David Brooks sours on Bobos

he writes,

If you base a society on a conception of self that is about achievement, not character, you will wind up with a society that is demoralized; that puts little emphasis on the sorts of moral systems that create harmony within people, harmony between people and harmony between people and their ultimate purpose.

These days, I find myself thinking more and more about issues of morality and character. In particular, I think that trying to emphasize social opinions rather than personal character does not work well.

25 thoughts on “David Brooks sours on Bobos

  1. The nice thing about achievement is the ‘reality’ of it.

    The idea of measuring the means by the ends – randomized controlled trials, etc – underpins an achievement mentality. A focus on character is in some sense about process.

    The questions that arise: what about outputs that can’t be effectively measured? Anyone who does RCTs comes to realize the limitations. How to handle complex and chaotic systems? What to do when the guidance is insufficient and will likely not be available in any relevant time frame? What about gaming the system – ‘when metrics become targets…’?

    The opposite: why do things that don’t seem to have any tangible benefit or may even seem counterproductive? Shouldn’t results matter? How to resolve differences of opinion on fundamental issues of values and character? Haven’t the ‘unscientific approaches’ failed for many years already?

  2. Brooks thinks we need less individualism, more collectivism. And this is supposed to be insightful social analysis?

  3. People don’t resent the rewards that come with real achievement. The wealth earned by a Lebron James, a Bill Gates, or an Oprah Winfrey does not send mobs into the streets armed with pitchforks.

    What people do resent is wealth amassed by swindlers. What they resent even more are political systems that institutionalize wealth transfers to swindlers.

    • When the left goes on and on about the 1%, do any of them stop to clarify, “not the deserving 1%, mind you, just the swindlers.”?

      That’s not how group resentment works.

      You’re using individual cases of extremely high status, popular, famous, and celebrated individuals whose achievements are repeatedly glorified and who benefit from an instinct towards hero worship.

      But group resentment is faceless, which enables people to imaging a maximally evil and undeserving caricature as archetype and ‘representative’, which justified general animus and makes any subsequent confiscation or punishment a case of “they all had it coming”.

      • No, most people understand the difference between income earned through effort and income unearned through swindling. My doctor makes much more than I do, but I don’t resent my doctor’s income. What people resent are high incomes that do not provide any accompanying good. People apply the same standard to the bottom 1% as well as the top 1%. Reaganite conservatives resented “strapping young bucks” buying T-bones with food stamps and “welfare queens driving around in Cadillacs” (a frequent Reagan trope) every bit as much as liberals resent a rich swindler. Whether those images are true or not is another question, but people do instinctively understand the difference between people who earned their wealth versus people who swindled their way to wealth, just as they understand the difference between poverty due to misfortune versus poverty due to laziness.

      • I’d divide it up into achievers, swindlers, parasites, and scavengers.

        The parasites are those who are ostensibly earning their money, but do little that is useful. Lots – not all but lots – of financial and trading activity falls into this category. So do many corporate CEO’s. Ruin a company out of incompetence and walk away with tens of millions? Yeah. Parasites.

        The scavengers are the inheritors of great wealth who also don’t do much – the undeserving rich. Like buzzards, they live off the remains of the dead.

        I’m fine with achievers. With the others not so much.

        • I would go even further.
          Who owns the wealth accrued by finance?
          Our understanding of the right to wealth is grounded in a morally intuitive sense that if you work for something, you deserve to own it.
          But passive investment involves no labor or work or even creativity, so how much is rightfully the property of the public, versus the holder of capital?

          Why couldn’t we say that after some point ,like a billion dollars, the claim to that wealth is diminished to essentially nil.
          After all no one’s labor is actually worth that much; No one can possibly generate a billion dollars in wealth without the benefit of state property laws and rents, provided courtesy the people. Why shouldn’t the people then claim their rightful share?

        • I believe some of the issue of dividing people so easily is achievers (Gates in 1998) become ‘parasites’ (Gates today)

          And some like, Jeff Bezos, can be both a the same time.

        • We are all parasites and scavengers, recipients of benefits that we didn’t earn. If you had been born just a few hundred years ago, you could not have achieved anywhere near the luxuriant lifestyle you now enjoy. The difference between what you have “achieved” in actuality and what you could have attained had you been born long ago is due to the labor, the creativity, and the self-denial of many of your predecessors.

          And, speaking of unearned benefits, what about the care your parents (or other caregivers) bestowed upon you when you were a baby and a small child? You didn’t earn any of that.

          So please don’t pose as a “deserving achiever”!

        • People deal with their circumstances in ways that work for them and their reference can’t very usefully be the opinion of others because those opinions are often all over the map. For instances inheritors of great wealth who also don’t do much. A problem is that not doing much is pretty subjective and the perception of the individual is far more important than an observer anyway.

        • But passive investment involves no labor or work or even creativity, so how much is rightfully the property of the public, versus the holder of capital?

          If it’s “labor” or “work” that determines property right to something, then the public isn’t rightfully entitled to it, either. After all, what labor did they put in?

  4. NO WTF? I think David Brooks is a good writer but I swear he has little understanding what went wrong about 2005 and his columns are becoming a conservative version of Richard Cohen. (No liberal under 50 cares about a single thing Cohen has written in 20+ years.)

    A cheerleader for the competitive global economy now wants to lecture us against a conception of self that is about achievement. And next he lecture the Bobos on need to marry younger and how wrong divorce is.

    A lot of young people are following the leadership of economic elite, and more focused on their resume and career than local society and family. And what is wrong with that? Seems like that is what they are suppose to do. In fact young people are behaving much better today than ever (they graduate High school, teenage sex & pregrancy is down, crime etc.) so I am not sure David Brooks is going after here.

    And I believe a lot what is bothering conservative so much as a group this age is avoiding going into blue collar career jobs. And question, why should young people go into careers with falling wages and what is the private sector doing to train these young people. (That older generations are upset young people are avoid early marriage and parenthood which again I wonder why this is wrong as well.)

    • +1

      There’s a paleoconservative conscience gnawing at neoconservatism. Sometimes it’s painfully obvious as in the case of Brooks.

    • The concern with delaying marriage and parenthood is that the delays often become permanent.

      And having kids is awesome and y’all are missing out.

    • “A lot of young people are following the leadership of economic elite, and more focused on their resume and career than local society and family. And what is wrong with that? Seems like that is what they are suppose to do.”

      Brooks is waking up to the fact that this mindset, what he would have said 15 years earlier is exactly what he wanted, has fueled social dislocation and the dashed hopes of career frustration, because not everyone can work and be highly compensated at a top advertising firm, BigLaw, investment banking, and the like when everyone is going to college and then getting advanced degrees. At a more concrete level, this generation is facing large piles of debt from school and consumer spending, the latter a replacement for forming strong social ties, which is harder when people have to continually keep relocating and changing jobs or schools to get new degrees, certificates, and licenses just to stay afloat. A lot of millennials are hitting their late 20s or early 30s and thinking they’re not where they want to be from a career and money standpoint, so they just keep putting things off that would help ease social dislocation; and who can blame them? Brooks, Thomas Friedman, and others have been cheering the careerist mindset since the Cold War ended.

  5. “In particular, I think that trying to emphasize social opinions rather than personal character does not work well.”

    Opinions are a useful proxy for loyalty: like an army’s uniform. The big argument is over to what and to whom we should be loyal. Accusing people of being tribal doesn’t seem to be doing much, and this the reason. One person says ‘tribal’, but their targets hear ‘loyal’.

    It does raise the interesting question of how to incentivize character development, and discourage social enforcement of opinion.

    The problem is that character development is costly, with rewards that are uncertain and without any immediate thrill to them, whereas virtue signalling and participating in lynch mobs are very low cost, while providing the sensation of immediate social reinforcement.

    One idea could be a rule of having to make a personal sacrifice, “for the good of the community” before any call to impose extra-legal negative consequences on anyone else. Perhaps calling for someone to be fired comes with the social expectation that one would give up one’s own job to make it happen, or have any of one’s own income in excess of the target’s future income stream taxed at 100%, in the name of “taking one for the team.” A tax on socially-harmful BS. If it’s really important, surely it’s worth it. If it’s not worth it, then how important is it, really?

    Various traditions were very good at building in incentive structures to bolster their moral goals and outlooks. Today, our moral and ethical discussions often happen in a manner disconnected from considerations of rewards and punishments – of real-world costs and benefits – as if we can all just agree to adjust entrenched norms and deeply-rooted problems by mere discussion, argument, and moral suasion.

    If you want people to take risks, you can just try and tell them, “Hey buddy, take some more risks!”, or you can offer carrots and sticks. Providing surety or indemnification should things go wrong, that kind thing. If you want people to take fewer risks, maybe insist that they provide assurances, e.g., asking universities to cover for student loan defaults, and so forth.

    Part of the trouble is that some of our ideological traditions are so allergic to certain kinds of state interventions or impositions, that any talk of what it might take is much too far out of the box to allow for sober consideration.

    My belief is that we can break this terrible fever, but we would have to be serious enough to deploy unconventional and powerful tools that would seem shocking in normal times. But these are not normal times, and the temperature keeps rising.

  6. Brooks might be right – but its far more likely he’s noticing two random trends in modern society and connecting the two. I suspect that even had we kept a less meritocratic and more “aristocratic” society, many of the other trends that trouble Brooks would have emerged.

    Arnold – you’re right that there’s way too much emphasis on personal social opinion. But the issue is not merely that social opinion has been elevated above character.

    It’s that for far too many people, one’s character is now viewed as a direct function of his political beliefs.

  7. David Brooks, the preachy moralist who supported the invasion of Iraq and dumped his wife for his young research assistant, thinks that judging people by their actual actions and achievements is a bad idea. Instead we should judge them on “character”, which is apparently something you can discern without examining the actual outcomes of a person’s life choices. Shocking.

  8. Meritocracy opened up success to lots and lots of talented people who would have otherwise not have had a chance to succeed (Jews, Catholics, women, etc.). These people went on to marry other talented people and had talented (and better-raised) kids (go to any public school in a poor neighborhood and you’ll get a nice dose of this reality). This increased the level of inequality and led to increasing class resentment.

    Populists like Sanders and Trump, as well as innumerate liberal arts majors in the media, fanned these flames of resentment and got us to where we are today.

    The problem isn’t talented people doing well. It’s ignorant people who see increasing inequality as a bad outcome in and of itself. Increases in inequality (and trade deficits and immigration) are bad only when people are repeatedly told lies that confirm their basest human biases against “the other” (the 1%, foreign manufacturers, illegal immigrants).

  9. A different interpretation of the Brooksexceept – what is missing is a sense that the elites are invested in society, which manifests itself in different ways.

    Gone is the notion of noblesse oblige. Instead of a feeling that elites are taking a greater sacrifice in accord with one’s greater station (leading the men into the breach), there’s a feeling that the elites rig the system against the little man.

    Gone are the days when the elites attended church and professed good morals as an example for the less fortunate to emulate even if they themselves don’t really believe (most Episcopals), now they profess libertinism while practicing prudishness, much to society’s detriment.

    Once elites gave losers in battles an honorable way to rejoin society (see Lee). Now we rub losers’ noses in it (bake my cake!) and even revisit old battles (statues).

    I think this sort of focus by the elites of what’s good for them now at the cost of what’s good for the long term health of society is Brooks’ lament.

    • I remember reading this “all in the same boat” somewhere as a more subtle argument in favor of steep inheritance taxes (and against evasive trusts, cushy nepotistic sinecures, etc.) than one usually comes across.

      The idea being, that is the kids of the rich, powerful, inflential, high-status, etc. really had to make their shot at life with the bare minimum, then a certain amount of “class complacency” regarding the future conditions of their offpsring becomes more untenable, and the “bequest motive” might be channeled into concern for the general welfare and amelioration of overall conditions.

      One can certainly appreciate the appealing logic of it. But as it happens, the experience of various Communist countries tends to demonstrate that it doesn’t work in practice, and instead human nature means that smart people will use their talents to try and circumvent any system that prevents them from doing what they can to allocate maximum advantages to their own children.

      Also, it kind of depends on the elites actually having kids, which they are increasingly reluctant to do, in part because not having kids provides one with big consumption and professional advantages these days.

    • Actually, the elite do “profess[ed] good morals as an example for the less fortunate to emulate.” They are anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, etc. and are quite clear that you can’t be a good person unless you follow them in that.

      What they don’t preach–to outsiders!–though they practice, and preach to their own are some of the old bourgeois virtues, work hard, don’t have a kid if you can’t support one, defer gratification. Ironically (?), that may be one reason for increased inequality.

  10. Brooks:
    “Life is not really an individual journey. Life is more like settling a sequence of villages. You help build a community at home, at work, in your town and then you go off and settle more villages.”

    Life is both the individual journey AND the social links. Freedom AND responsibility.

    How has so much amazing talent produced such poor results?
    This was answered by the terrible B. Schiff: Marxism, a respectable political and philosophical tradition…”

    When high talent people try to create a perpetual motion machine, they will always get poor results — the elites who respect Marxism ARE the problem, and usually are part of the gov’t (“here to help you” Ha!)

    Even high IQ Jewish Zionists failed to create a sustainable Marxist / socialist set of Kibbutz communes (starting in 1909).

    The elites have given up the pre-WWII focus on individual character, and trying to recreate in real life the Horatio Alger poor boy, with good character, grows up to be successful. (Harry Potter followed that, some. Good, not perfect, character). Brooks is wrong about too much focus on individuals, because only individuals actually make choices. But he has a good point about the choices made and whether they lead towards better social / community outcomes.

    With unreal PC visions, the elite remain doomed to fail.

  11. I find myself thinking about morality and character a lot these days as well.

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