Brooks and Krugman II

While this blog is often critical of David Brooks, it can give credit where due. What is not to love about his deserved, if petulant, absolute smack-down of colleague Krugman?

Over the past two weeks, Charles Murray’s book, “Coming Apart,” has restarted the social disruption debate. But, judging by the firestorm, you would have no idea that the sociological and psychological research of the past 25 years even existed... his left-wing critics in the blogosphere have reverted to crude 1970s economic determinism...

Liberal economists haven’t silenced conservatives, but they have completely eclipsed liberal sociologists and liberal psychologists. Even noneconomist commentators reduce the rich texture of how disadvantage is actually lived to a crude materialism that has little to do with reality.

This economic determinism would be bad enough if it was just making public debate dumber. But the amputation of sociologic, psychological and cognitive considerations makes good policy impossible.

The American social fabric is now so depleted that even if manufacturing jobs miraculously came back we still would not be producing enough stable, skilled workers to fill them. It’s not enough just to have economic growth policies. The country also needs to rebuild orderly communities...

Social repair requires sociological thinking. The depressing lesson of the last few weeks is that the public debate is dominated by people who stopped thinking in 1975.

Brooks and Krugman

David Brooks hypes Coming Apart. He describes it as arguing "the country has bifurcated into different social tribes... the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country)... the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese." They are also much less likely to work. He claims that this disproves the arguments of both parties "in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites" (Wall Street/Media). He argues that this calls for "a National Service Program."

Krugman, of course, argues that causality is reversed: "young men, confronting the reality that they won’t earn anything near as much in real terms as their fathers did... don’t marry and raise families the way the previous generation did"

Krugman's argument is stunningly besides the point. It should go without saying both that the more financial comfort one has the easier it is to uphold personal, family and communal responsibilities and that the more people uphold personal, family and communal responsibilities the better off economically they are likely to be. If the reality of an increasingly competitive world in which the US controls a shrinking share of the global economy, (amongst other factors) is a toughening economic outlook for under-skilled labor, then it is more important now than ever for people to uphold personal, family and communal responsibilities.

Brooks' argument is stunningly blind. It may well be that the "20 percent" "live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses", but the 1 percent that dominate the media clearly do not. To the degree that the left fancies itself as standing for social responsibility, it is hard to understand why they are so resistant to the argument that our cultural elites have a responsibility to our most vulnerable countrymen who lack the personal and communal resources to resist -- as the "20 percent" do -- the economically destructive messages which flood our airwaves.

Cultural Capital

David Brooks, I suppose, fancies himself conservative for writing things like:

it is easier to talk about the inequality of stock options than it is to talk about inequalities of family structure, child rearing patterns and educational attainment. But the fact is... it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent... If your goal is to expand opportunity, then you have a much bigger and different agenda.

He is certainly correct up to a point: cultural capital matters -- big government policies that disregard that are doomed to fail. He, and others, however, imagine that there are other, smarter, big government policies which can, taking cultural capital into account, succeed.

Structurally, these arguments take some factor which is correlated to cultural capital (e.g.: home ownership, college education), latch on to any tenuous rationale arguing the relationship is causal (People take better care of things they own! College graduates have wider social networks!), push expensive government programs with inevitable unintended consequences that, equally inevitably, fail because wishful thinking cannot turn correlation into causation.

Von Hayek taught that the natural, evolutionary, processes of free societies tend to increase cultural capital. More traditional conservative teaching would accentuate the role played by community. In either case: A government which governs least expands opportunity best.

Social Science Bubbles

In his latest column, David Brooks acknowledges that 50 years worth of gigantic policies driven by flawed social science has produced disappointing results. He is, however -- like those perpetually convinced that the latest financial bubble is not a bubble at all -- absolutely convinced that the latest social science, this time, can produce effective policies.

At the center of his argument is research by Eldar Shafir of Princeton and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard that finds "scarcity produces its own cognitive traits." For example, if you are poor, you are more likely to know the starting taxi fare or make complicated trade-offs involving milk and orange juice. This imposes enormous cognitive demands, crowding out other cognitive function. He doesn't explain what policies follow from this insight, but the most obvious would be those freeing poor people from these difficult choices. He does re-iterate his belief that "we need to design policies around" the knowledge that "we each have multiple selves" that "emerge or don’t emerge" in specific contexts.

It is worth noting that generations of folk lore would contradict any policy conclusions of scarcity research: Those we celebrate as having lifted themselves from poverty, do so, largely, because, not in spite, of their acute -- even obsessive -- attention to the kind of questions Brooks is convinced are obstacles.

Above all, as previously argued, pre-scientific teachers well understood our complex and divided natures. For that reason, they encouraged beliefs -- in particular: virtue and personal responsibility -- that supported our better angels. There is no evidence that social "science" ever has, or will, improve on what it displaced.

Politics And Culture

In David Brooks' latest column, he observes the pointed disagreement between the German and American Governments in how to approach the economic crisis. American leaders argued... governments should borrow billions to stimulate growth. German leaders argued... what was needed was not more debt, but measures to balance budgets and restore confidence. He notes that the early returns seem to favor the Germans. Recycling Von Hayek, he believes this is because

The economy can’t be played like a piano — press a fiscal key here and the right job creation notes come out over there. Instead, economic management is more like parenting. If you instill good values and create a secure climate then, through some mysterious process you will never understand, things will probably end well.

The crucial issue is getting the fundamentals right. The Germans are doing better because during the past decade, they took care of their fundamentals and the Americans didn’t.

He believes the underlying reason the Germans have done better is because they "inherited a certain consensus-based economic model", while Americans have inherited an economic model that "fosters disruptive innovation (of the sort useful in Silicon Valley)" but has "a penchant for over-consumption and short term thinking." Recycling Moynihan, he believes it all reduces to:

Nations rise and fall on the intertwined strength of their cultures and governing institutions...  German governing institutions have functioned reasonably well...  The U.S. has a phenomenally creative culture, but right now it’s an institutional weakling... [where] political division frustrates long-range thinking.

To blame irresponsible government on "political division", is simply to re-frame the question: Assuming this is, in fact, so (and I am not convinced): Why is American politics more divisive than German politics?

What seems evident to me -- and perhaps implicit in Brooks' argument -- is that the divisiveness in American politics is a reflection of the divided-ness in American society. We lack the ethnic ties that bind other societies, and -- as illustrated by the WTC Mosque debate -- we lack any unifying conception of American Ideals/Values.

One the other hand, it is not clear that the cause of institutional irresponsibility is political divisiveness. For example, in Von Hayek's teaching, the values the "parenting model" calls for instilling, are the context-specific product of an evolutionary trial and error process. In other words, much clearer with-in a consensus-based context than a disruptively innovative one.

The ultimate argument contra-Brooks is Japan, consensus-based and not particularly politically divisive, in whose economic footsteps, America is now following. In contrasting Japan and Germany, what sticks out is the resistance the Japanese have towards accepting responsibility for WWII war crimes against the willingness of Germans to do so. It should not be surprising that being a society which generally accepts responsibility is related to having a government that acts responsibly. What is reflexively somewhat more surprising is what this indicates of American society.

Political Meta-Cognition

Polls that indicate many Americans believe Obama to be a Muslim have the media agitated and self-critiquing, in a way that similar polls indicating larger numbers of Americans believed W Bush complicit in 9/11 never did.

Lapsed conservative, David Brooks, a-historically, sees contemporary culture as the problem:

...[contemporary] culture places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one’s own mental feebleness. Today’s culture is better in most ways, but in this way it is worse.

The ensuing mental flabbiness is most evident in politics. Many conservatives declare that Barack Obama is a Muslim because it feels so good to say so... Issues like tax cuts and the size of government, which should be shaped by circumstances (often it’s good to cut taxes; sometimes it’s necessary to raise them), are now treated as inflexible tests of tribal purity.

To use a fancy word, there’s a metacognition deficit... Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.

Strauss taught that there is a natural friction between philosophy (or "metacognition") and -- in particular, but not exclusively, democratic -- politics, ultimately symbolized by the political death of Socrates, the first philosopher. He was skeptical of liberalism on precisely this point: its faith in -- actually, its bet on -- the real possibility, or even the inevitability, of a rational, "enlightened", (democratic) politics. To his critics, this is evidence of his anti-democratic project.

On the other hand, there is no shortage of evidence -- these sorts of polls included -- of the correctness of Strauss' critique. Confronted like this, liberal commitment to democracy wavers:

Churchill said: 'The best argument against Democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.' That was England back in the 1940's. Tragically -in the USA of 2010 - that conversation would only need to be 30 seconds.....

Read carefully, Strauss provides an approach towards upholding democracy as it apparently is, and not as one may wish it would be.

The Mind of Obama

Brooks, a bit back When Obamatons Respond

On Tuesday, I wrote that the Obama budget is a liberal, big government document that should make moderates nervous. The column generated a large positive response from moderate Obama supporters who are anxious about where the administration is headed. It was not so popular inside the White House. Within a day, I had conversations with four senior members of the administration and in the interest of fairness, I thought I’d share their arguments with you today.

In the first place, they do not see themselves as a group of liberal crusaders. They see themselves as pragmatists who inherited a government and an economy that have been thrown out of whack. They’re not engaged in an ideological project to overturn the Reagan Revolution, a fight that was over long ago.

There are, no doubt, those within the administration that do not see themselves as liberal crusaders. There are also, equally certain, those within the administration that do.

It would almost be comforting if Obama was among the latter. I am starting to suspect that he is amongst the former. He likes thinking of himself as thoughtful and moderate. It would be a reflection of the bubble in which he lives, if he views as thoughtful and moderate policies which Americans increasingly see as being hard left.

...Second, they argue, the Obama administration will not usher in an era of big government. Federal spending over the last generation has been about 20 percent of G.D.P. This year, it has surged to about 27 percent. But they aim to bring spending down to 22 percent of G.D.P. in a few years... I was invited to hang this chart on my wall and judge them by how well they meet these targets. (I have.)

As Brooks suspects, this is very likely bs. Even Krugman expects the over. Which argues that "Obamatons" responding were -- less than effectively -- in the business of dis-information.

I suspect that they understand that if the economy is doing well in 3 years, they will be able to persuasively argue "see 30+% is good for the economy" and if the economy is still doing poorly, they will be able to persuasively argue "We obviously can't now cut programs Americans are depending on to get them through crisis". Leaving Brooks' chart politically meaningless.

Third, they say, Republicans should welcome the budget’s health care ideas. The Medicare reform represents a big cut in entitlement spending. It amounts to means-testing the system. It introduces more competition and cuts corporate welfare. These are all Republican ideas...

I agree with this. Obama has shown a willingness to measure the efficacy of government programs. I think this a process Republicans ought to embrace and ought to ensure that the metrics used are as objective and comprehensive as possible.

We believe that free people making free decisions produce better results then centralized, politicized, bureaucrats making decisions for everyone else, and we should welcome initiatives that offer to provide data which demonstrates that.

Fifth, the Obama folks feel they spend as much time resisting liberal ideas as enacting them. The president resisted union pressure and capped pay increases for government workers. He resisted efforts to create mandatory veterans’ health benefits. The administration plans to tackle the suspiciously large increase in the number of people claiming disability benefits.

Obama was the candidate of ivy-league, not blue collar, liberals. That he is resisting pressure from blue collar liberals, while enacting, virtually wholesale, the agenda of ivy-league liberals, is hardly comforting to moderates.

I didn’t finish these conversations feeling chastened exactly... Nonetheless, the White House made a case that was sophisticated and fact-based. These people know how to lead a discussion and set a tone of friendly cooperation...

If these conversations where, in fact, sophisticated and fact-based, Brooks failed to do them justice. What these people understand, I more suspect, is how to humor a somewhat conservative columnist.

Obama Heart David Brooks

DrudgeReport links to a 1996 interview in which Obama sounds very much like David Brooks:

"What concerns me the most are children and the way they are treated," he says about why he will pursue a career in public office. "As an African-American, I am very concerned about children from poor neighborhoods, the problems they deal with, the total lack of a stable environment to enable them to grow and develop. It depends a lot on the economy, the opportunities they are given, their own selves and their parents. It also depends on values, for instance on the kind of family values that get talked about a lot, especially by politicians."

He continues, saying, "values don’t just belong to individuals, they are also collective. Children are exposed to the values around them, and if they come to believe that the lives of their parents and their community cannot be rewarded, if their schools and homes are crumbling, how can they come to believe in their own values when they don’t have any to begin with? My priority is to return social values to public debate, because we are all one big family, transcending racial or class differences. We have obligations and responsibilities towards one another."

He says, "perhaps that’s where the private and public spheres meet, when it comes to couples, relationships, families or tribes. What’s important is empathy, an understanding of shared responsibilities, the ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes.

It is a standard part of the (neo-)conservative narrative that well-intentioned great society government programs (e.g.: welfare and integration) aimed at helping individuals wound up destroying communities -- homes and neighborhood schools -- and hurting the people they sought to help.

Obama appears, in this interview, to implicitly endorse, at least something close to this view.

Obama identifies empathy -- identifying, being fundamentally concerned, with the suffering of an-other -- as the solution to the breakdown of communities. A lack of empathy is the certainly, once he points it out, perhaps the most visible evidence of the dis-function of broken communities.

Obama leaves open what sort of policies he envisions to rebuild communal empathy. But it is clear that he understands the flawed nature of the knee-jerk great society liberal approach.