Social Secuirty and Medicare -- The Sky is Still Falling

Frank Bruni has penned an entirely banal editorial, echoing those of years and decades past, about how unfair it is that Americans are "saddling" the next generation with the cost of Social Security and Medicare. Bruni pitches people over the age of forty against the "Millennials", but it seems like only yesterday that poor Gen. X was going to be forced to support the Baby Boomers.

For Bruni, Bob Kerrey proves to be a veritable fount of platitudes,

This subject haunts him more and more. “If we’re trying to figure out how to advance the next generation’s future, we need to be spending more on the next generation, and we’re spending it on yesterday’s generation,” said Kerrey, 70. “I am not the future. My 12-year-old son is. But if you look at the spending, you’d think I’m the future.”

So the argument is that we need to spend more supporting children? No, of course not.

Kerrey is referring mostly to Social Security and Medicare, which, along with Medicaid, are the so-called entitlements that claim a larger and larger share of the federal budget.

He’s fixated on those sorts of numbers: According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid totaled 6.7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in 1990. By 2010, they were 10 percent. And by 2038, such spending may represent 14.3 percent. It’s hard to see how that leaves much money for discretionary spending on infrastructure, on education, on research, on a range of investments that safeguard or improve the America that today’s young people will inherit.

Of course, by 2020 such spending may not represent 14.3 percent, but that's always beside the point in this type of editorial

If the problem is that we need to shift those numbers, let's consider what has happened when the President has proposed Reagan-style adjustments to FICA taxes and benefits. The Republicans have obstructed those efforts, and have even demagogued against the President as trying to cut Medicare benefits for seniors. The politics seem to be irrelevant for Bruni, but it's reasonable to infer both that one of the two political parties has no interest in reforms that will help to preserve Social Security and Medicare over the long-term, and that very same party is too craven to be honest with its supporters about its goals. And that's why haven't we moved forward on the obvious solution, which Obama has at times attempted to pursue despite strong opposition to benefits reductions from within his party. How does Bruni see it?

That unwillingness [to look at budgetary math] includes the predictable pushback from many members of Congress, from voters and from various advocacy groups when proposals are made to limit the growth of Social Security by, say, fiddling with cost-of-living adjustments.

Well, yeah, but it does bear mentioning that when one party was ready to forge ahead with reforms, the other party refused to cooperate.

Bruni continues with a complaint that we're already making cuts,

Talk to physicians and other scientists who have long depended on research grants from the National Institutes of Health to keep the United States at the forefront of invention and innovation and they’ll tell you how thoroughly that spigot has closed over the last 10 years. They’re defeated, despondent.

Would Bruni have us believe that those doctors were focusing their full effort on childhood illnesses? Of course not. But if not, how does he reconcile his complaints about spending cuts with his complaint that we're spending too much money on the medical needs of older Americans?

Bruni offers another tired complaint,

The Urban Institute released a report in 2012 that looked at figures from 2008 for the combined local, state and federal spending that directly benefited Americans 65 and older versus spending that went to Americans under 19; the per capita discrepancy was $26,355 versus $11,822. Julia Isaacs, a senior fellow at the institute, told me that while data for subsequent years hadn’t been analyzed yet, it wouldn’t show a significant change in that gap.

Sure, if you include Social Security and Medicare, we spend a lot more money on older Americans than we do on kids. But Social Security is a program that you pay for over your working years, and for the average participant the return on the investment is not particularly impressive. Similarly, Medicare is supported by people over their working lives and it's reasonable for people who have spent their lifetimes paying into the system to receive its benefits when they retire.

Would Bruni complain that the money in his 401K plan is not clawed back for the benefit of younger workers? That the long-term care insurance he paid for ends up paying for his long-term care? One would expect not. While an argument can be made about whether workers should pay more or whether the payout is too high (or too low), there's no equivalence between Medicare and Social Security payments, which workers have paid for, and government funding for kids.

As for Bruni's general complaints about how his peers talk about millennials,

Sure, some people make a habit of complaining about "kids these days", but such has it always been. Bye Bye Birdie came to stage in 1960. here's a memory from 1967:

Why Nerds Drop Out of School

Courtesy of David Brooks:

Surely, part of the situation is that many men simply do not want to put themselves in positions they find humiliating. A high school student doesn’t want to persist in a school where he feels looked down on.

Don't take it from me, take it from Brooks:

In every high school there are students who are culturally and intellectually superior but socially aggrieved. These high school culturati have wit and sophisticated musical tastes but find that all prestige goes to jocks, cheerleaders and preps who possess the emotional depth of a cocker spaniel. The nerds continue to believe that the self-reflective life is the only life worth living (despite all evidence to the contrary) while the cool, good-looking, vapid people look down upon them with easy disdain on those rare occasions they are compelled to acknowledge their existence.

Oh, I recognize that Brooks is arguing something else, the sort of thing Orwell argued in The Road to Wigan Pier,

The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a 'job' should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned!

If anything, Orwell's essay highlights how little schools have changed, and how a willingness to participate in the academic side of high school has a lot less to do with young men "want[ing] to put themselves in positions they find humiliating" and a lot more to do with cultural expectation. It is actually true that a good number of kids who are academically inclined have memories of how much they hated high school, and a good number of kids who barely cracked a book have glorious memories of their social lives and athletic achievements. You can sense some of that resentment in Brooks' caricature of the popular kids and how they perceived kids like... him. But you have to grow up - sometimes "you gotta do what you gotta do."

If You Want to Reduce Suicide, Focus on the Economy

Ross Douthat is concerned that "loneliness" may be behind an increase in the suicide rate among middle aged men... a classic case of missing the forest for the trees. You would think this part would clue Douthat in:

This trend is striking without necessarily being surprising. As the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox pointed out recently, there’s a strong link between suicide and weakened social ties: people — and especially men — become more likely to kill themselves “when they get disconnected from society’s core institutions (e.g., marriage, religion) or when their economic prospects take a dive (e.g., unemployment).” That’s exactly what we’ve seen happen lately among the middle-aged male population, whose suicide rates have climbed the fastest: a retreat from family obligations, from civic and religious participation, and from full-time paying work.

But you can see he's already on the wrong track by the end of the paragraph. That is, the problem is not about a retreat from family, community and work. It's about the carpet being pulled out from under you.

You would think it was a state secret that the group at highest risk of suicide was middle class men (particularly white men), and that risk of suicide is strongly associated with three stressors: job loss, loss of family and poor health. Contrary to Douthat's assumption, there's not a higher suicide risk if you're single versus married - but divorce is a risk factor.

In our culture, our identity is wrapped up in the work we do. One of the first questions you're likely to be asked when you meet somebody is "Where do you work" or "What kind of work do you do". The factors also tend to go hand-in-hand. Poor health can lead to the loss of employment, financial stress resulting from loss of employment (or from poor health) can lead to divorce. When somebody's self image is built around job and family and he feels that he's irretrievably lost his economic future and his family, that's a huge psychological blow.

Douthat builds his argument in part on a fiction, that we're dealing with "structural unemployment". I've taken some issue with those who argue that there's nothing structural about our unemployment situation, but the type of thing they're talking about (the ability to return to full employment) and the type of thing I'm talking about (the ability of somebody who has lost employment to get back onto a similar income and career path) are two different things. If Douthat believes that there's something new about the problems men have if they're displaced from the workplace during or after their late forties, he hasn't been paying attention. Not even to the content of the newspaper for which he writes:

Unemployment is almost always a traumatic event, especially for older workers. A paper by the economists Daniel Sullivan and Till von Wachter estimates a 50 to 100 percent increase in death rates for older male workers in the years immediately following a job loss, if they previously had been consistently employed. This higher mortality rate implies that a male worker displaced in midcareer can expect to live about one and a half years less than a worker who keeps his job.

There are various reasons for this rise in mortality. One is suicide. A recent study found that a 10 percent increase in the unemployment rate (say from 8 to 8.8 percent) would increase the suicide rate for males by 1.47 percent. This is not a small effect. Assuming a link of that scale, the increase in unemployment would lead to an additional 128 suicides per month in the United States. The picture for the long-term unemployed is especially disturbing. The duration of unemployment is the dominant force in the relationship between joblessness and the risk of suicide.

Joblessness is also associated with some serious illnesses, although the causal links are poorly understood.

More academically,

Suicide rates among both men and women aged 35–64 years increased substantially from 1999 and 2010. This finding is consistent with a previous study that showed a notable increase in the overall suicide rate among middle-aged adults relative to a small increase in suicide rates among younger persons and a small decline in older persons during a similar period. The increases were geographically widespread and occurred in states with high, as well as average and low suicide rates. By race/ethnicity, the increases were highest and statistically significant only among whites and American Indian/Alaska Natives, widening the racial/ethnic gap in suicide rates....

Possible contributing factors for the rise in suicide rates among middle-aged adults include the recent economic downturn (historically, suicide rates tend to correlate with business cycles, with higher rates observed during times of economic hardship); a cohort effect, based on evidence that the "baby boomer" generation had unusually high suicide rates during their adolescent years; and a rise in intentional overdoses associated with the increase in availability of prescription opioids.

In a loosey-goosey sort of sense, one court argue that Douthat has a point. That if people who were suicidal could break out of their mindset, reconnect with their communities, and find peace and joy in their lives, they would no longer be suicidal. But that would be to assume that depression and suicide are the results of a rational thought process rather than cognitive distortion, and that somebody who is suicidally depressed is well-positioned to make significant life changes. Sometimes in response to a suicide you hear, "I don't understand, he seemed so happy that day" - the result of a confusion of the immense relief that can come from the decision to commit suicide with an emergence from depression. When severely depressed individuals receive treatment, you have to be very careful during their early recovery because in some cases the only thing holding them back from suicide is lacking the cognitive energy to carry out their plan. This cartoon series, I think, does a pretty good job of illustrating depression - but that freedom depicted at the end can be (and in the author's case, was) dangerous.

Douthat shares a non-suicidal author's account of how he reconnected with his small hometown due to his sister's terminal illness, and extrapolates,

Too often, and probably increasingly, not enough Americans will have what the Lemings had — a place that knew them intimately, a community to lean on, a strong network in a time of trial.

And absent such blessings, it’s all too understandable that some people enduring suffering and loneliness would end up looking not for help or support, but for a way to end it all.

It seems that Douthat is looking for a simple solution to the issue of suicide that ties into his conceit that a simple, small town lifestyle is somehow superior to... the way he lives his own life. As if anybody can find peace, contentment and community simply by moving to small town, rural America. As if small town, rural America would be unchanged if we all moved there. As if that's even possible. As if you can't find community in a city. As if suicide rates weren't higher in the less urbanized parts of the nation.

If you care about reducing suicide, you should be calling for government policies to help restore full employment. You should be advocating programs to help people deal with job loss and regain decent employment. You should be concerned about the quality and availability of mental health care. Pretending that all will be well if people return to the type of community seen in states with above-average suicide rates? Probably not helpful.

Wealth is Not Proof of Better Genes and Values

In response to an essay about rich kids doing well in school, McArdle questions whether the answer truly lies in enriched environments,

But is that really the right explanation? The rich pulling away from the middle class is also exactly what we would see if test-taking ability has a substantial inherited component, and the American economy is increasingly selecting for people who are very, very good at taking tests. The latter is undoubtedly true, and there's some fairly strong evidence for the former, in the form of studies of adopted kids. Such studies tend to show that adopted kids bear a much stronger resemblance to their biological parents in terms of lots of things, from weight to income to test scores, than they do to their adoptive parents. Once you've hit a fairly basic parenting threshhold--food, health care, touching and talking to your kid, and not physically or sexually abusing them--the incremental benefits of more intensive parenting seem at best small, at worst unclear.

McArdle appears to be confused on a number of fronts. First, the manner in which people in our society meet, form family units and reproduce is not scientific. If this were scientific, not only would we be looking at and testing for specific criteria before approving reproduction, we would see weaker stock that we would need to exclude from contributing its genes to the next generation. We would see a marked difference between the children of the power couple, where both parents had high education and high income, versus couples where only one partner had the "power job", versus couples where one partner stayed at home, versus couples who were wealthy simply by virtue of inheritance.

McArdle presents the example of the marriage of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House on the Prairie), who she sees as intelligent and bookish, and Almanzo Wilder, who sees as being significantly less intelligent - intelligence apparently defined by academic interest and achievement. McArdle suggests that in the modern era, the couple would have had nothing in common and thus would likely not have met and married.

Laura Ingalls would quite likely have gone to an elite school, and probably graduate school, then moved to a coastal city, and eventually married another bookworm. Almanzo Wilder would be married to someone like him, a hard worker who nonetheless found school tedious and left as quickly as possible. And when their two sets of children showed up at school, their test scores would be very different.

Instead they had one child, Rose Wilder Lane, who became a very talented short-story writer (her collection, Old Home Town, is a very fine and somewhat brutal study of the Missouri town where she grew up.) They could just as easily have had a child like Almanzo, whose talents lay in other directions.

It apparently did not occur to McArdle that the outcome is not binary - that genetics are far more complex than the "Brown Eyes vs. Blue Eyes" diagrams she made in fifth grade. She could as easily argue that her example proves that bookishness is a dominant trait, and that if we pair off intelligent, bookish people with those who are not "nearly as smart as" as them, we'll have a nation full of smart people within a generation.

Second, you cannot effect significant genetic change across a culture over the course of two or three generations. If the argument is that tests became important in the mid-20th century, and that good test-takers have subsequently congregated, married, and as a result have produced a population of exceptionally good test-takers, it's fair to ask, what are the genetic components behind test-taking, and how do we measure them? When an individual takes a test prep course and sees a 10% increase in his score, is that because his genes have changed? Also, if test-taking prowess is hereditable and leads to wealth, why does the U.S. have a long history of economically outperforming nations that consistently outperform the U.S. on tests such as PISA?

Third, the fact that some aspects of personality are hereditable does not render environment irrelevant. As a group, children raised in an unsafe, tumultuous home predictably suffer long-term effects from their childhood experiences that are less prevalent in children raised in safe, stable households. When you see significant changes in a population across a generation (e.g., the rise in IQ in Irish children since 1970, or disparity in IQ between children of East and West Germany with the differences dissipating after reunification, it's not only inadequate to say, "What can we do - it's genes" - its obviously wrong and it's a cop-out. People tend to marry within their social class, and they tend to follow a career path modeled for them within their social class and family, with a potentially profound impact on their future earnings.

Fourth, the wealthy remain at an advantage even when you control for personality and intellect. When the economic outcomes for the lowest-performing children of the wealthy meet or exceed the economic outcomes for the highest-performing children of the poor, you can't deny the role of wealth. Winning the lottery doesn't change your genome, but it sure can open up opportunities that were not previously available.

I don't disagree so much with McArdle's conclusion as I do with how she reaches it,

Maybe the answer is not a quixotic attempt to somehow replicate the experience of being raised by two professionals with advanced degrees. Maybe it's to question the great educational sorting, and the barriers it has erected. Of course, I am not suggesting that we should give up on educating our kids, or that education is irrelevant to preparing people for the workforce. But we should ask whether incremental requirements are actually adding value. Because every additional year of schooling we require makes it harder and harder for those who don't enjoy school to compete in the wider world.

McArdle's argument does not support either the notion that the wealthy perform better academically because the typical wealthy child enjoys "the experience of being raised by two professionals with advanced degrees", as there are plenty of wealthy people where one or both partners lack advanced degrees, and plenty of middle class families where both parents have advanced degrees. Few impoverished families with two advanced-degree holding parents, and fewer still when you recognize that their transitory period in student family housing or at the very start of their careers isn't representative? Certainly. But none of that directly supports the genetic argument.

It would be helpful, I think, if McArdle explained what she means by "incremental articles". If I interpret that as, "Adding another round of standardized testing," or "Trying to concoct some sort of formula for rating teachers and trying to purge the lowest-performing teachers", then she's right. That sort of reform can make it "look like we're doing something", and may also be very expensive, but is not likely to materially affect outcomes - and we should examine the data, costs and benefits before expending hundreds of millions or billions on experimentation. Similarly she's correct that insisting that people get additional years of education, without any associated effort to ensure that they're getting something of value in exchange for their additional investment of time and money, is not likely to produce meaningful results. But if you look at the German or Irish experiences (or Polish, or certain American immigrant communities, etc.), you can see why its inappropriate to point to an impoverished community and say, "It's their genes" - and can find many examples of that argument being used to deny equal treatment to a population on grounds that, in retrospect, seem absurd.

Tolerance, Intolerance and Politics

In response to David Hoffman's argument, "a national conversation about guns and violence, facilitated and sped up by the internet, reduces our ability to try out different versions of the good life, and thus diminishes our capacity live together in peace", Jonathan Adler states:

I think he has a point. I also suspect this problem is magnified due to a decline in the understanding and appreciation of tolerance as a virtue. Not tolerance as acceptance or approval, but true tolerance. Tolerance as in there is something unpleasant, objectionable, or distasteful that one nonetheless tolerates. And this is brings us back to the problem of cocooning. If we have little interaction with those of truly different viewpoints — those whose entire worldview and starting premises are different than ours — we have a harder time recognizing the goodwill and fundamental humanity of those with whom we disagree. And that means we have a more difficult time discussing divisive political issues and trying to find common ground. So instead we demonize and attempt to marginalize our opponents — undertakings that may make us feel good, but do nothing to improve the situation.

I am reminded of the various "remember the good old days" essays, speaking of the 1950's and early 1960's as an idyll. Never mind the tensions, the racial discrimination and segregation, behind the scenes. Never mind the mentally handicapped child who is never allowed outside of the house or is institutionalized, lest his parents be embarrassed by the neighbors finding out about him. Never mind the ostracism of homosexuals and the criminalization of homosexuality. "We were all so much more tolerant when we were all the same. Why can't we get back to that sort of embrace of tolerance as a virtue?"

I don't want to be unfair to Adler. I'm just having a difficult time thinking of a period of human history in which the "true tolerance" he describes was lived as a virtue. Not discussed or advocated, but an actual part of the culture. I see instead a history in which differences in politics, religion and lifestyle have frequently been magnified, often with horrendous consequences for a targeted population.

Thanks to the Internet it's actually easier than ever to find and interact "with those of truly different viewpoints" - if you choose to do so. It's also very easy to cocoon. But to the extent that this represents a change, it's that people have a greater opportunity to seek out alternative viewpoints, not so much that people are largely staying within the confines of a like-minded community.

Adler argues that "It seems increasingly rare in political discourse for either side to consider that the other may be arguing in good faith", something he attributes in part to cocooning. I think a big part of the problem, though, is that many people who are leading the political discourse are not arguing in good faith. I've heard many politicians argue that they and their peers often take different positions behind closed doors than the ones that they take in public for their constituents. I've never heard a politician deny doing so. Behind the scenes we have a massive apparatus attempting to influence, manipulate and corrupt the debate.

If we're talking about people in general, it's reasonable to say that they're likely taking their positions in good faith, even if you're certain they're wrong. But when you look to the institutions that are advancing a particular narrative, those involved in the debate who are profiting from the stance they take, and those engaged in demagoguery, it's fair to both question their motives and to suggest that they're part of the problem Adler describes. When John Boehner distributed checks from tobacco lobbyists to his Repubican peers on the floor of the House, he branded himself as somebody whose motives are always in question. Does he believe the positions he takes? It's like the old joke, "Now we're just haggling over the price" - once you establish that you're for sale, your actual beliefs no longer matter.

At another level, if somebody is sincere in his support for a political position, but cannot explain why, cannot support or defend the position with facts, and cannot support or defend his position with logic, he makes himself irrelevant to the debate. We can engage in the type of tolerance encapsulated by the notion of agreeing to disagree, but you're not going to have a productive discussion if "tolerance" requires continuing to include that person in the debate or is contingent upon changing his mind.

It's not merely cocooning that leads academics to at times express puzzlement about how "someone of reasonable intelligence, good will, and good faith could reach diametrically opposing conclusions" - sometimes it's a product of the academic's having thought about the issue, while the person on the other side of the debate has given the issue little to no thought, or lacks sufficient information to properly analyze the issue. If you're actually interested in having a discussion, it doesn't take long to figure out if you're talking to somebody who is locked into a position, never to be moved, or if you can have a genuine discussion. I am approaching this from Adler's perspective of "an academic vs. everybody else", but if you want a meaningful discussion it's best to approach good faith debate without presupposing that you have an intellectual or informational advantage. You don't need to assume that the other person's position is informed, well-considered or offered in good faith, but you can attempt to provide an honest audience. If you're lucky, you might even learn something.

It would be interesting if Adler gave a position of an example of issue for which an identifiable population held an "entire worldview and starting premises [that] are different than" his own. My own international travels suggest that people around the world have a lot more in common than Adler's comment suggests. I suspect that he's speaking less about an individual or culture that disagrees on pretty much everything, across the board, and more about disagreement on some number of core or fundamental issues. Religion provides a context for how two people or cultures can be locked into a set of beliefs that exclude the possibility of the other's being correct. Religion provides an excellent context for the position that we would benefit from "true tolerance". Yet, alas, it also provides a context in which we have seen an exceptional level of intolerance over the whole of human history. (Even when one or both of the religions teaches "true tolerance" as a virtue.)

So, sure, let's aspire for "true tolerance" - but even if the tolerance we generally experience in the 21st century western world is a pale imitation of the ideal, it nonetheless stands as a remarkable achievement.

Public Policy vs. Illusions and Delusions

Dave Hoffman suggests that we are "forced by the Internet to nationalize problems", and as a result it is "harder for local communities to experiment with localized solutions to threats to the moral order". I would be more impressed with the argument if the imposition of national solutions on moral issues were a new phenomenon, or if it weren't the "don't tread on me" types who weren't often attempting to impose their own moral conventions upon the rest of us. But certainly, the national media, the 24 hour news cycle, and the Internet have changed the manner and speed at which local issues can become national news.

In fact, we have not been "forced" to "nationalize problems". We live in a society in which some problems that were once treated more uniformly on a national basis have been transitioned back to local mores. For example, obscenity is judged by community standards, and states are free to impose restrictions on access to abortion that were once considered forbidden under Roe v Wade. The Hatch Act and its creation of "right to work" states started the downhill slide of organized labor. We weren't "forced" to nationalize the problem of alcohol consumption during the prohibition era, nor was prohibition a product of the Internet. The anti-kidnapping laws that followed the Lindbergh kidnapping were not driven by the Internet. Behind the determination of what is "best" handled at the state vs. federal level lies a great deal of political gamesmanship that sometimes gets in the way of the formation of good policy.

Josh Marshall argued that suggesting that school shootings might not occur or might be less lethal if small children were trained to mob a gunman, or if schools were not a "feminized setting … in which helpless passivity is the norm" represents the discussion "quickly veering from the merely stupid [Megan McArdle's "mob the gunman" suggestion] to a pretty ugly kind of victim-blaming [Charlotte Allen's 'feminized settings' argument]". McArdle's suggestion is at best impractical and unrealistic, but to be fair to her she was comparing her own bad idea to ideas that she deemed worse - she admitted that her idea might not work, but had a better chance at preventing school shootings than the ideas she was criticizing. Marshall's criticism of Allen's comment is fair. Let's also throw in Mike Huckabee's blaming the shooting on a lack of prayer in schools.¹ That is blaming the victim, and it is ugly.

Hoffman appears to project his own discomfort with firearms onto people like Marshall,

I didn’t grow up with guns in the house, and the idea of allowing a child of mine into a school where the teachers are armed is horrifying. Worse, I think, is the concept that we ought to militarize children – to teach them that they are all on their own, and the state is powerless before the forces of chaos in society.

Marshall did speak of the growing militarization of our society. His comment is a bit cryptic, but he appears to be suggesting that fear of violent crime is resulting in people "seriously or [like McArdle] half in jest - pushing for a use of force race to the bottom".

Marshall's point is valid - even as violent crime has plummeted, fear of violent crime and terrorism has led to an expanded police and military presence in spaces that were far less secure during times when crime rates were significantly higher. I think part of the issue is that the more rare an event becomes, the more attention becomes focused on its increasingly rare occurrence. Marshall is making a public policy argument, that we should take a step back and try to figure out if the militarization is good for society, a good use of manpower and resources, or if it's likely to be effective before we expand it into new areas of society, such as public schools. Hoffman isn't actually addressing militarization - "teach[ing children] that they are all on their own, and the state is powerless before the forces of chaos in society" is not militarization - but more importantly he's not even arguing about how public policy should be formed.

My intervention here is to just to point out that the problem we actually have here is one of discourse – we are forced by the Internet to nationalize problems. This makes it much, much harder for local communities to experiment with localized solutions to threats to the moral order. If a community in, say, Connecticut wanted to ban assault weapon clips (because it made them feel safer – [(]let’s put to one side data on efficacy!), Glenn Reynolds would lead a charge against the liberal fascists. Indeed. Heh. Yes. If a community in Tennessee wants to arm its teachers (because it makes them feel safer – let’s put to one side data on efficacy!) Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan would call them out as conservative fascists. Or loonies. Or winners of the Moore award. And we’d all get to pat ourselves on the back, but no one would actually get the benefit that law is supposed to provide, which is the helpful illusion that we’re more civilized than we actually are, and that we’re actually doing something to push back against the tide.

The thing is, people like Marshall don't "put to one side data on efficacy" because they are interested in facts. They are interested in what works. Hoffman takes several potshots at Marshall,² but all the while misses that the McArdle "rush the shooter" comment was neither a serious policy proposal nor reasonably characterized as a proposal "offered by gun proponents". McArdle was in fact pointing out that some of the proposals being advanced in response to the school shooting, such as banning certain types of firearm or magazines of a certain capacity, would not have prevented the shooting. McArdle tends to get ridiculed in some corners because she has a history of making arguments that are not well-thought out, but her essential approach here is the same as Marshall's. She's not interested in making people feel safe. She's pointing out that your feelings have little to do with what actually does or does not make you safer.

At a basic level Hoffman is correct about a culture clash, although it's not s binary as he suggests. He's correct that a measure that to one person or community might serve as a "helpful illusion that we’re more civilized than we actually are" might differ from, or even be the opposite of, what another person or community would deem a "helpful illusion." If Hoffman wants to argue that communities should be able to create their own "helpful illusions", let's assume within reasonable constraints, he's only going to run into issues where those illusions start to impinge upon the rights of others. There already are schools that allow any teacher with a CCW permit to bring a gun to school.

The problem is that Hoffman is trying to impose his standard for "helpful illusions" onto a policy debate - an attempt to determine what may or may not actually work to prevent (in this instance) school shootings, and the extent to which arguments for measures that offer only illusory benefits are worth implementing, particularly when other civil, social and legal issues are implicated. The policy discussion does not "reduce[] our ability to try out different versions of the good life, and thus diminish[] our capacity live together in peace". In fact, if properly conducted, the policy discussion avoids imposing "helpful illusions" on a nationwide basis, instead implementing only those policies that can be reasonably expected to work, while leaving localities to form their own "helpful illusions" within the aforementioned parameters.
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1. There is a natural human tendency to try to explain away tragedy - to find a way to believe that a horror that happened to somebody else could not happen to you. Huckabee put himself into the same column as the TV ministers who blame local and national tragedies on homosexuality, feminism and the like - and they know exactly what they are doing when they exploit tragedies in that manner.

2. I found Hoffman's essay through a link provided by Jonathan Adler, a call for tolerance that, in context, is rendered odd by his hollow man arguments about mythic "liberal bloggers" who are having a "fevered reaction" and are in "a frenzy" about Megan McArdle's "what if kids mobbed the gunman" column. Adler's a law professor, so I assume he has enough familiarity with the Socratic method to understand that scorn, derision and ridicule, as unpleasant as they can be, do not constitute a frenzied or fevered reaction.

Hey, Pleb - Why Aren't You Kissing The Ring?

Yesterday, when I was spending a ridiculous amount of time troubleshooting a server, I missed a lecture from David Brooks in whose view our nation, it seems, is no longer sufficiently deferential to authority. After an odd sort of introduction in which he complaints that modern memorials tend to humanize rather than deify their subjects, Brooks asks, "Why can’t today’s memorial designers think straight about just authority?" And by "memorial designers" he appears to mean "average Americans".

Some of the reasons are well-known. We live in a culture that finds it easier to assign moral status to victims of power than to those who wield power. Most of the stories we tell ourselves are about victims who have endured oppression, racism and cruelty.

Then there is our fervent devotion to equality, to the notion that all people are equal and deserve equal recognition and respect. It’s hard in this frame of mind to define and celebrate greatness, to hold up others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves.

But the main problem is our inability to think properly about how power should be used to bind and build. Legitimate power is built on a series of paradoxes: that leaders have to wield power while knowing they are corrupted by it; that great leaders are superior to their followers while also being of them; that the higher they rise, the more they feel like instruments in larger designs. The Lincoln and Jefferson memorials are about how to navigate those paradoxes.

I disagree with Brooks' initial premise. We live in a culture that, on the whole, idolizes fame, wealth and power. We have an enormous population of celebrities who are "famous for being famous", people with little to no skill or talent beyond attracting media attention. From the Kardashians to Joe the Plumber, they're not necessarily bad people but they have nothing to offer beyond their fame. We assume that anybody who has become wealthy or who has succeeded in business is admirable and worthy. And yes, that extends to politics. You need look no further than the host of mediocre politicians who sought the Republican presidential nomination - and were taken seriously.

I am not sure what to make of Brooks' second point, save for this: If Brooks could make a genuine case that we're tearing down "others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves", he would provide an example. It's fair to say we're living in a very polarized time, and that there's a strong partisan effort to tear down individuals and politicians associated with "the other side", but that's far from new or unique to this era. It's fair to say that we know more about people of prominence than we did in the past, and that it's easier to deify a business or political leader if you don't know about his quirks and foibles - but although it may be easier to imagine that somebody is "immeasurably superior to ourselves" if we don't know the facts, it's not unreasonable to judge a person based upon facts instead of myths.

Really, in this context it would be helpful for Brooks to clue us in, by naming at least one individual whom he concedes to be "immeasurably superior to" himself.

In terms of a "fervent devotion to equality", Brooks may not realize this but one place you can get the idea that "all people are equal and deserve equal recognition and respect" is... wait for it... the Declaration of Independence - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...." One might also note that the preamble to the Constitution does not begin, "We the others who are immeasurably superior to you...." Brooks may believe that to be the subtext, "Ha ha, let's pull one over on the plebs and suggest that they're our equals", but even if he truly believes that language to be a conceit it would be absurd for him to simultaneously pretend that no prior generation "fell for it".

Further, the concept of true equality is not dominant in our culture. When you hear demagoguery about "liberal elites", the neglect of "flyover country", whether the President is a "full-blooded American", and the like, that's about building a sense of superiority in the target audience. Perhaps Brooks means that we should attempt to be more objective when assessing ourselves, but there's no shortage of judgment in our society when it comes to assessing others.

Brooks complains that the slogan, "question authority" is used indiscriminately - questioning not only bad authority - perhaps the authority that led us into war in Vietnam - but also good authority - perhaps the authority that led us into war in Iraq? As with sharing the identity of his superiors, examples would strengthen his argument - or reveal its incoherence.

Brooks complains that Americans perceive "elites" as self-interested. He does not define that term, and his separate reference to "public servants" makes it clear that he's not simply talking about elected officials. In what sphere other than politics would he have us believe that the "elites" are looking out for the rest of us? Should we look to the historic leaders of the tobacco, energy and financial industries? The entertainment industry? Are we being too hard on media elites, such as Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black? Egad. You don't have to assume that they're hiding something to recognize that they're people, and that they very often put their incomes and stock options ahead of the interest of their own companies, let alone the general public. I'll concede - Rupert Murdoch is "immeasurably superior" to me in terms of his ability to identify and exploit economic opportunities, but beyond that he's a terribly flawed human being. Should I close my eyes to that truth?

And what of politicians? When Mitch McConnell declared that "the single most important thing we [the Republican elite] want to achieve" is to make President Obama a one-term President, should I take him at his word? Or not? Because if I take him at his word, how can I avoid viewing him as a flawed human being, looking out for position and power even if it harms the country? And if I think of him as lying, how is it not his fault that people assume that he means what he says instead of assuming that he has glorious, positive motives and intentions that he hides from us?

Nonetheless, Brooks states, "I don’t know if America has a leadership problem...." Seriously? He can be a card-carrying member of a party that is led by McConnell, and that flirted with the idea of President Gingrich and President Santorum, and still wonder?

You can argue that McConnell makes it easy - that he's the low-hanging fruit - but really, if I'm not supposed to look at McConnell who's left to deify? John Boehner? Am I supposed to deify Mitt Romney, who technically has not yet even won his party's nomination, based upon his past ten years of self-aggrandizement and political campaigning? Just assume, perhaps because he's rich and has the right pedigree?

Daniel Larison refutes Brooks' notion that the Tea Party and OWS movements are leaderless, and responds,

What bothers Brooks about these movements is not that they reject all authority, but that they have weighed the claims to authority made by the current political class and found them badly wanting. These people probably haven’t concluded that they are “better than everyone else around them.” They are reasonably sure that their leaders are worse than they should be. If they are more cynical now than before, it could have something to do with the complete lack of accountability for the people most responsible for the calamities of the last ten years.

Not just ten years, though. The Watergate scandal broke in 1974. And any comment on increased cynicism toward government should acknowledge that the Republican Party has made a deliberate effort over recent decades to attack the motives, competency, and utility of government.

Brooks argues that our nation needs more "good followers", those who "recognize just authority, admire it, be grateful for it and emulate it". As stated, that's not unreasonable. If you are governed by a "just authority", you can no doubt find many admirable aspects, worthy of gratitude and emulation. The problem is that Brooks implies that the "just authority" we should be grateful for is that of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Mitt Romney. And through it all, while Brooks has no problem condescending to the masses for their failure to defer to those "others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves", one senses that Brooks has no trouble placing himself near - and perhaps even at - the apex of "others who are immeasurably superior to" you.

I Know Exactly How Things Always Used to Be....

Because I've seen a few episodes of Ozzie and Harriet. Seriously, can we expect pundits to ever tire of cherry-picking a date from the late 1950's or early 1960's as the date that society was perfect, and acknowledge both that the period at issue was anything but perfect - particularly for non-whites - and is not representative of the rest of human history?

In 1957, 57 percent of those surveyed said that they believed that adults who preferred to be single were “immoral” or “neurotic.” But today, as Eric Klinenberg reminds us in his book, “Going Solo,” more than 50 percent of adults are single. Twenty-eight percent of households nationwide consist of just one person. There are more single-person households than there are married-with-children households. In cities like Denver, Washington and Atlanta, more than 40 percent of the households are one-person dwellings. In Manhattan, roughly half the households are solos.

In 1857, what percentage of people do you suppose would have argued that marriage should be based upon romantic love, and that the romantic feelings should last a lifetime? What percentage of people would argue that it is never acceptable for a husband to strike his wife? I've heard it argued that conservatism is predicated upon trying to identify and preserve the best elements of the past, while acknowledging and accepting change of the worst, but the Brooks-style argument is far more prevalent: Pick a point in history, most often when the commentator was a child, romanticize the era, ignore its bad points, ignore the social factors that contributed to the often historically brief high points of the era, and argue that everything would be perfect if only we could build some form of social engineering time machine and force society into the fictionalized mold of that era.

Brooks observes,

A few generations ago, most people affiliated with one of the major parties. But now more people consider themselves independent than either Republican or Democrat.

Um... so what? At one point it was Whigs versus Tories, right? Times change. More to the point, the fact that people call themselves "independent" does not mean that they in fact vote differently than people with stated party affiliations. If you follow up with "do you lean toward the Republican Party or the Democratic Party", you'll get an answer that his highly predictive of how an independent will vote.

A few generations ago, many people worked for large corporations and were members of a labor union. But now lifetime employment is down and union membership has plummeted.

An interesting observation, given that union jobs, stable employment and the ability to earn a solid, middle class salary as a blue collar worker factored into the middle class culture of the late 1950's that Brooks so adores, but I somehow doubt that Brooks is arguing for more unions, higher wages for factor jobs and job protections. It's like that song, Love and Marriage, which I believe was released in 1955 - you can't have one without the other. Except in relation to marriage you can, and for most historical marriages you did. What you can't have is a strong, economically stable blue collar middle class if you don't have job opportunities and labor laws that will support and sustain a strong, economically stable blue collar middle class - history teaches us that lesson, as well.

A few generations ago, teenagers went steady. But over the past decades, the dating relationship has been replaced by a more amorphous hook-up culture.

A few generations ago, boys were allowed to "sow their wild oats" while girls were to remain chaste and to marry, often at a very young age, the man their parents chose for them to marry. Brooks also later suggests that if teenagers hang out in groups instead of going steady, this is indicative society's evolution away from a time when "America was groupy". Um, yeah.... Needless to say, Brooks carries on for a while longer in that vein.

Brooks makes an interesting observation,

But if there is one theme that weaves through all the different causes, it is this: The maximization of talent. People want more space to develop their own individual talents. They want more flexibility to explore their own interests and develop their own identities, lifestyles and capacities. They are more impatient with situations that they find stifling.

Brooks overstates his case. As with his attempt to attribute major changes in society and culture to technologies that have only existed for the past ten to twenty years, he overstates both the role of talent in society and the extent to which talented individuals can carve out their own successful career paths. But there's a lot of truth to the fact that our society has evolved toward an expectation that people have the right to make their own choices, to "be happy", and to be fulfilled, even if we don't have a clear sense of what that means. In Brooks' "groupy" past, there were strong group pressures to tolerate miserable situations lest you lose your status within your groups. I don't consider it to be a bad thing that some of the groups that once dominated social behavior have lost their stranglehold, but at the same time we have evolved into a society in which people feel more free to pursue their individual wants and needs and that the freedom has had an impact on traditional groups and upon the institution of marriage. Like pretty much every process of social evolution, the result is a mixed bag.

Predictably, Brooks imagines that society is composed of two kinds of people:

Over all, we’ve made life richer for the people who have the social capital to create their own worlds. We’ve also made it harder for the people who don’t — especially poorer children.

If life is harder for children who are poor we're not actually talking about social capital, are we? Because poverty is an economic construct. Here Brooks appears to be trying to sustain his weak argument from recent columns in which he attempts to argue that the bottom thirty percent of wage earners have lost their moral bearings but that, even though he sees something close to a perfect correlation between economic trends and the changes in social behavior, their situation has nothing to do with economics. It's a bit like his allusion to union membership in this column - he can identify and track myriad economic factors that correlate with what he perceives to be a shift in values, but then turn on a time and argue without evidence that we're actually seeing some form of transformation of human nature. Correlation should not be confused with causation, but if the correlation holds for pretty much all of human history and you have no other evidence to support your claim....

Brooks concludes,

These trends are not going to reverse themselves. So maybe it’s time to acknowledge a core reality: People with skills can really thrive in this tenuous, networked society. People without those advantages would probably be better off if we could build new versions of the settled, stable and thick arrangements we’ve left behind.

It's a shame he couldn't find room in his column to suggest a means through which we can push the working poor through that social engineering time machine and recreate the world of Ozzie and Harriet. (Perhaps we could call that world Pleasantville.) But really, if Brooks breaks away from his standard cocktail circuit and explores the real world, he will likely find that people with the "skills" and opportunities necessary to create a wholly independent life are few in number, and that most people are pretty much embedded in a culture of jobs and paychecks. One might argue that if we lived in the meritocracy that Brooks imagines himself to be a part of, a better columnist would be composing a column in his place and would be acknowledging that reality.

The Impact of Economic Opportunity on Behavior

Back when I first started practicing small town law, I represented a significant number of criminal defendants. From the moment I stepped into District Court for the criminal docket, it was an education in a subculture with which I had little prior background. You would see defendants in custody sitting in the jury box as they awaited arraignment, fresh from a night in jail, most yucking it up like they were at summer camp. The smell of a crowded courtroom was usually an unpleasant mixture of body odor, alcohol (from sweat and boozy breath) and cigarettes. No small number of the defendants present had been there before, and with most you had a strong sense that they would be back.

For most of us, the idea of getting through six months or a year without committing a criminal act, let alone being caught and prosecuted, doesn't seem like that big of a deal. For the District Court regulars, it's a real challenge. I represented a number of defendants who couldn't even make it from the day they entered their plea bargains to the date of their sentencings without getting arrested. While investigating cases and interviewing witnesses, I was introduced to households in which a five minute visit would require a shower and a change of clothes - usually due to their being thick with cooking grease, overwhelming 'pet odor' or decaying filth, but other not-so-pleasant odors could enter the mix. At court hearings, I would at times have to remind clients that jewelry that included drug symbols or implied gang activity had best not be worn.

In reading the pre sentence reports of some of these offenders, it was no mystery as to why many of them weren't faring well. Actually, sometimes it was a testament to human resilience - how would you hold up, for example, if your childhood involved witnessing the murders of both of your parents in separate incidents? Odds are the experiences wouldn't inspire you to become Batman.

Sometimes, when working with the defendant, I would meet a spouse who you would think would have a strong civilizing effect on the offender, and you could see that spouse's influence on the children. But it was sometimes quite clear what would happen to the spouse and children if they remained within the defendant's family unit. Odds are, a cycle would continue. And yes, you would see multi-generational patterns.

Within the community, you would find people working hard to live law-abiding, peaceful lives. People trying to get and hold jobs. People who did hold steady jobs. People whose homes were, by any standard, immaculate and well-ordered. Yet their neighbors couldn't hold it together, and the general state of the neighborhood had a spillover effect. Valuables were subject to being stolen, the streets could be unsafe, kids were in danger of being recruited into gangs or as street dealers. And for those who came from the most troubled families, the family itself was akin to a bucket of crabs - try to climb out, and one of your kin will latch onto you and try to pull you back into the bucket.

One thing that was perfectly clear is that there was a multi-generational cycle in effect, with factors including mental illness, substance abuse, and childhood trauma repeating themselves through parents, children, and grandchildren. Another thing that was perfectly clear is that the families and communities where you would see that cycle were economically depressed. There were few job opportunities for young people, many of the adults were unemployed, and those who worked were for the most part making modest wages, near minimum wage.

Another thing that was perfectly clear was that there were no easy answers to breaking the cycle. I recall one particularly odious, abusive offender, about to go to prison, subtly threatening his wife (the victim of his crime of felonious assault) with what he might do if she divorced him. She was there, showing support, along with their son who looked to be about eight years old. You knew that she, and more so their child, would have little chance of escaping the cycle if she stayed with him.

David Brooks believes that our ability to observe this cycle is a relatively new thing,

Over the past 25 years, though, a new body of research has emerged, which should lead to new theories. This research tends to support a few common themes. First, no matter how social disorganization got started, once it starts, it takes on a momentum of its own. People who grow up in disrupted communities are more likely to lead disrupted lives as adults, magnifying disorder from one generation to the next.

The funny thing is, Brooks seems to view that as a retort to the people who have been criticizing his report on Charles Murray's new book. To the contrary, people seem to be criticizing Brooks for imagining that we're seeing a mysterious transformation of human nature that is leading to economic decline, as opposed to economic decline that leads to entirely predictable patterns of behavior. Brooks' critics are acutely aware of what happens if you destroy the economic foundation of a population. Resorting to the same quote of Paul Krugman that I used yesterday in response to Ross Douthat,

Back in 1996, the same year Ms. Himmelfarb was lamenting our moral collapse, [sociologist William Julius] Wilson published 'When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor,' in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group — say, working-class whites — experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.

People who are concerned with wage stagnation and loss earning potential at the lower end of the labor market - an effect that has crept up into the middle class - are acutely aware of how you can destroy a community and create a set of perverse influences and incentives that create a poverty trap. And experience has taught us that it's much better to keep people out of that cycle than to try to break the cycle. Fifty years of experience demonstrate quite clearly that we're absolutely terrible at finding ways to break that cycle.

Brooks continues,

Second, it’s not true that people in disorganized neighborhoods have bad values. Their goals are not different from everybody else’s. It’s that they lack the social capital to enact those values.

This is true to a degree. Most of the people in what Brooks calls "disorganized neighborhoods" - note how he uses every euphemism he can find to avoid references to the economics of the people and communities he's discussing - have values and goals that are not dissimilar to those in more affluent communities. But they have social deficits. Many lack job skills, not just in terms of marketable skills desired by employers, but the basic sense of what an employer expects and how to behave in a workplace.

I recall one woman who I would see every few months. She always had a job - always a different job. Interpersonally she was engaging and pleasant. But she had a problem taking direction from supervisors, and was reaching an age when a lot of her supervisors were younger than her. These are the people who might be helped by basic training in how to behave during an interview, how to behave on the job, and sometimes even such mundane details as why you need to show up to work on time and why your boss thinks it's a big deal when you blow off a day's work because you have a really bad hangover.

Brooks talks of "social capital" while avoiding the question of how other types of capital, specifically money, factor into the "enactment" of values. When you have enough money to live in a safe neighborhood with decent schools, and where you and your children are exposed to a peer group that has internalized the standards of behavior that are expected in school and in the workplace, gaining that "social capital" can be effortless. When you live in a society, as we do, where about 80% of jobs are filled through personal connections, having people in your life who can make those connections for you is a big deal.

Brooks asserts,

Third, while individuals are to be held responsible for their behavior, social context is more powerful than we thought. If any of us grew up in a neighborhood where a third of the men dropped out of school, we’d be much worse off, too.

Really? My stepfather came from a working class family in the North of England. His grammar school graduating class included about twenty students, the vast majority of his classmates having dropped out along the way. My high school was both a neighborhood school for a working class area of my city and an academic magnet school. I was surprised by how how small my graduating class turned out to be, given the population of the school. Yet I can't say that my stepfather, who has a laundry list of degrees and certifications including a Ph.D. in physics, or I (only one post-graduate degree, alas) are "much worse off" for our experiences. We both had the opportunity to attend good schools, and the British government at the time made my stepfather's college education virtually tuition free. My paternal grandfather went to night school but was not able to finish. My father grew up with the expectation that he would attend and graduate from college. So did I. And you know what? That's a much bigger deal than the drop-out rates in our respective high schools.

What does differentiate [African American men who complete college], the study suggests, is a complex stew of mostly external factors that appeared to give them a sense that college was not only possible but expected, and engaged them academically and otherwise in their schools and colleges. Among those influences: involved parents with high expectations for them; at least one K-12 teacher who took a personal interest in their academic and personal future; adequate financial support to pay for college; and a transition to college in which high expectations were set for them as much if not more by influential black male juniors and seniors at their institutions as by formal programs designed to smooth their way.

So while Murray writes one book suggesting that underachievement by African Americans is dictated by genetics, and another suggesting that underachievement by lower-SES white Americans is driven by values, there in fact appears to be a significant commonality - you know, as if we're all human beings under our skin, behaving as humans do. As for the notion that wealth is somehow earned through good genes and good upbringing, a somewhat controversial study found an interesting commonality between African American students and legacy students enrolled at Duke University - legacy students underperform those admitted through regular channels and have a pattern of switching to softer majors. And yet why am I thinking that a typical legacy student has a significant advantage over a similarly situated African American graduate, or for that matter even an outstanding non-legacy graduate, despite a weak academic performance? If underperforming legacy students like Dan Quayle and George W. Bush hadn't been from rich, powerful families, do you think we would have heard of them? Oh, that's right, it's all about their good values - as demonstrated in G.W.'s case by indifference to academics, years of drunken self-indulgence, DUI's and the like.

Brooks also informs us of "attachment theory", pursuant to which "children who can’t form secure attachments by 18 months face a much worse set of chances for the rest of their lives", a fact that Brooks appears to believe is a revelation but is something you might otherwise learn in psychology 101. Brooks also asserts that "people raised in disrupted circumstances find it harder to control their impulses throughout their lives", something you would think he would understand to undermine his thesis that the tail wags the dog. Does he imagine that families within the bottom thirty percent of wage earners have been moving into neighborhoods in which their children are raised in "disrupted circumstances" because they like run down communities and underfunded schools? Or is that a consequence of the significant reductions in the number of middle class jobs available to workers with fewer job skills, and the overall reduction of wages for most jobs that remain available?

Brooks, like Murray, fixates on an artificial start date as the benchmark for middle class values, an era of cheap higher education, significant economic growth, strong labor organization, and of middle class blue collar jobs that carried good benefits. Brooks could look to many centuries of history preceding that point in time to get an understanding of how an impoverished underclass behaves, and could easily find arguments similar to his own about how it's all a matter of values. Less sympathetic, as in the past it seems people were more willing to attribute bad values to the poor rather than softening things up with terms like "social capital", but there for him to read.

Instead, Brooks focuses on what, by historical standards, is a snapshot. The rise of a significant middle class. Apparently the values that allow for a robust middle class were lying dormant for centuries until they were finally set free in the mid-20th century, only to immediately being to fold in on themselves. And it is those values that led to economic growth, and the growth of job opportunities and wages at the bottom end of the labor pool, the economic realities of the time being irrelevant.

After gently faulting Murray for failing to address "social capital" in his book, Brooks sneers,

Meanwhile, his left-wing critics in the blogosphere have reverted to crude 1970s economic determinism: It’s all the fault of lost jobs. People who talk about behavior are blaming the victim. Anybody who talks about social norms is really saying that the poor are lazy.

That is apparently aimed at Paul Krugman, and particularly the quote I shared above:

Liberal economists haven’t silenced conservatives, but they have completely eclipsed liberal sociologists and liberal psychologists.

If Brooks believes his comment is a fair representation of the position of liberal economists, it can only be ascribed to weak analytical skills. Theirs is not an argument of "It's either economics or values," it's an observation that when you undermine the economic stability of families and communities, you undermine the rewards and incentives that support stronger families and the pursuit of higher education, and increase a significant amount of stress and trauma into families, while undermining their ability to obtain the tools necessary to rise, through such factors as economic distress, economically depressed neighborhoods and weaker schools.

Even noneconomist commentators reduce the rich texture of how disadvantage is actually lived to a crude materialism that has little to do with reality.

I don't know who Brooks is speaking of here, but it's safe to say that it's not the most appropriate target for that criticism - people on the political right who say things like, "How can that family be poor when they have a car, a television, a cellular phone and a microwave oven?"

Brooks declares,

I don’t care how many factory jobs have been lost, it still doesn’t make sense to drop out of high school.

In 1937, George Orwell described the British working class,

This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people's convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that 'they' will never allow him to do this, that, and the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately that 'they' would never allow it. Who were 'they'? I asked. Nobody seemed to know, but evidently 'they' were omnipotent.

A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in times of stress 'educated' people tend to come to the front; they are no more gifted than the others and their 'education' is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander. That they will come to the front seems to be taken for granted, always and everywhere.

And oh, the "disorderliness" of the community,

There is always something to be done, and no conveniences and almost literally not room to turn round. No sooner have you washed one child's face than another's is dirty; before you have washed the crocks from one meal the next is due to be cooked. I found great variation in the houses I visited. Some were as decent as one could possibly expect in the circumstances, some were so appalling that I have no hope of describing them adequately. To begin with, the smell, the dominant and essential thing, is indescribable. But the squalor and the confusion! A tub full of filthy water here, a basin full of unwashed crocks there, more crocks piled in any odd corner, torn newspaper littered everywhere, and in the middle always the same dreadful table covered with sticky oilcloth and crowded with cooking pots and irons and half-darned stockings and pieces of stale bread and bits of cheese wrapped round with greasy newspaper! And the congestion in a tiny room where getting from one side to the other is a complicated voyage between pieces of furniture, with a line of damp washing getting you in the face every time you move and the children as thick underfoot as toadstools!

Orwell noted the impact of high unemployment on people who could not find work,

But there is no doubt about the deadening, debilitating effect of unemployment upon everybody, married or single, and upon men more than upon women. The best intellects will not stand up against it. Once or twice it has happened to me to meet unemployed men of genuine literary ability; there are others whom I haven't met but whose work I occasionally see in the magazines. Now and again, at long intervals, these men will produce an article or a short story which is quite obviously better than most of the stuff that gets whooped up by the blurb-reviewers. Why, then, do they make so little use of their talents? They have all the leisure in the world; why don't they sit down and write books? Because to write books you need not only comfort and solitude--and solitude is never easy to attain in a working-class home--you also need peace of mind. You can't settle to anything, you can't command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you.

And what of workers whose job skills had become obsolete?

Still, an unemployed man who feels at home with books can at any rate occupy himself by reading. But what about the man who cannot read without discomfort? Take a miner, for instance, who has worked in the pit since childhood and has been trained to be a miner and nothing else. How the devil is he to fill up the empty days? It is absurd to say that he ought to be looking for work. There is no work to look for, and everybody knows it. You can't go on looking for work every day for seven years.

And the influence of consumerism and vice?

Trade since the war has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity. One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs. For the price of one square meal you can get two pounds of cheap sweets. You can't get much meat for threepence, but you can get a lot offish-and-chips. Milk costs threepence a pint and even 'mild' beer costs fourpence, but aspirins are seven a penny and you can wring forty cups of tea out of a quarter-pound packet. And above all there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries. Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days' hope ('Something to live for', as they call it) by having a penny on a sweepstake.

You would think that Britain was a hopeless case, and might have imagined that WWII would seal its fate. Oh yes, WWII was the beginning of the end for Great Britain as a world power, but despite the "disorderly", traumatized working class communities, and their emphasis on bling over education, their economic experience mirrored our own, with the rise of a significant middle class including solidly middle class blue collar jobs. Astonishing how similar the behaviors of the working poor of the 1930's are to the behaviors Brooks sees as the cause of the plight of the present working poor - and funny how those values shifted and changed based on wages and job opportunities.

Brooks, from his privileged childhood and exceptionally privileged adulthood, cannot understand why working class kids might drop out of high school. Everything old is new again. Back to Orwell,

To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly.

Brooks no doubt grew up in a household like mine - not in the sense of SES, as I expect his family was exponentially more wealthy than mine, but in the sense of there being a constant expectation that he would attend and complete college. How can somebody not see the value of high school, the most basic academic qualification for entry into the job market? How can somebody not want to at least create a foundation for college, even if they defer enrollment? It has to be a matter of values, not economic, right? But funny how the values that led the sons of coal miners to drop out of school were transformed along with the British economy moving into the 1960's, the starting point for the Brooks/Murray model of middle class values.

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.

What jobs does Brooks imagine himself to be describing? The jobs held by the legions of Foxconn workers who sit in cubicles for long hours, assembling electronic goods for more affluent and mostly western buyers, before retiring to company dormitories for their night's sleep? The issue isn't that we don't have workers capable of performing that type of task, the problem (if you can call it that) is that the workers of our nation have enough better alternatives that you could not maintain a sufficiently large, stable workforce to keep one of Foxconn's gargantuan company towns in operation. Yes, it would take a considerable amount of time to train a staff of supervisory employees sufficient to oversee such an operation, but that's because no such operations exist in this country. Does Brooks think that the work culture of China's massive manufacturing plants represents a value set our nation needs? Their lives are certainly structured - maybe that's enough for Brooks.

Still convinced that the tail wags the dog, Brooks sees a need "to rebuild orderly communities". Without explaining what policies he in fact endorses, he favors government intervention:

Building organizations and structures that induce people to behave responsibly rather than irresponsibly and, yes, sometimes using government to do so.

But what has actually changed in the "disorderly communities" that Brooks describes, as compared to those that predated the 1960's? Brooks points to out-of-wedlock childbirth, but makes no mention of declining divorce rates or the fact that out-of-wedlock pregnancy was extraordinarily high in the 1950's. Is he arguing for more shotgun weddings, even if they end in divorce? For imposing significant social pressure on young women not to carry their babies to term, or to give their babies up for adoption?

Brooks argues that marriage rates were high during the period between 1912 and 1962, but makes no explanation for why it took fifty years for "middle class values" to emerge and supposedly transform the economy or why, in his mind, those values proved to be so fragile. He argues, "Community groups connected people across class", which I guess means that people used to attend church more regularly. But seriously, marriage rates, in-wedlock births and "community groups" are the only differences he sees between orderly and disorderly communities? With "orderly communities" peaking in the 1960's, little things like this or this get flushed down the memory hole? Yeah, we were all "one big happy".

Brooks closes by arguing, "The depressing lesson of the last few weeks is that the public debate is dominated by people who stopped thinking in 1975." But David Frum (a guy Brooks perhaps believes is a liberal economist) reminded us know who actually stopped thinking in 1975, perhaps a bit earier:

In the first long quoted passage from Coming Apart, I asterisked one of Murray's statistical claims, a claim stating that wages have stagnated for the bottom 50% of the white work force. That claim is true if you draw your line, as Murray does, beginning in 1960. But put your thumb on the left side of the chart, and start drawing the line beginning in 1970. Then you notice that median wages have stagnated for the whole bottom 75%—and that the median wage only begins to show significant improvement over time when you look at the top 5%.

So again, it's values? And somehow the deteriorating values and "disorderly communities" of the bottom 30% of wage earners have caused wages to stagnate or drop for a full 75% of wage earners over a forty year period? Amazing.

Update: Taking issue with Brooks' suggestion that a key issue in the plight of the working poor is their high school graduation rate, Lawrence Mishel responds,

Brooks’ assumption, I guess, is that many workers have low wages because they never completed high school. He’s not alone in thinking that there are a lot of high school dropouts, but this is definitely not true. As the graph shows, the share of the workforce (ages 18-64) who have neither a high school or further degree (including a GED) has dropped tremendously in the last four decades, from 28.5 percent in 1973 to just 8.4 percent in 2011, a trend true among men as well as women.

Ross Douthat's Weak Take on Charles Murray

Does the AEI Throw Really Good Parties? I ask because, except for the guy we know doesn't get invited¹ to their shin digs, "moderate conservative" commentators seem to be lining up to a man to say, "Charles Murray wrote a great book with the wrong solutions, and liberals are idiots." Recall David Brooks, grafting his high school sociology onto Murray's notion of a "class divide" between high and low income whites. Now we have Ross Douthat lavishing praise on Murray for producing "a brilliant work", even though he thinks all of Murray's proposed solutions are dead wrong.

In a sense I should be grateful for the Times, and its pundits' tenth grade quality book reports - they read the book so I don't have to. I just wish they were more... capable when it comes to analysis.² By way of contrast, within a few paragraphs Frum pretty much shatters the notion that there's anything brilliant about Murray's book,

Murray is baffled that a collapse in the pay and conditions of work should have led to a decline in a workforce's commitment to the labor market.

His book wants to lead readers to the conclusion that the white working class has suffered a moral collapse attributable to vaguely hinted at cultural forces. Yet he never specifies what those cultural forces might be, and he presents no evidence at all for a link between those forces and the moral collapse he sees....

This trend toward inequality varies from country to country—more extreme in the United Kingdom, less extreme in Germany. The subsequent destabilization of working-class social life likewise varies from country to country. But if the trend is global, the cause must be global too. Yet that thought does not trouble Murray.

Frum also notes that Murray cherry-picked a starting date in order to support his conclusions, whereas other starting dates destroy his argument. I argued in response to Brooks' piece that Brooks (and by implication Murray) ignored prior history. Frum points out that they also ignore subsequent history.

Let me instance another example of the unwillingness. In the first long quoted passage from Coming Apart, I asterisked one of Murray's statistical claims, a claim stating that wages have stagnated for the bottom 50% of the white work force. That claim is true if you draw your line, as Murray does, beginning in 1960. But put your thumb on the left side of the chart, and start drawing the line beginning in 1970. Then you notice that median wages have stagnated for the whole bottom 75%—and that the median wage only begins to show significant improvement over time when you look at the top 5%.

That number points in a very different direction from the one in which Murray would like to lead his audience. And this kind of polemical use of data is one—but only one—of the things that discredits Coming Apart as an explanation of the social trouble of our times.

Douthat offers a knee-jerk reaction to Murray's proposal to reinvent the existing social safety net in the form of a "universal guaranteed income":

Murray argues that our leaders should embrace his own libertarian convictions, scrap all existing government programs (and the dependency and perverse incentives they create) and replace them with a universal guaranteed income. This is a fascinating idea; it’s also fantastically impractical, and entirely divorced from American political realities. Which means that it’s divorced from any possibility of actually addressing the crisis that Murray so vividly describes.

Particularly when you're talking about pushing massive reform bills through Congress, it's always difficult to change an entrenched status quo. But is that the end of Douthat's analysis? "It would never pass, so it will never work"? It's fair to suggest that Murray should have offered a few realistic proposals along with a Gingrichian, "We'll change everything to be the way I want and then everything will work!" But Douthat seems to be saying, "Change is hard, so unless you show me an easy path to implementing solutions I would just as soon do nothing."

Par for the course, Douthat goes right into a hollow man argument about liberals, fabricating an argument that few to none actually hold, but which he pretends is representative and, of course, is easy to bat down.

Murray’s critics accuse him of essentially blaming the victim: the social breakdown he described may be real enough, they allow, but it’s an inevitable consequence of an economic system that Republicans have rigged to benefit the rich. In the liberal view, there’s nothing wrong with America’s working class that can’t be solved by taxing the wealthy and using the revenue to weave a stronger safety net.³

That invites the usual challenge: Okay, Ross, name one liberal outside of the irrelevant fringe who actually takes that position. You can't? Then why are you pretending it's representative of liberal views.⁴ A dose of reality from the unapologetic liberal, Paul Krugman, a guy whose column can't be particularly difficult for Douthat to locate,

So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.

His position, of course, bears no resemblance to Douthat's fictional liberal. The problem Krugman identifies isn't that we're not taxing the rich - it's that the pool of jobs available at the blue collar end of the job market is drying up and the jobs that remain offer lower wages and fewer benefits. Economic stress.

Douthat's proposed solutions to the plight of lower wage workers are, well, insipid. After telling us that we cannot afford to sustain our present entitlements, even if taxes are increased on the rich, Douthat argues,

The current tax-and-transfer system imposes a tax on work — the payroll tax — that falls heavily on low-wage labor, and poor Americans face steep marginal tax rates because of how their benefits phase out as their wages increase. Both burdens can and should be lightened. There are ways to finance Social Security besides a regressive tax on work, and ways to structure benefits and tax credits that don’t reduce the incentives to take a better-paying job.

Okay, Ross, please describe exactly how we are going to fund Social Security if we reduce FICA taxes, and how will your plan do anything but add to the hysterical debate, driven by your political party, that Social Security is running out of money and must be slashed or abolished? And which benefits and tax credits do you imagine are keeping people out of higher wage jobs?

Is Douthat a child of privilege? It seems pretty clear that he has never worked a low-wage job - the type of job where a raise of twenty-five or thirty cents per hour is a big deal. Who does Douthat imagine is turning down pay raises because of the unidentified "benefits and tax credits" he imagines are a deterrent to seeking higher wages? I will grant that there's an uncomfortable period when you're earning well into the six figures, when you lose a great many tax credits and benefits available to lower wage earners, are hit by the alternative minimum tax, and pay an effective tax rate higher than people who earn vastly more than you do. But that's a problem for the top 10%, not the bottom 30%, and people who have worked their way to the top 10% don't appear to be giving up on work.

Douthat also argues that the best way to increase wages for the working poor is... to take more parents out of the workplace. Because nothing raises the living standard of a two-income family like having one parent lose a job.

Second, if we want lower-income Americans to have stable family lives, our political system should take family policy seriously, and look for ways to make it easier for parents to manage work-life balance when their kids are young. There are left-wing approaches to this issue (European-style family-leave requirements) and right-wing approaches (a larger child tax credit). Neither is currently on the national agenda; both should be.

Did you get that? Right after telling us how horrible it is that we "structure benefits and tax credits" in a manner that reduces "the incentives to take a better-paying job", Douthat argues in favor of benefits (extended paid maternity and paternity leave) and tax credits ("a larger child tax credit") that are intended to temporarily or permanently remove one parent from the workforce. Did you also catch that this proposal crashes head-on into Douthat's criticism of Murray - the type of subsidy that would improve or even sustain the living standards of working class families while one or both parents took extended parental leave or one became stay-at-home are "entirely divorced from American political realities".

I know Douthat doesn't like to hear this, but another way that people at the bottom of the labor pool can position themselves to advance is by deferring parenthood while they get established, and having smaller families. Douthat appears to be the sort of man who is deeply disturbed⁴ by the idea that women might have active sex lives without becoming pregnant.

I'll agree that our nation has implemented a maze of policies, primarily relating to eligibility for public assistance or and taxes, that create a disincentive to marry. It's fair to argue that we should revisit some of those policies, even if it means that some marginal households receive additional benefits due to the continuation of benefits based upon individual earnings instead of reducing or eliminating benefits based on family earnings following marriage, but the balance isn't easy to find and even if you found it you would likely have Douthat arguing that the best solutions are "fantastically impractical, and entirely divorced from American political realities".

Douthat next argues that the nation "shouldn't be welcoming millions of immigrants who compete with" low-wage workers. He pretends that while society as a whole gets some benefits from immigration, "it can lower wages and disrupt communities" and that we're effectively "ask[ing] an already-burdened working class to bear these costs alone." By this point I am not sure that Douthat understands anything about immigration, taxation or payment for public services. Douthat then endorses the strategy of "the leading Republican candidates" to "welcome more high-skilled immigrants" (I guess they don't compete for jobs?) and "mak[e] it as hard as possible for employers to hire low-skilled workers off the books" - something his party talks about from time to time, but generally obstructs.

Note also how Douthat sidesteps the issue of illegal immigration, as if there's a huge pool of legal immigrants fighting for minimum wage jobs as opposed to a huge pool of undocumented workers who are often willing to work for less than minimum wage. If we are talking about illegal immigration, Douthat needs to address the reality that people in his economic class or above (e.g., Mitt Romney or Walmart) utilize illegal immigrant labor on a routine basis, because it's cheap, they don't want to maintain their pools, lawns and tennis courts themselves - and it's not a problem as long as they maintain plausible deniability. When states have been effective in, say, keeping farmers from utilizing undocumented workers to harvest crops, we've had problems with crops rotting in the fields. I'm not sure what population of legal immigrants Douthat imagines are preventing citizens from getting near-minimum wage jobs.

Douthat's final argument is,

Finally, if we want low-income men to be marriageable, employable and law-abiding, we should work to reduce incarceration rates. Prison is a school for crime and an anchor on advancement....

Except the principal barriers to employment for an ex-offender are a lack of job skills and a criminal record. Reducing the number of people we incarcerate could offer other social benefits, but it's not going to transform a population of marginal workers into highly desirable, employable workers. In case Douthat didn't notice, crime rates tend to go up in communities that have higher unemployment rates and fewer government services. It's great to talk about "larger police forces", but given the budget crises that are particularly acute in high crime communities and how Douthat's own party demagogues on the subject of government employment, that doesn't seem particularly realistic. And recall, at least when other people's ideas are on the table, Douthat is quick to declare that if it's not politically easy "it's divorced from any possibility of actually addressing the crisis".

The idea of prison being a "school for crime" is interesting, given that over the years I've represented a number of people who have been in prison. It wasn't my observation that they were becoming better criminals due to their periods of incarceration. It was more that the smarter criminals don't get caught (at least not as often), insulate themselves from the most visible aspects of their criminal enterprises (e.g., supplying cocaine to the street dealers as opposed to doing the actual dealing), or find "legal" ways to steal money. (Conrad Black, for example, continues to fume over his incarceration for what he and his lawyers contend was a perfectly legal looting of his corporation.)

If Douthat wants to get on board with the tiny but growing population of prominent conservatives who are finally taking note of the extreme cost and limited benefit of our 'prison nation', and join with the left to fashion, implement and fund community-based policing and penalties that should, over time, help maintain and even reduce our presently low crime rates and allow states to realize cost savings through the closing of prisons, great. But I won't hold my breath waiting for him to get started.

Fundamentally, Douthat makes the same mistake as Murray and Brooks, believing that the solution to wage stagnation and a loss of job opportunities is "to make it easier for working-class Americans⁶ to cultivate the virtues that foster resilience and self-sufficiency." Working class white Americans, that is. Krugman notes,

Back in 1996, the same year Ms. Himmelfarb was lamenting our moral collapse, [sociologist William Julius] Wilson published 'When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor,' in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group — say, working-class whites — experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.

I guess it's easier for people like Murray, Brooks and Douthat to ignore history and to imagine that society's troubles come from a sudden transformation of human nature from what we saw in the decades and centuries preceding 1963, but no. Human nature hasn't changed. The opportunities and incentives available to low-wage earners have changed.

And speaking of incentives, I suspect that it's more than just AEI parties. If as a conservative pundit you don't pimp the right books, candidates and ideas - even when they're bad - you don't get the book contracts, speaking fees, invitations, and celebrity treatment that gilds your life. If you don't believe me, ask David Frum.
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1. Via mythago.

2. Or is it a question of honesty?

3. Douthat also argues, "It was globalization, not Republicans, that killed the private-sector union and reduced the returns to blue-collar work." It's fair to say that globalization was not exclusively a Republican idea or priority, but Douthat appears to believe that it happened in a vacuum, and appears to be ignorant of how nations like Germany took a different approach to globalization with a much different effect on its manufacturing base and wages.

4. Stupid or lying? Fool or fraud?

5. Per that article,

[Douthat] first gained attention for Privilege, a bittersweet 2005 memoir of his years at Harvard, where the drinking, partying, and hooking up left him feeling alienated. Of one alcohol-fueled fling, he wrote: "Whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered—'You know, I'm on the pill.'...On that night, in that dank basement bedroom, she spoke for all of us, the whole young American elite. Not I love you, not This is incredible, not Let's go all the way, but I'm on the pill."

It's more than reasonable to infer that Douthat didn't want to make a baby - but it completely ruined the mood when he found out that the girl expressing interest in him had taken precautions.

6. Douthat appears to be following Murray's thesis here, such that he actually means "white Americans." If he doesn't see this as a racial issue, he should distance himself from that aspect of Murray's thesis.