Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2342

If You Charge For It, They Will Come In Smaller Numbers

LR writes:

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on something I read yesterday in the Dallas Morning News. Is there evidence that half tolls/half free lanes decrease congestion?

There are a lot of variables that go into traffic congestion and we haven't seen a lot of projects of this sort running over the long term, so empirical data is difficult to come by. But the theory here is impeccable. You have what amounts to two identical roads, one is free and one costs money. Naturally, everyone wants to take the free road. But as "everyone" tries to crowd onto it traffic moves slowly and some people will want to exchange money for time by taking the toll road. And at any given time of day, there's got to be some price at which the tolled road will be uncongested.

The moral of the story, to me, is that in the end you get the kind of cities you want. People sometimes act as if it's an act of nature that cities built at different times have different characteristics, but obviously if you build tons of untolled highways what you end up with auto-oriented development and giant traffic jams (Los Angeles). If you build trains and train stations and no highways, then you get transit-oriented development and giant traffic jams (Manhattan). All kinds of infrastructure strategies "work" and I bet Dallas' will work too—if the tolls are set at an appropriate rate, this will become the best city for people who like to drive quickly and have money to burn on tolls. Given my personal lifestyle preferences that doesn't seem like the place for me, but given how important improving housing and transportation are to increasing American living standards I think it's good that someone's going big on this.

Happy Krauthammer Day

Henry Farrell reminds us that today is Charles Krauthammer Day, marking the eight anniversary of one of the greatest remarks of all time:

Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We've had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven't found any, we will have a credibility problem.

In a related development, Krauthammer continues to be employed as a major television commentator and newspaper columnist.

Review: HBO's 'Cinema Verite'

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Trailer

Reality television has become such a profoundly surreal, self-conscious genre, a country populated by socialites in leopard print, with a market economy based on the exchange of humiliation for recognition, that it's easy to forget that it began in 1973 as a semi-high-minded exercise in documentary filmmaking. The PBS show An American Family, which chronicled a year in the life of a Santa Barbara family named the Louds, drew ten million viewers per episode, produced the first openly gay character on scripted or unscripted television, and whether the producer who conceived the show, Craig Gilbert, intended it, the series spawned a new genre. Perhaps inevitably, there's now a movie based on the making of An American Family, Cinema Verite, which premieres on HBO on April 23 at 9 PM.

The fine cast, including Tim Robbins and Diane Lane as Pat and Bill Loud, James Gandolfini with an almost oddly luxuriant head of hair as Gilbert, and an excellent Patrick Fugit and Shanna Collins as documentarians Alan and Susan Raymond, does its best with the occasionally preachy material. And while the Louds are the center of the film, the dissolution of their family is less interesting than the debates that Gilbert and the Raymonds have about the ethics of their project. Both the Louds and Gilbert have objected strenuously to the script of the movie, which that implies that Gilbert and Pat Loud had an affair, and HBO paid the Louds a settlement. What Cinema Verite makes clear is how profoundly political An American Family was, whether in its representations of Pat Loud as a liberated woman, of her son Lance as an unapologetically gay man, or simply in its style, which was considered profoundly intrusive (or, given the perspective of people who excoriated the Louds, grotesquely revealing) at the time.

Looking at clips of the show, it's striking how well HBO's managed to reproduce the Louds as a family unit, as well as the emotional itchiness of people who were aware they were putting their whole lives on-screen.

Lane is a remarkable clone of Pat Loud, and Tim Robbins turns Bill Loud into a loose, bitter older version of his star turn in Bull Durham, a grown man making a fool of himself in pursuit of fun. They're a beautiful family, though, and when Bill declares "We're the West Coast Kennedys" to Pat early in the movie, it's silly, but not impossible. Lane does wonderful work with a trip to New York to visit Lance, during which she eventually realizes that he is gay. After he takes her to see Warhol star Candy Darling in a show, the truth slowly dawns on Pat. "That's your friend Candy, who wants to marry you?" she asks Lance in the club with the cameras rolling. "She's a man?" "Well, I haven't accepted," Lance vamps back at her, upsetting his mother's fantasy of presenting a perfect family. But she's essentially supportive, and in the movie version, Gilbert woos her by promising Pat that she will be a role model for women who were slightly too old to experience the full force of women's liberation, but who want meaningful roles none the less.

The characters' sense that there's something redemptive in what they're doing, some cultural treasure in the ordinary secrets of American life, is poignant, given all the ways the genre evolved later. "We've gone to the moon and beyond, but we have yet to get past the American front door," Gilbert declares in his pitch meeting.

Later, reassuring Pat that the project is meaningful, Gilbert tells her and Bill at a party to "think of a spaceship landing on earth a thousand years from now, and finding a time capsule. And inside that time capsule is a film. And on the film, everyone is smiling and safe in the certainty of each other's love. But as it turns out, all the aliens found was an old episode of the Partridge family. Now, is that what we really want to leave behind as a culture? Something that's the complete antithesis of how we really live?"

But as Bill and Pat's relationship worsens, Alan and Susan, who have already refused to film certain moments in the Louds' lives (they, unlike Gilbert, were embedded with the family) flare into open conflict with their producer. "What happened to all that fancy talk about the threshold of privacy?" Alan confronts Gilbert, after walking out of filming a bitter fight between Pat and Bill. "It has to be breached," Gilbert tells them, almost pleading, aware he's at the threshold of something entirely new — but unaware of the consequences.

The irony is that after Gilbert's efforts (he never made another movie or television show afterAn American Family) and the Louds' suffering, reality television producers today have almost no interest in American families, unless the parents have dwarfism, or the children have sex tapes, or unless they own a particularly successful pawn business. A genre that was meant to mine the drama in ordinary American life has blown past it entirely, slamming shut the ordinary front door that Gilbert knocked on and that the Louds opened wide in response. Divorce and gayness may not be shameful failures or secrets any more, but there's something a little sad about our collective decision that our lives, in all their profundity and mundanity, simply aren't that interesting.

Confessions Of A Former Trigger

I had not previously paid much attention to the question of Trig Palin's parentage since I never understood the allegation's relevance to questions about the merits of Sarah Palin as a political leader. Indeed, what she was alleged to have done would arguably be noble and self-sacrificing. My basic understanding of the issue was that the Triggers had no actual evidence for their view, but that it was at least in some loose sense a plausible theory.

Justin Elliott's exhaustive inquiry in to the subject indicates that this is mistaken. Anyone who thinks there's doubt about Trig's parentage has either not looked into the issue (and why should anyone?) or else is peddling an extremely implausible conspiracy theory that flies in the face of the available evidence:

The exhaustive review of available evidence that we conducted, along with new interviews with multiple eyewitnesses who interacted with a pregnant Sarah Palin up-close in early 2008 — most of whom had never spoken publicly about the matter before — has produced one clear conclusion: Sarah Palin is, indeed, Trig's mother and there is no reason to suspect any kind of a coverup.

We've learned, for instance, that an Associated Press reporter in Alaska who was covering Palin during her pregnancy in early 2008 (before she became a national figure) thoroughly investigated rumors that the pregnancy was a hoax. The reporter directly questioned Palin about the matter in a private meeting in her Juneau office before she gave birth. Gov. Palin responded by voluntarily lifting her outer layer of clothing, offering a clear look at her round belly. The reporter quickly concluded that there was no truth to the rumors and never wrote about them.

As Jon Chait says this helps put the persistence of birtherism into perspective. If I'd gotten a question about Trig from someone a week ago, I would have given an inadequately definitive put-down to suspicions on this score. But now I know—Sarah Palin is Trig Palin's mother and nobody has any business claiming otherwise.

The Disappearing Center

I take a somewhat sanguine and utterly fatalistic line on the much-deplored increasing polarization of American politics. While the DC media remais obsessed with the idea that politicians should be nicer to one another, the reality is just that the decline of the Jim Crow system in the south has made the emergence of polarized, ideologically coherent parties inevitable. Alan Abramowitz' important book The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy adds some critical society-level elements to this story. Tragically, I read the book in primitive paper-and-ink format which makes it challenging to reproduce charts, but Professor Abramowitz was kind enough to send me a few choice ones.

First, look at how well ideology lines up with voting behavior among voters who aren't very knowledgeable compared to those who know what they're talking about:

The implication here is that the existence of a large bloc of crossover voters is driven by the existence of a large bloc of people who don't actually know anything about politics. Such voters might be swayed by candidate-personality factors, by group-loyalty factors, by regionalism, whatever. But among better-informed voters, people act the way they ought to—as if important systematic ideological differences exist and you ought to vote for the candidate whose ideology is more similar to yours.

And while political information isn't a strict function of educational attainment, it is true in a rough and ready sense that better-educated people are better-informed about politics. And guess what's been happening as we've become more polarized:

Abramowitz details evidence that "citizens with a college education are much more likely to understand ideological concepts ad to use these concepts to evaluate the parties and candidates" and also that "college graduates have more consistent beliefs across a wide range of issues than individuals with less formal education." In other words, better educated people are more likely to listen to coalition merchants and more likely to apply ideological coalition concepts correctly. The right question to be asking is how should we adapt political institutions to a world of more sophisticated voters and more coherent, accountable parties.

Nobody Will Take Mass Transit To Work Unless You Build Tall Buildings Near The Stations

I read on Twitter today that only about 5 percent of American workers commute to work via mass transit. And as a great example of why that's the case, reader SD forwarded me an email that Seattle City Council member Nick Licata sent to constituents explaining why he thinks new buildings in the Pioneer Square neighborhood should be limited to 120 feet instead of 140 feet.

The message offers a variety of basically aesthetic reasons in defense of this position, but it doesn't confront the basic fact that transit-accessible urban space in economically dynamic cities is scarce. When you restrict the quantity of built space that can fit in that scarce space, the activity (houses, offices) that might otherwise locate there don't just vanish. Instead, they locate to some other other place that almost certainly isn't dense transit-accessible urban space. Meanwhile, building mass transit is expensive. And while I'm all for building more, there are limits to how much new building is realistic. Far and away the most cost-effective way to increase transit utilization is to relax restrictions on dense construction near existing nodes. And the most realistic way to make the case for additional construction is, again, to maximize the use of station-adjacent land.

People Believe The Government Should Guarantee Health Care For The Poor And Elderly

Framing effects matter a lot in polling, so it's certainly interesting to see that The New York Times' pollsters have devised language under which the Republicans' Medicare plans are non-toxic, though I think the contortions they went through to get that result are misleading. But from the same poll, I think the really telling point for the long term is that Democrats and Independents are joined in favoring government health care guarantees that Republicans oppose:

For decades now the government has, in line with public opinion, undertook to guarantee that everyone gets health care. That's been done through Medicare, Medicaid, and a complicated series of regulations and subsidies to ensure that most non-elderly people get health care through their employer. Over time, the efficacy of the complicated series of regulations and subsidies has tended to decline, and the government has responded with new regulations (think Kennedy-Kassebaum), expansions of Medicaid eligibility, and new programs like SCHIP. One important element of the Affordable Care Act is to continue those trends.

But this whole undertaking is increasingly costly, in a fiscal sense, over time. The progressive response to that has been to increase taxation on other sectors and also to try to imply technocratic management tools to reduce genuine waste from the system. Another important element of the Affordable Care Act is to deploy those ideas. This is an agenda about which the public has mixed feelings and that prompts ferocious interest group opposition. But the only workable alternative to this agenda over the long run is simply to repudiate those guarantees. The House Republican plan to control health care costs is to try to create a situation in which non-wealthy people will be routinely denied access to genuinely useful health care services on the grounds of price. This will initially reduce health care costs by reducing utilization of health care services, and will further reduce costs over time by creating incentives for health care service providers to focus energy on cutting prices to increase market share. In a political rhetoric sense, you can try to sneak this agenda past the voters with sly verbal formulae and smoke and mirrors around "block grants" and delayed phase-ins but in practical implementation terms it flies in the face of overwhelming existing public consensus.

Speed Is Key To House Republicans' Blowback Containment Strategy: Progressives Should Learn

Xuan Thai reports on the rough reception freshman Representative Patrick Meehan (R-PA) got from constituents at a town hall after he voted to privatize Medicare, gut Medicaid, and steadily destroy America's technological edge. And earlier this week, my colleague Scott Keyes got video of Rep Paul Ryan (R-WI) being booed by constituents after informing them that upward redistribution of wealth is the key to prosperity:

These aren't the only incidents of Medicare privatization backlash facing proponents of the Republican budget strategy. But I do think it should be conceded that the backlash hasn't reached anything near the fever pitch that we saw during the debate over the Affordable Care Act and I think there's an important lesson there—speed matters.

When Republicans reached basic consensus about what they wanted to do, they then delegated the details to a small group of people who fleshed out the plan, it was then presented to the caucus and within a week they had the vote. Democrats, by contrast, put their health reform plans through an agonizing months-long process of public intra-party disputes. That gave people who didn't care about the details tons and tons of time to organize a backlash while tending to signal to low-information voters that Democrats were doing something controversial even among their own partisans. The backlash against Medicare privatization is overwhelmingly likely to grow over time, but it's also the case that between today and November 2012 other events will intervene and crowd the agenda space possibly letting members off the hook for an unpopular vote.

Speed matters. As Napoleon said, "When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna."

America Can Cut Defense Spending And Still Beat Tiny, Impoverished North Korea In A War

My colleague Ben Armbruster takes note of the Washington Post editorial page's odd contention that we can't afford to reduce defense spending because we might want to go to war with North Korea:

[R]eaching Mr. Obama's goal would probably require cuts in the size of the Army and Marines beyond the reduction of more than 40,000 troops already proposed by Mr. Gates. Defense analyst Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution thinks it could require the elimination of more command structures and another round of base closures. What will then happen if the United States is forced into more conflicts like those of the past decade — if it must intervene to prevent Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon or respond to aggression by North Korea, for example?

The implication here that the United States was "forced" into invading Iraq is, I think, the big tell here. We might choose to attack Iran over WMD disputes, but nothing could possibly force us to do this, nor would bombing Iran prevent it from building a nuclear weapon. As for North Korea, consider that our current defense budget is over twenty times as large as the entirety of the DPRK's economic output:

North Korea is one of the poorest countries on earth. Even if the US defense budget were to fall to $0, our allies in the Republic of Korea could easily defeat the DPRK. And even if we reduced defense spending substantially we would still retain ample ability to contribute to the ROK's defense.

The Health Care Debate In Canada

They're having an election in Canada, so naturally a big issue is health care. The opposition Liberal Party is running an add slamming incumbent Prime Minister Stephen Harper as being "open to American-style, private for-profit health care."

It's a potentially damaging charge because even though Harper's been in office for years, the Conservatives haven't enjoyed an actual majority in parliament. Consequently trying to convince people that Harper has a secret hard-right "hidden agenda" is a potentially damaging allegation. But Harper is pushing back, insisting that he stands fully behind socialism:

Contrast this with the American debate, or the debate in the UK, and what you see is how dominated health care politics are by status quo bias. Three countries that have pretty similar political cultures but that adopted very different health care schemes in the 1945-65 period and are all pretty deeply attached to their current methods.