The temptation of stupid

Updated 3/9/15

Robert Walker in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), via lifeshouldbemorelikeamovie.

If you were sure David Brooks ("The Temptation of Hillary") would be supporting Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, I have to tell you that's probably not inevitable. He totally hasn't endorsed her yet. He's a little concerned that her economic views might not be sound, although he doesn't know what they are, but

it was always likely that she would move left as the primary season approached. It’s now becoming clearer how she might do it. She might make a shift from what you might call human capital progressivism to redistributionist progressivism.

I'll tell you the truth, I don't believe I would call anything "human capital progressivism". What is it when it's at home?

the theory that the key is to improve the skills of workers. Expand early education. Make college cheaper. Invest in worker training. Above all, increase the productivity of workers so they can compete. But a growing number of populist progressives have been arguing that inequality is not mainly about education levels. They argue that trying to lift wages by improving skills is an “evasion.” It’s “whistling past the graveyard.”

Oh, I see, "human capital progressivism" is the kind of progressivism that Reihan Salam and Yuval Levin and company, including our Mr. Brooks, have been trying to market as conservatism ever since the rest of the Republican Party slid into early-onset senile dementia—except with a sweet Democratic idea that government could help pay for it. That kind of progressivism.

The quotation marks provide a helpful clue as to the identity of that growing number of populist progressives; they are probably mainly four guys, the Clinton secretary of the treasury, the former president of Harvard, the Obama chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, and Obama's rejected candidate for the Federal Reserve chair, i.e., they are all Lawrence Summers, who told the audience of a panel discussion at the Hamilton Project on February 19 (I'm quoting from Mike Konczal at Rortybomb),

I think the [education] policies that Aneesh [Chopra] is talking about are largely whistling past the graveyard. The core problem is that there aren't enough jobs. If you help some people, you could help them get the jobs, but then someone else won't get the jobs. Unless you're doing things that have things that are effecting the demand for jobs, you're helping people win a race to get a finite number of jobs. […] The idea that you can just have better training and then there are all these jobs, all these places where there are shortages and we just need the train people is fundamentally an evasion. 

Brooks picked it up when he was casting about for something nominally serious to write about (in opposition to Tuesday's plaintive groan ("So set 'em up, Joe,/I've got a little story I'd like you to know") and found it in Thomas Edsall's column in yesterday's Times (reproduced at Summers's website), which gives an excellent account of Summers's evolving views.

It's easy enough for an economist of Brooks's caliber to demolish Summers's argument. All he really needs to do is plagiarize himself from last October:

as economist David Autor has shown, if you took all the wealth gains the top 1 percent made between 1979 and 2012 and spread it to the bottom 99 percent, each household would get a payment of only $7,000. But if you take a two-earner, high-school-educated couple and get them college degrees, their income goes up by $58,000 per year. Inequality is mostly a human capital problem. (then)

Autor’s own research shows that skills differences are four times more important than concentration of wealth in driving inequality. If we could magically confiscate and redistribute the above-average income gains that have gone to the top 1 percent since 1979, that would produce $7,000 more per household per year for the bottom 99 percent. But if we could close the gap so that high-school-educated people had the skills of college-educated people, that would increase household income by $28,000 per year. (now)

Silently correcting a $30,000 error he made last time (explaining something that confused me a lot at the time). Of course as I said in October if everybody had the skills of college-educated people they'd be worth a lot less money. Well, thinks Brooks, what if they all got MA's?

It is true that wages for college grads have been flat this century, and that is troubling. But this is not true of people with post-college degrees, who are doing nicely.

Then you could have such a great time talking about Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova with your Starbucks barista and Uber driver. Oh wait, you can do that already. Brooks doesn't have an MA, by the way, and yet he's a professor at Yale, or rather a practitioner, which possibly asks for different qualifications.

It's a shame he didn't get all the way to paragraph 8 of Edsall's column, because he could have gotten some updated numbers from Summers on the inequality premium:

If we had the income distribution in the United States that we did in 1979, the top 1% would have $1 trillion less today, and the bottom 80% would have $1 trillion more. That works out to about $700,000 a family for the top 1%, and about $11,000 a year for a family in the bottom 80%.

(Presumably Summers's own arithmetic, I can't find an anterior source. I think the reason you can skip the top quintile minus the 1% is that their incomes were basically stagnant during the period, as they blended gradually into the other 99%.)

He also would have learned that Autor himself was on the panel too, and, if he'd checked out a fuller report (such as Konczal's) of the Hamilton Project discussion, discovered that Autor is moving into a less gee-whiz position on the role of technology and education:

I think there's reason for some skepticism about how fast things are actually moving. There’s a lot of aggregate data that don't support the idea the labor market is changing or the economy is changing as rapidly as this very dramatic story. The premium to higher education has plateaued over the last 10 years. We see evidence highly skilled workers have less rapid career trajectories and are moving into less skill occupation if anything. Productivity is not growing very rapidly, and a lot of the employment growth we’ve seen in the past 15 years has been in relatively low education, in-person service occupations.

As we see once again in today's jobs report, with its fantastic hiring growth and shabby wages.

In short, Brooks prepared to write today's column by reading the first seven paragraphs of somebody else's column, and doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Yeah, you knew that already. But it's an amusing example of the way he works, and gives me a chance to link to some good stuff (on why you should stop using the obnoxious and misleading term "human capital", see Branko Milanovic).

I hope Hillary Clinton does listen to Summers (and Robert Rubin [!], who was on the panel too), and moves in this direction. I'll feel a lot more comfortable voting for her if she does. As to Brooks's vote, I don't think she was really worried about that anyway.

Drifty makes a valiant attempt to set the piece in the context of Brooks's (lack of) intellectual development.

Update:

Great minds... like Jared Bernstein, who unlike me is an economist, not to mention a distinguished one, also notes that our Brooksy doesn't do his homework

If Brooks had then looked at the more broader policy document ...

and accuses him, accurately, and obviously with a lot more skill than I could muster, of practicing the "Palin one-step", which is exactly as legitimate as it sounds, and shows quite clearly that he is wrong in pretty much every important respect. Also a wonderful analysis from Brad DeLong pointing out that Summers doesn't in any sense devalue education and noting a number of deceptions and idiocies in Brooks's presentation of the facts.