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Hello everyone.
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Today I'm here with Matt Yglesias.
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Matt needs no introduction, but I should tell you all he has a new and excellent book out called 1 Billion Americans, the case for thinking bigger. Matt, welcome. Good to be here. How's it going? Good.
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Now I take it as a common theme in your work that you believe in increasing returns to scale, namely that the gains from interacting with other people typically outweigh the congestion costs of having them around.
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And that's certainly consistent with your earlier book, The Rent Is Too Damn High, right? Yes, absolutely.
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Now what views do you have that are inconsistent with a strong belief in increasing returns to scale?
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I you know, it's a little bit attention with my personal preferences.
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People will sometimes say to me, you know, well, it's easy for you to say this stuff.
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You like live in this big city, you know, blah blah blah.
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But I I happen to have grown up in Manhattan, you know, the densest place in the United States by far.
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I don't like it there that much.
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I I moved to smaller scale place. I like it better.
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Anytime I visit a small town, I kind of think, I kind of like this.
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You know, I'm not I'm not I'm not personally that into like big crowds and huge things like that.
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I remember I went to to Hong Kong one time and I felt like I was like the universe was having revenge on me for having done all these pro-density takes as I felt like incredibly overwhelmed by these these huge buildings everywhere.
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So like I I genuinely do sympathize with the view that there's something nice about calm and quiet and and things like that.
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Um, and you know, I mean, obviously everybody knows that, but but I do think, you know, on an analytical level that you see tremendous rewards to sort of big scale things.
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things. Like I remember thinking I was working on this book at an early time and I was in Midtown Manhattan where you know even New Yorkers don't go cuz it's so terrible and it's full of people right like I think full of people who would tell you nobody likes going to Midtown Manhattan and there must be some
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reason for that now obviously we're all doing everything on Zoom right now and those kind of effects have gone away but it's not like we didn't have telephones you know 18 months ago or no ability to to do these kind of things remotely were were drawn to each other for whatever reason
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Let me put the question another way in the book you stress that American growth rates have been declining you and I agree about that but if there are increasing returns to scale at the national level as the US does have more people and more GDP shouldn't growth rates be going up now you might think
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well there's increasing returns within a city but not within a country but your argument's at the country level and you even see a lot of cities dissolving or becoming smaller you mentioned that also St Louis and Detroit are the more obvious examples but the US as a whole the population has become
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more dispersed Yeah so doesn't that mean actually there aren't increasing returns to scale Oh I see yeah so you know I do think on some level right some of the deep structures of economic growth do have to do with our basic ability to exploit natural resources right I mean I say in the book it's like we're not
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all farmers here who you know need to worry about we're running out of wheat fields but when you look at the sort of big long-term trend right industrial revolution take off and kind of slow down in in post-war years that has to have something to do with the technology of energy exploitation on a on a pretty
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fundamental level and you know that is an area where I don't think you see necessarily those same clear returns to scale we've had you know some big advances in fracking, uh some promising advances in solar power, some some other kinds of things like that, but the the kind of fundamentals of how we produce
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and use energy have driven a lot in the sort of macro picture, and I think the news from the latter quarter, whatever it is, of the the 20th century on that front was just sort of, you know, very disappointing, uh notwithstanding other things that might power growth forward. So, would your recommendations be much
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So, would your recommendations be much more potent if paired with a better energy policy?
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And I don't here mean a greener policy, though that's justified in its own right, but just command over much more energy, something like nuclear power, that say Peter Thiel has proposed.
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Would that make the increasing returns from a billion Americans much stronger?
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Yeah, I mean, I think if we had a burst of good luck, right, on the nuclear front, or maybe it's purely policy.
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I'm not in that well versed in the in the nuclear universe and the arguments that people have there, but I think it's definitely true that if we had a breakthrough there that could get us, you know, the kind of clean, abundant power that was hoped for in the original post-war nuclear years, and that, you know, the micro-reactor people are very enthusiastic about.
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I mean, that would put us even more clearly in an increasing returns to scale world.
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Do you think that a believe in significant increasing returns to scale means that massive income inequality is simply inevitable?
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That even with high rates of taxation, the rates of growth of the increasing returns at some point just overcome that, and the wealthy people are just extremely wealthy and possibly politically very powerful.
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And uh you live in a Silicon Valley kind of world, whether you like it or not.
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Um you know, I I don't know exactly where the the where the lines curve on that.
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I mean, I'm impressed, as I think, you know, a lot of people who are not hardcore anti-inequality folks that, you know, Sweden has a high number of billionaires per capita despite a lot of social democratic policies.
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And the reason for that fundamentally is that there are successful companies that were founded by Swedish people.
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And that that's good, right?
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If you If you're on the other side of it and you're trying to make the case for Sweden, you're trying to say universal health care is good.
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It's great that they have all these trains in Stockholm.
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You'd say like Look, like this is a successful country, right?
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Like it's high GDP per capita, they've got IKEA, they've got What's it called? Spotify.
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But that's also why they have some of that very high-end inequality.
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And you know, can you like balance that out in some Gini coefficienty way? Maybe yes, maybe no.
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But I think even if you did, you wouldn't eliminate all of the political inequality that worries people, right?
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That you see Um you know, this thing in California, right?
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Where they're trying to regulate Uber and Lyft more strictly.
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And so now the companies are saying, "Well, we're going to shut down there."
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And left-wing people are now mad at them.
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But if you run a significant business enterprise, like you're going to be a powerful person in society, whatever your personal income is.
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Because it matters what these big businesses do.
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And I don't think that there's ever been a country that doesn't have that feature, right?
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I mean, as long as you have big successful businesses, the people who run them are going to be more politically powerful than I don't know, the man on the street. And that's just life.
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But it seems there is a difference between say Denmark and Sweden.
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So especially if you take away Maersk, Denmark doesn't have that many global companies.
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It's very socially democratic.
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Stockholm has a huge and pretty successful startup scene.
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They're probably going to grow more billionaires or at least multi-multi-millionaires in the pretty near future.
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Uh would you in this regard rather be Sweden or rather be Denmark?
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I would rather be Sweden.
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I'd rather be Sweden, too.
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I mean, I think it's fine if Denmark is Denmark.
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Uh you know, one of the themes of this book, right, is it's about America, right?
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Like this is not a book about all countries everywhere and what everyone should do.
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Uh there's people there's like um anti-Semites troll me uh on on my email all the time by saying like where's your support for diversity for Israel?
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Um and I don't know I'm too. Yeah.
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So, I'm I'm not a super Zionist person, uh but I'm Jewish, secular.
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I have some critiques of of Israeli policy, but fundamentally to me the idea of there being a Jewish state is not crazy.
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Just like there's a Danish state and there's a Finnish state.
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Um and and you got to do things there and and it wouldn't be that if you know, you had flood of immigration.
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Uh similarly, economically, Denmark's nice, you know, it's it's a nice place.
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Uh if Danish people like it that way, I think that's fine. Good for them.
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Uh America, you know, is a big, diverse country whose strength I think has always had a lot to do with scale.
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And it doesn't make It makes a lot of sense, I think, for us to see some positive lessons learned from Sweden in terms of ways you can be more humane and still be a dynamic, you know, we have big startups, things like that here.
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I think the idea of trying to turn the United States into a giant Denmark where it's like people are reasonably affluent, but like there's no really big deal things happening here, like some guy who makes windmills.
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Like to me, that doesn't make sense, right?
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The United States is a is a big place, right?
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It's been a big place for a long time. It's a diverse place.
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It's a place that cares about its power on the national scale.
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And you know, you're I mean, I think to your inequality point, like that means it's going to be a relatively unequal place compared to some other kinds of countries.
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In your book, you only cover the United States, but a lot of your arguments are pretty general, and I mean that in a good way.
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So, why not say a billion people for the European Union?
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Now, you mentioned that America has a tradition of being diverse, but at some point it didn't have that tradition.
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Do you think that countries or regions that don't have the tradition of being diverse can start being diverse?
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And the EU, which is actually now pretty diverse, uh could take in a billion people?
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I think it would be interesting, right?
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You know, the EU has had a lot of problems, I think we've all heard.
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But, you know, on some level, if this project continues and they develop more of a European identity, like that would be a diverse identity, right?
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If you look at their little euro notes, and they're trying to abstract away to like styles of bridges and instead of national heroes, then that becomes a more accessible identity, right?
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I mean, conceivably it's easier for an immigrant to become {quote} European than to become specifically Austrian in some way.
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And there could be a lot of benefits to that.
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I went to Ireland, which was the sort of last international trip I took.
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And it's a beautiful country, very successful in a lot of ways, but obviously a really empty country.
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You know, if you're working on a book about a billion Americans while going across from from Dublin to Galway, like I could not help but be struck by like it's like where where is everybody here?
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Like, couldn't we couldn't we do more?
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And Dublin is this really exciting international city, you know, I went looking for um somebody told me there was like a good Indian restaurant somewhere.
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And then the the staff there was like, "Oh, it's going to be very spicy."
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And I was like, "No, no, no, it's okay. I'm not Irish."
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Um and I but I saw I was like there was an Amazon office near there and they had their, you know, some some foreign engineers uh looked like from South Asia.
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And they were eating in there and I thought, okay, that's good. That's okay.
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I I can trust these guys.
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Uh but it's not it's not the tradition, you know, of Ireland.
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So, it's a it's a tougher political conversation, but I do think that's a society that you see changing to be more cosmopolitan, more diverse, and that will ultimately help like power them through to the next level.
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Now, as you know, the city sizes within a country are quite unevenly distributed.
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Uh in your vision of the the billion people America, how large does New York City become? It's interesting.
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I I think probably really really big.
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Uh it depends obviously on their infrastructure issues, but you know, the case of Japan, right, which is a big country, but not nearly as big as current US, to say nothing of billion people US.
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Um that's a really big city, uh much bigger on a metro area basis than New York, and it keeps growing even though Japan's overall population has stagnated or shrunk.
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And that's because they um they have a different uh land use regulation paradigm there that makes it much easier to keep adding houses to Tokyo.
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And you know, I read I I think I read in some book somewhere that you know, in urban growth you benefit agglomeration benefits with congestion costs, uh which makes sense, right?
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I mean, that's a you could draw a good chart like that.
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Uh but in Tokyo it never seems to happen, right?
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There's like plenty other places to go in Japan, uh but they keep losing people and Tokyo keeps adding them, and there's no spot at which cuz they don't have the political constraint that New York or the Bay Area has.
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And there's no spot at which Japanese people um want to stop clustering in the greater Tokyo area.
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But say politically speaking, can you imagine a New York City running sufficiently well with 70 million people, which would be larger than most countries in the EU, right?
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That would be a pretty big country right there.
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So if we're a billion, is New York City 70 million and you still have city councils and a mayor and this just huge police force that could be armies? How does that work? No, yes.
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If we're talking about the political constraint, then then obviously it's a it's a much lower bound than that.
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Uh New York um has a lot of governance problems and you know, they're going to take a a short-term, I think, fiscal hit from from the pandemic, uh but, you know, a question for any political entity is like, how do you handle a short-term fiscal hit?
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Do you able to ride it out and kind of rebound in a strong way or do you uh totally wind up running the car into the ditch?
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And I don't have like incredible levels of confidence that New York's political authorities can avoid the the run into the ditch scenario.
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Um you know, I just think that in the abstract, the ability of an urban area to keep growing is bounded by governance issues rather than by the sort of fundamentals of of space or congestion per se.
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Um So these governance issues mean you can't get to a billion?
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Cuz as we move toward a billion, the new arrivals, uh a lot of them will want to go to New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and they'll wreck those places. And then we'll stop.
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Is that not the equilibrium?
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Or is the equilibrium somehow New York annexes Connecticut and a lot of it starts operating more like northern Virginia and it works pretty well and it's all one big happy ending? Or do we stop?
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Well, that's interesting.
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You know, I mean, I don't know that it's clearly true that population growth would pour into a place like like New York.
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I mean, some people would, right?
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But we have seen incredibly dynamic growth in our Sunbelt metro areas, which are, you know, sort of unfashionable in various ways, but people are doing very well for themselves in Atlanta, in Dallas, in Houston, and the smaller ones, Nashville, San Antonio, where I spend a lot of time for for family reasons.
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They're becoming incredibly international just because America is a good place to live.
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Chicago, which has a lot of those sort of New Yorky qualities, uh but is much cheaper, you know, has been losing people, uh which is its own kind of governance type problems, but I feel like there's there's sort of plenty of plenty of space for folks.
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You know, the interesting political constraint, obviously, is on immigration, right?
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I mean, I remember you wrote sometime ago, I think in response to Brian Kaplan, that it's like, "Look, if you care about immigration, and you care about people's ability to move, let's maybe chill with the like open borders talk, uh because if you you're going to hit a hard political constraint, and the country's going to lock down."
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And we've seen something like that dynamic in the United States.
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We've seen it in a lot of countries.
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And so, managing people's level of tolerance for social and demographic change, particularly with with foreigners coming in, you know, is an important political concept.
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That's where you need, um I don't know what you would call it, wise political leadership, and not just like strident, analytically correct, uh abstract people.
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Let's talk about fertility for a bit.
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Is there a danger that the whole world, or most of the world, becomes like Japan, where the population just keeps on shrinking, and the world becomes a depopulated place?
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Is that on the horizon If we don't do what you're saying?
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I mean, I think that's a serious possibility.
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You know, and we can sort of People can disagree as to exactly how dire is that?
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I mean, Japan continues to function as Dean Baker would tell you.
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Um, they're they're doing okay by some means.
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Um I think that's a sad outcome.
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I mean, in part for sort of vague Derek Parfit type reasons.
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Um, but also in terms of growth and and dynamism, I think that, you know, uh it it's important that people, you know, be able to have families.
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Um, and and I was struck, I mean, my thinking evolved a lot when Lyman Stone and others pointed out that people were saying in America that they still wanted to have the like classic 2. 5 kids on average. And they just weren't.
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The number of children they were having was slipping to more like 1. 8, more like 1. 7 now.
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Um, you know, and that's sad, right?
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When people can sort of achieve their aspirations.
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Of course, sometimes people's aspirations are wildly unrealistic or they're incompatible with each other or something like that.
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But I think we know that a world in which most people have two or three children instead of one or two children is like a perfectly plausible scenario.
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That's not like, I wish I had a flying car, right? Like we can do that. have flying cars.
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So, I think the flying car is more likely.
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But let's say we subsidize for fertility with all of your proposals and we implement them perfectly.
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Won't it be the case that we're shifting the composition of the American population toward people who are much less educated?
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Because the people who are very well educated typically have higher incomes, the subsidies matter less for them, right? Mhm.
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You could subsidize another birth for Mark Zuckerberg, it's not going to affect his calculus. Mhm.
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But for less educated people, it's a bigger factor.
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So, you'll make the US on average much less educated, and you'll make voters worse. No?
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Um okay, so you're saying it's it's going to be like dysgenic to to to to be supporting people be a genetic mechanism. Well, sure. Okay, yes. It it yes.
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It it doesn't have to be genetic.
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It could be a pure cultural inheritance.
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Um You know, that's interesting.
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I don't think it's a big issue necessarily.
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I don't think that the gaps in numbers that we're talking about are all that enormous.
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I also think that a lot of the way society is structured um disincentivizes educated professional people from having a second or third child, even though it's not that the objective financial cost of doing it is so high, but that it's like, you know, you think about it like Democratic Party uh microtargeting of everything.
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And they'll say, "Well, okay, you know, if this if this little extra boost will help lift some people over the poverty line, like we should do that."
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Uh but if you're making $140,000 a year, you don't {quote} {unquote} need you know, help with with your child care costs.
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That's that's how, you know, the the people in the think tanks think.
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Um but people care about the impact on their relative standard of living of these things.
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And so, I think a program that gives people, you know, child allowance type money or that organizes after-school activities for people in a plausible way does have an impact.
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You know, not on Mark Zuckerberg, cuz obviously you know, billionaires don't have a lot of limits on their consumption of of things.
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Uh but this kind of like, you know, middle-class professionals who live in Northern Virginia, like they do, right?
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Even though they're comfortable economically comfortable people, their consumption possibilities are still constrained in meaningful ways, and how we structure incentives, what we subsidize, what we don't subsidize, makes a difference to what people do.
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Now, I think people on average should become more religious in part because that would encourage fertility.
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Do you also think people should become more religious?
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Yeah, I mean if I could be like full Straussian and you know, kind of be.
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It's not a political I I I I I I DON'T I DON'T I DON'T I DON'T REALLY I DON'T REALLY KNOW HOW TO do it, right?
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Like if I if I put in my book um I think we should make people be more religious.
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I I don't know how I would do that. for it, right? Talk about it. Yes, no, look.
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If if I if you told me for mysterious reasons church attendance is going to start going up back again over the next 30-40 years, I would consider that to be a very optimistic forecast for America.
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I think I think good secondary things would follow from that.
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Um I think, you know, community institutions are important and in a practical sense religious ones are what seems to really work for people.
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When I hear people say, "Oh, you know, this like new um like woke uh anti-racism on the left, that's like a new religion."
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Um I don't know that that's 100% accurate.
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I mean I think there's something to that and there's also ways in which it's not true.
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But if it was like really literally true, like this is a new religion where people are going to get together like once a week and they're going to know each other and they're going to have um a higher value system that motivates them and they're going to like make connection like that would be really good.
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Like for religion bad things have happened, you know, by religious people or under religious causes, but generally speaking, like it's it's good which is when people go to church.
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If you're rooting for a more religious America, does that mean in a sense you're rooting for a more right-wing America?
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Uh It's just a correlated, right? Causality may be tricky.
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But I suspect there is some Yes.
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Um I think probably I mean I think probably we say that religiousness is almost constitutive of of right-winginess.
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Um at least in some definitions.
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Uh so yeah, I mean I think a more traditionalist kind of America in some ways would be would be good.
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It seems that two-parent families or maybe three-parent families for that matter have and support more children than do one-parent families.
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So what should we do to encourage there being more two- and three-parent families? Yeah, that's a good one.
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I mean, you know, the book talks about sort of marriage disincentives in welfare state design because that's the sort of boring thing I'm into.
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And cuz it's also a real policy lever, right?
23:52
Like we we could change how Medicaid eligibility rules work and how EITC phase-in and phase-outs work.
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Uh you know, I think the Bush era stuff like marriage promotion, like if if if you could do that, like if that really worked, like that would be amazing.
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Some people you know, just like really kind of sneered at it, like this is absurd, you know, you're going to tell people to get married.
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Um it's like a totally good idea.
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I just I don't think that they came up with a program that like you know, actually did this.
24:24
But what's your program, right?
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Elizabeth Warren has a plan for everything, so you can figure out a plan for this.
24:31
Yeah, so you know, as I say, look, I I think both liberal and conservative people should take marriage incentive impacts on program design more seriously, right?
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So I think that liberals should admit that this is a real issue and that we should care about it and that you don't need to go like full Jerry Falwell to see that there's an advantage to encouraging people to form stable partnerships.
24:54
I think conservatives should take their own like on this a little bit more seriously.
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And like, yeah, if we have to spend a little bit more money to make this work, like we should do it, right?
25:04
The important building blocks of society um the important building blocks of free market capitalism don't hinge on the exact spending level on social welfare state programs, I guess, is what I would hope people on the right would appreciate.
25:18
Um you know what else can we do?
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Public leadership, you know, probably matters.
25:25
Um it's probably good for, you know, Barack Obama to talk about being a dad, right?
25:32
That like that that was nice.
25:32
Um I think Donald Trump is a poor role model in social and personal life and that we should encourage sort of elite high-profile people to talk about commitment and marriage and why it's why it's valuable, things like that.
25:47
Um that's not like a program.
25:49
I don't think we can make it legally mandatory for people to discuss the benefits of uh being an involved parent, but I think it's important.
25:59
But there's so many subsidies and taxes in the book.
26:01
Uh why not have subsidies and taxes for essentially discouraging divorce and single parent families? That's interesting.
26:11
Um I don't know exactly how you would discourage divorce uh in in a kind of subsidy structure. But I'm I'm open to it.
26:18
That's not uh I don't know.
26:21
Do you do you have a you have a white paper on that?
26:26
There is a big literature on comparative divorce law, which I don't know well, but there are some systems across the states which discourage divorce.
26:32
I'm not sure they're good for human happiness.
26:36
If you just look at the parents, it seems especially women are worse off.
26:40
But the more you wait, a higher number of people is a good thing.
26:42
Uh obviously you're confronted with the trade-off.
26:47
Yeah, and look, I think um back when everybody was debating, uh, same-sex marriage, right?
26:53
Um, Andrew Sullivan, I think, you know, had a kind of, uh, a troll take where he was like, "How come none of these people talking about the sanctity of marriage are talking about, you know, revisiting no-fault divorce?"
27:06
Um, and, uh, I think that was like actually a good point, right?
27:10
And, you know, it would be worth looking at.
27:12
I don't know exactly what the literature on that says, or where the trade-off would be, or what's even, you know, politically plausible.
27:19
Obviously, if you tell people straight up, like, "Well, we're going to make you miserable, but it has some hazy long-term payoff."
27:25
That that doesn't work in the political system.
27:27
But, I think that's a subject, you know, people should should think about.
27:31
Um, I think in so many areas of life we look back on the 1970s and we say, "Mm, you know, we maybe made some bad decisions back then."
27:40
Um, and I I don't think we should, uh, completely exempt divorce and marriage law from that general critique.
27:48
Do you think having more three-child families would set back feminism?
27:55
I don't think that it would.
27:55
Um, I think in the sense that it Well, look, feminism means different things to different people.
28:02
Uh, there's a version of feminism in the United States that is Well, I suppose other countries, too, that is extremely focused on the sort of super-duper-duper high-end elites, right?
28:16
And I think having larger families is probably bad for women's equality in the top, you know, 0. 1% of achievement.
28:26
If you look at, um, the fact that there are many more male billionaires, right?
28:30
Um, that having any prospect of like leveling that is probably goes against sort of family things.
28:40
Uh, on the other hand, if you're saying, "Okay, like, the mainstream ways in in feminism impacts most people, right?
28:47
It's like women's uh, legal and social entitlements to have jobs, to be financially independent, to be able to get out of really bad marital situations, that kind of thing, you know, get school.
29:01
The general changes we've seen over over the decades where women are now on average better educated than men, where the income gap at the median level is starting to narrow.
29:10
Like those kind of things I don't think are meaningfully impacted in a in a negative way by somewhat larger families.
29:19
But my view is this, that for reasons that are probably intrinsic and biological, women on average care more about the kids than the fathers do.
29:27
The fathers are more likely to say, "Oh, let them go out and play. It'll probably be fine."
29:34
Women on average are more inclined to worry.
29:36
That may be hard to change.
29:36
So if there are more children in the life of the family, the preoccupations of women will shift more toward the children than will the preoccupations of the men.
29:47
Doesn't have to be a bad thing, right?
29:50
Certainly good for the kids to have three of them.
29:53
But it could harm what many people would consider to be feminism. Right.
29:58
I mean, on the other hand, I think we see that when we had larger families, there was less aggregate worrying. Right.
30:05
I mean, that's part of how that how that went together.
30:07
So I think it's a little bit of a I think it's true that if you had exactly 2020 parenting norms, but with an additional child per family, that would have, you know, one set of impacts.
30:21
I think shifting back to slightly more relaxed standard might be healthier for everybody involved.
30:29
You know, I'm I'm going to try to avoid getting myself canceled with too much speculation as to what's what's inherent and what's sort of socio-cultural in terms of the gender difference in in interest in parenting.
30:42
But I mean I do think it's true that, you know, a theme in the book is that we should be thinking about supporting the actual needs and preferences of women rather than the kind of um hypothetical egalitarian sketch, right?
31:00
And like we see that women have more desire to have children, uh that most women, like most men, are working-class people who are like working for They have jobs, right?
31:11
Cuz like they need to pay the bills and things like that and are not necessarily hyper obsessed with the glass ceiling um and who's leaning into what.
31:21
And people want to have like nice, happy lives with a high standard of living where they can meet their aspirations.
31:27
And that is 100% in line with some strands of thinking of what's feminism and very much in tension with some others.
31:37
If I think of the well-governed countries in the world, it seems to me that most of them are pretty small.
31:42
There's Denmark, there's Singapore, there's New Zealand.
31:45
You know the list, right?
31:47
And if I think of the very populous countries, I wouldn't quite call them a wreck, uh but they're much, much less well-governed. Mhm.
31:54
It's amazing in a sense the US is not more corrupt and screwed up than it is.
32:00
So, if we move to a billion people, are we lowering the quality of governance in this country and by how much?
32:07
Um I don't know, you know, I I mean that's an interesting question, right?
32:10
I mean I sometimes think, well, one reason that that governance standouts are small is that there's more variance in the small countries, right?
32:18
Because there's there's like a lot of them.
32:21
So, you go around and like there's a couple sort of really nice ones and there it is, which is different from a causal question, right?
32:29
Does scaling up make it make it worse?
32:32
Um I think it's probably true though that, you know, a billion Americans will be more of a more of a mess in the sense that, you know, people will scan the headlines of the latest in politics and be like, "Oh my god, you know, like what a catastrophe."
32:49
Cuz it's people who don't know each other, people who don't have anything in common, politicians opportunistically are like trying to create weird new identity cleavages to mobilize people, and it's all very ugly and like everybody hates politics.
33:04
And now all the politicians are unpopular.
33:07
And you know, we would only kind of go more in that direction.
33:09
Whereas if you have a homogeneous small town, people who don't like it, you know, just leave, right?
33:16
And so you're left behind with a kind of a nice community of people who have a lot in common, who who share a lot, who can directly self-monitor each other, who can be really well informed about whether the guy in charge of the fire department knows what he's doing.
33:32
Um probably the right solution is something to do with federalism, but um it's definitely a different book as to like why American federalism does not deliver on its promise in the way that we might think it should.
33:46
If I think of myself, when I analyze say Denmark or Singapore, I'm less libertarian than when I analyze America cuz I think their governments have a higher chance of succeeding at what they might set out to do.
33:58
So does Matt Yglesias 1 billion Americans world of the future, will that future Matt Yglesias be more libertarian just like I'm less libertarian when I analyze Denmark?
34:08
Uh I think in terms of direct public provision of things, right?
34:11
Is one way in which some of the small countries really suggest non-libertarian solutions to problems that I don't think is appropriate for America or would be for the future.
34:25
My mind was always blown by I I Stockholm sometime and I was like super confused by how their city bike share thing worked and I just like went into the T-Bana and I asked someone who worked there, you know, obviously in English, right?
34:41
Like so in not a domestic language.
34:43
I was like, "How does this public service that you are not responsible for in any way or work for?
34:48
Like how does it function?"
34:48
And she explained it like really well to me in a foreign language for no good reason, right?
34:54
There's like no I'm sure they have strong unions there, right?
34:58
It's There's no reason for her to provide high-quality customer service and no American transit agency employee would do that.
35:09
And that's just nice, right?
35:09
And like that's not American.
35:11
It's not going to be America and it's really not going to be 1 billion Americans' America.
35:15
So I think that level of libertarianism in which we do not expect uh uh direct public provision of things to be all that high-quality is very much baked into the cake and and could become even more so.
35:33
It's time for a bout of overrated versus underrated. Are you game? Sure.
35:38
You had him for a class, Robert Nozick. Overrated or underrated? Uh underrated. Why?
35:44
Uh I I think most people do not pay attention to what um The End of Anarchy, State, and Utopia actually says or to some of his other books.
35:52
Um but, you know, he's a really deep thinker and particularly because so few um you know, academics are right of center, um it is really to people's benefit.
36:05
I mean, this is probably not like to the specific benefit of the Conversations with Tyler audience, uh but like people should really try to engage these major works like his in a serious way, not with the like I'm going to get my highlighter pen and debunk this guy.
36:22
Um I It was one of the great privileges of my life to be a you know in a small seminar with him and really learn from him.
36:30
I have obviously not become a Nozick style deontological libertarian.
36:36
But you learn a lot more Nor did he.
36:38
Another Harvard philosopher, Hillary Putnam.
36:42
Hillary Putnam I don't think is that widely rated at all but I am definitely a Putnam fan.
36:48
The pragmatic tradition in American philosophy is good.
36:52
He taught the single best class I ever took in my life on philosophy of language.
36:56
LeBron James overrated or underrated? I think correctly rated.
37:00
I think at this point everyone with a brain sees LeBron for what what he is and he's excellent.
37:08
Gilbert Arenas Well you know So he got in trouble for that gun thing, right?
37:22
And the other guy in that conflict turned out to be Right.
37:26
But I don't even remember his name but he was like an actual murderer right? Who went to jail.
37:30
So I mean Gilbert got a raw deal in that.
37:36
He pioneered the long distance three, correct?
37:38
So maybe he's underrated.
37:41
Now you spent a number of weeks recently up in the state of Maine. Overrated or underrated? Underrated. It's a It's great.
37:50
What people don't know about What is it we don't know about Maine?
37:54
You know I think not a lot of people know about Maine off the coast.
37:55
You know interior Maine and the North Maine woods are really cool and great in a very different way from coastal Maine.
38:02
A lot of people come up there for a sort of brief visit. They see the rocks.
38:06
They eat a lobster and they say all right this is okay.
38:09
And then they come back but there's a there's a whole Maine contains multitudes.
38:13
You know You got to get to Greenville, Millinocket, see the see the real weird up there. What makes it weird? What makes it weird?
38:23
It's because, you know, America has a rural culture that is regional, you know, in a particular way, southern and midwestern.
38:33
And that kind of northern New England is just different in its own way.
38:39
It's it's cut off like spatially from the rest of rural America.
38:44
It's like tucked away in with Quebec.
38:47
There's like weird towns up there where everybody speaks French.
38:49
And it's just like it's a it's a different kind of place and I'm I mean I'm like you, right?
38:55
I'm just somebody who likes weird stuff and places not a lot of people go.
39:01
Why is your father Rafael Yglesias so underrated as a novelist?
39:06
That's a great question cuz not enough people have listened to you over the years, you know.
39:09
It's a But that's true but that's anything, right?
39:14
You know, so I think I I am not a I am not a literary person on any level.
39:16
But I think that a certain kind of social realist unfashionable and that, you know, applies to him and his books and and also to my grandfather's books.
39:33
When you revisit your earlier musical tastes, what is your perspective?
39:37
So if I think of a group such as Rancid, you used to listen to them. I bought that CD.
39:41
I thought it was pretty good.
39:43
I listened for a while but now I never go back to it.
39:47
It just seems derivative of the Clash.
39:50
I'm not opposed to their body of work but it seems irrelevant.
39:55
The music you used to like, do you feel that way about it?
39:57
The Arctic Monkeys, did they contribute anything of value?
40:01
Yeah, I mean I I think that is a great You know, you think back on on your life, right?
40:07
And there's stuff that you listen to because or I'll say for me, right?
40:13
Like I think most people, I have a kind of a a a of new music adoption, right?
40:17
Where there was just a time in my life when I was super into going to see bands.
40:20
So, I was always checking out new things.
40:23
I was getting into new CDs and just new music that happened to come out in those kind of mid-aughts years loomed really, really large in my mind.
40:33
Then, as I become an old person, I stopped going to concerts.
40:36
I stopped being as on top of new stuff.
40:38
I have a much longer back catalog to go through and a lot of that stuff that kind of I don't even know what you call it.
40:46
Uh but like mid-aughts rock and roll kind of stuff that, you know, white people in their 20s were listening to, I don't think holds up that well and has not um going to stand the test of time.
40:58
So, what in popular music has proven to be enduring for you?
41:03
Uh enduring for me well, so Rancid is enduring for me.
41:05
I will I will always I will always stand up for for for Let's Go.
41:10
Um you know, I so from from the era that I was dismissing, uh Metric is the band that um I really like that, you know, I I look forward to all their new stuff.
41:18
I revisit their old stuff all the time. Um I don't know.
41:23
I haven't thought that much about popular music.
41:26
How would you redesign Twitter?
41:29
How would I redesign Twitter?
41:29
Um they have to make blocking tools, I think, much more prominent, right?
41:37
That like it's really important on Twitter, I think, to be constantly editing your experience.
41:41
And they don't present it that way um for I'm sure various reasons.
41:48
But like one thing I always want to do is like sometimes you see a post and like it's terrible and you should be able to just like mass block like everybody who gave it a little heart.
41:58
Uh because there's too much I don't know.
42:02
Just like trolling, you know?
42:04
Like Twit Twitter's great, honestly.
42:06
Like it's an incredible way to be in touch with other people, to have these kind of mechanisms.
42:10
But so much of what people do on there is just sort of reinscribe their affiliations.
42:15
And to get value out of it, you need to try to like dial that down and really take control over what you see.
42:24
Today is, I think, August 21st, give or take.
42:27
At this point, what do you think we are learning from the NBA bubble?
42:32
About basketball, not about COVID testing.
42:35
What are we learning about the NBA bubble?
42:36
Um that is an excellent question.
42:38
Um I I think we're learning that there is stuff going on off the court that is impacting what we see on the court in like a more clear way than we necessarily knew.
42:53
Like the games have been more different.
42:55
Like the quality of the defense has been lower.
42:58
Um something is is off, right?
43:01
And I think it it stems from people's routines being disrupted.
43:06
I mean, I don't think we know exactly what it is that's that's going on in there.
43:12
Uh but there's something more to the game um than what's happening within the the the kind of four lines of the court.
43:21
And what's your prediction about what kind of team or what kind of player is favored by the bubble? Hm.
43:29
Um That's a good question.
43:31
People will hear this and be able to judge your prediction, just to be clear. I know.
43:36
I just like I I I really hesitate to make sports predictions.
43:38
Um you know, I think it's like having incredible amounts of uh like self-confidence with your offense.
43:47
I mean, we were talking about Gilbert Arenas and how he pioneered the really far long-range three.
43:50
Um and there were all kinds of problems with him, right?
43:54
But it was um that kind of spirit of like I I in fact can hit this shot, so I'm going to go take it, you know, like knowing that, right?
44:01
And being uh assertive, you know, I think has proven its value in the NBA over the past 10 15 type years and with what seems to me to be a slipping level of defensive focus inside the bubble.
44:14
It's like even more just like pull the trigger.
44:18
Some urban and YIMBY questions. Mhm.
44:21
Will there still be a YIMBY movement say 3 years from now when coronavirus we hope is more or less gone?
44:27
Uh yes, I think that there will be.
44:30
But if you see a lot of the YIMBY movement is coming from the Bay Area, the impetus to build there might be much weaker.
44:36
Support from builders might be weaker.
44:38
Uh rents could be say 15% maybe 20% lower.
44:41
Palantir is moving out of Palo Alto. Mhm.
44:45
Uh maybe COVID-19 in a sense is the rent-lowering mechanism.
44:48
Not in a good way, but Yeah, so I think you've seen in some ways the biggest YIMBY political successes in Oregon rather than in the Bay Area.
44:59
And the people who work on that there, they all say to me that the fact that the prices are not as high as they are in the Bay Area is helpful to them.
45:06
That it becomes more um comprehensible to people why new construction new market-rate construction improves the market cuz it's not so mind-bogglingly out of reach for normal people.
45:21
It's like, "Okay, this nice new house might just be better than the house that I'm in and I could move into it.
45:27
So I have a kind of a case for new construction."
45:29
So I think that unless we see cities unraveling, right?
45:32
That having a somewhat of a decline in the incredible pressure on prices in the Bay Area could be constructive.
45:41
Also, there's at least some chance that uh with fiscal problems affecting cities, uh that the kind of municipal budget stakeholders get more involved in the fact that, you know, a city like New York actually has the ability to increase and enhance its tax base uh anytime they want to by making it easier to do market rate building.
46:03
Um that constituency, even though there's a there's a robust group of people who would like their salaries and their pensions to be paid, have not really been mobilized on behalf of that cause.
46:15
Uh and so we'll see, right?
46:15
I mean, I don't want to go too into this like, you know, it's a crisis, but it's also an opportunity type paradigm.
46:21
Um but places prove themselves when they are hit with problems, right?
46:25
It It forces you to either try to address your issues uh in order to survive or get much, much worse.
46:36
So, I think we're going to see a bit of a turning point.
46:40
Say 10 years from now, how do you think New York City will be different for having had COVID-19 as compared to a non-COVID trajectory?
46:49
Um I think probably more of a reset to, you know, even more of a sort of youth-oriented non-family type place.
46:56
Um I've been sort of you know, going back to New York sporadically for years.
47:01
Um and I've been struck that it's become a lot more sort of family-friendly than I remember it from growing up there.
47:09
Um and I think there's a pretty good chance that COVID pushes it back toward more of that '90s equilibrium.
47:18
If there was a mutual fund for each and every well-known American city, uh which one would you go long on?
47:24
Which one would I go long on?
47:25
Relative to market opinion.
47:28
Relative to market opinion. Huh. Huh. Huh.
47:32
Um I mean, I you know, the future for Austin is very bright, but I think market opinion already knows that.
47:37
Um you know, maybe uh maybe Nashville, uh maybe San Antonio, um Minneapolis.
47:45
I'm going to say Minneapolis, actually, because right now people are getting very low on Minneapolis because of their sort of looting problems.
47:52
Uh but the fundamentals there are very strong.
47:56
And where would you short? Where would I short?
47:58
Um I think definitely San Francisco uh which um you know, is not just taking this kind of COVID hit uh but I think had a real um New York there's like a lot of different things happening in New York.
48:19
There's a lot of different foundations that economic cluster there and there's a real proved inability to lose certain things and gain other kinds of things.
48:27
Uh the attitude between people in San Francisco and the technology industry is like really toxic and poisonous in a way that um would give me serious pause about the city's future.
48:40
You could actually imagine civic leaders there thinking that they welcome the departure of that entire ecosystem uh which is really dangerous for them.
48:49
I mean, it's true that there have been problems uh associated with with the growth of of tech in San Francisco, but the number of people there like serious well-informed people who don't see that that's like more of an asset than a penalty.
49:02
Um it puts them at at big risk.
49:07
Now, I'm very much an outsider to Portland and Seattle, but just from my great distance, it strikes me as a public choice puzzle that the mayors seem to put up with so much nonsense in their cities. Yes.
49:18
You don't have to believe the most extreme right-wing conspiratorial view of this, but I still don't understand why the what happens there happens.
49:24
Can you explain that to me? It's very mysterious.
49:29
I don't know either of those cities well.
49:31
I think it must have something to do with the fact that those are the whitest of the major cities in America and that they don't have the um I I saw a lot of people remarking on at the Democratic Convention.
49:44
They say, "Oh, you know, uh they put all these African-American mayors up there um Um, instead of the activists who are yelling at the mayors.
49:53
Um, and I was thinking, well, yeah, of course.
49:54
Like, you put up responsible, accountable elected officials who, um, you know, have to manage the various considerations that are up there, not activists yelling in the streets.
50:04
And I feel like Seattle and Portland don't have the kind of political institutions and political stakeholders who can say, "No.
50:14
Like, this is not helping.
50:14
Like, I agree that there's a problem here and I want to work on it, but the specific thing that you guys are doing right now in the streets is not in any way, uh, related to that.
50:26
Um, and it's you have just very white, uh, Democratic parties in those cities.
50:31
Um, and I don't think it is helpful to managing racial tensions.
50:38
You wrote a well-known essay suggesting that American democracy is doomed. Yeah.
50:43
There's some tension there. Why tension?
50:48
Well, with the idea that we should have more people and that the country's going to collapse.
50:53
Well, all of that can happen, right? Yes.
50:58
If you think American democracy is doomed, does that make you less interested in adding more people or a bit like, well, it will be richer, they're not going to create that many political problems anyway since we won't have democracy, so you might as well crowd in some more people from other non-democracies and raise their standard of living.
51:16
What how does the whole picture fit together?
51:20
Well, you know, so I want to say, uh, my my my my forecast there was not that the United States of America will cease to be, uh, democratically governed country in the long run, uh, but that the United States is due for a constitutional rupture, right?
51:34
I mean, we've seen in French history and a number of other countries, uh, you know, over the years that, you know, they they continue to be democracies or or democracy is restored, but you have breaks in the system, right?
51:49
You have a moment where there's a rewrite of things.
51:51
And even in the United States, of course our famous moments in history now are the founding fathers kind of calling backsies on the Articles of Confederation, or the country completely falling apart after Abraham Lincoln was elected.
52:04
And you you come out on the other side of it and we we now call those people like like the heroes of our historical epic.
52:10
And you know, it's how you have a successful country over the long term is that when things break down, you come out on the other side with something better rather than with something worse.
52:21
And my main aspiration in writing that essay is to try to get people, American people, to be a little less mad at each other and to have a little bit more recognition of the extent to which there are structural issues in our governance that is making it hard for us to proceed, and that it's not all, "Oh my god, what the hell is wrong with those people?"
52:48
Because, you know, if problems arise, if something goes badly wrong, I think we you want to say what they did after the Articles of Confederation, which is like, "We need to change the the rules here.
52:59
We need to change the system."
53:00
Not, "We need to kill our political opponents."
53:02
Um What is the most plausible scenario for that rupture?
53:06
So the Civil War, we know how that went.
53:09
Uh the Constitution, Articles of Confederation, that's past history.
53:14
What do you actually see happening?
53:17
Not a prediction, but just the modally most plausible path.
53:21
You know, I think the configuration would involve something like a very unpopular Republican administration being replaced with a very left-wing Democratic president who for the demographic balance reasons in Congress doesn't have um majority support in the Senate, right?
53:41
And who then faces a lot of pressure from his supporters to sort of govern in extra-constitutional ways, and then conversely a lot of elite actors in the business community, in law enforcement, in the military, are very motivated to resist that president's factors.
53:57
I think it's the kind of thing we've seen in Latin American presidential type systems, and that, you know, um could happen here very plausibly.
54:05
I mean, like that's not Joe Biden, right?
54:09
Um but the Democratic primary could have gone in different kinds of ways.
54:13
8, 12 years in the future, you might have a different outcome in this sort of situation.
54:18
You and I both know Donald Trump is not favored to win, but he does in fact have some chance of winning even with very high unemployment, serious problems with the pandemic, long history of being corrupt, other issues surrounding rhetoric.
54:31
I don't I don't need to tell you.
54:34
What is your best account of why Trump is still in the race?
54:39
Um I mean, I think there are sort of two versions of it, right?
54:43
I mean, one is that polarization has created a situation in which there's a lot of loyalty, right?
54:50
If you are broadly speaking in agreement with the ideas of the Republican Party, you are now highly motivated and highly incentivized to back the leader, right?
55:02
You can imagine like a different kind of political system where you would say, "Okay, we're going to we're going to get rid of this guy.
55:08
We're going to we're going to put somebody else up who's going to stand for the same sort of general values, but have a different approach."
55:15
In America, you can't do that.
55:17
The other thing is that, you know, progressive politics in the United States is very, um I don't want to say it's very unpopular, because if it was very unpopular, it wouldn't win anywhere or win ever.
55:32
But the public has serious doubts about putting the left in power in places in ways that a lot of people I know are a little bit in denial about even though the facts are like staring you right in the face.
55:46
Like why are there Republican governors in Maryland and Massachusetts and Vermont, right?
55:50
Why is Andrew Cuomo so popular even though people on the left complain about him constantly.
55:55
Um, and it's because like people don't want to put left-wing activists in charge of the country.
56:05
Democrats I think will probably beat Trump because people don't think that's what electing Biden would accomplish, uh, but you know, it's it's it's out there and it's like I think I think not a new fact in American politics but an enduring truth.
56:21
How should we attract more talent to state and local governments?
56:23
And I mean this in a purely non-partisan way.
56:24
Just smarter, harder working people.
56:29
Ooh, yeah, smarter, harder working people in state and local governments.
56:33
Um, you know, for local government I think a lot of this probably has to do with, um, cleaning up some of the muck.
56:39
Like there's like too many different local government institutions.
56:43
People don't know who they are or who does what, things like that.
56:46
And trying to get a sort of, uh, Blunin said, "Better fewer but better."
56:50
Uh, which I think you could accomplish a lot with in in local governments in the United States.
56:54
State government is interesting, right?
56:56
We have a big problem where the media, like people who follow politics don't get at all emotionally or intellectually invested in like what's happening in Indiana.
57:08
Um, even though the state government just carries an incredible amount of of of the load, right?
57:15
All the first-order service delivery is done there, but it's very it's not just low prestige, it's like almost people don't pay attention to it at all.
57:26
Well, that is low prestige, yeah. Sure, yes.
57:28
Um, and you You so like what what what what can we do about that? Um I don't know.
57:35
I mean, I think David Schliecher says we should concentrate more power in governor's hands because people do know who the governor is and pay attention and bad governors tend to get replaced.
57:45
Uh so that has some some merits to it.
57:48
I mean, I have um it gives me pause on some level, but I guess if I had to pick, that would be my solution that you have to strengthen the decentralized institutions of American government by centralizing them.
58:06
One question on monetary policy.
58:06
Has the pandemic shown that a nominal GDP rule is unworkable?
58:11
Because say real GDP falls by 10% Mhm. right?
58:16
Over some specified time frame.
58:20
Then to stay on the nominal GDP path, you have to inflate by that much more? Mhm.
58:25
That seems both not desirable and politically impossible and that the rule will just break. What do you think?
58:32
Uh I think hitting a strict target might be unworkable, but it's also shown the value of the nominal framework because we are otherwise finding ourselves um spending a lot of time quibbling about how to understand inflation adjustment in a strange period of you know, trajectory, right?
58:53
So it's like if college wants to charge you full tuition, but they're only giving you online courses, like I think probably the right thing to say about that is that that's massive inflation.
59:03
Um but like you just like you really can't redo how the CPI works in real time and then hit a CPI target.
59:11
I do think you might have to say faced with a big shock like all right, we're we're settling for less, uh something like that, but a lot of the apparatus of NGDP targeting, right?
59:25
Like that we should have a futures market, that we should be paying attention to what this is, that we should be trying to get the newspapers to talk about about nominal GDP.
59:32
I think it's all been validated by this experience.
59:35
Um and it all got very in vogue as a discussion topic because of the Great Recession, 2008-2009 crash, but that was a very um from a macroeconomic perspective, I think that was a very conventional kind of situation.
59:50
Whereas this pandemic is a little bit is a little bit weird, but the strength of nominal targeting is that it can handle is it it can help you think about the demand side aspect of real shocks in a clearer way.
1:00:05
Last but not least is the Matt Yglesias production function.
1:00:07
So, as you know, many public intellectuals, they use economics as a base, and then that shapes how they comment on public policy.
1:00:17
The way I've read a lot of your career is you've used analytic philosophy as your base, uh then later learned some economics.
1:00:24
Is that something you did consciously?
1:00:26
Do you agree with that characterization?
1:00:29
I definitely agree with do that.
1:00:32
Um you know, I definitely agree with that characterization.
1:00:33
I think um it is not a conscious plan of attack.
1:00:36
I majored in philosophy for uh very naive reasons.
1:00:42
Like, I enjoyed the intro class, and my TA was flattering and encouraged me to pursue it as a major.
1:00:48
Uh but I do think it's a good um to the extent that people want to be like writers about things, I think it's a pretty good training.
1:00:55
I mean, I did a a panel discussion at American Philosophical Association one time with uh with Andrew Sullivan and with with another writer, and we were all like old philosophy majors, and we were talking about this.
1:01:07
Um and it's a good it's a good background because it's it's like really about words and how they work and how to think about things and how to draw distinctions and how to parachute in to conversations that you don't know anything about and still make some kind of useful contribution to them.
1:01:26
Um, you can always like read a textbook about something else, learn something.
1:01:31
Uh, and you would never want to make, you know, economics is obviously an important subject and economists know a lot of good and useful things.
1:01:37
But in academia, you are rewarded for like pushing the frontiers, right?
1:01:43
For having like the edgiest uh, idea out there.
1:01:45
Uh, but you don't really want to base policy recommendations on something like that, right?
1:01:52
Like one promising line of research that some hotshots have two new papers on is not like what you want to bet the future on.
1:02:00
Um, so you to talk about policy, I think you like want to know the basics, uh, but the basics are relatively easy to learn.
1:02:07
Do you think of yourself in some ways as a kind of successor to the 1960s, 1970s Jewish New York intellectual scene, but now hyper-powered by the internet?
1:02:17
I mean, isn't that also your tradition? Uh, I don't think so. I don't know. I'm from New York. from that scene?
1:02:25
You are from the the West Village, right?
1:02:27
Yes, I'm from New York and I'm Jewish. Um, I I I don't know. was a writer.
1:02:31
Yeah, I don't know that much about those guys, to be honest.
1:02:33
Um, so I'm not saying it's not true, but I I I that's not something that I I think about or situate myself with.
1:02:42
What did you learn about yourself from your stint working as an actual manager? Oh, man.
1:02:50
You know, it's so easy when you uh, do your job to get mad at your managers um, and to then make the subsequent turn to like all these people have no idea what they're doing.
1:03:02
Uh, but it turns out like it is uh, challenging to manage.
1:03:06
Uh, it involves real skills.
1:03:06
I was um, it stressed me out.
1:03:10
I don't think I did a great job of it and you get a good appreciation for the idea that even though it might be hard to measure or to see externally, that there is real skill being deployed in middle management and that um the sort of meta management skill, right?
1:03:27
That must be I mean, I I didn't reach this level, uh but the managers who have to pick the other managers, they are doing something that must be I I think really hard to even conceptualize, uh but must have incredible influence on the success of really big organizations.
1:03:44
Now, blog Blogging was very important for your career, it seems. Helped you a lot.
1:03:48
Why is it that blogging doesn't seem like it's coming back right now?
1:03:51
If it was useful to you, useful to me, useful to many other people, Mhm. is it Facebook? Is it Twitter? Is it something else? Why not?
1:04:01
Yeah, I mean, I I think we blame Facebook and Twitter conventionally for it.
1:04:04
Um but I don't think that it's necessarily just about the the the technological modes.
1:04:10
Part of why blogging was such an interesting moment was that it introduced a genuine uh disruption into the the ecosystem, right?
1:04:18
And that people who early on were not affiliated with important institutions or necessarily well-known, by kind of colonizing the open space, uh you know, became big deal in our own little sort of niches.
1:04:35
Um so, Twitter has had some of that impact, right?
1:04:38
Like there are smart, good people who've come to public attention through their ability to to tweet, um which is good, right?
1:04:44
That's like a a sort of strong thing, but I don't think if you brought blogging back, it wouldn't be blogging in that sense, right?
1:04:55
Like people would want to read uh the blogs of famous people or the blogs that had big brands behind them or like The New York Times would own blogging or something.
1:05:03
Um whereas what was what was special about that that blog moment uh in in first decade was the extent to which um people who we didn't know uh would just kind of write stuff and and become influential.
1:05:20
What did you learn from Paul Joskow, the famous economist and also your uncle?
1:05:24
Uh learned a lot of stuff from Paul.
1:05:24
Um you know, I mean you learn specific things about uh certificate of need rules for hospitals.
1:05:32
Um but we always in my family, uh a lot of economists, he and his brother Andy and and my grandfather Jules um are all economists, PhD people.
1:05:41
Um I I was always interested in the subject, you know, would like to ask questions at at family discussions.
1:05:48
And you know, his real sort of specialty is in uh regulatory type issues.
1:05:52
And you know, I I I came to appreciate from things he said just exactly how complicated these questions are of like what should we do with utility-type infrastructure, with these regulated-type industries that so many people I know, you know, fall back on very hazy, like big-picture ideological things.
1:06:20
Like they heard something happened that was called deregulation and it was bad.
1:06:24
Um and that's just like not true.
1:06:28
Like I mean, it sounds it's not true that it was bad.
1:06:30
It's like Like what is deregulation, right?
1:06:31
It's like a harder question than I think most people appreciate.
1:06:36
And that's something I definitely learned from him. Very last question.
1:06:39
What is the most important thing you learned from your mother?
1:06:44
Most important thing I learned from my mother um is well, like personally or intellectually? Combined.
1:06:53
Um you know, so I am not a visual person, uh but she was.
1:06:57
Um and she really helped me um I I I am always reminded by her emphasis on that and how much it actually matters, like what things look like and how the visual design is and that that's not a superficial question.
1:07:14
That our communications with one another, not exclusively, I mean we we have podcasts, but so much of what we do like comes through our eyes, right?
1:07:22
And that like that impacts the message in like a profound and real way and you shouldn't think of it as just a sort of a distorting feel.
1:07:32
That that's actually what we're what we're doing when we write something is we're creating images that other people look at.
1:07:40
Matt Yglesias, thank you very much and again everyone a big plug for Matt's new book 1 Billion Americans, The Case for Thinking Bigger and of course you can also find Matt on Twitter and in many other places. Matt, thank you. Thank you. Yes, tough questions.