Category Archives: David Brooks

David Brooks on Redistribution vs. Education

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He writes,

No redistributionist measure will have the same long-term effect as good early-childhood education and better community colleges, or increasing the share of men capable of joining the labor force.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

A cynical believer in the Null Hypothesis would argue that putting money into education is an exercise in redistribution. It will redistribute income toward teachers’ unions members, college professors, and administrators.

Also, what is the probability that Brooks is simply trolling Bryan Caplan?

David Brooks’ Economic Priorities

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Dean Baker writes (The post is unsigned, so it might not be Baker),

we get Brooks telling us:

“The government should reduce its generosity to people who are not working but increase its support for people who are. That means reducing health benefits for the affluent elderly.”

There are two questions that come up here. First what is the definition of “affluent” and second what counts as “generosity.”

In case you didn’t know, Baker does not heart Brooks. My own views align with neither Baker nor Brooks.

1. Brooks supports more government spending on infrastructure, as does Baker. I do not.

2. On the redistribution issue, my perspective differs somewhat from Brooks. My concern is that we have too many uncoordinated means-tested programs, making marginal tax rates too high for the able-to-work poor. As you know, I prefer something more along the lines of a small universal basic income provided at the Federal level, with additional specific needs addressed through programs from states, local governments, and charities.

As for health benefits, I am not for taking away Medicare from the elderly today, but I am for scaling back promises to people tomorrow. Note that Baker claims that today’s beneficiaries have paid for their benefits. I call baloney sandwich. What they paid for were their parents’ benefits, and what they paid into the system was not sufficient to pay for the benefits they are now receiving. If it were true that they had paid for their benefits, the system would be solvent.

3. Brooks endorses the reform conservative Room-to-Grow idea of showering middle-class families with tax credits. I see that as political posturing. If I could be in charge of tax reform, we would get rid of credits and deductions, and we also would move away from taxing income and instead toward taxing consumption. Note, however, that tax reform is not one of my top three priorities.

4. Brooks wants us to open the immigration door wide for high-skilled immigrants, while presumably trying to keep it relatively closed for low-skilled immigrants. If it were up to me, the door would be wide open for people who are grateful for the chance to live in America and are eager to assimilate, and otherwise my feelings about opening the door would be more ambivalent. But I also would not make immigration reform a top priority.

5. Brooks wants more spending on education. I take the null hypothesis seriously.

David Brooks’ High-Holiday Sermon

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He said,

The way I express this contrast, this hunger for success is by two sets of virtues, which you could call the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. And the résumé virtues are the things you bring to the marketplace which you put on a résumé. And the eulogy virtues are the things you get expressed in your eulogy. And these are non-overlapping categories. So the eulogy virtues are to give courage, to give honor, what kind of relationships do you build, did you love.

…Adam One is the external résumé. Career-oriented. Ambitious. External.

Adam Two is the internal Adam. Adam Two wants to embody certain moral qualities to have a serene, inner character, a quiet but solid sense of right and wrong, not only to do good but to be good, to sacrifice to others, to be obedient to a transcendent truth, to have an inner soul that honors God, creation and our possibilities.

I think he should read Yuval Levin’s sermon, which you can now read for free. It is a reminder that politics is the arena for Adam One, not Adam Two.

David Brooks Plays Fantasy Despot

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He writes,

The process of change would be unapologetically elitist. Gather small groups of the great and the good together to hammer out bipartisan reforms — on immigration, entitlement reform, a social mobility agenda, etc. — and then rally establishment opinion to browbeat the plans through. But the substance would be anything but elitist. Democracy’s great advantage over autocratic states is that information and change flow more freely from the bottom up. Those with local knowledge have more responsibility.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. An example of what Brooks may have in mind is the Regulatory Improvement Commission suggested by the Progressive Policy Institute.

Originally conceived by PPI economists Michael Mandel and Diana Carew, the RIC is modeled after the highly successful military base-closing commission. It would consist of nine members appointed by Congressional leadership and the President to consider a single sector or area of regulations and report regulations in need or improvement, consolidation, or repeal.

The spirit of the proposal is fine, but I do not see why we need a commission appointed by Congressional leadership. Any Administration has the power to improve, consolidate, or repeal regulations, without requiring a special commission.

Modern democracy gives rise to what Kenneth Minogue called “fantasy despot syndrome.” You imagine that policies would be wise and benign if you became despot, and then you project this onto your favorite candidate. Each of these steps involves an error. It is unlikely that your policy ideas are so wonderfully wise and benevolent, and it is very unlikely that your favorite candidate is going to follow wise and benevolent policies. With Barack Obama, I believe that Brooks committed both of these errors.

Brooks can be very insightful, but he has a wet dream any time he contemplates “unapologetic elitism.” I don’t find it such a turn-on. Being somewhat older than Brooks, my visceral attirude toward elites in power is much more strongly influenced by the Vietnam war.

Both David Brooks and Tyler Cowen seem to have liked The Fourth Revolution. I am almost finished with the book, and apart from an anecdote here or a statistic there, I do not feel I profited from it. It felt dumbed down, either because they were trying (probably unsuccessfully) to appeal to non-libertarians or because that is how they roll.

Sorry if I seem off my meds today.

Occupations of the Future

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David Brooks writes,

Millions of people begin online courses, but very few actually finish them. I suspect that’s because most students are not motivated to impress a computer the way they may be motivated to impress a human professor. Managers who can motivate supreme effort in a machine-dominated environment are going to be valuable.

Actually, I think that a big reason that people drop online courses is that those courses are a misfit for them. An advantage of a typical live course is that most of the students have been selected to have similar abilities and experiences. A lot of people sign up for online courses who otherwise would be discouraged from doing so. That is not necessarily a problem with online learning.

However, that is why MOOCs are not the answer, in my view. My line is that we need instruction that is many-to-one, not one-to-many. Indeed, Jonathan Haber suggests that MOOCs might be a step backward, and he links to something I wrote in 2002.

suppose that we had all of the highly-touted electronic technologies for distance learning, and then someone came along and invented the book. My guess is that the book would be greeted as a technological marvel–easy to hold, convenient to carry, outstanding resolution, and so forth. This thought experiment leads me to suspect that electronic distance learning is a fad.

On the subject of the future, my joke is that the ideal occupation will be a yoga instructor working in an old-age home. That lines up with the trends toward more spending on health care, education, and leisure, along with an older demographic.

David Brooks and Mark Shields on Obamacare

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The transcript is here.

At one point, Shields says

this is beyond the Obama administration. If this goes down, if the Obama — if health care, the Affordable Care Act is deemed a failure, this is the end — I really mean it — of liberal government, in the sense of any sense that government as an instrument of social justice, an engine of economic progress, which is what divides Democrats from Republicans — that’s what Democrats believe.

At this stage, they are inclined to put the blame on the American people. Here is Brooks:

My big thought is, are we no longer the kind of country in which you can pass this sort of thing? And by that, I mean, when you were passing the New Deal or the Great Society, there were winners and losers.

But the losers felt part of a larger collective and they said, OK, I’m going to take a hit for the team. We may no longer have that sense of being part of a larger collective, so when you’re a loser, you just say, I’m a loser. And, as a result, you’re just not willing to be part of the group.

…we have lower social trust, lower faith in the institutions, lower sense of collectivity.

And those are deep social trends that have been building for decades, but it just makes it much harder to sustain this kind of big legislation.

Shields agrees:

The we-ness of our society, the we, that we’re all in it together, has really been diminished.

To be charitable, this narrative could be correct. That is, it could be that the wonks who designed Obamacare had the right idea, and that the American people are too selfish and too unwilling to trust government to allow it to be implemented honestly and properly.

However, I see things differently.

Start by asking why it is that Healthcare.gov is not as good as Amazon.com or Kayak.com. One answer is that the government is not good enough at deploying information technology. However, I think that is only a shallow answer.

The deeper answer is that when we look at Kayak and Amazon, we are seeing the survivors that emerged from an intense tournament. In this tournament, thousands of competing firms fell by the wayside. Competitors tried many different business models, web site designs, business cultures, and so on.

Healthcare.gov did not emerge from this sort of competition. It came about because Congress passed a law.

Central to my approach to economics, and that of other economists who are variously called Austrians or market-oriented economists or Smith-Hayek economists or what have you, is the respect that we have for the evolutionary process by which markets produce innovation and excellence. My sense is that what divides us from pundits like Brooks and Shields, and even from most economists, is the credit that we assign to market evolution rather than elite expertise as a process for solving problems.

The Neocon Servile Mind

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David Brooks writes,

The conservatism that [Irving] Kristol was referring to is neoconservatism. Neocons came in for a lot of criticism during the Iraq war, but neoconservatism was primarily a domestic policy movement. Conservatism was at its peak when the neocons were dominant and nearly every problem with the Republican Party today could be cured by a neocon revival.

Kristol and others argued that the G.O.P. floundered because it never accepted the welfare state. “The idea of a welfare state is in itself perfectly consistent with conservative political philosophy,” he argued. In a capitalist society, people need government aid. “They need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it. The only interesting political question is: How will they get it.”

I am reading The Servile Mind, by Kenneth Minogue, which takes the opposite point of view. Minogue argues that the welfare state substitutes political agency for moral agency. As citizens, we lose our moral compass and instead pick up a political one.

I find the book rather heavy going, but I probably will review it somewhere down the road. If you are looking for someone who concedes nothing to the oppressor-oppressed axis and instead views it as undermining Western values completely, then Minogue is your champion.

Back to the squishier conservatives, Reihan Salam lauds Brooks and Irving Kristol.

the right response to programs that really do undermine self-reliance and individual liberty may well be to eliminate or consolidate or devolve them. But it is important to acknowledge that not all programs undermine self-reliance and individual liberty, e.g., wage subsidies are designed to entice low-wage workers into the labor market, a crucial first step if these workers are eventually to climb the economic ladder to self-sufficiency. Wage subsidies are a paradigmatic example of a conservative welfare state initiative, and when well-designed they can do a great deal to strengthen the social foundation of a free enterprise economy by making it more inclusive.

Read the whole thing.

Notes from a Civilization-Barbarism Symposium

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I heard a number of former Bradley Prize winners speak at a symposium Wednesday morning. That evening, there was an awards reception, at which this year’s winners were announced. Yuval Levin said,

Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.

You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed. We should never forget that the people who oppose our various endeavors and argue for another way are well intentioned too, even when they’re wrong, and that they’re not always wrong.

…That’s not to say that conservatives are never outraged, of course. We’ve had a lot of reason to be outraged lately. But it tends to be when we think the legacy and promise we cherish are threatened, rather than when some burning ambition is frustrated.

Overall, I think that he spoke to the civilization-barbarism axis, as one would expect. He also tended toward Thomas Sowell’s “conflict of visions” analysis of the difference between liberals and conservatives.

The Bradley folks are conservatives, not libertarians. In the hallway conversations at the morning symposium, I heard lots of support for government snooping. (Speaking of the snooping program, David Brooks certainly took the conservative line, didn’t he? I think others have pointed out that Brooks is more concerned about the lack of checks and balances against Edward Snowden than about the lack of checks and balances against the intelligence agencies.)

One of the panels at the Bradley symposium addressed the topic of threats to freedom (other than economic policy, which was the subject of a separate panel). A couple of panelists cited Charles Murray’s “coming apart” thesis. Heather MacDonald thought that perhaps too much individual freedom was leading the lower classes into behaviors that lead to dependency. Later, after Robby George voiced similar concerns in response to a luncheon speech by Charles Krauthammer, Krauthammer replied that the Constitution was not designed to require virtuous citizens. On the contrary, it is meant to be robust to human failings. While I appreciate both sides, I think that in the end I come down on the side that a culture of virtue matters more than the Constitution. I think where I would differ from Murray/MacDonald/George is on where the cultural problem lies. I think it lies not with the lower classes but instead with certain parts of the elite. Another panelist, Brad Smith, spoke of the need for conservatives to regain control over the K-12 curriculum. I think that is closer to being on track, and if that is the case, then lamenting the breakdown of the traditional family is barking up the wrong tree.

MacDonald also cited the atmosphere of censorship in academia. Topics on which there is not freedom of speech include gender differences and IQ. But note that, again, this is a problem among the elite.

Krauthammer offered an optimistic take on the electoral prospects of conservatives. Among his reasons:

1. Polls show more conservatives than liberals.

2. The 2012 election was idiosyncratic. Romney lost on the issue of “who cares more about people like you?” in which Obama swamped Romney in exit polls by 60 percentage points. (Krauthammer did not give figures, but one can imagine something like 75 Obama, 15 Romney, 15 undecided)

3. The current scandals hurt Democrats, because they are the party of government.

4. The key issue of our times is the crisis of the welfare state, an issue on which conservatives are better positioned than liberals.

The immigration issue came up in the earlier panel on the economy. Victor Davis Hanson carried the ball for the restrictionist civilization-vs.-barbarism team. Gary Becker proposed using tariffs rather than quotas (although he did not use that terminology). I used that term in my essay ten years ago, and in fact you should read that essay to see how little the issue has changed during the interim.

The Null Hypothesis in Health Insurance

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is that, in the United States, better health insurance produces no difference in health outcomes. Recently, for example, Katharine Baicker, et al, found

This randomized, controlled study [in Oregon] showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.

Pointer from, well, everyone. All I can say is that this is really separating what David Brooks calls the “detached” from the “engaged.” The latter are making an all-out effort at what I call trying to close minds on your own side.

Somewhat detached commentary includes

Tyler Cowen, Ray Fisman, and Reihan Salam.

Robin Hanson has an even stronger version of the null hypothesis. His version says that differences in health care spending produce no difference in health care outcomes. He and I disagree about how to characterize this result. Let me try to explain how we differ. Let us stipulate that:

1. Some medical procedures improve health, but not in a way that shows up in statistics. For example, if you get your broken arm fixed, you are much better off than not getting it fixed, but this will probably not show up in measured statistics of health outcomes, including longevity.

2. Some medical procedures are a waste (futile care, unwanted care, treatments of non-existent ailments, treatments that do not work, and so on).

3. Some medical procedures have an adverse effect on health.

4. Some medical procedures improve health outcomes, but only with a low probability (e.g., precautionary screening).

5. Some medical procedures definitely improve health outcomes in a measurable way.

Note also, that most studies of medical spending are not controlled experiments. In observational studies, including cross-country comparisons, the results tend to be dominated by a 6th factor, namely that health outcomes are determined much more by individual genes and behavior than by medical intervention.

Robin and I agree that (5) is true. The question becomes, how does (5) wash out in the statistics on differences in spending? His view is that there has to be enough (3) to offset the (5). My view is that it is mostly that (1), (2), and (4) serve to dilute (5). If I am correct, then researchers should find some quantitative differences in health outcomes, but these differences will not be statistically significant. Out of (bad) habit, they will report this as “no difference in outcomes.” This makes it sound as if they have proven the null hypothesis, when they have merely failed to reject it.

Of course, in a large study (as this was), there may not be much difference between failing to reject the null and proving it. The confidence interval around zero could be small (if someone has access to the paper, you can let me know).

David Brooks on Detachment

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Read the entire column. An excerpt:

These days most writers land on the engaged side of the continuum. Look at most think tanks. They used to look like detached quasi universities; now some are more like rapid response teams for their partisan masters. If you ever want to get a political appointment, you have to be engaged, working on political campaigns and serving the team.

But I would still urge you to slide over toward the detached side of the scale. First, there is the matter of mental hygiene. You may think you can become a political partisan without becoming rigid and stale, and we all know people who achieve this, but the risk is high.

I am very sympathetic to Brooks’ point of view. If anything, I think he is more charitable than I would be toward what he calls the “engaged” pundit.

In fact, a major goal of The Three Languages of Politics is to encourage people to be more detached. Incidentally, for those of you who do not have Kindles, you can get a Kindle app that would enable you to buy and read the book.