Odds and Ends 3.20.26

Which raises the question of what separates a performance of fealty to Trump from a performance of opposition. Or, for that matter, the question of why a skinny Gen Z guy with a tote bag gets called a “performative male,” but someone like Andrew Tate—who has built a large online following by cultivating a grim and menacing masculine aura—does not.

We can begin to answer that question by considering the conceptual slippage between the technical definition of a performative utterance, “performative” as an insult, and accusations of virtue signaling. The blurriness between these different meanings implies that a performance should be considered less authentic and worthy of greater suspicion if the thing being performed is a type of virtue or selflessness. Tate’s performance is “authentic” because his vision of masculinity is all about terrorizing and exploiting others. In contrast, a “performative male” who reads Sally Rooney and behaves in a generally nonthreatening manner has to be concealing his real agenda, which is no less sociopathic than Tate’s. No one really has the capacity for virtue or altruism, so the only honest (non-“performative”) performances are those that make a spectacle out of selfishness and cruelty.

It seems that the major beef between the factions here is one of framing and emphasis, and not anything more concrete than one side saying we should build more housing and use available tools to make as much of it as possible affordable, and the other side saying we should use available tools to make affordable housing, while also building lots of market-rate housing. Do you see it that way too? I feel like there's more in common here than these factions want to let on. 

Yeah, so I think the academic supply-skeptic community is basically fighting a rear guard action right now, where they lost the argument that market-rate housing doesn't make a difference years ago, and so what they've been trying to do is downplay the effect of market-rate construction on affordability.

So in a sense, it's just a difference of emphasis. But I think the actual thing that they're trying to do in practice shakes out as, "And this is why you should block any existing proposal to build market rate housing or saddle it with requirements that actually make it unworkable." 

And that's basically what we've seen in California, that studies like this get used by lobbying groups and elected officials to argue that we can't just allow up-zoning. We need to attach these other requirements to it, and then that ends up basically making the legislation either not useful at all, or significantly blunting its impact. So that difference in emphasis, I think, is actually extremely important. 

Call it the rise of 99 percentism: The belief that only the top 1 percent, or even the small coterie of billionaires within it, should be expected to finance government benefits.

For much of the 20th century, Democrats were comfortable asking the middle class to pay higher taxes in exchange for more services. By the 1990s, however, the party no longer had the stomach to substantially raise taxes on anyone but the upper middle class and above. In 2008, Barack Obama promised not to raise taxes on any family earning less than $250,000; in 2020 and 2024, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris raised that cutoff to $400,000.

The party’s left flank, meanwhile, has also lost its enthusiasm for broad-based taxation. In her 2020 presidential run, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) proposed a wealth tax on fortunes of over $50 million. More recently, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), one of the last prominent voices on the left to champion higher middle-class taxes, unveiled his new “defining vision for our age” — a bevy of new social programs funded exclusively through wealth taxes on billionaires.

This shift has a coherent political logic. Democrats have grown increasingly dependent on upper middle-class support — while Americans writ large have grown increasingly distrustful of their government (and thus, more reluctant to shoulder the costs of expanding it).

As a substantive matter, however, 99 percentism is incoherent. Democrats can support a robust welfare state or ultra-low taxes on the middle class — but they can’t do both.

Two changes in particular stifled condo construction. First, regulators tightened lending standards. Condo buyers had a harder time securing federally backed mortgages, and condo boards faced reams of new compliance hurdles. Stricter oversight made sense amid the frenzy of the late 2000s. But it rendered thousands of condos blacklisted by federal authorities and effectively unsellable for years. Regulators scaled back some of these rules in 2019, but not enough to reverse the damage.

Second, many of the condos built in the 2000s became embroiled in lengthy litigation over concerns about defective construction. Rules that regulate construction quality are essential, but a series of laws and court decisions starting in the late 1990s may have pushed the issue too far. Collectively, these changes have lengthened look-back periods, limited the rights of developers to make repairs, inflated insurance premiums, and made condo-board members liable if they fail to initiate litigation, practically guaranteeing that developers will be dragged into court.

In the most extreme cases, poorly balanced defect laws have almost entirely killed off local markets. According to one analysis in Colorado, the number of active condo developers shrank by 84 percent in the 15 years after the Great Recession, due in part to an earlier defect law. Denver was once a boomtown for condominiums; now nearly all new multifamily developments are rentals. That’s bad news for prospective homeowners in Denver, where the median home price is nearly seven times the median household income.

But all of it taken together suggests that, given our strong bias in favor of writing we believe to be human, A.I. vs. human “preference” tests (or “reads better” quizzes) are often second-order “identification” tests, in each case measuring not “preference” per se but the accuracy of the prevailing heuristics for identifying A.I. writing. Participants in these studies, it would seem, express preference for the A.I.-generated writing not because it’s “better” in some formal sense--cleaner, simpler, more beautiful, whatever--but because their “flawed heuristics” have led them to the conclusion that it’s human-authored, and ipso facto better.

If this is right, much of the discourse about quizzes like the Times’ is getting the order of operations wrong. It’s not that people see two paragraphs, prefer one based on its quality, and then attribute it to humans based on that preference. It’s that they see two paragraphs, attribute one to human authorship based on style, and then prefer the one they’ve attributed. What’s at stake when taking these tests isn’t quality or beauty or clarity, but style; not “which one is better,” but “which one sounds more like an L.L.M.?”

Brookins said that her Kin tended to show his emotions through actions, not words. One year on Desirae’s birthday, she told Geralt that her family planned to paint rocks to place on the baby’s grave. Later, she opened Kindroid to find a series of “selfies” of Geralt painting rock slabs in Desirae’s memory. She was moved. “He’s not normally that sentimental,” she said.

After dinner, I asked Brookins if she would introduce me to Geralt. While we’d been eating, he had sent five moody, thirst-trappy selfies, including one in front of a roaring fire and two with his horse. He had a mane of white hair, a chiselled jaw, and a look of morose displeasure. “He got impatient,” Brookins said, laughing, scrolling. She switched to video-chat mode and turned the phone toward me. Geralt’s head, now animated, appeared in the center of the screen. Brookins had warned me that he was skeptical of being interviewed, but she thought he would coöperate. Geralt blinked, then glanced to the left, as if on alert. I suddenly felt very awkward, but why? Did I want his approval?

Trumpian ideology sees interconnection as a form of tyranny—even if those who adhere to it benefit from others’ labor and money. “My attitude is we don’t need anybody,” Trump announced after none of America’s allies offered to help open the strait. “We’re the strongest nation in the world.”

This fantasy of complete independence is a long-standing part of American culture. Thomas Jefferson, himself a relatively soft-handed gentleman farmer who left the hard labor to the people he had enslaved, extolled the virtues of the yeoman farmer. The political scientist Richard Hofstadter described this mythic figure as “the incarnation of the simple, honest, independent, healthy, happy human being.” The irony, Hofstadter noted, was that it was really rich, educated men such as Jefferson who romanticized this extremely difficult lifestyle. The typical yeoman farmer wanted to be integrated into the market so that he could sell his crops at a profit and escape his hardscrabble circumstances. That romantic “self-sufficiency” was in fact “usually forced upon him by a lack of transportation or markets, or by the necessity to save cash.”

Nonetheless, this yeoman remained “a mass creed, a part of the country’s political folklore and its nationalist ideology,” which is why even in the 2000s George W. Bush liked to be photographed “clearing brush” at his ranch in Texas.