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.

David Brooks on the Work Ethic

I had intended to follow up my post, David Brooks vs. The Facts, by challenging his assertion that "nations like Germany and the U.S." are rich because we share "values, habits and [a] social contract upon which the entire prosperity of the West is based", to be distinguished from the European nations presently in crisis, but a flood of others have already done the job. I will grant that it's true, you will find commonalities between western democracies, but as those others have pointed out, when Brooks attacks nations like Greece and Italy and praises Germany he ignores Germany's higher social spending, lower average annual hours worked, high government spending, and embrace of social democracy.

Brooks states a basic philosophy that most people would describe as fair:

People who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not. Community institutions should nurture responsibility and fairness.

He's also correct that you can undermine that ethos, one of the obvious lessons we can draw from the communist experiment. But I think he's being both parochial and incorrect when he argues that there exists some form of Northern European / North American work ethic that simply doesn't exist in the rest of the world. I also think he misunderstands the genesis of the work ethic and what sustains it.

Let's start with Brooks' observations about the supposed decline of work ethic, something he believes is a new phenomenon,

Right now, this ethos is being undermined from all directions. People see lobbyists diverting money on the basis of connections; they see traders making millions off of short-term manipulations; they see governments stealing money from future generations to reward current voters.

Does Brooks believe that lobbyists are new? That historically they have not diverted money "on the basis of connections"? Such a belief would seem to be completely at odds with history. As for "traders making millions off of short-term manipulations", since when is that new? When we transitioned from Jimmy Carter telling us to tighten our belts to Ronald Reagan's ushering in the era of "Greed is Good", we witnessed the Savings and Loan debacle, insider trading scandals, and plenty of evidence of crony capitalism. Brooks' notion that workers have suddenly become lazy because "they see governments stealing money from future generations to reward current voters" seems absurd.

Although it's true that Medicare costs more than one would have anticipated when the system was created, and as it turns out Social Security is on the whole a good deal for most lower- and middle-earning workers (and not such a bad deal for workers who want some level of affordable disability insurance), does Brooks truly see that the nation's living up to its promises to workers who have paid into those systems over the course of their working lives constitutes "theft"? And if he does, why the praise for social democracies like "Germany and the Netherlands" that "steal" even more money to ensure that retirees avoid poverty and citizens have access to quality healthcare? It's simply not the case that the work ethic has materially changed since the housing bubble burst, or that it is weakened by offering workers the promise of eventual retirement or access to medical care.

Further, in speaking of nations that "have lived within their means, undertaken painful reforms, enhanced their competitiveness and reinforced good values," he explicitly omits mention of the United States. That's fair, given that by Brooks' measure we do not appear to have done any of those things. Yet there we are, in Brooks' mind, sitting at the top of the heap of exceptional nations due to our work ethic. What gives?

As with "kids these days" editorials, people have been writing about the decline of the work ethic pretty much since the time it was first conceptualized. Brooks seems to be asserting two contradictory thoughts - first, that the U.S. has a remarkable work ethic as compared to the rest of the world, and second that it is newly threatened by the scandals of the past six years.

I am reminded of John McCain's comments from a few years ago, suggesting that Americans are too lazy to perform hard physical labor, and wouldn't spend a season picking lettuce even at $50 per hour. If a willingness to pick lettuce or work in sweatshop conditions for wages that are a small fraction of that $50, it would see that Americans have nothing on the poor of the world - China has no shortage of workers willing to toil in factories for long hours under unpleasant conditions, Southeast Asia is full of factories producing consumer goods in what can reasonably be called sweatshop conditions, and we use thousands of Mexicans, both legally and illegally in the U.S., to harvest crops, clean houses, cut lawns, or work in the building trades. You could draw a comparison to the working poor of the industrial revolution, who also worked ridiculous hours in horrible conditions for meager pay. The commonality, of course, is not "habits, values and social capital" or a delusion held by the workers that their jobs will lead to "a fair shot at prosperity" - it's their lack of better alternatives, and fear of what will happen if they lose their meager remuneration.

Even though by historic standards, taxes are low, without presenting any evidence to support his claim Brooks contends that people are put off working by the notion that the government is "stealing" their money to support unworthy others. Can Brooks name one person who has "Gone Galt" due to the fact that our nation hasn't completely eliminated its comparatively meager social safety net, or because seniors get Social Security and Medicare? One person who has so much as slacked off at work over outrage over lobbying in Washington? When the Tea Partiers rose up against the financial industry bailout, did they quit their jobs? What am I missing?

The real lesson from financial crises is that, at the pit of the crisis, you do what you have to do. You bail out the banks. You bail out the weak European governments. But, at the same time, you lock in policies that reinforce the fundamental link between effort and reward. And, as soon as the crisis passes, you move to repair the legitimacy of the system.

Let's relate that suggestion to the U.S. - what did we do after the financial industry bailout to "reinforce the fundamental link between effort and reward" or "repair the legitimacy of the system"? The steps the government took would seemingly fall under Brooks' conception of "stealing money from future generations", with a huge reward going to a privileged special interest, well represented by lobbyists, as opposed to "current voters". But no, it's not stealing to take hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars from future generations in order to ensure that bankers never miss a bonus - that's "necessary". But if you promise somebody approaching retirement, who has paid into Social Security and Medicare for their entire career, that you will fulfill the promise that it will be there when they retire, Brooks apparently sees an act of "theft". (Does Brooks endorse any financial industry reforms that will make that industry less of a lottery, help ensure that there won't be additional crises and tie pay to actual performance?)

Although taking away the social safety net, job security, decent wages, and the other factors that helped our nation develop its middle class may in fact be effective at creating a population desperate enough to take any work at any wage, it would seem to move us much more toward the ethos of China or Cambodia than that of Germany. The retort, "But we'll still have the Horatio Alger myth", seems like small solace.

Newt Gingrich Thinks Americans Need To Work Harder?

In his new Washington Post idiotorial, Newt Gingrich prattles,

Sarkozy had the courage to campaign on the theme that "the French will have to work harder." Imagine trying to get that past an American campaign consultant. In effect, he repudiated the French left's passion for income transfer and trumped it with a passion for pursuing happiness.

The obvious retort is that a political consultant will tell you, "No problem - as long as voters understand you to be talking about the need for other people to work more. Better yet, if it is understood as code directed at certain groups regarded as shiftless and lazy." (Contrary to Newt's apparent belief, they do have political consultants in France.)

But what does this comment really tell us... about Newt. It suggests that he truly believes that Americans need to work harder. It suggests that he has spent too much time hanging out with certain people who appear intent to break records for taking the most vacation, and doesn't have the first clue how much the average American actually works as compared to workers in other nations. (That "uniquely American" work experience....) It suggests that he has never worked a job where he was "on the clock", or at best did so as a teen with the income he earned being largely or entirely discretionary.

Come to think of it, wasn't it Newt's first wife who worked Newt's way through college? Nice reward she got.

How out-of-touch must Newt Gingrich be, to imply that Americans would have no right to object to a politician telling them that they need to "work harder"....

"Don't Forget To Punch Out"

That's the instruction I gave to an employee, many years ago, when she threatened to quit if I insisted that she... do her job. (I wonder what brought that to mind....)

More on Work Ethic

There were some interesting comments to the recent discussion of declining work ethic, including:

Now the name of the game is "personal freedom" and "feeling good". (My personal experience being that hard work and civility don't always align well with these things; but that may just be me.) Personal responsibility is passé and hard work is something to be mocked. Actually, pretty much everything that tries to make use do things we don't want to do (take responsibility for our actions, work hard, etc) is to be mocked. To some extent this is no different than most generations "teen years" but for whatever reason (parents had enough money to indulge their children, life got soft, popularity of TV, lack of parental involvement, whatever) this "teen" phenomenon became a cultural norm. It seems to work in both directions, we don't discipline children for behavior that would in the past be viewed as inappropriate (Rude remarks to teachers and other adults), and we see adults carrying on like teenagers (making rude remarks themselves, dressing like their children, etc)

In a nutshell you see a shift from "personal responsibility" to "personal rights" and "governmental responsibility." You also see civility and societal norms go right out the window. To a large extend the cultural norms of today are the adolescent behaviors of the past.

and

One thing the awful teens today *aren't* saying is that they expect they'll be able to put in a fair day's work for a fair day's pay and raise their family at a decent standard of living.

That's because we've pretty much tanked any possibility of that ideal being reality, and that didn't happen in the 1960s. In the 1960s, it was still possible to believe one could work twenty years in the mill and retire with a modest pension, or that as long as you showed up at the office and did the work assigned to you, you'd have a job.

I am interested in the effect to which today's teenagers are expressing diminishing expectations as a result of changes in the workplace and increased international competition for white collar jobs. If I recall high school correctly, I doubt that many are thinking about it.

I am not one to lament about "those awful kids today" and how they will ultimately ruin the country/world. That song has been sung for centuries, yet here we are. I am one to believe that the behavior of kids reflects the behavior of the grown-ups that surround them, and that the values of kids are most affected by the values of their parents. I think that most kids seek peers who share their value systems, rather than "falling in with the wrong crowd" and being "corrupted" by those kids who don't. Most teenage rebellion ends up being more annoying than harmful. Listening to Ozzy or Alice Cooper or even Marily Manson won't turn a kid into a satanist, nor will listening to 50 Cent or Tupac turn a kid into a gangster.

At the same time, our culture has changed a lot in the past century. On the BBC series, Manor House, an elderly woman who had worked as a maid (starting at the age of 14) in the very house where the series was set was asked by the modern-era persons who were performing the "below stairs" servant roles, why people didn't just quit if they didn't like the working conditions. Despite their having worked for more than a month within a context most modern workers would find unacceptable, it hadn't occurred to them that workers of the Edwardian era may have had no choice - they couldn't afford to be unemployed, couldn't risk leaving an employer without a reference, and some had no place to go if they gave up their room and board. We've now progressed to an era where, as mythago recently pointed out, some people (who should know better) can't even envision a world before OSHA, let alone one where a worker could not afford to quit a dangerous job.

As I've previously argued, with no claim to having originated the idea, within the workplace there is also a top-down element to these issues. It is difficult for workers to remain dedicated and motivated within the context of a workplace where management treats and compensates itself like royalty, while showing little in the way of competence, honesty, work ethic, or loyalty. Where a CEO is siphoning off millions from the company for new corporate jets which are essentially reserved for the CEO and his family (ENRON-style), lavish multi-million dollar parties (Tyco style), multi-million dollar "loans" which are quickly forgiven.... it becomes easy to rationalize taking an extra fifteen minutes for lunch, or spending time surfing the web instead of working. And if you work for a company like Delphi, where management scoffs at the value of your work and demands that you agree to have your wages slashed by two thirds, all the while rewarding itself at record levels.... Well, let's just say that I doubt that worker productivity or morale are at peak levels.

Solutions for the working family? Once you get past his acknowledgement of how hard many people work, Sebastian Mallaby seems to exemplify the management position:

The high-risk, high-reward economy encourages people to put everything into their jobs, with the result that they have little energy left over for chores that might save money. To keep up with their work, two-career couples buy cooked meals, send the laundry out, bribe the kids with toys rather than attention. Perhaps in time the pendulum may swing back. The spend-hard-in-order-to-work-hard family may give way to thriftier behavior.

Is he actually suggesting that if their wages are slashed, workers will muster what little is left of their energy after the workday to spend more time doing their own cooking, cleaning and child care? And what of the service economy that is presently driven in no small part by the hard spending of working families?

Some of our nation's political leaders depict this as the result of an entitlement culture. The Gingrichian-type solution is to suggest that we kick out any social safety net which might catch a falling worker - with emphasis on "worker", not "manager". These individuals advance the argument that employer-provided or employer-subsidized benefits amount to a "welfare state". None of these consequences are to be extended to the nation's wealthy or politically connected classes - which is perhaps the segment of society with the greatest present sense of entitlement.

The movement to strip workers of benefits, privatize Social Security, and reduce job protections goes hand-in-hand with the movement to end taxation of wealth in favor of the taxation of wages. The former position is insincere - the Republicans who wish to deprive workers of pensions and health benefits are part of a majority in both houses of Congress and control the White House, where if they were sincere they have now had ample opportunity to put their money where their mouths are, ending their own generous health and pension benefits. Consistent with their... hypocrisy, they advocate "bankruptcy reform" for individual consumers, while perpetuating a bankruptcy system which permits even profitable corporations to escape their freely negotiated labor contracts and to shift their pension obligations to the taxpayer.

Are there easy answers? I wish there were. It seems likely that reduced opportunity for workers will force an increase in work ethic, but at significant consequence to other aspects of our society which we (meaning, middle class America) deem valuable (and perhaps also at significant cost to the service sector). There seems to be no chance of reigning in the practices at the highest levels of government and industry where cronyism, self-indulgence, and even outright laziness are seemingly accepted as the just rewards of success (even for those who hold their positions only by virtue of an ancestor's hard work or good fortune).

Meanwhile, we'll probably continue to pretend to be a classless society. (In the economic sense, that is.)

More on Work Ethic

Coming from a profession which can demand arduous hours, with billable hour demands having increased substantially in recent decades for most of the nation's associate lawyers, some of my fellow lawyers may question whether my comments on work ethic also apply to our shared profession. They do.

Here, I'm not just speaking of the absolutely substandard work product that some lawyers and firms consistently produce - they are, in my opinion, the exception. I'm also not speaking of partners who complain about declining associate work ethic, even while imposing billing expectations on those associates that are substantially higher than those they had to meet at a similar stage in their careers.

I'm speaking of a different type of work ethic. Sure, lots of lawyers slave away at the office, six or seven days a week, and barely see their families. But what about their clients? When law firms take a "wink wink, nudge nudge" attitude toward creative and padded hourly billing, or pretend that a caffeine-stoked late-night hour at the office is just as productive as an hour of work after a solid night of sleep, they are not encouraging an atmosphere which is conducive to achieving the best value and best outcomes for their clients. The worst part is, they don't seem to want to do so - for fear of losing income.

No matter how many hours you work, if at the end of the day you put the firm's finances ahead of client welfare and accurate billing, there is a deficit in your work ethic.

Some predict the demise of the billable hour. Others question whether alternatives to hourly billing will primarily serve to add to law firm profits. One way or another, hourly or alternative, a bill should be honest.

Declining Work Ethic

Of all the things that seem to be hurting us in an era of globalization, a declining work ethic would seem to be near the top. If you look at productivity figures for U.S. workers, you might not immediately suspect a declining work ethic. But if you encounter a spectrum of U.S. workers, or even U.S. college students, it is hard to miss the decline.

Any thoughts as to what is behind this? Where does the sense of entitlement come from, that people think they should have well-paid employment, license to be rude to customers, break time whenever they want it, and not have to work hard? Oh, I grant some of it comes from the top - you can't see a Bernie Ebbers or Dennis Kozlowski-type CEO at the top of your company's organizational chart and be inspired to work hard for your company... quite the opposite. But perhaps that's less of an explanation, and more of a manifestation of how lousy work ethic and and an exaggerated sense of both self-importance and entitlement reach all levels of employment, public and private. (Chicken v. Egg - did the phenomenon start at the bottom or at the top?)

Under a "CEO President", this phenomenon can seemingly put the nation at risk.

A Valid Observation from David Brooks

David Brooks notes,

Poorer Republicans support government programs that offer security, so long as they don't undermine the work ethic. Eighty percent believe government should do more to help the needy, even if it means going deeper into debt. Only 19 percent of affluent Republicans believe that.

I think that the political left should take note of that observation which, although not entirely true, does hold true for a significant block of potential swing voters. A Democratic strategy to make the "Horatio Alger" story at least slightly less a myth, while focusing social assistance efforts on programs which help people rise out of poverty, may well win over some swing voters. But as long as the working poor see welfare benefits as primarily benefiting the indolent poor, and run into perplexing situations where it appears that they would be "better off" by not getting married - because their combined household income disqualifies them for social assistance programs that would be available were they single - that particular block of Republican-leaning voters will likely remain allied with the Republican Party. Even if you don't agree with the perception, it should be understandable why the working poor resent seeing their incomes taxed such that others can receive health care, food and housing subsidies.