Trump and Ukraine

As a kind of time capsule, today the big news is that Trump may have pressed Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden (Joe Biden's son), possibly in exchange for military aid, intelligence, or other inducements. This is all extremely speculative at this point. Here is the New York Times story, here is a good background post from Just Security, and here is Giuliani ranting about it:

CNN's @ChrisCuomo: "Did you ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden?"@RudyGiuliani: "Of course I did"

President Trump's attorney says he had spoken with a Ukrainian official about Joe Biden's possible role in that government's dismissal of a prosecutor who investigated Biden's son. pic.twitter.com/hqmqtmx2VW

— Cuomo Prime Time (@CuomoPrimeTime) September 20, 2019

And here's Giuliani's tweet:

I predict that more details will emerge and that the debate will essentially boil down to shouting about whether it's appropriate to pressure another country to investigate one of your citizens. I want to sound a note of caution on that front. While I think it's flagrantly wrong to do so (at least in this manner—more on that later), this isn't going to be intuitively obvious to a lot of people, and I think Trump might brazen it out. I'm sure we've pressured countries before (e.g. we've certainly pressured countries not to shelter Assange and Snowden), and so it's going to be easy to muddy the water.

Of course who knows, maybe this speculation will all turn out to be wrong.

I do want to make one additional observation, which is that in 2012 many Republicans were utterly convinced that Benghazi was going to sink Obama's reelection if only the media would report on it. This was good for a chuckle at the time, as were Trump's flailing efforts on behalf of Romney. But both jokes turned extremely sour in 2016, and I still haven't quite figured out to my own satisfaction how the right did it.

And so assuming the speculation turns out to be true, I'm very curious which way it will go. Will the right's obsession with meritless investigations finally backfire? Or will it yet again pay dividends in our increasingly broken political system?

[edited for grammar]

Long Sigh

I am perhaps unreasonably angry about two Kevin Drum blog posts (first, second). In the first post, he writes:

Let me put this in concrete terms. If you truly believe that climate change will broil the planet in the next 50 years or so, the very least you should do is immediately get rid of your car and adopt a vegan diet. How many of you have done that? How many of you have even considered it? Virtually none of you.

In the second post, he writes:

Climate change isn’t a game, and trying to make people feel bad about living their lives isn’t going to increase support for the kinds of things that really make a difference.

Okay.

Now in fairness to Drum, his consistent position appears to be that no one should feel obliged to change behavior to fight climate change, and no one should support policies such as carbon taxes that might address climate change by altering the behavior of large numbers of people. What is called for is the invention of technologies that will allow us (meaning affluent Americans) to keep our current lifestyles while limiting global temperature increases to manageable levels.

Still, if that's what you believe, I think it really behooves you not to write troll-bait like the passage I quoted from Drum's first post. I suppose his (honest) response would be something like, "For a lot of people, if they don't hate-read me they won't read me at all," but it is really very unhelpful to the underlying substantive argument. (Which, by the way, is stupid as hell.)

If We Had But World Enough and Time

From time to time I am asked to interview prospective hires at the law firm where I am employed. This is usually depressing because the interviewees are young and bright and interesting, and they would generally be happier and more productive doing something other than practicing law. But you've got to feed the monkey.

Anyway in one particularly depressing interview, the interviewee explained the biscuit conditional to me. The biscuit conditional is a linguistic concept illustrated by the following Demetri Martin joke (which I am paraphrasing):

I went to shop for clothes and the woman in the store said, "If you need anything my name is Kim." This startled me because I had never met anyone with a conditional identity before.

The point of the biscuit conditional is that an "if" statement sometimes pertains to the relevance of the information, not the information itself. The traditional example is: "If you're hungry there's a biscuit on the table." Of course there's a biscuit whether or not you are hungry, but the information is only relevant to you if you're hungry. Similarly Demetri Martin only needed to know Kim's name if he needed to ask for help.

Anyway my point today is that biscuit conditionals are a kind of exception that proves the rule, the rule being that statements contain an implicit "and this information is relevant to you" appended to them. To put this another way, at any point you can choose to pay attention to any of the nearly infinitely many streams of information available to you. Each of them demands a certain amount of your attention, and you can't conceivably pay attention to all of them. Of course in some circumstances you are cut off from most of them, e.g. your phone dies in the middle of an intercity train ride and you are left with only a single magazine to read. But this example is revealing precisely because it is unusual—in our ordinary circumstances we face no such scarcity and instead it is attention that is scarce.

So how do we allocate attention? I'll write some more posts about it, but in short I think we do it haphazardly or driven by a desire for entertainment or comfort. A few quick implications:

• This is the reason that propaganda needs to entertain us. Fox News and Donald Trump are very good at this. You also see this on Twitter where ridiculous arguments couched in humorous terms often go viral.
• Because attention is so scarce it is often sufficient for an idea to be superficially plausible or attractive. Few people have the attention spans to delve deeper. (Again, this is clearly visible in propaganda and viral tweets.)
• It is unreasonable to go through life without consciously allocating attention, and yet this is how most of us behave in our personal lives. (Professionally there are usually few opportunities to pay attention to random things rather than the task that's been assigned.) Of course allocating attention well may be a very hard problem, but simply going with the flow is almost certainly worse and exposes people to many of the well-known hazards of modern life (polarization, in-group thinking, manipulation by advertisers, and so forth).

I think the right way to go through life (one that I seldom practice, admittedly) is to consciously ask, "Is this worth my time?" before committing any serious amount of attention to a subject. Moreover, I think it's important to maintain a kind of awareness of uncertainty for most things. It's okay to form a provisional opinion based on very limited information (e.g. the FDA says pasteurization is good, so I'll provisionally take the view that milk should be pasteurized), but it's also important to remember the degree of confidence that you attach to your beliefs and to behave accordingly.

Twitter is terrible for all of this. I've been thinking about how to use Twitter responsibly and I am not sure it can be done. More on that later.

City Dwellers Pay the Price

Just a few quick observations.

First, cities are generally the greenest place for people to live. "Greenest" in the sense that an urban lifestyle (small house, relatively little car use) is generally less polluting than a suburban or rural one. I think this is pretty well understood these days, at least among the audience for this blog. (It is worth noting briefly that (A) big cities tend to have big, polluting suburbs, so if you take the entire metro area into account I'm not sure big cities are actually all that green, (B) poor people tend to have low-carbon lifestyles wherever they live, and rich people tend to have high-carbon lifestyles wherever they live, and (C) with better public policy smaller cities and suburbs could be made to be pretty green. These are all topics for a different post.)

Anyway my real point has to do with my second observation, which is that cities tend not to be at all green in the sense of having healthy environments. This used to be a severe problem, now in the developed world it is not nearly as bad (more on that in a minute), and it's even improved quite a bit in many big cities in developing countries (Mexico City for instance). But it's still pretty bad to live in a city. This is extremely unfair in my view. If you live in a leafy green suburb you really will live a longer, healthier life than if you live in a city. In particular as I've started to ride a bicycle around the city more and more, I've noticed that I'm breathing a lot of really terrible air. (This post was motivated by this article, but there's plenty more evidence that small particulate pollution is very damaging. By the way, that article was published in Britain, which is why there are so many misspellings.) It kills me to think that I'm trading away my health in this way. (I know, probably the exercise benefits outweigh the costs to my heart and lungs, but still, it's a shitty tradeoff.)

My third point is that despite what I've said, cities' environmental conditions seem to have improved a lot relative to the rest of the country in the last 50-100 years. This may be a partial explanation for the high prices that houses in some urban areas command. Emphasis on partial! I'm not trying to deny the supply constrains that appear to be the core problem. But I suspect demand would be far weaker if pollution were as bad today as it was in the 1950s. In some ways, what is happening is that the product is improving dramatically and the price is responding as you would expect.

I'll write a separate post on how to think about where to live.

[Update: I think I should link to a recent piece on the conservative movement's abandonment of cost-benefit analysis. It's a well-written piece that I think manages to explain the problem without glorifying CBA itself. I will return to this topic too, but for now I'll just observe that it appears that reducing small particulate matter pollution is a hugely beneficial policy.]

Build More Housing for the Sake of Housing

A quick point about urban zoning. I am stealing this point from Matt Yglesias, but his decision to delete all his old tweets has freed me from the obligation to dig up the specific tweets that I'm thinking of.

The point is simply that the main virtue of allowing more housing construction in urban areas is that there will be more housing in urban areas. I'm not convinced that housing will be significantly cheaper in the long run as a result of upzoning. If upzoning does drive prices down in the long run, it's probably because it makes the city less livable, not because of supply and demand effects.

But all of that is speculative and mostly beside the point. It is simply good for more people to live in dense, walkable cities. Adding housing to dense, walkable cities means that more people will live there. And allowing supply to expand when people live there means that choosing to live there doesn't simply displace someone else.

In a perfect world, lots of cities would be dense and walkable, and existing cities would become more dense and walkable over time. In practice this is difficult and maybe impossible in a lot of places (not that we should stop trying). But we do have cities that are dense and walkable, and they are capable of housing millions more people than they presently do, and we should try to make that happen.