So David Brooks put out a column this morning, asserting that America is going to be just fine. Great news!
And then I read it.
This produces a lot of dynamism. As Stephen J. Rose points out in his book "Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger From the Financial Crisis," the number of Americans earning between $35,000 and $70,000 declined by 12 percent between 1980 and 2008. But that’s largely because the number earning over $105,000 increased by 14 percent.
facepalm
Isn't Brooks supposed to be one of the "elite", or something? How did he pull that off without basic math skills?
David Brooks must know that he's blowing off basic math here. He has to know that, or there's no way he would be a Serious Columnist for Our Paper of Record. Right?
Or maybe he's really just that stupid, because you can find an article in his own newspaper from a few years ago that puts the exact same phenomenon in context:
While incomes have been on the rise since 2002, the average income in 2005 was $55,238, still nearly 1 percent less than the $55,714 in 2000, after adjusting for inflation, analysis of new tax statistics show.
The growth in total incomes was concentrated among those making more than $1 million. The number of such taxpayers grew by more than 26 percent, to 303,817 in 2005, from 239,685 in 2000.
These individuals, who constitute less than a quarter of 1 percent of all taxpayers, reaped almost 47 percent of the total income gains in 2005, compared with 2000.
Nearly half of Americans reported incomes of less than $30,000, and two-thirds make less than $50,000.
The number of taxpayers making more than $100,000 grew by nearly 3.4 million and accounted for more than two-thirds of the growth in the number of returns filed in 2005 compared with those in 2000.
That's the thing about percentages. 12% of the number of people making between $30,000 and $70,000 is enormous. 14% of the people who make over $100,000 does not even come close to making up for the 12% of people who no longer fall in to the $30,000-$70,000 range. And David Brooks must know this.
Or maybe he doesn't, because he goes on to lay more mind-numbing stupidity on us:
As the world gets richer, demand will rise for the sorts of products Americans are great at providing — emotional experiences. Educated Americans grow up in a culture of moral materialism; they have their sensibilities honed by complicated shows like "The Sopranos," "The Wire" and "Mad Men," and they go on to create companies like Apple, with identities coated in moral and psychological meaning, which affluent consumers crave.
Funny thing about Apple- they don't make anything. That's all done by manufacturers in China. Apple is mostly a marketing company. Who will be doing the actual making of things in the future?
David Brooks doesn't seem to care. And why would he? From his lofty perch at the New York Times, he doesn't need to. That's for lesser people to worry about.
And implicit in what David Brooks is saying is that people in developing countries are too stupid to ever be better than us at marketing. And that's what we're banking on for the next American Renaissance.
David Brooks is saying that following the collapse of the finance(read: vapor)-based economy, the Next Big Thing is producing "emotional experiences".
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
The good news is that there's a generation in waiting ready to prove David Brooks wrong. We don't watch television, we don't care about conspicuous consumption, and we've grown up in a world where many of us are acutely aware of the problem of a society led around by people like David Brooks, who have in all likelihood never worried about their survival.
I'm optimistic because I'm in journalism school, watching an entire industry collapse under the weight of people like David Brooks. An industry that is more concerned with "emotional experience" than the yeoman's work of actual fact-based journalism.
I'm optimistic because I'm uniquely positioned to help it die faster, so that we might get back to fundamentals instead of allowing people like David Brooks to base their livelihood on a few hundred words of pure bullshit ever week.
I could be wrong, but for reasons exactly opposite of David Brooks', the future looks very bright to me.
Cross-posted at What's the dang fuss be?