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.

Abortion Science II

Guest of honor at a Singapore Full Moon party, via. 

 

Shorter David F. Brooks, "Abortion: The Voice of the Ambivalent Majority":

No, I don't mean abortion is the voice of the ambivalent majority. I mean I am the voice of the ambivalent majority, and I think the solution to the problem is obviously to be of two minds, which is what all but the extremists want, so I support overturning Roe and Casey without overturning Roe and Casey. This is the only appropriately moderate position.

That is: Brooks believes the Court should uphold the Mississippi ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, in defiance of the finding of Roe v. Wade (1973) that the state's interest in protecting the fetus applies to a fetus that is 28 or more weeks old, and the revision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992) changing that to the standard of "viability", a fetus that is capable of living outside the womb (28 weeks in the received medical opinion of 1973 but by now 23 or 24 weeks, sometimes set as low as 22); or in other words should allow Mississippi to introduce an entirely random standard whose only possible purpose is to reduce the number of abortions overall  (not that much—95% of abortions in the US are before 15 weeks) and then claim they hadn't overturned Roe and Casey even though they obviously had:

"Mississippi's ban on abortion, two months before viability, is flatly unconstitutional under decades of precedent," Center for Reproductive Rights Senior Director Julie Rikelman said during oral arguments. "Two generations have now relied on this right, and 1 out of every 4 women makes a decision to end a pregnancy."

Or, in Brooks's own words,

Abortion Science

 

Image via Ms. Magazine.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "The Case Against Abortion":

In the bad old days, we were dependent on philosophers, theologians, and lawyers to decide moral issues, which obviously led to a lot of disputes, for example on the question of abortion, but now we have science, which proves unequivocally that abortion is objectively evil.

No, seriously:

There is no way to seriously deny that abortion is a form of killing. At a less advanced stage of scientific understanding, it was possible to believe that the embryo or fetus was somehow inert or vegetative until so-called quickening, months into pregnancy. But we now know the embryo is not merely a cell with potential, like a sperm or ovum, or a constituent part of human tissue, like a skin cell. Rather, a distinct human organism comes into existence at conception, and every stage of your biological life, from infancy and childhood to middle age and beyond, is part of a single continuous process that began when you were just a zygote.

We know from embryology, in other words, not Scripture or philosophy, that abortion kills a unique member of the species Homo sapiens, an act that in almost every other context is forbidden by the law.

Sociological Bent

So two weeks ago was Bad David Brooks, and last week we had Self-Help David Brooks ("The Awesome Importance of Imagination", which read like a compilation of BrainyQuotes, though it actually wasn't), so naturally today Woke David Brooks is doing a shift ("Joe Biden Is Succeeding"), which among other things praises the Biden agenda to the skies. And then explains why he's qualified to disagree with the economist Lawrence Summers on the subject of whether last spring's American Rescue Plan might overstimulate the economy and lead to inflation

Larry is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known and someone I really admire. If I were an economist, I might have agreed with him. But I’m a journalist with a sociological bent. For over a decade I have been covering a country that was economically, socially and morally coming apart. I figured one way to reverse that was to turbocharge the economy and create white-hot labor markets that would lift wages at the bottom. If inflation was a byproduct, so be it. The trade-off is worth it to prevent a national rupture.

and then agrees with him anyway

Tippy-Top Student Flamboyance

Update: Hit "Publish" a little prematurely on this one, late at night, and it's now somewhat revised and extended.

Flamboyants, via disney.fandom.

Say, what's woke David Brooks up to these days? A little less woke, to put it bluntly, castigating the élites, of course, as you'd expect from a part-time New York Times columnist and Aspen-backed social entrepreneur! Well, some élites ("Democrats Need to Confront Their Privilege"):

One of the Democratic Party’s core problems is that it still regards itself mainly as the party of the underdog. But as the information-age economy has matured, the Democratic Party has also become the party of the elite, especially on the cultural front.

Democrats dominate society’s culture generators: the elite universities, the elite media, the entertainment industry, the big tech companies, the thriving elite places like Manhattan, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In 2020, Joe Biden won roughly one-sixth of the nation’s counties, but together those counties generate roughly 71 percent of the nation’s G.D.P.

Look, I know we're all tired of this, but in the first place unless you're a very old-fashioned Marxist you don't envisage a two-party system where one party is the ruling class and the other one is the advance guard of the proletariat. Most people are not "the élite", by definition, so a true "party of the élite" wouldn't be able to win an election. For a majority, you need some non-élite voters.

Annals of Derp: Brooks Stabs at an Answer, Answer Fights Back

 Independence Day 2017, reposted

The new Brooks backyard.

Happy Independence Day! Here's former New York Times columnist David Brooks to celebrate by swallowing 50 hot dogs' worth of American history in ten minutes, without once mentioning any of the things we traditionally think about on the Fourth of July, like self-evident truths, or letting facts be submitted to a candid world, or fireworks.  Instead he wants to know, "What's the Matter with Republicans?", in the context of the fact that as Trump and the Republican Party work to take away benefits from the American working class, Trump's base of 40% or so remains faithful to him and Republican candidates win special elections in Kansas, Montana, Georgia, and South Carolina:

What’s going on? Why do working-class conservatives seem to vote so often against their own economic interests?

Let's see, how can we think about this question without addressing any of the discussion that has taken place since Thomas Frank asked it 13 years ago? I know! Put it down to the good old frontier ethos!

Restless Natives

Poster for the 1985 film by Michael Hoffman.

A slightly fresher version of the thesis about how "we" cosmopolitans, I guess, need to listen to "them" rednecks, or whoever the enemy is supposed to be, as long as you understand they're not supposed to be the enemy, came on my radio yesterday morning, at 6:00, and I found myself not going back to sleep. It was an interview with the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, a clearly better qualified person to defend any thesis than David Brooks or Bari Weiss in the New York Times, but I still got irritable right away.

Hochschild, a Berkeley professor emerita who has been hanging out ethnographically with people from southwestern Louisiana since 2011, whose "deep story" she elicited and wrote up in her Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which came out last January and has been praised as "humble" by David Brooks and "masterly" by Atul Gawande:

The metaphor for the right-wing deep story that I describe in Strangers is that you’re waiting in line for the American dream that you feel you very much deserve. It’s like waiting in a pilgrimage, and the line isn’t moving. Your feet are tired. You feel you are properly deserving of this reward that’s ahead. And the idea is, you don’t begrudge anyone in this right deep story. You’re not a hateful person. But then you see — the second moment of the right-wing deep story — somebody cutting ahead of you. Why are they getting special treatment?

Then, in another moment, the president of the country, Barack Obama, who should be tending fairly to all waiters-in-line, seems to be waving to the line cutters. In fact, “Is he a line cutter?” — the idea is. How did his mother — she was a single mother, not a rich woman — afford a Harvard education, a Columbia education? Something fishy happened. That was the thought there.

Brooks on the Gender War

La Dixième Symphonie, Abel Gance, 1918.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Gender War Is On! And Fake", New York Times, 3 July 2018:

Of course it's silly to say gender equality will lead to men and women being equal, for instance the Nordic countries have more gender equality than anywhere else but fewer women in top management positions than Estonia and Latvia, not to mention the United States, Mongolia, Belarus, Colombia, Saint Lucia, and Jamaica, which proves that this method of counting how many women are in top management is an infallible statistical tool. In America, gender equality is advanced, as all millennials agree that the best system is to have feminism in the workplace and neotraditionalism at home. Nevertheless young women insist on mobilizing in America, insisting they are economically worse off then men, which ironically forces young men to follow Jordan Peterson and complain that they are the real victims. Yes, women are to blame for Jordan Peterson, who I used to like but it turns out he's not as fashionable as I was expecting. And Donald Trump's cartoonish masculinity is clearly a response to women cartoonishly asking "Why can't we hate men?" But anyway not to worry, they'll calm down when they settle down and have kids, thank you all.

That assertion about how young folk prefer an egalitarian office and an authoritarian home—

Pierre Bourdieu, bitchez

Pierre Bourdieu could. Or at least he could explain it.

Shorter David Brooks, "Getting Radical About Inequality", New York Times, July 18 2017:

Recently I took a friend with no more than a high school diploma to her name to listen to some music. Insensitively, I brought her to a well-known conservatory, where one of the faculty members was presenting all of the first book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier on the harpsichord. Suddenly I saw her face go dark and panicky as she looked at the program and its unfamiliar words like "prelude", "fugue", and "C major". Quickly, I asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and with a fearful gesture she assented and we went to the Pops, where they played Strauss's Beautiful Blue Danube. 

Well, not really. He doesn't refer directly to last week's "How We Are Ruining America With Our Filthy Elitist Capicollo Sandwiches" at all, in fact; but it's carrying on the same argument, about how people like him use a set of cultural signifiers to shut out the mob from their councils and amusements and he feels bad about it, I guess, but at least that proves there's no need to redistribute the money, we just have to redistribute the Italian delis.

Only in a different key, you see, appealing to the late, (sort of) cultural-Marxian sociologist Pierre Bourdieu ("I’m not in the habit of recommending left-wing French intellectuals, but..."), who, believe it or not, kids, turns out to think exactly like Brooks! I mean, except for the Marxian part:

Let them eat tacos

Sweet potato, sage, and fried egg tacos, via Serious Eats.

Shorter David Brooks, "How We Are Ruining America", New York Times, July 11 2017:

So I'm deeply concerned about how the college-educated class has arranged things so that their children retain their privileged status right from infancy, where their women have jobs that make it easier for them to breastfeed their babies.

Hahaha no I'm not, but (paragraph 6) Richard Reeves is, as his recent book Dream Hoarders explains: structural factors beginning with the municipal zoning that keeps the well-off segregated in the pleasant parts of Portland and San Francisco where the good schools and jobs are, and college admissions criteria that favor their kids.

Annals of Derp: Brooks Stabs at an Answer, Answer Fights Back

The new Brooks backyard.

Happy Independence Day! Here's former New York Times columnist David Brooks to celebrate by swallowing 50 hot dogs' worth of American history in ten minutes, without once mentioning any of the things we traditionally think about on the Fourth of July, like self-evident truths, or letting facts be submitted to a candid world, or fireworks.  Instead he wants to know, "What's the Matter with Republicans?", in the context of the fact that as Trump and the Republican Party work to take away benefits from the American working class, Trump's base of 40% or so remains faithful to him and Republican candidates win special elections in Kansas, Montana, Georgia, and South Carolina:

What’s going on? Why do working-class conservatives seem to vote so often against their own economic interests?

Let's see, how can we think about this question without addressing any of the discussion that has taken place since Thomas Frank asked it 13 years ago? I know! Put it down to the good old frontier ethos!

Maybe there's a plural working class

Most of them would already be voting Democratic, of course, but maybe not all.

Ziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929, via Gegensmith.

Hate to keep picking at the scab of the 2016 election, but there's some really compelling new data out that isn't getting interpreted, I think, as usefully as it could be, in a survey for the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group that was briefly reported on NPR yesterday morning.

The big general thing they found, in a YouGov poll taken in the weeks just after the election, with a sample of voters they had studied just after the 2012 election, was about the nature of the Trump electorate, which was that—surprise!—it was completely incoherent, dividing into five categories that had pretty much nothing in common with each other other than their disapproval of Hillary Clinton:

Correction

Image via Hora de Aventura.

Early in November, I was very startled by some research reported in a paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton find that as mortality rates have generally been dropping all over the US there is one group where they have been going up rather steeply between 1998 and 2013, that being undereducated non-Hispanic white people (high school diploma or less) between 30 and 64, from causes dominated by suicide, liver cirrhosis, and drug overdose.

Some new work is putting a somewhat new reading on the numbers, I learn from Katie Surrence over at LGM, and I also find that I made an appalling error myself in my post back then, so I have to correct that.

My error was to say that it was white non-Hispanic men whose death rates were rising, which is not what that report said. I unconsciously made it up, I guess out of the belief that suicide and intoxicants are typically guy deaths, but the fact is there was no gender breakdown at all in the Case and Deaton study.

And in fact in the new treatment by Andrew Gelman and Jonathan Auerbach, adjusted for age groups and including gender breakdown, it turns out the people whose mortality rates are rising are non-Hispanic white women, ages 45 to 54, mostly in the South but to some extent also in the Midwest. (The rates for non-Hispanic white men in the South were rising pretty sharply from 2000 through 2008, but have declined since then.)

What it means I don't really know, but it does mean my Beavis and Butt-head scenario isn't exactly right, so let the record be revised accordingly.