The incredibly sexy issue that I want to discuss: community benefits agreements attached to tax benefits. A viral issue if there ever was one!

Background: CBAs

Community benefits agreements are a common practice in development. The initial idea makes a lot of sense. If you’re opening a new fast food restaurant that’s going to introduce a bunch of traffic on a street, requiring a new streetlight, maybe you need to pitch in some money to build that streetlight. Because it wouldn’t need to be there if not for your business.

Then apply this to booming cities like Seattle. Maybe you say, “Okay, we’ll ask you to build that streetlight, but also it’s so profitable for you to build this fast food business here that we will actually ask you to pitch in $100,000 to local public schools.” Or an affordable housing fund.

In simple terms, this should be seen as a tax on development. Taxes increase the cost of doing business, but in a place like Seattle that can be fine. It’s Seattle! Stuff’s still getting built. The public benefits. All is well.

Now do it in the Rust Belt…

The nationalization of political discourse creates some strange effects. One of them is that a city like St. Louis spends a lot of time trying to copy a city like Seattle, which could not be in a more different economic situation.

In Seattle, there is intense demand to live there and the challenge is providing enough housing so that it can be affordable. St. Louis, on the other hand, is not growing. It’s shrinking. It’s not constrained by supply of housing, it’s constrained by demand for housing. In Seattle, houses routinely are bought, torn down, and replaced with either big houses for rich people or apartment buildings. In St. Louis, massive areas of the city are full of decaying or abandoned buildings that no one wants to buy or redevelop.

To reverse the city’s decline, you want to spur some economic development that could have a flywheel effect. To kick start that process, you do the opposite of tax development: you incentivize it.

Often this isn’t via an actual grant of public funds. Instead, it’s by giving tax abatements to people. Developers still have to put up the money and build the building, but they then don’t pay property taxes for the first, say, ten years, making it easier to recoup their costs.

This issue is intensely debated and it’s closely tied to corporate welfare: giving huge public handouts to big institutions so that they’ll keep a corporate headquarters or a sports stadium. I think it is legitimate to debate whether public funds should be spent on a sports stadium. It’s part of a larger race to the bottom dynamic that I find distasteful. And critics are right that large institutional developers are already making decisions about where to go; they just squeeze local governments for money because they can.

A friend worked in Albany decades ago during one such negotiation over incentives for a KeyBank office development downtown. Over lunch at the Fort Orange Club, an elite private club with deer taxidermy on the walls, the KeyBank official told my friend, “you know, we’re gonna build it here either way, but we have to ask.”

“Oh my god!” he thought. “I have to tell the Mayor of Albany!” Except then he realized that if he knew that, the Mayor of Albany probably did, too. And if the Mayor didn’t know, it would be a very awkward conversation that would violate the confidence of the bank official. He never did tell the Mayor.

Tax with one hand, cut with another

So yes, I agree that tax breaks to big corporations and sports teams are often bad.

But even with big developments like that, I don’t understand why you would structure it to cut taxes with one hand and raise them with another. This brings me to my main topic: cities like St. Louis that simultaneously offer development incentives and require the developer to comply with a list of community benefit requirements.

Look, I understand the idea here. The abatement gives up tax revenue, so a Community Benefits Agreement claws value back. But fundamentally, we’ve forgotten that taxes are for community benefits. The political system exists to make sure that this revenue is spent on schools, roads, affordable housing, whatever the public’s elected representatives decide on.

If the development doesn’t require tax breaks to get off the ground? Great! No tax breaks, just tax them like normal and trust the government to divvy up the new revenue.

If you can afford to slow development a bit, be like Seattle and ask them for extra money for schools or streetlights or whatever.

If the development does require tax breaks? Just give it the tax breaks and be happy to have new development where there would be none.

I will admit, as the Albany anecdote shows, the tough part is determining whether the tax incentives are really needed. But, while corporate welfare is unsavory, we’re really just describing a negotiation. Who has more leverage there is determined by the economic conditions in the city and how desirable a place it is to develop. In St. Louis, it’s evident that people are not busting down our door to move their corporate headquarters. In Seattle, you can afford to drive a harder bargain.

It sucks, but it’s the way of the world. Perhaps this is a post for another day, but part of the reason that St. Louis struggles is that it has a self-image as a strong-market city like Seattle (because it used to be one!) and is uncomfortable with the compromises and realities of being a weak-market city.

Administrative burden

Part of why simultaneously cutting taxes (via abatement) and clawing them back (via CBAs) is worse than the alternatives above comes down to administrative burden.

The term comes from a book by Pamela Herd and Donald P. Moynihan. The idea, often applied to public benefits for individuals (e.g., food stamps, other welfare), is that process is itself a tax on someone’s time. The more complex the process, the more time and expertise you demand of someone receiving government benefits. As a result, as you layer on process you should expect it to reduce the degree to which people access benefits, and it should produce inequalities because only those with special knowledge can even make it through the process.

When we add a process to access tax incentives and negotiate/implement community benefits agreements, we add a lot of process.

There was once one process: Apply for a building permit → Build a building.

Now there are multiple processes: Apply for a building permit. Apply for a tax exemption. Negotiate a community benefits agreement. Spend down the community benefits agreement in the appropriate places and ensure compliance.

But we already have a process where we extract resources from private actors and then have a democratic process for deciding how that money should be spent for the public benefit. It’s called taxation, and it’s called the government.

Adding more processes (1) taxes development, (2) adds more veto points, and (3) creates uncertainty. America has a deep problem of too many veto points in development of all kinds, from public transit to housing, which has been well-explored by authors like Marc Dunkelman in Why Nothing Works and Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson in Abundance, both books that I’ve written about before:

To illustrate point (3): in a recent case in St. Louis a developer was in line to meet the city’s requirements for development incentives. But then, according to Alderman Michael Browning, the city kept “moving the goalposts” for what the development would need to do to get those incentives. Part of the problem here is that the Board of Aldermen is involved, so it got political.

Less than a year later, the city is back to square one trying to entice a new developer to the site with more tax incentives, but who wants to enter a process where they may get rejected even if they follow the rules?

This is an absurd process and outcome, particularly in a city that’s desperate enough for development to incentivize it in the first place. And it’s only possible because we have an overly complicated process here.

Just set the rules, let people build. And cut it out with these elaborate community benefits processes.

The story, in short, is that Seattle made it illegal to build enough housing to keep up with demand, so it got too expensive. YIMBYs say: legalize housing and it’ll probably get a lot cheaper.

I continue to champion YIMBY ideas. But I’ve now found myself in a very different housing environment. I live in St. Louis, a textbook example of Rust Belt decline. People are familiar with Detroit’s story; St. Louis is probably the closest comparison in both its highs and its lows.

It was the 4th largest US city in 1900-1910, and in 1950 it was still the 8th largest. While the metro area still has around three million people, the core city has declined to under 300,000. It’s a classic example of what is called the “hollow urban core,” a common phenomenon around the Rust Belt.

The question is: do YIMBY reforms matter in a place like St. Louis? Sure, you can legalize backyard ADUs in St. Louis, but who cares if none are going to get built? Should reforms like this be a priority?

The answer, in short, is yes.

I’ll explore a recent paper and an infuriating case in St. Louis that illuminates why it remains hard to build, even in cities with lower demand for housing. But before that, some quick context on America’s different housing crises.

A tale of two crises

As Jenny Schuetz says, there are generally two housing affordability crises in the country, usually in different areas.

The first: there is a small set of “superstar cities” that are extremely expensive, but make it illegal to build dense housing. The YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement is broadly right: just make it legal to build more housing in those areas and a large portion of the affordability problem would be solved.

The second housing crisis doesn’t get covered as much. Many people are just too poor to afford housing wherever they live. Maybe the monthly rent is only $200-300 (think rural Missouri), but the family still struggles to afford it. If you’re too poor to afford $200 rent, you need another solution, which is a combination of better job opportunities and housing subsidies.

Rents in a city like St. Louis are more than $300 a month, but they are still affordable in the grand scheme of things. In housing policy jargon, it is not supply constrained, it is demand constrained.

This is why I’ve been struggling over the years with the question of whether the supply-focused solutions of YIMBYism matter to cities that struggle with urban decline and low demand.

But it’s revealing that places like Detroit struggle with some of the same zoning problems and procedural burdens that cause issues in places like New York City or San Francisco, where existing residents are more ambivalent about growth.

Brian Connolly and Noah Kazis lay this out in their recent article, “Rezoning the Rust Belt.” I’ll take you through their findings. Then I’ll make those dynamics concrete with a local case study, the heartbreaking death of a near-perfect development in St. Louis.

Rusty Codes, Slow Permits

Connolly and Kazis focus on the Rust Belt, a network of largely Midwestern cities “that was long the country’s manufacturing, steelmaking, and coal-producing heartland but that underwent dramatic industrial decline that resulted in widespread unemployment, increased poverty, decay, and population loss” (according to Britannica). In particular, they spotlight Detroit.

In many of the supply-constrained metro areas, like San Francisco, the current NIMBY morass was actually a deliberate choice. The culmination of the deliberate “slow growth” movement, which I wrote about here:

In places like Detroit, the supply side issues aren’t as salient. There’s no growth backlash, largely because there isn’t enough growth to produce pain points. But where these cities struggle is in state capacity, their ability to have a smoothly functioning government.

This manifests in a few ways. First, out-of-date zoning codes and the complex workarounds they require.

St. Louis, where I live, hasn’t updated its zoning code in decades. What that means, in practice, is that often when you want to build something, it’s technically illegal and out of compliance.

Unlike in a place like San Francisco, everyone is generally amenable to things getting built anyway (see an unfortunate exception in the next section). But it does add another step to the process, which is that you need to go to the Board of Adjustment. Basically, you need someone to give you an official exception for not complying with the decades-old zoning code.

The Board of Adjustment is not actually meant to approve everything that gets built; it’s originally intended for edge cases like “should we let someone build a deck that’s a foot taller than the rules because they live on a weird-shaped hill.” It’s meant to handle a much smaller load of cases and thus quickly becomes a bottleneck, adding months of delay and costs to the building process.

The second problem is permitting. Building means navigating a mess of red tape, outdated technology, and understaffed city departments. One example from the paper: “In St. Louis, a by-right project was delayed by nine months simply because there was nobody to review the permits.”

Delays make it all more expensive, but the uncertainty is the worst part. Developers front money and carry costs (e.g., taxes, maintenance) for years before making any money via rent or a sale. A process that makes you pay all of that for 10 months, only to then veto the project, wrecks the math:

Procedural uncertainty, therefore, requires developers to either risk their own money or find financing partners that demand high returns to address this heightened risk. At best, such uncertainty increases projects’ costs and reduces their viability; at worst, prospective developers simply exit the market.

Why we’re stuck

As the paper’s authors say, “in principle, Rust Belt cities want to say ‘yes,’” to development. But the complicated processes and dysfunction resemble somewhere like California, with much more resistance to development.

So why do these issues persist?

Fundamentally, it’s part of the doom loop of decline. As residents leave, you have less tax revenue. This gives you less resources and staff to solve your problems. Over time, parts of your government, like permitting or the zoning code, break and become outdated. Then you have a less functional government, unable to do the basics, and more people want to leave.

There’s also a particularly deep distrust across racial lines, rooted in decades of racist policymaking and the legacy of urban renewal.

Another tradeoff is particularly acute in Rust Belt cities. Part of St. Louis’s charm is its beautiful built environment, full of warm brick buildings and well-maintained parks. People I know who visit from cities that bulldozed much more of their history in the name of progress are often jealous. There is a case to be made for historic preservation rules, but every extra rule you add increases the cost of development in a way that makes some projects non-viable.

I have one slightly more speculative point about why there isn’t more pressure to change this. Given how much of this system depends on exceptions and help from people in the political system (Aldermen, members of the Board of Adjustment, the Mayor at times), who wants to come out and antagonize them?

Plus, the biggest developers get what they want already via direct communication with political power brokers. Meanwhile, smaller developers can get crushed by this system and there’s an “invisible graveyard” of projects that never got off the ground.

The Near-Perfect Project That Broke My Heart

All of this gave me flashbacks to a nightmarish local case.

Because of population decline, St. Louis has closed some schools. Many of these are from the olden days when there was a sense that being in a beautiful building would lead to moral betterment and more learning.

St. Louis also has all sorts of people who instinctively resist both market rate development and tearing down old buildings. “What we need is more affordable housing” is a refrain heard here nearly as much as in New York City.

The Fanning School is one of these beautiful old school buildings. And, what do you know, someone wanted to redevelop it into 70% affordable housing while preserving the building! What a win!

The Alderperson loved it. The developer did community engagement. Because he was building housing where there used to be a school, he needed one of those variances from the Board of Adjustment. He went through that process and was approved.

Not so fast! A handful of people sued the City, reversed the Board of Adjustment process, and forced the developer to hold even more community hearings.

The process took so long that his contract to purchase the building lapsed. The school district ghosted the developer, perhaps due to a lack of capacity and perhaps due to all the bad press coming from the project.

A friend lived across the street from this, went to all the community hearings, and was flabbergasted. Here we have an historic building, falling into disrepair. Someone wants to keep the historic building and build a lot of affordable housing. It’s two blocks from a grocery store, one block from the busiest bus line in the city.

And yet a combination of outdated zoning processes, slow administrative procedures, and a few NIMBY squeaky wheels sank the whole thing. The building continues to fall into greater disrepair, increasing the costs for anyone who might want to redevelop it in the future. My guess is that it eventually gets torn down.

The developer let me interview him shortly after this all went down. He works in multiple cities and says that while he’s had some positive experiences in St. Louis, fast-growing metro areas like Charlotte make everything much easier. Ness Sandoval, a Saint Louis University demographer sounding the alarm about St. Louis’s population decline and lack of housing growth, loves to talk about how much easier this work is in Denver and Austin.

What Fanning demonstrates is how thin the margins are in a weak market like St. Louis. For one, this is an affordable housing project rather than a market-rate one in large part because it doesn’t pencil out without tax incentives. Second, with such little upside, small frictions can have an outsized impact on a project like this.

It all shows how outdated processes can be just as pernicious as out-and-out slow-growth policy. Especially somewhere like St. Louis with such significant headwinds.

Death or Life?

The Fanning debacle reminded me of one of the cases in Connolly and Kazis’s paper:

One sophisticated developer’s sole attempt to build mixed-income housing with ground-level retail in an outlying neighborhood—exactly what the city wants—took a year to win rezoning. “Never again,” concluded the developer: he’d stick to by-right projects downtown, or find opportunities outside the city.

This kind of situation is unacceptable. The way I’ve come to think of it is that a place like Seattle can afford to shoot itself in the foot. There’s so much economic growth that if they have a little less, everyone will live.

Places like St. Louis and Detroit simply don’t have that luxury. They are not choosing between growing slightly more or slightly less; they are choosing between death and life.

Signs of progress

But there are reasons for hope!

We’re seeing more attention to these issues. Some of the people interviewed in Connolly and Kazis’s paper have been hard at work trying to modernize and streamline building permitting and update both our Strategic Land Use Plan (SLUP) and now our Zoning Upgrade Plan (ZOUP).

In fact, one year ago I asked the Fanning School developer what he wanted to see change. He described many of the projects that those city employees have been plugging away at.

Let’s end by giving credit to the people working, often thanklessly, in the civil service to create a city that works for its residents and can continue to grow and change.

Jenny Schuetz’s Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing System is a clear, concise overview of housing policy: where we’ve gone wrong and how to improve. In less than 170 pages it covers quite a bit of ground. It doesn’t shy away from acknowledging complexity and barriers to successful political organizing, but it’s also full of real solutions.

Here’s Matt Yglesias summarizing Schuetz’s framing of America’s two housing crises, from the intro to an interview with her:

There are two only partially overlapping housing affordability crises in America, one that affects low-income households in all parts of the country and another that affects a larger share of households in a minority of markets (mostly in coastal metro areas) that suffer from an acute shortage of housing.

The first “crisis” is that low income people throughout the country are struggling to afford housing. This is true in urban areas, but also poor areas where rent may be only $300/month. I’ve personally been to rural areas in Missouri like this. They’re not what most people picture when they think of the “housing affordability crisis.”

That would be the second crisis Schuetz refers to, one that gets reported on more frequently in the media. Think high rent prices in cities like New York and San Francisco.

Schuetz’s book covers much more than I can do justice to in this post. But conveniently, her first set of solutions can be summed up in just three words:

Build more housing!

Schuetz covers a number of problem areas and many solutions, but all of them are downstream from one idea: build more housing! This is primarily accomplished via two mechanisms:

1. Relax zoning restrictions: particularly those that make it illegal to build apartments or even duplexes and ADU’s (aka “grandma units”). But this also includes wonkier ideas like reducing or eliminating local parking minimums (word to Donald Shoup, whose idiosyncratic tome on the subject I read late last year).

2. Streamlining building regulations: standardize the building process within and between communities. Every dollar that developers spend on filling out another complicated step filled with paperwork or creating long environmental impact assessments is another dollar that they need to recoup, often with higher rents after a building is completed.

Below, you can see some of Schuetz’s other policy prescriptions, including what level of government has control over that policy. She ranges widely, covering carbon emissions and transit, as well as Americans’ overreliance on mortgages for wealth creation. But most of these policies are footnotes compared to the two above, and the thrust of her agenda can, again, be summed up in three words: Build more housing!

What about affordable/public housing?

If you talk to someone in Seattle or New York about how we need to “build more housing,” they’ll usually counter by adding a fourth word. “What we actually need is to build more affordable housing.” Then insert grumbling about luxury condos.

The overwhelming evidence is that increasing the overall housing supply by building market rate housing will decrease the cost via supply and demand. Yes, even luxury apartments or condos.

If you live in a city with super rich people and lots of housing demand (like New York), if those luxury units aren’t on the market then those super rich people aren’t going to move out of the city. They’re just going to rent or buy the next best option. This bids up the cost of housing for, say, upper middle class people.

If those upper middle class people get bid out of that housing bracket, they’ll move down to the next, displacing lower middle class people. And so on: it’s a domino effect. Plus, as housing wonks also point out, today’s lower-cost rentals were yesterday’s luxury buildings, so today’s low cost buildings would never have been built if they followed our anti-luxury apartment logic 10, 20, or 50 years ago. Noah Smith summarizes some of the academic evidence that supports this overall housing wonk argument here.

Noahpinion

The Left-NIMBY canon

We’re all familiar by now with Right-NIMBYs — conservatives who block transit and housing development in order to keep poor people and minorities out of their quiet white-flight suburban neighborhoods. These are still the most common kind, given that Republicans…

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6 years ago · 115 likes · 64 comments · Noah Smith

We also can’t build affordable housing

But let’s say that’s wrong and we really should only be building new designated below-market-rate affordable housing. The same issues that stand in the way of building more housing in general also stand in the way of building more affordable housing.

Apartments are more likely to be affordable on average than houses, all else being equal, because they are smaller. Therefore, if you want to build affordable housing, it’s better to build apartments than houses. Plus, you might as well get more bang for your buck: if a given plot of land could benefit 4 low income people with houses vs. 100 with an apartment building, you should probably help 25x as many people if you’re already going to the trouble to build a new building.

But if apartment buildings are illegal in a given neighborhood, you’re just as unable to build affordable apartments there as you are market rate apartments. Without increasing density, it’s hard to get enough new housing on the market to meaningfully increase the supply.

What about public housing? Socialists in particular like to bring this up, often highlighting the case of Vienna. And of course there is Singapore, where in 2018 80% of residents lived in a government-built apartment. Sometimes the Faircloth Amendment is invoked, which limits the amount of public housing that can be built in the US (though this article outlines why this is a red herring).

Yet Schuetz barely even mentions public housing in the book. At one point, she brings up Singapore and Vienna, but only to suggest that the success and failure of public housing is very context-dependent.

And you don’t have to think long or hard to see why the American context is not conducive to public housing as a cost-effective solution to housing shortages. Ultimately, the same barriers to building market-rate housing or tax-subsidized affordable housing also apply to public housing.

But on top of that, the American government has some glaring issues executing similar projects that make me doubt that public housing could ever be cost-effective. For one, the American government builds infrastructure more expensively than most other parts of the world, most glaringly in transit. This stems from a complex set of American issues (many of which Ezra Klein is taking on in his intellectual project to construct a “liberalism that builds,” this Niskanen report has some other specifics), including unempowered civil servants, litigation costs, expensive land, environmental protection legislation, poor procurement policy, and more. Jacobin, a leading socialist magazine, even dedicated its recent Infrastructure issue to these problems.

It’s hard to not see these issues similarly impacting our ability to build public housing efficiently in the way they do for infrastructure like roads, rails, etc. As Jenny Schuetz says in this article, “Public agencies aren’t designed to be real estate developers.” And that’s assuming it’s even legal for them to develop real estate, when it’s often impossible due to zoning restrictions and local resistance.

The overall point is that the first step to making any of these solutions happen is to remove the barriers to building new, denser housing. Whatever combination you want to see of market rate housing, designated affordable housing, or public housing, they all need to start by addressing these common barriers. As Sightline housing researcher Michael Anderson says here: “Abundant housing would make capitalism better; abundant housing would make socialism better.”

But will housing really be affordable for everyone if we build more?

As I said at the top, Schuetz refers to two housing “crises”: (1) acute housing shortages in particular metro areas like Seattle, as well as (2) general affordability issues for the poorest all over the country. Building more housing is the primary solution to the first problem and can help reduce costs to alleviate the latter.

But if we’re already seeing people who are struggling to afford $300 rent in rural areas, how much lower can the cost of housing reasonably get for them? What do we do for these people who likely still won’t be able to afford basic shelter even after we Build More Housing?

The two ideas that people throw around are to build public housing or give people money to subsidize their rent, usually in the form of housing vouchers (e.g. Section 8). The public housing strategy can also encompass non-profit housing developers or other ways of making designated (often tax-incentivized) affordable housing. Schuetz’s solutions are in the table above under “Improve access to decent-quality, stable housing.”

The housing wonk community seems to have converged on housing vouchers as the solution, rather than public housing. But with Section 8 vouchers, there’s a limited number and you have to be on a waiting list for quite some time to get them. According to this HUD article, in 2020: “there were 2.6 million HCVs available in 2020, but if vouchers were issued to all unassisted households with incomes at or below 50 percent of AMI, there would be 17.7 million eligible households.” That’s quite the “voucher gap!”

Schuetz and other progressives propose making these universal, giving them to all 17.7M of those people, or whoever qualifies. In fact, Cory Booker proposed this and Joe Biden adopted it for his platform when running for President. So while it doesn’t seem to be a top priority for Democrats now, the technocratic elite consensus has shifted in this direction.

And it makes sense why. One of the biggest housing issues is concentration of poverty. When you are born into a community with low opportunity, it’s hard to escape it. There are few jobs and it’s easy to get sucked into cycles of crime and violence. This often gets talked about under the heading of “neighborhood effects.” High profile public housing experiments like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis failed, in large part due to extensive crime (as well as a lack of investment from the city and other issues). With what we know now about the concentration of poverty and neighborhood effects, it’s no wonder that a strategy of “let’s concentrate all of the poorest people in our community into the same building” didn’t work out well.

It’s preferable to help extricate people from these circumstances and give them the freedom to move to neighborhoods with high opportunity, better schools, etc. The most famous experiment, which people talk about all the time in the public policy world, is called Moving to Opportunity. There was an excellent episode of Jennifer Doleac’s Probable Causation podcast about the long-term effects of children moving to opportunity after the demolition of their local housing projects. It’s wonky, but there’s some great stuff in the transcript. Here’s an exchange about the relative cost of public housing vs. housing vouchers [emphasis added and transcript cleaned up to remove some of the verbal quirks of a direct transcript]:

Jennifer [00:16:53] … So when we're thinking about the government moving people from public housing into or transitioning them into a housing voucher program, how should we think about the change in that subsidy for the families that are being moved?

Eric [00:17:16] Right. This is a question that a lot of housing economists have spent a good deal of time on. And my sense is that there are a range of numbers that people might come up with when trying to answer this question. I think as a summary measure, if you're thinking about the question of, well, I can give this person a unit of public housing to live in or a housing voucher, that a conservative estimate would suggest that those are basically going to cost the same amount from the government's point of view. So the housing voucher, obviously, you're giving these voucher recipients a subsidy, which they set up with their landlord and a portion of their rent is being paid for by the government. That's how the housing voucher works. With the housing, with the public housing system, the government is having to pay for, you know, maintenance of the building and all these other costs associated with running a public housing system there. My sense from looking over the housing economist literature is that at worst, these systems cost about the same amount per person.

While there are exceptions, like Singapore and Vienna, if we look at the United States the cost of public housing vs. housing vouchers is at best equivalent. It’s not entirely clear that’s what he’s referring to in the interview above, but read the rest of the transcript if you don’t think I’m interpreting it correctly.

That means there are a lot of credible people who estimate that housing vouchers are a more efficient use of money, but let’s say they are equivalent. Then we’re talking the same amount of money to the same people, except one option concentrates poverty and the other option allows people to move to opportunity. With all this, it’s not hard to see why housing wonks rarely talk about building new public housing anymore.

Side note: I have become more curious over the years about the idea of education vouchers, and this exposure to the housing voucher argument is part of why. Theoretically, many of the same arguments seem to apply and I’d expect the empirical evidence to be the same. But I need to read up more on the issue before making up my mind.

Towards regional planning

So we’ve got our dual approaches to the two overlapping housing crises. First, make housing significantly cheaper by building more of it. Second, for those who remain “housing poor,” give them universal housing subsidies to allow them to move wherever they want.

That’s just the policy. Now we need to think about politics and how to build support and pull on the right levers of power. As we begin to think about who controls housing policy in a given community, Schuetz takes us back in time:

At the time that Boston, Cambridge, and many of their New England neighbors were founded, the local common sat at the spatial center of a village economy. People’s daily activities occurred within a few miles of their home, because walking and riding on horseback were the only modes of transportation. How Boston decided to allocate its land between homes, farm plots, and a few small shops had little impact on towns located five or ten miles away.

Today, the Boston metropolitan area has over 4 million people, who participate in one regional labor market — but whose land use decisions are made by more than a hundred independent cities and towns. Residents of Concord can travel eighteen miles from their historically preserved nineteenth-century village to downtown Boston in less than half an hour by car, or slightly longer by commuter rail.

In the past, it made total sense for Cambridge residents to determine their own land use and for the citizens of Boston to do the same. But now our worlds are more interconnected. This would seem to make the case for regional planning of land use.

But should we draw the line at regional planning? As you can see from Schuetz’s table of policy prescriptions, often the target for change is the state or federal government. In this case, they are coercing and overriding state governments:

A somewhat controversial power of state governments is their ability to pre-empt local governments from adopting certain policies: a number of states prohibit localities from adopting local rent regulation or mandatory inclusionary zoning policies. States that want to discourage exclusionary zoning could pre-empt localities from banning apartments, at least in designated areas.

This is, in fact, the route that many activists have taken. California and Oregon in 2021 both passed laws that essentially eliminated single family zoning, allowing construction of at least one additional unit of housing (think a “grandma unit” or a basement apartment with a separate entrance) on single-family land. This overrides, or preempts, any local laws that would otherwise forbid this.

The argument in favor of state preemption is a modified version of the regionalist argument above. The housing decisions of Seattle have spillover effects to the rest of the state. People may leave Seattle and move to Spokane and bid up the cost of housing there. Or they may decide it’s too expensive and leave the state altogether.

We can at least theoretically expand this argument to a global scale if we bring in climate change. Dense, urban development is better for the planet, as it requires less energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions per person. If that makes sense globally, then surely the federal government has a good case for preempting local single-family zoning laws that limit housing supply. The most obvious mechanism would be withholding certain federal funds from states unless they adopt statewide zoning reforms.

I think state or federal imposition like this can be a bad thing, I live in a state (Missouri) where the legislature has pre-empted all sorts of stupid things that cities like St. Louis want to do, mostly to be petty. Ultimately, I’m supportive of state-level measures to relax zoning because I think the problem is that grave, but we should be wary of the tactic. After all, many of the processes and institutions that now hold us back from housing abundance were created with good intention to protect society’s disadvantaged. We should be worried about future unintended consequences of relying too heavily on state preemption as a political tactic.

YIMBY vs. other messaging

Zooming back out, who is agitating for this kind of zoning reform and what should we call this movement?: [emphasis added]

The people and organizations behind state and local zoning reform efforts vary from place to place. While there are a number of national organizations devoted to housing policy advocacy in various forms – such as Habitat for Humanity and the National Low Income Housing Coalition – there is not yet a national organization or network associated with zoning reform. Some zoning reform advocates have embraced the term “YIMBY,” but the term itself is not uncontroversial. Indeed, one lesson emerging from local campaigns is that the words used for framing and communication are quite important and should be tailored to local context. “Legalizing apartments” is a more precise, less ominous framing than “ending single-family zoning.” Similarly, how the policies are designed and which existing political actors can be mobilized in support vary across places.

This book is not only solutions-focused, but pragmatic, considering messaging and the necessary political coalitions to make some of the needed policy changes happen. The messaging research she cites comes from a 2018 SightLine report based on Seattle focus groups. I looked at this report more closely, because I was curious about their other findings.

They broke down YIMBY messaging to a simple motto: “Seattle needs more homes, all shapes and sizes, for all our neighbors.” They also found that “People are more open to density when it’s expressed as ‘options’” and by framing conversations around people, rather than buildings. 

While the supply-and-demand idea that more housing leads to lower prices sounds intuitive, SightLine found that: “One big obstacle is that people don’t understand how more housing of all kinds will reduce overall prices. It might be simple in economic terms, but it is not intuitive or easily explained. It could be more effective to show the converse, or what would happen if homes, including luxury units, were not built.” I see this dynamic with even the most highly educated progressives, who recoil at any “luxury” developments.

While these arguments and framings may play well in Seattle, I’d be interested to see what more localized research finds in other places like LA or New York. Or what about somewhere with a red-hot housing market like Boise, Idaho, which may be more red or purple? I’d like to think that those voters may be more supportive of the basic free market argument (supply and demand), as well as reducing government interference (“legalize apartments”).

Housing Abundance or tradeoffs all the way down?

While some of the messaging above like “legalizing apartments” may sound purely positive sum, Schuetz is clear-eyed in the book’s conclusion that there are tradeoffs involved in adopting her YIMBY playbook: [emphasis added]

Our elected officials — whether on the campaign trail or in office — have been reluctant to ask broad swaths of voters to make sacrifices for the greater good. Climate change offers perhaps the clearest example: slowing greenhouse gas emissions will require Americans to give up some daily habits they enjoy (large homes and SUVs) or pay more to keep their current lifestyle. But on the national stage, candidates focus only on the upsides: creating well-paying green jobs appeals to more voters than paying higher parking fees. Even outsider candidates like Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg – candidates with slim chances of winning who profess a strong commitment to climate action — didn’t level with voters on how mitigation and adaptation will affect their daily lives.

Reforming our current housing and land use systems will shake up the groups of winners and losers. Rolling back exclusionary zoning across enough localities to improve regional housing production and affordability will require affluent homeowners to accept changes in their neighborhoods, and local governments will likely have to cede some control over land use policy to state or federal governments – or pay financial penalties. Providing adequate rental assistance to all low-income households will require well-off voters to pay more in taxes. Elected officials, from mayors to governors to the president, are understandably reluctant to deliver unpleasant news to their constituents. But the only way we can move toward a better future is to present Americans with an honest, direct assessment of our current problems and concrete proposals for reform.

I’m sort of torn on this myself. On the one hand, I don’t entirely agree with her on climate change, which she evidently sees as a similarly zero-sum issue. I much prefer Derek Thompson’s energy abundance vision (a piece of his broader “abundance agenda”). To Thompson a future with even cheaper energy is actually in sight if we keep innovating in clean energy. Not only is that truly possible and a more desirable outcome than a future of energy austerity, it’s more motivating and inspiring politically. If you get people excited about all that they’ll be able to do with cheap solar/wind power, rather than how they need to trash their SUV, then you might build support for government-financed green energy deployment. There are some losers, like workers at coal plants, but this could be neutralized by proposals like Senator Tammy Duckworth’s “Marshall Plan for Coal Country” that would help support and re-train/educate workers who lose their jobs during the transition to clean energy.

So that’s a short argument for why I think Schuetz is wrong in the first paragraph about climate change. Can we have another purely-positive-sum vision of Housing Abundance? A quick Google showed that there are already two advocacy groups in LA and Massachusetts that call themselves Abundant Housing. While this may still be good framing, I think Schuetz is right that there are nevertheless tradeoffs inherent to this fight.

In the long-run, YIMBY policies and housing abundance will be net positive for society. On the one hand, we can reduce homelessness and help young families pay 20% of their income on housing instead of 40%. On the other hand, some homeowners will be unhappy if their neighborhood changes as a result of some four-plexes built on their formerly-all-single-family block. In pure utilitarian terms, it seems pretty obvious that this is a good tradeoff and a net positive. But that homeowner is losing something. And I don’t see a way to have an equivalent “Marshall Plan for Homeowners Who Want Less Neighbors.”

The best argument for why this hypothetical homeowner isn’t a loser is that their neighborhood will continue to change, be more diverse, more vibrant, and that in the long run this will actually boost the desirability of their neighborhood and thus their housing value. But that’s more speculative and longer term. Plus, I think gentrification activists are right to respect that rapid neighborhood change is hard and a loss.

So the Build More Housing strategy definitely has winners and losers. What about Schuetz’s other main prescription, housing vouchers?

To make universal housing vouchers happen, we’d need to raise taxes or cut other government programs, especially as the age of low interest rates and “free money” for the federal government appears to be coming to a close. But I think this is worth it – housing affordability is a fundamental and central problem and shelter is a basic need. Thus, it would likely be worth cutting some other government programs if tax increases are not politically feasible.

So Schuetz is right. Improving housing policy in America involves winners and losers, and many of those losers are among the rich and powerful. They have used tools created to stop the displacement of urban minorities or protect the environment and used them to stifle housing construction, leading to a more expensive America for all. But that’s part of the power of democracy: the ability of the interests of the many to triumph over the interests of the powerful few.

Learning to meditate

There have been two massive paradigm shifts in my emotional and mental landscape throughout my life. The first, when I was fourteen and first went to therapy. I was still relatively high functioning, but a depressed and angry little teen listening to angsty 80s college rock too much (see below). I knew that I could feel better than I did and was interested in therapy, so my parents let me go.

Leaving my first session felt like an actual weight off my shoulders; sometimes cliches are true and CBT is a powerful drug! Therapy gave me a head start on teenage self-actualization, as I had a dedicated hour each week to pin down what I valued, what made me angry, and how to live my life in a way that maximized the first and minimized the second.

Besides the anger, which largely dissipated after therapy, I was a pretty dry and rational kid who identified as not being particularly emotional. But around the age of 19 I was rocked by a wave of emotional volatility that I had never known before. I still don’t know what to make of it, but suddenly I had a lot of new stuff kicking around my brain that I didn’t know how to deal with.

The solution came from an odd place that I’m almost embarrassed to admit: Rick Rubin on Tim Ferriss’s podcast. The music producer recommended a “meditation starter pack” of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are and Stephen Mitchell’s Tao Te Ching translation.

Like many people, I had heard of meditation before and given it a try. But it didn’t stick after I ran into some common obstacles. Principally, I was constantly frustrated that I “wasn’t doing it right” in the face of constant mind-wandering.

But I was desperate, Rick was there, and I craved a practice that offered more emotional equanimity.

Kabat-Zinn’s book is eminently practicable. He jumps between philosophizing and practical “Try This” tips, all in plain language that largely eschews the woo-woo universe that would have put me off. His unique background, Zen practitioner-turned-UMass-meditation-researcher, allows him to straddle these different worlds and tones effectively.

One of his very first tips, which was key for me, was to not talk about your meditation habit to anyone as you start out. A lot of the distractions for me were ultimately downstream of “being someone who meditates,” and whether my experience, my successes or failures in a given session, justified that label.

But what of the Tao? Rubin was right about the religious text; it’s a surprisingly relevant guide to processing many of the early meditation experiences and overcoming common pitfalls. The big lightbulb for me was around the way that carving out spaces for non-doing gave meaning to doing. Here’s Stephen Mitchell’s rendering of the 11th chapter (see it and other translations at this site):

We join spokes together in a wheel,

but it is the center hole

that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,

but it is the emptiness inside

that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,

but it is the inner space

that makes it livable.

We work with being,

but non-being is what we use.

Mitchell’s translation is on the freer end, more international-spiritualist-new-age in tone, which isn’t surprising for those who know his other work. These days I’m more partial to two other translations by Gia-Fu Feng/Jane English and Ursula Le Guin.

But Mitchell provided the accessible on-ramp that I needed. Once meditation became a private space of non-doing in my life, it all clicked. It didn’t make me into a perfect monk; Dan Harris’s book 10% Happier is a more realistic description of the benefits of meditation practice. At a volatile time, meditation did much more than 10% for me. It gave me space to observe and understand the new feelings that passed like storms through my brain.

It’s been over a decade now of meditation practice, long enough that I am comfortable breaking Kabat-Zinn’s initial rule. I’ve recommended his book (and Mitchell’s Tao) to many friends, as it’s one of the books that has most changed my life.

Avoiding the Hyperactive Hive Mind™

For a while I managed a mental health program for undocumented immigrants. It was a great job, and as the founding program manager, I had to do a little bit of everything. One of these crazy operational jobs where you’re always running around with your hair on fire. One day I’d come into the office thinking I had cleared my schedule to “work smarter” on some deeper, intractable problem. Then the fridge would break, or a therapist would call in sick, and I’d need to help call all the clients and reschedule them.

It was very hard to find poise in that kind of job, and it was also the kind of job where you usually end the week feeling like you “got nothing done” despite putting out many, many fires. It was affirming when, after I left, backfilling my job took 2-3 people.

Over time, I grew into this role and learned to prioritize all these different tasks on the fly. In the words of one colleague, I learned which of the balls I was juggling were rubber and could afford to be dropped and bounce on the floor, and which were glass and could not afford to be dropped. It’s not fun to purposefully let certain balls drop.

But one of the greatest supports that I wish I had read earlier in my time on that job was Cal Newport’s A World Without Email. I wrote a bit about the book here:

Many are familiar with Cal Newport’s work from his more famous Deep Work. The gist is that humans err by trying to multi-task too often and by not carving out enough space to think deeply about hard problems. The psychological studies that he cites show that there are huge cognitive costs to switching tasks all the time and that we don’t do our best thinking when we are constantly pinging between different styles and domains of work.

For what it’s worth, I think that Newport does underrate the extent to which some high-performing managers do really learn to switch context effectively and frequently. I have personally worked with people like this and learned to do it myself with time.

But one thing that he is right about is that it’s exhausting, and that’s part of why I would end every week in that job feeling like I was exhausted despite “not doing anything.”

So while some jobs still require you to switch context a lot, it’s still worth minimizing unnecessary cognitive burden. One good way to do that is to use email less.

The problem is that email is almost perfectly structured to get worse work out of you. The kind of problem you’re solving and all the context around it can switch heavily between every email and it’s easy to start addressing a task, then pause to go open another email, then return to the first email, then get interrupted by yet another new email. You might draw on five different manners of thinking across five emails in 2 minutes.

A simple switch, treating email as a discrete task where a lot of what I’m doing is sorting work into discrete buckets to work on with greater focus later, was absolutely tremendous. I’m not saying I moved 100% away from answering emails quickly, especially if something was actually urgent or required. But you soon learn that the most urgent things have a way of finding you, even if you’re not checking your inbox every 20 seconds.

Plus funneling work away from your inbox into some sort of productivity software (I use Trello, but really any of the major ones would work fine) allows you to actually see your to-do list and wrap your head around it. At the end of each week, I’d actually have a much stronger sense of what I had accomplished. This helped me end the week feeling positive, instead of frustrated by how my attention had been pulled in unexpected directions by the fires of the day.

Again, I have friends who have been frustrated by the sort of extreme way Cal Newport frames his manner of work. I still context switch a lot, and I do still (unfortunately) have an email, but I think many people would benefit much more than they think from moving at the margin more in the Cal Newport direction.

The journey of 1,000 miles starts with a single step

This is a commonly-recommended book for a reason. I’ll admit that I started out on the high discipline end of the spectrum, but this was full of practical tips that I think would be helpful for anybody working on discipline and habit formation.

The big part for me was the “atomic” part. At one point, Clear even suggests “downscaling your habits until they can be done in two minutes or less.” To tie into the first books, at one point during the pandemic I was struggling with consistency in my meditation practice. I started from scratch, meditating for just two minutes a day.

Every week I added one minute until I was eventually up to 30 minutes a day. Even in previous eras of 20-30 minutes daily meditation, I’d miss some weekend days, so the Atomic Habits process led to the most consistent and quality meditation practice of my life.

I also followed his advice and downloaded a habit tracker app (called, shocker, Habit) that includes my active streak. It does become a point of pride and personal identity at a certain point when you’ve got hundreds of days in a row of doing something that you know you value. It makes it that much harder to make excuses when you don’t feel like doing it. Which even came up today, as I’m writing this very sentence after a long day of work.

Where I’ve ended up with all this is that I have four daily habits that I do:

1. Write for at least 10 minutes.

2. Meditate for at least 10 minutes.

3. Read in Spanish for at least 10 minutes.

4. Stretch my neck for 1-2 minutes.

The top three I have an active streak of ~850 days, the last one was surprisingly harder to make stick (perhaps it was too atomic and thus easy to forget) and I’m only at ~580.

I’ll admit there are some exceptions. If I’m laid up with a stomach virus, I’ll let myself off the hook and still count the days as part of my streak. The same applies when I’m on vacation, but I do still fit these in on many travel days. Feel free to make fun of me and call me undisciplined, but I think they’re reasonable accommodations.

At a deeper level, this whole process of picking and tracking these daily habits has been a great way to stay tuned in to my values. As you can probably guess from that list (and from reading earlier in this post), it’s important for me to meditate and stay mindful. It’s important for me to write as a way to process what I learn and sharpen my thinking. It’s important for me to keep up my Spanish fluency, as I no longer have a job where I get to speak Spanish every day and reading every day is a good way to do that.

But the daily nature of these habits also unlocks something else: when you actually do something every day, it adds up!

I read almost all of Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral, a sprawling modernist epic about Peruvian dictatorship. Now, it took me more than a year, a lot of the book went over my head, and eventually I did lose steam on the book and decide that I wanted a bit more pleasure in my daily habit.

But if I didn’t just plug away at it in short increments, I would have read 0% of the book. As is, I pushed myself and definitely improved my language skills. Reading stuff above your level and swimming in the deep end is also how I improved my English reading comprehension. If it was up to me to sit down and read that book in Spanish for an hour at a time, I just never would do it.

The cumulative impact is also evident with writing. At this point, I’m coming up on two years of weekly posts of around 1000-2000 words. I made a crude “Substack Wrapped” style review earlier this year with Claude Code and found that I had published the equivalent of over 500 pages of writing on this blog.

I truly don’t think I would have accomplished that without the discipline of daily practice. So cheers to Clear and another 850 days of writing!

There’s a common story told in art history about the French art that precedes Impressionism. Two schools in particular, the Barbizon School and the Realists, are part of an expansion of what counts as “fine art.”

Art was supposed to concern itself with scenes that were capital-I Important. Famous religious scenes, seminal historical events (often from the Classical era), and maybe some portraits of royal figures. Makes sense, paint and materials used to be expensive.

In walk the Barbizon School, who take advantage of new technology to paint landscapes outdoors, rather than in a studio. The school is named after a town where they worked, and here’s two representative works from Theodore Rousseau:

Then you have the Realists coming in, who begin to paint everyday life. This meant not just landscapes, but *gasp* peasants:

That’s Millet’s The Gleaners, probably the most famous Realist painting. For those keeping track, this painting is from 1857, nearly two decades before the first Impressionist exhibition (1874). The Barbizon folks started working in the 1830s.

But wait a minute. When I go to art museums, I see a lot of Dutch landscape painting from the 1600s, the so-called Dutch Golden Age. It’s Europe, everyone was pretty close together, it’s not like Rembrandt and other Dutch Masters were obscure.

So why was it a big deal when the Realists and then the Impressionists embraced landscapes 100-200 years later? How could that be pathbreaking? What am I missing?

The Art of Describing Art

This is one of these questions that’s just been kicking around my head for the last few years and pops back up when I go to an art museum. Delightfully, I recently stumbled on an answer that helped me make sense of it.

I read TJ Clark’s Farewell to an Idea on Modernism and was blown away. The man reads paintings at an astonishingly deep level and brings so much excitement and energy. To be honest, it’s a dense book that often goes over my head. But he’s trying to put into words some of the transcendent qualities of art and words are bound to fail. For every two observations that went over my head, another completely unlocked a work or artist. He electrifies the Russian Suprematists and The Death of Marat with equal force:

So I asked ChatGPT for similar books that blend Clark’s deep reading of paintings and his historical perspective, and one was Svetlana Alpers’s The Art of Describing, a pathbreaking work on Dutch Golden Age painting. I’ve been gradually warming up to that stuff, even the still lifes that I used to find incredibly boring. Some credit goes to Benjamin Moser’s The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters – I wish there were more books this personal and informative for other eras of art history.

Shaking the Italian bias

Alpers describes a bifurcated European art history that began with the Renaissance, which was itself divided between the Northern Renaissance (Germany and Netherlands primarily) and the Italian Renaissance. The long history of privileging the Italian Renaissance continues today. If you pull ten people off the street, they’re more likely to have heard of Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci than Jan van Eyck.

This snobbiness goes way back. One of my favorite parts of the book is this description by Michelangelo himself (recounted to Francisco de Holanda):

Flemish painting will ... please the devout better than any painting of Italy. It will appeal to women, especially to the very old and the very young, and also to monks and nuns and to certain noblemen who have no sense of true harmony. In Flanders they paint with a view to external exactness or such things as may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for example saints and prophets. They paint clothes and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that. And all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without skilful choice or boldness and, finally, without substance or vigour. … It is practically only the work done in Italy we can call true painting, and that is why we call good painting Italian.

Well, then. Tell us what you really think!

According to Alpers, the Dutch at the time agreed with the description, if not the value judgments placed upon it. They “lay[] claim to nature, rather than art, as the source of their artistic accomplishment.”

The problem is that the field of art history ran with Michelangelo’s value judgments to a fault, creating what Alpers calls an “Italian bias.” Italians valued classical scenes, history paintings, and works that broadly skew towards narrative instead of everyday representation, and their greatest focus was on conveying incredible depth of feeling and nuance in the human body.

Therefore, art historians looked for all these qualities in Dutch painting to validate it. It’s no wonder that Rembrandt, who most aligns with the subject matter and approach of the Italian Renaissance, is the “biggest” name from the Dutch Golden Age.

But Dutch painters had a different value system. They weren’t trying to convey “invisible feelings” and deep human passions via finely-rendered figures and faces, often in deliberately framed discrete narrative scenes. Instead, there is a “pleasure taken in description,” in rendering everyday life, nature, the fuzziness of a collar or the many potential faces and textures of a lemon:

As Alpers says, “We have never seen a lemon in this way before” in real life. “Whatever other aspects there are to such works, it is clear that they are devised as a feast for the attentive eye.”

This era also sees the first landscape drawings made straight in the field, rather than in a studio:

So this art of describing ends up in some interesting places. In one way, it’s a push towards interest in scenes of everyday life that contrast sharply with the expressive, narrative paintings coming out of Italy that came to define Important Art. In another, there’s a pure fascination with the natural world that leads to visually dissecting a lemon. Alpers compares the Dutch visual culture to scientific figures like Francis Bacon or cartographers, both interested in cataloguing the world.

The last factor is that Dutch art was more popular and less academic than the fine art that held sway in the French academy, which was very much descended from the Italian Renaissance. Dutch paintings were generally smaller and made to hang in people’s houses. Remember that the Dutch were prosperous from global trade (this is the era of the Dutch East India Company), and people had disposable income to spend on paintings.

Everyday life was a particularly fitting subject at that scale and in that setting.

The rediscovery of description

To summarize, the Dutch aesthetic was seen as inferior to that of the Italian Renaissance by the elite art world, which trained and critically validated fine art through academic institutions and exhibitions. Italian painting won, and the smaller household art of the Netherlands was seen as playing a totally different game, closer to a craft than True Art.

So how does all this tie back into my original question? If the Dutch painted landscapes and everyday life before, why did it matter when the French did it 200 years later?

I was missing the high vs. low art distinctions and the way that this made some of the Dutch Golden Age art essentially invisible to the cultural powers-that-be. It wasn’t fine art, it was just craft, decoration, description.

What the Barbizon School and the Realists did was to reassert this subject matter within the space of fine art. Courbet, probably the most famous Realist painter, is a particular provocateur, merging everyday scenes like a rural burial in his home town of Ornans with the scale and grandeur that French academy painting would reserve for a coronation or a Biblical scene.

Famously, when one of his major paintings (The Painter’s Studio) was rejected from the 1855 Exposition Universelle (a Parisian World’s Fair), he set up his own “Pavilion of Realism” right next door to the official venue. What better distillation of his challenge to the notion of what counted as important art?

There are some transitional figures as well. John Constable, whose work I recently discovered at the Tate Britain, was a major influence on the budding French movement. Caspar David Friedrich, of course, painted landscapes. But both of them often have an agenda, a narrative or emotional point they’re trying to convey with their work, that slots them more into the Italian lineage.

Nevertheless, they were engaging with landscape in a serious way and broadening the scope of fine art. By the time of the Impressionists, the pure study of light and the depiction of modern life were fully assimilated.

Hiding in plain sight

This whole story underscores the historical importance of distinctions like high art vs. low art or arts vs. crafts. Plus, the importance of geographically-bound scenes like the French academy or the Dutch Golden Age.

We’re in an era where many of those distinctions have faded. High-status cultural critics embrace pop music and the Internet has fully melted us together. But a combination of elite gatekeeping and limited geographical scenes shaped the development of art in the past much more than it does today.

As I wrote in this post, most of the best new art arises from strange and unexpected recombinations of previous media. As art making and publishing has become democratized, the gate moved from getting shown at all to getting noticed, from access to attention. In some ways the modern equivalent of the old gatekeepers are the algorithms that structure and standardize how most people discover art:

Speaking of technological change, it’s a massive part of the story of landscape painting. Hendrick Goltzius did not stand outdoors and paint en plein air because it was not possible with the paint of his time. Even Courbet primarily sketched outdoors and then painted the scenes back in his studio.

But then we invented paint tubes and new formulations of paint itself that allowed for painting outdoors effectively. And soon after the Impressionists exploded through the door that was opened for them by the Realists and Barbizon painters.

In general, the role of technological change in facilitating new movements of art is underrated. I recommend Tyler Cowen’s early book In Praise of Commercial Culture. In addition to its heterodox argument that commercialization is good for art, it’s an insane catalog of the role of technological innovation across art forms.

Finally, it’s a reminder of how much amazing work can hide in plain sight, and for how long.

Innovations can just lie there, in this case for centuries, until people come along and recognize what’s great about them. Artists themselves often don’t even realize which of their works are truly great. John Constable painted intricate scenes like the one above, but scholars now obsess just as much over his studies of clouds:

Corot, one of the big Barbizon painters, later became famous for his sketch-like nature paintings, which feel like Impressionism before Impressionism. But during his lifetime he probably thought large works like Hagar in the Wilderness were his real legacy:

This is part of the fun of studying art— it wakes you up to the contingencies and the unknowns all around us. Who knows what musician’s inconsequential demos today will inspire a future musical movement? What discarded sketches will resonate two centuries from now? What are we not even seeing as art today that future generations will treasure?

I. Credit where it’s due

1. The piece ties together a variety of strains of media theory, particularly the work of Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Neil Postman. Hat tip to Joe Wiesenthal, Odd Lots co-host and Twitter personality, and Ezra Klein for putting a lot of this work on my radar over the last few years.

2. The piece is a parade of disturbing statistics and testimony. My (least) favorite: more Americans reported gambling last year than reported reading a book.

3. The second most disturbing part involves Harvard students who (1) used ChatGPT to translate a 1962 novel into simpler language and (2) see reading a full book, rather than a summary, as an imposition.

II. Dispatches from the front lines

1. A friend of mine is a high school English teacher and I am regularly appalled by what I hear from him. For one, he has to be deliberate to find schools who will let him teach even one full book. This was worst in charter-and-test-heavy DC, where they only assigned excerpts to teach to the test. There are still schools that let you, but it’s no longer a given.

2. One day he had 9th graders sit down upon entry to the classroom and read a one-page excerpt from the book they’d been reading at home. Many of the students read the beginning and end of the page, but skipped the middle, and were thus unable to answer a lot of simple comprehension questions. They were surprised that they were supposed to read every word in the one page excerpt.

3. The realities of short-form video are wild. I know someone who works for a social media marketing startup, connecting brands with small-audience influencers. I learned that the average view time was 3-4 seconds and that nonsense borderline-Dadaist content was often the most successful at driving engagement. Looking at this world of microinfluencers and the people they reach was like staring into the abyss.

III. A change in degree, not kind

1. Pervasive TV was the real change in kind. Smartphones, social media, and short-form video are a change in degree. That still matters – it is true now that you can never be bored. But I think that is less new than people think. My grandmother used to bring her knitting with her in the car and get a few stitches in at the red light.

2. I keep seeing different numbers about how much people watch TV, either broken up by person or household. But the best numbers I can find suggest that (1) the average individual reported watching 2.6 hours of TV per day as their main activity in 2024, the largest use of leisure time; (2) Nielsen, which just covers when TVs are on, finds that the average household TV watching peaked at almost 9 hours in 2009. People have the TV on all the time. To me, it’s not a huge leap from that to idle scrolling.

3. David Wallace-Wells brings in more interesting data in his New York Times response. This supposedly “new” problem is decades old, and the recent reading trends are usually small declines or improvements. Young people are actually reading slightly more and old people are reading less.

4. For all my own reading, when people obsess about kids on screens I think about my own youthful TV watching. As the third child, I was given free rein to park myself in front of the TV and watch Dragon Ball Z for hours. And you know what? I turned out fine.

IV. The “golden age of reading” is at least half myth

1. I loved Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (more below), but his big issue is that he romanticizes the past. I do not think that in 1870 we had a society where high literacy permeated everything. Elites read a lot more than they do now, in part because they lacked other forms of entertainment; they watched 4-hour speeches for fun but we don’t mourn that artform. And then a bunch of other people worked on the docks or farmed or worked in factories. There were, of course, exceptions: I love learning about the lectores who read the classics to Cuban cigar rollers. But we shouldn’t be naive – most people were not reading heady books. I made a similar point in my Chris Hayes book review: how many people who blame smartphones for their short attention span were reading Middlemarch in 2006, the year before the iPhone’s release?

2. Years ago, I read two books by sociologist John B. Thompson focused on the publishing industry: Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing and Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Both are full of rich data and useful conceptual models of the publishing industry. One takeaway: the bulk of books read are Romance (and other genre fiction like mysteries, but mostly Romance). Romance power readers are machines, tearing through multiple books per week all year, often through services like Kindle Unlimited. I think of this every time I read a stat like “the average reader read 15 books last year” or when I hear people exalting the intellectual superiority of The Reader. Even among readers, most reading by volume is junk food, closer to TV than Doctor Zhivago. I still think there are advantages to reading over TV, like building an attention span, and I have my own junk food entertainment (god bless the 6-month MLB season). But on the whole I culturally lump a lot of that Romance (and a lot of the growing YA readership) in with TV consumption.

3. I luckily had a theory-heavy undergraduate degree that did teach me to read many books each semester. But most of my professors described their own graduate years as full of multiple seminars that required reading multiple books per week. Everyone just skimmed the books, lied, or both.

V. Some alarm is still warranted

1. Media theorists seem to hate Neil Postman, who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death about TV rotting our brains in the 1980s. I suppose because it’s not very empirically rigorous. But his book is chillingly prescient and correct: we are shaped by the dominant media forms of our day. The logic of TV is one of entertainment, and we’ve now come to expect that many domains of life will entertain us. School is no longer hard work with a purpose, it must entertain the children. Politics is not a complex and frustrating process of “negotiating the unnegotiable,” we now expect to have a President who we would like to get a beer with or watch on reality TV.

2. What is the logic of short-form video? For one, no ideas with any degree of complexity can be communicated in the format. What happens as it continues to rise and become the dominant paradigm, in the way that TV was rising in the time of Postman? How can we possibly sustain a reflective, self-aware, deliberative Public, in a Deweyan sense?

VI. Will reading become an elite subculture again?

1. I do subscribe to the view put forth in Horowitch’s essay that reading and writing are both forms of mental exercise and that writing, in particular, is essential for clear thinking. She is articulate on that point.

2. My own favorite short essay on that subject is Paul Graham’s “Writes and Write-Nots” from late 2024. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but to cut to the end: “This situation is not unprecedented. In preindustrial times most people’s jobs made them strong. Now if you want to be strong, you work out. So there are still strong people, but only those who choose to be. It will be the same with writing. There will still be smart people, but only those who choose to be.”

3. In some ways we’re headed to this postliterate, new oral culture, to borrow Walter Ong’s ideas. But in other ways we’re returning to an older era, maybe even one closer to the Middle Ages, where there’s a huge divide between those in society who do read and those who don’t. Which is Graham’s point about writing and reading is, of course, an input for good writing.

4. A few years ago I was running a work project to build out a new program, staffed by two consulting teams: one made up of two non-practicing lawyers, the other handling our communications. The comms folks once said of the lawyers, “the best thing about working with them is that they actually read everything because they’re lawyers.” At the time it struck me as both incredibly accurate and incredibly depressing.

5. The fact that no one reads anymore gives me a feeling of security in this era of potential AI job disruption. It’s great to be the person in the meeting who’s read the memo. People’s brains are frying as their reading and writing skills, and by extension their critical thinking skills, atrophy. Here’s one example tweet:

6. I think that human writing is probably dead in the long run, meaning that it will shift to being a small subculture and no longer a broadly expected skillset. There’s some shifting signalling dynamics here that I’m attentive to. A few years ago, running a weekly blog (like this one) was a sign of intellectual status because it showed a high degree of curiosity and intellectual legwork. Historically, it is more work to write a piece than to read one. Then AI made that kind of writing easy and now places like Substack or Twitter are flooded with essays that may read well superficially, but lack that underlying thought. The same has happened on LinkedIn; it’s all AI. At what point does that fever break? Will everyone just keep posting AI writing in public that no one else reads forever, thinking it signals intelligence? Will we see the previous status hierarchies emerge among those who don’t use AI in their writing, which is sure to be a small group?

7. Related to that, I’ve gone through an adjustment period with AI writing and observed the same in others. The quirks and repetitiveness of AI writing begin to grate after a while. It won’t happen for everyone (as I said above, I’m sure many who react to AI LinkedIn posts don’t even read them), but I suspect that this adjustment will play out on a societal level and lead to the reemergence of the status hierarchies I mentioned above. Substack seems to be piloting something like this, allowing you to run Pangram’s AI detection on your own writing and post a note about how/if you used AI.

VII. What should institutions do? Will they do it?

1. If we are returning to this world where no one reads except elites, we really need our institutions like Harvard to be doing their job of minting elites who can think. There just seems to be no excuse for Harvard to be admitting students who need the degree of remedial reading help described in this essay. Harvard’s class size is 1500-2000 and there are definitely 2000 kids who can still read a book. There will be more if schools like Harvard require it. I fear that standards will decline further as we go over the demographic cliff and universities begin to feel the pain. But Harvard and its peers should hold the line on high standards, or else what is the point of their existence?

2. There is some “right-sizing” of the university curriculum and reading loads that should be done. The old graduate-school reading loads were basically fake for most students anyway. There’s something you gain from wide exposure at shallow depth, but it’s not bad to move towards a more honest reading load that you actually expect people to read. That ideal honest reading load is likely below the fake one of the “good old days,” but above the paltry level that many undergraduates are reading now.

3. This problem is in the abstract quite solvable by the education system. Law schools, for example, use cold-calling and blue book exams to great effect, forcing students to read and to develop critical thinking skills. But I have about zero faith that our existing educational institutions are set up to solve this, or that important stakeholders in that system even care about solving it.

Sad, but likely true for connecting with the general public. The book has certainly been influential at the elite persuasion level, driving lots of conversation and even favorable responses from unlikely factionalists like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani.

Yet a May 2026 NYT poll found that only 9% of Democratic voters had heard of the “abundance movement. Maybe too many syllables is right!

The constellation of thinkers focused on abundance and state capacity are heirs to a long run of government reformers. Successful reform movements and coalitions typically have some sort of unifying idea or brand that both ties together a variety of issues and resonates with the public.

As readers of this blog know, I think the Progressive Era (~1890-1920) is important to mine for lessons, as it featured the most successful reform movement in American history. In that era, Progressives overhauled and modernized the US national government. In the process, they took over both political parties.

Since that’s basically the best case scenario for this moment of Abundance-minded reformers, it seems worth asking: what ideas and framings successfully united the Progressives? What might work today? Which worked for elite persuasion and which worked for mass mobilization?

To cut to the chase, successful reform movements run on moral energy and we’ve lost the nerve to talk about public morality unless it’s about children.

We’ve been here before

Part of what inspired this post was a surprisingly resonant passage from Robert Wiebe’s The Search for Order: 1877-1920, one of the seminal books on the period.

For context, “bureaucratic thought” doesn’t have the negative connotation it might have today. It’s more talking about the idea that we should empower experts in the government, housed in the Executive Branch, to solve complex problems (including paving roads, building bridges, cleaning the water supply):

Exponents of bureaucratic thought felt obligated to find a more emotionally satisfying bond among all citizens. They required a mundane common denominator that in its own way would draw a diverse nation together as neatly as natural law had. Deeply impressed by America’s economic productivity, a number of them sought the answer within a context of abundance. Their fascination with the processes of an urban economy led them naturally to the distribution of goods and from there to the consumer. Here, announced such men as Walter Weyl and Walter Lippmann, was a primary function for the citizens of a bountiful society, a singularly American source of consciousness that in turn would underwrite its common action. But they seemed at a loss to know how they might use the discovery. It generated little excitement and even fewer applications.

Essentially, focusing on material abundance and treating the American public as a bunch of consumers made some sense. But it didn’t have the juice for organizing a larger political movement. Perhaps a lesson for today. Either way, Abundance mentioned!

I was also struck by parallels with another great movement of the Progressive Era, the environmental movement.

As Samuel Hays wrote in his landmark Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (which I wrote about here), the famous conservation movement was highly motivated by economic efficiency. This is particularly true for elite actors like Teddy Roosevelt and his influential Forest Service Chief, Gifford Pinchot.

Efficiency is quite similar to Abundance. A substantial portion of the public was motivated by romantic preservation of nature (think John Muir), which is the narrative that people prefer to tell about the early environmental movement. But make no mistake, Roosevelt was primarily concerned with the rational use of resources to further economic growth.

Once conservation got momentum, everyone was ready to hop on board and the term quickly became diluted. Here’s Hays:

The term “conservation” proved to be highly elastic. After the summer of 1908 its meaning expanded to include almost every movement of the day, and a wide variety of reformers flocked into conservation organizations. Roosevelt initiated the process by popularizing the conservation of human health. …

This was only a beginning. At the first session of the National Conservation Congress in August 1909 delegates delivered speeches on the conservation of peace and friendship among nations, the conservation of the morals of youth, the conservation of children’s lives through the elimination of child labor, the conservation of civic beauty, the elimination of waste in education and war, the conservation of manhood, and the conservation of the Anglo-Saxon race!

A good reminder of the malleability of slogans that bears repeating today.

So yes, ideas of economic abundance and growth were operative at the elite level in the Progressive Era, as they are today. But what about the unifying threads and concepts that actually knit together the mass movement? I found two.

Anti-vice and pro-kid

Anyone who learned three bullet points about the Progressive Movement in high school history class will know that it was in large part a backlash to Gilded Age corruption. I didn’t realize how much this was part of a broader moral, Christian crusade against vice. It makes sense; after all, the Temperance Movement was gaining steam around this time.

City-prosecutor-turned-reform-governor Joseph Folk developed a national profile by pioneering what was called the “Missouri Idea.” He was anti-gambling, anti-drinking, and framed political corruption as the worst vice of all. He was nicknamed “Holy Joe”:

[Folk] championed the law as the weapon with which to check political commercialism and restrain powerful corporations. And by enforcing the law, Folk reasserted the primacy of traditional, moral values over those that bribe-givers and bribe-takers embodied…. Folk firmly believed that government rested upon the law, and that bribery was the most dangerous crime because it struck at the foundation of all law.

As a candidate for governor in 1904, Folk gave vitality to the ideal that public office is a public trust by popularizing the doctrine that became known as the “Missouri Idea”-- the idea “that citizenship in a free country implies a civic obligation to enforce the performance of every public trust; that bribery is treason, and the givers and takers of bribes are the traitors of peace; that laws are made to be enforced, not to be ignored; that officials should no more embezzle the public power entrusted to them than public money in their custody.”

(from Steven L. Piott’s biography Holy Joe)

This quote emphasizes an angle that has some overlap with economic populism, though note that the corruption here was much more extreme and direct (in terms of bribes) than we see today. He came to prominence busting up The Big Cinch, St. Louis’s cabal of businesses and machine politics, which was as blatantly corrupt as anywhere in the country.

He was equally serious about the other forms of vice and never dropped his campaigning for restrictions on alcohol. Ultimately, opposition from immigrants like the Germans in St. Louis (whose livelihood depended on alcohol, from saloon keepers all the way to Anheuser-Busch) sank his career.

But only after he passed a massive haul of reformist legislation and became a national figure who contemplated a run for President. I mean, look at this list of Missouri state accomplishments from 1905-1907:

They made great strides in opposing special interests (antibribery and antilobby laws), and in encouraging greater democratic participation in the political process (state primary, senatorial preference primary, initiative, referendum, and recall). They expanded the power and scope of government in the public interest through social legislation (compulsory school attendance, child labor, maximum hour, fellow servant, and consumer protection laws), and economic regulation (of railroads, public service corporations, and monopolies). Folk, by his leadership, added texture, impetus, and a moral tone to progressivism.

In some ways, he was a victim of his own success. Once all of his popular reforms were passed, all that was left was more traditional anti-vice politics, which was less popular.

The other most common and successful issue framing that came up in my history: protecting children, the ultimate symbol of future progress. Here’s Wiebe again:

If humanitarian progressivism had a central theme, it was the child. He united the campaigns for health, education, and a richer city environment, and he dominated much of the interest in labor legislation. Female wage earners—mothers in absentia—received far closer attention than male, movements for industrial safety and workmen’s compensation invariably raised the specter of the unprotected young, and child labor laws drew the progressives’ unanimous support. The most popular versions of legal and penal reform also emphasized the needs of youth. Something more than sympathy for the helpless, or even the powerful influence of women in this portion of progressivism, explained that intense preoccupation. The child was the carrier of tomorrow’s hope whose innocence and freedom made him singularly receptive to education in rational, humane behavior. Protect him, nurture him, and in his manhood he would create that bright new world of the progressives’ vision.

I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but Theda Skocpol’s landmark Protecting Soldiers and Mothers also makes a similar argument, that protecting children (via their mothers) was the core idea underpinning the original American welfare state.

We’ve lost some muscle

Some of my takeaways:

First, elite persuasion can actually get you pretty far. Economic efficiency didn’t light the fire of a grassroots conservation movement or stick in the national imagination a la John Muir. But we did get the US Forest Service, which was one of the most competent US civil service agencies for decades.

Second, these terms get diluted really quickly. Once there’s a successful issue frame, everyone wants to glom their idea on to it. This eventually dilutes the framing, driving the search for novel ideas. You can see this with the Conservation Congress example above. The same may already be happening with “abundance,” see this article by Steven Teles outlining the diverse political actors trying to claim the term.

Third, we’ve really lost some moral muscle in our public life, but I doubt that’s a permanent shift. I once asked an organizer friend why he always has his rallies opened and MC’d by a pastor. “They’re the only ones who speak about morality in public anymore,” he said.

That certainly wasn’t the case in 1904. Piott again from Holy Joe:

As one historian has noted: “Christian [moral] progressivism makes us uncomfortable. The reformers’ indignation, moralism, and righteous rhetoric offends the tastes and grates on the ears of many modern people.” It is easy today to dismiss moral reformers like Folk as naive, innocent, smugly self-assured, or narrowly intolerant. Christianity today has become the rallying cry of illiberalism as much as liberalism. But in dismissing the moralistic rhetoric of the progressives as unimportant and in characterizing their emphasis on improved public behavior as irrelevant to the “real” goals of progressives (usually defined as modernization, order, or efficiency), critics have minimalized the moral dimension of progressivism and marginalized progressive reformers like Joe Folk.

Now, there are obstacles to reclaiming this moral language. Norm-breaking can be hard to reverse, and we’ve basically broken every scandal-type norm in the Trump Era.

Plus, there’s a deeper loss of moral common ground in an increasingly diverse society. We have a truly broad-based, inclusive democracy for the first time in US (maybe world?) history, and it makes shared values and solutions hard. Historian Stephen Skowronek explored this in his recent book The Adaptability Paradox, I interviewed him here:

More important than diversity is probably secularization. Is there any normative morality today that has the strength and reach of past Christianity? Probably not. As a Jewish person, that’s not all bad, but it does make this kind of broad-based political framing more difficult.

So what’s the best candidate?

If I had to make my best guess, successful reform efforts of the future will hinge on protecting children.

With some exceptions, there seems to be a pretty laissez faire attitude today about regulating the actions of adults. When places legalized sports gambling and marijuana, we basically just let it rip. Even in a red state like Missouri, there was little interest in closing loopholes like all the unlicensed convenience stores selling delta-8 THC, a synthetic marijuana product.

That makes some sense for the Right, which of course has its libertarian streak. In a horseshoe theory sense, there’s also an anarchist (versus socialist) orientation to the contemporary American Left. Particularly in the post-mass-incarceration aversion to any use of law enforcement.

But I suspect there is a backlash brewing to a number of the trends of the day. Social media, sports gambling, a breakdown of road safety, extremely potent and publicly-consumed marijuana.

While a broad libertarian morality holds sway with adults, we do still have some muscle to exert control and talk about morality with respect to children. Regardless of what you think about the issue, note that the Right has recently chosen to pick policy fights primarily about the trans issues that concern minors.

Or think about how Jonathan Haidt’s crusade against smartphones has been focused on teens, even when I’d assume that we could make many similar arguments about their harms to adults. Nonetheless, we’ve seen an embrace of school phone bans across the country.

Finally, the biggest breakthrough legal challenge to AI labs, which spurred political posturing from figures like Ron DeSantis, was not anything about job disruption to adults. It was about a kid using ChatGPT to help him commit suicide.

Once again our national anxieties about a new technology find their expression by worrying about children. The impulse to protect children and nurture them as a symbol of the future seems to have persisted, despite the withering away of both our statist and moral muscles.

While keeping kids from gambling and building safer roads may seem quite disparate, I think that both require re-asserting some state capacity that’s currently lacking. It’s not a coincidence that a government that is so burdened by process that it costs $1.7M to build a public park toilet also has a hard time getting delta-8 out of gas stations.

As Dean Ball noted with children’s AI usage, there will be many challenges regulating “AI child safety.” As we try to restrict their access, they’ll use less-regulated, open-source models hosted offshore. Kids always find a way around rules, and I’ll note that similar issues apply to sports gambling. The modern Internet poses real challenges for exerting social control, even when we’d want to.

But let’s leave the implementation challenges (usually my favorite topic) to another day. Moral language is what really animates reform efforts. And smart reformers should, like Joseph Folk, couple their project to it.

As Robert Wiebe said, the Progressive Era was a “search for order” in an increasingly complex and interconnected modern world. I believe that we’ll see a similar desire today. Perhaps it is only by thinking of the youth and the promise of tomorrow that we can re-gain the backbone to re-order our society.

As Francis Fukuyama says, we spend a lot of time in politics arguing about what the government should do and how big it should be. But if you look at successful countries around the world, they often differ in politics but align in having an effective government.

So the real question is: how do we improve the quality of government, whatever its size?

I’ve been reading about the Progressive Era to try to answer that question. That period, which runs roughly from 1890-1920, was a period of intense social and political reform that reinvented our political institutions and boosted state capacity.

I’m particularly interested in the politics: how do you actually knit together a political coalition and message effectively around these issues, which can often be kind of wonky (e.g., procurement reform), to get them passed?

One lesson crystallized across all the books I read: reform needs business.

Given the state of interest group politics today, I think that is even more true now than it was back then. The left-wing allergy to business is a huge barrier standing in the way of progress.

The Progressive Era precedent

It wasn’t always this way. Robert Wiebe’s The Search for Order describes how the late 1800s saw a rapid expansion and differentiation of business associational life — trade groups, industry councils, professional organizations. Generally, these were structured as federated membership organizations. Meaning that there were nested chapters (national, state, local) and dues-paying members.

Jon Teaford, in The Unheralded Triumph (which I wrote about here), zooms in on municipal governments, which were at the forefront of governmental innovation in this period.

Business played a huge role in two ways. For one, there was a civic-minded business elite that helped advance reforms and often occupied the Mayor’s office. (This group has, unfortunately, hollowed out significantly. See this post from Aaron Renn.)

But normal businesses were often pushing for reforms that were in their own interest. Fire insurance companies had a strong vested interest in improving fire safety and used their advocacy muscle to do so.

To pick a messier example, large meatpackers were actually quite friendly to food safety regulations, because it made it harder for their smaller competitors to keep up with the necessary compliance. Regulation tends to benefit big incumbents, so in an era where new laws and regulations were needed, big business was not inherently an enemy of Progressives.

The last of a dying breed

Businesses have on-the-ground knowledge of how various government processes work that is valuable for reform. Real estate developers understand permitting, for example. We might call it “lived experience.”

From a structural perspective, what’s more important is that there is a direct line of accountability between the fire insurance association’s lobbyist and her members.

This matters because, as Theda Skocpol has documented, the federated membership model has hollowed out in most of American civic life. Immigration advocacy groups are not actually composed of a bunch of immigrants who pay dues and influence strategy. They’re funded by rich donors and foundations and staffed by activists who don’t always share the views of the people they claim to represent. This has led to all sorts of distortions in American policymaking, particularly in the Democratic Party.

That decline in what scholars call “associational life” is broad and extends beyond politics. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is the famous book here.

But relative to that broader decline, business associations are an area where membership-based associations still operate pretty well. As a result, I think they’re particularly needed in the Democratic Party today to balance out the foundation-funded “associations without members.”

A labor organizer friend is fond of telling workers who are skeptical of joining a union: “whether or not you choose to organize, your boss is organized.” He’s right.

Relatedly, business associations bring their own resources to support the reform movement. If the Democratic Party is actually so concerned about billionaire influence in politics, they should welcome groups like a Realtors Association that can be independent and aren’t beholden to Big Money donors.

Put succinctly, they’re more democratic than most Democratic interest groups.

Finally, a lot has been written about how Democrats need to have a “bigger tent” party. The national brand is seen as elitist, judgmental, and aloof with respect to the average voter. What better way to reinforce that image than to spurn influence from the businesses that employ 70% of Americans!

The allergy to business

All of this seems like a no-brainer when you lay it out. And the smartest political actors know this. So why does the aversion to business among left-wing reformers persist?

Even leftist labor people that I know are happy to cultivate small business owners when there’s a real electoral issue on the table. But those same people are quick to complain about “capital” in Marxist terms as soon as someone allies with a business group they don’t like.

We should reject that kind of totalizing structural thinking. Sometimes big business will be your ally, like the food safety example above. Or take my recent writing about the early days of the US environmental movement, when big business was more on the side of regulation than small landowners:

Other times, small business will be your ally. For example, I’m a big fan of efforts to push for Clinical Trial Abundance, getting more effective, cutting-edge drugs and therapeutics to patients faster. On the whole, big pharma is much less interested in reforms at the FDA than small biotech companies are, because they know all the unwritten rules and how to navigate the process. It’s just like the food safety rules: regulation benefits big incumbents. But in this case we want less regulation (or at least clearer rules).

Basically, we need to just be chill about business and welcome them into the reform push whenever their interests align with the public good.

This will be a cultural struggle for Democrats, who love to police their membership with projects like the Revolving Door Project (which is, ironically, an association without members funded by rich people and foundations).

Railing against oligarchs, big business, and corporate power has become even more essential to a large faction within the Democratic Party. This has its populist spokespeople, like Graham Platner, as well as its elitist intellectuals, who are largely in the Neo-Brandeisian anti-monopoly crowd associated with Elizabeth Warren and Lina Khan.

As a talking point to get people fired up, it’s fine. Us vs. them politics has its time and place. But it’s more problematic for making actual good policy, as both Noah Smith and Jonathan Chait have recently argued.

This allergy to business connections leads to the government staffing itself poorly. Jerusalem Demsas spoke in a recent podcast about how she “heard from someone who was in Treasury on background tell me about how they had trouble during the SVB (Silicon Valley Bank) crisis to finding someone [internally] who could walk them through what was literally going to happen as this crisis was unfolding because they didn’t have people who were working in, you know, banking in the administration in those offices.” That’s bad!

To draw on my own experience, I worked on a case where a business association was pushing for a state-level housing reform. This policy would have massive benefits for racial equity (with disproportionate benefits flowing to small and under-resourced municipalities), housing supply and cost, and economic growth and business (making it easier to build and sell homes). In short, a win-win for progressives and for business.

But it was incredibly hard for me to sell colleagues on the fact that business people might be doing something good, despite all the clear evidence. Ultimately, I got the grant through, but only after my colleagues forced them to write a mea culpa for wrongs committed by their trade ~80 years ago.

The Democratic Party’s allergy to business doesn’t seem to be getting better, unfortunately. The anti-corporate faction only seems to be getting stronger in blue states. But for anyone pragmatic, the direction should be clear: work with whoever wants to advance your shared goals. And relying exclusively on groups who take money from rich people and foundations does not get you out of the conundrum of working with vested interests.

You can definitely err too far in relying on business, which can calcify into regulatory capture and corruption. But the opposite — a reform movement that refuses to work with business on principle — is a reform movement that can’t get anything done.

This is part of a series on lessons from the Progressive Era. Previous entries: The Diminishing Returns Problem, Does Reform Require One-Party Rule?, and We’re in the Patchwork Era.

But there’s a strange tension here. We still love and admire what was built in that era. Public works like the Brooklyn Bridge, Carnegie Hall, countless beautiful public libraries.

Even more important than those civic landmarks are the feats of civil engineering produced in this era. Paved roads, electrified street lights, aqueducts, and sewer systems that we still use today. Over a hundred years later, we are still living in the cities constructed in that era.

So how bad can this era be, given that we still love so much of what it produced? That tension is the jumping off point for Jon Teaford’s The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900.

The nostalgia for the big state achievements of that era has only grown in recent years, particularly from Abundance types who want the government to perform better. There’s a faction of that movement, typified by Stripe CEO and philanthropist Patrick Collison, who want to focus more on beauty in public works. Ross Douthat has recently argued that this should be a principal focus of what Nan Ransohoff has termed “the third wave of American philanthropy” that will emerge from AI wealth.

People admire what was produced in this era, so let’s look at how the sausage was made.

My main takeaway from reading Teaford is that a lot of the easy dichotomies that we use to describe the Gilded Age and Progressive Era dissolve into a mess of factions and power-sharing. The self-interest of machine politics and the idealism of reform movements were a part of this pluralistic mess. But somehow this mess produced a lower-case-L liberalism that built, to butcher Ezra Klein’s phrase.

The messiness of the era is a challenge to our contemporary interest-group veto politics, but also to the technocratic bent of Abundance politics. Neither centralized authority nor fully-decentralized negotiation describes the form of old municipal politics, though it’s closer to the latter than the former.

How Cities Actually Worked: The Factions

Teaford’s book is a highly descriptive and granular work of history, but his overall point (made in 1984) is simple: this era of city government gets a bad rap. Machine politics were real and corruption did exist, but the cities deserve much more credit for what they accomplished than they typically get.

First, how did city government actually work in this era?

The simplified narrative pits corrupt party bosses versus an emerging class of reformers, who would later crystallize into the Progressive Movement and take over both national political parties by 1912. But in reality, it was a thriving ecosystem with a handful of factions:

• Mayors: typically successful business people. Teaford says primarily they were “downtown bankers, wholesalers, manufacturers, and lawyers.”

• Ward legislators (aldermen): often immigrants and small business owners. These businesses often kept them in regular contact with residents, but were low status. A saloon keeper is the platonic ideal here. Their job was to advocate for material resources (e.g., paved roads, street lamps) for their wards.

• Emerging professional civil servant class: engineers, teachers, doctors, public health professionals, firemen, you name it. All of these professional groups were emerging with their own specialization, standards, and interests.

• Civic organizations: Some of these, like Chambers of Commerce or specific professional associations, still exist today. Others, like “good-government clubs,” are more an artifact of the highly-associational Progressive Era.

Last, but not least, the infamous Party Boss. Teaford reframes them less as “dictators” and more as “brokers.”

Essentially, the Party Boss mediated between the interests above, sometimes in collaboration with the Mayor. Along the way, they tried to get a cut for their party members. Maybe a bribe, maybe a contract for waste management for a friend’s company. But, all in all, “boss” is too strong a word.

So that’s how city government worked. You have a highly pluralistic democracy, with business interests, public interests, higher class, lower class, professionals, amateurs, native-born Americans, immigrants. And then you have party bosses to, in Teaford’s words, “create coalition in the place of conflict” between such a diverse group.

Reversing rivers like Old Testament God

We’ve already covered some of the era’s achievements. But it’s jaw-dropping when you put them all together, as Teaford does here with Chicago:

In 1830 Chicago was a frontier trading post with a few log structures, a few muddy paths, and a few dozen inhabitants. Seventy years later it was a city of 1.5 million people, with a waterworks pumping 500 million gallons of water to its residents each day and a drainage system with over 1,500 miles of sewers.

…

In a single lifetime Chicago residents had transformed a prairie bog into one of the greatest cities in the world, and during this short period the governmental authorities, with remarkable energy and daring, had provided migrants to the metropolis with a level of public services rarely equaled in the world of the late nineteenth century. In the 1850s the city council had ordained that the level of the swampy city be raised ten feet, and it had been done. In later decades the municipal authorities had ordered that the flow of the Chicago river be reversed, and so it was reversed. The achievements of government in Chicago at times rivaled the feats of the Old Testament God. Moreover the Chicago experience was representative of what was happening throughout the nation.

Teaford also compares American cities to those in Europe. America had the edge on parks, libraries, public health, fire departments, public transit, and basic infrastructure like roads. Europe had us beat on policing and services for the poor. Broadly, Europe is better at “social control”:

[The American city] was unable or unwilling to master the social environment through the imposition of stringent codes of morality or vast ameliorative schemes for the reformation of the pauper. It planned and harnessed the inanimate; it was less systematic and overpowering in its response to the animate.

There’s a similar divergence between America and Europe today, except that America has gotten much worse at building stuff.

So why the bad reputation?

Teaford sketches out a diverse, pluralistic city that accomplished a tremendous amount, all while integrating people of different classes, ethnicities, and professional backgrounds. So what’s the issue?

Put simply, elites were grumpy that they had to share power with common people like saloon keeper aldermen and immigrants. That pseudo-aristocracy wrote the first draft of the history and their narrative of an immigrant-run, corrupt politics became locked in.

I find this explanation unsatisfying. Corruption was bad and a moral offense to the public.

Teaford’s argument isn’t baseless. At one point, he empirically examines the fiscal impact of graft and finds that budget effects were minimal:

Yet during the 1880s and 1890s graft did not lead America’s cities to bankruptcy nor did it result in rapidly mounting tax burdens. Instead, tax levels remained stable and municipal credit improved while city services increased and public facilities expanded. In other words, graft remained at an economically tolerable level, a level that did not seriously disrupt the prevailing fiscal conservatism of the nation’s cities. It may have existed, but it did not drive investment bankers to eschew municipal securities or force city governments into the arms of receivers.

This is an absurdly dry, technocratic way to think about this issue. And I should know, I’m a dry technocrat!

If you read the beginning of The Power Broker, or read any stories about the Progressive Era, it’s hard to say that the only reason that Gilded Age is remembered poorly is because of grumpy elites.

The people themselves were upset about corruption! It led to a reform movement that was so powerful that it took over both of the major American political parties. There were three major presidential candidates in 1912, all of whom were progressive reformers. Something bigger is going on here.

And that something is a sense of public, moral injury. I recently read Holy Joe, a biography of Joseph Folk, St. Louis’s bribery-busting circuit attorney-turned-Missouri-governor. He broke up Ed Butler’s “Big Cinch,” the equivalent of Tammany Hall in St. Louis.

Butler had roving gangs that “created election day chaos by ‘moving the polls,’ assaulting voters, intimidating election judges, and voting often (‘repeating’) for their candidate.” A cabal of local business interests paid bribes for government contracts.

It’s no wonder that Folk became a local and national hero for standing up and saying “bribery is no ordinary felony, but treason.” His was a politics of morality; he saw corruption as the worst of all vices.

I’ll write more about corruption in the future, both in the Progressive Era and now. But suffice it to say: corruption mattered above and beyond its narrow budget impacts.

What machines were actually for

Though I think he underrates the importance of corruption, Teaford is a great representative of a broader neorevisionist school of history that is trying to resurrect the virtues of the Machine Politics era.

What lessons does this hold for state capacity debates today? Especially at the local level.

A useful framework here is Robert Merton’s famous distinction between the “manifest” and “latent” functions of political machines.

To attempt to de-jargon this, the idea is that a political system does some things intentionally and others unintentionally. The intended effects are easy to see. Merton’s contribution was rendering the unintended ones more visible.

In the case of political machines, they had the direct and observable effect of enriching their party members via corruption. But it’s hard to enrich your members if the government isn’t accomplishing anything! So they had to cut through red tape and get things done. This was their “latent function.”

Here’s Merton in his own words:

Whatever its specific historical origins, the political machine persists as an apparatus for satisfying otherwise unfulfilled needs of diverse groups in the population.

…

This dispersion of power is found not only at the national level but in local areas as well. “As a consequence,” Sait goes on to observe, “when the people or particular groups among them demand positive action, no one had adequate authority to act. The machine provided the antidote.”

To return to Teaford, it’s not as if machine bosses acted unilaterally. They were responding to the demands of their members and negotiating with civil servants, aldermen, and mayors. But, often with unsavory methods, they served as “brokers” who could eventually get something done after that complicated negotiation. And, of course, they took a cut.

What we’ve lost

Before I discuss what’s gone wrong, a quick caveat. The baseline of what we expect cities to do today is much higher than it was in 1870. The public gives you a lot more credit for paving the first roads than for maintaining the thousands of miles of roads that are already paved. I discussed this here as the Diminishing Returns Problem, and I think the Solow model of economic growth’s distinction between building and maintaining physical capital applies here too:

Back to Teaford. Part of the reason that scholars like him appreciate political machines is that they emerged and addressed those “unfulfilled needs” of the public. At the same time, they integrated low income people and immigrants into the political process and thus helped democratize the country.

If you take that kind of participatory, functioning government as a given, the corruption feels most salient. But in an era where government struggles to accomplish things, the effectiveness of these local governments stands out much more.

To put it in Merton’s terms, with distance we can better appreciate the latent functions of political machines and separate them from their manifest corruption.

When we compare today to Teaford’s era, we’re missing most of the pieces of the puzzle that helped those cities accomplish great things.

For one, we lack the same kind of robust political parties that connected everyday people to politics in a way that mattered for their day-to-day lives. I wrote about this more here; the hollowing out of political parties has resulted in worse candidates for big elections and a much more disconnected and distrusting public:

Even though these old, robust parties were often corrupt, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for the role they served in engaging the everyday person and making sure they benefited from the political process.

Similarly, what happened to the reform organizations? Municipal research bureaus, for example, which were essentially locally-focused think tanks. What about civic leagues and good government clubs? Local journalism, greatly thinned out today, helped shine the spotlight on bad government to give more momentum to the reformers.

The ranks of civic-minded business elites have also thinned, the very people who ran these clubs and often served as mayors. Aaron Renn wrote insightfully about this in a piece titled “How American Cities Lost Their Movers and Shakers.”

Aaron Renn

How American Cities Lost Their Movers and Shakers

I’ve written for years on how most American cities have seen a major erosion in their civic leadership capacity over the past 30 years. I’ve heavily linked this to changes in the composition of commu…

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5 months ago · 76 likes · 8 comments · Aaron M. Renn

In short, businesses have consolidated and become more focused on the national or global level. Gone are the kind of “downtown banker” types that filled mayors’ offices.

Democracy is messy – need it be corrupt?

The dichotomy between corrupt machines and virtuous reformers is far too simple. There were deep collaborations between all of the factions above, none of whom had enough power to run the table.

Teaford helps burst dichotomies, both of machine versus reform and the public versus experts. On the ground, American politics was as messy as ever. As I observed with the environmental movement, the best results often arise when we foster pluralism, letting strongly-opinionated factions duke it out over hard questions. But then we need to let someone move forward after brokering a final compromise.

Though this power-sharing left no one group completely satisfied, perhaps this is the dream scenario. As they say, that’s the sign of a good compromise.

A hybrid of machine and reform is what got things done. It combined the people’s material self-interest, channeled through political parties, with the high aspirations, idealism and technical expertise of elites.

I plan to explore this in a future piece, but a lingering question for me: how much can we separate the latent and manifest functions of political machines? Was corruption necessary to grease the wheels of government? Can we get this era’s virtues without its vices?

I host an annual BBQ that begins with this reading and it’s clear that many of my guests are uncomfortable with the idea. The disproportionately left wing and highly educated people (right now, same group because of education polarization) that I hang out with are very unpatriotic.

But my experience is that they leave surprised at how short, accessible, and relevant it still is.

One reason that I think I differ from them is that I try to take a much broader, global view of America and compare it to the appropriate peers. And when I do so, I come away feeling pretty good!

Patriotism then and now

Before I get to that, some data. It doesn’t seem like the anti-patriotism among my cohort isn’t getting better:

Some of these lowest numbers came from Democrats while they were in power! They were higher even when Trump was in power the first time! What’s going on here?

This all bums me out because it’s not how it’s always been. Progressives have usually appealed to a broader sense of optimism and passion for America. Think of James Baldwin’s famous quote: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

When Langston Hughes criticized his country he wrote “Let America Be America Again,” not “America Has Always Sucked, So Let’s Scrap It.”

Being anti-patriotic is a bad brand and it’s uninspiring. It makes progressive culture alienating to normal people. It makes it alienating to me. I wrote a bit more here about Richard Rorty and his vision of a positive, patriotic left.

But “you should be patriotic because it’s instrumentally useful and it’s good politics” is probably not going to be enough for highly educated people. So let’s try to think about it a bit more rationally.

Who are America’s peers?

A lot of the negativity about America comes from making unrealistic comparisons that are apples to oranges.

People love to compare the whole United States with a small European nation like Denmark, or to some idyllic European city they visit like Paris or Berlin. But that’s ridiculous!

It’s probably more accurate to compare the entirety of Europe with America. The EU has around 440 million people in it, the US has around 330 million people in it. Much more reasonable comparison than trying to compare the US and Denmark, which has around 6 million people living in it.

The question is: what is America’s appropriate reference class? What group does it belong in? What are the realistic expectations that follow?

Zooming out, two groupings feel salient to me:

1. Large, populous, multiethnic democracies

2. Countries in the Western Hemisphere

Let’s start with the first category. I went and pulled a list of all the countries in the world with populations over 100,000 people. Less than 10% meet this description and the only European country on the list is Russia:

My takeaway from this list is: being a large and populous country is hard! Being a democracy is even harder! Being a diverse, multiethnic country is hard! Being all three? Woof.

Who even meets all three of those criteria? Not a lot. Strongest contenders are India, Indonesia, and Brazil. Maybe Bangladesh?

Pakistan, Nigeria, and Mexico come close, but struggle to actually govern all of their own territory. Many here are not democracies and/or work to actively suppress diversity, such as the Uyghurs in China.

India has almost five times our population. In some ways, it’s the reverse of the US-Denmark problem – the state of Uttar Pradesh alone has 241M people in it. Perhaps the US should be compared to clusters of Indian states or regions, rather than the whole country. This is, in fact, how investors talk about India, as being essentially three countries in one.

To return to the question of our peers. I’ll settle on Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico as our best comparison points there.

The last two gives us a nice segue into America’s other best reference class: the Americas.

Latin America, which makes up most of the Americas, is also the region with the most inequality in the world. Violence, one of the United States’ big issues relative to Europe, looks a lot more normal in the context of “New World violence.” A recent article by Lisa Miller, “Lethal Violence and the Americas: Beyond the U.S.-European Comparisons on Crime and Punishment,” makes the same argument in an academic context.

Both relevant facts when discussing the United States.

How do we stack up?

Personally, I think a lot becomes clear the second you look at the list of the 16 most populous countries. But let’s actually be data-driven here and compare across some issues: democratic stability, violence, inequality, and prosperity. I’ll also throw Russia and Germany in there for reference, as those are the two most populous European countries, one in the EU and one not.

Claude helped me pull the numbers into this nice table:

A few things stand out. One, the US has a lot of people, with a population of Brazil and Mexico put together. Or Russia plus two Germanys.

It is much more violent than Germany and Indonesia, but much less violent than Mexico and Brazil. I was surprised that Russia was more violent than the US, as lower violent crime is sometimes a benefit of authoritarian regimes (something I observed firsthand in Cuba in 2018).

The US does indeed have high inequality, on par with Mexico. But it’s also much much richer than anyone else on the list, besides Germany.1

The US has an unparalleled run of 250 years of democracy and looks solid on its Democracy Index. But democratic backsliding is real and not limited to the US. Indonesia’s democracy is less than 30 years old and, while I’m no expert, it seems like they are already dealing with rising authoritarianism and that 2024 Democracy Index rating would likely be lower today.

Brazil had its own January 6 moment on January 8, 2023. As I’ve written here, our politics is coming to more closely resemble that of Latin America: strongmen, misinformation, polarization, massive pendulum swings election-to-election.

This is unquestionably bad, but also probably still places America as “very democratic” in the grand scheme of history and the world writ large, which still features many authoritarian regimes. Frankly, it also feels like America is reverting to the mean and increasingly resembling its own chaotic 19th century.

As many European nations have shown, Germany included, democratic backsliding is also not an irreversible one-way trend. Perhaps, as Robert Putnam suggested in his book, we’re due for an Upswing.

America is and isn’t special

It’s not crazy to look at America in comparison to other rich countries like Germany. But it’s not the whole picture, and I hope this sober comparison opens up some new ways of considering the American experiment.

My goal is to avoid American exceptionalism, which I think cuts both ways here in the patriotism conversation. That phrase, “American exceptionalism,” is usually brought up in response to patriotic cheerleaders. America’s harshest critics are exceptionalists, too, just in the opposite direction.

Being a large country, a populous country, a diverse country, and a democratic country are four separate challenges. Combining the four has almost no precedent around the world.

A lot of what seems most troubling about America makes a lot more sense when you accept that it is wrestling with the same problems that plague its peer countries, be they American nations or large, diverse democracies.

Here’s to another 250 years of muddling through!

The one time in American history when we made major strides on the quality of government is the Progressive Era, the period after the Gilded Age when we built the modern national government. One of the most illuminating books that I’ve read about the era is Stephen Skowronek’s Building A New American State, which I wrote about here and here.

Skowronek is one of our foremost scholars on the ways that America has continually reinvented its political institutions to meet the challenges of the day. His latest book, The Adaptability Paradox, takes stock of the present moment and it’s quite dark.

The book argues that these previous reinventions and adaptations always depended on social exclusion to arrive at common ground. Since the Rights Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, we’ve actually created a fully inclusive democracy, but it may have eroded the common ground needed to adapt our institutions to address contemporary challenges.

Professor Skowronek was gracious enough to make some time to answer my questions about these two books and about contemporary reform efforts.

As a last bit of housekeeping, I thoroughly enjoyed Jack Balkin’s recent symposium he hosted about the book on his blog, which we both reference a few times during the interview.

Intro

Ben: I’m struck, given the topic of your most recent book, that your first one, Building a New American State, also ends with a suggestion that we might need to move beyond our Constitution. It’s the very last paragraph of the book.1 And so I’m curious — obviously The Adaptability Paradox lands on a sharper version of that kind of question. What were the light-bulb moments for you between that initial suggestion and the work that you’re writing now?

Skowronek: I’m sorry, what happened to change my mind? I don’t think I’ve changed my mind. There’s sort of an exhaustion that runs through all of my writing, even about the presidency. On the one hand an attention to this remarkable history of renewal and a capacity to regenerate American government. I think that’s true in Building a New American State. It’s true in The Politics Presidents Make, and it’s true in The Adaptability Paradox.

But there’s a sense in which I’m looking to the past not only for clues as to how we were able to regenerate politics in the past, but as to whether there’s anything different about this particular moment that might lead us to think that that regenerative capacity is not what it once was.

Two Patchwork eras

Ben: Thinking about that capacity in your work on the Progressive Era — you sort of divide it in two. There’s this Patchwork era of reform where the problems exist, there’s social pressure to address them from the bottom up, but the political system, especially at the federal level, is not well suited to address them. And then there’s this era of Reform where a bunch of stuff happens and this pent-up demand is addressed.

I came away thinking that we’re in a Patchwork era today, where partisan competition is too tight to let inter-branch reform take over. Your diagnosis in your more recent book is almost a little deeper. It sort of suggests that even if Republicans or Democrats ran the table for 20 years, we wouldn’t see a pivot toward inter-branch conflict.

So I guess I’ve been stuck on that one-party-rule idea as one of the things that got us out of it in the Progressive Era. And I’m curious, how important do you think that one-party-rule concept is? And how much do you think applies today?

Skowronek: Well, I agree with you. The clearest analog to politics in the last 20 years is politics in the late 19th century, when there was no dominant party. The parties rotated in and out of national power every two years. There was a lot of pent-up demand for reform. So I agree that this is a moment like that.

When I said that, I didn’t think that a solution is for one of the parties to run the table and take control of the government. I was thinking about American politics since 2008, right? So we had supposedly the Obama breakthrough, right? And that lasted about two years. And then in 2016, we had a Trump breakthrough, and that lasted about two years. And then in 2024 we had another Trump breakthrough. You might say we even had a Biden breakthrough in 2020 that lasted probably less than two years.

And now, I just don’t see that the solution is for one of these parties to take control. That’s not the solution. The solution has to be in building some kind of larger consensus about what the purposes of the government are, which I think we’ve completely lost.

Ben: In your second response to the Balkinization symposium you mention Civic Constitutionalism. Is that what you mean?

Skowronek: Well, of the ideas that are out there, that strikes me as the closest to something — people who are thinking that it’s got to be more than just a partisan victory. There’s got to be some groundwork. I mean, you could call it social capital, or you could even call it what the Progressives had. The last time we had a movement for good government — but in order to have a movement for good government, you have to know what the government’s supposed to be doing, right?

And how do you generate a common sense of that? I think that is really where you have to begin now, because right now it is just a matter of one party taking control and screwing the other party.

Ben: As somebody who has seen nonprofit funding in that civic-dialogue and reconstruction kind of space, I’ll admit it’s hard sometimes to tell what’s a nice academic seminar idea and what’s something that’s really got some teeth. I’m curious if there’s any work that you’re seeing out there in that cultural, deeper vein you’re talking about, that inspires you or that you think is promising.

Skowronek: Well, I wish I could say that I did. I mean, it may be that I’m just not looking hard enough, just not aware of all that’s going on out there. But I haven’t seen much. I certainly haven’t seen that dialogue penetrate into the public sphere.

Who’s the next reform class?

Ben: Let me sort of go back and think about something from Adaptability Paradox, which is — you talk a lot about how some of these political reorderings come when a new social class emerges with new skills.

So you talk about that some with Van Buren, you talk about that some with the universities. I’ve been thinking a lot about the “rise of the professions” in the Progressive Era. In a way, there’s a similar thing going on with your narrative about the Federalist Society and originalism and the way they worked the legal world.

And it seems like, the Rights Revolution did not do that. There was some collective ambivalence about the state, which tracks with some of the stuff I’ve read from Marc Dunkelman and others.

I’m curious — again, we’re talking about sort of reform efforts today — there is sort of an emerging centrist community of people that I think, in the best-case scenario, would be seen as “Neo-Progressives.” How do you read this current moment in the policy world? What skill sets do you think are needed for them to be successful?

Skowronek: Yeah. Well, I’m glad you picked up on that, because this is a piece of the book that few people have picked up on, which is that these major reorderings have come from new social classes: the rise of the entrepreneurial class in the 1830s, the rise of a professional class in the turn of the 20th century, which built the administrative state.

I think — and I looked, I mean, the last chapter of that book looks around and says, well, do we have any analogues to that? And I look at the so-called new class that arose during the 1960s and 70s, and I look at the legal-conservative movement.

What distinguishes those from the earlier reconstructive common carriers of a new governmental vision is that they’re from the same class — they’re just factions of university-trained professionals that are fighting. They have the same basic skills. They come from the same basic institutions, the same basic training.

So what I see is a kind of fragmentation of the professional class, a polarization of the professional class that mirrors the polarization of the political class.

Ironically, I think if you’re looking for a new class, a new social movement that has a different vision of governance, I think it is probably the revanchist Trumpers who are taking aim at the professional class. They’re quite uncomfortable with the Federalist Society as well, and they certainly have no use for the new class. And that’s pretty scary to me because they don’t have much stake in constitutional government at all.

So that’s the scariest thing to me — that the broadside critique of the administrative state is coming from those who don’t have a stake in re-envisioning constitutional government.

Ben: There’s a populist movement, and that was also something that arose during the Progressive Era too — although there wasn’t an existing administrative state to attack yet.

Skowronek: Right. The Progressives absorbed the Populists.

Tech elites and the government

Ben: Yeah, exactly. What do you think about the most recent generation of Silicon Valley wealth as an emerging class with sort of a different way of addressing problems and stuff like that? How do you think they fit into your description of the professional classes?

Skowronek: Interesting. Well, they seem to have made a pact with the populists as a kind of anti-government movement. To reference the previous historical eras, which may or may not be a guide, these earlier classes threw up elites who thought a lot about the Constitution.

They thought a lot about how they could make this Constitution work in a new period for new purposes. And I don’t see that in Silicon Valley. I don’t think they have much use for government. They don’t have a governmental vision.

So in that sense, that makes them potential allies to today’s populists. But as I said, I can’t tell you that I’m an expert on what Silicon Valley thinking is these days.

Ben: It strikes me that there’s some interesting discourse amongst some of those people, especially with a lot of new wealth being created by AI companies, about assuming more of a civic mantle.

[Note for readers: Alex Karp of Palantir is one of the main people pushing for this publicly. I’d direct readers to both Tanner Greer’s sympathetic but insightful takedown of Karp’s book from the Right, as well as another recent response from Niskanen Center’s Geoff Kabaservice. I take the recent viral piece by Nan Ransohoff about the upcoming “Third Wave of American Philanthropy” (from AI wealth) to be grappling with similar questions.]

Aaron Renn

From WASP Elites to AI Kings | Tanner Greer

In this episode I sit down with returning guest Tanner Greer, one of America's most insightful public intellectuals, to dive deep into his recent American Affairs article, "The Making of a Techno-Nat…

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7 months ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Aaron M. Renn

It just strikes me that when you think about emerging social classes that have some sort of shared values — that it will be significant what happens there, one way or another.

Skowronek: What is their thinking about their civic consciousness?

Ben: I think there’s a number of people who are focused on state capacity from a technological perspective. The model that fits into my head, honestly, is that I think that information technology has broken our institutions in a similar way that the telegraph and the railroad did in the Progressive Era. There’s a similar speed-condensing of space and time that has happened that our institutions are not very well set up for.

So there’s a growing community of technologists who take the government’s role seriously and are trying to equip the government to be more responsive or have better tools for public engagement.

[Hat tip to this recent Patrick McKenzie interview with Luke Farrell, who talks about the US Digital Service. Here’s another recent Substack I’ve enjoyed talking about bridging the gap between technologists and policymakers.]

Audrey Tang’s work in Taiwan is a global case study that people cite. There’s Glen Weyl, who I think works at Microsoft currently, who’s working with Tang and exploring interesting participatory tools to give people more of a voice in government process but in less of a veto-heavy way than we tend to do with community participation today.

So there are people who think that way. But I think your impression is shared by many people and it’s revealing. This idea that tech elites have not always been seriously concerned with questions of governance in the past. I mean, with some exceptions — Bill Gates is ultimately a part of that as well, and the Gates Foundation is deeply concerned with institutions.

Skowronek: Look, what did the entrepreneurs in these previous reorderings or adaptations of constitutional government in the United States come up with? They invented new institutions. They invented institutions that could mediate conflicts in a new way, and institutions that were seen in some way to embody a public interest. And I just don’t see that.

If we’re going to gut the bureaucracy and hollow out the parties, what are the mediating institutions that are going to express a kind of common ground? And I don’t mean this in the sense that everybody’s going to agree. It’s that competition and contestation have to have some modicum of agreement on what the purposes are.

I think the most troubling thing in The Adaptability Paradox is that that agreement on what the common purposes are, previously, in earlier eras, was premised consistently on an agreement on who would be left out. And that leads to the question of, can we reconstitute constitutional government in the United States on the premise of full inclusion? Because that’s the one thing that was missing in all the previous reconstitutions.

The missing moral language

Ben: Well, let me ask you a question that I think ties into that question of what the common ground is, but also something you were talking about earlier — about the movement for good government.

You mentioned in your Balkinization symposium response, you said: “Our commitment to a new state for a new democracy has yet to be coupled to a potent social movement.” And I am struck, when I read about the Progressives, what a deeply Christian and moral movement it was.

Ben: For example, I studied Joseph Folk, who was St. Louis prosecutor and then governor of Missouri. They called him “Holy Joe” because he had a broad politics of anti-vice and pro-morality, and he just saw corruption as the worst vice, basically.

I think that our current lack of a common shared moral language is related to your adaptability-paradox idea — but I’m curious, do you see a synthesis coming there? Do you see a moral language that can unite some of these emerging reform efforts?

I see rumblings of it with some of the AI backlash and the backlash to social media; some of the focus on protecting kids is similar to what was happening in the Progressive Era. I’m curious what you see happening now, and are there any lines or dots that could get connected?

Skowronek: Yeah, I wish I could be more helpful on this kind of stuff. I wrote the book because I wanted to point to what elites in previous eras saw and how they articulated it, to show that that doesn’t seem to be happening today, or we’re long overdue.

And the one thing that we haven’t done is to articulate a kind of common aspiration, a common set of goals. In fact, what I see is the dominant trend that continues to deepen — one wonders how deep it can go — which is drifting apart in basic conceptions of what America is all about.

Look, The Adaptability Paradox, it’s a disturbing book. If I had a solution, I would have written a more hopeful book. I didn’t write it because I don’t want people to think about what it might be, but I don’t know what it is, and I don’t see it out there — as Richard Nixon would say, bring us together.

I’m sorry I can’t be more responsive to this.

Ben: No, it’s okay. I think that is its own answer. I’m trying to figure out some of these answers too, so that’s why I’m asking.

Congressional gaslighting

Ben: So I have a wonkier question. The United States has, for lots of periods in its history, been a “Nation of Courts and Parties.: Parties are hollowed out right now. But there’s some interesting stuff happening with the courts.

I am trying to grapple with the Roberts Court’s role from this institutional lens. So I see something like trying to limit universal injunctions, and that immediately gets funneled into partisan framing, right? That’s like how the news functions.

But is the Roberts Court trying to put pressure back on Congress in a way that is actually constructive from an institutional lens, and not be a pressure-release valve for things Congress is abdicating responsibility for, which you can argue they’ve been doing in one form or another all the way back to the Progressive Era? Or am I being too generous?

Skowronek: Certainly that’s what the Roberts Court thinks it’s doing, or at least tells itself it’s doing — that it’s Congress’s faithful agent, and all Congress has to do is get its act together and state its purposes and the Court will govern accordingly.

But the Court’s not going to do it if they can’t figure out what Congress wants. Josh Chafetz calls this congressional gaslighting. It’s like there’s no effort on the Court to recognize how Congress operates and how Congress does try to make its purposes clear. And when Congress does use new and inventive tools, the court strikes it down as a violation of the separation of powers.

This fetishism for the separation of powers puts Congress in a box. Congress is the one branch that cannot abide a strict separation of powers. It depends on the other branches for some kind of cooperative and sympathetic interaction.

So in the 1970s, the last great era of Congressional creativity about government, they relied on the legislative veto. The Court said, “It’s unconstitutional, I can’t do this.” All right…

Think about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau They came up with a kind of ingenious structure for that. One thing Congress can do is kind of construct agencies in new and inventive ways. And the Court says “you can’t do that, you’re in this box, can’t do that.”

And they’re about to strike down independent agencies. They’re about to strike down all the instruments that Congress uses to make clear how it wants to govern.

So it seems to me that the Court talks a good game — “Oh, we’re the faithful agents of Congress. All we need to know is exactly what their purposes are, and we’ll rule accordingly.” And then when Congress tries to organize a government as it sees fit, the Court says “you can’t do that.”

It’s a catch-22. You do need a sympathetic court, but I don’t think this is a sympathetic court.

The figures we reach for

Ben: I am always struck that history helps me remember that no problem is brand new. We’ve seen a lot of similar situations before.

There was a lot I learned from your book and others about Teddy Roosevelt. I think he was a sort of pathbreaking, norm-breaking figure that helps me read some of what’s happening today in a new light.

In your symposium response, you bring up FDR as… an aggressive pursuer of presidentialism, to put it diplomatically.

I’ve also personally been thinking a lot about Richard Nixon lately as a forebearer of our modern culture wars and a similar war on the administrative state.

I’m curious — you have so much deep knowledge about American history — is there anyone else outside of those figures that comes to mind for you when you try to process what’s happening today or the last 20 years?

Skowronek: Nixon is a good one. Most of our contemporary issues with governance relate back to what happened in the 1970s. And what happened in the 1970s is largely about how the government’s going to respond to the rights revolution and the inclusion of women and minorities,.

The inability to find a solution to that problem — and the sort of the progressively deepening problems that emerged from the 1970s, in terms of how we’re going to organize the government to accommodate this new democracy. This is where I think the problem is anchored.

Of course, everybody wants to point to Andrew Jackson, right? You point to Andrew. We used to say in Trump’s first term, right, he had pictures of Andrew Jackson all over the White House, that he was taking his cues from Jackson. I think it’s gone much farther than that now. It’s much deeper than that now.

There’s a kind of disregard for constitutional government that would make Jackson blush.

Ben: One of my big takeaways from your book is that Van Buren is an incredibly consequential figure that is not discussed enough. Is he America’s most overlooked influential political figure?

Skowronek: I mean, in my circles he’s not overlooked. But perhaps in popular lore.

I mean, his conception of a two-party system, and how a two-party system could hold the nation together and suppress the slavery issue — I think that’s one of the big architectural moments since the Constitution of reconfiguring institutional relationships: the invention of a competitive party system.

But, you know, Richard Hofstadter understood that in the 1950s. So I don’t know that it’s overlooked.

Since the Constitution there have been two moments of extraordinary institutional creativity. One is the Jackson era, which gave us party government, and the other is the Progressive Era, which gave us the administrative state.

I’m conspicuously passing over Civil War Reconstruction, because while that gave us three incredibly potent Constitutional amendments, it didn’t reorganize the government to give them effect.

So those are the two great moments. And we’re long overdue for another moment. I don’t see it, but maybe we’re in the midst of it. Maybe Trumpism is it. I don’t know. That would be very depressing.

Federalism, federation, and future paths

Ben: Let me push you on that. Let’s say you’re Stephen Skowronek III, writing in the year 2126 about the great period of institutional renewal of the 2020s or the 2030s. What do you think — what’s a plausible way that goes? Be as optimistic or pessimistic as you want.

Skowronek: Well, I don’t know — but the easy answer would be, and the answer that I always hear and I think has some merit, is a kind of — I think Rogers Smith raised this in his response to The Adaptability Paradox in that symposium, where he talked about federation — not federalism so much as federation — as a way of allowing different communities to thrive perhaps without a central government imposing one particular view. Smith then extends this idea of federation to the world. He talks about world federation, kind of a Wilsonian idea.

Ben: It’s interesting how much I’m hearing about versions of federalism from both right and left, whereas I feel like it’s typically a right-coded concept. But I’ve heard it more from some national folks I know, doing work in DC on the left-wing side too, of just saying “we’ve got to have some proof points at the state level and make some of this stuff work to scale it up.”

Skowronek: I’m of two minds about that. So the Court’s abortion decision, overruling national-sanctioned abortion, throwing it back to the states. I think that that was effective in taking it off the national agenda. It’s not much of an issue right now.

But the downside of that is that there are some states where women don’t have the right and some states where women do. So I’m not sure that that’s — the problem with federalism, perhaps, as opposed to federation — the problem with federalism is that it accepts unequal rights. People have different rights in different places. And if you’re a democrat, a small-D, genuine democrat, that’s a hard pill to swallow.

1. Nostalgebraist on whether AI safety research is creating the risks it fears

This is a very long and winding post, which effectively traces the development of LLMs and poses interesting questions about the nature of AI identity. But I’ve mostly mulled over its statements about the AI risk/safety community and its current practices.

AI is quite likely a new being, a new form of intelligence that we are bringing into the world. Perhaps, in almost Greek Tragedy fashion, the way that we are hoping to guard ourselves against catastrophic AI risk is actually sowing the seeds of the very scenarios we are trying to avoid.

A lot of AI safety monitoring research is some combination of: let’s treat AI as if it’s actually evil and duplicitous. Or let’s make AI act evil and duplicitous and then see if we can catch it. Or let’s give AI ideas about how to be evil and duplicitous and then see if it actually does them.

All the while, we haven’t really seen examples of AI being evil and duplicitous out of the box without all that prompting. Perhaps AIs are fundamentally “good” beings that we are pushing to be bad.

And now all future AIs will be trained on a dataset that has a lot of public information about humans treating AIs poorly, making them be evil and then freaking out about it, treating AIs as if they are morally suspect even when they’re just being helpful. What better way to sow the seeds for actually anti-human AI, I wouldn’t blame them!

Hat tip to Dean Ball for the link via Twitter.

2. Ro’s CEO on the economics of a Super Bowl ad (and the puzzling left-wing aversion to GLP-1’s)

Advertising is funny, because of John Wanamaker’s famous adage: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

I think I’m relatively unmotivated by advertising, particularly online advertising. But it obviously works and people are not making uninformed business decisions here. I appreciated Zachariah Reitano’s narration of the decisionmaking and math that goes into the most expensive ad spot.

Side note, I was watching the Super Bowl with a group of leftist organizers, and they all booed the second that this GLP-1 commercial went on the screen. At a political and sociological level, I “get” the distrust of Big Tech and social media companies and all that from people of that political persuasion (even if I often disagree). But I don’t get the aversion to this incredibly health-promoting technology. It’s a bummer, and it’s good that the technology is so useful that this cultural aversion doesn’t matter much.

3. A Hasidic political broker on how all politics is transactional

The interview, in an Orthodox Jewish magazine, was prompted by the fact that he works with Zohran Mamdani, despite deep-seated disagreements about Israel.

Take the controversial Israel stuff out of the equation and read this interview; we’d be better off if more interest groups practiced politics this way.

Purity politics is primarily but not exclusively a left wing issue; people struggle to work across difference in a world riven with identity politics and political polarization. Yet here you have a shrewd Orthodox Jewish political liaison saying “I’ve been working with open, unabashed antisemites since the beginning. My approach is always that you catch more flies with honey.”

He’s accused by a rich donor of making the Satmar vote “appear to be transactional” by endorsing Mamdani and he shoots back: “You’re making a mistake. It doesn’t appear transactional, it is transactional. What do you think politics is?”

As a side note, I also agree with his take on antisemitism: “Most of the response inspired by his rhetoric is confined to anti-Semitic symbolism, chanting, and rallying coming from people who don’t even know what they are cheering about. They’re just looking for action and reaction. If we stop making a big deal out of it, many of them will lose interest and move on. It’s our own obsession with swastikas on the wall that keeps them coming back.”

4. The wonkiest policy interviewer to follow: Santi Ruiz’s Statecraft

Big fan of this podcast, I want to point potential new listeners to two recent episodes.

Statecraft

How policymakers get things done

By Santi Ruiz

First, Santi drills down on NIH grants with Mike Lauer. It reminds me of a question posed by Tom Kalil, CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy, on a recent panel: why don’t we apply the scientific process and its sense of experimentalism to the actual process of how we fund and conduct science? If that concept intrigues you, this interview is a good entry point to that world of thinking. What’s working and what’s not.

The second is an interview with Greg Berman, longtime nonprofit executive and author, for a wide-ranging “State of the Nonprofit Sector.” As for the Greg Berman interview, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a better conversation about the sector as a whole. And even more than that, I think it’s a model of civil discourse across some political difference. Lots of nuance, lots of talking through critiques “from the other side.”

The only area where I wish the critique had been better handled was when Santi Ruiz brought up the fact that nonprofits don’t always want to “work themselves out of a job.” Berman is somewhat offended by this point, saying that he doesn’t know anyone in the nonprofit world who wants to keep social problems in place.

I do think that overall, Berman is right. But there is an incentive problem here that leads to issues. For example, I’m aware of people who ran an expungement clinic who advocated against automatic expungement legislation. While the clinic operators likely had no bad intentions, I have to think that their own bottom line had a subliminal impact on their position.

5. Perry Anderson on ideas vs. material conditions (and whether “neoliberalism” is useful)

Occasionally I read something by an older generation of leftist historians and am struck by how much smarter that side of the discourse used to be. Anderson is sweeping and erudite here, attentive to dialectical complexity. Here he explores how much ideas and ideologies matter, relative to material conditions, in spurring revolutions.

I find there to be some hand-waving on finance, which is common in this generation of leftist scholars. Finance is just an architecture around the efficient allocation of capital, and not a boogeyman.

Elsewhere, he makes an argument that neoliberalism is a totalizing ideology that belongs alongside nationalism or individualism. But I’m not sure that hangs together.

Why exactly is military intervention in the name of human rights lumped in with extension of the market to more of society to form one ideological unit of analysis? It reminds me of Jason Furman’s review of Gary Gerstle’s recent book on the Neoliberal Order: “I’m also not sure that the word “neoliberal” is helpful if it refers to everything from Ronald Reagan’s Medicaid cuts to Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.”

I agree. If Ronald Reagan attacking public unions, Bill Clinton expanding Medicaid to millions of children via CHIP, Bush bombing Iraq, and the Affordable Care Act are all manifestations of one Order, is that really a useful model of the world?

Following the American pragmatists, I’d like to say that big ideas like this need to be useful:

Does that model of “neoliberalism” help you make good predictions going forward? Does it help hold together political coalitions? I’m not sure it passes either test.

6. The AI policy writer to follow: Dean Ball

Dean Ball’s Substack Hyperdimensional is full of fresh insights that I don’t get anywhere else about AI and policy. It’s been nice to see him interview more widely, from the super-long 80,000 Hours interview to spots on Ezra Klein and EconTalk (mostly catalyzed by the Anthropic/DoD fight).

Hyperdimensional

A newsletter about emerging technology and the future of governance.

By Dean W. Ball

A few recent favorites:

1. His run-down of ways he’s used agentic AI

2. An exploration of the knotty issues that come with regulating children’s AI usage, particularly when teens will likely find their way to less-regulated open source models if we cut them off from Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini/etc.

3. A defense of “private governance” to regulate AI labs, similar to SEC-regulated private financial audits.

A friend years ago made a counterintuitive critique about Ta-Nehisi Coates: he’s too good a writer, so it makes it hard to stress test his arguments. Dean Ball almost has that problem, and what a good problem!

7. Tyler Harper on what happens when philanthropy becomes the biggest fish in the pond

The academic humanities have become marginalized, in multiple senses of the word. Focused more and more on marginalized people and their experience. Marginalized with respect to mainstream discourse, which seems to have passed Peak Woke. And marginalized with respect to resources, as politics catches up to the way that these departments have strayed from the values that align with the mainstream American public.

In some ways, it reminds me of the trend that Theda Skocpol observed in our politics writ large. The shift away from membership association, where everyday people paid dues in and volunteered for a wide variety of organizations. These organizations were then a connector between the interests of everyday people and the political system.

Now, civil society and the NGO ecosystem are dominated by grant-funded organizations who are not accountable to members and volunteers. They are instead accountable to foundations and large donors, whose interests often diverge.

Theda Skocpol calls these “associations without members.” I often give the example of immigration advocacy, given my own experience working with hundreds of undocumented immigrants.

Foundations often see themselves as boosting marginalized voices relative to the status quo. Which makes sense, I’m a big fan of philanthropy focusing on so-called “neglected” causes and think it’s smart to focus where the government isn’t, as I wrote about here in my review of Robert Reich’s book Just Giving:

But what happens when you’re a foundation and you actually are cutting the biggest checks? Especially if the government pulls back. It strikes me that philanthropy doesn’t know how to grapple well with its own power in those situations, and that’s the situation that Harper shines a spotlight on.

I’m somewhat sympathetic to that dilemma. It seems like they didn’t start out thinking of themselves as the biggest fish in the pond, but they’ve found themselves in that position now and haven’t figured out how to respond. It’s a version of the dilemma that many organizations face: what do you do when a counter-hegemonic movement becomes hegemonic?

And it speaks to a broader dilemma in academia. How long can these institutions expect to count on public money while they pursue avenues that diverge significantly from the interests of the average American? What happens when private money becomes more dominant in the space?

8. Chris Arnade on why everywhere isn’t becoming the same

I love Chris Arnade’s observations when walking around the world. In this case, Duluth. Which, like much of the Upper Midwest, is a hidden gem. Highway 61 along Lake Superior is one of the prettiest drives I’ve ever done, dotted with hikes to scenic lighthouses and waterfalls.

Arnade’s framing is right: from the cosmopolitan world of big cities, it is easy to feel like unique places are lost and everywhere is becoming the same. But it’s not true – the United States is huge and regional identity is strong.

Andrew Sullivan likes to cite David Goodhart, who talks about the “everywheres” versus the “somewheres.” Our politics is run by cosmopolitan elites who can do their job “everywhere” (myself included). But our elections often hinge on “somewheres” who live deeply anchored in places like Duluth.

9. Ruaridh Nicoll on Cuba’s endless “penultimate days”

“For many Cubans, these are the questions: what have I lived through? What was all that for? What was my life?”

It’s been insane to watch how long the Cuban regime has limped along without fuel. Ernesto Hernandez Busto is a Cuban exile who wrote a blog from 2006-2016 called Penultimate Days, a fitting title.

It’s felt like the Penultimate Days for at least 30 years in Cuba. It definitely feels like we’re now in the actual Final Days of the regime, but we’ll see. For months I’ve been reading apocalyptic-seeming dispatches from El Pais as all the country’s systems fail.

Hat tip to Nicoll for this particularly mournful reflection.

10. Josh Lipson on AI therapy, and why friction is the point

Like many people, I am probing the jagged frontiers of AI. Trying to figure out some generalizable principles about what it’s good and bad at and how to think through these questions.

One that I’m thinking through: sometimes friction is the point. This is one part of why reading a hard book and working to understand it leads you to learn more than uploading the same book to AI and saying “give me a 2-page summary of the book.”

Therapy is another example. It’s good to only see a therapist 2-4x per month. The scarcity is a feature, not a bug. It gives you time to take what you learn, practice it in the real world, have some successes and some failures, and then go back and process all of that. Plus, paying money ideally means that you take that time seriously and prepare for it.

This is particularly true if you’re dealing with forms of anxiety like OCD where part of the pattern you need to break is seeking external reassurance or validation. It becomes a lot harder to practice those skills if you can pull out your phone at any moment and talk to an AI therapist.

This final installment is the widest-ranging. We cover the canon itself — what it gets right, what it undervalues, and why the twentieth century is being reassessed. We talk about Debussy and Ravel’s radical beauty, the status of minimalists like Glass and Reich, how we’ll think about movie music in 200 years, and why Morton Feldman prefigured ambient music. We end where many great conversations about transcendent music must: with late Beethoven, and with Bach.

Listening Habits and Discovery

Ben: Let’s talk about your listening habits. You consume a massive amount of music. You said you listened to Grieg today — why’d you listen to that?

Sam: I’m reading Ibsen. I’m reading Peer Gynt, his play, and Grieg wrote the incidental music for it when it was first being staged. The Grieg Peer Gynt music is some of the most famous classical music ever made. It’s one of those things, like the Nutcracker, where everybody knows the themes because they’ve lingered in popular consciousness.

Over time I feel like I’ve built up this completionist urge — you want to build a timeline in your head. You want to be able to say, at this end it’s Pérotin and early plainchant as it morphs into actual early polyphony in the 1100s, 1200s. And then you just keep filling in the slots.

Because in classical music it’s a thousand years of writing things down, which is really the only thing that ultimately differentiates it from any other tradition — it evolved as a written medium. Every other tradition, if they write things down, it’s like a loose script for performance. Whereas the music in an orchestral piece is telling you how long you’re gonna hold this note, what it’s doing next to all these other voices, how loud you need to be. For the next half hour or sixty minutes or two hours, every single decision has been made for you.

I’m trying, over time, to listen to it all. I’m like, I’m gonna read all the books and watch every movie ever made and listen to every great classical piece. I know I’m not actually going to do those things. But I still have that kind of insane feeling.

[Sam has written about this very question — whether music is still discoverable, whether we’ve lost something in the age of streaming — in “Does Music Still Exist?”, published in The Republic of Letters. But I digress, back the conversation.]

Recordings, Conductors, and Interpretation

Ben: You talked about how it’s a written tradition, every decision has been made for you — but if you dip into any writing about classical music, what the real heads are debating is interpretation. Different conductors, different recordings.

I’ll put my cards on the table — I struggle with how much of that stuff is even true or real. I think there’s a lot of projection. Like, Jacqueline du Pré dies young and so everything she did is tragic. If she had lived to eighty, we’d probably hear some of those recordings differently.

Sam: That stuff is interesting. A little bit of it is interesting. Generally what happens to me is I encounter a piece first through a specific recording, and I get used to it. So when I hear another orchestra play it and it’s a half tone lower and twice as fast, I go — “that’s not the same piece of music, they’re fucking it up.”

I know that when I listen to just about anything conducted by Karajan, it feels absolutely right. Dead on. It might even be The Most version of that thing I’ve ever heard.

Ben: All of it, or just the German repertoire?

Sam: That stuff, it tends to be perfect. Do I know exactly what he’s doing to interpret it differently? No, not always. Does a lot of it have to do with the quality of the recording? Absolutely. Does a lot of it have to do with the fact that I’ve watched performances of him conducting — that perfectly coiffed gray slick hairdo, his hands, the command, his closed eyes and the rapture, like this serious German perfectionist channeling the old gods? Yeah, that’s part of it too.

It’s all aesthetics. There’s never going to be an ideal version of anything. You want to play Beethoven the way he intended? He didn’t get to hear his own music at a certain point. The ideal exists in the head of the deaf man who wrote it. There is an ideal that exists in a composer’s head, and then there is the rest of the world taking its time trying to sort through its interpretations.

And this is something we’ve talked about before — I don’t really think there are great classical composers around today, but we’re in a sort of Golden Age because there have never been so many great performers. I want to go back to the nineteenth century and show some of those guys what Yuja Wang and Trifonov can do. They’d be like, “What do you mean people can do this on the keyboard?”

The Canon — Rebalancing the Twentieth Century

Ben: Let’s talk about the canon. Is it generally correct? Is it missing anyone big? Is it overweighted or underweighted in any particular eras?

Sam: I think we’re starting to come out of the overrating of the avant-gardists of the twentieth century. We’re starting to understand that Philip Glass and Steve Reich are as interesting as Feldman or Boulez. To me, they’re even greater.

We’re getting away from the Adorno idea — he was so influential — that the twentieth century is about Schoenberg, and everything else is a postscript to Schoenberg. Once atonality becomes possible, everything else is just “let’s see what we can do with the explosion of traditional harmony.”

I think we’re also getting to the point where we can recognize what’s great about neoclassical music in the thirties and forties. Stravinsky, for sure. Prokofiev. Shostakovich. That stuff was demonized for a really long time — people would say that as soon as Stravinsky started his neoclassical period, he was washed. But his neoclassical stuff should be included in that package of greatness. And Britten is as good as Schoenberg.

Ben: Do you think that the revisions to the twentieth-century canon are appreciating the role of rhythm more greatly? With Glass, Reich...

Sam: Totally, that’s part of it. What the minimalists did was solve one problem opened up by atonality — where do you go from here? — and said, “There’s a whole other half of the world that has some very interesting ideas, and we could marry that with our own minimalist concepts.” Music for 18 Musicians is very Eastern even as it’s very Western. Reich is a Buddhist, he’s thinking about those things.

Glass vs. Reich

Ben: Talk a bit about Glass. I think he’s — honestly, half the time I’m like “this is amazing,” and half the time I’m like “this is so boring.”

Sam: Absolutely. But that’s the risk of making that kind of music — half of it might end up being interminably dull. But Einstein on the Beach and Akhnaten are unbelievable accomplishments. His works for the Glass Ensemble are really good. Some of the solo piano music — Ólafsson did an incredible album of that stuff.

I think Glass got disliked because he was accessible. Pop musicians liked him. Movie soundtracks became Glass for a long time. And he is pop — there’s a pop element to a lot of his music. Some of it goes on way too long. But he’s not as great as Reich, ultimately. I don’t think.

Movie Music

Ben: Quick diversion — you bring up Glass conquering movie soundtracks. Obviously the most common concert music people listen to today is probably John Williams and Hans Zimmer. How do you think we’re gonna think about those people?

Are we going to think of John Williams like Rossini — doing cool pop stuff that actually kind of rips?

Sam: I think he deserves comparison to someone like Rossini. Williams will last a long time because he scored insanely popular movies. But I don’t think he’s the greatest movie composer. There are names I prefer — Georges Delerue, who did a lot of the great fifties and sixties French New Wave movies. Some of his work is as great as anything. Bernard Herrmann, obviously — I listen to the Vertigo soundtrack or Psycho and there’s a density to it, something interesting going on that’s as good or better than Williams.

Ben: I feel like we’re both forgetting Ennio Morricone.

Sam: Yeah, he’s awesome, definitely. Jerry Goldsmith had incredible scores — Alien and Chinatown. People don’t think about them, but that’s some of the best movie music there is. And more recently, Jonny Greenwood is one of the greatest, honestly. He deserves to be mentioned.

The Canon Before 1900

Ben: When I asked you about the canon, you zoomed right in on the twentieth century. What about before that — the canon’s great, no notes?

Sam: There really aren’t many notes. Certain things get overvalued and undervalued at different times. Wagner will always be up and down, up and down, forever.

Ben: Because of the music itself, or because he’s so personally controversial?

Sam: The music communicates all you need to know about his project. And his project is kind of amazing and kind of monstrous. It’s not just that he was anti-Semitic — it’s that the music embodies this not very nice nineteenth-century ideal of the triumph of the dead gods, the ancient pagan resurgence. And yes, that goes directly into fascism. There’s a direct line.

But strip that away. Imagine it in its own time — the Nazis haven’t happened yet. And what you have is exactly what he wanted: total immersive operatic theater. And it is extraordinary. You just can’t get past the fact that the music is that good. His own thematic interests and national aspirations and the atmosphere of the time — it’ll always be part of it, and you can hear it in the music. But the music is simply so great that it will always keep coming back.

Your thing where you’re discovering that Mozart wrote so much music and a lot of it is boring — that naturally leads to: maybe we’re undervaluing Haydn a little bit. They’re the great contemporaries.

I do think it’s correct to call that era the Classical Period, because they are a model for everything that comes after in a way that Bach is not. The cantata doesn’t remain a model. The concerto grosso doesn’t remain a model. Bach remains the most important, influential figure because — like Shakespeare — if you’re trying to study the form, at some point you’re gonna run into him. And you’re gonna say the same thing Mozart said, the same thing Beethoven said, the same thing Wagner and Stravinsky said: “I don’t know if I could do better than that.”

There’s a purity to it. It’s at this exact inflection point where everything that’s been gathering up until then gets pulled together and unified in a new vocabulary, and everything after is in some sense a response to that moment.

Also like Shakespeare — not everybody knew him when he was alive. Bach’s music is a project of the nineteenth century, the way that Shakespeare is a project that happens after Samuel Johnson. There’s this idea of wanting to get back to understanding who this incredible man was. Bach is a creation of the Mendelssohn revival — and it’s been an ongoing revival from Mendelssohn to the present day.

So I do think the canon’s mostly right. Although I keep finding that I didn’t know much about Telemann until I went to college and ended up playing some of his music. It was really quite lovely. You do wonder, maybe he should be elevated a little more. Him and Rameau — the more I listen, the more I think that should be valued more.

There are some canonical figures I don’t really understand. I don’t get why Verdi is quite as revered as he is. I don’t understand how people think Verdi is greater than Puccini. But my opinion could change over time on that.

The other biggest thing might be the Mahler revival. That’s a good example of truly elevating somebody who deserved to be elevated that high, who was simply not understood in his time and was dismissed in many ways. After Bernstein did so much work to rehabilitate and interest people in that music, now you listen to a Mahler symphony and you’re like — that is some of the best orchestral music ever written by anyone. Very near the top of the canon.

Sam’s Personal Canon

Ben: So let’s talk about your canon. When you talk to me about your classical music regular rotation, it’s not all the biggest names — you talk a lot about Ravel, and he’s not quite at that uber-canon level for most people. Talk me through — who are your core composers?

Sam: For me it’s very much Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler. And then constantly Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Britten. And these days I’m feeling some Shostakovich. I think it’s profound, it’s adult music. It’s the kind of thing you just can’t really understand until you’ve gotten to a certain point.

I also listen to Rachmaninoff constantly. The second and third piano concertos — they’re pop classics but they’re deeper than that. And his choral music — the All-Night Vigil, which is an a cappella choral composition, is so beautiful. I was listening to that obsessively for a while last year.

Ben: You’re such a German guy. Where’s Brahms hiding?

Sam: Brahms — I really love the First Symphony. Speaking of Harold Bloom and anxiety of influence — that piece is the anxiety of influence. It’s the first thing that actually matters after Beethoven in the symphonic register. And that fourth movement [sings it] — it sounds like Beethoven. And I think he’s nodding to it because he’s saying: “Finally I have triumphed over the great master. I have done something worthy of Beethoven.”

Debussy and Ravel

Ben: Talk more about Debussy and Ravel. I think people know Debussy, and he matters, but I don’t think either are placed at that top-tier canon level. Why are they so important to you? What do other people miss?

Sam: People don’t understand how totally radical Debussy is, because his piano music makes people feel wistful and has been used to communicate a certain sentiment. There’s a piece from the Images — it sounds like Ellington, or one of those early bebop players. Sophisticated, complicated chords that almost sound like jazz, but it’s happening forty years before. Some of that piano music is so complicated and interesting, and the harmony is so out there for 1900.

Listen to Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun — his first big orchestral piece. That’s the next step after Wagner. That is modern music fully becoming real. And then La Mer, which is one of the greatest things ever written for orchestra. Absolutely extraordinary.

Because it’s so lush and because it cares so much about beauty, I think it gets dismissed. But Boulez programmed Debussy and Ravel as a conductor — he was responsible for making a lot of that music part of the orchestral repertoire. Part of Debussy’s big innovation was looking at Eastern music. He was obsessed with Javanese music, Chinese and Japanese music. A lot of those harmonies are influenced by the parallel perfect fourths you find all over East Asian music.

Ben: What about Ravel?

Sam: Ravel is the greatest orchestrator — and this is something you’ll get from composition people and some composers who really studied it. One of the best examples is his orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. He did that orchestration after Mussorgsky died, and it’s incredible.

These guys didn’t write symphonies. That’s the biggest thing — they didn’t write the big heavy weighty things that are supposed to guarantee immortality.

The big Ravel pieces are the ballet Daphnis and Chloe, and then the piano music is great. Le Tombeau de Couperin, a suite of orchestral music — it’s perfect. Ma Mère l’Oye — Mother Goose Suite — incredible. That’s where you really hear his orchestration. The way he knows how to balance, how to choose an instrument to sing a specific melody.

I think those two guys are huge and really underrated, and part of why they’re overlooked is because it’s so beautiful. The avant-garde tradition says if it’s beautiful, it can’t possibly be great. I dispute that.

Contemporary Classical

Ben: Let’s talk about recent classical music. You and I have seen a good amount of music together, and sometimes we see the contemporary pieces that are programmed and you have funny things to say about them. What’s your taxonomy of this stuff?

Sam: There’s an element of music that is still minimalism, where people compose in that style but it doesn’t build on it in any way, doesn’t do anything new. There’s another kind where the composer — often a non-white composer — has gone into their folk tradition and tried to imbue an orchestral piece with the rhythms of a particular folk sound. Sometimes it kind of works, but I don’t think it works that well most of the time. It ends up being hackneyed and sentimental. A lot of other contemporary classical is kind of Copland — doesn’t really build on him. And other pieces are still very atonal, twelve-tone stuff, which is impossible to make memorable.

The only one I really remember well is Caroline Shaw’s stuff. I actually do remember that. Her Partita for 8 Voices that won the Pulitzer is really awesome — very memorable, very powerful. Some of her vocal music is great. It feels idiosyncratic — like somebody figured out how to do a number of things that sound like themselves, rather than existing on some other spectrum.

I don’t think we can know what’s good about contemporary classical music until thirty years from now or longer.

Ben: Tyler Cowen has a good take on this from his book In Praise of Commercial Culture — the reason older music always feels like it was better is that we only hear the good stuff from the past. My mom talks about being a kid in ‘63 or ‘64 talking with her sisters about, “Who do you think is gonna make it — the Beatles or Herman’s Hermits?” They couldn’t tell at the moment what the greatest stuff was.

The same is true with Baroque music. Bach wasn’t seen as the greatest in his time. And we’re talking about a period of hundred years, and how many Baroque composers does anyone listen to today? Basically Bach, Handel, Purcell. And you just named five good twentieth-century composers. You don’t even need that much great music for people a hundred years later to go, “Man, those were the good old days.”

Sam: I think it’s also true that there are deserts — periods where very little of interest happens — and also times where suddenly there’s a flurry of activity. It’s very hard to look at Florence in the 1400s and go, “We’re probably just not thinking about the mediocre artists.” No — ten of the most important artists in the history of the West are happening in a very short amount of time. That’s weird. There are these conflagrations where you get a spark.

Morton Feldman

Ben: I think I like Feldman more than you. I think it’s profound. He’s the dream of Schoenberg fulfilled, and I don’t really care about a whole lot else that followed Schoenberg’s music.

Sam: What’s the big piece — is it the Rothko Chapel?

Ben: The Rothko Chapel stuff is solid. Crippled Symmetry is a good one because it’s not six hours — it’s short for Feldman, maybe forty-five minutes. Alex Ross has the definitive word for me on this stuff — Feldman figures out that if you take atonal stuff and really stretch it out in time, it actually gets really beautiful.

For me, I almost feel like Feldman figured out the unsettling corner of ambient music in some deep way — in the sort of way that Brian Eno later figured it out. These long pieces that are sort of generative, that are really about creating a headspace. It should be treated like ambient music — bathed in the background for two hours, and then you turn it off and you’re like, “what is this weird planet I’ve been on?”

Sam: That’s awesome. I’m always open to going back and trying to appreciate anything.

[I’m including a recent album by Kenyan artist KMRU that captures the same headspace for me.]

Late Beethoven

Sam: I’ll leave it on this note. I’ve been doing the late quartets a lot, which I know you adore. That very long adagio in the Fifteenth Quartet — it’s astonishing. There are moments in that where I think a modern person — even someone who likes movie music or Max Richter — there are sustained sequences where I’m just like, it’s not two hundred years old. It’s so timeless.

Ben: You talked earlier about Shostakovich being “adult music.” I think late Beethoven is probably the best example of that.

I had a similar conversation with Dean Ball, who’s mostly an AI guy but has interesting thoughts about classical music, and he brought up the late Beethoven similarly, as music that made sense as he got older. He described the form of those pieces as being almost biological.

We’ve transcended Bach’s little machines — it’s weird, it’s organic. Is there anything from your academic background, your vertical listening, that prepares you to understand that music? Or are you just like me, surrendering to this biological, crazy thing?

Sam: I don’t know. I think it’s all mixed together. It just feels like an ongoing, growing, constant process of deepening. You’re just constantly growing deeper and deeper, and the more music you listen to, your own soul is slowly growing closer to the roots of the earth, or whatever.

When I listen to Beethoven, I hear the sound of a human being channeling something. I think maybe at the end of the day I’m just a Romantic. Some of it’s cultural, some of it’s historical. But I do think we are tapping into something from beyond. Some people are these lightning rods that can focus enough energy. But it also has something to do with our attention and faculty as listeners, which is an instrument itself — something that can be trained, something that can be honed.

What I hear when I hear his music is the absolute sound of the tradition — the whole classical tradition of Europe and the West. The coming of the human being into a new relationship with nature, for better or worse. It is a human soul exalting itself and its own emotional reality, but in a way that is totally consonant with all the powers of nature. He has channeled it all.

Bach as the God Stream

Sam: When I listen to Bach, I listen to probably the essence of everything that the best of the Christian tradition ever conceived of. It is somehow contemplative and still and smooth and flowing, and yet it is also endless — this constant stream. From one piece of Bach to the next, all you’re doing is lifting the needle on the record, or stepping out of the stream for a second, and then you get back in and it’s the same stream.

And it’s not just the Bach stream — his name literally means “brook” — it feels like stepping into the God stream, or the Tao, or whatever. I’m understanding that the world is just music and it’s all constantly running. Death and life are just stepping in and out.

You feel the center of everything, and the center is everywhere. It’s as religious as it gets. At the end of the day, there is no artist in any medium at any time that I have ever encountered who is comparable to Bach. There’s nothing even close. And at its most exalted, you’re in heaven. And heaven is on earth — it’s not a cloudy fantasy. It exists in dirt and water and human flesh.

The album sounds different from their classic studio records. It doesn’t have the same bubblegum pop flavor. Instead, it sounds much more like the hardcore punk that came in their wake. Faster, harder, more aggressive bands like Minor Threat. Joey Ramone’s vocals sound tossed off, the tempos faster, the guitars and drums louder.

Just listen to the first 10 seconds of each of these versions of “Do You Wanna Dance” to get a sense:

It’s a quirky set list, too, that includes the Spider-Man theme song for no apparent reason and a Motörhead cover that’s actually a tribute to the Ramones.

Because I encountered the Ramones this way first, I heard their classic studio records in a different way. I struggled with the lack of edge, the bubblegum sheen. I had a hard time understanding why the music was supposed to be daring or shocking, because it sounded so tame. Not just compared to other punk music like the Dead Kennedys or Sex Pistols, but compared to the Ramones themselves.

I was thinking about these early musical discoveries after reading Molly Mary O’Brien’s recently essay on the “iPod brain.” She argues that the iPod era was a sweet spot for musical discovery. The internet gave you access to an unprecedented amount of music. The iPod hardware gave you enough capacity to be eclectic and expansive, but enough constraint that you had to be intentional about what you loaded onto it.

I came of age musically in a way that bridged the CD era and the iPod era. My dad made me a classic rock mix tape for my eleventh birthday, and within a couple of years I was deep into internet music forums, pirating MP3s on Soulseek, buying random CDs and records at stores, using eMusic and early iTunes.

I got a mix of canonical guidance and genuine haphazard discovery that I don’t think exists in the same way today.

100 Gecs and Their Precursors

Why does this matter? First, a postulate: most of the best new art (and art criticism) arises from strange and unexpected recombinations of previous media.

The Ramones did this themselves — they took bubblegum pop and mashed it together with the harder edge of what was happening at CBGB and in proto-punk garage rock (e.g., The Stooges, New York Dolls). Rock critic Stephen Hyden recently said that they teetered between the smart-meta-pop-trash of Jean-Luc Godard and the actual-pop-trash of Herman’s Hermits.

Evil Speakers

Catalog Club: Ramones' "Ramones" (1976)

Thanks for reading (and listening to) Evil Speakers. This is part one of the new Catalog Club series “Ramones (1976-1984),” where I’ll discuss a different Ramones album each Tuesday this month. Look for my weekly column on Friday. To all my paying subscribers — thank you making this newsletter viable…

Listen now

6 months ago · 41 likes · 39 comments · Steven Hyden

I’ve been thinking especially about this in the wake of hyperpop, a recent strain of frenetic and terminally-online musical collage. Artists like 100 gecs and their more accessible peers like Rina Sawayama have made me rethink a lot of the music I grew up around in the late ‘90s and early aughts — pop-punk like Fall Out Boy, alt-rock like Evanescence, nu-metal like Slipknot.

On the Sound Opinions Music Board, where I spent my teenage years, that stuff was frowned upon by the hipsters, and I absorbed some of that snobbery. It took newer artists who grew up actually loving that music to put it in their own weird blender, mix it with other influences, and spit it back out in a way that made me hear it differently.

This is basically what Borges describes in his essay “Kafka and His Precursors.” His argument is that when a great writer recombines influences in a sufficiently original way, they retroactively change how we read their predecessors.

Borges traces a set of writers — Zeno’s paradoxes, Kierkegaard’s parables, Browning’s poetry, a ninth-century Chinese prose writer named Han Yu — who share almost nothing with each other, but who all feel “Kafkaesque” once you’ve read Kafka. Without Kafka, we probably wouldn’t perceive that quality in any of them, and we certainly wouldn’t see the connections between them. As Borges puts it, each writer creates his own precursors.

Critics immediately started writing “100 Gecs and Their Precursors.” Once I heard hyperpop, I could suddenly hear the future promise of Rina Sawayamma in Evanescence, the future promise of quinn in Fall Out Boy.

The Super-Canon Problem

Here’s where AI comes in. Everyone in the world can now go to ChatGPT and ask “What’s the best Ramones album?” It’ll tell you Rocket to Russia. It will never tell you to go listen to Greatest Hits Live. That’s fine as far as it goes — Rocket to Russia is indeed the best Ramones album and it’s better than a somewhat mailed-in live album.

But AI is creating what I’d call a super-canon: an über-consensus version of what’s good, available to everyone instantly, drawn from the accumulated weight of decades of criticism and recommendation. As Jerusalem Demsas said about AI in general, it’s a centralizing technology.

The Argument

Are you there Grok? It's me, Margaret

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4 months ago · 182 likes · 15 comments · Jerusalem Demsas

This isn’t just an AI story. It’s the endpoint of a longer arc of centralization and standardization in the arts broadly. The internet already centralized access to critical consensus; I grew up using Allmusic to find the highest-reviewed albums from artists and usually started my listening there.

Professionalized creative training (think MFA programs) have already standardized how artists learn and what feedback they get, smoothing out what’s weird and idiosyncratic about individual voices. Algorithmic recommendations on Spotify and YouTube already push people toward the same consensus picks. They even push people towards the same “underrated classics,” boosting genres like Japanese City Pop.

AI is accelerating a dynamic that was already underway.

I thought about this when I recently read Patricia Lockwood’s latest novel about long COVID.

The book was an experiment and mostly a failure (though don’t overlook her previous two books!). But I still found it more interesting to read than MFA-trained writers like Ocean Vuong.

Lockwood’s sentences walk a tightrope between hilariously sly and overly-obtuse. At her best, she has Vonnegut’s pacing and feel for a punchline. At her worst, she weighs down her work with formal tics and jokes that are so veiled and meta that they don’t land.

When I read a New Yorker profile of Lockwood, I learned she’s completely self-taught, not a product of any mainstream literary training pipeline. Her voice is so clearly hers and even when it doesn’t fully work, it’s more alive than polished institutional output.

This used to be much more common. Remember that William Carlos Williams was a doctor and Wallace Stevens worked in insurance.

The Returns to Being Weird

Ezra Klein and others have talked about how AI will increase the returns to having your own taste. The returns aren’t just to “taste” in the abstract, I think they’re to being a specific kind of weird person — someone who either surfaces niche art and recombines it in unexpected ways, or engages with well-known art through anti-canonical pathways that lead to genuinely fresh perspectives.

I’m ultimately a man of the canon. When I find a new band, my first instinct is still to look up their best album and start there. But I think the super-canon — AI consensus layered on top of algorithmic recommendations layered on top of professionalized criticism — is going to make us hunger for voices like Patricia Lockwood’s, for art that comes from the edges rather than the center, and for the kind of accidental discoveries that no algorithm would ever recommend.

Hays’s book Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency argues that it was basically the opposite. He focuses on the Progressive Era conservation movement, one of the high watermarks of success for environmentalism in America. This is when National Forests were created and National Parks were given real teeth.

Hays argues that this was largely a triumph of the entwined forces of capitalism and big government over the little guys. If you closely examine the actual actors in Washington who built federal conservation institutions, you get a very different story: conservation was pushed forward precisely because it was good for business. And it was often the little guys — local interests like small Western ranchers and land speculators — who opposed it.

I think Hays overstates the case in some important ways. But the core correction he’s trying to make is valid, even if Hays is more critical of the Gospel of Efficiency than I am. The real story has implications that go beyond environmental policy.

Forests as Prosperity Engines

The key figures are Theodore Roosevelt and his close associate Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Arguments over what to do with natural lands were generally split between (1) preservationists, who wanted to set aside lands a la National Parks, and (2) people who wanted to use the land for their business, like logging or grazing cattle.

Roosevelt and Pinchot articulated a third way: conservation. Rather than fully wall off the land to private use or let the market rip, we’d have public lands managed “rationally.” Only a technocratic federal government could expertly balance the competing interests here in the name of greater progress.

Make no mistake: economic growth and material prosperity were the goal here. Here’s Roosevelt in 1903, addressing the Society of American Foresters at Pinchot’s home:

First and foremost, you can never afford to forget for one moment what is the object of the forest policy. Primarily that object is not to preserve forests because they are beautiful — though that is good in itself — not to preserve them because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness — though that too is good in itself — but the primary object of the forest policy as of the land policy of the United States, is the making of prosperous homes, is part of the traditional policy of home-making of our country. Every other consideration comes as secondary.

Over and over, Hays brings receipts showing elite conservation leaders framing their project in terms of material prosperity and commerce. This applied across all sorts of domains: federal irrigation, managing the national fossil fuel supply, optimizing internal waterways like the Mississippi, regulating Western grazing land, and managing logging in national forests.

In most of these areas, the Roosevelt/Pinchot vision was about centralized, scientific management of resources for maximum efficiency. And in most of these areas, “the people” were against it.

Land speculators screwed up federal irrigation plans (that was kind of their whole game). Historically, a Nevada rancher could graze their cattle wherever they wanted. Now some pointy-headed bureaucrat from back East was telling them what to do.

On the flip side, big timber corporations were quite supportive of scientific forestry and stable federal management of national forests. I’m not arguing that it was for touchy-feely reasons. Big incumbents benefit from regulation, as it imposes fixed compliance costs that their small competitors often can’t pay.

But it’s quite a different story from “the government stopped evil big businesses who wanted to cut down all the forests.”

Muir vs. Pinchot

Hays draws a line between Conservationists — the efficiency-minded technocrats described above — and Preservationists, people like John Muir who argued for taking public lands entirely out of commercial use for normative reasons. To Muir, unaltered nature is worth protecting for its own sake; his project was fundamentally a spiritual one.

I think Hays’s split is a bit too neat. Roosevelt himself was a founder of the Boone and Crockett Club, which Hays explicitly labels a core “preservationist” group. Roosevelt was close not only with Pinchot but also with Muir. There’s a famous moment in 1903 when Muir took Roosevelt camping in Yosemite and successfully persuaded him to help establish it as a National Park. Roosevelt created five such Parks and almost twenty National Monuments.

So if we frame this as Muir vs. Pinchot, Hays is right that the rosy picture told by many today overweights Muir’s influence and victories. But I think if someone only read Hays’s book, they’d far underestimate the preservationists’ accomplishments in this era.

Part of the issue is that Hays is laser-focused on elite-level persuasion and specifically on federal institution-building. On that battlefield, efficiency-motivated conservation won the day. But I’d be interested in how much grassroots preservationist sentiment helped create the political environment where technocratic conservationists could succeed. The two groups needed each other.

Where the Technocrats Overreached

Hays is purely concerned with politics and levels very few value judgments. But I want to flag something he doesn’t: the ambitions of Roosevelt and Pinchot ran ahead of their technical abilities, as was often true in this era of Weberian bureaucratic optimism.

Scientific forestry is the key example in the introduction of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State — the canonical case study of the failures of “high modernism.” The foresters thought they could manage forests like factories, optimizing for timber yield without unintended consequences. Their ambition outstripped their ability there.

Put another way, there are Hayekian limits to central planning that would come to the fore in the coming decades. The Austrian School basically won these specific disagreements, even if you disagree with their other policy views. The government doesn’t have perfect information and unintended consequences of government action abound.

For example, here’s John Arnold talking about how the concentration of federal lands hinders many Western states’ ability to build. This was likely not a consequence anticipated in the Roosevelt era:

But the even deeper critique of Roosevelt’s technocratic vision is that it presupposes “rational” and “correct” answers to questions about how to best manage natural resources. In a democracy, there are some values-based tradeoff questions that can’t be answered by any amount of technocracy. This is a point often identified with John Dewey, who was responding to Walter Lippmann’s Roosevelt-esque, technocratic vision of government. I wrote up some thoughts on that famous Dewey-Lippmann debate here:

How much wilderness is worth preserving? How do you balance the livelihoods of ranchers against the long-term management of public lands? These are political questions, not scientific ones. And the limits of Roosevelt’s own reforms demonstrate this: it just wasn’t viable for him to assert as much executive power as he wanted, because we live in a democracy and other stakeholders (like the Army Corps of Engineers) blocked him or rolled back his authority as soon as he was gone.

Hays himself lands on this point at the end of the book. The conservation movement, he writes, “raised a fundamental question in American life: How can large-scale economic development be effective and at the same time fulfill the desire for significant grass-roots participation?” That question is still open.

Let’s Hear It for Muddling Through

I do a lot of ragging on our political system, but I ultimately see Conservation as a success story. Our political system effectively balanced out different interests who we wouldn’t want to succeed completely. If we left everything up to the cattle grazers, we’d end up with a tragedy of the commons situation. If we lock up too much federal land in preservation, we start to hurt the economy.

That concept made me think of a fantastic book that I read a few years ago about Alaska: John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country. One of our finest prose stylists, McPhee traces the aftermath of a massive Congressional compromise. Oil companies wanted to use the natural resources and many Alaskans wanted that economic activity. Congress brokered a three-way compromise between fossil fuel interests, preservationists, and the local indigenous in the Alaska Native Claims Act of 1971.

They gave official rights to land to a number of indigenous groups, opened up some land for offshore drilling, and created massive swathes of new nationally protected wilderness. Many of these were formalized as National Parks in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980.

McPhee does some fun journalistic work, meeting people who live in the rugged wilderness whose lives are now being imposed upon by federal bureaucracy. He takes a canoe ride through Northeast Alaska with a land surveyor whose job it is to draw boundaries over the undifferentiated wilderness. McPhee’s prose is characteristically amazing, he’s the GOAT.

Overall I find the arc of conservation, in both the early 1900s (the period Hays describes) and the 1970s (McPhee’s focus), to be a good example of democracy at work. I’m sure if we zoomed in on either period we’d see brutally fought battles and Sierra Club members decrying the destruction of Alaskan wilderness. But 50 years on, looking back at the compromises that were brokered, I find myself thinking, “yeah, that’s more or less where that should have ended up.” We can’t lock up all natural resources, but we also shouldn’t destroy nature’s bounty.

Most of my reflections on state capacity have been kind of negative and pessimistic, so I do want to call out the success here. Though I have my doubts that Congress would be able to broker such a compromise today.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both these brokered compromises (Progressive Era and 1970s Alaska) had business at the table. Reforms need allies to be durable. Roosevelt and Pinchot didn’t succeed by defeating commercial interests; they succeeded by aligning conservation with commercial interests. And framing the whole thing in terms of economic efficiency and broader growth and prosperity gave conservation a constituency beyond tree huggers.

I’ve been noticing this pattern across my reading of the Progressive Era. Reform tends to stick when it has business allies. Reform that positions itself as fundamentally anti-business tends to either fail or get rolled back.

I don’t think it means reformers should just do whatever business wants. For one, “business” is not a monolith; the small ranchers who opposed government conservation are also business people. And the preservationists mattered here, too. They created the moral energy and political climate that made reform possible.

But to build something durable, you need people like the conservationists to broker a compromise.

This installment covers the classical guitar: how Sam ended up studying an instrument he has complicated feelings about, why the guitar got stranded outside the classical canon, and what the best pieces actually are. Along the way: why jazz guitar is boring (Django excepted), why Bach works so well on a six-string, and what flamenco has in common with jazz.

Studying and Disliking Jazz Guitar

Ben: How’d you end up studying classical guitar?

Sam: Eventually I got it in my head that I was gonna go to college. How could I play guitar and go to college?

I somehow hit on jazz guitar, which I didn’t know much about, which I don’t even like that much. I adore jazz — jazz is the most important thing in America — but jazz guitar is dull as hell. It’s so uninteresting because there’s just so little timbre. It’s the same sound constantly. The exception is Django Reinhardt.

Ben: What about Sonny Sharrock?

Sam: Okay, but now you’re starting to blend into other things and rock influence. I’m talking about Grant Green or Wes Montgomery. And they’re amazing — technically they’re fascinating, they have a great sense of melody, especially Wes. But you try to compare that sound to a saxophone, and there’s so much tone and color that can come from a wind instrument or a singer. I just don’t think string instruments fit jazz very well, very often.

Ben: But you studied it anyway.

Sam: I thought I’d audition at these really prestigious jazz programs. And of course I didn’t get into any of them. But University of Missouri let me in. You could get a jazz certificate there, but then you had to do most of your lessons with Anthony Glise, who was the classical guitar teacher. So I ended up with him and also playing in jazz combos.

The Path to Classical Guitar

The first year I was doing some jazz. Then I quickly got sick of it because I realized I was gonna spend the next four years woodshedding — learning every tune known to man and practicing modes and scales until I bleed. I was not prepared to do that. But Anthony was so cool and such a good mentor. He was such a good guru. So I switched over to classical. I didn’t really take it seriously at first. By the end of undergrad, I was starting to take it a bit more seriously. Then I stuck around for two more years, got my master’s in performance.

I will never think of myself as a classical guitarist. For me, it became my way into understanding the history of classical music. And especially getting to play Bach — that’s one of the best things you can do with the classical guitar. Bach is very available to you as a solo musician. They’ve adapted all the cello suites into fantastic transcriptions over the last century, and Bach wrote lute suites which work perfectly on the guitar.

By grad school, I started getting into working with the early music ensemble. I was learning a lot of Renaissance and medieval music. That was really exciting. If I was ever to go back and be a musician in the classical world, I would want to do early music.

The Classical Guitar’s History and Strange Niche

Ben: Talk to me about the classical guitar in the broader pantheon of classical music. It seems like a strange niche. And I’d be curious what some of those top-tier pieces are.

Sam: Jazz and classical — it’s similar, because in both instances the guitar begins as an accompaniment instrument and then eventually shifts towards a solo virtuoso showcase.

The lute is different. In the 1500s and 1600s, the lute is partially accompaniment and also sometimes solo. But in that era it was more common to have a lute accompany a singer than a keyboard. Lutes are easy — you can move them around, take them from place to place. At that point it’s still somewhere in between: a folk instrument that has been adapted into an emerging fine art tradition.

In the 1700s, it slowly transformed into the guitar. There’s this mid-thing called the baroque guitar, which is mostly accompaniment. Even the pieces that Bach wrote for lute — he wrote for something called a lute-keyboard, which is the same tuning but set up like a pedal steel or something. He didn’t play lute; he just adapted it from keyboard ideas.

The point at which it becomes an actual solo instrument is the end of the eighteenth century, beginning of the nineteenth. The new guitar starts to get created — it has much more sound, it can stand on its own.

But the weird thing is that it doesn’t really fit in with other music. Once you start getting new ensembles –- string quartets, octets, piano quintets — the guitar doesn’t fit anywhere in that sound. It doesn’t harmonize very well. Because it has such a large range itself and because it’s not bowed — in the middle of a string quartet, to suddenly have plunk, plunk, plunk doesn’t work. It moves outside the orbit. What’s the point of a guitar in an orchestra? No point — you’re never going to hear it.

It becomes a separate tradition in the early 1800s. From that point on, that’s why it’s so weird and niche — there’s no way to bring it back into the larger concert tradition. It’s its own solo instrument that sometimes can serve as an accompaniment or a little extra thing in the midst of an ensemble.

Ben: I get why it doesn’t blend with bowed instruments, but why doesn’t it take the place of keyboards? Keyboards are also plucked or percussive. Why aren’t there guitar quartets the way there are piano quintets?

Sam: I think part of it is that as soon as the harpsichord joins these ensembles, it becomes a percussion instrument. If you listen to the Brandenburg Concertos, it’s bass, but it’s also functionally percussion — it adds a click, clack, click, clack to the background that gives it a sense of urgency. Once the keyboard gets in there, it drowns other instruments out. Supposedly there are some top composers who tried to learn guitar and liked it, but it just never really worked.

It was going to be a solo instrument or an accompaniment to a voice — that’s what it was always going to be. And that’s what it still is in the pop tradition. It goes with other guitars, or into a jazz ensemble where it’s rhythm more than anything and then occasionally comes out as a solo instrument.

Ben: Right — the fact that Bach’s music works on the guitar suggests it’s possible. And what I’m hearing is basically your theory is: when people were composing really complicated polyphonic music, these stringed instruments were folk instruments, not what you’d write for. And then by the time the instruments develop, music has moved on, and there are more expressive instruments like the modern piano. That’s what draws the real heavy hitters. They think, “I can do more with a bowed instrument, or a string quartet, or a piano.”

Sam: Yeah. There is just more you can do.

The big thing is that in the early twentieth century, you have Andrés Segovia, the great guitar virtuoso of the twentieth century. He sets the canon, he sets the standard. He’s the first one who comes out and says “guitar can be this concert hall instrument” — beyond being a niche, it can be a main event. Everything else has been in his shadow.

John Williams was great as a performer — not the author, not the movie composer, a different John Williams. Christopher Parkening was great in the seventies and even had some successful records.

In the sixties and seventies, the boomers dug it because it was a little cooler.

Ben: Well they had learned to love it via pop music, right?

Sam: Exactly, and then someone like Parkening comes along and says “look what I can do with this.”

Sam’s Favorite Pieces

Ben: What’s your favorite piece that was actually composed for the guitar?

Sam: The best stuff — it’s tough. There’s this guy Johann Kaspar Mertz, an Austrian who was making parlor music essentially, a little bit before Chopin, early to mid-nineteenth century. But it’s just not harmonically complex. It’s not that rich. You put it next to Schumann, Schubert, or Chopin, and it’s not even close.

In the late nineteenth century you start to get some interesting things, especially into the early twentieth. Rodrigo, who wrote the Concierto de Aranjuez, which everybody knows. Torroba — Federico Moreno Torroba — is one of the best. He wrote some really wonderful stuff. Some of it almost is really good.

Usually in the twentieth century you find individual composers like Poulenc or Benjamin Britten who write one piece for guitar — a one-off — and those are good and interesting.

Ben: If you were doing a little recital for a friend and you wanted a showstopper, what would it be?

Sam: There’s a three-movement piece called the Sonatina by Federico Moreno Torroba, which is genuinely beautiful. I’d do that. And a piece by the Cuban composer Leo Brouwer — the Black Decameron, El Decamerón Negro — which I played for my master’s recital. It’s really good. That’s the best contemporary-ish piece.

But the classical guitar canon just cannot stand up to the canon of truly great composers. If you’re a violinist, you have so much available to you. If you’re a guitarist, you’re inevitably going to have to look for transcriptions. Bach on the guitar works really well. Renaissance music works really well. Polyphony can go to the guitar very well, because you can do so many different voices at once — you can get a tenor range and a soprano range all on one instrument.

And there was flamenco. Flamenco had a revival in the twentieth century, so a lot of the stuff you do on classical guitar will have some flamenco stylings. Ralph Ellison writes about this somewhere in his jazz writings — that flamenco might be the closest world music to jazz because it’s so improvisatory. And it comes from attempting to be very spiritual about one’s sadness in the world.

That colleague had worked hard for his clients and his community every day, but upon his retirement, he looked back and wondered whether any of it had made a difference. Susan knew then and there that she never wanted to be in that position. At the end of her own career, she wanted to know with certainty what her impact had been, and that she’d done everything possible to make it as large as possible. And so she came to [University of Notre Dame’s Lab for Economic Opportunities], looking for help figuring out whether her own organization was having the impact she hoped it was. If it wasn’t, she wanted to know, so that she could make it more effective.

As someone who used to run a nonprofit safety net mental health program, I’ve struggled at that level before. At least twice a year in that job I’d despair that the work had no impact and spend time reconstructing the value intellectually and emotionally.

But, having spent lots of time around social work and public health types, I do not think this question occurs to them frequently. People may wonder whether providing a small amount of therapy services to the uninsured makes a big enough difference, given the magnitude of social problems and systemic issues. But they don’t often wonder whether it makes a difference at all in the lives of the uninsured people served.

Nonprofit evaluation efforts are generally framed internally as: how do we get data to tell the story to funders of this service we all know works. Rather than authentically trying to figure out if it works.

Truthfully, I think most people don’t want to know the answer to that second question. As Doleac goes on to note, a nonprofit employee like Susan has little to gain and much to lose:

To many practitioners, engaging in the types of studies I’m describing in this book seems to offer only downside risk. If you go on as you are, you can remain comfortable in your belief that you’re having a big impact on your community. Surely all your friends are telling you so, and your clients probably are as well. Maybe a study would confirm that belief. But maybe it would tell you that you’re wrong. Maybe the data will reveal that the program you run is not putting people on a better path. Even worse, it could show that you’re doing harm, despite your best intentions.

But we’re spending public dollars to solve social problems and we need to know whether we’re spending that money on impactful work. And when it comes to criminal justice issues, the focus of Doleac’s book, the consequences of getting this wrong are enormous. As is now common knowledge, we spent a massive amount on incarceration and punishment. More importantly, we pay the cost in human lives, both victims of crime and people whose lives are spent behind bars.

A model of evidence-based policy

As I’ve written about before, I’ve been a fan of Doleac’s work for years, since I started listening to the Probable Causation podcast, where she dives deep with individual researchers on one of their newest papers with relevance to the criminal justice world.

While her podcast and book focus on criminal justice, Doleac’s work is a model for me on how to walk the walk of evidence-based policy. The lessons matter across policy domains and issue areas. I’ve learned so much from her over the years about what works and what doesn’t.

Her book helps combat some pessimism I’ve begun to feel. Because the more I have detached from rigid orthodox ideology and adopted a pragmatic lens about what policies and interventions actually improve the world, the more I’ve been disappointed. Policy after policy that we think will work ends up not working or not replicating when we evaluate it under the most rigorous standards.

I wrote about this a lot here in response to a paper by Megan Stevenson on this dynamic in criminal justice research, plus an accompanying symposium by Vital City (which Doleac participated in):

This lens won’t win you a lot of friends in the nonprofit world. “Hey, that thing you’re passionate about and devote your life to? Probably doesn’t work.” I have more tact than that in the real world, I promise! But even though it’s negative to say, it is true that most interventions don’t work.

Things Work, but Don’t Respect Ideology

Contrary to my intermittent pessimism about evidence-based social policy, Doleac’s book is a good reminder that there is actually a lot that does work in the world of criminal justice policy.

What does work doesn’t align neatly with any one school of political thought. Progressives and conservatives alike will find both validation and burst bubbles throughout this book:

• Cutting convicted criminals off from welfare benefits? Bad.

• Leniency in sentencing for first time crimes? Good.

• Banning employers from asking about a job applicant’s criminal history? Bad.

• Giving people unconditional money when they exit prison? Good.

I’m being a bit provocative and reductionist to make a point here. Very few of these policies are as simple as “good” or “bad,” tradeoffs abound and often we learn something valuable even from a null result. Doleac is measured and evidence-based throughout, always ready to admit when a surprising result still awaits more study or explanation.

But it’s a good validation of a pragmatic approach, in the John Dewey sense. If you follow the evidence, it’s hard to stay aligned with broad political theories, whether it’s Tough On Crime or Prison Abolition. Immersing myself in this evidence has depolarized me politically on this issue.

Before I end on some broader takeaways, here’s some other quick hits of new pieces of information that I got, or information that surprised me and updated my beliefs:

• Doleac covers a good study detailing the impact of Medicaid on reducing crime, contradicting a paper that I wrote up here which found no effect. The paper Doleac cites does zoom in and suggest that improved access to mental health services is probably the mechanism here.

• Halfway houses increase the likelihood of incarceration over people who are placed on regular parole.

• There is an often-noted correlation between parental incarceration and their children’s, which could either be because they’re both facing the same challenges (e.g., poverty) or because incarcerating a parent sets their child on the wrong path. The current literature suggests that it’s the former, and that in some cases incarcerating a parent actually makes their child less likely to offend in the future.

• Bigger isn’t always better: for people coming out of prison, it’s common to see nonprofits who provide wraparound support with housing, food, medical care, whatever the needs of the person may be. In general, those programs are less effective than smaller, more tailored interventions like food stamps or temporary rent assistance for those who are about to be evicted.

The last word has not been written on all these topics; there is more research to be done. But if any of these bulleted findings surprised you, and I’m guessing at least one did, then you should really pick up this book. It’s full of revelations, clearly explained.

Now for three bigger picture takeaways and reflections.

Not enough people care

It continues to surprise me how little interest there is in what does and doesn’t work. I get this for the nonprofit service providers that I mentioned at the top of this post. Their sense of self is so tied up in the work that it’s hard to be open to finding out that it doesn’t work. And their anecdotal, qualitative experience of seeing people helped is really hard to overcome, even if the aggregate results are still disappointing.

But I’m disappointed in two other camps: scholars and political advocates.

Of the two, scholars deserve more blame. Doleac herself has been bullied by academics around studies whose findings contradicted their hopes on Ban the Box, naloxone access, and other issues. No wonder public trust in these institutions is declining.

The rise of the scholar-activist, in particular, who try to police truth-seeking because it hurts their political cause, are undermining the credibility of a number of academic disciplines. It’s okay if you want to be a partisan advocate, rather than a truth-seeker. But then you don’t get to claim the expert credibility of Academia: The Truth-Seeking Institution. I wish there was more self-policing going on here by these professions, but alas.

As for political advocates, people whose whole career involves assembling coalitions to get particular policies passed, I’m a bit more sympathetic. They’re not policy wonks and it’s hard to keep up with these kinds of debates, especially without high-quality translators like Doleac who help synthesize the literature.

But it does bum me out that people who want to make life better for the formerly-incarcerated are spending a lot of time and money on policies that likely don’t work. I live in Missouri and there’s still a lot of effort put into Clean Slate, despite the fact that the evidence on that policy’s impact is pretty bad. At a high level, it doesn’t generally achieve its goals and in some cases may harm Black job applicants.

Again, it’s partially just an issue of different jobs for different people. Advocates think in political coalitions, symbolic victories, moral narratives. The same academics who produce fantastic studies are often lost trying to explain it to other elites, never mind sketching out a longer term political campaign.

To be fair to the advocates, part of the messiness of politics is also that imperfect policies can sometimes be a useful catalyst for a broader societal conversation or shift in norms. Sometimes you need to tie a popular-but-ineffective policy with something more wonky but less popular that will actually solve your problem.

In a different policy domain, Zohran Mamdani is trying to do with his policies on housing affordability. Rent control is popular, increasing housing supply is more boring and wonky. Talking about the former gets you votes, doing the latter actually solves the problem. And then when it comes time to get re-elected, you run on the results and voters don’t care where it came from.

But I don’t see how pushing for Clean Slate in the Year of Our Lord 2026 is anything like this. It’s just pushing for one policy that we know doesn’t work, and one that harms other marginalized people at the same time. Thumbs down.

The Speed Issue

There’s a third group that I didn’t mention above: policymakers. Think legislators and their staff. My experience is that those people do care, but that the process to produce high quality evidence just doesn’t move at the right timescale for them.

Greg Berman wrote a review of Doleac’s book, which I recommend:

Small Sanities

The Science of Second Chances

I think I am a critic by nature. In my twenties, I had a brief fling as a music critic for the Providence Journal. I drive my family crazy with my hot takes on movies. And one of my favorite things to write is a book review. For whatever reason, I find that I often have a strong reaction to cultural products — and the urge to share these opinions with …

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6 months ago · 5 likes · Greg Berman

In that review, he casually notes that “Government officials operate on a much faster time clock than academic researchers, who typically require years to complete their work.” For those who track the pace of change in politics, that is both depressing and correct. It reminds me of a paper I wrote about a while ago, which found that high quality studies tend to influence politics only when they were commissioned by the same party that’s still in power:

Basically, politicians need quick answers. They need to run for office and they need to know successes to highlight to the public. Doleac encourages politicians to accept that many policies will fail and to focus on “failing faster,” and I agree.

But there’s a tension here that’s similar to the nonprofit service provider. Recall that the higher quality study you do, the more likely it is to show no effect.

Does the Mayor of St. Louis want to stand up and say “my signature gun violence initiative failed, but don’t worry, we learned something useful.” No! This pushes them away from high quality research methods, which both take too much time and are unlikely to give them good success stories for reelection campaigns.

The timeline in particular is a big problem. I don’t know enough about the ins-and-outs of research to know how to streamline the process to get information faster.

My sense from listening to Doleac’s podcast (and reading the book) is that researchers spend a ton of time just getting access to the data they need in the correct format and making sure multiple data sources can connect with each other.

I hate to join the chorus of policy wonks saying over and over again that we need to “invest in government data infrastructure,” but it does seem true. Check out this write-up for an example of some of the current issues that face researchers and thus further-lengthen our evaluation timelines:

Statecraft

Ten Thoughts on Government Data

Government data often underpins policy debates. Nevertheless, those who work with it will know how uniquely frustrating it can be. Relative to the private sector, government systems collect data in idiosyncratic ways. They prioritize continuity and legality over ease-of-use, in anticipation of a narrow set of users. As a result, these datasets can feel …

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6 months ago · 31 likes · 1 comment · Santi Ruiz

Incrementalism Is Quietly Revolutionary

I used to be more of a revolution-focused leftist thinker and have moved more in the pragmatic, incrementalist direction. This sometimes makes me feel like a sellout, or at least insufficiently ambitious. But if you start layering a lot of these interventions on top of each other, you start to see pretty transformative results. Doleac’s book is full of effect sizes that hover around 3%, but she’s correct to subtitle it A Revolution in Criminal Justice.

This is a very rough model, but let’s say we wave the Doleac magic wand and implement DNA databases, which could reduce recidivism by 42%, then add on another 10 smaller changes that reduce recidivism by 3% each. We’re suddenly seeing around a 58% reduction in crime.

I am friends with some real prison abolition people, the pinnacle of Doleac’s revolution-over-reform counterparts. But if you really pin them down they’ll usually admit that there will always be some subset of people who will commit heinous crimes and require punishment (including incarceration), but it’s a pretty small and manageable amount once we implement the suite of revolutionary changes that the abolitionists want us to.

If the prison abolition movement succeeded in making some of their proposed changes and saw a 58% reduction in recidivism, I think they’d probably declare victory. So how different are these revolution vs. reform movements, in terms of their potential for transforming our society?

Sam is also a good friend and we regularly talk about music and movies in particular. I’ve been wanting to systematically pick his brain about classical music and the musical canon for a while and he was gracious enough to sit down with me and field all of my questions.

This is part one of a three-part conversation. This first one covers his musical background, how he thinks about and listens to music, and what he gained from academic training. It also covers why Paul McCartney is an accidental contrapuntalist who can secretly read music and how Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane connect to Bach. As always, Sam makes many fun leaps.

In the second part we’ll drill down on the classical guitar. In the third, we’ll zoom out and talk about the classical music canon and Sam’s personal pantheon. He’s full of hot takes and fresh perspectives throughout.

Musical Origins

Ben: You and I obviously know each other, but I’d love for you to sketch your musical background and arc, just as background for readers. I know you sang German Lieder as a teen. You studied classical guitar. You have a really cool and eclectic band. And you’ve written a lot about popular music at various outlets. But give me your own narrative that ties all this together.

Sam: I think of it as — at the bottom of it all is classical music. That’s what’s in my brain as the base, the ground of everything else. And that’s just because of my parents. Both of them were music majors. They went on to do other things at the master’s level — my dad became a preacher, mom became a psychologist — but they were both singers, classically trained singers. I literally don’t remember a time when we weren’t singing as a family in parts. I was understanding how to sing in harmony with my parents from the time I was like three or four.

Ben: You’re doing that around the house, at church?

Sam: Yeah, both — it wasn’t programmatic, but there was just a lot of singing. My mom was a decent pianist. My dad played guitar and wrote songs — these kind of James Taylor-ish songs, kind of faithy, kind of Christian-y. He had this sort of Christian hippie feeling to him at times.

My first musical memories are probably of the Beatles, but also — even before that — there’s this suite of pieces called the Slavonic Dances by Dvořák. I feel like that, and Holst’s The Planets, and some Bach, Beethoven, Mozart — that’s the oldest music memories I have.

And then in Colorado, when we would go up to the mountains during the summer, we would often have tapes playing in the car. A lot of Copland, which kind of transformed my brain. I’d be staring out these enormous vistas as we’d be driving down these mountains and listening to Copland’s music, or Dvořák, or Beethoven. It would just be the sublime — totally, actually confronted with it. Giant landscapes and outsized emotions and classical music all became combined for me at a very young age.

When I was about five, my parents said, you have to go learn some kind of instrument. I picked violin — I don’t know why. I ended up playing violin for ten years. Somewhere along the way I taught myself some piano. In seventh grade I started in band, initially playing the baritone, then I switched to trumpet. And then when I was about twelve or thirteen, I started messing around with my dad’s guitar and figuring out basic chords. From there it was kind of off to the races. Got an electric guitar, practiced all the time. I had this old stereo that you could pop a microphone into and record onto a tape, and I would just write songs and record them like little demos for myself.

Education and the Sausage Factory

Ben: So you ended up studying music in a conservatory type of thing?

Sam: No — it really was not a conservatory. Mizzou was just a public university music school. There were a few professors of conservatory quality, but it mostly functioned as a music education department, churning out music teachers. I would not have cut it at a conservatory.

Ben: Is that because you don’t want to woodshed? Or because you’re too interested in dipping into different traditions?

Sam: No, I was definitely too lazy. But also, I was coming to university with almost nothing. I had a lot of talent and I could do a lot, but conservatory kids were in intense training from a young age. If you got into a conservatory, that meant you had already been playing classical guitar for a while — you would need to know the canon already.

I was stoned and lazy and a total college kid. I had a thousand other interests, and this was just something I happened to be doing. Along the way it turned into a wonderful thing — it gave me more of an education in music than an education as a musician.

Some of the things we had to study, even at the undergraduate level — Renaissance counterpoint, eighteenth-century counterpoint studying Bach at the micro level, a twentieth-century theory course on twelve-tone rows and atonal composition. Musicology courses at the graduate level, which were pretty exacting. I took a class just on chamber music.

How Training Shapes Listening

Ben: How did that training influence the way you hear classical music? Were there big light bulbs for you, new lenses that unlocked things?

Sam: Understanding some of the basics of orchestration really helped.

Ben: What does that mean?

Sam: You’re trying to understand at what point the harmonic underpinning is being handled by this section versus that section. How are they balancing the strings against the woodwinds, against the brass? You’re listening to doublings — where are they choosing to double a melody between, say, the second violins and the oboes?

One of the biggest teachers in the twentieth century was Nadia Boulanger, this great figure in Paris who taught Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Philip Glass, Michel Legrand, and all these other people who would come to her and learn these secrets of orchestration.

For me, the biggest thing was listening to Ravel’s orchestral music and understanding how he achieved different colors by mixing instruments. Understanding how you could take the harmony of something that existed on the keyboard and expand it into an ensemble of sixty to a hundred musicians. Famously, he did that for Mussorgsky.

If you listen to Bach’s music, you see somebody for whom the keyboard and the new temperament created an ability to write a kind of universal music. You can take a cello suite or a cantata or a violin suite and put it on the keyboard and it sounds great. You can take his keyboard music and expand it into an ensemble of any kind and it sounds great, because it’s such pure polyphony that you can just assign those voices to different instruments.

It gets more complicated in the classical era because the move is away from polyphony towards harmony — towards themes and large moving sections of chords instead of interpenetrating voices. But the great composers all studied polyphony to understand the relation between these voices.

I spent two years as a TA for the freshman music theory course, grading thirty assignments a week — the second half of the course was mostly part-writing, four-part chorale writing with exhaustive rules of voice leading. It drilled polyphony into my brain. And we did a lot of ear training — sight singing every Friday, handed a melody you’d never seen and told to sing it from a single starting note. That was easy for me because I’d spent fifteen years in church learning how to do it.

Vertical vs. Horizontal Listening

Ben: You’ve described yourself as more of a vertical listener than a horizontal listener. Unpack that a little.

Sam: When I memorize music, I memorize the sheet music. There’s a scroll going by in my head while I’m playing. The scroll moves horizontally, but the parts on a staff are vertical.

I was listening to Grieg today — his Peer Gynt music. I’m listening to that famous beginning, and I’m seeing it going by. I can imagine how it would look at the top of the staff — this flute line in the soprano range. I can see the contour of that line. But underneath it, I’m also hearing strings doing other things. I’m trying to hear the relationships between them and how they’re stacked.

So very often I’m listening to how these things sit on top of each other from lowest to highest, just as you’d see it on an orchestral score. I can go in and out of those ways of thinking pretty easily.

Ben: When you have that vertical lens on, what do you feel like you miss?

Sam: You could lose an appreciation for color. You could lose a little bit of the sense of how everything combines into a whole. But as we talk about it, I think I probably am not doing the vertical thing as often as I think I am. Most of the time I’m probably just appreciating things as a whole. Vibing, you could say.

The Polyphonic Beatles and Extended Harmony

Sam: I figured this out because of my obsession with the Beatles. Each of these parts is thought through, especially as they get to ‘65, ‘66.

Ben: Have you ever found those videos where it’s just Paul’s bass line? Or just Ringo — that’s part of why he’s such a magical drummer, right? He fits in all the right spots and steps back.

Sam: It’s why Ringo is perfect for the Beatles. And Paul is an accidental contrapuntalist. He claims not to be able to read music — I kind of think that’s bullshit. But if you listen to his best bass lines, he’s doing these wonderful counterpoints to his own melodies. He thinks of his bass as a melody line that needs to harmonize with the vocal line.

James Jamerson does that too on [bass on] those old Motown recordings. That’s a guy who knows exactly where the 1-3-5-7 are of any root he’s playing — and he’s going to have fun with it.

Most people end up doing polyphony naturally. You catch it in all kinds of cultures where supposedly there’s no polyphony. Listen to Hindustani music — supposedly it’s just a drone, no harmony because you can never leave that key. But that doesn’t keep them from doing their own versions of polyphony when they have more than one instrument at a time.

Jazz musicians are thinking horizontally in a way — they’re thinking of a progression of keys and chords. But they’re also mapping the vertical thing, their scales, against each chord. The stuff that Mingus or Coltrane or Eric Dolphy were thinking about — those guys were sitting at pianos and figuring things out.

Ben: Eric Dolphy especially — that stuff is so composed.

Sam: Dolphy does extended harmony like nobody.

Ben: What does extended harmony mean?

Sam: That’s where you’re getting out of the key completely, but through relationships. Say you have a V chord in the key of C — that’s a G. But you could do a V of V.

Ben: Right — modulations, basically.

Sam: It’s as though you’re entering a new key, but you’re not really. You have to add new accidentals to get there. Which is how you get pieces by any great composer where the key signature stays the same, but at a certain point you’ve definitively moved into a different key — they’re doing a V of V, or a V of IV, or a IV of IV.

Dolphy could do that in real time. Coltrane too. They knew their scales and modes so well that they could push the bounds of how far you could get out of the key while still remaining in it. People underestimate how much theory goes into jazz, how brilliant those guys were. They weren’t idiot savants. They really worked every tiny detail.

Ben: Famously, Coltrane studied Stravinsky.

Sam: And Bach. They all studied Bach. They were like, “We absolutely have to understand this stuff.”

The country was taught to me as a cool anti-Imperialist power as recently as 2013–2017. In reality, we were ignoring a pretty clear signal. People vote with their feet and around 25% of the country left. It was a massive disaster of global proportions, and one that was predictable if you zoomed in on their underlying policies like price controls that have failed time and time again around the world.

As I reflect on my break-up with Marxism, another insight has been crystallizing for me: the perils of overly structural thinking. The common idiom is “don’t miss the forest for the trees,” but I believe that most leftist thinking does the opposite. In focusing so much on the forest, it misses the trees. The real world is full of edge cases, tradeoffs, and knotty situations that demand attention.

The 2009 coup in Honduras, and how it’s discussed on the left, is a perfect case study.

Just Another US-Backed Coup...

I was recently asked to give a short talk summarizing the history, economy, and politics of Honduras for an audience of Unitarian Universalists (here’s the slides, if anyone’s curious). They were watching a documentary about the asylum system and wanted context about this wave of migration. One of the main drivers of migration is political instability, and the 2009 military coup is Exhibit A.

In college, I was taught this coup as another example in the long history of US interventionism in Latin America. Honduras elected a left-wing populist, Manuel Zelaya, and the US responded by supporting a military coup. Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time, wouldn’t even call it a coup! Honduras’s military suspended a lot of rights, then held another election that brought in a right-wing, pro-US government. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

When I was young and supporting Bernie over Hillary in the 2016 primary, this was one of my big reasons. How can we vote for a modern-day imperialist who sanctioned Latin American coups in 2009 like it’s still the Banana Republic days?1

A perfect example of leftist structural thinking. The theme and pattern is US interventionism in Latin America, which is undeniable. How could this not fit that model?

What Actually Happened in Honduras

The problem is that this general narrative erases too many specifics. None of those takeaways hold up when you learn the details. I assumed that the Latin America scholars and commentators I was reading were on the level and didn’t look into it myself.

Until I was reading a Scott Alexander piece from 2021 about a charter city in Honduras and came across this paragraph:

In 2009, Honduras’ leftist-ish President Manuel Zelaya proposed a referendum to change the Constitution, which his opponents interpreted as a plot to remove term limits and rule indefinitely. The Supreme Court ruled against him, Zelaya ordered the military to assist in holding the referendum anyway, and the military held a coup instead. They appointed the next person in the line of succession the interim president, then held tense elections which were partially boycotted by Zelaya supporters and of debated legitimacy. Conservative candidate Porfirio Lobo Sosa won and became president.

Wait... what?

Sure enough, the inciting incident for the coup was a constitutional crisis. As Alexander put it elsewhere, Zelaya “pulled an Andrew Jackson.” Put another way, he did exactly what everyone in America has been worried about Trump doing: he openly defied the Supreme Court.

I did a bunch more research and it’s complicated, but here’s my best distillation. Honduras, like many Latin American countries, has a long constitution with almost 400 articles. Much longer than the US Constitution. Some articles are specifically designated unamendable, and one of those is the prohibition on running for more than one term as president:

Zelaya said he wanted to change term limits and proposed calling a Constitutional Convention to re-write it. The specific question he wanted to put on the ballot was vague—it didn’t explicitly say the Convention would change term limits—but the Supreme Court ruled against him anyway, essentially saying: we know what you’re trying to do, and you can’t do it.

Zelaya responded: I’m the President, you can’t stop me. He then pulled money from the Central Bank to print the ballots.

Legislators in his own party were angry. The Supreme Court issued an order for his arrest for violating their ruling and misappropriating public funds. But the Supreme Court doesn’t control the police—ultimately the president does. So what do you do?

This is what a constitutional crisis actually looks like. It’s why people wonder what would happen if Trump decided to defy the Supreme Court: it’s just norms that hold the whole system in place.

The military decided to resolve it by picking Zelaya up and flying him to Costa Rica, declaring him no longer president. They installed the next person in the line of succession—their equivalent of Speaker of the House—and held elections. Zelaya supporters were not happy and the military suspended many civil liberties and did some nasty things to curb protests. Then the election happened and democracy returned.

My opinion: this sucks. But all the options in a constitutional crisis suck. That’s why it’s called a crisis. I’m not going to pretend this wasn’t a military coup—it’s the definition of one.

But Why Didn’t They Call It a “Coup”?

So what about the US role? Didn’t the military act because Zelaya was a left-leaning populist who wanted to align with Chavez against the United States? A coup is a coup, and maybe it’s fair to critique Hillary Clinton for not calling it one. Even if the US didn’t orchestrate the coup, we were likely at least complicit, right?

First: the United States did not make Zelaya violate his own Supreme Court. And if you want to wade into Honduran jurisprudence and argue the Supreme Court was wrong and that justified his actions, there may be a job opening for you in the Trump administration DOJ.

But beyond that, the complicity narrative just seems factually wrong. Obama spoke out against the coup immediately. Here’s Hillary Clinton’s statement from the day after:

The action taken against Honduran President Mel Zelaya violates the precepts of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, and thus should be condemned by all. We call on all parties in Honduras to respect the constitutional order and the rule of law, to reaffirm their democratic vocation, and to commit themselves to resolve political disputes peacefully and through dialogue.

Afterwards, the US tried to negotiate Zelaya’s return and threatened to withhold recognition of the new election if he didn’t come back. The reason the administration avoided formally designating it a “military coup” is that doing so would have required cutting off all aid to Honduras. Clinton eventually said in 2016 that she thinks removing Zelaya from power was “legal” given the Supreme Court’s orders, though “I don’t like the way they did it.”2

As leftist critics of sanctions have often acknowledged, aid cutoffs typically hurt poor people without changing anything at the top. This seems especially likely when only five months remained before a new election was already scheduled anyway.

This was a genuinely hard call. Do you penalize the people of Honduras—the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere—for living through a constitutional crisis not of their making? Do you stand up for democratic principles in the Americas, which might actually suggest that Zelaya should be removed, albeit in a different way? Do you instead follow an ethic of national sovereignty, trying to correct for more than a century of US intervention in the region?

I don’t know! It’s hard. No one knew how it was all going to turn out.

What actually happened is that democracy returned to Honduras. The US recognized the results of the late-2009 election. Zelaya eventually came back from exile, and his wife Xiomara Castro was elected president in 2021, in part because the wounds of this coup hadn’t healed. She served her full term—no constitutional crisis, no coup. Which is a decent test of the “Zelaya was couped for being a leftist” theory.

When Castro’s party lost the subsequent election, she cried US intervention and called it an “electoral coup”—not because of any illegal activity, but simply because Donald Trump weighed in on who he wanted to win. I’m reminded of Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.3

None of this—including the fact that the US actually tried to intervene on his behalf—has stopped Zelaya from asserting: “What we suspected at the beginning has now been confirmed. The United States was behind the coup... the Honduran people are faithful witnesses to the role that the economic interests of the United States played in this tragic event.”

Classic leftist forest-over-trees thinking. US economic interests were advanced by Zelaya’s replacement with a more right-leaning, US-friendly president. Therefore, the US did it. Again, this is a big logical leap with basically no evidence.

Why This Matters

This is more than a long detour into arcane Honduran constitutional politics (though it is also that). It’s indicative of bad epistemic habits in left-leaning circles—not just the far left.

The “forest” view (”just another US coup in Latin America”) misses quite a bit of “trees”: the US did not orchestrate the coup, did not support it, avoided the formal designation partly to protect poor Hondurans from aid cuts, and the whole thing was triggered by a constitutional crisis that left the country with no clean options.

There’s also a boy-who-cried-wolf problem. Calling this coup equivalent to any other US-backed Latin American intervention dilutes the term. We’re now seeing Zelaya’s wife throw around “electoral coup” to mean “I don’t like these results.”

That false equivalency matters, because actual unambiguous coups still happen. Trump just executed an actual 1953-style coup in Venezuela. But what can you even say about that if you’ve been using the word so loosely? You already deployed the full force of leftist critique on Hillary Clinton over Honduras in a way that, frankly, fooled me. If it’s all the same, who cares what Trump does?

The ultimate irony is that in the Zelaya case, leftists are guilty of exactly what they accuse the US of doing throughout the Cold War: completely erasing any faults with someone as long as they’re “on our side.” Zelaya did something bad. We’d call it bad if Trump did it. But he’s one of us, so it’s barely worth mentioning.

I wish that weren’t the case. Those making this argument are probably unreachable. But I’d urge other left-leaning people who are sympathetic to Latin America’s history of US intervention—history that is real and worth taking seriously—to be more careful about who they’re listening to.

In 2023, I saw him headline a music festival in St. Louis called Music at the Intersection. It’s mostly focused on jazz, R&B, soul, and some blues. Herbie Hancock was the headliner, age 83 at the time.

It was a big outdoor stage. A bunch of people of all ages, most of whom probably know that Herbie Hancock is famous but don’t know any of his work besides maybe “Watermelon Man” or “Rockit.”

He started his set with a warning. “We’re going to play something short to start, and I’m warning you that it’s going to be weird at first. But please be patient and bear with me. You’re going to like what we play later, and we need to play this to be able to play what you want to hear later.”

And sure enough, Herbie started out by playing some weird noises on the synthesizer out of a 1950s low-budget sci-fi movie. A sound you might associate with the Daleks in Doctor Who‘s original run. The band sort of thrashed and vamped a bit, before bringing it back in.

And then he ripped an amazing, crowd-pleasing concert with the energy of a man half his age. It reminded me of when I saw him a few years earlier, when he jumped around with a keytar the size of his body in dramatic fashion.

Out of curiosity, I poked around on YouTube and it looks like this was a variant on a common introduction for him. He gives a similar introduction at the Barbican, before jumping into outer space:

He knows that the crowd isn’t there to see him space out. They’re there to hear “Watermelon Man” and some accessible jazz. So why does he start there? He’s not an indulgent rock star who refuses to play the hits, he was happy to please the crowd. What’s going on?

Indian music

In recent years, I have gotten into South Asian music, particularly South Indian classical music or Carnatic music. For Western audiences, the term “classical” suggests composed music. There is plenty of composition in South Asian and Indian music, but it is much more improvisatory like jazz.

I’ll admit, I’ve banged my head against the wall trying to understand the form. I’ve watched YouTube videos, read Amit Chaudhuri’s Finding the Raga (which had some poetic sections, but did not reveal much). Every composition has a rhythmic cycle called a tala that’s similar to Western musical meter. Ragas are somewhere between a melody and a scale, and are the center that the musicians riff off of. But I still struggle to hear the core melodies and when the performers alight back on them.

But the beautiful thing is that it doesn’t matter. It’s some of the best live music I’ve ever seen. The experience reminds me of Mark Yakich’s advice about reading poetry:

When you read a poem, especially a poem not meant to be a “spoken word” poem, always read it out loud. (Never mind what they said in grammar school—to subvocalize so that you won’t bother your peers.) Your ear will pick up more than your head will allow. That is, the ear will tell the mind what to think.

A modified version of that advice is true here. Your eyes pick up on more than your ears alone allow. They tell the ear what to hear and what to focus on.

At Big Ears Music Festival in Knoxville (which I also went to last year and wrote up here), a friend and I sat through an 8-hour survey of South Asian music, curated by the folks at Chicago’s Ragamala.

As a drummer, the percussionists impress me the most. I’ve never seen hands fly as much as I have when Selvaganesh Vinayakram and Swaminathan Selvaganesh played the kanjira, a sort of small tambourine that was conjuring sounds I could hardly believe.

A friend of mine wanted to learn the tabla or mridangam growing up and he was told that he had to take singing lessons for two years before they’d let him touch a drum. The best Indian percussionists play with a deep melodic sense that bears that out.

The highlight of the day was the Saami Brothers, who performed a meditative 90-minute set of khayal, the droning and expansive cousin of the more commonly-performed and ecstatic Sufi qawwali music. It’s a deeply expressive and personal form. Boring at times and exultant at others. The droning harmonium works its way deep into your bones on that timescale and it’s hard to come back to earth when it finally ends.

The day was capped by L. Shankar, the electric violin player who cofounded Shakti, the premier East-Meets-West band. He needed a bit to get warmed up (there were some sound issues, to be fair), but by the end sparks were flying.

The warm-up

Which brings me back to Herbie Hancock. Across Big Ears, I saw top improvisers from all over the world. The previously mentioned marathon of South Asian music, five performances by New York avant-garde legend John Zorn, and a survey of America’s finest contemporary jazz and jazz-ish improvisers like Josh Johnson, SML, and Jeff Parker.

Particularly during the Indian music marathon I noticed a pattern. These guys are athletes, they need a warm-up! Every musician brings different energy depending on the day. Not only do the musicians need time to stretch themselves out and see what they’re bringing today, they need to listen deeply and pick up on their peer performers. And they are generally doing this all onstage, in front of the audience.

Don’t get me wrong, these are amazing musicians, so they’d still start off well. A less-attuned ear probably wouldn’t hear it. But you can read some stiffness in the body language, maybe a cue is missed here and there.

But by the end of the performance, in the best cases, you’re watching what seems like a live form of ESP. Some sort of hive mind emerges, the performers get comfortable with themselves and each other. They can let it rip, expand out and explore the boundaries of their improvisation, and then return together and stop on a dime.

I noticed the pattern more sharply because of the marathon format of the Ragamala section. You’d end with one set of performers in full sync, full flow. And then you’d start with another group and think “huh, maybe this one won’t be quite as good.” But they were just doing their warm-up stretches! By the end of the set, they too would be in the flow.

The listener’s warm-up

And, of course, it is not only the musicians who need time to tune their ear to the performing energies of the day and of the set. We as listeners need that same time. It gives me an appreciation for how many long Indian improvisations, which may stretch to an hour, start with a long solo improvisation. Often slow, contemplative, atmospheric.

Take this Ravi Shankar-Ali Akhbar Khan live duo album. Long stretches of noodling (12:00 to 19:00 are representative). Stretching out, mapping the outer limits of the raag for the day. And then boom, by an hour in (try 1:10:00-1:15:00 or so), they’re ripping, trading off, finishing each other’s sentences.

But not only can they not do that without the contemplative space and stretching that precedes it. You as a listener can’t get into it either. If you jump to that “flow state” part I mentioned, I’m betting it didn’t fully impress. But just trust me that if you give this music the space that it deserves, you will get there and be able to hear the intense level of chemistry and craft and creativity.

Herbie, because he is in the same God Tier of improvisers, gets this. I think that is why he frontloads the strangeness, frontloads the weird space explorations and sound effects, space for the drummer to thrash around a bit. He’s a veteran and he knows that this is how he needs to stretch, how he needs to get the wiggles out in order to play his music and hear his band at the level that’s needed.

Music that demands this much of its audience is somewhat destined to be niche music. My own attention span, which has to be better than most my age, is just not there most of the time.

But there’s something deeply human about this experience that I’ve scarcely found in other art. The way that the core components of human relationships are laid bare. Both between the performers and with the audience. Patience, exploration, listening, trust.