In Saturday’s edition of the NY Times, Arthur C. Brooks, the President of the American Enterprise Institute, had a rather odd op-ed piece, which is a good sample of how various spokespersons, and he is surely one, for AEI and the Kock brothers attempt to mislead the American public. So it’s worth looking at this piece in detail from that perspective.
AEI is funded by the CEO’s of some of the largest corporations in the US, often by using their companies’ money. Big corporate CEO’s fill the Board. Dick Chaney brings his special brand of hostility to the 99%. And two of the biggest funders of AEI are the Kohn brothers, who also fund a linked group of supposedly independent “think tanks” and organizations, including, but certainly not limited to, the Cato Institute and ALEC, one of big business’ most effective influence peddlers.
Along with 5 or 6 other very wealthy conservatives, the Koch brothers fund these organization so they can undermine the values of the country by having a steady stream of seemingly independent and unrelated people make variously untruthful statements about various topic such as education and economics which interest the Koch brothers. These various authors, like Mr. Brooks, all claim that they are just writing on their own and that the organizations which pay them and the Koch brothers and the big business CEO’s who fund the organizations which pay them have no influence on what they say. Of course, in reality, they would lose their cushy jobs if they said anything that the Koch brothers disagreed with, so anything they say should be viewed the same way one views statements by tobacco company scientists about how smoking won’t hurt you.
With that background, let’s look at Mr. Brooks’ op-ed piece. He wants the reader to think the column is a sort of whimsical riff on the value of moving around. So does the Times headline writer. However, by the time the reader gets to the end of the piece, it becomes clear that what Mr. Brooks is selling for his CEO employers is the theory that the massive income and wealth inequality, which he patronizingly describes as a “national funk” and “the forlorn stagnation of people at the bottom of the American economy”, is merely the result of the fact that workers refuse to move to places where there are better jobs. This is just another version of the 1%’s insistence on blaming the victims for the fact that they have successfully rigged the system, as Elizabeth Warren famously said, to make themselves richer and the rest of us poorer. So the point of this piece is not that Mr. Brooks can quote some cute poetry, but rather that we should all ignore Joseph. Stiglitz’ The Price of Inequality and numerous other writings by prominent economists and just stick with the conservative/Republican claim that any inequality in our country is the result of the fact that most people are stupid, lazy, etc. To which list we can now add: unwilling to move to better jobs.
Mr. Brooks tries to foist this theory on the reader by throwing out a series of mostly unrelated statements and observations which he hopes make his point as subtly as he can, since if he just stated his thesis, he would just draw a lot of laughs. So he quotes Walt Whitman. He suggests that he’s like Jack Kerouac, and the country would be better off if everyone were like him and Jack. (This has to be one of the very few times, if not the only time, anyone seriously suggested that the country would be better off if more of us lived our lives like Jack.) He quotes Alexis de Tocqueville to put the thought in the readers’ head that all would be well in the country if we all just embraced the change in our lives which the 1% continues to create.
While he tries to show how well read he is and how philosophical he is, when it gets down to facts, Mr. Brooks has the same problem with misusing them as virtually all Koch brothers’ spokespersons have. He says that Americans are “less geographically mobile today than at any point since 1948”, a statement that says less than it seems.
Why pick 1948 as the starting point for comparison? Mr. Brooks doesn’t tell us. It’s an odd year to cite as a comparison year. World War II effectively ended in August, 1945. By 1948, among other things, the troops had been demobilized, the baby boom had started and the Great Migration of African-Americans from the South to the North, which had been going on for almost 30 years, was starting to slow down as conditions began to improve some in the South and the availability of war-time production jobs for African-Americans in Northern factories was significantly declining. Since the country was entering a great period of middle class economic strength that would continue into the 1970’s, citing 1948 as the starting point of his decline of Americans moving pointlessly around the country like Jack Kerouac clearly disproves his theory that an economically strong middle class requires a lot of moving, as contrasted with other things.
Mr. Brooks mentions immigrants to this country, but the fact is that once they got here, they were quite inclined to remain in the areas they settled in initially, often for generations. He also quote Horace Greeley’s saying about “Go west young man”. The irony of this is that Greeley went east and made a fortune, unlike most of the young men he urged to go west and be farmers. It’s also ironic that Mr. Brooks doesn’t know this. As a practical matter, the West was not settled by people moving onto the frontier from all over the country. Mostly, the people who moved to the frontier were people who lived on relatively nearby settled land and who just jumped over the people who were right next to the frontier. After the transcontinental railroad was completed, immigrants were lured by misleading railroad pamphlets to settle on the land the government had given the railroad companies to pay for the building of the railroads, which would otherwise have been uneconomical. In general, young men did not go West, any more than they are going to Fargo, as Mr. Brooks suggests they should.
Mr. Brooks next conflates moving from a small home to a larger home or vice versa or moving to a better neighborhood with moving across state lines to a better job. Another indication of a man who cannot be trusted on the facts.
Next, Mr. Brooks moves on to the bizzare argument that unemployed Mississippians are responsible for their own problems because they don’t move to New Hampshire or North Dakota to get all the jobs available in those states for African-Americans from the poorest and worst educated state in the country. Seriously, Mr. Brooks? Which jobs are those? And to what welcoming African-American communities are they supposed to be moving? The irony of Mr. Brooks suggestion is that he seems unaware that the gas and oil boom in North Dakota is over and workers, which were mostly unaccompanied men, there are moving back home. That’s certainly true of the Naïve American men who left their families in the two poorest counties in America and moved to North Dakota to work in the oil and gas fields. Once again, Mr. Brooks is just making up stuff to say to support his unsupportable theory.
Mr. Brooks further observes that people don’t move (where is not clear; he seems to just want them to move) because “welfare is place based”, a “problem” he wants to fix. He doesn’t explain what he means by this, presumably because to even begin to explain the statement is to make clear it’s a baseless statement. In the first place, thanks to the Republican passed and Bill Clinton approved Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, welfare doesn’t last all that long, so people who might be held back from moving to a good job are hardly held back by the not so generous welfare benefits which have a time fuse. Also, one can apply for welfare benefits wherever one moves. Which raises the question of why Brooks is so concerned that people who are qualified for welfare benefits of some kind need to be able to move them elsewhere, if there are all these good jobs out there which would make the welfare benefits unnecessary.
Mr. Brooks suggests that to solve his invented problem that moving companies don’t have enough business, people should be discouraged from getting college degrees. This is a swell idea except for the fact that college graduates make a lot more money in their lifetime than non-college graduates. Perhaps Mr. Brooks can get his employers to instruct their human resources departments to avoid hiring college graduates as much as possible. Until then, people with any sense are going to get college degrees. Once again, one can only wonder what planet Mr. Brooks is living on.
Mr. Brooks proposes that instead of making more money by getting a college degree, people go to trade schools and get some sort of technical training. (We’ll put aside the fact that this country has wasted a huge amount of money on for-profit trade schools which didn’t teach anything and didn’t get anyone jobs. Until Mr. Brooks gets his employers to lobby for federal control of those schools, there is no reason to encourage students to waste their money and the country’s money on them.)
He seems to like pipe welding as an interesting and rewarding job, although not enough to give up his job as a spokesperson for the rich to get into it. Perhaps the problem is that being a pipe welder doesn’t pay all that well or isn’t as exciting as he think. Clearly, in a capitalist system, if companies really are desperate to hire for people with certain skills but can’t find enough of them, the companies should pay people with those skills more money or train people to do those jobs for free or pay to move people with the needed skills to the places where the jobs are. Mr. Brooks’ whining that his employers who make $30 million a year in compensation don’t want to play by the rules of the free market so everyone else should rearrange their lives and take less money for their work than the market demands is a rather bizarre argument. Especially for someone who is President of AEI.
Finally, it should be noted that getting as many people out of schools where general education is taught and into places where they are not taught to think for themselves or where learning about the world they live in not required is part of the Koch brothers’ propaganda. The various Koch brothers funded organizations have for decades been hard at work promoting “education” plans which are intended to make sure that students only learn what the Koch brothers want them to learn. Fact based education that trains people to think for themselves is the last thing the Koch brother want. Thus, it’s not surprising the Mr. Brooks, as an indirect employee of the Koch brothers, would propose just such a scheme.
Since Mr. Brooks is not helping us understand anything about the problems of the country, let’s think about why people move and, more importantly, how that might have anything to do with fixing the inequality problem. Clearly, the inequality problem and the continuing disappearance of the middle class can be fixed only by getting more money in the hands of the 99%. An obvious way to do that is to for Mr. Brooks’ employers to pay their employees and suppliers more and charge their customers less. If Mr. Brooks were serious about dealing with the economic problems faced by so many people in this country, he doesn’t need to worry about ways to get people to move pointlessly around the country or move every 2 or 3 years no matter where (one wonders if he has stock in a lot of moving companies); he just needs to figure out how to get his employers to pay their employees more.
As to Mr. Brooks moving problem, there are several observations that one can make. First, the first Baby Boomers hit 60 in 2006. While some of these people will move at some point to a warmer state or a state where their children live or to a small housing situation, none of that moving has anything to do with the income inequality. Being retired or about to retire, they are not going to move some place new just to find a job, except in rare circumstances. Clearly, the older the population, the fewer people are going to be moving for work, and this is hardly cause for an op-ed piece.
Second, just moving from one housing situation to another when a job change is not the direct cause has nothing to do with fixing inequality, so Mr. Brooks is looking at the wrong statistics, which he should know or does know and simply doesn’t care. When I was young, I moved several times in the same city, but kept the same job. My having made all those moves proves nothing, helpful thought it may have been to the moving company.
Third, the reason why people leave one job and go to another is usually to get paid more. Some people may change jobs to find “more interesting work” or to get away from an obnoxious boss or oppressive working conditions, but most people change jobs to make more money. So if Mr. Brooks thinks it is so important to get people to move somewhere to get another job, he needs to get his employers to offer jobs with higher pay. And it has to be a noticeable amount higher. Not only does moving cost money (something Mr. Brooks should know), but in most families in the 99%, both spouses work. So it does not make any economic sense for a couple to move somewhere new if the spouse getting the new job will not earn more than the couple is currently earning, unless the new employer has also promised the spouse a job at pay at least equal to that person’s current pay. Finally, if one spouse has a stable job which they are likely to keep for years, it make no sense for the couple to move so the other spouse can get a higher paying but more insecure job unless the pay increase is huge enough to cover the risks of losing the new job and being unemployed for a while.
Fourth, Mr. Brooks’ employers and their fellow CEO’s are engaged in a massive amount of age discrimination. There are lots of people who are over 50 who would like to get a new, better paying job, but who can’t get past the door of the human resources department, which has been instructed not to hire older workers because they are too expensive. Instead they look for younger, cheaper workers. So one reason many very qualified people don’t get better paying jobs is age discrimination.
What this op-ed piece shows is how little one can trust writing out of the American Enterprise Institute. One wonders why the NY Times bothered to publish it.