Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias ( ; born May 18, 1981 ) is an American blogger and journalist who writes about economics and politics. Yglesias has written columns and articles for publications such as The American Prospect, The Atlantic, and Slate. In 2014, he co-founded the news website Vox.

In November 2020, Yglesias left his position as an editor and columnist at Vox to publish the newsletter Slow Boring. In the same month, he joined the Niskanen Center as a senior fellow.

Early life and education Yglesias is the son of Rafael Yglesias, a screenwriter and novelist. His paternal grandfather, novelist Jose Yglesias, was of Cuban and Spanish Galician descent, while his paternal grandmother, the novelist Helen Yglesias (née Bassine) was the daughter of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from the Russian-controlled portion of Poland. His mother, Margaret Joskow, was a daughter of Jules Joskow, the founder of National Economic Research Associates; the economist Paul Joskow is Yglesias's uncle. His maternal grandparents were also of Eastern European Jewish descent.

Yglesias went to high school at the Dalton School in New York City. He attended Harvard University, where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent and graduated in 2003 with a BA magna cum laude in philosophy. In 2001, he interned for Senator Chuck Schumer, reporting to communications director Bradley Tusk.

Career

Early career Yglesias started blogging in early 2002, while still in college, focusing mainly on American politics and public policy issues. While blogging, he came to know future Vox-collaborator Ezra Klein.

From June 2007 until August 2008, Yglesias was a staff writer at The Atlantic Monthly, and his blog was hosted on the magazine's website, The Atlantic. In July 2008, he announced that he would leave The Atlantic Monthly for the Center for American Progress where he wrote for its blog, ThinkProgress, because he missed "the sense of collegiality that comes from working with like-minded colleagues on a shared enterprise" and thought he could "help advance their mission." On November 21, 2011, he left ThinkProgress to work as a business and economics correspondent at Slate's Moneybox.

Andrew Sullivan, a fellow blogger, takes nominations on his blog for the Yglesias Award, an honor "for writers, politicians, columnists or pundits who actually criticize their own side, make enemies among political allies, and generally risk something for the sake of saying what they believe."

2014–present In February 2014, Yglesias left Slate and joined Vox Media to co-found Vox with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell.

Yglesias authored the political nonfiction book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, released on September 15, 2020. It was inspired by Doug Saunders's Maximum Canada.

On November 13, 2020, Yglesias announced that he would no longer be writing for Vox. Yglesias moved to the digital blogging and writing platform Substack, saying that he wanted more freedom than he had at Vox to challenge the "dominant sensibility" in the "young-college-graduate bubble", whose views, he felt, often clashed with those of "older people, and working-class people of all races and ethnicities". In relation to a former colleague at Vox, Emily St. James, who had disagreed with his signing of the Harper's Letter, Yglesias said: "It is an industry that's about ideas, and if you treat disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety, then it's very challenging to do good work." The title of his Substack newsletter Slow Boring is derived from Max Weber's 1919 essay "Politics as a Vocation", describing politics as a "strong and slow boring of hard boards".

In 2021, Yglesias's Twitter account was one of the most commonly followed by 150 Biden administration staff with public accounts. As of 2024, Yglesias was one of the highest-earning Substack writers, reportedly earning at least $1.4 million per year.

Controversy In 2013, after the 2013 Dhaka garment factory collapse, Yglesias argued against a "unified global standard for safety", writing that Bangladesh should have lower safety standards than rich countries, as the cost of higher standards is not feasible for poorer countries. He concluded: "The current system of letting different countries have different rules is working fine." His comments were widely criticized in The Daily Beast, Time, and other outlets. In The Guardian, Maha Rafi Atal wrote that "every worker deserves a workplace that is clean and safe, and the right to organize to protect themselves against abuses" and that Yglesias "is conflating the cost of a life with the cost of living, confusing a person's human worth with their socio-economic status". Yglesias stood by his original position, but clarified that in his view the problem was a matter of enforcing existing laws rather than strengthening them. He issued a correction to his original article, having referred to the building collapse as a fire.

Political views

In 2011, The Economist wrote that Yglesias espoused "left-leaning neoliberalism" in his writing. In 2017, Vice listed Yglesias among a group of political writers who were labelled "neoliberal shills" in left-wing Twitter communities. In 2019, Yglesias himself embraced the "chief neoliberal shill" label in The Neoliberal Podcast.

In or before 2010, Yglesias coined the term "pundit's fallacy" to denote "the belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively."

Yglesias has been a long-time supporter of the YIMBY housing movement to address the US housing crisis. Former Vox colleague Ezra Klein credited Yglesias with a "huge, singular effect" in popularizing this position.

Foreign policy In college, Yglesias initially supported the US invasion of Iraq. On a personal blog, he wrote that the Arab–Israeli conflict could only be resolved by weakening Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, which could be accomplished by invading Iraq, and that if other Arab governments subsequently became "outright hostile [...] we can just topple them". Calling his support for the war a "mistake" in 2010, Yglesias identified the reasons for this error as: a "predisposition in favor of military adventurism" based on an erroneous belief that the US was "unduly constrained" in the use of force by domestic politics; misplaced trust in elites such as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Tony Blair and Kenneth M. Pollack; and a false assumption that the Bush administration's claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was not a "massive, easily-debunked-after-the-fact lie".

In November 2023, Yglesias argued that Israel's war in Gaza was a "just war", writing that the "humanitarian disaster is an inevitable consequence of waging war in a place with the population density of Philadelphia or Chicago", but denying that Israel was "deliberately targeting a civilian population center as a means of psychological warfare".

Personal life Yglesias is married to Kate Crawford. They met in 2008 and have one son together. and the chief of staff of The Argument, an online magazine.

His uncle is MIT economist Paul Joskow.

Works Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats, Wiley, April 2008. "Long Philosophical Rant about Spider-Man 2", Ultimate blogs: masterworks from the wild Web, Editor Sarah Boxer, Random House, Inc., 2008, "The Media", The 12-Step Bush Recovery Program, Gene Stone, Carl Pritzkat, Tony Travostino, Random House, Inc., 2008, The Rent Is Too Damn High, Simon and Schuster, March 2012, ASIN B0078XGJXO One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, Portfolio Penguin, September 2020.