Category Archives: David Brooks

Bobos and their children

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David Brooks writes,

The educated class has built an ever more intricate net to cradle us in and ease everyone else out. It’s not really the prices that ensure 80 percent of your co-shoppers at Whole Foods are, comfortingly, also college grads; it’s the cultural codes.

Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else. We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.

And part of the cultural code is Progressivism.

Timothy Taylor writes,

In a society with a high degree of social and economic mobility, grandparents should not have much or any effect on the social and economic position that children attain as adults. Thus, on average you should expect your five grandchildren to be evenly distributed across the socioeconomic spectrum. More specifically, if the levels of income are ranked and then divided into five groups with equal numbers of people, or quintiles, or educational attainment is divided up into five quintiles, you should expect that one of your five grand children will end up in each of the five quintiles–from top to bottom.

Some grandparents in America would be delighted beyond words if they had a reasonable expectation of this outcome: that is, they would be thrilled if three of their five grandchildren were in the middle quintile or above. Other grandparents in America would be appalled by this outcome: that is, they would be dismayed and even horrified if three of their five grandchildren were in the middle quintile or below.

The upper-class Americans that Brooks labeled the Bobos behave as if they would be appalled to see their children or grandchildren experienced relative downward mobility.

An interesting question will be how well the Bobo signals correlate with skills going forward. As long as the correlation is high, the status equilibrium may be robust. If the correlation is low, then the status equilibrium may be more fragile.

Thoughts on the new class war

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Michael Lind writes,

the theory of the managerial elite explains the present transatlantic social and political crisis. Following World War II, the democracies of the United States and Europe, along with Japan—determined to avoid a return to depression and committed to undercutting communist anti-capitalist propaganda—adopted variants of cross-class settlements, brokered by national governments between national managerial elites and national labor. Following the Cold War, the global business revolution shattered these social compacts. Through the empowerment of multinational corporations and the creation of transnational supply chains, managerial elites disempowered national labor and national governments and transferred political power from national legislatures to executive agencies, transnational bureaucracies, and treaty organizations. Freed from older constraints, the managerial minorities of Western nations have predictably run amok, using their near-monopoly of power and influence in all sectors—private, public, and nonprofit—to enact policies that advantage their members to the detriment of their fellow citizens. Derided and disempowered, large elements of the native working classes in Western democracies have turned to charismatic tribunes of anti-system populism in electoral rebellions against the selfishness and arrogance of managerial elites.

This is a theme of a number of recent essays. In a review of Richard Baldwin’s book on globalization, Christopher Caldwell writes,

But only a tiny fraction of people in any society is equipped to do lucrative brainwork. In all Western societies, the new formula for prosperity is inconsistent with the old formula for democracy.

In the same publication, Angelo M. Codevilla writes,

The 2016 election and its aftermath reflect the distinction, difference, even enmity that has grown exponentially over the past quarter century between America’s ruling class and the rest of the country.

…The government apparatus identifies with the ruling class’s interests, proclivities, and tastes, and almost unanimously with the Democratic Party. As it uses government power to press those interests, proclivities, and tastes upon the ruled, it acts as a partisan state. This party state’s political objective is to delegitimize not so much the politicians who champion the ruled from time to time, but the ruled themselves.

A few remarks.

1. Keep in mind that if a few tens of thousands of votes in key states had come up differently, we would be less interested in essays of this sort.

2. As the authors are aware, the class differences have been simmering for a long time and have been noted by many writers. Lind starts with Galbraith and James Burnham. One could move on to Robert Reich’s “symbol analysts” and David Brooks’ Bobos.

3. I might use the distinction of abstract workers and concrete workers. Concrete workers work with stuff. They are in construction, mining, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation. They might own small retail and service businesses (think of repair). Abstract workers work with words, numbers, and computer programs. Think of lawyers, accountants, software developers, teachers, and bureaucrats. This abstract-concrete distinction is not a perfect dichotomy (health care, for example, combines a lot of both), but it is useful if we do not get too carried away with it.

4. The status of workers in the concrete sector is threatened in many ways. Outsourcing, machine substitution, ease of firing a non-performer, inefficient firms going out of business, and industries with productivity rising faster than demand all could cause the loss of a concrete sector job.

5. The status of workers in the abstract sector is protected in many ways. A public school teacher or industry regulator need not worry about outsourcing, machine substitution, being fired as a non-performer, having an inefficient employer shut down, or facing a decline in demand. Many abstract workers have protection from having their wages pressured by competition from people who lack their credentials. Workers in the concrete sector believe that their wages can be pressured by competition from people who do not even have citizenship papers.

6. Government and management are mostly abstract functions. So the natural order of things is for the Abstract class to rule over the Concrete class.

7. You have to wonder whether (5) is to some extent a result of (6). That is, maybe the Abstract workers who make the rules have set things up to protect Abstract workers but not Concrete workers. As policy makers rescued the economy from the financial crisis, a lot of Concrete workers lost their homes, but financial executives did not lose their mansions.

8. Lind argues in favor of policies that add protection to workers in the Concrete sector. The libertarian alternative is to provide less protection and government indulgence to workers in the Abstract sector. I do not much care for Lind’s vision. But the libertarian vision is surely a non-starter in reality.

Firm, Soft, Militant, Moderate

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Suppose that your beliefs can be firm or soft, and that your tone can be militant or moderate. This yields a matrix:

Firm Soft
Militant True Believer Tribal
Moderate Principled Weathervane

The True Believer expresses anger and contempt for those who disagree.

Tribal means that you care most about group status. An example would be an economist who is a deficit hawk when one party is in power but a deficit dove when the other party is in power. Or an economist who uses a high estimate of labor demand elasticity when arguing for more immigration and a low estimate of labor demand elasticity when arguing for a higher minimum wage (or an economist who does the opposite).

Principled means that you care more about your beliefs than about tribal loyalty. However, you are willing to tolerate and even respect people who disagree.

Weathervane means that you want to just “go along to get along,” to please people and further your ambitions.

1. David Brooks, in Bobos in Paradise (2000), seems to me to have suggested that people with firm beliefs tend to have to be militant in tone in order to be successful as public intellectuals. That is, the public does not respond to the category I call Principled as well as it does to the category I call True Believer. People may even mistakenly treat a militant tone as a signal of firm beliefs.

2. I think that in the media, the biggest growth over the past twenty years has been in the Tribal category. The other categories are losing out. Both the strong pro-Trump camp and the strong anti-Trump camp strike me as Tribal.

3. I am disturbed by the increasing use of violence and speech suppression by the True Believers on the left.

4. You can argue that the Weathervane category is what holds the country together. Politicians who can change with the mood of the country and compromise make democracy more comfortable than politicians who stick to their guns. Many people look at Macron in France as a sort of Weathervane savior.

My bottom line is that I like the Principled category the most and the Tribal and True Believer categories the least. I lament that the media culture rewards and amplifies militants over moderates.

Re-reading Bobos in Paradise

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On p. 47, there is this:

For one reason or another the following people and institutions fall outside the ranks of Bobo respectability: Donald Trump, Pat Robertson, Louis Farrakhan, Bob Guccione, Wayne Newton, Nancy Reagan, Adnan Khashoggi, Jesse Helms, Jerry Springer, Mike Tyson, Rush Limbaugh, Philip Morris, developers, loggers, Hallmark Greeting Cards, the National Rifle Association, Hooters.

That is David Brooks, copyright 2000. Unless you think I have a photographic memory, I did not recall this sentence when I first wrote that the 2016 election was along the Bobo vs. anti-Bobo axis.

Iraq and Vietnam

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A commenter asks,

Could you write more about this? Vietnam is really remote to someone like me. I guess Iraq would be the closest experience for most people, but it seems different.

I would describe Iraq as a very costly Type II error. Let us stipulate that Iraq did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), but we could not be sure of that prior to invading. All that we knew was that Iraq was defying the UN resolution requiring the government to submit to international inspections.

A Type I error would have occurred if we had not gone to war and they in fact had obtained and subsequently used WMD. Policy makers assumed that this would be a costly error.

A Type II error occurred when we went to war and they had not obtained WMD. Policy makers assumed that this sort of error would have low cost. In fact, some thought that it was not an error at all. A neocon I know who was never an official in the Bush Administration gave me this rationale early on. Not long after Saddam was killed, this fellow told me that soon Iran would be surrounded on two sides by working democracies–in Afghanistan and Iraq. I thought to myself, “Oh, dear [euphemism], if Bush believes that, we’re in trouble.” It was the cost of the attempt at nation-building, and the consequences of the failure of that attempt, that make the outcome of the Iraq war so ugly.

I believe that the fundamental reason for the bad outcome in Vietnam also was our doomed attempt at nation-building. None of the governments that we supported in South Vietnam had a strong popular base, so that the enthusiasm for fighting the war came from us, not from the South Vietnamese.

In hindsight, the big puzzle about Vietnam is why we fought a war there in the first place. President Eisenhower was offered a war in Vietnam in 1954, when the French were defeated there, and he declined. In hindsight, Ike seems to me to have been one of our great Presidents.

There was nothing strategically or economically valuable about Vietnam. Rather, the Kennedy Administration foreign policy team talked themselves into seeing it as a test of their determination and tactical dexterity in containing Communism in the Third World. They managed to show a fair amount of determination. Tactical dexterity, not so much.

The consequences for us? Eventually, the United States gave up on the war. The Communists took over, and that had zero cost to us strategically. But before that, we had lost tens of thousands of Americans killed, and many others wounded physically and psychologically.

I think that if you want to understand how badly the war wounded American culture and where today’s Left came from, it would help to delve into some of the history of the campus activism of the 1960s.

So how should you do that? Hmmm. Maybe for starters look up people like Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden on Wikipedia, and also click on links there that look interesting.

There are some movies that reflect the period. Easy Rider; The Strawberry Statement; Zabriskie Point; Alice’s Restaurant

If you prefer reading, The Strawberry Statement was originally a book. Also The Whole World is Watching (not the newer book of that title by a different author). Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night is recommended. I avidly read and re-read it when it came out.

Vietnam created political divisions that have still not healed. The war either fostered or brought to the surface a sentiment of anti-Americanism on the left, and that sentiment continues to be a major factor in polarization. It explains why “make America great again” was such a potent and divisive slogan. Since Vietnam, the left has decreed that America never has been great. Incidentally, many libertarians are on the left on this issue, and I believe that you can trace this to Murray Rothbard during the Vietnam era.

Patriotism has become something that President Trump’s supporters believe in and something that the left abhors. [UPDATE: Let me clarify. If you ask Trump supporters, “Are you patriotic?” they will answer “Of course!” If you ask people on the left, they are likely to look at you suspiciously and say, “Define patriotism.” They might be happy to call themselves patriotic if you are willing to define patriotism as support for social justice, but they will abhor the patriotism of the Trump supporter.] For the left, America can only be great when it helps the oppressed. President Trump’s order on refugees went against that, and you can see the reaction. But I think that the order went down well with people who are more traditionally patriotic, and I have seen some stories giving polling data that bears bear me out.

As economists, we tell the story of the end of the draft as a triumph for Milton Friedman and economic efficiency. But it is significant that the draft ended during the Vietnam War. As a political matter, it allowed the left to opt out of military service, which reinforced the division over patriotism.

In high school and college, I soaked up the anti-American view of the Vietnam war. You can still see the anti-American, anti-capitalist view expressed in this more recent review of Mailer’s book, but I came to discard the Chomsky “blame the capitalists” thesis.

I gradually went from being anti-American and anti-capitalist. Instead, I became anti-elitist. As I have pointed out often, a major turning point for me was reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Even apart from the historical context, it offers many insights into bureaucratic infighting and organizational dysfunction. And the lesson that smart people can do something monumentally stupid is terribly important.

I often sense that my temperament is similar to that of David Brooks, but his sympathy for elites creates fundamental differences in our political views. He is younger than I am, and the Vietnam War and the protest movement were less salient to him. Perhaps if our ages were reversed, our attitudes toward elites would be reversed, also.

My distrust of elites continues to color my views. I see many events in Vietnam terms. For me, 2008 was a financial Vietnam, for both bankers and regulators. I tend to think of Obamacare as a domestic policy Vietnam, with its architects showing the same overconfidence and the same inability to listen to dissenting voices. And, for that matter, the same denial of the need for fundamental re-thinking (during Vietnam, the Administration was constantly saying that there was “light at the end of the tunnel,” and they were constantly putting out statistics that said that the policy was working).

Tonight’s Debate

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I’m guessing that the people most motivated to watch will be those who already have made up their minds which of the two they are voting for. I have already made up my mind, not to vote for either one of them. And I will not watch. (Note: Peggy Noonan has encountered a lot of people who are undecided. That goes against my experience, but I don’t deny living in a bubble. I remember in previous elections Jonah Goldberg wondering who the heck these undecided voters were. I sympathize with his befuddlement.)

Also, I think that Gary Johnson deserves to be in the debate. The threshold of 15 percent in the polls may have been appropriate when the two major parties were nominating acceptable candidates. However, that is not the case this year. Simply being on the ballot in every state should qualify Johnson to be in the debates in a year when the majority of people have a negative view of both Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton. I think that the threshold for keeping Johnson out of the debates should be that the polls show that the unfavorability ratings for the other candidates should be less than, say, 40 percent.

While I am on the topic of the election, Tyler Cowen recommends David Brooks. Brooks writes,

We have an emerging global system, with relatively open trade, immigration, multilateral institutions and ethnic diversity. The critics of that system are screaming at full roar. The champions of that system — and Hillary Clinton is naturally one — are off in another world.

There is a strong case to be made for an open world order, and a huge majority coalition to be built in support of it.

In the nearly twenty years since Brooks wrote Bobos in Paradise, coining the expression “bourgeois bohemians,” have the Bobos achieved the status of a “huge majority coalition”? My guess is that Peggy Noonan, based on her conversations with potential voters, would have doubts.

The guardians of the open world order helped encourage a revolution in Syria that became a civil war. The guardians of the open world order were unable to stop this civil war. The guardians of the open world order have yet to convincingly demonstrate that they can cope with the refugee problem created by this civil war.

I am not joining the anti-Bobos here. But I do think that one should not over-estimate the Bobo vote, and where Mrs. Clinton needs help is with people who are not Bobos. If you talk to them about an “open world order,” they are likely to want to know where the “order” part is going to come from.

As a final point, I endorse the view that democracy works best when elections do not matter much. Let us all hope that this election does not matter much, and that the system is robust enough that we can get through the next four years regardless.

David Brooks Sends a Valentine

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He sent it on Tuesday, to President Obama.

Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I’m beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him.

Tyler Cowen said that he agrees with the column.

I find myself feeling less charitable.

Brooks claims that the Obama Administration was scandal-free. I think it was more of a case that the mainstream press had his back. Could George Bush have survived the IRS scandal? Could Ronald Reagan have gotten away with choosing not to enforce immigration laws?

Brooks claims that President Obama “grasps the reality of the situation” in the Middle East. Certainly there are plenty of delusions that President Obama does not hold. I think he is right to be skeptical about how well military intervention would work out. But he appears to be stuck in a very sophomoric delusion, which is that virtue-signaling constitutes an effective foreign policy.

Brooks credits President Obama with listening to other points of view and having good manners. I don’t think he shows any real understanding of or good manners toward those who disagree with him about the relative merits of markets and government or about the relative merits of civilization-barbarism vs. oppressor-oppressed in describing the conflict involving radical Islam.

We certainly can do worse than President Obama. No one should be surprised if the next President turns out to make a lot of mistakes and to have major intellectual and moral defects. But any comparison with President Obama should be based on the reality, not Brooks’ air-brushed portrait.

Reading David Brooks on Character

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After downloading his new book, The Road to Character, I started by skipping to his concluding chapter, where he writes,

The things we call character endure over the long term–courage, honesty, humility. People with character are capable of a long obedience in the same direction, of staying attached to people and causes and callings consistently through thick and thin…They are anchored by permanent attachments to important things. In the realm of intellect, they have a set of permanent convictions about fundamental truths. In the realm of emotion, they are enmeshed in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm of action, they have a permanent commitment to tasks that cannot be completed in a lifetime.

…Wisdom starts with epistemological modesty. The world is immeasurably complex and the private stock of reason is small. We are generally not capable of understanding the complex web of causes that drive events. We are not even capable of grasping the unconscious depths of our own minds. We should be skeptical of abstract reasoning or of trying to apply universal rules across different contexts…The humble person understands that experience is a better teacher than pure reason. He understands that wisdom is not knowledge. Wisdom emerges out of a collection of individual virtues. It is knowing how to behave when perfect knowledge is lacking.

As to whether I will like the entire book, I am worried about two things.

1. The reviews I have read are bland and uninteresting. An interesting book should provoke interesting reviews.

2. My instinct was to skip over the meat of the book, which is his biographical sketches of people whose character he admires. When I get around to reading those, the question is whether I will find them rewarding.

Joseph Heath on the Roots of Conservatism

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He writes,

There is of course a much-observed tension between the cultural-evolutionary and the free-market versions of conservatism, particularly since the untrammelled free market is the most effective device for destroying traditional institutions that has ever been devised by man. Most of what cultural conservatives and religious fundamentalists hate about the modern world – the rootlessness, hedonism, crass commercialism, loose sexual morality, anti-authoritarianism, and general lack of discipline – is either a direct product of the market, or is a tendency that is dramatically amplified by it. What brings the cultural and the market conservative together is the conviction that these unplanned processes are better than the alternative, which is “social engineering” in the rationalist style.

Read the whole thing. I arrived at it starting from Alex Tabarrok’s link.

Thinking about the quoted paragraph in terms of the three-axes model, I would say that there is a tension about markets in the civilization vs. barbarism axis. A conservative would view productive work as civilized, and markets encourage productive work. However, a conservative would worry that consumer tastes are barbaric, and markets work to satisfy consumer tastes.

Another way in which the market process is civilized from a conservative perspective is that businesses fail. Failure builds character because it reinforces humility. It keeps us from developing too high an opinion of ourselves as individuals or of humanity as a whole. (David Brooks’ latest book, The Road to Character, which I have started reading, seems to stress humility.) In contrast, progressives seem to see government as a tool to eliminate all forms of failure.

Conservatarian Dilemmas 2: Social Issues

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This is the second of three posts inspired in part by the dialogue between Nick Gillespie and Charles C.W. Cooke. The social issues that I have in mind are drugs, abortion, and gay marriage. Some thoughts.

From the civilization-barbarism perspective, one may oppose legalizing marijuana, abortion, and gay marriage to the extent that one believes that civilization depends on, or at least is enhanced by, restrictions against these. However, that is not Cooke’s conservatarian position. He instead favors allowing different communities to adopt different policies. My thoughts:

1. From the freedom-coercion perspective, I see Cooke as trying to argue for a (local) “freedom to coerce.” As a general rule, this is problematic. In fact, the controversy over Indiana’s religious freedom law (or “religious freedom” law, to those who oppose it) may be an illustration of the difficulties with this approach.

During the battle over civil rights, Barry Goldwater applied federalism to argue for states’ rights to impose Jim Crow laws. Milton Friedman argued that businesses should be allowed to engage in discrimination. Today, most Americans believe that Federal coercion to prevent racial discrimination is a good thing, and Cooke supports this consensus.

2. Some conservatives try to appeal to libertarians by arguing that progressive social policies are coercive. For example, a businessman who opposes abortion can be forced to pay for health insurance that in turn pays for abortions of employees. The libertarian counter is that the wrong involved here is not that the businessman is forced to pay for abortions but that he is forced to pay for health insurance.

3. Another conservative line is that without traditional family values, people will become degenerate and thus dependent on the government, leading to bigger government. Call this the David Brooks argument. My own view, as readers of this blog (particularly the posts under the category “Four forces watch”) know, is that bifurcated family patterns are unlikely to be altered by government action.

4. The elephant in the room here is religion and voters who are motivated by it. Just the other day, I saw a full-page ad in the Washington Post using biblical imagery to argue against legalization of gay marriage. There is a long tradition of conservative politicians (and, for that matter, progressive politicians) who are not themselves committed to religious beliefs wanting to appeal to voters who are.

5. Should a baker who is opposed to gay marriage have the right to refuse to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple? I think that the most appropriate libertarian answer is to say that the baker should have such a right. But it seems to me that if you open the door to a right to discriminate, then racists can use that door. On the other hand, if you say that government should be able to force a baker to do business with an unwanted customer, does that mean that government also should be able to force a customer to do business with an unwanted baker?

My preferred society would be one in which (a) there is sufficient market competition so that if you are discriminated against by x you can easily obtain what you want somewhere else. The government has to get involved only if discrimination is pervasive; and (b) religious values are enforced within religious organizations only. If you violate the beliefs of your religion, you can be excommunicated by that religion, but otherwise you should not suffer.

I do not think that this solves the conservatarian dilemma on social issues, but it’s my best shot.