There are a host of offenders, from Politico, to any randomly selected Washington Post columnist (EJ Dionne and Eugene Robinson being notable exceptions), to the Stache, to Tim Keller, and the worst of all, that pothead turned faux Burkean David Brooks.
Here is where I take extreme umbrage with his tired old schitck
“There is a very strong correlation between single motherhood and low social mobility. There is a very strong correlation between high school dropout rates and low mobility. There is a strong correlation between the fraying of social fabric and low economic mobility. There is a strong correlation between de-industrialization and low social mobility. It is also true that many men, especially young men, are engaging in behaviors that damage their long-term earning prospects; much more than comparable women.
Low income is the outcome of these interrelated problems, but it is not the problem”
Perhaps those problems are the OUTCOMES of LOW INCOME? Even when it’s done through his nerdy, U of C educated, NY Times stamp of left coast approval style and mannerism it’s still the same old conservative playing card trumpted by the likes of Andrew Carnegie since Social Darwinism in the 1880s. The morally stout become wealthy and the morally indolent become poor. This ignores the fact that today’s children are growing up less educated, less employed, less wealthy, and even less healthy than their parents. First American generation to be worse off. And the only way to solve this is with systemic PUBLIC investments in those areas. I agree with Brooks and Ryan that it should be equality of opportunity not equality of outcome-but they fail to see the easy conclusion that there is no equality of opportunity in today’s America since the rich start from such a better point.
Brooks knows better. He is a big fan of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and Coming Apart and knows-and has even written about-how the upper income families tend to produce more stable, more homogenous families that tend to ensure their kids get into the best schools, have access to the best jobs, and stay within that strata. It is the vast lower middle class that is burgeoning-due to an intentional de-industrialization I might add-and that needs to be rescued and lifted up-not blamed for its own plight.
It’s also a massive canard to play the pox on both houses polarization came when only one of the two parties is even remotely functioning as an eager, moderate governing partner.
Look to see continued attempts by the ‘bipartisan consensus’ Washington-New York corridor to sideline Elizabeth Warren , sandbag Occupy, apologize for Christie or Ryan, and generally try and wish the problem away as Brooks does here.
Mark L. Bail says
serve power by justifying the status quo. And they make a darn fine living at it. They are the priests of power serving the 1%.
Just ask Ken Langone:
abs0628 says
…then presumably these folks are keen to accept one of the thousands of minimum wage no benefits jobs that have proliferated in our economy during the “recovery”, amiright?
Buehler?
petr says
…or four…
Hey… when you’re right, you’re right…
kbusch says
David Brooks, at least, does not argue that low income is not a problem. He argues in his column that talk about income inequality obscures the problems connected with low income. He doesn’t see the accumulation at the top side of the scale as related to the impoverishment at the bottom of the scale.
There are certainly flaws with Brooks’ view here, but it is not reducible to a cold-hearted calculus of callous plutocrats.
fenway49 says
As you say,
First among them is:
Which is just all too convenient. Funny how his diagnosis of what ails us never involves any sacrifices by the “plutocrats.” It’s all the little guy’s fault. Quite frankly, there’s now a correlation between being an American born into the bottom 60% and low social mobility. Not all of those people dropped out, engaged in destructive behaviors, or otherwise frayed the social fabric. Pop sociology as a way to divert attention from basic arithmetic is either self-delusion or it’s pretty cold-hearted.
kbusch says
Here is one of his criticisms of the income inequality view. This doesn’t seem to be a particularly “pop psychology” view:
Sure, there are conservatives that chalk this stuff up to individual responsibility: people make poor chances, shame on them, they deserve to be poor. However, Brooks does not argue that.
I should add. I think Krugman is precisely right here. He points out that West Virginia, where the economy has depended on a shrinking coal industry, has seen many of the “cultural” issues Brooks points to. So it’s wrong to take the sociological stuff as causative because the economic dislocations bring them about. Liberal economists generally point to the the mismatch between the rise in productivity and the rise in real wages. That mismatch is why everyone in the lower 99.9% is not doing as well as she or he should.
I’m used to spotting “blame the victim” talk in conservatives discussions, but it just doesn’t seem to me that talking about culture is the same thing as blaming the victim. We liberals think systemically all the time, and we try to change the culture all the time, and we don’t blame people individually for being pulled along by bad cultural forces.
petr says
I think relying on terms like “natural response” is the essence of pop psychology: it is an appeal to the “everybody knows” school of distinctions… And the fact that he doesn’t try to unpack the “natural response”, but instead takes a few shots at the strawmen that result is further proof.
I’m not sure I have a ‘natural response’ to income inequality, but I am sure that raising the minimum wage would be only a portion of any “natural” response that I might have…
Brooks continues in your quote:
2 people working 4 part time jobs, in the abstract isn’t different from 2 people working 2 full time jobs. Why doesn’t that happen? If one is speaking of ‘natural responses’, one might be forgiven for thinking that a ‘natural response’ to full time workload is full time employment rather than a number of part time employees.
The employer has made a deliberate choice, an all to easy choice, to hire multiple part timers rather than a smaller multiple of full timers. A decent minimum wage might be the ‘tipping point’ for employers to move from a largely part-time workforce to a more full-time based workforce. Then again, it might not. But Brooks doesn’t even consider this because he’s too busy, a priori trying to deny the minimum wage any policy effect whatsoever… and too short-sighted to see possibilities.
Yes. This is the real problem but he leaves it out there and instead pivots to yet other reasons why the minimum wage is bad and goes on to bemoan the social and cultural effect of single motherhood and high school dropouts and nasty liberals who polarize the debate. In a very pop psychology understanding (sic) of motivations and intentions: as tho’ ‘class conflict’ (whatever that means) is such a hurtful term, and notion, that the righteous wealthy will be too busy having the vaoprs to do anything productive… so let’s not shock them overly much, less they (or ‘we’ might Brooks say…) pull a Galt on all y’all…
kbusch says
seems like the utterly appropriate term as in “If you think an excess of deer is the problem then the natural response is to reduce the deer population.”
This isn’t pop psychology at all. It’s just saying that analyses lead to policies.
*
Before jumping on what Brooks is “doing”, it might also be useful to look up the Sabia-Burkhauser paper whose results he appears to be summarizing. Perhaps they make a methodological error.
petr says
Leaving aside the not-applicable notion of a natural response to a natural occurrence, Brooks makes a specious argument that relies upon facile definitions and trite, commonly held but scientificall untested, perceptions. It’s not at all clear that A) there is a ‘natural response’ and 2) Brooks should be the one to put a name to it should it exist If that doesn’t eerily resemble pop psychology, then I don’t know what does and you’ll have to enlighten me…
I don’t think analyses lead to policies. At least not directly. I think politics leads to policy and some of it can be dogmatic and others can be pragmatic without cogent analyses being operating variables… I think it would be great if analyses led directly to policy, but it is clear that it rarely, if ever, has done so.
I think Brooks’ notion that “analyses leads to policies” is itself rather trite and sorta a way to congratulate himself for having a big brain. I think that, too, is specious as I don’t find his brain all that big.
kbusch says
In my deer example, the “natural response”, in the sense of the simplest, or the one that comes to mind most readily, is to cull the deer population. That is to be distinguished from other responses that might not spring to mind so readily, i.e, bringing in wolves or bobcats, bringing in animals that compete with the deer, planting flora deer hate, etc. Brooks means “natural response” to distinguish it from other responses that might not be so direct or might not come to mind as readily.
This is not some kind of venture into psychology, pop or otherwise. Distinguishing the obvious from the less obvious should be pretty standard.
I’m guessing you took the word “natural” to mean he was misusing more profound concepts, but it’s really pretty simple.
kbusch says
I’m not sure I even understand what you’re asserting or what makes it germane.
By focusing so much on word choice, possibly you have missed Brooks’ argument. The Democratic Party, currently, is focusing on raising the minimum wage. He is arguing that that is an easy reaction to there being a large number of working poor, but that, look, it won’t put as big a dent into poverty as one might have imagined. Frankly, with Republicans declaring the Democratic war on poverty a failure, it might not be very wise to be so breezily dismissive of academic studies liberals might find counter-intuitive.
As to this
One might simply respond by saying it might not be a tipping point, or by questioning whether you have inadvertently made an excursion into “pop economics”.
Finally, Brooks is no libertarian. There’s nothing in his writing I’ve encountered that even hints of fountainheads or shrugging atlases. He seems, rather, to come of a conservative tradition that cares deeply about culture and community, and the power of those things to bestow upon us good lives. Of course we can caricature all that, make fun of it, and regard it as deeply stupid, but that’s part of the inability of liberals to sway people from conservative positions. Without fully grasping conservative positions never mind their attraction, we guffaw at how idiotic they are and then wonder why foolish voters can’t see what we find obvious.
I’m not arguing that we agree with it. I certainly don’t. I’m arguing that understand it and understand it thoroughly so that we can defeat it.
petr says
… that since Brooks makes his living by choosing his words, he can’t be given a pass for a poor choice. I think if he wanted to say “the obvious response” or the “simple response” he would have said those things. Instead he said ‘natural’.
I also take it as given that conservative speech is always coded… which places and even greater emphasis on word choice than casual, or even “Freudian’ choice.
Like I said, conservative speech is always coded. It might even be axiomatically so: if their real purpose is to pine for a culture and a community that depended upon racial oppression on the one hand and moral hygiene of a particular sort upon the other… without the ability to actually justify that racial oppression and make direct reference to that moral hygiene he finds acceptable…. well, there you have it, don’t you?
Is that fair to Brooks? Not if he is earnest. But I don’t think that it is possible for him to be earnest. It might be possible for him to fool himself with high-minded sounding arguments and therefore blind himself to his real purpose, or the purpose of the people he is serving, but ultimately he’s still just putting forth arguments that are not wholly aligned with his goals…
So, yes, I ‘missed’ the point of his arguments. I think that’s because even he doesn’t wholly invest in them.
I think my previous statements address this. I don’t think you can particularly sway conservatives from their arguments because their arguments are facile attempts to achieve wholly separate, unspoken and, ultimately, unattainable goals by using coded language. If you ‘win’ one of the arguments, they just switch to another snippet of code. That’s one of the reasons they are so miserable, in general, and not at all triumphant when they do win the surface argument. Brooks argument is
H.L. Mencken once said (paraphrasing from memory) “It’s difficult for you to believe another person is telling the truth when you know you would lie if you were in their position.” I think this quote is instructive in sevearl ways: I don’t think conservatives are telling the truth, even to themselves, and so don’t allow themselves the notion that liberals are telling the truth to them. It’s actual pure relativism, if you think about it… And so the responsibility, or even the ability, to ‘sway’ conservatives rests with them and their willingness, or not, to lie… most of all to themselves; Also, turning that quote around on itself and noting the difficulty in believing one conservatives argument having been directly lied to by another conservative using the same argument.
And, yes, I’m aware of the irony of that Mencken quote when accusing the ‘other person’ of lying… as though I’m admitting to a facility with untruths, myself, and therefore why should you trust me…? Well, I’ll have to trust to your knowledge of me and my previous arguments to take what you can from this…
jconway says
But what infuriates me is that in a prior column praising Coming Apart, Brooks in fact makes the causative argument lacking here
Even he recognized this. And now he doesn’t. Just like he once enjoyed a recreational toke but now wants to continue the mass incarceration insanity.
A great conservative counter to Brooks comes in this article from First Things which makes the connection more explicit. Like Brooks it points out the social breakdown that strawmen liberals supposedly ignore (though frankly this has never been the case), but it recognizes that this is a symptom of a wider disease-mainly deindustrialization and the collapse of the middle class. It’s solutions are also quite radical. They are more distributionist than conservative or liberal-creating Catholic worker collectives like Dorothy Day did-but increasingly newer members of the ‘religious right’ are recognizing that charity alone can’t solve the problem. The economy itself is systemically flawed, and this article ends with a call for a living wage as Pope Francis has called for. That’s what Brooks could’ve wrote. Instead, as much as he insists he is a Burkean communitarian he remains an aloof Randian in Burkean clothing.
fenway49 says
in this post appears to be a perfect example of saying that individual responsibility (single motherhood, dropping out of school, frayed social fabric) is to blame for much income inequality.
I also take issue with the piece you cite. First, there are plenty of studies showing minimum wage increases do help. Brooks chose to cite the AEI fellow.
Second, I don’t think it’s true anymore that anything close to 2/3 of minimum wage workers are in households making over twice the poverty level. In any event, in many heavily-populated parts of the country twice the official poverty line still means broke. The focus on “poverty rates” obscures the fact that, for those getting the wage hike, it does make a difference. It makes work pay. If people below the poverty line are not helped by it, then we need an even more systematic fix for the labor market. Doesn’t mean we pass on the minimum wage hike.
Which gets me to my third, and most important, reaction. My “obvious” response to income inequality is not merely to raise the minimum wage, though that’s part of it. It’s also to strengthen labor unions through legal changes, and to restructure the tax code to (1) alleviate the effects of pre-tax inequality; (2) make it less likely to occur; (3) to reward creation of good jobs here and penalize pure speculation. It’s not to say, well, if an AEI guy says raising the minimum wage doesn’t get you there, I guess there’s nothing to be done.
Where you suggest Brooks should get credit for not breathing fire, I think that’s exactly why he’s more dangerous. His assigned role is “Mr. Reasonable Moderately Conservative Guy Who Genuinely Cares.” And tells us, without fail, that whatever prescription we had in mind just won’t work.
fenway49 says
that David Brooks and Politico are not on our side. Brooks is particularly annoying in the way he frequently presents his credentials as a member of the New York City intelligentsia, then proceeds to “apologize” to the NASCAR set on behalf of his “class” in a way that just happens to dovetail with his personal political preferences. If you’ve read one (or maybe three) Brooks columns, you’ve read them all. This is a guy who thinks chatting with students after his Yale seminar lets out is an acceptable substitute for rigorous research. The Beltway crowd and Politico, Charlie Pierce takes them down with searing wit at least twice a week.
We’ve always needed to get the message out there in spite of the noise coming from those people.
jconway says
I worry Esquire isn’t a big enough platform. Considering the poor excuse for liberals the Times has lying around he’d make a great foul for Brooks-far more so than mark shields
fenway49 says
But I can’t imagine the Times, or any other significantly bigger platform, allowing Charlie to keep his inimitable style. Can you see “The Things in My Colleague’s Latest Column That Make Me Want to Guzzle Antifreeze” in the Times?
Krugman is a good antidote to Brooks. Joe Nocera’s OK. Ezra Klein’s generally pretty good (not always), and I love Greg Sargent’s stuff.
jconway says
He and Robinson and to a lesser extent Dionne are worth my time
at WaPo. Nocera is ok, but Bruni, Dowd and Blow are insufferable.
cannoneo says
Krugman pretty reliably demolishes Brooks in his blog the day after columns like this. (Which themselves often seem motivated by a desire to outdo Krugman.)
From the opening Upton Sinclair quote to “What’s a sociologizer to do?”, this one is a direct hit.
Dean Baker is a good guide to the everlasting stupidity of Brooks and his ilk too.
kbusch says
The Times has a policy, I believe, of getting its columnists not to mention each other by name. So Krugman’s rather effective answers to Brooks are never labeled as such.
Mark L. Bail says
are the twin offspring of David Broder’s attempt to onanistically reproduce.
David Brooks’ sole value as a pundit is that he doesn’t foam at the mouth. NPR can put him on with E.J. Dionne and know he’s going to sound reasonable in spite of his general idiocy. How many conservatives can you say that about these days?
I occasionally teach a column he wrote channeling Marx and the inaccessibility of education. His analysis isn’t bad, but then he has to get all conservative and stupid.
kbusch says
One thing that distinguished Brooks and Douthat from almost every other conservative I run across is that both read, quote, and respect liberals. On the right side of the spectrum, that is remarkably rare.
I completely avoid reading the Mustache of Understanding. Dowd was incisive during the Bush Presidency but I can’t read her anymore. Evaluating the Obama Administration on a masculine-feminine continuum casts no light, and she just can’t let go of that nonsense.
Mark L. Bail says
that Corey Robin points out is the counter-revolutionary Right’s appropriation of revolutionary rhetoric. And they are frequently attributing their own tactics to the Left. I never got into dialectics very much, but I think there’s something there. Maybe Brooks & Douthat are more interested in the status quo than turning back progressive achievements.
jconway says
Her schtick since the Clinton years has been the odd masculine-feminine psychobabble. She also helped ‘elect’ Bush by repeatedly slamming Gore as some effete whimp, her colleague Frank Bruni was guilty of the same. Frank Rich and Bob Herbert made substantive policy based arguments against Bush. Dowd just made it all about some non-existent family drama.
But yeah we can agree, her sell by date has long passed. Same with Bill Keller-the Richie Cohen of the Times.
JimC says
Saying “she also helped elect Bush” is a stretch.
kirth says
I don’t think Al Gore thinks it is, either. She’s not different from large swathes of the corporate media in having helped Bush, but she played a part.
JimC says
There is a set of NY Times readers.
– A subset of those read Maureen Dowd.
– A subset of those are persuadable voters who were undecided between Bush and Gore.
– A subset of those vote in swing states (not overwhelmingly blue New York or Massachusetts, or California).
– And those people were influenced by MAUREEN DOWD to vote Bush.
I think it’s a stretch.
kirth says
or to anything. Saying that only a small number of voters in effective locations were swayed to Bush is not the same as saying “it’s a stretch” that Dowd helped Bush. Also, her distortions were picked up and repeated and riffed on by other media mouths. It’s not just voters she influenced directly.
JimC says
Then why single her out? I was replying to a comment that did.
jconway says
Bruni, Russert, Matthews, O’Donnell, all bought into that narrative.
But she was one of the worst offenders.
stomv says
and Florida, I’d bet, has quite a lot of NYTimes readers.
JimC says
Elderly Maureen Dowd readers. There must be tons of those.
Sorry guys, you’re believing this because you want to. The logic is shaky. I don’t like Dowd either, but we have enough to complain about her without laying the 2000 election at her feet too.
jconway says
But she contributed. As much as Katherine Harris or karl rove? No. But for a purported self described liberal elitist she did a really crappy job helping Gore and a really good job bashing him and making him out to be someone he wasn’t.
kbusch says
Her columns about Bush were often surprisingly good. And yes, her characterization of Gore was to be fair unfair.
fenway49 says
…in the meantime, has taken Brooks head-on.
jconway says
The first candidate I ever volunteered for and one who I will always admire.
kbusch says
He makes good arguments, but contrast and compare how he begins and ends. Beginning:
and ending:
Mark L. Bail says
that Corey Robin points out is the counter-revolutionary Right’s appropriation of revolutionary rhetoric. And they are frequently attributing their own tactics to the Left. I never got into dialectics very much, but I think there’s something there. Maybe Brooks & Douthat are more interested in the status quo than turning back progressive achievements.
fenway49 says
I think Reich’s saying:
1. Brooks is among the most thoughtful conservatives.
2. He’s still not much of a thinker, showing how far out to lunch the right is at this point.
It seems to me both are correct.