (4) that I could vote for.
General election yes. Primary no. Matt's point that Republicans putting up increasingly worse candidates has allowed Democrats to move left and still win has significant repercussions for both parties and what their political coalitions think is good/achievable.
What's weird to me is that Joe Biden "was" the moderate option in the primary. If the moderate candidate winning the primary doesn't get you moderate messaging and policy then what does?
Because as much as you guys don't like it it, the vast majority of people voting for Democrat's don't have center-right policies on immigration and crime or centrist rhetoric on culture war issues.
Matt tried the whole "Democrat's should moderate on abortion" argument and it actually failed on him.
Like, John Bel Edwards, who signed umpteen pro-gun laws and a six-week abortion ban is to the left of some of this comment section on a certain issue that drives people up the walls for some off reason.
I'm not saying the Democrat's should appease the left only, but the Clintonian thing doesn't work anymore on a national level, because for many voters, the fact Democrat's don't actively hate undocumented, LGBT people, feminist, or whomever their Other is enough to not vote for them, in a way that wasn't true in 1996 because they didn't know any better. There are milliions of Clinton '92/'96 voters who basically didn't know the Democrat's were the party, even then, of gay people, feminists, African-American's and so on. Now, they do.
The Democratic Party can't only exist to appease low-info swing voters in Wisconsin, as much as many people here would love for anybody one inch to the left of them to shut up forever because they think it's the reason Democrat's lose, when in reality, if inflation was 2% and we had 2012 Biden, he could talk about cops being bastards and show up at a BDS rally and probably still win.
"Because as much as you guys don't like it it, the vast majority of people voting for Democrat's don't have center-right policies on immigration and crime or centrist rhetoric on culture war issues."
To win an election, you need swing voters (yes, they absolutely exist).
Also, I am pretty sure what you said just isn't true. If you look at black voters, for instance, they are clearly far to the right of white democrats on both crime and abortion, and this is a block that votes 90% democrat.
"If you look at black voters, for instance, they are clearly far to the right of white democrats on both crime and abortion, and this is a block that votes 90% democrat."
This is highly overstated as a backlash to the idea that all minorities line up with activists on certain issues - on most social issues, most minority voters are yes, more conservative than white liberals, but they're much more liberal than white conservative on these issues.
Also, on crime, from everything I've read, the median view among African-American's seems to be, "crime is bad, but also a lot of cops suck, and sure, we need more here, but can they be less terrible and focus on actual crime instead of bothering my cousin going to work," which again, is the view of basically elected Democrat and most Democratic voters. Which is different than the cop hagiography and defense force I see here in the comments.
Like, the median African-American voter wants more cops in their neighborhood, but also want those cops to have more public oversight, body cameras, and a higher bar to get hired, all things a lot of tough on crime people don't want. See a certain former cop who used to have a Substack who used to pop up here.
There's are also a big age gap here as well - even if younger minorities aren't supportive of defund, they're far less socially conservative than older minorities for the same reasons it's true of white liberals.
On your more general point, the median Democrat is basically where Joe Biden is on most stuff, which is why despite having issues, he has a very high approval rating among Democrat's, still, and there was no big primary challenge from the Left or Right, which honestly, might've happened from the Left if he governed the way some of this comment section wanted form Day One.
Most people in this comment section are pro police reform, I can't say I've seen many comments like you describe that blindly defend cops no matter what.
Graham was one of the more pro-cop people in here of course, but even his view on police reform was much more nuanced than you imply... He did oppose some reforms because he thought they would lead to bad results, but he supported others such as body cameras, discipline matrices, etc. On oversight, his problem with the citizen-led committees many reformers advocate was that in practice, they seem to go easier on bad cops than other cops do.
Everybody here is pro-police reform until crime goes up one percent or one person they think should get a lengthier sentence gets out earlier than they could, then everybody here starts sounding like Buckley running for Mayor.
Honestly, whenever I read Graham on here, he was defending any cop's actions, and then saying he was for "reform", but pooh poohing any actual reform that could get passed, ironically, the way progressive groups stop any reform that isn't perfect to them.
"Everybody here is pro-police reform until crime goes up one percent or one person they think should get a lengthier sentence gets out earlier than they could, then everybody here starts sounding like Buckley running for Mayor"
I've never read anything on here along the lines of "Crime is so high, we need to make it harder to fire cops".
Again, wrt Graham, that just isn't true about reform, and defending every cop's actions. I mentioned two examples of reforms he supported that could and did get passed in many US cities. He supported pretty much all 8 Can't Wait reforms. He also mentioned supporting better policies and training related to positional asphyxia that would reduce incidents like Eric Garner and George Floyd. He wrote a whole Substack piece denouncing people on the right trying to argue Chauvin was actually innocent and explained why they're wrong.
Sure he may not go as you on reform, and disagree with you about the actions of some cops. Maybe it's because I read his Substack instead of just his comments on here, but he had pretty nuanced views and thoughtful posts, I just don't think it's fair to characterize him as someone who thought police could do no wrong and the status quo is perfect in every way.
We don't necessarily have to go back as far as Clinton, though... What about Obama? He cleaned up in the midwest, but can you really argue people didn't know he was the candidate of choice for African Americans, LGBT (despite his initial claim to not support gay marriage), etc?
It seems to me like you're falling into the classic progressive trap of writing off way too many potential voters entirely. Yes there is a hardcore Trump base like you describe who are never going to vote for a Democrat, but many of the people who have defected to the GOP in recent years don't have particularly right wing social views. In many ways these voters the GOP picked up more recently are less socially right wing than traditional GOP voters, as they tend to be non religious.
I mean, there are literally stories of canvassers saying they ran into people saying, "I'm voting for the n-word," while on the trail.
Putting what can be put aside as ancedotal stuff, in many ways, has Matt has talked about on here, on podcasts, and on Twitter, Obama even if it was an act, acted more socially moderate, including like you said, opposing gay marriage, doing a lot of "pull up your pants young kids" rhetorical stuff, and so forth.
Stuff that's harder when even by 2012 standards, we're far more fractured.
Obama was also helped that Mitt Romney was the worst person to run to pick up these type of voters. Frankly, in 2012, Obama might've won by a larger margin if say, Huckabee or Santorum was the nominee, but we would've begun to see the dropoff in these areas sooner.
Remember, the Trayvon Martin "he could've been my son" stuff happened after Obama's reelection, which one can argue when the current rise in wokeness and this version of the Culture War started.
I don't think all Obama/Trump voters are hopeless, and I even think post-Trump, when instead of a charismatic populist who is the most well-known person since Eisenhower to run for President running things for the GOP, it's all of the post-Trump weirdoes, you might see some bounceback in these areas in part due to vote shifting, but also do to a lot of Trump-only voters drifting back in non-voterdom.
But by the same token, Tim Ryan did everything you're supposed to do and lost to a charlatan like J.D. Vance.
I think also frankly, yes, there are a lot of Obama voters who are now more racist or "racially conservative" than they were in 2008 due to 19,000 stories about Black Crime on Facebook and so on. I can easily see a kind of apolitical dude in exurban Wisconsin who voted for Obama because the economy sucked and he didn't like the Iraq War falling down the wormhole of right-wing Facebook and online content convincing him no, black people really are violent thugs and look what they're doing to cities, and so on.
But putting that aside, sure a lot of these voters are less conservative on say, gay marriage or abortion, but they're more reactionary on immigration or other promninent culture issues that are prominent now.
Right, of course Obama acted moderate in a lot of ways - and I think Matt is absolutely right that was key to his election success! He comforted people that he wasn't going to do crazy left wing stuff, etc. But there was still no doubt among anyone that he was the more socially progressive candidate of the two by far. If you were someone who was particularly socially conservative, he was not the person to vote for. I remember reading that anecdote about "voting for the n*****" too, but I would need a lot more solid evidence, to believe that many people racist enough to use that word voted for Obama.
WRT Tim Ryan, midterm elections are just weird and I don't think they're comparable to presidential elections. I also don't think congressional elections can be viewed in a vacuum - if voters think the Democratic party is too radical, one candidate doing the right thing won't cut it.
Interesting hypothesis about Obama voters becoming more racially conservative. I kind of have a hard time believing it just because of how much more racially liberal the American population in general has become in that time (look at the drops in opposition to interracial marriage for instance), but I can't disprove it.
I mean, the "problem" is a lot of Democrat's who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 are dead or are partisan Republican's now and a lot of current Democratic voters are younger and far more liberal than the median Democrat in 2008.
As a result, 2024 candidate can't talk like Obama did on a lot of issues for the same reason Obama didn't talk about immigration like say, Bill Clinton did, which is why Bill Clinton didn't talk or just ignore gay people the way, say Walter Mondale did, who didn't ignore women the way say, LBJ did, and so on, and so forth.
I think as long as left-wing people exist and continue to live in cities and as long as the Democratic Party is largely supportive of abortion rights, immigrants, LGBT people, African-American's who have issues with police overreach, and are generally the party of The Other, 40-45% of the population will always see the Democrat's in radicals, especially when the GOP is now the party of the Anti-Other.
I think a lot of voters have radicalized on various culture war issues so much that moderation will not bring them back over the way people think it will. Like yes, I'm fine with Biden being preformatively pro-cop and I think we got the best political result in that the border bill was voted for by Democrat's, but not actually signed into law, but I think that helps more with wary Biden 2020 voters, not winning over Trump 2016 or 2020 voters.
I think there's some myth that there's some way to toss the left overboard completely, while winning over enough centrist voters to make it up, but I don't think there are that many winnable centrist voters, at least whens that are winnable by moving to the center to center-right on immigration or other culture war issues.
What wins we'll get of former Republican's will be people who are already moderate to liberal on social issues who liked low taxes who finally are sick of the Trumpified GOP, not Johnny, who voted for Obama in 2008, but now wants the border closed.
Like, it was changing by 2008, but I remember a study that's obviously lost in the mist that the first time voters could reliably idenitify the Democratic Party as the party of either minorities or African-American's was either the 2004 or 2008 election.
Which makes sense - even in say, 2000, if you're a low info voter, and only pay attention during election periods, the GOP of the late 90s and early 00s tried to get every non-white face they could get in convention spots and focused on in the crowd, so you might be sure, if you're truly low info.
My larger point is, it's not that the Democrat's are so much to the left than they were in 2008 or 2012. It's that a lot of voters who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 wouldn't have voted for him if they knew the actual positions of the Democratic Party in 2008 even when "moderated", and now they do know, and that's why they vote GOP.
I realize due to the demographics of this comment section, and one could argue the demographic of our host, that many people here wish it could be 2007 politically and culturally forever, but that's almost twenty years ago.
It's like wishing in 1970 to have the politics of 1953 back. Or in 2007 wanting the politics of 1990 back.
Part of the issue for Dems with immigration is that the fundamentals have changed, not just views of voters. Like, there are a lot more illegal border crossings were in 2008, so even if Biden talks a good game about immigration, he will struggle more than Obama did to get people to trust him on the issue. Of course, the challenge is that situation isn't all Biden's fault, as the GOP wants to undermine anything that might make him look good.
Curious, what's your perspective on the best political strategy is for Dems? Do you think there's *anything* they should do differently from now to try and get more centrist voters, or should they just focus on turning out the left?
I agree. It was the great lost opportunity of the 2021 trifecta.
The flip side of this is that a boring Republican who embraced a few center-left ideas would probably win 60% of the popular vote...
Kind of what they thought about Humphrey in '68, when the center-right and center-left were closer together.
My only complaint about this article is that it fails to acknowledge that one of the most attractive things about Slow Boring is the comment section. Honestly I pay more to be able to access the intelligent thoughtful and diverse comment section.
Having said that, Matt’s thoughtful writing is what attracts such a great group.
Also, you brought us Milan… the greatest intern ever. (No hate to the current interns)
Careful. Everyone here will be demanding royalties.
Unfortunately, for me Milan is the worst of the interns so far.
40-year old Milan is going to be killing it, though. You're going to love him.
Maybe. Hopefully he eventually tones it down on social media.
In other words, why is the NYT "Goring" Biden?
Slow Goring
I'm glad you've found it to be a very positive experience. I am certainly a satisfied customer, and even friends of mine who refuse to subscribe will grudgingly admit it is influential.
As a reader, the utility of Substack has really increased as Twitter has began to decay, and Slow Boring is a big part of that. Twitter used to be a great place to find deeper analysis and bits and bobs from other parts of the internet.
But now that Twitter is sabotaging itself by penalising outbound links and Substack itself, I find that my curated feed on Substack is now where I am getting a big chunk of longer form content from people I'm interested in, and Substack DMs are starting to be a place where I am sharing stuff to other people who use Substack a lot. The content unbundled by the death of newspapers is slowly being re-bundled.
+1
Twitter has really nosedived in the last year, which makes me sad. My feed is just straight up not as interesting any more.
My feed would still be good if Musk didn't put an insane paywall on the API. Now I have to jerry rig things together that get close, but risk me missing a bunch of good replies people have to each other.
I'm curious if you and others think this wouldn't have happened anyway once Substack came along and was successful. The ability to monetize content via Substack compared to Twitter seems like it always was going to dramatically impact the platform - especially longer form content.
I tend to think it has more to do with Musk's management, for a few reasons:
1) The jank factor went way up following the change in management--it feels like there's always something broken, like my feed looping weirdly or video being blacked out or whatever, so using the platform is just kind of low-grade irritating.
2) Elon's politics chased off a lot of the clever / funny feeds I followed where the content itself wasn't really political but the feed was run by someone who cared enough to leave.
3) The new pay-to-play rules seem to elevate a lot of blue-check stuff into my feed that I find weird, dumb, or gross, which presumably is crowding out stuff I would have liked.
To be honest, Substack has not really filled that hole for me; I just flat spend less time on the internet, with old Twitter-scrolling time replaced by other screen activities like video games or reading on the Kindle app. Admittedly, Twitter scrolling was, for me, mostly slotted into little moments of spare time, like right before bed or on the bus to work or on my lunch break.
That's fair. I never used twitter for much beyond following a specific set of people on topics I enjoy and they are still mostly on Twitter so the experience hasn't felt that much different for me. The biggest difference was a few of them gaining enough of an audience to make adding a different platform to monetize worth doing.
Matt’s evolution on climate has brought him closer to my views, so I want to propose some cool topics.
1. The benefits of climate change. In most countries, deaths spike in the winter. People in the US migrate towards the warmer parts of the country. This suggests cold currently causes more human suffering than heat. To what extent will global warming reduce winter mortality? To what extent will making the climate like Virginia more like North Carolina make people happier?
2. Seawalls. We all know the oceans are going to rise. How much would it cost to protect population centers from this? Do developing countries like Bangladesh have the state capacity? Can developing counties do more good through building sea walls or through carbon capture?
3. Air conditioning. To what extend can the harms of climate change me mitigated through air conditioning? How much would bringing air conditioning to poor Indians and Nigerians cost? Can it be done with clean energy?
I understand there are tail risks associated with climate change. However, it’s difficult to have a good understanding of the issue when mainstream media refuses to admit climate change has any benefits and even blames it for blizzards and cold snaps.
I do think we should be thinking about these topics (in fact, the insurance industry already does!), but I would be careful not to frame this as "benefits." The single most important thing to know about climate change is that you're increasing uncertainty. It's not a question of making Virginia more like North Carolina (it's going to be making Virginia more like Florida, btw); it's a question of, are the places where we currently grow our food still going to be suitable for that? And if not, will there be other places? What about the collapse of the food webs in the ocean? What about wildfires? What happens if the ocean currents shut down? What if ancient bacteria get thawed out that we don't have resistance towards? There's way way more.
The point being: Earth is an N of 1. You don't get to run a control experiment and see what happens when you change one of the inputs to the climate. We're running the actual experiment now and we're running models to predict the outcomes, but there's a whole lot of uncertainty that is going to be destabilizing.
I get that there is uncertainty, but there is also a big “cushion.”. The upper midwest, Canada and much of Russia are all regions where the growing season is constrained by frosts. A longer growing season would increase yields in many areas that are now on the northern fringe of agriculture and would extend the fringe further north. Yes, water might evaporate faster but most northern climates have a lot of lakes because water currently evaporates so slowly. Any place with lakes is also likely to have lots of fossil water.
The other thing is we currently grow so much corn that we burn it for fuel. That’s another cushion.
I don't think the "cushion" is as large as you say it is, but I also appreciate that that wasn't really your original point. On that I agree; every climate piece doesn't have to be "here's the doomsday scenario" or "climate change isn't happening and even if it is, we shouldn't do anything about it because China" or "this one weird trick will lower carbon emissions by 40%." I want to read a lot more about "it's coming, and here's how we'll need to adapt."
People also overestimate how large to poles are based on map distortion. There's just more area near the equator.
There's also a nature paper that models pandemic likelihood based on climate change. Tldr it goes up because of climate shifts in the topics, especially with mountains. The poles/midrange attitudes end up being less important.
People say this about the growing season, but what's the topsoil situation like in northern Manitoba? Is this as easy as "well now it's five degrees warmer so I can definitely crow corn"? (I genuinely don't know)
I think some of the problems with opening up new cropland include exactly like you say, no banked topsoil from millions or at least thousands of years of grazed grassland soil building, but also the costs of rebuilding and moving infrastructure, and most of all the unpleasantness of all the wildfires currently converting those areas to grassland or just different forest (the last part is probably hyperbole, it's hard to know how much the wildfires are caused by climate change vs commercial forests planted in single age cohort monocultures)
“What if ocean currents shut down” - then Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal will need to save us.
How do we bring air conditioning to the developing nation of the United Kingdom
We also have to bring faucets that mix the hot and cold water to make warm water.
That is one of the weirdest things about the UK. Like, you’re washing your face in their teeny tiny sink and your choices are “ow ow burning” and “yikes too cold”.
If I remember correctly it's because their houses (historically) have gross hot water tanks and mixer taps risk contaminating the public (cold) water supply
And closets
Energy abundance would help.
Nope, the Brits need liberation, send in the troops
Or, what if as a way of compensating parts of the world more affected by climate change for the U.S. role in contributing to it, and also making progress towards one billion Americans, the United States opened up Alaska, "the Last Frontier" and the state with the lowest population density by a lot, to essentially unlimited immigration for climate refugees from equatorial regions?
Now that's a half baked idea.
And who doesn't like baked Alaska?
There is also a potential multipart series on how climate change might affect/strengthen Canada. I’m tempted to write “One Half Billion Canadians”
My suggested title, "One Half Billion Canadians in Gas Masks": https://calgaryherald.com/feature/wildfires-novascotia-bc-alberta-summer-canada-burned-book-smoke#:~:text=It%20was%20%E2%80%9Cthe%20most%20devastating,140%20of%20the%20world's%20countries.
Seriously though, while I'll concede there may be some upside in some places, the disruption already being wrought by climate change, as well as the uncertainty mentioned above, just seems like more compelling topics. I'll add that people who live in a place tend to have adapted to the climate they have, with an agricultural, industrial, and economic (e.g., ski resorts) base that rapid climate change will wreak havoc upon.
And, more poetically, and personal to me, is a sense of loss for what used to be. Winter is a gift and a source of wonder for me that I never understood until I moved north from the southern swamp where I was raised. Everything ends, of course, and we may envision a future where the climate is irrevocably altered and humans have adapted, but beyond the actual death and destruction involved in that process, there are these small-scale effects wherein individual people's lives are altered in ways that feel tragic to them.
Immigration is such a benefit to us that I am reluctant to point out how beneficial it is to migrants for fear that this (mistakenly) be seen as zero sum compensation.
But yes the US and other rich countries should massively assist poorer countries to adapt to climate change that they only minimally benefitted from in the past.
Does Canada publish statistics on the fiscal impact of immigration by source?
No. The idea of merit based immigration is that merit does the selection, not country of origin.
But this lets people check if it is merit based.
??? In the sense that a BA from a top Indian university would be worth more than one from a Somalian university?
You still couldn't have super high immigration levels. Immigration levels need to be slow enough to allow time for assimilation. Otherwise you would be recreating the countries that people are fleeing from which have much lower levels of social capital.
This makes me wonder what California in the 1850s, and other gold rush sites, were actually like, and how they transitioned (though some, like Alaska, may never have transitioned).
Sure, if all of the diseases that get released from the permafrost don't create another pandemic...
Maybe the neopastoralists will get their wish for fewer humans...
There's a lot written about this, here's the first Google hit: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/could-zombie-viruses-from-the-permafrost-trigger-another-pandemic#What-types-of-viruses-could-be-lurking-in-the-permafrost?
I like the terms “Pandoravirus, Megavirus, Pacmanvirus”, but it does sound like most of the people quoted in that article still think that viruses in living animals in the remote tropics are more likely to be relevant than thawed frozen viruses (which is not to say that the latter are zero risk, just not contributing as much even to climate change related viral risk).
Yeah... I literally just pulled the first Google link. There's a lot better writing on this topic out there but I'm too lazy to look it up.
Not once they become citizens, but there's no reason Congress can't create a program where admission and permanent residency are contingent on maintaining residency in one state for a limited time until the immigrant qualifies for citizenship.
And similarly, require employers to follow such regulations, too. Compliance wouldn't be 100%, sure, but you probably don't need 100% compliance to make such a system work. The H1B program already has something of this element (wrongly in my view) in that such workers are bound to a particular employer.
You would have to impose internal border controls and freedom loving Alaskans would hate having to show a passport to visit SF or Seattle.
Not saying anything about the merits, but you wouldn't have to physically imprison them in the state, just make sure they live and work in it.
I would also love to see some coverage on regenerative farming and how it can store huge amounts of carbon as new top soil while also improving food quality and soil health
On air conditioning, it would certainly help, but people still have to do things outdoors, and if the wet bulb temperature gets to a certain point in tropical monsoon climates, then watch out.
Oh man, this is the problem with the emerging trend of "heterodoxy as a service" -- now a bona fide sector of the gig economy. There are reams and reams of studies on all these issues. The fact that none of them endorse the pollyanna point of view some want is not a reason to dismiss or re-evaluate them or to demand that the media spend more time looking for the pony under the pile.
I'd like to see some sort of enduring "reader bleg" board where people could submit and vote on topics over time. It would work like the feature request tools that software firms use.
I did not know about the winter deaths. I had assumed the opposite, probably because I have lived in northern cities with scarce residential air conditioning for most of my life, so deaths caused by heat are in the news and top of mind. Thanks for a new perspective.
The death increase issue has to do with degree of concentration -- the cold weather death increase is much larger in total volume, but spread over a few months and many of those who die do so in the hospital; heat deaths tend to be concentrated in spikes of just a few days and many of those people die at home, so their deaths are more shocking from a media perspective.
I think we also don’t really have a proper explanation for winter deaths, and we don’t really know how many are caused by absolute temperature vs being caused by just being the relatively cooler time of year locally. As I understand it, the winter surge of deaths is just as large in Florida and Hawaii as in Minnesota and Alaska. This is the whole question we never really learned about with COVID seasonality, and that of other viruses, as well as things like heart attacks.
Re 1, depending on the location, there are real economic benefits to climate change and increased carbon dioxide levels (especially for agriculture), but the "deaths spike in winter therefore warmer weather is good" argument always seems silly. As best I can figure, a lot of extra deaths in winter are from respiratory infections, and while the temperature does have some impact on that, both Alabama and Alaska have flu seasons in the winter. So, even turning Alaska into Alabama won't get rid of the "winter death spike".
Covid was unusual, so I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from it. The flu basically peaks in winter in the whole US. You can see cases by HHS region if you scroll down a bit and set the surveillance area to "Region". The sunbelt is covered by regions 4, 6, and 9.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm
(EDIT: posted wrong link)
Your (1) and (3) are linked. If we don't resolve (3), then climate change could reverse (1). That said, there *are* a lot of companies developing cleaner, more efficient cooling systems, including systems better suited to running on renewable power. They're out there, being used and tested, but it's slow going, and for a long time resilience and adaptation have been dirty words in many circle, for a variety of reasons. That seems to finally be starting to change.
(2) Possible, but I think sea level rise in general is overrated as a major risk.
@Allan Thoen: On migrating towards the poles, it's possible, but there is also a question of speed and whether building all new infrastructure in those places is going to be better/easier than trying to adapt-in-place. And rightly or wrongly, even the tiniest efforts to build new things in new places gets shut down for "environmental" reasons without regard for cost-benefit analysis. My take is that by the time enough people recognize the problem as being serious to justify this kind of move, it'll be too late to execute it. I do also think it will be viable to adapt in place. As one example, we may not need polar farmland in the 2080s if by the 2050s we have solar power at 1-2 cents/kWh and energy storage at $50/kWh and mass--produced SMRs and we start to use these capabilities for high-efficiency indoor agriculture (not just lettuce). It may seem far fetched, but I think the longer term development path makes it very likely.
"Hundreds of thousands of people will become climate refugees in places like Bangladesh, but Minnesota will be slightly warmer" does sound like a climate change benefit to most people who care.
I think part of the reason we don't hear much about this topic is that the "benefits" won't really be beneficial "on net" but should realistically be categorized as "mitigating factors."
I think it's more that there just isn't much of an audience for it. To those trying to halt climate change pointing out benefits is counterproductive. To those unconcerned by it pointing out benefits requires acknowledging that it's happening at all.
Climate shifts will be disruptive and disruption is always costly. I doubt anyone has seriously gamed out whether a world that's 2 degrees warmer is a net benefit in the long run.
My two cents on lack of articles about the benefits of climate change is that the benefits are more theoretical and longer term than the harms. E.g., a warmer climate will lengthen growing seasons at higher latitudes, but the topsoil layer (on average) gets thinner and poorer the farther north you go due to historically less dense plant life[1], so the expansion of agriculture in higher latitudes isn't going to offset losses of agricultural land in lower latitudes from desertification, sea rise, etc., for many centuries or more.
[1]: Basically all topsoil north of the 47th parallel in North America and Europe was scrubbed off during the last glacial maximum; meanwhile much of the northern part of Asia that remained ice free nonetheless became a desert due to low humidity levels.
Ah, I just made this same comment elsewhere. This does seem like a big question--south of the Twin Cities is some of the most fertile farmland in the world. You go the other direction and it gets pretty rocky pretty quickly, and by the time you're at the Canadian border it's pine trees sticking out of piles of billion year old volcanic rocks. Not sure if you can grow soybeans in that regardless of temperature.
How much of modern agribusiness just involves pumping some sort of neutral aggregate substance that roots hold onto full of petrochemical derived fertilizers? Seems like that might be able to work just fine regardless of local soil.
Right--but the land I'm thinking of isn't even, like, gravel, it's basically piles of boulders. Maybe you invent a way to turn sand into topsoil (or whatever) but you're going to need to lay it down for tens of thousands of square miles if you want Iowa 2.
But the temperature differential is much worse in cold climates. In NYC you need to increase the temperature by 40-50 degrees F on average to stay sufficiently warm in January. It's more like 10-12 degrees (of cooling) in July.
Cooling and heating are equal in energy usage when you are using a heat pump - the efficiency is exactly determined by the ratio of the warm side to the cold side temperature, expressed in Kelvin’s, which basically means it’s determined by the difference in temperatures in degrees F or C (since we are dealing with at most 30-40 degrees C difference at around 300 degrees C above absolute zero).
Heating does have the advantage that basically every process you do inside the house (including breathing) helps a bit with heating
My slow and boring take on coverage is that I almost think that largely ignoring the entire presidential election might be a good thing. It gets covered to death by everybody else. I'd like to hear a lot more about important down ballot races and issues that otherwise get smothered in the coverage of presidential politics. To be clear, I'm not arguing that the presidential results aren't important. As they say "elections have consequences", but from a point of view of comparative advantage let's discuss things that aren't discussed everywhere else.
Here’s a thing that I don’t think we consider often enough: most of us live in states where our presidential vote is essentially meaningless. Most of us know who is going to carry our state, no matter what they did yesterday or will do tomorrow. All this media hand-wringing about influencing the election? Probably the handful of voters in Michigan who matter are never going to encounter your work. Just tell me the truth please, hold your intellectual integrity dear and trust that it will pay off over time.
For what it's worth, I think MY covers the presidential election in a very refreshing way, and I suspect it gently tugs the national conversation in a healthy direction.
Strong agree.
If Matt and team would like help in their brainstorming, I'd like to offer one heterodox topic for a future post : Seven Good Things About the Groups We Like to Punch.
I.e., not about what is good about ideas from the Left (he just did that), but about the The Groups themselves. We here at SB love to beat up The Groups (I do too) but that kind of kneejerk response can make us lazy. They're still bad, but are they 100% bad? I'd love to have Matt shake up our thinking by forcing us to confront cases where, actually, The Groups (and their donors) are right and the rest of us are wrong by too quickly dismissing them.
This would be great! And would help separate the commenters that are here because they like Matt from the ones that are here because they like how Matt hates on The Groups. (This happened in the comment section on that article a few months ago about how antisemitism is really a problem on the right much more than the left.)
That parenthetical is only true if you think antisemitism actually isn’t much of a problem on the left, which many dispute! It’s pretty low to dismiss those who disagree with you as “haters”, esp so when in doing so you yourself by the by the by come out as dismissive of one of the worst forms of hate
I don’t understand this comment.
I'm not sure I've ever fully understood what is and is not included in "the Groups", but to the best of my understanding they are organizations more-or-less narrowly focused on specific public policy issues and outcomes. On that reading, there are any number of Groups out there doing good work out there.
I’m a longtime subscriber and admirer. However, I’m wondering about the sustainability of this medium in the longer term. With every writer one wants to hear from asking for a paid subscription (and sometimes basically requiring it) I am now subscribed to (at least) a couple of dozen substacks. So, instead of simply subscribing to a few magazines, like The Atlantic and such, and a couple of newspapers, I am subscribing to them but also now paying thousands of dollars a year to read all of the good people I know and then discover all the time who have moved to Substack. I don’t think this is sustainable and I’m wondering what Matt thinks? What I really think must eventually happen (sooner versus later) is for a number of authors to form groups or syndicates to which someone can subscribe “for a discount.” In other words, become more like magazines or journals. Matt, any thoughts?
I'll ask the Substackosphere again, what would be the problem with having a micropayments option. Am I the only person that would like to read -- and for me that means be able to comment on -- a lot more Substacks than I am prepared to pay for? The all or nothing model makes sense for Gym memberships where holding unused capacity has a real cost, but that is not the case with Substacks. I can see that there is little additional revenue for a hugely successful site like Matt's, but why not for others?
But the other point is that a micro pay to comment model would mean that sites would be slightly less bubbly. Again, not with Matt and Noah, but many sites just get comments praising the author for his valuable work! The subscribership does not see any dissent. This does not seem healthy.
No one has ever been able to make the economics work with individual digital purchases. Most people simply find even $1 to be too large of a barrier when there's so much free content online.
Furthermore, publishers don’t want sporadic purchases, but instead the more consistent revenue from subscriptions (and ads). That entails creating a product that is a regular, consistent, novel point of view. Select free articles, as well as publicity on other venues like twitter can convince potential subscribers to consider the product. Customers need to be compelled to commit to a paid subscription.
The tech analyst Ben Thompson has written extensively on the subscription business model for news and opinion publications. He has first hand experience as he’s been running an amazing paid newsletter since 2013. (Substack founders cited him as their inspiration). Notably, see his 2017 article, “The Local News Business Model” [1]
> It is very important to clearly define what a subscriptions means. First, it’s not a donation: it is asking a customer to pay money for a product. What, then, is the product? It is not, in fact, any one article (a point that is missed by the misguided focus on micro-transactions). Rather, a subscriber is paying for the regular delivery of well-defined value.
> Each of those words is meaningful:
> Paying: A subscription is an ongoing commitment to the production of content, not a one-off payment for one piece of content that catches the eye.
> Regular Delivery: A subscriber does not need to depend on the random discovery of content; said content can be delivered to the subscriber directly, whether that be email, a bookmark, or an app.
> Well-defined Value: A subscriber needs to know what they are paying for, and it needs to be worth it.
He has a lot of free articles that cover news and more generally the media industry, particularly how the internet disrupted it. If you find this topic interesting, I bet that you’ll find reading a few convinces you to commit to a paid subscription for $120/yr.
[1] https://stratechery.com/2017/the-local-news-business-model/
Comment adapted from my past comments on this topic:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/another-brutal-year-for-the-media/comment/45242472
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-two-crises-in-the-news-business/comment/48444478
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-two-crises-in-the-news-business/comment/48441091
I'm just saying I do not understand why a subscription substack cannot have an additional piece rate module. It would be a two part tariff, extracting some income from the part of the demand curve below the profit maximizing subscription price. Would all of Doomberg's subscribers switch to paying by the peice if he allowed it?
Because if sites like Slow Boring started offering individual purchases, then I imagine fewer free subscribers would convert to paid over time because when readers finally got over their barrier to paying, they can contend themselves with a single article rather than committing to a subscription. Matt and co. would have to regularly convince free subscribers and guest to making purchases, whereas now they just need to get us to click subscribe once.
Furthermore, once we commit to a purchase, we're more likely to read future paid articles that we've already bought. We may even feel compelled to consume to justify our past purchase decision. As we grow accustom to the habit of reading SB, our subscription becomes increasingly sticky.
Your scenario just seems less plausible to me than people discovering sites they like enough to subscribe (at a lower cost/read) plus some income from drive by readers or low intensity readers.
[Although it is not a big concern for me, I'd probably try charging people to read for my priceless opinions if I could test the waters with micro-payments. ]
And adding a micropayment option would be more valuable to Substack as a platform than the sum of the financial advantages to writers.
My fear is that readers paying by the article will push writers, consciously or not, to prioritize clickbaity type articles. Seeing certain articles rake in the bucks while others you lovingly crafted instead crash and burn has to affect their motivations.
I think we have enough clickbait junk already.
I think that per article payment coud be an addition to subscribers. Admittedly I am generalizing from myself. There are a lot of Substacks I will not pay to subscribe to that I would occasionally pay to have access to.
I think you underestimate the differences in business models between paying per piece vs subscription and the dangers of cannibalizing the second if the first is offered. For most writers, the advantage of steady income from subscriptions is far more valued than the ability to get a bit more money through a piece rate model to the extent that you wouldn't want to jeopardize it in any way.
The only way I could see making it work would be to make the piece rate model to be so high that people would only use it if they really only wanted one or two pieces a month. E.g. if you are charging $10-$12 a month, then make the one piece rate price $4-$5 each. But then very few would do the second option so it negates the point of having it.
Maybe so, but people are not really deciding month by month to subscribe. The thing I subscribe to I quite enjoy every post. I would not unsubscribe to pick and chose for a buck or so per article. But admittedly I may be atypical.
Neither would I. Having thought about it more, I also think that people are not likely going to want to exert the mental energy of sifting through articles that much. Better to simply pick the sources/subscriptions that you feel bring higher value and go with those.
I do. But there are many sites that I am not willing to subscribe to that I see posts on that I'd like to read and comment on.
But maybe _I_ am just not a big enough market to be worth catering to. :)
Still, I really suppose that if Substack allowed a option of Subscribe for $X/year or read individual pieces for $X/n each where n = ~ 50 (each poster coud choose their n) the number of Subscribers would be about the same. I can see that if has more overhead cost, so maybe THAT is the constraint.
The flipside is that high monthly subscription prices promote a star system that makes it harder for other voices to gain a viable economic foothold in substackland.
1) Is $10 a month a high subscription price?
2) People who subscribe, get regular articles, and are able to comment and converse with other regular commenter are buying a different product that someone who buys a one off article.
I mean as compared to $10 for a bundled subscription. NYT all news subscription is what, $17 / month? That's for a vast amount of information and differing viewpoints, etc. Compared to that, the economics of Substack are pretty niche. Most people won't subscribe to 10 substackers at $10/month each.
If only we could bundle all these great writers into a single entity that has columns we read regularly, perhaps on a daily or twice a week basis... someone should create something like that.
There's probably something real to the critique that most business strategy just comes down to bundling / unbundling and centralization / de-centralization cycles.
What I'd like to see Substack offer is a sitewide subscription where you could unlock any article on any blog that chooses to opt in to the sitewide subscription, and that blog would get a cut of the revenue from that sitewide subscription. Ideally I'd like one lump sum of $A for B number of articles, but given what Matt Hagy always says below about publications obsessing over recurring set it and forget it monthly subscriptions, I would begrudgingly accept that too.
My comment was meant to be a bit tongue in cheek... it's essentially the newspaper/magazine model. Kind of like how all of the streaming services are recreating the cable model by bundling again.
Sure, but people have differing overlaps of interest, and it would be cool if someone could invent variable bundles to cater to each person's unique interest.
Flipboard for Substack...
It's definitely coming soon, right? "Pay $20/month for these 6-7 substacks?"
This would, in practice, mean more popular substacks would be subsidizing others.
To some extent, yes, but bundling can be positive-sum.
There are almost certainly people who won't pay $10/month for Slow Boring but would pay $20/month for SB + 10 other newsletters. That increases the revenue pie.
It also can increase the quantity of economically viable content, which can increase demand even more. Think about cable: ESPN obviously subsidizes other channels and has forever, but bundling also opened the door for prestige television and channels like AMC and FX became powerhouses in their own right that drive bundle subscriptions and extra revenue for ESPN.
ESPN worked really, really hard not to subsidize other channels! Their carriage rates were extremely high compared to most other channels and are a major reason why cable got so expensive that people started cancelling their subscriptions.
I understand that the dynamics are different because cable is/was a monopoly, but it's still true that bundling created a big pile of money that enabled lots of high quality content, which in turn drove more subscriptions, and the ESPNs ultimately benefited from that.
Ultimately, there *are* synergies - acquisition cost savings and a larger revenue pie - so there *should* be a positive-sum bundling opportunity, but that would depend on the right bundle, pricing and marketing execution. Who benefits most would come down to negotiation.
Hope so...
Ad-supported is micropayments and shows exactly all the perverse incentives that micropayments create.
You think clickbait headlines are bad now? Just till you see the clickbait incentivised by a micropayment to unlock the actual article.
You hate how articles are spread across 7 pages to maximise ad views? Just wait until you need a micropayment to unlock Part 7 in the article you're reading.
You hate how recipes online always start with 1,000 words of ChatGPT biographical rambling because of ads? Just wait until micropayments means there's an even bigger incentive to pad things out so and split the article into multiple micropayments.
Hate all the content farming by ChatGPT/developing country "content writers"? Just wait for a Cambrian explosion of that, even harder to distinguish from real content, once micropayments make it more lucrative.
Then add in all the NEW issues. You know how Amazon can give a cut for purchases via a referral link? Micropayments could do the same thing. So now you don't know if Matt is linking to some article because it is genuinely great or because he thought it was kind of okay but he gets 20% of any micropayment to unlock it.
I am talking about opening a micro-payment/post by post option in Substack.
Thoughtful piece, but I disagree with "This has created a sort of paradoxical situation in which the NYT remains stridently neutral in its core political coverage, but quite left-wing in other areas." The NYT is left of center politically--it rarely, if ever, has anything positive to say about a conservative politician or policy, while it often explicitly or implicitly praises liberal ones (such as on immigration, climate change, etc).
That said, congratulations on your well-earned success.
That’s… uh… quite a take…
I presume you’re a fan of Obamacare, but per your comment, have nothing positive to say about Romneycare, on which it was largely based? Or the individual mandate which was originally espoused by the Heritage Foundation?
The idea Obamacare was largely based on Romneycare is a stretch, ironically pushed by left-wingers who wanted single payer and the 12 reasonable conservatives who wanted credit.
Romneycare had almost none of the regulation changes, no Medicaid expansion, and so on. The only real thing was the worst part of the ACA - the exchanges, while the best part is the parts that tell health insurance companies they have to be less evil and the Medicaid expansions.
Also, the individual mandate was actually bad policy it turned out, and Obama was right to initially oppose it.
The individual mandate was not bad policy, but rather bad politics, which I think is an important distinction.
Agreed that Romneycare and Obamacare are not as similar as some claim, I was reaching for that in response to the commenter above who had nothing positive to say about anything any conservative policy. I think someone who supports Obamacare (a presumption I made about the commenter which may not be true) would be able to find something positive in Romneycare (eg it significantly expanded access to healthcare).
Totally agree on how bad the individual mandate and how it was bad that Obama caved on that. Why do you call the exchanges the worst part of the ACA?
Partly because the other parts were much better (Medicaid expansion, regulatory changes, etc.) and simpler, and because not only were the exchanges not that effective at least at the beginning because of compromises that had to be made toward centrists, they were also the cause of about 90% of the bad stories that went beyond the right-wing fringe of 'death panels' and the like.
This is totally ancedotal, but when I heard normies complain about it back during the initial startup, from what I remember, it's because the costs were way too high, it was confusing what was actually covered, and technology hiccups.
It seems better now, but largely because it's become much closer to being a subsidized private option, as opposed to a pure market. Which as a dirty social democrat, I don't mind, but I also think we could've gotten a better political deal, if possibly, by passing the regulatory changes, expanding Medicaid, then also dropping the Medicare age to 55 and introducing Medicare opt-in for kids or something like that, instead of making Peter who works part-time at a gas station pay $400/month for crappy insurance or face a fine.
Honestly, the part where the GOP basically stopped the IRS from fining people from not getting insurance was a backend political win for the Democrat's.
Thanks. I'm just getting started on the exchanges for the first time, and I do find it frustrating so far that I have to go through one operating as a middleman instead of just doing business straight with the insurer. I can conceptualize the need to build big insurance pools, but I'm encouraged by you saying that there could be a better way.
My main pain point with the ACA is the public option getting killed. Damn Lieberman, even back in the 90s as a teenager I always knew something was not right with him. Especially when he ended up looking like a dead ringer for Palpatine.
Your partisanship is blinding you.
The reality is neither side is always right. And society needs both impulses, progressives pushing change and conservatives say slow down have you thought this through.
>>And I’ve come to see the mainstreaming of this fairly extreme approach to climate change as probably the central error of the contemporary progressive movement.
Not to go TOO far off topic, but this is similar to my most heterodox view contra progressivism: I view it as a central error that modern feminism incorporated such an extreme approach to abortion. Not necessarily because I think they should all go to the other extreme, but the degree to which dissent has been rendered anathema and feminism identified EXCLUSIVELY with choice is kind of striking. It's entirely possible to imagine a feminist movement that remained divided on the issue and was more or less "OK" with that status quo.
Although, to their credit, much of the aftermath of Dodd has indeed proved that the hardcore abortion left were correct that the right just wanted to control women. Which IMO doesn't remotely excuse abortion per se, but certainly lends credence to marginal arguments for things like birth control and generous abortion exceptions.
I really didn't want to be the woman who argues with you about abortion today, but your second paragraph negates your first.
The mainstream feminist position that abortion is a private healthcare decision between a woman and her doctors is NOT extreme and, as you almost admit, recent events have proven that. Tragically, publicly, and unnecessarily.
Dobbs has been painful in the short term. But longer term, I can now see within the next five to ten years an end to the bitter and seemingly-intractable abortion debates that have divided our country and warped our politics for my entire life -- and the end is the emergence of a genuine democratic consensus that abortion should be legal. That wasn't possible before Dobbs.
Abortion has often been framed similarly to prohibition, in that the parties staked out extreme positions and demonized the other side. Then when the temperance movement won, it took everyone a few years to realize "oh yeah, this was a stupid idea" and repealed it.
Unfortunately for abortion, a lot of people are going to have some pretty serious health issues before that happens.
This is the forecast I keep thinking of. And Prohibition lasted 12 years, and we're just finishing up Year 2 of Dobbs being on the books.
Capone is considered responsible for over 200 murders as a result of the gang fighting he was part of...
The backlash to Roe from the right lasted 50 years. I doubt it will be different now that the shoe's on the other foot, and I expect the backlash to Dobbs to stick around for a while.
Isn't the difference that laws can be changed after every election while constitutional rights cannot until the justices on SCOTUS change?
I think if left to the states, the issue will be settled in most of them within a couple years.
Can't agree more. Roe's biggest problem wasn't that it legalized abortion, but that it prematurely "settled" the issue.
Considering that Leonard Leo and crew are pushing to have a national abortion ban enacted either with the next Republican trifecta or with the current SCOTUS, the issue will indeed be "settled." Just very much not in accordance with popular sentiment.
A national ban might happen. But it would be like prohibition, and get repealed in a few years after causing lots of suffering, and later be seen as a misguided step on the way to whatever the eventual consensus is.
It's unfortunate that so many women will have to pay a large price as we make our way to the sunlit upper lands of this hoped-for near-consensus, but all the same I think you're right. Of course, if Trump wins and takes over the FDA, that happy outcome will be all the more painful and delayed.
I wish this were true, but I don't see how this happens any time soon, to be honest
Yeah and our system makes it so hard to actually "codify Roe". Red states probably can get away with banning abortion forever even if it hurts the broader Republican party.
I just honestly disagree on the merits and don’t think I have anything meaningful to contribute in rebuttal. Cheers.
Ed: Also, FWIW, I harbor no prejudice towards you as "the woman who must make the argument". I get that it's not fun being the stereotype, and I feel as a "choice-skeptical feminist" that it's my duty to give women I disagree with (or anyone else for that matter!) a fair hearing, and not reduce them to stereotypes. It's not my first rodeo having the unpopular, heterodox opinion in progressive spaces, and it's actually brought me to a rather moderate stance relative to where I started out. But thanks for at least helping uphold the value of civility here! I know it's a difficult topic for everyone, least of all myself.
Good model of constructive discourse here from both of you!
I would say recent events have only demonstrated that the counter position (no abortions or very early bans) is extreme. But I agree with Dave’s point that the extremism in the other direction has also been counterproductive for the feminist cause. Had that movement struck a more moderate note, I think it would have been less alienating to a broad swath of women, myself included.
I think that the mainstream feminist position was that any restriction would be used by people opposed to all abortions as a complete ban to the absolute greatest extent possible, and therefore they had to oppose all restrictions in practice, even if they didn't all actually oppose all restrictions in theory.
That is, they were responding to a practical political world where there was no authority that could be trusted to be given the power to say "no" to an abortion that would not be distorted into saying "no" to all abortions and therefore creating any such authority was not acceptable.
That doesn't mean that they necessarily all believed that every abortion should be a "yes", but, over time, you come to believe your own talking points, so they came to believe that extreme position.
It's possible that some restrictions that will actually be limited to the cases that they are intended for will be able to actually be implemented.
Soomething like a typical European policy: "abortion on demand to 15 weeks, abortion for any significant health issue affecting mother or baby until birth, though if a C-section is an option very late, then you have to do that instead of abortion" requires a body that is capable of deciding if there is a "significant health issue" quickly and which is not subject to being dragged through the courts (by either side) afterwards. I'm not even sure if you can create such a body within the bounds of the US Constitution, but there was certainly no way of doing that pre-Dobbs. In a typical European system, it's some sort of group of doctors, sometimes in a single hospital, sometimes national (which is roughly equivalent to statewide in US terms). I can't imagine US lawyers accepting a system where some body with no lawyers on has the final word.
I think that was rather paranoid and unhinged of them. They didn’t have to assume the worst; maximalism on their part was one of the major factors in the downfall of Roe.
I think the problem was that TRAP had demonstrated that they couldn't get a good-faith compromise from anti-abortionists, and that institutional design is not something that any part of the US political spectrum works at. So they'd seen restriction laws and knew they were just bans, they'd never seen a restriction that actually worked and they'd reached the reasonable conclusion.
The fact is: institutional design is important, is something the US is really bad at, and creating a novel institution to achieve a complex compromise and then tweaking it legislatively several times until it works is something that has literally never happened. Why hasn't the structure of the EPA been modified by a new act of congress every few years to ensure it's achieving its intended goals? Because the US political system is not good at this.
However, I'd just add that what you're describing is a clear case of a distrust spiral.
Which is dumb! This same dynamic is how wars get started! We are presently hotly divided on the Israel-Palestine conflict which is just another example of this dumb dynamic!
IMO, in these cases it's the leaders who are generally to blame. Peacemaking is extremely hard and takes remarkable personal courage, because it means standing up to your own tribe and saying, "We shall not retaliate". Leaders who fall short of this, or worse, happily contribute to the spiral, are the ones primarily responsible for the failure to make peace.
So, if anything, however understandable your explanation is, it's not excusable. NARAL should have done better. So should the pro-lifers. Generations of BOTH women AND the unborn deserved better than this. None of your explanation exonerates any of the leaders involved, it just further indicts their short-sightedness.
Point is well taken.
Correct. The thing with exceptions for non-viable pregnancies, rape, incest and welfare of the mother is that pregnancy has a very tight timeline and every time you have to seek the input of another body you're throwing up a roadblock and delay, and every time there's a grey area doctors are incentivized to avoid performing the abortion. Because of this, exceptions aren't sufficient, at least not in the United States, because they do effectively force women to carry to term even if technically the woman probably qualifies for the exception. It's too much red tape and government footdragging on a timetable where weeks, even days, matter.
The Norwegian medical panel is obliged to reach a decision within 24 hours and there is no appeal. If, in the attending doctors' opinion, the medical condition is more urgent than that, then they can operate without waiting and the worst penalty a doctor can face if the panel subsequently disagrees is that they can't do abortions thereafter (and they can only be penalised if the panel decides that the abortion wasn't justified at all, not just if they decide that there was time for them to weight in).
That's what an exceptions system looks like. The fact is that no American proposal has ever come close to that. Exceptions are essentially defences the doctor can present in court, which means they can expect to have to defend every abortion they perform in a court case, which is profoundly unappealing.
Thinking about a federal law, I think you could do it constitutionally; you create a new Article III Courts in each Federal District, which, while being courts, the members must be doctors and need not be lawyers. You then limit the jurisdiction of all other courts to the effect that there can be no appeal from an abortion court. Then you require them to, on application from any doctor within their district, select one member of their court to make a decision and then render a decision within 24 hours of the request; failure to respond within 24 hours would result in all the judges on that court being fired (being a failure to reach the "good behaviour" standard in the Constitution) and denied the ability to ever be reappointed and would result in the abortion being approved when the timelimit is met (this prevents running out the clock being a tactic that can be used by either side).
It's a radical reworking of the judiciary to get the rest of the courts out of the way, and it would be enormously controversial procedurally. The Supreme Court would be absolutely furious. But I can't see how anything short of this kind of radical procedural innovation could provide doctors with the legal certainty they would need to make use of an exception in a timely manner.
I think the skeleton key is thermostatic opinion. Various abortion restrictions polled well when Roe was on the books and now that Roe is off the books pro-choice ballot referenda are undefeated in the states.
The abortion politics equilibrium was “don’t make us think about this issue.” Dobbs said “we will disregard standing, precedent, and a reliance issues to explicitly overrule a ruling we just made a few years ago because we now have the political power to arbitrarily make law.”
Now people are forced to notice and the public’s perception of the legitimacy of the judiciary has been (rightfully) damaged.
Right. I know a lot of legal scholars heavily criticize the Roe ruling. I recently read it, and portions of the Casey and Dobbs rulings while reviewing for my con law exam. I don't know, it seems like Roe and Casey struck a good balance between a woman's liberty interests and a state's interest in protecting potential life. As a matter of con law Roe/Casey seemed fine to me? Not a lawyer though.
Just to reiterate, I think that "privacy" was a really shitty peg to hang a right to bodily autonomy on. You really don't see that specific legal theory in any of the other countries that have legalized abortion, except when they've been influenced by Roe itself.
I could have accepted a case based in 13A's explicit right to bodily autonomy, 14A's right to due process, and 3-5A's implicit rights to bodily autonomy. I might have still been of the opinion that in light of the conflicts with the fetus's own bodily rights, 10A (states rights) ought to carry the day, but I'd at least see it as a judgment call based pretty soundly in constitutional principles of bodily autonomy.
But IMO, the right to privacy only guarantees the right against government intrusion on your property. Just because you have a right against the government busting down your door* while you're snorting cocaine, doesn't mean you have an inherent right to snort cocaine.
* Someone always brings up the obvious objection, so I just always add the caveat that conlaw already nullifies 4A rights against unreasonable searches if you're in plain view through a window or whatever; so assume here that all windows and drapes are closed and it's impossible to see inside the house.
I basically agree with your position here. I'm maximally pro-choice, but the "privacy" rationale of Roe was hot trash, as most obviously reflected by the fact that it got applied by the courts to literally nothing else in terms of medical care. I.e., there's a general "right to privacy," but it somehow protects only a very narrow slice of the universe of medical procedures/treatments. My strong preference dating back to law school would be that, if there is to be a federal constitutional right to abortion, it be re-grounded on the Thirteenth Amendment in that banning or significantly restricting abortion compels unpaid labor (no pun intended!) on the part of the mother.
Exactly; and that's exactly the kind of 13A argument I'd have accepted. Like, I might have different value judgments on the exact moral balancing of "unpaid labor", but I can at least understand and accept that someone with different value judgments would indeed feel that 13A demanded some form of legality for abortion.
Personally, I think that given our nation's great diversity, it would still have been a wiser choice for any 13A-grounded "Roe-Like" to leave up to the states the precise balance they'd like to find, but I would find myself hard-pressed to just say, "Well that's not ANYWHERE in the fucking Constitution, WTF".
One other thing I'd say is, I think it's also potentially valid to interpret forced birth as a "taking" under 5A. Setting aside the medical costs, a woman's body is pretty clearly her own private property, and by prohibiting abortion, the state is "taking" from her for a public use.
5A would therefore require the state to compensate mothers if the state finds some compelling 14A reason for violating her 13A right against forced birth. Under this kind of jurisprudence, pro-life states would have to choose between subsidizing mothers (something I think we/they should favor anyways) or allowing abortion.
In fact, if anything, I'd have PREFERRED this kind of jurisprudence for the broader reason that if it sets the mother's and fetus's rights against each other, then they can be *weighed*. Under Roe, the justices presumed to do the *weighing* themselves in advance, and did it too broadly, and then eventually Casey just set up a whole wild goose chase of TRAP laws and such under "reasonable restrictions" to be weighed against a nebulous right of "access" that was itself grounded in privacy -- so, it was basically all Calvinball the rest of the way.
Under 13A's bodily autonomy and 5A's "takings", it all becomes a lot simpler: Which body gets precedence, who gets compensated for the taking/labor/etc.? The law is just better at weighing these kinds of concrete questions than it is TRAP laws.
I'm not sure what you are saying here. The right to privacy on which Roe hinges was elaborated in Griswold, and relies on "zones of privacy" created by the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 9th Amendments, as well 14A liberty / due process interests.. The Constitutional concept of privacy is not a "peg" independent of those amendments, let alone a "shitty" one.
It's a shitty one because it requires inferring something that is not textually there: a generalized "right to privacy." That such a broad right does not plausibly exist is reflected by the fact that the Griswold/Roe "right to privacy" was never extended by the courts to anything beyond: (1) protecting access to birth control and (2) protecting access to abortion. E.g., why doesn't the same right extend to, for example, the right to take non-FDA approved drugs? (Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. von Eschenbach, 495 F.3d 695 (D.C. Cir. 2007) found that there was no such constitutional right.)
Something else for you to consider that hasn't been mentioned yet in the replies below your post here is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg always disliked the rationale of Roe, believing that instead it should be constitutionally protected under the Equal Protection Clause due to pregnancy being a trait uniquely born upon women. Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, I'm guessing should would have written a majority opinion on those grounds if an abortion case came her way before she died.
Equal protection says it all.
But I think it's fair to say that Ginsburg (and others) disliked the Roe rationale not because she objected to privacy jurisprudence but because she believed that Roe did not secure the right to abortion unambiguously enough under the trimester-based balancing of interest tests. This fear was confirmed when the court scrapped Roe's test in favor of "undue burden" testing in Casey, which began the long slow trench warfare of "burdening" abortion rights as much as possible.
I’m open to an Equal Protection argument, but I’m more partial to 13A and the broader 3-5A penumbra of bodily autonomy.
But you are having the correct reaction to actually reading Roe after a lifetime of hearing about it through the filter of the political warfare that raged around it all your life. It is a measured, rational and nuanced opinion that recognizes obvious facts about the human condition. (Lawyer, son of lawyers, father of lawyers..)
While I broadly agree, I think it’s important to also consider confounding factors. It could be entirely possible that the winning streak owes more to its unpopularity in many states before Dobbs, which motivated trigger laws that obviated the need for referenda that might have broken the streak.
We’ll never know the true counterfactual, but it’s at least important to steelman our own narrative to avoid future strategic mistakes.
Possibly, but some of these states are, like, Kentucky, which is not exactly known for general social liberalism. Message testing I've seen shows that abortion-related spots are the best performing Dem ads this cycle.
That's my point, though. Kentucky wasn't conservative enough to have a stricter trigger law. Alabama... was.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/marilyn-lands-alabama-special-election-abortion/
That's just one win in one district, though. And not a referendum.
The _central_ objection to Progressivism is its failure to link policy to results. Opposing fossil fuel projects in the US does very little to reduce global emissions of CO2 and methane. University protests do little to advance Palestine independence. Defunding the police does not protect "black lives." Today, affirmative action as practiced by elite institutions is not moving us toward a society where minorities are not disadvantaged. Etc.
The argument I've seen is "In order to deal with climate change, we have to leave substantial fossil fuel reserves in the ground. This is an opportunity to leave substantial reserves in the US in the ground, so we should take it: if other countries then take up the slack, we then, separately have to seek mechanisms to get them to leave their reserves in the ground, not compete with them to do our environmental damage over their environmental damage".
I think this misses that the likely mechanism to work in keeping fossil fuels in the ground is people not needing them (see: coal, where there are many mines with huge unmined reserves that have been closed because they can't extract the coal profitably) rather than regulators not letting them be extracted. But it's not as completely incoherent and disconnected from results as some people suggest it is.
I agree. The way to keep fossil fuels in the ground is to tax net emissions of CO2 (and methane).
That's an operational-level criticism, though, not an ideological one.
It doesn't discredit Progressivism, it discredits progressives.
If Progressivism is just wanting more equal outcomes in material and status terms then I'm all for Progressivism. It would just be the "inclusive" part of the Neoliberal objective of inclusive growth. I just see Progressives as Liberals who flunked Econ 101.
If that's the case, then they're not really "Progressives". They're just extreme liberals.
My personal headcanon is that progressivism is an actual set of values. However, those values are all in tension with each other -- equality vs. equity, stuff like that. And also, the default human brain-plan is generally more conservative than that; it might treasure one or even a handful of those values, but rarely all at once. Thus, progressive values implemented through a conservative mindset is the only reasonable way to proceed politically: incremental progress, wary of making mistakes, with our progressive values motivating a relentless focus on building consensus.
IMO that's different from liberal progressivism, which basically just asks, "What's the next most forward-thinking thing we can do beyond conventional liberalism? Okay, let's do that". I agree that that's stupid, but it's not because progressivism or its values are inherently stupid. It's just that an overly liberal mindset leads to a form of intellectual laziness where they never stop and smell the roses.
I guess I don't really appreciate enough that people have different visions of what a good society looks like.
But as a practical matter I prefer to argue as if we do not differ much on objectives, just have somewhat different weights on different parts of our objective function but REALLY different models of what moves toward those objectives.
"The right just wanted to control women."
What are you talking about? How has the aftermath of Dodd shown that?
Pregnant 12 year-olds and Texan women who can’t terminate unviable pregnancies and all the women who nearly lost their ability to access IVF would say so.
I can completely understand disagreeing with those positions on the merits, but they are completely consistent with the view that a fetus growing in the womb has all the rights of a person, which is the position of pro-life people. How do you get to the conclusion that the right just wants to control women? It seems like as much of a straw man as the people who claim those on the left just like killing babies.
For the record, I disagree with Lisa’s defense of myself. No shade to her, it’s just a different mindset that I have in coming from the opposite side of the spectrum as her.
I think that post-Dobbs, the pro-life movement has failed to enact even a TOKEN gesture toward supports for pregnant women - whether economic or social. Everything has been focused on punishment and enforcing draconian ideas like the Texas bounty law or wierd attempts to control interstate abortions despite that just being incredibly clearly “Not How Federalism Works, You Idiots, And It’s Rich Coming From The People Who Always Lecture The Left On Federalism”.
THAT is my beef.
Because they are controlling women. Is your issue just with the framing of "just"? "I don't want abortions to exist, therefore I will control women so they can't access them" is still controlling women.
David said, "[T]he aftermath of Dodd has indeed proved that ... the right just wanted to control women." I think it is pretty clear that David's assertion is that control of women is the ends, rather than a means of limiting abortion. I disagree with that assertion, and I don't think the examples you pointed to support that assertion.
I think those on the left have a problem in not trying to make a good faith effort to understand those on the right.
Normally I think "intent isn't magic" is a feeble defense, but in the case of bodily autonomy, the impact of controlling women it for the unborn children or controlling women for the misogyny of it all is identical.
We get that right wingers think it's a baby, but you want to control women to get there - and frankly, the fact that many pro-life people are against birth control and spending on child tax credits or public daycares makes it seem like it's really just for the misogyny. Was there an explosion of pro-life support for the child tax credit that I missed?
All restrictions on certain behavior "control" people.
In another thread, I stated: "Although I would support restrictions like parental notification or bans after a certain point in the pregnancy, I don't trust Republicans would stop with a compromise position when I think they really want to ban all abortions under any circumstances."
Now, you might think my theoretical support for restrictions after a certain point in the pregnancy is "controlling women", but I think that's an uncharitable way of characterizing a position.
This becomes very obvious as soon as you see the venn diagram of people that want to ban abortion and the people who want to make contraception illegal or difficult to access (even though it would reduce abortions). It's not quite a complete overlap, but pretty close.
If you are against abortions, but also the pill, sex education, HSV vaccines, and IUDs, look for the common denominator.
OK, let's look at that Venn diagram. This is something that can be answered by polls. According to one I found at https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/abortion-birth-control-poll/, more Republicans favor condoms and birth control pills being legal than Democrats, although it's overwhelming supported by both. So you are not correct.
Why is it, then, that one only sees outlier (unpopular, I might add) proposed laws to regulate birth control in Republican states?
I think there are plenty of republicans who (privately, probably) are closer to "safe, rare, legal" than they are to "force 12-year olds to have babies" on abortion. This is literally why Dobbs is such a "dog catches car" moment for them. A complete abortion ban has only ever been favored by a pretty far right religious minority that just so happens to be a 100% Republican voting block, so they wield a lot of power, especially at the primary level.
I interpret OP as referring to the extremists who truly want a 100% ban on abortion, with no exceptions. If you spend any time with that group, you will find a lot of folks who also want to prevent sex ed, or reduce access to reproductive health in general. This is absolutely a group that has, at minimum, a disregard for female body autonomy, and it's not hard to see an interpretation that goes all the way into wishing to control female bodies.
Moving further off topic…Trump likely wins and carries a lot more of congress without Roe v Wade being overturned. In an odd kind of way it may be the one thing that stops his reelection or
If he still wins at least a builds up the opposition.
I want to really encourage Matt to write about macroeconomics :) because a) he almost always gets to the right policy conclusions and the wider world ought to hear more of them but b) he gets to them by sometimes dubious paths that _I_ get to comment on.
As an economist myself, I have to say that I’ve been a little disappointed by the macro articles.
I’m willing to entertain the idea that the policy conclusions are correct. But Matt consistently seems unaware of how economists think about the issues he’s writing about.
I’d even be happy if Matt said “economists think X, but here’s why they’re wrong.” But right now in his articles he often seems to be debating straw men or leading readers down a line of argument with little relevance to the matters at hand.
(By contrast, I really liked Milan’s recent article where he actually asked economists with differing views what they thought about secular stagnation.)
Most people have no idea what economists think. So many people think we are the Chicago Boys and are telling Pinochet to throw people from helicopters.
There can never be too much regard for Milton Friedman
Counterpoint, helicopter drops of money kind of worked for Covid.
Also I am shocked we did it at a policy.
What if we split the difference and strap the political dissidents to the pallets of money?
I think it would have been better to size ARA according to "need," not what someone thought they could outguess the Fed about.
I remember when the first covid helicopter drops came that I was optimistic that this would be the wedge by which universal basic income became a mainstream idea. Unfortunately, in retrospect it seems to have been the dying gasp of UBI, which is now much less a topic of speculation and discussion than it was pre-COVID. (Though perhaps this is actually just a changing phase in the hype cycle, like with self-driving cars.)
"These?"
Slow Boring is WAY too popular to be a good example of what I want. There is zero chance that Matt's subscribers would all defect to post by post payments. The issue is, are there other more marginal sites that would see pots-by post pricing cannibalsize subscriptions. _I_ think very few, but I can't be sure.
Thanks!
Can you give an example?
My go-tos are his arguments about nominal GDP targeting:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-ngdp-targeting?utm_source=publication-search
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-real-world-is-nominal?utm_source=publication-search
It's true that economists have discussed nominal GDP targeting before. But the arguments he makes in these articles have almost nothing to do with the pros and cons of that strategy. He would've been better off saying "Scott Sumner thinks it's a good idea. I don't quite understand why, but I trust him."
Also, as a bonus, the article in which he claims "background conditions of economic equality" are required for efficiency, which he often references here:
https://www.vox.com/2014/12/20/7423505/inequality-market-prices
He doesn't even quite understand how economists define (Pareto) efficiency! What he's talking about is maximization of utilitarian social welfare, which is an entirely different matter best left to philosophers. Even in Econ 101, you learn that there are "efficient" allocations that are horrible in a moral sense -- e.g., one person gets all the food and everyone else starves to death.
Thank you.
I appreciate the introspection! Also the Times criticism is spot on. It's particularly poignant since the Times has vacuumed up a lot of the best talent from other publications. I'm glad these writers are getting paid, but there aren't any other legacy publications with the same reach and influence (besides maybe the Washington Post). So it's imperative on the Times to get the big picture right, and they're not.
I will quibble a bit with, "As a reader, I keep wishing that other writers I like who work for bigger institutional outlets had assignment editors who would force them out of their lanes a bit more." Yes, and the examples you gave are good ones. But the writers need to be informed... it doesn't do anyone much good to hear half-baked ideas without understanding the underlying principles.
No of course I’m not saying people should write bad columns where they don’t know what they are talking about. But these are smart people, if they were pushed they could research/report and I’d be interested to read what they come up with.
They could... but far more frequently I've observed pundits or experts pull the "I'm knowledgeable in one particular field, therefore I will opine on unrelated fields" and pass off nonsense opinions.
Btw, this is one of the main reasons I subscribe to your Substack! You're willing to do this AND you're willing to do the research. Even when I disagree, you've clearly done your homework (or at least, your intern of the day has). Of course, there's the notable exception of a lot of the science writing... but that's my field so I'm highly attuned to those issues.
I really love your substack and I’m glad it’s worked out for you, but I kind of feel like Vox had a kind of measured optimistic tone especially in the Obama years that I miss as a niche between utopian fantasy and popular substack’s being a bit harsh feeling.
Isn't the issue that the Vox of the Obama years disappeared and that's part of why Matt left?
I don’t think it disappeared. Future Perfect is still that, and I’ve been liking some of their other new features, like Ever Better and whoever is doing a financial advice column. It’s really interesting that they’ve got all those things even as their center is the mainstream media epitome of woke strident doomerism.