Eric Levitz

Think out loud for [email protected]

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

Yeah. I think there's definitely something to your initial point to be clear; we have clearly transformed human social relations in ways that would have seemed nearly as improbable as a creating a murder-free society of 350 million people.

But with respect to DAC, I think 2 things contribute to the response:

1) Many liberals are skeptical about whether her fundamental values/ideological commitments. A lot of her past remarks seem more sectarian than humanist (implicit praise for authoritarian socialist states, campist sentiments about the Russia-Ukraine war, the seemingly anti-white/interracial dating tweet etc).

2) As I you sort of suggest, DAC isn't merely claiming that we can engineer an America without murder, but sustain a zero-homicide mass society *without* maintaining a carceral deterrent. There's really no empirical basis whatsoever for believing that's possible (as you note, our extraordinary progress on crime has been undergirded by state policing/punishment). And I think liberals have an allergy to this kind of ungrounded utopianism, in part out of the belief that Marxists' overestimation of human nature's pliability yielded famines and tyrannies in the 20th century.

I think there's a zero percent chance that the US abolishes prisons. So I'm not especially perturbed myself. More concerned by her tacit approval of authoritarian communist states (not because I think America is going to become communist, but because those statements reflect worse impulses than naivety imo)

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

Everyone should have access to air conditioning. Its opponents are enemies of God and Man

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

There was absolutely a push! For months, leadership refused to take Manchin's "no" on the child tax credit extension for an answer. They very nearly gambled away their *entire* climate and social agendas because they tried so long to make him fold on the CTC.

And the bully puplit surely would have made no difference here. Manchin answered to a Trump +40 electorate. Dems had scant leverage. And the one time the White House actually criticized him publicly, he responded by dropping out of negotiations.

The failure that did in the expanded CTC was primarily electoral (winning too few Senate races). Secondarily, the error was also probably not stomaching more targeting, as the headline price of the full version was always going to be hard for mods to swallow (hence why even the House version only extended it for a single year)
https://t.co/ANMKgGvDiL

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

There was absolutely a push! For months, leadership refused to take Manchin's "no" on the child tax credit extension for an answer. They very nearly gambled away their *entire* climate and social agendas because they tried so long to make him fold on the CTC.

And the bully puplit surely would have made no difference here. Manchin answered to a Trump +40 electorate. Dems had scant leverage. And the one time the White House actually criticized him publicly, he responded by dropping out of negotiations.

The failure that did in the expanded CTC was primarily electoral (winning too few Senate races). Secondarily, the error was also probably not stomaching more targeting, as the headline price of the full version was always going to be hard for mods to swallow (hence why even the House version only extended it for a single year)
https://t.co/ANMKgGvDiL

[Matthew Zeitlin @MattZeitlin]

very useful thread on new york city rent regulation because it maps out how we're moving from a "second generation" rent regulation system to something more like a "first generation" one

[Mike Fellman @MikeFellman]

Nuanced thread

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

How would it do so? If the government does this by giving subsidies to the generator providers -- such that the price their allowed to charge + government subsidy gets them close to the price-gouging rate on each generator provided -- then the policy seems almost identical in practical terms to letting the generator providers price-gouge and then giving subsidies to people in need so they can effectively purchase them at the capped price or below

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

I think I agree with that. Certainly, the desire for rent control is typically rational for incumbent tenants, particularly in a context where restrictive zoning looks politically sticky and supply expansion is unlikely to keep pace with demand growth, even in the absence of controls.

That said, I think impact of this year's rent freeze in NYC on housing stability is complicated. For the majority of New Yorkers who are not in stabilized units, it could plausibly increase rents (and thus displacement pressure) at the margin, though I wouldn't expect the impact to be large in the short-term.

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

@DrTonyChopper_ @hecubian_devil I don't know offhand. How much? (Don't see what that has to do with my argument above, but interested nonetheless)

[Basil🧡 @LinkofSunshine]

Do I even need to say anything

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

I just think this is an unhelpful analogy. Tobacco wasn't a primary input into industrial modernity. Fossil fuels have helped spur gargantuan advances in human prosperity. One can't say the same of cigarettes.

And we still don't have actually have the technology necessary to end the use of carbon energy in aviation, maritime shipping, steel, cement, and chemical production. So, we still need fossil fuel companies in the world.

Eliminating carbon energy from electricity generation is also very challenging and expensive task. It requires building enormous amounts of new transmission infrastructure, solar farms, etc. In the immediate term, this will involve real economic costs (and also require people to accept new power infrastructure near them, which even many local environmental groups have refused to accept).

We still need to phase out carbon energy to the fullest extent possible. And it's true that oil companies have used their political sway to frustrate that project in various ways. Which is very bad. But I don't think their lobbying ranks all that high on the list of reasons we haven't transitioned. It is a genuinely difficult technical, economic, and political problem.

Or at the very least, it's a radically *different* kind of problem than tobacco and the analogy does more to obscure than illuminate it imo.

[Adam Carlson @admcrlsn]

I don’t really care who wins this race, but if you think Scott Wiener is “center right” then you have completely lost touch with reality, and I would urge you to proactively seek out interactions with people outside of your neighborhood and social media feedback loop, and maybe take up some sort of hobby — I hear great things about birding.

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

Alex Bores lost Tuesday night. But so did his adversaries in Silicon Valley. https://t.co/6Mj6Ou87QH

[Reihan Salam @reihan]

A few tentative thoughts I’ll have to refine. I’m sure there’s a lot I’m missing.

Espaillat and Reynoso were both decidedly left-wing. So what’s the difference between them and their successful challengers?

A few core differences:

Are you loyal to the incumbent party machine or to a movement for “worker power” — that is, a disciplined, ideologically cohesive organization that can offer skilled volunteer labor as a substitute for campaign contributions, and that will exert ongoing leverage over the candidate, not just during elections.

To demonstrate loyalty, it’s helpful to have sent costly signals, or rather signals that were costly in some earlier period: obsessive anti-Israel sentiment is the most important ideological litmus test, of course. More prosaically, a track record of volunteering (also a way to cement loyalty — there is a path for you, loyal cadre, if you have the right surname, biography that can be characterized the right way, etc.) gives a good indication of where you stand. 

Failing that, pliability and dependence on the door-knockers, micro-influencers, etc., will do in a less favorable district. These non-core candidates (e.g., Lander) can demonstrate momentum, the power of the network, which will bend other electeds in your direction. 

For now, I assume the biggest policy upshot of the expanding DSA bloc will be on foreign and defense policy. We’ll learn more about the psychological disposition of these new members, i.e., how attention-seeking and otherwise unstable they are, how they handle scrutiny, etc. My intuition is that thr DSA bloc represents a turn against personality-driven candidates who excel by building their own donor bases — the goal is to build a team and a brand that transcends individual candidates. AOC is bigger than the DSA, which gives her flexibility. It will be important to have more elected officials in more prominent roles who are smaller than the DSA.

[Ilia ✨ CHISA S6 HAVER @AstralDelight]

“how about these prices” as he’s trying not to laugh is comedy gold, man

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

@katrosenfield I was bored and procrastinating on more involved writing projects (I suspect you’ve posted argumentative replies for similar reasons at some point in your life, tho admit I could be mistaken)

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

My issue with your post was its dismissive/derisive attitude towards the backlash to Wayne's tweet, much of which was justified imo for the reasons stated above. I have little complaint with the sentiments expressed thereafter (We agree that history is full of ironies/tragedies, that many laudable social developments have plausibly had some unfortunate second or third-order consequences, and that people can be excessively resistant to discussing those consequences).

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

@katrosenfield (whoops; meant to include these attachments)

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

Yeah, I do read "critiques" differently here. The other key phrase to me is his declaration that he isn't "super" rightwing on suffrage and is willing to entertain all kinds of arrangements. To me, that strongly signals that he thinks we should at least consider actually abridging suffrage in general -- and women's in particular.

Separately -- and this is all orthogonal to my complaint with your take -- I just find Wayne's argument substantively weak. Gender polarization isn't exceptionally high right now. And women have been able to vote for a very long time.

The social trends that people like Wayne tend to worry about are mostly post-60s developments (if not, post-90s). In my view, the big drivers of falling marriage rates/family formation and gender antagonism within the culture are the advent of oral contraception, the sexual revolution, the emergence of a post-industrial service economy, the explosion of on-demand entertainment, and rising general prosperity (the last two making it much more comfortable for people to defect from the dating market).

You can argue that women's suffrage was a precondition for some of that. But the fact is, the divorce rate barely increased for 40 years after women got the vote. It was a separate social revolution in the 60s that really upended gender relations. And some post-60s (/post-2010s) trends have been felt even in patriarchal societies where women cannot vote. Birth rates are falling in Saudi Arabia!

The other problem with Wayne's argument is that it fails to consider the counterfactual. I don't think female suffrage was a precondition for most of the economic and technological changes of the past century. So, the question is what gender relations would be like in a world where women weren't allowed to to vote but 1) oral contraception was widely available, 2) female-coded, post-industrial service roles became a steadily larger share of the economy as the labor intensity of manufacturing fell and 3) digital media immersed young men and women in content geared to maximize their engagement/flatter their identities/stir up their resentments?

Personally, I suspect that sales of "yum, male tears" mugs would be substantially higher in that world. The idea that women would gamely accept disenfranchisement in anything resembling modern America's technological and economic climate is laughable. And to some extent, the hypothetical is just unthinkable; every single liberal democracy felt compelled to enfranchise women much much earlier in the modernization process.

So, in addition to being offensive in its casual openness to abridging basic rights -- and condescending in its tone -- Wayne's argument is also just dumb imo