David Brooks Columns I Never Finished Reading

Maybe that's what it's about. Via Kevin A.Thompson.

I started in the middle of the Brooks of the Week ("The Politics of Exhaustion"), where this stood out on purely methodological grounds:

People in the exhausted camp are tired of having politics thrust in their face every hour. As Ryan Streeter of the American Enterprise Institute has found, young people who are “lonely at least once in a while” are more than seven times more likely to be active in politics than those who are socially active. Those who are exhausted have other things to do. They want to restore politics to its rightful place, and find meaning, attachment, entertainment and morality in something else besides Twitter wars and election campaigns.

People who are "lonely at least once in a while" are the opposite of those who are socially active? And those who are socially active are too exhausted to be active in politics and need to limit themselves to more morally significant activities, while loners are full of political energy and having a great time on Twitter? Reader, no. Brooks doesn't link the study, but it's not hard to find a reference to it, and that is not what it says:

Leftover Turkey

I guess it's too late already.

Which of the following proposals from the bipartisan list released by Opportunity America ("Work, skills, community: Restoring opportunity for the working class") with cooperation from Brookings and AEI might not benefit "the working class"?

• Make work pay by expanding the earned income tax credit to cover childless workers and experimenting with a new wage subsidy. 
• Require state and local agencies that administer government benefits to make a priority of getting recipients back to work. 
• Strengthen work requirements for some beneficiaries of means-tested government programs so long as jobs, training, treatment slots and other relevant services are available.
• Reform unemployment and disability insurance to promote work. 
• Reform federal education spending to fund programs that teach students, college-age and older, the skills they need for the jobs of the future. 
• Mobilize communities to make the most of the job-creating investment we expect to be unleashed by the Opportunity Zone provision of the 2017 tax bill. 
• Make the child and dependent care tax credit more available to working-class families. 
• Create a new federal program to monitor and limit opioid prescriptions.

I guess it's the ones that look as if they're designed to loosen up the job market and keep wages from rising. I mean, what problem exactly does a member of their target population have

Based on well-documented and widely accepted empirical evidence

Update: Hi MBRU readers! Thanks as ever Tengrain!

From the economists Aparna Mathur and Kevin ("Dow 36,000") Hassett at the Wall Street Journal last week, and recycled this morning in the daily bulletin of the American Enterprise Institute, where Hassett is director of economic policy studies,

The cure for wage stagnation

I know, teacher! Give everybody a raise! No, silly, of course that's not how economics works. If the boss gives you a raise, that isn't real; you have to get it from the Invisible Hand.

But it turns out that's going to be easy. All you need is a plan that everybody agrees in advance is the right one:

Annals of Derp: The Fatuous Party

Gary Cooper and Mary Brian in Victor Fleming's The Virginian (1929).

So, what with David Brooks being on vacation, the Times is having trouble making its August silliness quota, and normally dignified persons like economics writer David Leonhardt have to pitch in—here's Leonhardt giving some publicity to W. Bradford Wilcox, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the director of the Home Economics Project of AEI and the Institute for Family Studies, trying to scare up some evidence against the well-known finding of Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, in their 2010 study Red Families V. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, that (in Leonhardt's words)

Liberal attitudes toward gender equality, sexual orientation and education all seem to foster stronger, more stable family lives.

How can that be? cry the conservatives, in some panic. Don't we have all the family values? And they rush out foraging for data.