You don’t need to look to me to do more bashing of yet another evidence-free policy argument from David Brooks. You have, of course, Krugman debating him (albeit not by name), and thank god for him, and you can also see Dean Baker, Mike Konczal, Alex Pareene, Charles Pierce, and the Mahablog, each of whom has actual data, facts, and information to combat his Grand Narrative of America’s Insufficient Virtue. I just want to add one little thing.
As befits his constant claim that we were once noble, but are now fallen, Brooks says, ““The United States, once the world’s educational leader, is falling back in the pack.” That we were once number one in education is a beloved opinion of education “reformers” and those like Brooks who yearn for a prelapsarian age when we all pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps. The problem is that there isn’t any evidence that it’s true. As a very useful Brookings Institute report from 2010 shows (h/t Liz Dwyer), we weren’t ever number one. Dwyer looks at the example of math: in 1964, back when our economy was go-go, the space race was swinging, we hadn’t yet been chased out of Saigon, and the world looked a lot more like David Brooks wants it to look, American students ranked 11th in math. Out of 12.
This past semester I was working with a colleague on a proposal for this year’s MWERA conference that never came together. We were looking for a citation for the claim that American used to be number one, and more, for context on what exactly that means. She and I found ourselves in one of those research spirals that will be familiar to some of you– people make the claim, but don’t really back it up with evidence, or they’ll cite someone, and you look up the citation and that person either just asserts it as true or cites someone else who asserts it as true. The best we came up with are metrics that are obviously subject to multiple confounding variables, like percentage of citizens with a college degree. I would suggest two things: one, America’s perceived educational advantage in the past is at least not empirically demonstrable in a rigorous way, and two, that inter-national education metrics are highly susceptible to bias and complication with other demographic and sociological factors. Our time is probably better invested in examining intranational differences were more valid comparisons can be drawn.
Of course, if you remove the “we aren’t giving kids the education we used to” plank, the whole structural unemployment treehouse is a lot shakier.
Villago Delenda Est
I have said this before, and I’ll no doubt say it again.
The world will be a better place when David Brooks’ broken body is found in a Manhattan alley.
Just Some Fuckhead
America is like me when I was younger and could outfuck, outfight and outrun anyone. The legend of me is pretty fucking awesome.
Brachiator
I kinda figured that this would be more likely.
Brooks must be taking lying lessons from Mitt Romney.
BGinCHI
This is similar to the meme that “the education system in this country is broken.” You hear it so often you assume it to be true, until you stop and ask, “How?” In what way is it broken, or different, or in trouble?
Certainly there are more challenges. But what you can say for certain is that funding has changed dramatically, at nearly all levels.
And for higher ed, that’s the whole story pretty much. University education costs more because state budgets have been giving less and less every year to higher ed as a percentage of their budgets. Thus tuition raises to cover the difference.
r€nato
I’ve frequently heard it said that India turns out a lot more engineers than America does.
What often gets left out of that argument is that you can call yourself an engineer in India with the equivalent of what we would call an associate’s degree.
beltane
Well, in exchange for peddling lies on behalf of the parasitic 1%ers, David Brooks gets to live in a multi-million dollar home with 4 1/2 bathrooms. The more he lies the nicer his house. Don’t expect him to stop lying any time soon.
Turgidson
What I think is funny about this (I agree with your premise though) is that America looked like this after 30+ years of nearly uninterrupted liberal/Democratic governance, with some moderate Ike sprinkled in.
I’ve always found it amusing that the world the conservatives seem to want to go back to is one that was shaped overwhelmingly by the kind of liberal policy decisions they claim to abhor in the same breath.
(granted, Paul Ryan and his acolytes want to return us to the Gilded Age, not the 1950s-early 60s)
r€nato
@Villago Delenda Est: meh. I can think of quite a few others whom I’d rather see there than him. I’d just like to see Bobo lose his job and be forgotten, unable to earn honoraria nor sell a book. People point and laugh at him when he goes out in public.
If there’s a pundit or columnist who truly deserves the treatment you suggest, I’d say it’s Thomas Friedman. He’s not only completely fucking wrong about just about everything as well as possessed of a godawful writing shtick; he’s provided the intellectual justification for policies that have gotten a lot of innocents killed and wasted literally trillions of dollars.
ornery_curmudgeon
Brooks says, ““The United States, once the world’s educational leader, is falling back in the pack.”
Maybe another rebuttal could be that ideological attacks on education and the privatization of public schools and universities is failing and is in fact hurting our nation.
Indeed, this problem calls for a reinvestment in our education and renewed focus on academic achievement! America’s best days are ahead of us, if we invest in the future.
Turgidson
@r€nato:
Yeah, sure, but suck.on.this.
Cluttered Mind
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that teachers are woefully underpaid compared to their counterparts in almost every other developed country, most public schools are severely underfunded, and teacher’s unions are the go-to whipping boy whenever anyone has a problem with education in general. I wonder how many school supplies or new computers a school district could buy for the price of one Predator drone.
schrodinger's cat
No hattip? I mentioned Brooks column last night and again this morning. Brooks is really shilling Raghuram Rajan’s idea. Some of the unemployment is always going to structural and frictional but the massive increase in unemployment numbers that we have since this financial crisis has unfolded is due to the shrinking of aggregate demand. Don’t tell me that 3% or more of the workforce suddenly lost the skills they had.
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator:
No actually, Brooks is the one giving the lessons. He is a far better liar than Romney, see the number of totebaggers who believe that he is a sensible, reasonable conservative.
SatanicPanic
@BGinCHI: It’s broken because the private sector isn’t making money off it. Really though the curriculum is just too much reading and math at the expense of everything else. Overall I wouldn’t call our public schools terrible though. Our problem is that people are saying “we used to be prosperous, what happened?” and trying to pin the blame on schools, avoiding the fact that so many more people are getting an education than were back when the middle class had it best. What changed? Could it be that our manufacturing sector is disappearing? Could it be that other countries built better safety nets so people could innovate?
rlrr
@schrodinger’s cat:
30 years ago there may have been sensible, reasonable conservatives, but since Reagan, Gingrich, etc. the sensible, reasonable conservative is pretty much extinct.
rlrr
@SatanicPanic:
There are plenty of public schools that are excellent. The problem is the public schools that are bad tend to be really bad.
r€nato
@rlrr: They do exist, they just have little influence within the GOP.
It’s kind of like how the Christian brand has been tarnished by the ones we hear from most… the molesting priests and their enabling bishops, the televangelists and extreme right god-botherers.
kay
One of the things I like about my father is he has always said this is bullshit.
“I was there. We were dumb then, too.”
He also says the greatest generation weren’t so great.
MANY were subpar. LOTS, as he remembers it.
BGinCHI
Somebody please take the cost of the Iraq war and tell us what we could have done with those dollars if we had spent them on k-12 + higher ed. Then add 1/3 of the yearly Defense budget that could be spent maintaining those gains.
Thanks
TerroristsRepublicans.schrodinger's cat
This op-ed is riddled with errors. Brooks calls the latest downturn cyclical, when it is clearly one of the worst we have faced since the Great Depression. Also the theory of Business Cycles is not in any way a liberal idea.
Sifu Snafu
@Just Some Fuckhead: Our legends are quite similar, though I don’t know if I could outrun anyone…because I ran from noone.
driftglass
Anti-Stimulus David Brooks 2.0 continues the merciless beatdown of Pro-Stimulus David Brooks 1.0:
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2012/05/while-mining-mighty-slopes-of-internet.html
Eric k
@Turgidson:
Yeah, ince we know they don’t like all the government programs,, tax rates and so on from the 50s what is about that era that they pine for, what could it possibly be…
gaz
Why doesn’t Bobo just go on a spirit quest to find our misplaced virtue? If the stupid fucker would just put his money where his mouth is, he’d be otherwise occupied and we could happily forget he exists.
ETA: I’ll even point him in the right direction. Our lost virtue can probably be found somewhere in the vicinity of the Applebee’s salad bar.
Cluttered Mind
@kay: That’s not hard to believe, just look at the average tea party rally.
r€nato
@BGinCHI: We could have easily paid for a lavish public health care system. No American ever again would have had to fear medical bankruptcy. Millions would have been freed from jobs they loathe, merely because they need the health insurance, and would have had the freedom to pursue making a living doing what they love.
But that would be SOSHULISM.
So we had to go spend that money instead on a needless war that drowned the nation in debt (conveniently blamed on the black Democratic president) and got hundreds of thousands killed.
Forum Transmitted Disease
Until the 20th century, America was a backwater, full of ignorant hicks, grifters, and religious maniacs.
Once we relocated all of those folks to an uninhabitable part of the country known as the “Deep South”, it became the world’s largest economic power.
We then sent all the jobs away, the idiot brigade was allowed to flee the South and resettle the nation, and the America of the 21st century will be restored to the glories of the 19th.
maya
IIRC, the Beave always brought home straight ‘A’s in Arithmetic. The liberal, Eddie Haskel, was a different story.
grandpa john
@Brachiator: Brooks long ago polished the art of lying. Actually I would expect that he is the teacher and Mitt the student
BGinCHI
@maya: Which one did the young Karl Rove play?
Forum Transmitted Disease
@r€nato: Surely you don’t think that McCain was run in ’08 because he was the best candidate out there, do you?
I’ve watched this twice in my life now. Carter was allowed in to clean up the Vietnam debt. Obama was run against an unelectable senile nutjob so that he’d clean up Bush’s mess. Dems clean it up, Republicans take the credit, get in and the stealing starts all over again.
Jay in Oregon
I see David Brooks is hard at work trying to boost his Tumbrl score.
( No, that’s not a typo.)
Marc
It was the case that we had a much larger fraction of college-educated people than the first world norm, and this is no longer true. In this sense (only) I think the claim is defensible. Of course, the reason is that we decided that tax cuts and prisons were more important than universities.
kindness
Speaking of the Krugman/Brooks pissing contest the one who I can not understand regarding these two is Kevin Drum. Kevin says he’s 2/3 with Krugman and 1/3 with Brooks. He then gives no reasons as to why he is 1/3 with Brooks other than a gut feeling that Krugman can’t be 100% correct.
While I may agree that Krugman isn’t 100% correct, that doesn’t excuse Kevin fluffing Brooks for any percent. I mean, Brooks lives in a fantasy world where people act like he wants, which has no direct coorelation or linkage to the world we all live in. Why Kevin, why? Why must you pander to the Serious Village Elders? Is there a free set of Tupperware in it for you? A Country Club invite? Why would you throw pearls at swine like David Brooks? I just don’t understand these people.
schrodinger's cat
@Marc: Actually we decided that targeting inflation was more important than job creation. This is the culmination of the 30 years experiment that began with Reagan (and Thatcher).
Ed Drone
@Just Some Fuckhead:
The older we are, the better we used to be.
Ed
Maude
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
That’s what Mitt is trying to do. He wants to blame Obama. Today it’s the economy is going sideways. Yeah, well with Bush it went sky diving.
Comrade Dread
We aren’t giving kids the education we need to.
My first reform would be mandatory economics classes from K – 12, with an emphasis on finance, personal finance, how compound interest works, etc. Let the kids know just how badly Wall St. is screwing them and how the banks are going to screw them if they’re not prepared.
Second, replace Social Studies with PolSci. Not the rah rah Pollyanish crap I got, but an actual blinders off critique of how the sausage is made in the Capitol. Let kids know how f***ed up and corrupt the political system is.
Lastly, and closely related to the other two, introduce K – 12 classes in logic and critical thinking.
I’m aware that would detract from the all important national testing regime, but in a generation, I think we’d be better off with a class of very informed and active citizens.
General Stuck
At this stage of the game, argument over economic theory in the context of the possible as in applied policy prescriptions, is entirely moot. Other than mud slinging on the internet. We have entered the neutral zone where clowns from outer space control the vertical and horizontal of your minds eye. For all intensive purposes, the watchwords should read
Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice.
danimal
I’m pretty smart when I’m not making inane comments on blog posts, but I’ll be damned if I can keep up with the stuff my kids have to learn in public schools at ever younger ages.
There is no way that the prominent critics of American education have actual kids attending actual public schools. They are flat-out misrepresenting the state of public education. As always, follow the money, it leaves a trail of highly concentrated, root-burning pure bullshit along the path.
Zach
We aren’t giving most kids the education we used to when it comes to equality of education on a statewide basis. Local control of education by funding it through property taxes rather than out of state revenue has been abused to create our current state of de facto segregation. I attended one of the best public schools in the country. Ten miles away schools in the same state couldn’t afford new books. Twenty miles away schools over the state line weren’t even accredited. The obvious elephant in the room here (which also hits most of Brooks’ arguments and even some of Krugman’s 50s/60s nostalgia) is that primary education was hardly all that equal in that era, either. However, inequalities today are driven by different forces that are totally preventable in ways that are a lot easier than, say, ending institutionalized segregation.
Local funding of education is a critical factor driving accelerating inequality and real estate bubbles. I can’t imagine an argument where its benefits (creating desirable communities proximal to good public schools) outweigh the drawbacks of inefficiently allocating education spending, destroying rural communities, etc. Somehow I’m doubting that you’ll see Brooks & Co. argue for less local control of schools, though, unless you’re talking about state takeover of an urban district.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Clearly, he’s too young to remember New Math.