As I’ve said here before, Matt Yglesias’s status as both uber-aggressive YIMBY radical and cautious incrementalist popularist makes no sense. Popularism, for the unfamiliar, is the idea that politically-minded folks should only ever publicly pursue political ideas that are already popular and avoid any association with unpopular ideas, which imperil electoral gains. They have some sort of weak waves in the direction of how to accomplish things that are necessary but aren’t currently popular, but it’s all quite vague, and their hearts clearly aren’t in it. As has been pointed out many times, in 1955 the popularists would absolutely have been telling the civil rights movement to pull back and get serious and accept that the public believes that separate can be equal, so simmer down. As I’ve said before, this is always a stalking horse for what popularists actually
Hang on a minute. If the high and increasing pricing of single family sprawl and stroads reveals public demand for them, then the even higher and even more rapidly increasing pricing of dense walkability in superstar cities reveals even higher public demand for that, no?
The public is not a monolith—NYC is very expensive because there are more people who want to live there than places to house those people. But there are also many, many people who have the income to get a place in NYC but choose sprawling suburbs instead, for a variety of reasons. One of the increasingly annoying tendencies of urbanists is the paternalism of asserting that anyone who doesn’t like city life is disingenuous or brainwashed by Big Car. (They probably don’t like it because real life cities are flawed in all the ways that Twitter urbanists will complain about all day!) This is spoken by someone who couldn’t be paid to leave their dense walkable city, btw
I agree that YIMBY's are often obnoxiously strident in their aesthetic preference for city life online (I also incidentally agree with Freddie about how circular and confused the whole "popularism" thing is). But one person who consistently argues for housing abundance as something beyond just hipster urbanist aesthetics is Matt Yglesias. Of THAT charge he's innocent.
Exactly. I currently live in a city due to the requirement of my job, but I love astronomy (and nature in general), so given a choice I'd much rather live in a small town or a rural area. Not everyone has the same preferences!
Edited to add: EVERY place is flawed in significant ways! All you can do is pick which flaws you find most tolerable.
The person who in 2024 wants to live in the dead center of San Francisco and who wants to live in Atherton is not the same. Today's SFer may want to move to Atherton in ten years. Both are popular but the latter far moreso, which is why there's such a thing as a superstar city (of which there are anywhere between 2 and 5, depending on your definition) but dozens of superstar suburbs (that is, there is far less to differentiate a tony suburb of Houston or St Louis or Denver from those of superstar cities.)
Just find the suburbs of superstar or growing cities and you will find superstar suburbs.
Dallas may not be a superstar city yet, but Plano is probably a superstar suburb. Washington DC may not fit your definition of a superstar city, but Fairfax County and Montgomery Country are almost certainly superstar suburbs.
I feel like housing issues are so sensitive to framing concerns that you probably can advocate for yimbyist concerns in a way that’s consistent with popularism.
I feel like there’s a part of popularism that’s just envy for the way the business lobbying community doesn’t have to say the unpopular thing to get it on the agenda they can just vote for Republicans and know it’ll get done usually quietly.
The tricky thing about YIMBY is that the *results* of it are broadly popular -- more widely available housing at lower cost -- but the means to get there aren't so popular.
The similarities and differences between the issues being addressed by YIMBY and climate change activists are interesting.
In both cases, there is a free rider problem where people want the benefits without the pain. People would like to see the benefits of less carbon emissions without having to change their own behavior or spend more money. Similarly, people would like to more housing being built but want to see it happen in other places so it doesn't affect their neighborhoods. In both cases, overall outcomes improve if there is less local control, through a federal gas tax in the case of the climate and through removing the ability for neighborhoods to zone themselves against additional housing.
But they're also different in important ways. With a gas tax, the pain is immediately felt by everyone and it is distributed more or less equally. In the case of housing, the pain (in the form of the parking and traffic issues) and any possible impact on the esthetics of the neighborhood (I think folks can legitimately disagree on how real that is) will take much longer to manifest. In addition, they won't be equally shared. In a world without zoning, building still won't happen to the same degree everywhere. And there is is also more that can be done to offset the negative externalities of more building (e.g. introducing additional public transit options).
Haven't really through the implications of what these differences imply (in terms of both the policy and politics of the two issues), but think they're probably worth pondering.
I always enjoy reading Freddie's disdain for Iglesias. I read them both and regard it as a show of respect. But Freddie's point about populism is pretty spot on: "it’s a disagreement about political values masquerading as a disagreement about political strategy." If you are interested in a non-policy-oriented defense of NIMBYism, read this:
I dunno. I haven’t heard the term popularism in a long time, an indication that the main proponents have softened on the whole idea. But I also think the gracious interpretation of the idea was not to never advocate for something unpopular, but to a) honestly understand and appreciate where the public is on your pet issues b) pick your battles and c) adjust your approach based on the above. Does MY adjust his tone on Twitter based on the popularity of YIMBYism? I guess not. But as I recall (haven’t been on Twitter since it changed names) his YIMBY tweets didn’t usually get much hard pushback. Maybe I’m wrong. But I think that goes to the nature of the ‘unpopularity’ of YIMBY ideas. Isn’t it the case that ‘let’s build more housing and get rid of red tape and restrictions’ is pretty popular, but people just get upset when their stuff changes? All the more reason to build up a lot of momentum for ‘LET’S BUILD’ in the abstract in hopes that it trickles done to something actually getting built.
Yeah--I think Matt is aware that he is abrasive and irritating on Twitter, a website that is designed to make people behave in an abrasive and irritating way. I think that he has admitted this in one way or another on a couple of occasions. (the government should shut down Twitter). In his actual posts, which are a bit longer and more nuanced than the tweets, I think he is a lot more realistic about the agenda and what makes sense to prioritize as issues. If you spent a lot of time looking at snide tweets and then saw the posts about being less irritating as a political strategy, I can understand wanting to point that out. I have tried to be less irritating, which involved getting rid of Twitter a while ago.
Further, Freddie has popped into the comments on Matt's posts on more than one occasion to reiterate his thing about how he thinks YIMBYs have a big problem where they often accuse all the NIMBYs of being white and privileged. I think the acronyms are stupid and unhelpful with this situation, but I think he's overindexing on something I'm sure he's seen happen in Brooklyn. I live in Minneapolis, where white people complaining about all the other white people is basically the municipal past-time. One time, I saw some unwell white Internet communists I'm aware of generate a lot of content from marching a group of East African immigrants around a public hearing for a housing development, holding signs that were unrelated to the subject of the public hearing, but did relate to a different subject the unwell white Internet communists were fired up about. I think I have a pretty good idea of what was going on in that situation, but it would be unhelpful to assume everyone I disagree with on housing issues is up to the same funny business.
"The government should down Twitter"? Wow. Why not just commit suicide now? Twitter is actually what we make it with individual choices of who to follow.
The government should ban ALL social media. And, truth be told, the internet. I would make it a summary execution offense to network 2 computers together
The contradiction disappears when you realize that having large amounts of single-family housing does not require zoning—and in fact is more affordable without it.
Houston, for example, has no zoning and the most abundant and affordable single-family housing in the nation.
People love to hate on sprawl, but they pretty obviously prefer cheap housing to zoning restrictions, which is exactly what Yg advocates.
Does anyone remember that in Houston's wild overbuilding led to massive damages during Hurricane Harvey because huge subdivisions were in the maximum flood pool areas. Houston's expansion completely ignored reservoirs and flooding.
"The corps was fully aware that neighborhoods like Canyon Gate would flood. It issued a report in 1986 — one of several — acknowledging that Barker’s maximum flood pool extended beyond government property.
“As the surrounding areas are developed, this may mean that homes in adjacent subdivisions may be flooded,” the report said. “This could result in lawsuits against the Corps of Engineers for flooding private lands.”"
...
"“The county permitted the houses to be built here and the Army Corps’s design included our private property,” said Ms. Micu, who has lived in Canyon Gate since 2012. “Our house was messed up because of their decisions, so we should be made whole.”
A Fort Bend County planning map from 1997 warned that Canyon Gate was “adjacent to the Barker Reservoir” and “subject to extended controlled inundation.”
But few homeowners knew about it, and most, like Ms. Micu, had not acquired flood insurance before Hurricane Harvey because Canyon Gate lies outside the 100-year floodplain"
So basically, Houston overbuilt and the taxpayers footed the bill for the damage caused by their expansion.
I feel like you just have no idea what Matt Yglesias actually thinks or believes.
He doesn't particularly like Obama. He has said multiple times he thinks Biden's success shows that Obama was an ineffective negotiator, too focused on what the other side ought to want instead of just negotiating based on what they actually want.
His view of popularism is that you need to shill popular ideas so you can attain power to implement good ideas. You build goodwill by talking up popular stuff and then spend it down by making policy. The whole point is that there are unpopular ideas that are nonetheless important to implement, so you need to maximize your popularity elsewhere so you can ram the unpopular but necessary stuff through. It's also important to be very strategic about messaging. He talks a lot about "secret congress" and how the best bills are often passed quietly with little news coverage and traditional activism can threaten this by bringing unwanted media attention.
When you do choose to spend your goodwill on unpopular policies, it's important to get the maximum bang for your buck - the most good for the amount of popularity you're spending down. So you have to be cagey and smart. The absolute worst thing you can do is blow your goodwill on a policy that doesn't end up achieving your goals.
I think that Matt is also clearly an effective poster. He is often able to move the dial on things just by posting about them. His confrontational approach is appropriate for posting but he is pretty clear it would be a bad move for an elected official.
In terms of YIMBYs, Matt is on the side continually urging YIMBYs to moderate their goals and focus on achievable wins. He encourages YIMBYs to downplay unpopular anti-car rhetoric and focus on straightforward messaging about doing what you want with land you own. A lot of more radical YIMBYs really hate Matt for insisting on a more moderate approach. He's not really "king YIMBY," he's just the person with the biggest platform advocating YIMBY ideas. It's sort of like calling Bernie or AOC the king/queen of socialism because they have huge platforms, even though many serious socialists have ambivalent feelings about them.
My take is that Yglesias didn’t like Obama’s timidity on macroeconomic expansion (we needed a lot more of it 2009) but did like Obama’s relative moderation on hot button cultural issues like race and immigration.
Yeah, Matt especially thinks that Obama benefited a lot from being able to moderate on racial topics without sacrificing his credibility (because he himself is black). I think Matt's stance is that Biden also has good instincts here, but has a harder time managing his coalition because he's white.
"Biden is a politician who really embraces politics as a vocation. Donald Trump was an amateur who waltzed into politics without ever having thought seriously about it. Barack Obama was a non-politician’s ideal, or perhaps what politicians would be like in a better world. But Biden is into politics and doesn’t pretend otherwise.
A lot of people seem to think that the politics of the presidency is about finding and articulating the one right answer, then making everyone implement it. But Biden, a true artist of the possible, is more focused on his conditional optimism: can political leaders reconcile our society’s varied interests, passions, and factions and unite us as a country? If so, I think he believes we can live with a range of outcomes on the details. But if not, we risk disaster."
"Biden’s approach is more based on understanding Republicans’ actual needs. On the face, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS and Science Act don’t make sense. Republicans say the big problem in the country is inflation driven by irresponsible spending, so why would they agree to a couple of spending bills paid for with gimmicks? And also a series of big arms packages to Ukraine? And then largely give Democrats want they want on domestic spending in the omnibus in exchange for a big boost in military spending? Do they even know what their own ideas are?
But instead of embarrassing them, Biden worked with them and got the deals done. If Republicans had wanted these bills to be paid for with prudent tax reform, Biden probably would’ve done that. If they’d wanted a $3 billion investment in domestic pickle manufacturing, he probably would’ve done that, too. For Biden, the job isn’t to out-debate the other party, it’s to work with their genuine desires — whatever they may be — and see where that gets you."
If you read his post about how he went from left to center left he expressly says that the Obama years were the peak of his agreement with the people in power and that the main problem was that Congress didn’t enact his policies. He has also said that Biden has not yet accomplished what Obama did in another post. He definitely has a critique that Obama tried to offer Republicans what they said they wanted (deficit reduction) rather than what they really wanted (tax cuts) but now he’s adamant that it’s time for deficit reduction so not sure he disagrees with the central policy objectives that Obama was behind.
I think there's a difference between agreeing with someone's objectives vs agreeing with someone's strategy. Matt certainly agrees with Obama on what ideal policies would be, but a great deal of Matt's thinking is on strategy, and there he tends to favor Biden's style over Obama's.
Most spending is good. The CHIPS act and funding for EVs is good. He got the child tax credit extended for a time. Money for Ukraine.
Would have been better if it was concurrent with confiscatory wealth taxes and drawing and quartering of Trump and his supporters, but ya gotta compromise somewhere.
That is all you got for four years? I don't have time to list all the crap negative outcomes happening during his four years in office. The list is long.
I don't agree with everything he’s done or not done, nor do I agree with everything any president has done or not done. Inflation sucks, but that would have happened had Trump won in 2020, too. Probably worse bc of bullying the Fed. A lot of boomers finally retired during COVID, we were always going to have a labor shortage leading to a wage/price spiral when the Boomers retired anyway. Supply shocks didn’t help, and they happened under Trump too, and we could have done better there as well under both presidencies.
If you’re gonna blame Biden for outcomes beyond his control, ya gotta blame Trump for the collapse of the economy during the pandemic, the conflicting CDC guidance under his watch, etc, or it’s hypocritical. (I don’t blame Trump for COVID for this and actually think he did a pretty good job with managing the economy and accelerating vaccine production then, if not public health messaging, but he did leave Biden a broken economy!)
And Putin agrees with your drawing and quartering of your Democrat political opponents. Nice hate for your fellow Americans. Do you have a black mask and a big student loans for a degree in victim studies?
I just think we need to treat treason like the British used to. Not for regular folks who voted for Trump. But the Jan 6 folks and the party that enables him to break laws and incite riots, and leaders of conservative think tanks like Heritage that want to break the separation of church and state, yes. We need a loyal opposition, not a regime of traitors who hate everything good about America. Grandma who voted for Trump bc Eisenhower was a good guy gets a pass.
This is nonsense. Yglesias thinks Obama is awesome.
"His view of popularism is that you need to shill popular ideas so you can attain power to implement good ideas. You build goodwill by talking up popular stuff and then spend it down by making policy. The whole point is that there are unpopular ideas that are nonetheless important to implement, so you need to maximize your popularity elsewhere so you can ram the unpopular but necessary stuff through. It's also important to be very strategic about messaging. He talks a lot about "secret congress" and how the best bills are often passed quietly with little news coverage and traditional activism can threaten this by bringing unwanted media attention."
Yes. Popularism means "lie to the electorate and tell them what they want to hear and then do what you want when you're in office."
Good plan, that. And as fundamentally dishonest and shitty as anything Trump ever did.
“As has been pointed out many times, in 1955 the popularists would absolutely have been telling the civil rights movement to pull back and get serious and accept that the public believes that separate can be equal, so simmer down.”
This worked out pretty well for then-Senate majority leader LBJ and the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
This essay seems incredibly disingenuous. I don't agree with Matt on everything but I think his overall position is pretty logical. There are things that are good, and there are things that are popular. If something is good AND popular it's probably a good idea to focus on that. Some good things are unpopular. It might still be worth doing but the amount of good needs to be worth the hit your going to take pushing it. This isn't some crazy contradiction. He believes increasing the housing stock is worth pushing even if it's not always popular. I agree with him on that at least.
Maybe you were always like this but I'm noticing an increasing trend of you being unable to honestly interact with the ideas of people you disagree with.
FWIW, I think the trend is not an inability for FDB to engage with ideas he disagrees with. It's more a trend of inability to understand ideas that come from people he dislikes personally. Which is a fairly common failing IMO.
I also think there's a fair amount of honest mistake going on. I would say Yglesias Thought has to be approached as kind of a body of work. Yglesias often waffles between posts that straightforwardly explain his thinking and posts that are intended to maximize engagement. His ideas are also pretty nuanced - for instance, popularism sounds like it means "just do popular stuff," and that is the direction Matt wants people to go, but the actual deeper point of popularism is that it's a strategy for people who have esoteric/unpopular goals. I think it's understandable to miss the nuance here, especially because Matt's personality can really grate on people (though I personally find his personality charming, YMMV).
He can be glib at times, especially when it comes to the suffering of the poor, and it can be occasionally maddening coming from a Dalton/Harvard guy that’s never experienced any real hardship. His perspective would be better with more empathy.
That being said, I’ve read him since his Slate days, and I’ve learned more from him than any pundit or journalist out there. He’s very talented at making things like macroeconomics easy to follow, and he has a wide array of subjects that he can offer a unique and knowledgeable perspective on, though sometimes its dilettante-ish. And I agree with a significant subset of what he favors, too, both housing abundance AND the need for those of us on the left to stop being the Judean People’s Front vs the People’s Front of Judea…
Something interesting I've noticed is that people who are more familiar with the working-class lifestyle tend to be more glib about it overall. I think a lot of progressive "empathy" is sort of the opposite, overcompensating for a lack of familiarity by being extra deferent. Matt has certainly had a privileged upbringing, but I actually think he's rather more in touch with working class sentiment than most progressives.
Though admittedly, preference for cold/hard vs warm/soft affect is probably just a personality trait and both Matt and I lean towards the cold/hard end of that spectrum
Perhaps. It’s not the affect so much as he glibly asserts things like “the labor market is strong” when I’m looking for a job and all jobs in the field have 900 applicants or “inflation is good right now” which might be technically true but daft af when our weekly grocery bills for a couple at Kroger add up to $250 and that gas and groceries aren’t factored into the CPI or that “student loan forgiveness is a bad idea” when so many people are underwater, just from shit like hair school, and then has the nerve to be a natalist when the average young person can’t afford a house in most markets and so many have debt with high interest rates now. The other day he even advocated for cuts to social security in the name of deficit reduction which I never thought I’d see from him.
I like Matt. I learn a lot from him and have read him since the aughts. He’s absolutely fantastic at simplifying complex topics to a point where the analysis is understandable to the layman yet still rigorous, which is a gift! He’s spot on with like 75% of his hippy punching and I say that as an hippy! I agree with him 9 times out of 10, tbh, even about some of the things I mentioned. Especially about housing. But I disagree where he values growth and innovation over stability, which is a fairly profound disagreement. Over half of change is bad, especially change that the corporate world pushes.
For example, maybe student loan forgiveness really is a loser - though I think forgiving the *interest* on student loans and not charging interest on student loans could be a real winner, but that’s never talked about. I think Biden coming out to say that people should pay back what they borrowed but that the government shouldn’t make money off students could be powerful. I say this having paid off my $200k in student loans, but my best friend from pharmacy school had some shit go down in his life that caused his interest to balloon - he makes 6 figures *now* but owes close to $400k from a 200k baseline. And plenty of folks have fairly low levels of debt from dropping out of college but now work min wage jobs that get garnished while interest causes the balance to grow. Would a responsible person procreate in such situations?
This is the wrong point. The usury is the crime. As mentioned, reducing/eliminating debt on loans us NEVER part of ANY discussion. After 2008, and prior tbh, WS knew that lending for education was the next.scheme.
Will Stancil went on a tear dealing with people like you who don’t want to believe things like we have nearly full employment and rising wages.
Our school loan system is a disaster because the federal government subsidizes it and prices keep going up.
Forgiving school loans is a bad policy because it’s regressive and fuels inflation.
Thinking a responsible person wouldn’t have a kid now in the US, when it is a far better place than basically anywhere else in all of history indicates you have some brain worms. Our poor do better than most of the world by far.
I wasn’t saying forgive student loans, I was just saying don’t charge interest on them. That’s a big difference.
When did they start incorporating the cost of gas and groceries into CPI? I thought they were considered too volatile.
Yeah, the poor have it better here than Zimbabwe. But it’s still irresponsible to be having kids when you’re struggling financially.
Freddie’s a successful writer, just bought a house, and he’s also in his early 40s, I believe, which is generally pretty late to start a family (assuming his wife is of the same age, and she may not be). It’s great that he’s doing so. But most natalists think we should make it easier to have children in your 20s and 30s, and advocate for things like child tax credits, extended family leave, subsidized child care. At least Matt’s good on housing, which is a huge part of it, but I also think student loan burden is probably an even bigger part than the lack of extended family leave or subsidized child care. Though an expanded CTC would obviously help alleviate that burden too, also while increasing inflation.
The problem with rising wages is all price increases due to inflation have outpaced all salary increases due to higher wages. In real terms people are poorer now than they were before the recession.
The problem with talking about the unemployment rate is that labor force participation plummeted after the pandemic and has yet to recover. A smaller labor pool plus a ton of stimulus meant businesses overpaid to hire workers which directly contributed to inflation. Plus low labor force participation ultimately hurts productivity,
Right now the #1 indication of whether somebody is familiar with the working class is whether or not they believe the economy is "good". I am pretty sure that the blue collar segment of the economy has entered into recession and the only question is whether or not the contagion spreads to infect the economy as a whole.
The Americans who now view fast food as a luxury are probably not high earners.
Consumer spending for low income consumers has cratered. Auto repossessions, debt defaults, carried debt, etc. are heavily concentrated in that same demographic.
That's nonsense. Freddie is ripping apart what he sees as the flaws in Matt's positions. Yglesias is acknowledge, by all of his 'shippers, to be flip and facile, while a really good explainer who is excellent at shaping his reader's opinions to agree with him without noticing the massive flaws in his arguments.
Curious what you’re thinking about when you write that he is “excellent at shaping his reader’s opinions to agree with him without noticing the massive flaws in his arguments.” Don’t think I’d agree with that, but it’s hard to know without at least a couple of examples.
“Yglesias’s whole shtick is to act like a condescending choch to everyone who disagrees with him”
I like both you and MY, but I do find both of you to be pretty condescending at times. At what point does this cross over into being someone’s “whole schtick”?
I agree with 99% of this, but I feel inclined to offer a defense of what might be called weak popularism. The US civil rights example is an instructive one. MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is, in many ways, a broadside against the popularists of his day ("the white moderate") and a powerful articulation of his frustration with them, but it seems to me that if you look at how he and Rustin and their peers went about winning, they took the popularist argument quite seriously -- seriously enough that, 70 years later, some (including Yglesias, I think) even call them popularists. In the 1950's there were lots of folks in both parties who were sincerely sympathetic to the cause of civil rights, but who thought pursuing that cause would jeopardize a broader agenda (that, I'm sure they would have argued, would have helped African Americans). What the civil rights movement did was, among other things, put the ugliness of this implicit compromise on the front page of the morning newspaper: "This is what the compromise you are asking us to accept looks like. It's a german shepherd attacking a nicely dressed teenager forever." It rendered the deprioritization of civil rights less tenable for more and more people. And while it perhaps did not make the civil rights agenda broadly *popular*, it did create a civil rights constituency that was big and powerful enough to win over an entire political party to its agenda.
If, on the other hand, one of those parties had tried to pass the civil rights acts a decade earlier, they probably would have lost and, in doing so, quite possibly lost the opportunity to pass them in the '60's.
I don't know if this account counts as "popularism," but I would definitely say that an agenda's popularity matters a great deal, and if it is, broadly speaking, unpopular, then you need to take that seriously and do something about it...
Good pull Christopher. Not sure if access to that article requires being a Slow Boring subscriber, but just in case here is the final section of that piece, which both explains Matt's perspective and also acknowledges that in some situations (like the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s), it is not the right one.
Not sure if Freddie ever read that piece, but it really shows how misguided his argument is here:
-----
"The big point I want to make here, really, is that to a larger extent than most people realize, the precipitous rise in political polarization that we’ve seen in the United States is an elite-driven choice.
In part, it’s a good choice that was made by midcentury liberals to break the sordid political compromise that kept white supremacists inside the Democratic Party by gifting them the ability to keep civil rights bills off the floor. But it’s much less clear to me that the trend toward aligning all environmental concerns with broader partisan affiliation (documented in David Karol’s book “Red, Green, and Blue”) was a good idea or that the concurrent extensions of totalizing partisan conflict to gun control, abortion rights, and immigration have been productive. YIMBYs have deliberately tried to make the opposite choice, and I think that’s been wise.
And to be clear, this is actually something I’ve changed my mind about.
I used to think that the problem of housing politics in the United States was that YIMBYism naturally “reads” as right-wing deregulation but the biggest need for policy changes is in large blue state cities and their inner-ring suburbs. So I thought deliberately aligning YIMBYism with progressive politics would be a good idea. The people actually doing the work mostly disagreed with me, and I think events have proven them right. One issue is that regulatory constraints on housing supply are actually incredibly widespread, even if the problem is most severe in a handful of deep blue metros. But the other is that, in practice, it’s more productive to treat this as a state-level issue rather than as dozens of separate local dogfights, and in state politics it’s helpful to be bipartisan — even in New York or Texas.
I fully concede that resistance to letting the issue become part of totalized partisan conflict inevitably rubs some people the wrong way. But I think in practice, we are seeing that the depolarized approach is more productive and that advocates on a wider range of issues should consider developing strategies to depolarize what they are doing."
I see zero contradiction between writing a book on how the USA would benefit from a lot more immigration while also accepting that Biden shouldn’t run on that. The Yglesias fixation has become a bit extreme and at this point in the movie I kind of expect you to reach over and kid him. Hidden within that tough Marxist exterior is a pragmatic technocrat waiting to break free.
Yea, I did not realize that pundit slash fiction might have demand, but that would almost certainly be the most narratively satisfying thing at this point.
I’m continually perplexed that every discussion about housing and transportation online devolves to one between bike infrastructure and single family housing. Like every single one. Prove me wrong!
Instead we should be getting at the enormous hurdle we have as a country in embracing multi-mode transportation infrastructure investment. Since I’m in the northeast corridor, I’ll stick to that focus.
By that I mean, that you can’t say, insist that congestion pricing in NYC, is well thought out and necessary without addressing that the economic welfare of the greater NYC population that has been underserved by the lack of abundant alternate transportation into NYC. And since the greater NYC metropolitan region is essentially northern NJ, Fairfield Cty CT, and Westchester, Dutchess, Putnam, Suffolk counties plus the outer boroughs, then those communities have just as much to say about NYC as the citibike community.
Our political will seems to land approximately where painting bike lanes is the expedient choice when regional extensions of a subway, tram, light rail and high speed rail would better serve the economic growth of the region, and reduce the need for car dependency.
Countless municipal planners sing the song about transit oriented development at the expense of understanding that transit needs to be built first within a municipality. And that development needs to be guided towards building where the next station will be, not some random hodgepodge of increasing density near existing stations that haven’t seen a reduction in time to wherever since the 1920s. Yeah 100 years of trains moving slower.
So yeah the advocates for Yimbyism are really the activists papering over the financialization of housing. Which at its root is about turning housing into standard rental units that corporations can monopolize pricing with little recourse to the renter. Let’s not forget that the Yimby battles are almost all in the single-family communities that eventually sell-out because it gets hard to keep fighting corporate development. And the copycat mentality strikes everywhere since reducing single family home ownerships is the way to long term growth on subscription housing because that’s where everything else has proven a path to steady profits.
I’ve been a fan of MY and Freddie for a long time but now it just feels like I read condescending essay after essay. It gets tiring to feel like one is an idiot after reading one of these missives. Like do you think your audience are also composed of idiots who might consider different arguments? Austin builders are making expensive duplexes in my formerly middle class middle class neighborhood that tower over the older houses that regular people can’t afford, regardless of there being multiple units per lot. So on the one hand I don’t think banning single family housing will do much given this example. On the other hand, Yg’s impulse seems right. It would be great if smart commentators could reign in the condescension, because it really takes away from the message.
Regular people can’t afford the older houses either.
New construction should be more valuable than older buildings if land isn’t so expensive it dwarfs the cost of the structure.
Significantly, YIMBY doesn’t call for banning SFH, it calls for NOT MANDATING THEM.
Austin is choosing not to go the SF route and people like you will still complain about prices rising in your formally middle class neighborhood as new buildings are built.
In short, you are an idiotic audience on housing supply because you fail to understand the relevant counter factual of limiting vs. increasing housing stock in the face of high demand when you live in one of the places doing the best job of trying to build.
I have a hard time believing that Freddie doesn't read Matt's Substack and only follows his Twitter feed, but this piece certainly reads like that. But for those who really don't read Slow Boring (Yglesias' Substack), the two have essentially nothing in common. Matt's Twitter feed is indeed snarky and condescending. It's clearly part blowing off steam, part meant to annoy and make fun of people Matt doesn't like, and a large part marketing for his Substack.
But the Substack, itself, is nothing like that. There he makes the real case for both what he believes and what he thinks is wise politically, and he takes the arguments of people he disagrees with or simply have different tastes seriously. Freddie writes about Matt's perspective on housing and local control "Maybe Yglesias could square this circle, but he never tries, instead simply doing the YIMBY thing of dismissing anyone who pokes and prods at the foundations of their thinking as a rich white landowner", and perhaps his Twitter feed gives that impression (I don't know), but what he actually believes (both in terms of the correct policy and the correct approach to advocacy) is clearly captured in pieces like these which are the opposite of Freddie's quote:
There is nothing the least bit hypocritical or paradoxical about writing the book One Billion Americans, fully believing everything in it, but understanding that it would be suicidal to run on that platform and advocating a more incrementalist approach.
As for Sunrise and the climate folks, it's not like Matt's understanding of the optimum policy is any different from there's. The right policy on climate is clear: a carbox tax that fully captures the externalities of burning fossil fuels and investing some or all of that money into public transportation and alternative energy sources that don't emit carbon (solar, nuclear, wind, hydro).
The problem, of course, is that the vast majority of Americans don't care enough about the climate to support such a gas tax. Given that situation, the right alternative is something like the Inflation Reduction Act, which at least invests huge amounts of money into these alternatives. What is so frustrating about Sunrise and the other loons of the idiot faction of the environmental left is that they not only have not celebrated Biden for this incredible win, not only do (some) oppose nuclear and the lifting of regulations necessary to get alternative energy sources actually built, but they actually do a bunch of activist things that do nothing but help Trump get reelected.
The sad truth is that the environment would actually be far better off in the long run if Sunrise and groups like it simply disbanded. That is why they are treated with such disdain by folks with a brain.
Hang on a minute. If the high and increasing pricing of single family sprawl and stroads reveals public demand for them, then the even higher and even more rapidly increasing pricing of dense walkability in superstar cities reveals even higher public demand for that, no?
The public is not a monolith—NYC is very expensive because there are more people who want to live there than places to house those people. But there are also many, many people who have the income to get a place in NYC but choose sprawling suburbs instead, for a variety of reasons. One of the increasingly annoying tendencies of urbanists is the paternalism of asserting that anyone who doesn’t like city life is disingenuous or brainwashed by Big Car. (They probably don’t like it because real life cities are flawed in all the ways that Twitter urbanists will complain about all day!) This is spoken by someone who couldn’t be paid to leave their dense walkable city, btw
I agree that YIMBY's are often obnoxiously strident in their aesthetic preference for city life online (I also incidentally agree with Freddie about how circular and confused the whole "popularism" thing is). But one person who consistently argues for housing abundance as something beyond just hipster urbanist aesthetics is Matt Yglesias. Of THAT charge he's innocent.
Exactly. I currently live in a city due to the requirement of my job, but I love astronomy (and nature in general), so given a choice I'd much rather live in a small town or a rural area. Not everyone has the same preferences!
Edited to add: EVERY place is flawed in significant ways! All you can do is pick which flaws you find most tolerable.
The person who in 2024 wants to live in the dead center of San Francisco and who wants to live in Atherton is not the same. Today's SFer may want to move to Atherton in ten years. Both are popular but the latter far moreso, which is why there's such a thing as a superstar city (of which there are anywhere between 2 and 5, depending on your definition) but dozens of superstar suburbs (that is, there is far less to differentiate a tony suburb of Houston or St Louis or Denver from those of superstar cities.)
Just find the suburbs of superstar or growing cities and you will find superstar suburbs.
Dallas may not be a superstar city yet, but Plano is probably a superstar suburb. Washington DC may not fit your definition of a superstar city, but Fairfax County and Montgomery Country are almost certainly superstar suburbs.
Thank you for restating my argument that there are more superstar suburbs than superstar cities only while screwing it up.
And this is, partly, what contributed to SF losing its soul beginning in the 90s, and going into hyperdrive in the new century.
I think there are arguments one could make for "Americans prefer single-family housing", but the ever-rising cost of single-family housing is a really bad one, considering the same thing is true of multi-family/apartment housing: https://yieldpro.com/2021/10/multifamily-property-price-index-continues-to-climb/
Replying with a "like." Old browser.
I feel like housing issues are so sensitive to framing concerns that you probably can advocate for yimbyist concerns in a way that’s consistent with popularism.
I feel like there’s a part of popularism that’s just envy for the way the business lobbying community doesn’t have to say the unpopular thing to get it on the agenda they can just vote for Republicans and know it’ll get done usually quietly.
The tricky thing about YIMBY is that the *results* of it are broadly popular -- more widely available housing at lower cost -- but the means to get there aren't so popular.
The similarities and differences between the issues being addressed by YIMBY and climate change activists are interesting.
In both cases, there is a free rider problem where people want the benefits without the pain. People would like to see the benefits of less carbon emissions without having to change their own behavior or spend more money. Similarly, people would like to more housing being built but want to see it happen in other places so it doesn't affect their neighborhoods. In both cases, overall outcomes improve if there is less local control, through a federal gas tax in the case of the climate and through removing the ability for neighborhoods to zone themselves against additional housing.
But they're also different in important ways. With a gas tax, the pain is immediately felt by everyone and it is distributed more or less equally. In the case of housing, the pain (in the form of the parking and traffic issues) and any possible impact on the esthetics of the neighborhood (I think folks can legitimately disagree on how real that is) will take much longer to manifest. In addition, they won't be equally shared. In a world without zoning, building still won't happen to the same degree everywhere. And there is is also more that can be done to offset the negative externalities of more building (e.g. introducing additional public transit options).
Haven't really through the implications of what these differences imply (in terms of both the policy and politics of the two issues), but think they're probably worth pondering.
Damn man, I just hope you leave enough for Matt's family to bury when you're done with him.
I always enjoy reading Freddie's disdain for Iglesias. I read them both and regard it as a show of respect. But Freddie's point about populism is pretty spot on: "it’s a disagreement about political values masquerading as a disagreement about political strategy." If you are interested in a non-policy-oriented defense of NIMBYism, read this:
https://brianhoward.substack.com/p/what-if-you-want-to-actually-stay
I dunno. I haven’t heard the term popularism in a long time, an indication that the main proponents have softened on the whole idea. But I also think the gracious interpretation of the idea was not to never advocate for something unpopular, but to a) honestly understand and appreciate where the public is on your pet issues b) pick your battles and c) adjust your approach based on the above. Does MY adjust his tone on Twitter based on the popularity of YIMBYism? I guess not. But as I recall (haven’t been on Twitter since it changed names) his YIMBY tweets didn’t usually get much hard pushback. Maybe I’m wrong. But I think that goes to the nature of the ‘unpopularity’ of YIMBY ideas. Isn’t it the case that ‘let’s build more housing and get rid of red tape and restrictions’ is pretty popular, but people just get upset when their stuff changes? All the more reason to build up a lot of momentum for ‘LET’S BUILD’ in the abstract in hopes that it trickles done to something actually getting built.
You said it much better (and more succinctly) than I did.
Yeah--I think Matt is aware that he is abrasive and irritating on Twitter, a website that is designed to make people behave in an abrasive and irritating way. I think that he has admitted this in one way or another on a couple of occasions. (the government should shut down Twitter). In his actual posts, which are a bit longer and more nuanced than the tweets, I think he is a lot more realistic about the agenda and what makes sense to prioritize as issues. If you spent a lot of time looking at snide tweets and then saw the posts about being less irritating as a political strategy, I can understand wanting to point that out. I have tried to be less irritating, which involved getting rid of Twitter a while ago.
Further, Freddie has popped into the comments on Matt's posts on more than one occasion to reiterate his thing about how he thinks YIMBYs have a big problem where they often accuse all the NIMBYs of being white and privileged. I think the acronyms are stupid and unhelpful with this situation, but I think he's overindexing on something I'm sure he's seen happen in Brooklyn. I live in Minneapolis, where white people complaining about all the other white people is basically the municipal past-time. One time, I saw some unwell white Internet communists I'm aware of generate a lot of content from marching a group of East African immigrants around a public hearing for a housing development, holding signs that were unrelated to the subject of the public hearing, but did relate to a different subject the unwell white Internet communists were fired up about. I think I have a pretty good idea of what was going on in that situation, but it would be unhelpful to assume everyone I disagree with on housing issues is up to the same funny business.
"The government should down Twitter"? Wow. Why not just commit suicide now? Twitter is actually what we make it with individual choices of who to follow.
The government should ban ALL social media. And, truth be told, the internet. I would make it a summary execution offense to network 2 computers together
This, but unironically
I wasn’t being ironic
I’m with Calvin’s dad here:
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/08/17
The idea that individual will shapes X in any way is delusional.
X makes everyone who uses it worse, without exception.
Matt blocked me because I mildly mocked his use of brown socks as an analogy for YIMBY so he blocks even non-serious sardonic pushback.
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1682897324618514434
The contradiction disappears when you realize that having large amounts of single-family housing does not require zoning—and in fact is more affordable without it.
Houston, for example, has no zoning and the most abundant and affordable single-family housing in the nation.
People love to hate on sprawl, but they pretty obviously prefer cheap housing to zoning restrictions, which is exactly what Yg advocates.
So, zoning laws may be COMMON, but when framed in opposition to affordability, they are probably not very popular politically.
And YIMBY maximalism uses exactly that framing.
Does anyone remember that in Houston's wild overbuilding led to massive damages during Hurricane Harvey because huge subdivisions were in the maximum flood pool areas. Houston's expansion completely ignored reservoirs and flooding.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/us/houston-harvey-flooding-reservoir.html
"The corps was fully aware that neighborhoods like Canyon Gate would flood. It issued a report in 1986 — one of several — acknowledging that Barker’s maximum flood pool extended beyond government property.
“As the surrounding areas are developed, this may mean that homes in adjacent subdivisions may be flooded,” the report said. “This could result in lawsuits against the Corps of Engineers for flooding private lands.”"
...
"“The county permitted the houses to be built here and the Army Corps’s design included our private property,” said Ms. Micu, who has lived in Canyon Gate since 2012. “Our house was messed up because of their decisions, so we should be made whole.”
A Fort Bend County planning map from 1997 warned that Canyon Gate was “adjacent to the Barker Reservoir” and “subject to extended controlled inundation.”
But few homeowners knew about it, and most, like Ms. Micu, had not acquired flood insurance before Hurricane Harvey because Canyon Gate lies outside the 100-year floodplain"
So basically, Houston overbuilt and the taxpayers footed the bill for the damage caused by their expansion.
let's not be like houston.
Well yeah building in a floodplain is stupid, but there’s plenty of suitable land too, and this is not the same as zoning.
I feel like you just have no idea what Matt Yglesias actually thinks or believes.
He doesn't particularly like Obama. He has said multiple times he thinks Biden's success shows that Obama was an ineffective negotiator, too focused on what the other side ought to want instead of just negotiating based on what they actually want.
His view of popularism is that you need to shill popular ideas so you can attain power to implement good ideas. You build goodwill by talking up popular stuff and then spend it down by making policy. The whole point is that there are unpopular ideas that are nonetheless important to implement, so you need to maximize your popularity elsewhere so you can ram the unpopular but necessary stuff through. It's also important to be very strategic about messaging. He talks a lot about "secret congress" and how the best bills are often passed quietly with little news coverage and traditional activism can threaten this by bringing unwanted media attention.
When you do choose to spend your goodwill on unpopular policies, it's important to get the maximum bang for your buck - the most good for the amount of popularity you're spending down. So you have to be cagey and smart. The absolute worst thing you can do is blow your goodwill on a policy that doesn't end up achieving your goals.
I think that Matt is also clearly an effective poster. He is often able to move the dial on things just by posting about them. His confrontational approach is appropriate for posting but he is pretty clear it would be a bad move for an elected official.
In terms of YIMBYs, Matt is on the side continually urging YIMBYs to moderate their goals and focus on achievable wins. He encourages YIMBYs to downplay unpopular anti-car rhetoric and focus on straightforward messaging about doing what you want with land you own. A lot of more radical YIMBYs really hate Matt for insisting on a more moderate approach. He's not really "king YIMBY," he's just the person with the biggest platform advocating YIMBY ideas. It's sort of like calling Bernie or AOC the king/queen of socialism because they have huge platforms, even though many serious socialists have ambivalent feelings about them.
Yes. This post nails it.
I agree with the thrust of what you’re saying but I think that Yglesias does like Obama and has urged Biden to run more like Obama.
My take is that Yglesias didn’t like Obama’s timidity on macroeconomic expansion (we needed a lot more of it 2009) but did like Obama’s relative moderation on hot button cultural issues like race and immigration.
Yeah, Matt especially thinks that Obama benefited a lot from being able to moderate on racial topics without sacrificing his credibility (because he himself is black). I think Matt's stance is that Biden also has good instincts here, but has a harder time managing his coalition because he's white.
Here's a relevant passage:
"Biden is a politician who really embraces politics as a vocation. Donald Trump was an amateur who waltzed into politics without ever having thought seriously about it. Barack Obama was a non-politician’s ideal, or perhaps what politicians would be like in a better world. But Biden is into politics and doesn’t pretend otherwise.
A lot of people seem to think that the politics of the presidency is about finding and articulating the one right answer, then making everyone implement it. But Biden, a true artist of the possible, is more focused on his conditional optimism: can political leaders reconcile our society’s varied interests, passions, and factions and unite us as a country? If so, I think he believes we can live with a range of outcomes on the details. But if not, we risk disaster."
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/joe-biden?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=gvyo
More from the same piece:
"Biden’s approach is more based on understanding Republicans’ actual needs. On the face, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS and Science Act don’t make sense. Republicans say the big problem in the country is inflation driven by irresponsible spending, so why would they agree to a couple of spending bills paid for with gimmicks? And also a series of big arms packages to Ukraine? And then largely give Democrats want they want on domestic spending in the omnibus in exchange for a big boost in military spending? Do they even know what their own ideas are?
But instead of embarrassing them, Biden worked with them and got the deals done. If Republicans had wanted these bills to be paid for with prudent tax reform, Biden probably would’ve done that. If they’d wanted a $3 billion investment in domestic pickle manufacturing, he probably would’ve done that, too. For Biden, the job isn’t to out-debate the other party, it’s to work with their genuine desires — whatever they may be — and see where that gets you."
If you read his post about how he went from left to center left he expressly says that the Obama years were the peak of his agreement with the people in power and that the main problem was that Congress didn’t enact his policies. He has also said that Biden has not yet accomplished what Obama did in another post. He definitely has a critique that Obama tried to offer Republicans what they said they wanted (deficit reduction) rather than what they really wanted (tax cuts) but now he’s adamant that it’s time for deficit reduction so not sure he disagrees with the central policy objectives that Obama was behind.
I think there's a difference between agreeing with someone's objectives vs agreeing with someone's strategy. Matt certainly agrees with Obama on what ideal policies would be, but a great deal of Matt's thinking is on strategy, and there he tends to favor Biden's style over Obama's.
"Biden's success"? I just choked on my beer reading this. Care to itemize what you consider Biden's success?
Agree with them or not, he’s been pretty successful at getting big bills passed.
So, Democrat deficit spending is his only accomplishment?
What problems has any of it solved? Any dope can throw away money.
Most spending is good. The CHIPS act and funding for EVs is good. He got the child tax credit extended for a time. Money for Ukraine.
Would have been better if it was concurrent with confiscatory wealth taxes and drawing and quartering of Trump and his supporters, but ya gotta compromise somewhere.
That is all you got for four years? I don't have time to list all the crap negative outcomes happening during his four years in office. The list is long.
I don't agree with everything he’s done or not done, nor do I agree with everything any president has done or not done. Inflation sucks, but that would have happened had Trump won in 2020, too. Probably worse bc of bullying the Fed. A lot of boomers finally retired during COVID, we were always going to have a labor shortage leading to a wage/price spiral when the Boomers retired anyway. Supply shocks didn’t help, and they happened under Trump too, and we could have done better there as well under both presidencies.
If you’re gonna blame Biden for outcomes beyond his control, ya gotta blame Trump for the collapse of the economy during the pandemic, the conflicting CDC guidance under his watch, etc, or it’s hypocritical. (I don’t blame Trump for COVID for this and actually think he did a pretty good job with managing the economy and accelerating vaccine production then, if not public health messaging, but he did leave Biden a broken economy!)
And Putin agrees with your drawing and quartering of your Democrat political opponents. Nice hate for your fellow Americans. Do you have a black mask and a big student loans for a degree in victim studies?
I just think we need to treat treason like the British used to. Not for regular folks who voted for Trump. But the Jan 6 folks and the party that enables him to break laws and incite riots, and leaders of conservative think tanks like Heritage that want to break the separation of church and state, yes. We need a loyal opposition, not a regime of traitors who hate everything good about America. Grandma who voted for Trump bc Eisenhower was a good guy gets a pass.
Biden's largest spending bills were fully funded, they didn't add to the deficit.
Yeah right. $4 trillion in unnecessary pandemic "relief" that was 100% partisan Dem approved.
All of that spending has sent inflation into overdrive. If Biden doesn't make it into office this November that will be a huge component.
I suppose that if you shoot yourself in the foot you can claim that you "successfully" fired your weapon.
This is nonsense. Yglesias thinks Obama is awesome.
"His view of popularism is that you need to shill popular ideas so you can attain power to implement good ideas. You build goodwill by talking up popular stuff and then spend it down by making policy. The whole point is that there are unpopular ideas that are nonetheless important to implement, so you need to maximize your popularity elsewhere so you can ram the unpopular but necessary stuff through. It's also important to be very strategic about messaging. He talks a lot about "secret congress" and how the best bills are often passed quietly with little news coverage and traditional activism can threaten this by bringing unwanted media attention."
Yes. Popularism means "lie to the electorate and tell them what they want to hear and then do what you want when you're in office."
Good plan, that. And as fundamentally dishonest and shitty as anything Trump ever did.
Much of the time, the public wants things that sound good but are bad.
Other times, it’s the opposite.
Great leaders find a way to campaign in a way that lets them win and govern in a way that doesn’t result in terrible policy.
If you don’t do that, democracies tend to end up with terrible policy.
“As has been pointed out many times, in 1955 the popularists would absolutely have been telling the civil rights movement to pull back and get serious and accept that the public believes that separate can be equal, so simmer down.”
This worked out pretty well for then-Senate majority leader LBJ and the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
And there’s the whole bit where riots led to Nixon.
Freddie struggles to accept pragmatism ever working.
This essay seems incredibly disingenuous. I don't agree with Matt on everything but I think his overall position is pretty logical. There are things that are good, and there are things that are popular. If something is good AND popular it's probably a good idea to focus on that. Some good things are unpopular. It might still be worth doing but the amount of good needs to be worth the hit your going to take pushing it. This isn't some crazy contradiction. He believes increasing the housing stock is worth pushing even if it's not always popular. I agree with him on that at least.
Maybe you were always like this but I'm noticing an increasing trend of you being unable to honestly interact with the ideas of people you disagree with.
Not a trend. Pattern.
FWIW, I think the trend is not an inability for FDB to engage with ideas he disagrees with. It's more a trend of inability to understand ideas that come from people he dislikes personally. Which is a fairly common failing IMO.
I also think there's a fair amount of honest mistake going on. I would say Yglesias Thought has to be approached as kind of a body of work. Yglesias often waffles between posts that straightforwardly explain his thinking and posts that are intended to maximize engagement. His ideas are also pretty nuanced - for instance, popularism sounds like it means "just do popular stuff," and that is the direction Matt wants people to go, but the actual deeper point of popularism is that it's a strategy for people who have esoteric/unpopular goals. I think it's understandable to miss the nuance here, especially because Matt's personality can really grate on people (though I personally find his personality charming, YMMV).
He can be glib at times, especially when it comes to the suffering of the poor, and it can be occasionally maddening coming from a Dalton/Harvard guy that’s never experienced any real hardship. His perspective would be better with more empathy.
That being said, I’ve read him since his Slate days, and I’ve learned more from him than any pundit or journalist out there. He’s very talented at making things like macroeconomics easy to follow, and he has a wide array of subjects that he can offer a unique and knowledgeable perspective on, though sometimes its dilettante-ish. And I agree with a significant subset of what he favors, too, both housing abundance AND the need for those of us on the left to stop being the Judean People’s Front vs the People’s Front of Judea…
Something interesting I've noticed is that people who are more familiar with the working-class lifestyle tend to be more glib about it overall. I think a lot of progressive "empathy" is sort of the opposite, overcompensating for a lack of familiarity by being extra deferent. Matt has certainly had a privileged upbringing, but I actually think he's rather more in touch with working class sentiment than most progressives.
Though admittedly, preference for cold/hard vs warm/soft affect is probably just a personality trait and both Matt and I lean towards the cold/hard end of that spectrum
Perhaps. It’s not the affect so much as he glibly asserts things like “the labor market is strong” when I’m looking for a job and all jobs in the field have 900 applicants or “inflation is good right now” which might be technically true but daft af when our weekly grocery bills for a couple at Kroger add up to $250 and that gas and groceries aren’t factored into the CPI or that “student loan forgiveness is a bad idea” when so many people are underwater, just from shit like hair school, and then has the nerve to be a natalist when the average young person can’t afford a house in most markets and so many have debt with high interest rates now. The other day he even advocated for cuts to social security in the name of deficit reduction which I never thought I’d see from him.
I like Matt. I learn a lot from him and have read him since the aughts. He’s absolutely fantastic at simplifying complex topics to a point where the analysis is understandable to the layman yet still rigorous, which is a gift! He’s spot on with like 75% of his hippy punching and I say that as an hippy! I agree with him 9 times out of 10, tbh, even about some of the things I mentioned. Especially about housing. But I disagree where he values growth and innovation over stability, which is a fairly profound disagreement. Over half of change is bad, especially change that the corporate world pushes.
For example, maybe student loan forgiveness really is a loser - though I think forgiving the *interest* on student loans and not charging interest on student loans could be a real winner, but that’s never talked about. I think Biden coming out to say that people should pay back what they borrowed but that the government shouldn’t make money off students could be powerful. I say this having paid off my $200k in student loans, but my best friend from pharmacy school had some shit go down in his life that caused his interest to balloon - he makes 6 figures *now* but owes close to $400k from a 200k baseline. And plenty of folks have fairly low levels of debt from dropping out of college but now work min wage jobs that get garnished while interest causes the balance to grow. Would a responsible person procreate in such situations?
Yeah, no one--but no one--should ever feel sorry for an idiot who takes out $200K in school loans.
It was for in state pharmacy school, not undergrad
This is the wrong point. The usury is the crime. As mentioned, reducing/eliminating debt on loans us NEVER part of ANY discussion. After 2008, and prior tbh, WS knew that lending for education was the next.scheme.
Do you know what’s in the CPI?
Because food and gas are in there.
Will Stancil went on a tear dealing with people like you who don’t want to believe things like we have nearly full employment and rising wages.
Our school loan system is a disaster because the federal government subsidizes it and prices keep going up.
Forgiving school loans is a bad policy because it’s regressive and fuels inflation.
Thinking a responsible person wouldn’t have a kid now in the US, when it is a far better place than basically anywhere else in all of history indicates you have some brain worms. Our poor do better than most of the world by far.
Freddie is trying to have a kid ffs.
I wasn’t saying forgive student loans, I was just saying don’t charge interest on them. That’s a big difference.
When did they start incorporating the cost of gas and groceries into CPI? I thought they were considered too volatile.
Yeah, the poor have it better here than Zimbabwe. But it’s still irresponsible to be having kids when you’re struggling financially.
Freddie’s a successful writer, just bought a house, and he’s also in his early 40s, I believe, which is generally pretty late to start a family (assuming his wife is of the same age, and she may not be). It’s great that he’s doing so. But most natalists think we should make it easier to have children in your 20s and 30s, and advocate for things like child tax credits, extended family leave, subsidized child care. At least Matt’s good on housing, which is a huge part of it, but I also think student loan burden is probably an even bigger part than the lack of extended family leave or subsidized child care. Though an expanded CTC would obviously help alleviate that burden too, also while increasing inflation.
The problem with rising wages is all price increases due to inflation have outpaced all salary increases due to higher wages. In real terms people are poorer now than they were before the recession.
The problem with talking about the unemployment rate is that labor force participation plummeted after the pandemic and has yet to recover. A smaller labor pool plus a ton of stimulus meant businesses overpaid to hire workers which directly contributed to inflation. Plus low labor force participation ultimately hurts productivity,
Right now the #1 indication of whether somebody is familiar with the working class is whether or not they believe the economy is "good". I am pretty sure that the blue collar segment of the economy has entered into recession and the only question is whether or not the contagion spreads to infect the economy as a whole.
I don’t like that statement, but I agree with it.
What evidence do you have for this?
The Americans who now view fast food as a luxury are probably not high earners.
Consumer spending for low income consumers has cratered. Auto repossessions, debt defaults, carried debt, etc. are heavily concentrated in that same demographic.
That's nonsense. Freddie is ripping apart what he sees as the flaws in Matt's positions. Yglesias is acknowledge, by all of his 'shippers, to be flip and facile, while a really good explainer who is excellent at shaping his reader's opinions to agree with him without noticing the massive flaws in his arguments.
He’s flip on Twitter but not on his Substack.
Curious what you’re thinking about when you write that he is “excellent at shaping his reader’s opinions to agree with him without noticing the massive flaws in his arguments.” Don’t think I’d agree with that, but it’s hard to know without at least a couple of examples.
The massive flaw in your argument is making assertions without providing any reference to what those flaws are, let alone evidence they are flaws.
“Yglesias’s whole shtick is to act like a condescending choch to everyone who disagrees with him”
I like both you and MY, but I do find both of you to be pretty condescending at times. At what point does this cross over into being someone’s “whole schtick”?
The difference between the two is that Yglesias is a condescending choch only on Twitter and not on his Substack.
Only because he has Milan Singh (thankfully no longer with any power) being the nasty little condescending shit for him.
I agree with 99% of this, but I feel inclined to offer a defense of what might be called weak popularism. The US civil rights example is an instructive one. MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is, in many ways, a broadside against the popularists of his day ("the white moderate") and a powerful articulation of his frustration with them, but it seems to me that if you look at how he and Rustin and their peers went about winning, they took the popularist argument quite seriously -- seriously enough that, 70 years later, some (including Yglesias, I think) even call them popularists. In the 1950's there were lots of folks in both parties who were sincerely sympathetic to the cause of civil rights, but who thought pursuing that cause would jeopardize a broader agenda (that, I'm sure they would have argued, would have helped African Americans). What the civil rights movement did was, among other things, put the ugliness of this implicit compromise on the front page of the morning newspaper: "This is what the compromise you are asking us to accept looks like. It's a german shepherd attacking a nicely dressed teenager forever." It rendered the deprioritization of civil rights less tenable for more and more people. And while it perhaps did not make the civil rights agenda broadly *popular*, it did create a civil rights constituency that was big and powerful enough to win over an entire political party to its agenda.
If, on the other hand, one of those parties had tried to pass the civil rights acts a decade earlier, they probably would have lost and, in doing so, quite possibly lost the opportunity to pass them in the '60's.
I don't know if this account counts as "popularism," but I would definitely say that an agenda's popularity matters a great deal, and if it is, broadly speaking, unpopular, then you need to take that seriously and do something about it...
MY wrote about this a while back https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/housing-reform-shouldnt-be-a-super
Good pull Christopher. Not sure if access to that article requires being a Slow Boring subscriber, but just in case here is the final section of that piece, which both explains Matt's perspective and also acknowledges that in some situations (like the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s), it is not the right one.
Not sure if Freddie ever read that piece, but it really shows how misguided his argument is here:
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"The big point I want to make here, really, is that to a larger extent than most people realize, the precipitous rise in political polarization that we’ve seen in the United States is an elite-driven choice.
In part, it’s a good choice that was made by midcentury liberals to break the sordid political compromise that kept white supremacists inside the Democratic Party by gifting them the ability to keep civil rights bills off the floor. But it’s much less clear to me that the trend toward aligning all environmental concerns with broader partisan affiliation (documented in David Karol’s book “Red, Green, and Blue”) was a good idea or that the concurrent extensions of totalizing partisan conflict to gun control, abortion rights, and immigration have been productive. YIMBYs have deliberately tried to make the opposite choice, and I think that’s been wise.
And to be clear, this is actually something I’ve changed my mind about.
I used to think that the problem of housing politics in the United States was that YIMBYism naturally “reads” as right-wing deregulation but the biggest need for policy changes is in large blue state cities and their inner-ring suburbs. So I thought deliberately aligning YIMBYism with progressive politics would be a good idea. The people actually doing the work mostly disagreed with me, and I think events have proven them right. One issue is that regulatory constraints on housing supply are actually incredibly widespread, even if the problem is most severe in a handful of deep blue metros. But the other is that, in practice, it’s more productive to treat this as a state-level issue rather than as dozens of separate local dogfights, and in state politics it’s helpful to be bipartisan — even in New York or Texas.
I fully concede that resistance to letting the issue become part of totalized partisan conflict inevitably rubs some people the wrong way. But I think in practice, we are seeing that the depolarized approach is more productive and that advocates on a wider range of issues should consider developing strategies to depolarize what they are doing."
Dohhhh. I got mixed up. The long quote above is actually from https://www.slowboring.com/p/yimbys-keep-winning
But the two pieces build on each other and are both worth reading.
I see zero contradiction between writing a book on how the USA would benefit from a lot more immigration while also accepting that Biden shouldn’t run on that. The Yglesias fixation has become a bit extreme and at this point in the movie I kind of expect you to reach over and kid him. Hidden within that tough Marxist exterior is a pragmatic technocrat waiting to break free.
Yea, I did not realize that pundit slash fiction might have demand, but that would almost certainly be the most narratively satisfying thing at this point.
I’m continually perplexed that every discussion about housing and transportation online devolves to one between bike infrastructure and single family housing. Like every single one. Prove me wrong!
Instead we should be getting at the enormous hurdle we have as a country in embracing multi-mode transportation infrastructure investment. Since I’m in the northeast corridor, I’ll stick to that focus.
By that I mean, that you can’t say, insist that congestion pricing in NYC, is well thought out and necessary without addressing that the economic welfare of the greater NYC population that has been underserved by the lack of abundant alternate transportation into NYC. And since the greater NYC metropolitan region is essentially northern NJ, Fairfield Cty CT, and Westchester, Dutchess, Putnam, Suffolk counties plus the outer boroughs, then those communities have just as much to say about NYC as the citibike community.
Our political will seems to land approximately where painting bike lanes is the expedient choice when regional extensions of a subway, tram, light rail and high speed rail would better serve the economic growth of the region, and reduce the need for car dependency.
Countless municipal planners sing the song about transit oriented development at the expense of understanding that transit needs to be built first within a municipality. And that development needs to be guided towards building where the next station will be, not some random hodgepodge of increasing density near existing stations that haven’t seen a reduction in time to wherever since the 1920s. Yeah 100 years of trains moving slower.
So yeah the advocates for Yimbyism are really the activists papering over the financialization of housing. Which at its root is about turning housing into standard rental units that corporations can monopolize pricing with little recourse to the renter. Let’s not forget that the Yimby battles are almost all in the single-family communities that eventually sell-out because it gets hard to keep fighting corporate development. And the copycat mentality strikes everywhere since reducing single family home ownerships is the way to long term growth on subscription housing because that’s where everything else has proven a path to steady profits.
I’ve been a fan of MY and Freddie for a long time but now it just feels like I read condescending essay after essay. It gets tiring to feel like one is an idiot after reading one of these missives. Like do you think your audience are also composed of idiots who might consider different arguments? Austin builders are making expensive duplexes in my formerly middle class middle class neighborhood that tower over the older houses that regular people can’t afford, regardless of there being multiple units per lot. So on the one hand I don’t think banning single family housing will do much given this example. On the other hand, Yg’s impulse seems right. It would be great if smart commentators could reign in the condescension, because it really takes away from the message.
Regular people can’t afford the older houses either.
New construction should be more valuable than older buildings if land isn’t so expensive it dwarfs the cost of the structure.
Significantly, YIMBY doesn’t call for banning SFH, it calls for NOT MANDATING THEM.
Austin is choosing not to go the SF route and people like you will still complain about prices rising in your formally middle class neighborhood as new buildings are built.
In short, you are an idiotic audience on housing supply because you fail to understand the relevant counter factual of limiting vs. increasing housing stock in the face of high demand when you live in one of the places doing the best job of trying to build.
I have a hard time believing that Freddie doesn't read Matt's Substack and only follows his Twitter feed, but this piece certainly reads like that. But for those who really don't read Slow Boring (Yglesias' Substack), the two have essentially nothing in common. Matt's Twitter feed is indeed snarky and condescending. It's clearly part blowing off steam, part meant to annoy and make fun of people Matt doesn't like, and a large part marketing for his Substack.
But the Substack, itself, is nothing like that. There he makes the real case for both what he believes and what he thinks is wise politically, and he takes the arguments of people he disagrees with or simply have different tastes seriously. Freddie writes about Matt's perspective on housing and local control "Maybe Yglesias could square this circle, but he never tries, instead simply doing the YIMBY thing of dismissing anyone who pokes and prods at the foundations of their thinking as a rich white landowner", and perhaps his Twitter feed gives that impression (I don't know), but what he actually believes (both in terms of the correct policy and the correct approach to advocacy) is clearly captured in pieces like these which are the opposite of Freddie's quote:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-parking-reform
https://www.slowboring.com/p/yimbys-keep-winning
https://www.slowboring.com/p/can-we-nimby-cars-instead-of-houses
A couple of additional points:
There is nothing the least bit hypocritical or paradoxical about writing the book One Billion Americans, fully believing everything in it, but understanding that it would be suicidal to run on that platform and advocating a more incrementalist approach.
As for Sunrise and the climate folks, it's not like Matt's understanding of the optimum policy is any different from there's. The right policy on climate is clear: a carbox tax that fully captures the externalities of burning fossil fuels and investing some or all of that money into public transportation and alternative energy sources that don't emit carbon (solar, nuclear, wind, hydro).
The problem, of course, is that the vast majority of Americans don't care enough about the climate to support such a gas tax. Given that situation, the right alternative is something like the Inflation Reduction Act, which at least invests huge amounts of money into these alternatives. What is so frustrating about Sunrise and the other loons of the idiot faction of the environmental left is that they not only have not celebrated Biden for this incredible win, not only do (some) oppose nuclear and the lifting of regulations necessary to get alternative energy sources actually built, but they actually do a bunch of activist things that do nothing but help Trump get reelected.
The sad truth is that the environment would actually be far better off in the long run if Sunrise and groups like it simply disbanded. That is why they are treated with such disdain by folks with a brain.