David Brooks, in his column today, writes: “The standard thing these days is for Americans to scold each other for our profligacy, to urge fiscal Puritanism. But it’s not clear Americans have ever really been self-disciplined.”
That sort of phrasing suggests that there’s something wrong with “the standard thing.” Which is a bit odd, because over the past year or so one of the most prominent proponents of a return to America’s forsaken “fiscal Puritanism” has been… David Brooks.
Google “David Brooks debt,” and the first thing you’ll find is his column of June 11, 2008 (all dates from the print edition):
The people who created this country built a moral structure around money. The Puritan legacy inhibited luxury and self-indulgence…
The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal.
Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded.
Next up is his column of July 23, 2008:
America once had a culture of thrift. But over the past decades, that unspoken code has been silently eroded…
And now the reckoning has come. The turn in the market punishes many of those seduced by financial temptations. (Sometimes capitalism undermines the Puritan virtues, but sometimes it reinforces them.)
And then there’s his entry from September 29 of this year:
The Protestant establishment had many failings, but it was not decadent. The old WASPs were notoriously cheap, sent their children to Spartan boarding schools, and insisted on financial sobriety.
Over the past few years, however, there clearly has been an erosion in the country’s financial values…
A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.
If the meme Brooks identifies today is the “standard thing,” it’s in part because he has helped make it so.
I would think his myth making about the American frontier with the Chinese slaves and the black lunged miners forced to shop at mine stores might be an issue. It's obvious he's never heard of The People's History of the United States nor realized that much of the time it was not hard work alone that brought the promise of future prosperity, it was the struggle for a just and free world that elevated the human condition.
Nor does he understand that the Chinese people and economy has shifted towards consumption that he scolds in America and away from equality. "Make money" has been a political directive since the 1980's and inequality has risen sharply as 1/4 of the population rises far above the bottom 3/4's. It'd be nice if he could talk to those 3/4ths.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/in-depth/china-shuts-shop/story-e6frgah6-1111119001153
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5638893.ece
Hundreds, if not thousands, of “mass incidents” or outbursts of discontent shake China every day with most too small or too local ever to be reported in the media. The official number soared to 87,000 - big and small - in 2005 but fell the following year. Since then the police have not released statistics. However, state-run media have reported taxi driver strikes, protests by laid-off workers who did not receive their salaries and sporadic rioting in recent weeks as export-driven growth has slowed and companies have shed staff.
The security chief told officials that it was their responsibility to prevent unrest by swiftly resolving disputes over unpaid wages or bankruptcies. “Limit as much as possible the potential for mass incidents, try as hard as possible to solve problems at the grassroots and nip them in the bud and try as hard as possible to solve problems when and where they happen in the first instance.”
It's not as idyllic and "future oriented" as Brooks makes it out to be. People want to survive, they want to survive better, and they are struggling for it.
Plus it seems kind of silly that Brooks is complaining about "mounting federal debt that creates present indulgence and future hardship" while moaning about how it's harder than it should be to "to pass anything easy — tax cuts" for instance. You can't complain about the size of deficits if you're doing your damnedest to reduce the federal government's means to pay its bill.
And now you see why I read Krugman instead of Brooks, because this kind of work is garbage. With Krugman one can learn something. With this guy, one can learn the art of American navel gazing.
Can the New York Times not outsource its op eds to project syndicate?
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 18 Nov 2009 at 12:57 PM
Some on-the-ground informative work on China from the npr planet money folks.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/11/podcast_2.html
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 19 Nov 2009 at 12:56 AM