I always knew David Brooks was an asshole ....

Brooks was a former marijuana smoker, but quit after a traumatic event during English class. [42]

A basic rule of happiness is don’t buy things; buy experiences.

#livelikesteve

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/17/opinion/brooks-the-inequality-problem.html?ref=davidbrooks&_r=2

Asshole

David Brooks columns are just like blah blah blah to me at this point

"hi i'm david brooks and i've thought a lot about poverty in the last couple of hours"

Like as soon as someone says "because of the 'Superstar Effect'" is when I start stuffing them into the trunk of my car while they are still talking

"look, it's just the way things are"

knew this was gonna come down to the fraying social fabric

jobs for young men

If you have a primitive zero-sum mentality then you assume growing affluence for the rich must somehow be causing the immobility of the poor, but, in reality, the two sets of problems are different, and it does no good to lump them together and call them “inequality.”

taking this seriously for a sec, it DOES make sense to lump them together. doing anything to improve the position of the poor requires breaking the political power of the rich, since their party (or parties, hi morbs!) stands in the way.

assortative mating

superstar effect mating wink wink

these two aspects of the economy are totally unrelated why cant you seeeeee it is because ur so frayed out

I wonder how that's going for Brooks post-divorce, the assortative mating thing

lot of assorted mating around my way dave, come hang out. be cool tho, people smoke.

"fraying of the social fabric" oh noes slatternly teen wenches are allowing the fabric to fray by having babies!

(*teens are having fewer babies than they have in forty years)

why let the facts get in the way of airy and heavily loaded generalisations about "social fabric"?

theres no reason to when you think about it and are smart and reasonable and a horrific nerd

why can't you smart-asses just drop the partisanship and start from where we all agree: conservative talking points

"The incomes of the top 5% have soared even as wages for 75% of Americans have been flat for 30 years, even though their productivity has doubled; and there's a smaller and smaller tax base as those same 5% fight for lower and lower taxes and move their money out of the US, and therefore less money for things like decent schools, but I'm sure none of these things are connected and its deadbeat dads all the way down."

David Brooks' Social Fabric Softener: All the comforts of knowing your affluence is well-earned, none of the static cling of grasping, guilt-inducing poor people.

tbf, brooks is otm that lack of sittlichtkeit is primary challenge of contemporary society

nb i haven't read most recently posted op-ed but 'social fabric' is important so

just read it, he's still an asshole

"The income inequality debate is confusing matters more than clarifying them, and it is leading us off in unhelpful directions."

plz ban word "unhelpful"

I'm guessing you're coming at the idea of "social fabric" from a very different and much more legit place than Brooks

David Brooks' Social Fabric Softener: All the comforts of knowing your affluence is well-earned, none of the static cling of grasping, guilt-inducing poor people.

― something of an astrological coup (tipsy mothra), Friday, January 17, 2014 11:34 AM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol a+

doing anything to improve the position of the poor requires breaking the political power of the rich, since their party (or parties, hi morbs!) stands in the way.

― goole, Friday, January 17, 2014 4:13 PM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what are you some kind of class warrior

tbf, brooks is otm that lack of sittlichtkeit is primary challenge of contemporary society

― Mordy , Friday, January 17, 2014 11:35 AM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nb i haven't read most recently posted op-ed but 'social fabric' is important so

― Mordy , Friday, January 17, 2014 11:35 AM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for sure the thing he just cant see tho is its the mega rich who are tearing us apart

there are obvs also all sorts of complex cause and effect questions re moral and structural problems

ya i mean brooks' thing is just to point that out and leave it at that tho, which is as one might say unhelpful

his thing is to point it out and then be all destitute teen moms really need to get their act together *pinky sips crystal on g7 en route to ideas conference*

there's no way even the pro-poor ideas bandied around by the conservatives who even give a fuck (your douthat/salam types) such as a more kid- and marriage- friendly tax credit scheme to more 'radical' things like a wage subsidy or a more generous EITC to even more crazy radical changes like maybe cooling it a little on america's hideous gulag state of mass incarceration will get ZERO look from republicans who hold office

(i take that back somewhat -- i think it will be religious conservatives who tame the carceral state, frankly, if anybody ever does. nixon in china and all that)

new incarcerations are at a 20 year low fwiw

obvs so much more to be done

why hasn't Woody Allen created a David Brooks character in a movie

he could've dated Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine

new incarcerations are at a 20 year low fwiw

― lag∞n, Friday, January 17, 2014 11:15 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pretty tall mountain to walk down from

but yeah, maybe kevin drum is right and it was lead making ppl crazy for 30-40 years

LBJ plan to make the right crazier iirc

dean baker's takedown of this feudalistic bullshit is otm

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-primitive-defense-of-the-rich

As it happens, there's also this in the Economist today:

Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has displaced many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispensed with, just as the weavers were.

. . . Over the past three decades, labour’s share of output has shrunk globally from 64% to 59%. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the top 1% in America has risen from around 9% in the 1970s to 22% today. Unemployment is at alarming levels in much of the rich world, and not just for cyclical reasons. In 2000, 65% of working-age Americans were in work; since then the proportion has fallen, during good years as well as bad, to the current level of 59%.

But I'm sure these phenomena are entirely unrelated and it's all teen moms and church attendance.

but yeah, maybe kevin drum is right and it was lead making ppl crazy for 30-40 years

― goole, Friday, January 17, 2014 12:18 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i love this theory btw and i think its really true, also imo the drop in crime will have major positive effects beyond just like having less crime, i dont think legal weed would be happening if we had early 90s level crime, theres increased urbanization which is good for a bunch of reasons, obvs theres no way to start to roll back our horrible police state if w high crime rates etc

love this phrase: Fans of arithmetic everywhere

dean baker's takedown of this feudalistic bullshit is otm

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-primitive-defense-of-the-rich

― reggie (qualmsley), Friday, January 17, 2014 5:22 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ty for this

ruling class pretty much just keeps inventing new terms for the same old class justifications

theyre quite industrious in their own way

it all translates into "if you don't come from money, go fuck yourself"

krugs responds to his colleague

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/17/why-we-talk-about-the-one-percent/?_php=true&_type=blogs&module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs®ion=Body&_r=0

wow the times editorial team is acknowledging each other now i thought that was a no no

they do it in their blog posts sometimes but you rarely see it in print