September 9, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston
David Brooks’s persona, the character he plays in print and on TV, is the reasonable conservative – fair-minded, with ideas based in fact rather than ideology. He also likes to play the sociologist, offering broad pronouncements on society and culture. Especially culture.
Look at yesterday’s column, a puff piece for a new magazine, National Affairs, which he sees as the successor to The Public Interest. Brooks briefly summarizes the articles in the current issue.
Brooks loves virtue, which he usually subsumes under “culture” – the ideas people live by. But he ignores structure. He also forgets the basic insight of Sociology 101, week one – Durkheim: explanations of individual facts (like who gets ahead and who doesn’t) often aren’t much help in explaining social facts (like the overall degree of inequality and poverty in a society).
In explaining suicide at the individual level, sadness is a pretty useful concept. People who commit suicide are, no doubt, sadder than those who don’t. The surest way not to commit suicide is to be happy, not sad. But does knowing about these individual differences help us understand why the US has a rate of suicide nearly triple that of Greece? Are Americans three times as sad as Greeks? And within the US, are whites twice as sad as blacks?
Levels of income and degrees of inequality have as much to do with “virtue” as rates of suicide have to do with sadness.
From 2000 to 2007, median family income in the US fell by 5%. (Don’t look for the data on 2008 and 2009, when it comes out, to reverse this trend.) Can we conclude that Americans became more self-indulgent and irresponsible? That they threw away their degrees, broke up their families, and quit their jobs?
Since January 2008, over six million people in this country have lost their jobs. I guess the Bush administration wasn’t very good (and Obama, so far, no better) at “promoting virtuous behavior.”
Someone should suggest to David Brooks, that maybe, just maybe, when we consider income and inequality and unemployment at the national level, those individual–based explanations don’t help. It’s not a matter of culture or virtue. It’s the economy. Stupid.
4 comments:
Thank you, Jay, thank you.
Paul Krugman's NYT Magazine piece this week basically makes the same argument about Chicago School macroeconomists and points out the absurdity in saying that people are unemployed because they don't want to work.
Augh.. this made me look up Haskins at Brookings... Other jems? See here: http://www.brookings.edu/press/Books/2009/creatinganopportunitysociety.aspx
"Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill propose a concrete agenda for increasing opportunity that is cost effective, consistent with American values, and focuses on improving the lives of the young and the disadvantaged. They emphasize individual responsibility as an indispensable basis for successful policies and programs."
It's interesting because then it goes out to frame it as a social structural issue as well. It's like it's slipping in the culture of poverty argument... and no one is supposed to be the wiser. Of course, I'm not willing to pay the 29 bucks to see how exactly they manage this.
Andy, thanks. It's nice to be appreciated.
Mike, I haven't read the Krugman piece yet.
Pitseleh, as I recall, Sawhill's research is more mobility and inequality. The trouble is that it's easy to confuse the two. I suspect that the programs and policies she's referring to are directed at increasing individual mobility.
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