You needn't bother reading today's column by Mr. David Brooks. It's typical New York Times-underwritten dreck:
The Bernie Sanders FallacyPathological Both Siderism;
No, Virginia, there is no class war.
The G.O.P. has been swallowed by Trump’s culture war, and many Democrats seem to be rushing to join Sanders’s class war.With a side order of fawning praise for the 1%:
As Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute puts it, capitalism is doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s rewarding productivity with pay, and some people and companies are more productive. If you improve worker bargaining power, that may help a bit, but over the long run people can’t earn what they don’t produce.Cracks me up that the media's staunchest defenders of capitalism would all vanish in a puff of stink if they actually had to compete in am open market based on their own talent and productivity.
Anyway, ignore all that and turn your attention to one of Mr. Brooks' hoariest stories of his childhood:
And 50 years later, he's still running.I grew up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s to somewhat left-wing parents. When I was five, they took me to a Be-In, where hippies would just go to be. One of the things they did at the Be-In was set a garbage can on fire and throw their wallets into it to demonstrate their liberation from money and material things. I saw a $5 bill on fire in the garbage can, so I broke from the crowd, reached into the fire, grabbed the money, and ran away.
Update: Dr. Krugman points out that Brooks gets both the math and the history of this issue completely wrong. As if that mattered:
When it only takes one statistic to blow your column to flinders, then obviously your column isn't about about statistics at all. br />My colleague David Brooks asserts that rising inequality is about productivity, not power. People used to say that a lot, but the preponderance of economic analysis has moved the other way, for good reasons 1/ https://t.co/cCuA1G4u86— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 17, 2020
david brooks is the undisputed champion of writing entire columns that can be destroyed with one statistic:— mike casca (@cascamike) January 17, 2020
in the 1950s, ceos made *20* times more than their median employees. last year, the average s&p 500 CEO made *287* times their median worker pay.https://t.co/IoHMUHcI6o
It's about nothing more or less than whispering one more flattering fairy tales into the ears of the oligarchs who underwrite your career:
I know that capitalism is broken because David Brooks is paid more than any writer I know despite being unable to read a chart pic.twitter.com/5PZ0YXJ9Cs— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) January 17, 2020
Behold, a Tip Jar!
7 comments:
Some are inspired, some run away, and some go mad. (And some just see a dodgy CSO effect.)
OK this has absolutely infuriated me. Anyone who works in a medium or large sized business in the last decade has become all to familiar with these words come salary review time
'2% company wide pay increase' i.e. inflation only, no actual pay increase
So anyone who knows anyone who works in a normal job knows full well that pay increases are not happening
Now Brooks who claims to do pages of study per paragraph would surely also know that productivity improvements have continued to happen in line with, or slightly above the historical average over the last decade. In fact the thing that has broken in the economy the last decade is that post-GFC the link between productivity improvements & pay increases has been broken. For all the greed and failures of the corporate world, even through the Reagan years the link between productivity improvements and pay increases remained.
It is only after the GFC when bosses realised that workers would just cop no real pay rises and didn't have the bargaining power to do anything about it that this historic link was finally broken
Sorry, I know I wrote this in kind a rant-like style, but the lack of wage increases is an issue I both care deeply about and one of the few things I know a fair bit about because I have been looking into it for the last 5 years. Its scandalous that this clown could write such a paragraph.... RANT OVER... and sorry
That David Brooks quote of Michael Strain is the funniest thing I have read all year. It's funny 'cause its complete bullshit to anyone who has ever worked for a living under any form of 'productivity' requirement. Just last week, Boeing rewarded its CEO with 80 million - a Down payment on a controlling interest in a baseball team and a newspaper someplace warm - or 4 permanently endowed Route 66 writers colonies - for reinventing the Ford Pinto and the Death toll to match.
Since 1973, according to our very own AEI, productivity per worker hour has increased by over 75%. Which means in small words carefully put together: If granddad owned a machineshop, and called it Sanford and Sons - and both Dad and Uncle John worked there in 1973, today, Uncle John has taken it over, and his son Preston work there - now it is just Sanford and Son. Cousin JTO has to work somewhere else - because Uncle and Cousin now do the work that JTO WOULD have done because 'Productivity gains.' That is, if everyone hasn't been productivitied and automated right the hell out of business.
Wages, however, according to this very same AEI, have only risen by 9%. THIS means that while People bitch and moan about doing more With less, which we are, in fact, all doing more (producing more) and getting less. FFS, the federal minimum wage for tipped workers is still $2.13. I had that job 30 years ago, and still had to work an hour just to pay for gas to get there.
And, People doing the hard work? The Teacher in SoDak who starts at about $25k a year - outside of the Pine Ridge Rez - or the average in Floriduh at $43k? These are the rewards for the important contributions they make? As compared to the nozzlejobs at Boeing, at Enron and BP; Wells Fargo, JPMorgan - who never saw a bubble they wouldn't put Your house in?
Since 1973, the DJI has gone from 5,000 to almost 30,000 - almost half of those gains (ok, about a Third) have come in the last 6 years - and DJT and his Senate get all the credit for it. Of course, it means nothing when household debt is now at an all time high of what $15 trillion?
You don't have to read much Picketty to understand that Our masters of the universe demand Productivity increases, wage stagnation and a Stock market that doubles every 9 years - and whomever will keep giving them that will receive their full, multipronged support - from thinktanks, university presses, News coverage and opinion pages - and astroturf organizations.
What could have stood in the way? Democracy. What did we do instead?
I'd like to say that it has to get worse before it gets better. I am increasingly convinced that it is just going to get worse. We will look on these as the good ol' days of comite and Equity.
In solidarity,
JTO
Mr driftgalss, you make me work at reading your columns. Nearly every time I have to look up one or more definitions. This one was flinders. Thank you.
I think Trump ought to add DFB to his collection of WH spokes toys and speech writers . Sure, Trump will never have them speak out for him. Probably never read through a written speech.
But adding DFB to his pig pen of piglet wordsmiths. He could walk Putin and others through his genius farm and show off his collection of tight wing media and boast in competition who enslaves the most and best.
david brooks'schtick is the cooler. the nice monster...the radical right thinks he's a centrist or a bit left for offering you a cigarette before he kills you..
the rich guys that write the checks don't care how common sense, reason, fairness and compassion die; they just want it dead.
"I saw a $5 bill on fire in the garbage can, so I broke from the crowd, reached into the fire, grabbed the money, and ran away."
That's David Brooks' productivity right there. The entirety of his value system. He and the rest of the professional Republican pundit class. Grabbing money from the dumpster fire that is our contemporary politics and running away. He unwittingly told the truth about the MO to the whole of his sordid 'career'.
Snatching money from trash fires, and fleeing like a coward.
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