Let Them Eat Sermons

Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a pond on the farm at Pindar's Corners. Still from the 2018 documentary by Joseph Dorman and Toby Perl Freilich.

Hey,  David F. Brooks ("Why I Am Not a Liberal"), what up, man? How's the wife? Read anything interesting lately?

Last May a study came out suggesting that merely giving people money doesn’t do much to lift them out of poverty. Families with at least one child received $333 a month. They had more money to spend, which is a good thing, but the children fared no better than similar children who didn’t get the cash. They were no more likely to develop language skills or demonstrate cognitive development. They were no more likely to avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays.

Notice he doesn't tell us which study he's talking about, or offer a link so we can check it out for ourselves, which is often a sign of something funky in Brooks's social science commentary, at the least that he hasn't read the paper he's talking about (which Dr. Google was able to identify pretty quickly: the. NBER report on the Baby's First Years experiment by Kimberly Noble, Katherine Magnuson, Greg Duncan et al., The effect of a monthly unconditional cash transfer on children’s development at four years of age: A randomized controlled trial in the U.S.). In typical Brooks fashion he does link his source for Baby's First Years (BFY), a piece from two weeks ago in the Substack "abundance" mag The Argument, in the next paragraph, but without acknowledging it as source, in a reference to a different study—

These results shouldn’t have been a big surprise. As Kelsey Piper noted in an essay for The Argument, a different study published last year gave families $500 a month for two years and found no big effects on the adult recipients’ psychological well-being and financial security.

—he's trying, as ever, to hide how little he's read in the preparation of the column. But if he'd read more of her essay, or the excellent coverage of the experiment by Jason DeParle at the end of July in The New York Times, he could have learned that the question is a little more complex.

Literary Corner: Vulnerable to the Reliability

I call this his "deer in the headlines" look. Via Fox News.

If the Supreme Court really comes up with a way of finding the Texas Posse Postcoitum Act constitutional, I'm going to demand that New York State enact a bill deputizing private citizens to enforce libel law by filing suits against liars on behalf of reality itself, and spend the rest of my life hunting bounties, $10,000 at a clip from all the Republicans I can catch. 

I'm not sure I'll go after Senator Manchin, because his stupid act is getting so convincing I'm not at all sure he's lying, as in this interview with Dana Bash at CNN:

The Urgency That We Have

by Joseph Manchin III

What's the urgency? What's
the urgency that we have? It's not
the same urgency that we have
with the American Rescue Plan. We
got that out the door quick, it was
about $2 billion — $2 trillion. And
on top of that, all the things we
have got with the CARES package,
everything leading up to that. So,
we have done an awful lot and there's
still an awful lot of people that need help.

But you have 11 million jobs that aren't
filled right now. 8 million people are still
unemployed. Something's not matching up.
Don't you think we ought to hit the pause
and find out? The vulnerability that we have,
Dana, right now, we don't know what is happening
with this COVID. It's awful, coming back
the way it is with a vengeance. And
we don't know about inflation. We know
it's running rampant right now. I can tell you,
in West Virginia, inflation's running rampant.

And, on top of that, the challenges we're
going to have, geopolitical challenges.
Shouldn't we be prepared?

Brooks on Poverty

Town Square of Waterloo, Ontario, via Hogg Fuel and Supply.

Some really remarkable goings-on in the current David F. Brooks, I mean qualitatively different from the usual dishonesty we like to tax him with over here, presenting a truly original view of, of all things, poverty reduction in his native Canada, which Brooks claims is being handled better up there than down here on the other side of the border, which doesn't sound surprising at all, since they have a much more effective government than we have, but that's not what Brooks is saying: he's claiming that Canada is doing a better job of poverty reduction than the US because they're thinking more like, not to put too fine a point on it, David F. Brooks ("Winning the War on Poverty"):

According to recently released data, between 2015 and 2017, Canada reduced its official poverty rate by at least 20 percent. Roughly 825,000 Canadians were lifted out of poverty in those years, giving the country today its lowest poverty rate in history.

How did it do it?.... They begin by gathering, say, 100 people from a single community. A quarter have lived with poverty; the rest are from business, nonprofits and government.

Well, on the other hand, at first blush the reality doesn't look anything like the way David Brooks thinks, according to the available online information, which I have access to, no thanks to David F. Brooks, who provides no links, but because I own a Google, where they tell how they did it, in the following terms:

Mr. Sandman

Photo by Walker Evans for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941, of folks being taken care of by the intimate, affectionate local authorities, free from the burdens of one-size-fits-all federal regulations.

Meanwhile, breaking news from Dreamland, where David F. "Sandman" Brooks has come into a fresh supply of that classic Russell Kirk sand to sprinkle into our stinging eyes ("The Localist Revolution"):

Localism is the belief that power should be wielded as much as possible at the neighborhood, city and state levels. Localism is thriving — as a philosophy and a way of doing things — because the national government is dysfunctional while many towns are reviving. Politicians in Washington are miserable, hurling ideological abstractions at one another, but mayors and governors are fulfilled, producing tangible results.

Bill de Blasio says thanks for the endorsement, but are you sure that's what you meant? There's no question but that the federal government is dysfunctional and has been since the 2010 midterm election gave the House of Representatives to the Republicans and reduced the Democrats' majority in the Senate from an almost-functioning 57 to a wholly impotent 51, and the conservatives began to use their renewed power, as they always will, to demonstrate the hypothesis that government can't do anything. And no question but that in some localities people are coping with losses in federal funding in creative ways. Good for them! But there are other localities where they aren't, lots of them, as always, where local elites refuse to help, because they want to hang on to their money. A lot of them are in what they call "Trump country".

Oh, snap. Now she wants to make war on poverty.

This—Trump defying a fire marshal trying to enforce crowd restrictions for safety reasons—put another, dreadful picture into my mind, crystallizing the sense of Trump is doing to himself and his whole filthy following at this point:

.@BraddJaffy Horrible to think that's how it could end, like Kriemhild and the the Burgundians. #Trumpendämmerung pic.twitter.com/Rn1WxCbpIE

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 10, 2016

Meanwhile, as Trump works to set his funeral pyre ablaze inside the great hall or big tent of the party he's occupied and some Republicans sneak out to look across the plain for some place of safety, Hillary Clinton has chosen a very odd way of picking up new Republican voters for herself, by proposing the first program dedicated to the profoundly poor since Lyndon Johnson was president.

I think (you'll correct me if that's an exaggeration). Certainly the first since her husband unwittingly enabled Newt Gingrich to destroy the old welfare leg of the New Deal.

Kvelling in the Mises Library

Guatemala, via Pedrovisión.

Where did National Review's Jay Nordlinger go for his spring break?

When you see Adam Smith Plaza, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore. You also see Ludwig von Mises Library. And Friedrich Hayek Auditorium. And, for good measure, Milton Friedman Auditorium. 

UFM has not forgotten Professor Friedman’s better half: There is a Rose Friedman Terrace.

Certainly wouldn't be all that surprised to see such things in Kansas nowadays, when I think about it. But it's Guatemala, of course, where else? And its rightwing wonks' paradise, the Universidad Francisco Marroquín:

A Simple Matter of Fairness

Marguerite de La Motte and Claire McDowell in The Mark of Zorro (1920). Via Fritzi, of course.

David Brooks misses the good old days ("What Republicans Should Say", January29 2016) :

For a few decades, American and British conservatism marched in tandem. Thatcher was philosophically akin to Reagan. John Major was akin to George Bush.

That's precisely 1.2 decades when the tandem act was in effect, from Reagan's inauguration in 1981 to Clinton's in 1993 (Thatcher was prime minister 1979-90, Major 1990-97), but you were saying?

But now the two conservatisms have split. The key divide is over what to do about the slow-motion devastation being felt by the less educated, the working class and the poor.

Moar Clinton

Hillary Clinton and Marian Wright Edelman at a Children's Defense Fund event, 2013. Photo by Alex Brandon/AP.

That Amy Chozick story about young Hillary Rodham as an undercover agent of change in Alabama in the summer of 1972, infiltrating the system of "segregation academies" set up in the South to evade civil rights law, contains an amusing example of rhetorical electric slide:

D. Taylor Flowers, the chairman of the board of Houston Academy, whose father was a founding board member, was in the ninth grade at the school (which locals call “H.A.,” jokingly saying it stands for “holy Anglo”) when Mrs. Clinton visited. “I've heard the story, and I don’t think Hillary Clinton made it up,” he said over lunch in Dothan.

The school was founded to prepare students for college, not as a segregation academy, Mr. Flowers said. But, he added, “I would be disingenuous if I said integration didn’t have anything to do with” parents’ enrolling their children in Houston Academy. “Integration was a huge social change for us.”

Annals of derp: The poverty of poverty studies

Updated 5/6/2015

Marion Davies and William Haines in King Vidor's 1928 Show People. Via MoviesSilently.

World-famous poverty expert David Brooks:

Since 1980 federal antipoverty spending has exploded. As Robert Samuelson of The Washington Post has pointed out, in 2013 the federal government spent nearly $14,000 per poor person. If you simply took that money and handed it to the poor, a family of four would have a household income roughly twice the poverty rate.

At least if by 2013 you mean 2011, and some other details. Robert Samuelson, at the cited link:

Shorter Douthat: No, it's because poor people are so damn rich any more.

Update: Welcome Alicubini!

Image by Waldo3610.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, comes out swinging, to show everybody how a Harvard guy goes about writing David Brooks's March 10 column, which should like obviously be better than the way Brooks wrote it, in answer to the question raised (at least in the perfervid imaginations of the American right) by Robert Putnam's new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (partly Putnam's fault for refusing to name the "upper-class villains"),

whether the social crisis among America’s poor and working class — the collapse of the two-parent family, the weakening of communal ties — is best understood as a problem of economics or of culture.

It can't be economics, says Ross, because everybody's economic situation just keeps getting better and better. I bet you didn't realize that:

What if you don't *have* a village?

Emma Stone in Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010).

Verbatim David Brooks, "The Cost of Relativism", New York Times, March 10 2015:

People sometimes wonder why I’ve taken this column in a spiritual and moral direction of late. It’s in part because we won’t have social repair unless we are more morally articulate, unless we have clearer definitions of how we should be behaving at all levels.

History is full of examples of moral revival, when social chaos was reversed, when behavior was tightened and norms reasserted. It happened in England in the 1830s and in the U.S. amid economic stress in the 1930s. It happens through organic communal effort, with voices from everywhere saying gently: This we praise. This we don’t.

I've never spent much time wondering why, because the answer seems to me obvious. It's mainly because there are two things you can do about the problems of the United States, you can repair them or you can talk about the bad people who are to blame, and repairing them costs money, as we learned "in the US amid economic stress in the 1930s", whereas complaining is free. And for the opinionist it's pretty much the same thing: finding out what needs to be done is a lot of work, whereas if it's simply the bad qualities of poor people, for example, that make them poor, you can whip out that column almost effortlessly, leaving plenty of time for your many important TV appearances, university gigs, and other events where you can deploy your improvisational skills and not have to prepare at all.

You're such a character

David Brooks writes:

One of the main differences between parents and antipoverty programs is that character matters to the former. Thus if you are a parent, you probably think your children's chances of success in life will have a lot to do with their character, but if you're an antipoverty program, not so much.

This is true both for Democratic and Republican programs, naturally. Democratic programs assume that poor people need more money, [jump]

Buster Keaton in The Navigator (1924).

Better wed than dead

Times runs an enormous feature by Jason DeParle on life in the universe in which marriage is the key variable ("Two Classes, Divided by 'I Do'") from which everything else follows; Ms. F and Ms. S, who work in the same day care center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, are practically the same person, but Ms. F is married and Ms. S is not, so naturally Ms. F finished college, became the boss, and has the time and money to give her children a spectacularly nurturing and yet stimulating environment to grow up in, while Ms. S dropped out, became the employee, and consigned her own kids to a life of sensory deprivation and food stamps.

In other words, it's a dispatch from Brooksland, where income inequality is caused by sluts who persist in giving it away for free, thus creating poverty in an otherwise pretty cushy little society. Hold out until you see that ring, girls! The poverty you don't create may be your own.

Girl, Appalachian house. From America Watch.

Or, as DeParle puts it,

Maud, says here Medicare comes from the Government!

Holiday collage by the Chicago Imagist Don Baum. From Archives of American Art Blog.

I haven't seen much response to yesterday's Times report about the poor but conservative and their dependence on government money, but it's pretty extraordinary reading. It's not your Tea Party clowns who really think Medicare isn't a government program, it's people [jump]