Matt Yglesias

Looking Back at SOTUs Past

I thought it was good of Ezra Klein to look back at his commentary on the 2010 State of the Union Address:

There are a fair number of speeches that Barack Obama has given that I can recall quite clearly. But the 2010 State of the Union isn’t one of them. Looking back, I seem to have liked it well enough. And I apparently thought it had been sold as “a make-or-break speech for the president.” But it wasn’t. Single speeches virtually never are (for Obama, the ‘race’ speech in Philadelphia might be an exception). Presidents are too good at speeches to be broken by them, and Washington is too used to speeches to be transformed by them (though there was a time when that wasn’t true). And the same goes for tonight’s address.

I also loved the speech and also can’t remember it at all. In my defense, though, I correctly predicted that it didn’t matter at all:

I think Bob McDonnell gave arguably the best SOTU response I’ve ever seen—the choice to go with an audience is a big win. It still wasn’t a good speech, per se, but it didn’t suck. And that’s a triumph.

As for Obama, I thought it was just great. A reminder that Obama is fantastic at delivering formal speeches and has a fantastic speechwriting stuff. The past twelve months are a reminder that giving fantastic setpiece speeches has limits as a political strategy. You drop out of speech mode into the realm of cold, hard vote-counting and I don’t think anything’s really changed in that regard.

This year the situation is perhaps slightly different if only because possible GOP presidential contenders will be watching and a bravura performance might cause someone to lose his nerve or whatever. I do think people have a persistent tendency to forget how good Obama and his speechwriting team are at delivering formal set-piece addresses, and then when they’re re-surprised by his skills tend to forget how little this matters in practice.

Hispanic Intermarriage

Jeb Bush tries to make the case for a pro-immigration, pro-immigrant, pro-Latino posture for conservatives:

His insistence on engagement is not a call for multiculturalism. Quite the opposite: “The beauty of America—one of the things that so separates us [from the rest of the world]—is this ability to take people from disparate backgrounds that buy into the American ideal.”

With regard to assimilation, he says, Hispanics have much to be proud of. “Second-generation Hispanics marry non-Hispanics at a higher rate than second-generation Irish or Italians. Second-generation Hispanics’ English language capability rates are higher than previous immigrant groups’.”

Jon Chait objects to this twice in response to Ezra Klein who defends Bush. I want to recommend Jamelle Bouie on this subject who makes excellent points and come down on Ezra’s side of the dispute.

Here’s Chait’s point:

It’s clearly the case that Bush is making a pro-immigration argument and that he’s refuting some harsh anti-immigrant forces within his party. Ezra seems to leap from that point to the conclusion that Bush is making a perfectly benign argument about immigrants [...] He’s defending Latino immigration on the grounds that Latino immigrants intermarry and lose their identity. That’s better than opposing Latino immigration on the grounds that those things won’t happen. But not quite the same thing as accepting Latino immigrants as full Americans whether or not they marry white people and gradually lose their distinctive culture.

I really think this is wrong. For one thing, Bush was careful to say “non-Hispanics” and not “white people.” More generally, the fear that high levels of Latin American immigration will irrevocably alter American culture is I think a legitimate thing to worry about. After all, it’s certainly true that neighborhoods full of recent immigrants are quite different from neighborhoods where recent immigrants are sparse so you can see where people might get the idea that either we need to choke off immigration or else America will be transformed into a giant Jackson Heights. What’s more, binationalism is a genuinely problematic scenario for democratic countries as witnessed by Belgium’s endless problems.

The fact that these kinds of worries are factually ungrounded strikes me as an important point to make. This is particularly true because I think the evidence suggests that cultural worries of this sort are a crucial driver of anti-immigrant sentiment. If the wage impact of immigration was the main worry, you’d expect hostility to Mexican immigration to concentrated among Spanish-speaking recent immigrants and it to be highly correlated with enthusiasm for higher levels of high-skill Asian immigration. Clearly, however, that’s not the case. Erecting taboos around these cultural worries is only going to be counterproductive.

At any rate, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that Ezra and I are both examples of English-speaking people of partially Latin American ancestry. It seems to me that one of the roots of the problem is precisely that the general public doesn’t recognize the Matt Yglesiases of the world in this way. Only highly un-assimilated Spanish-dominant people “present” to the bulk of the country as genuinely Hispanic, leading to the perception that Hispanic immigrants and their descendants are all non-assimilators who don’t know English. That’s in fact not the case, and people should hear about it.

Changing the Tone

By request from Joseph Benaiah Cox:

As someone who frequently points out that Jonah Goldberg is a moron unsuited for any work in the public, let along public intellectual debate, how do you feel about calls to tone down the rhetoric? While obviously yours is not violent rhetoric, it probably doesn’t make anyone feel too charitable. I enjoy your candor, but as someone who has a blog award for bravery named after him I wonder if you could chew on your own role in the public discourse. Do you regret things you have said? Do you think that you contribute to the devil shift?

I have definitely said some things over the years which I regret. But I draw a distinction here. I don’t think people should pretend to like people they dislike or avoid saying what they mean. But I do think people should be careful to avoid a certain kind of tendentious rhetoric. Some of the participants in our political debate are quite stupid, some are corrupt, some are dishonest, and some combine multiple unattractive qualities.

What should be avoided is the tendency to dramatically overstate the ideological stakes in our political debates. The choice between Democratic candidates and Republicans ones is important and has important consequences. But in the grand scheme of things, you’re seeing what’s basically a friendly debate between two different varieties of the liberal tradition. I think efforts to elide the difference between the religiously inflected populist nationalism of George W Bush and the religiously inflected populist nationalism of Mullah Omar are really absurd, as are the efforts by Glenn Beck to elide the difference between the progressive income tax and Joseph Stalin. This stuff is mostly unserious, but I also think it’s potentially dangerous. If you really thought prominent American politicians were plotting to fundamentally subvert the American constitutional order tand supplant it with a totalitarian dictatorship, you’d be prepared to countenance some pretty extreme countermeasures.

The problem here isn’t really about “civility” or being nice, it’s about accuracy and not treating your audience like you respect them. Beck thinks of his audience as marks, which is just plain wrong, and some day I’m afraid the con may lead someone to do something equal in craziness to the yarn Beck is spinning.

Request for Requests

I’m off to see the dentist, where I trust I’ll be appropriately punished for complaining about how the dental cartel screws patients and hygenists alike:

So consider this another “request for requests” thread since I feel like we’re in a slow patch of the news cycle.

Have Blog, Will Travel

My very favorite request from the requests thread:

I would like to see The Great Matthew Yglesias American Road Trip of 2011. Spend at least a month driving around the country, seeing the sights but also talking with journalists, policy-makers, ordinary people, and anybody else of interest who might deliver some insight into their local situation. I think this would be a nice way to get some more perspective on the country, and also we the readers would benefit from you sharing the insights and new perspectives you get.

I love to travel, so I love this idea. Obviously the real limiting factors are the views of my boss (and, I suppose, my girlfriend) on the merits of taking this kind of time. For the record, here’s one of those “states I’ve visited” maps:

Not so bad, I think. Plus though I would never count an airport stopover as having “been to” a place, I do think it’s worth observing that the best airport lunch I ever had was in Memphis. Though of course looking at this state-by-state can be misleading. Norfolk and Clarendon may both be “in Virginia” but they’re very different and even tiny states like Connecticut conceal very diverse experiences. Arizona is huge and I’ve only bit to a tiny part of it. So there’s always more to be learned by going places, even places you’ve already “been to” in some sense.

Part of which is to say that I typically travel because someone’s invited me to speak somewhere, and when invited I typically say “yes.” Once early in my career I think I turned down a junket to Bentonville, which in retrospect was a mistake. Oftentimes student groups do this, and I’m always excited to do it. But for whatever reason, a very high proportion of the lifetime domestic speaking invitations I’ve received have been in Southern California and nobody’s ever asked me to come to Oregon or Kentucky. But I’d love to go.

New Year’s Weight Loss Advice

It’s come to my attention that many people make New Year’s resolutions to lose weight. I didn’t do that in 2010, but I did weigh almost 250 pounds on March 1, 2010 and this morning I weighed 180 pounds which goes to show that it’s possible to lose weight. So I thought this might be an opportune day to share some advice.

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Back in the USA

I’m back from Mexico!

CAP is actually on vacation this week, but obviously I just went on vacation so I’m in DC doing nothing and I need to work on a few freelance pieces so blogging should happen at a more-or-less regular pace starting tomorrow. Just maybe a little more whimsical than usual. After all, blogging was my favorite hobby before it was my job.

South of the Border

As mentioned in yesterday’s “endgame” I’m off this morning to Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico:

I’ll be spending the week down there with my girlfriend and her family. They’re from Texas, so I’m glad this means I’ll be meeting the male Crawfords for the first time in a scenario where they can’t bring their guns. Helps take the pressure off. Plus I’ve never been to Mexico before. Should be fun! Internet access may get sporadic, but I’ll try to keep throwing some posts up.

Comments?

Belle Waring asks:

Question of the day: is the unremitting, permanent badness of Matthew Yglesias’ comments the result of intentional sabotage, or can it be chalked up to his policy of utterly ignoring them at all times? I favor the former explanation, because he’s influential enough that I can imagine some testy Republican or two taking it on as a volunteer project to wreck it up constantly. There was never a time when they were good, either, even in the early days.

I would simply deny that “ignoring” takes place. I read the comments most days, and even chime in from time to time. But it’s hard to engage too thoroughly when they’re so sucky. The primary interpreative technique that takes place in the section is “let’s willfully misread what Matt’s saying so as to make it something I strongly disagree with.” It’s not very fun. But I actually think things have gotten a lot better since the latest update to the software. The ability to do nested threads means some interesting chains of thought can emerge and I would encourage more people to try to participate constructively and shift the norms away from the soullite & warstler model.

Innovations in Nigerian Spam

I’m a big believer in the United Nations, international law, and other efforts to institutional global cooperation. Today I learn that it’s finally paying off:

United Nations Development Programme
United Nations House
Plot 617/618, Diplomatic Zone,
Central Area District, Garki,
Abuja, Nigeria.
Compensation Ref Number: UN277360NG

This is to officially notify you that you have been selected as one of the few beneficiary of 2010 United Nations 65th anniversary Compensation by random Email Search System(ESS). Your email id was lucky to be picked among the ten thousand emails that was selected worldwide by UN, you have been compensated with $200,000.00USD by United Nations as a sign to help the less privilege worldwide. to enmark the suecessful United Nations 65th Anniversary Celebration we have decided to give ten thousand people around the world compensation funds as a sign of reducing the global economy and financial meltdown around the world.

I just wonder why they give this thing an Abuja address? Seems like a total giveaway. Why not pretend to be in Geneva, a city renowned for its international institutions and shady banks?

Off to New Haven

Taking the supertrain (well, actually the regular train) up to New Haven today to speak at the Yale political union tonight. Blogging should continue apace, but a certain amount depends on the vagaries of iPhone tethering so you never know:

On the general subject of Yale, I learned a lot from listening to Robert Shiller’s lectures and it’s distressing to learn that Gary Gorton doesn’t think the Volcker Rule implementation is actually going to work.

Five Years of BHTV

A brilliant distillation of the past five years worth of news from BloggingHeads TV:

Among other things, a sobering reminder that I used to be considerably less bald.

Best Correction Ever

As a typo-prone blogger myself, this is the kind of thing I certainly sympathize with: “This blog post originally stated that one in three black men who have sex with me is HIV positive. In fact, the statistic applies to black men who have sex with men.”

“Hyperpartisan”

Via Thers, Jonah Goldberg gloats about his book sales:

The Atlantic has a review of reviews of the Kos book. It’s chock-a-block with Liberal Fascism bashing, mostly from people who I suspect haven’t read it, plus activist Matt Yglesias who claims to have read it but has A) a very deep personal grudge against me and B) is an admitted fan of lying for political ends. His own hyper-partisan book famously bombed, barely breaking out of triple-digit sales. So maybe he still has some issues related to that as well. But that’s neither here nor there.

I think Goldberg needs to make more enemies if he thinks my grudge against him is all that deep. But to clarify, my book Heads in the Sand was indeed a commercial failure and Goldberg is much, much, much better than I am at coming up with books that sell a lot of copies. I think his tendency to harp on this point tends to demonstrate that he’s an extremely petty person driven to a remarkable degree by well-deserved insecurity about his intellectual abilities.

The main point I’d like to make, however, is that my book’s really not partisan at all and certainly not hyper-partisan. It’s a book that’s primarily critical of Democrats, and of the nexus between “liberal hawk” intellectuals and political opportunists that drove the party leadership’s positioning in the 2002-2006 and continues to exert a substantial-though-diminished influence today.

At any rate, the book is a little bit dated but still pretty good and thanks to aforementioned commercial failure available at steep discount so make Jonah Goldberg cry and buy a copy.

Do I Have Anything Interesting to Say?

Kartik Athreya, a self-described “rank-and-file PhD economist operating within a central banking system” who by his own admission has “contributed no earth-shaking ideas to Economics and work fundamentally as a worker bee chipping away with known tools at portions of larger problems” has published an essay condemning writ large bloggers and op-ed writers who’ve tried to explicate macroeconomic policy controversies in the wake of the financial panic of 2007-2008. He names me by name as one of the sinners, and argues that “it is exceedingly unlikely that these authors [i.e., people like me] have anything interesting to say about economic policy.”

I think there’s a lot that’s wrong about Athreya’s essay, much of it explained by Scott Sumner, but most of all I think his argument hinges on two category errors, one about what I’m doing and one about what he’s doing.

First me. Do I have anything interesting to say about economics? Well, “interesting” is relevant to audience. I should hope that PhD economists working in central banking systems aren’t learning about economics from my blog! That’s what grad school, conferences, the circulation of academic papers, etc. is for. But perhaps you’re a citizen of a liberal democracy who speaks English and tries to keep abreast of political controversies. Well you’ve probably heard politicians talking a lot about jobs and the economy. You’ve probably noticed that voters keep telling pollsters that jobs and the economy matter to them. Jobs and the economy may matter to you! You may have seen that political scientists have found that presidential re-election is closely linked to economic performance, and thus deduced that the fate of a whole range of national policy issues hinges on economic growth. Well then I bet you are probably interested in the fact that a wide range of credible experts (with PhDs, even) believe the world’s central banks could be doing more to boost employment. Is Athreya interested in this? Well, I hope he would know it whether or not he reads my blog—he’s working at a central bank somewhere and probably knows a lot more about this than most people.

But now to Athreya. His essay seems to partake of the conceit that what economic policymakers do is just economics and that for political pundits to second-guess their decisions would be on a par with me trying to second-guess someone doing particle physics. Completely apart from the fact that the “science” of economics is a good deal less developed than what you see in real sciences, the fact is that economic policy is economics plus politics. For example, according to Ben Bernanke, the Fed could reduce unemployment by raising its inflation target but this would be a bad idea because it runs the risk of causing inflation expectations to become un-anchored. That’s a judgment that contains some “economics” content but it’s largely a political judgment. It’s part of his job to make those judgments, but it’s the job of citizens to question them.

At any rate, the next time anyone finds me claiming to have broken original ground in macroeconomic theory I hope someone will call the expertise police. But you don’t need a PhD in sociology to see how it might be the case that the Federal Reserve Board of Governors would be unduly attuned to the interests of college educated Americans to the exclusion of the working class, or that the European Central Bank might be unduly attuned to the needs of Germans to the exclusion of Spaniards and Italians.

The Time To Blog

Describing the trend toward a progressive political blogosphere in which “95% or more of the audience share goes to three or four dozen bloggers who are now full-time media and / or political professionals,” Chris Bowers asserts that the new equilibrium cannot be reversed because:

[B]ecause it is virtually impossible for a hobbyist to compete with professionals who are actually paid to spend all day blogging. No one has enough free time to blog as much as Matthew Yglesias, David Dayen, or the front page of Daily Kos.

I have my doubts about that. Obviously at the moment we have a large number of unemployed people in this country. And in a more enduring way, we have a lot of retired people in this country. And with every passing year we have more. In a lot of ways, I think retirees are going to prove to be the killer ap of digital content creation. It’s just that at the moment relatively few retired people are all that comfortable with digital media. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now that’ll be very different. Obviously someone who’s affiliated with a larger institution will always have certain advantages over an amateur, and the blogosphere gives heavy advantages to early adopters, but I think a lot is going to continue to change on the internet as demographic change continues.

Request

Do readers think it would be possible to arrange some more condescending emails from people who’ve spent more time in China than I have pointing out that ten days on a semi-official junket can only give you a superficial understanding of a very large country? I’m actually a complete idiot, who doesn’t understand this at all. Also the underlying premise of my blog is in no way that a smart person who writes quickly can entertain and inform with non-expert commentary and aggregation on a wide array of subject.

Back in the USA

(cc photo by kevindooley)

I arrived at Dulles Airport yesterday evening and got back home, so today we should be back on our regular blogging schedule. Obviously I have a lot more to say about China and I expect that my trip will inspire further reading and research that will, along with the trip itself, serve as useful background as China continues to be in the news. I’ve also been very grateful that I’ve largely been able to avoid the pseudo-controversy over whether Barack Obama should have “done more” (magic powers? x-ray vision?) to combat the horrible Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

For now, though, I’d like to thank my guest bloggers Matt Zeitlin, Ryan Powers, Dara Lind, Satyam Khanna, Ali Frick, and Jamelle Bouie for holding down the fort while I’ve been gone. Their work is very much appreciated, as is their fortitude in putting up with some of the feistier commenters. At any rate, I’m trying to get back into the swing of the news cycle, so we’ll see what I come up with.

For now let me just observe in general that I’ve always found DC’s Chinatown, where I more or less live, to be painfully inauthentic. I mean, international chains with Chinese letters on the signs? Kitschy Chinese restaurants? It turns out, however, that major Chinese cities generally do have neighborhoods that are just like that so we can (sort of) hold are head high.

Gone Fishing (in China)

(my cc photo)

By Matthew Yglesias

So . . . I’m flying to China as you read this. The trip I’m going on is the same one Chris Hayes took last year to produce this article sponsored by the China-US Exchange Foundation. I’ll be back on June 2, and I’m very excited about the trip. I love to travel and I’m very interested in the world abroad, but have never been to China or the region more generally. Obviously once you start looking on a map it turns out that “China” is the name of a pretty giant place and it’s utter hubris to think you could learn or understand much based on a brief trip. But still, you’ve got to start somewhere.

At any rate, as regular readers know I love to blog and don’t intend to stop just because I’m traveling. But given the time zones, some uncertainty about my schedule, and the vagaries of Chinese internet access I thought it would be the better part of wisdom to line up some guest-bloggers to carry the load while I’m gone. I’m very excited about the team and I think I’ll let them introduce themselves over the weekend.

Standing While Working

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking a page out of Donald Rumsfeld’s book and standing while working instead of sitting at my cubicle. I don’t have a fancy standing desk, so instead my laptop is just perched on a big stack of books. It’s a bit hard on my feet, though I’m getting used to it, and in other regards I’ve been feeling much better—less of a drowsy, somewhat depressed feeling in the late afternoon and less stiffness in my legs and back overall. I also assume you burn at least slightly more calories this way, if only because it encourages you to fidget around more as you shift your weight.

A brief piece in Businessweek makes the case against sitting with the bombastic headline “Your Office Chair Is Killing You.” I think the main point would be that the human body evolved to walk around and that while sitting feels comfortable in the spirit of taking a break, our bones and muscles aren’t really designed with the expectation of sitting in a chair all day.