Oops! David Brooks Does It Again!
Sun Aug 07, 2005 at 12:07:42 PM PDT
I generally try to avoid reading anything by David Brooks, because his columns are so poorly thought out, and he is such a selective historian. However, today I made the mistake of reading one, and it was so egregiously self-serving, I just had to respond. See the column itself
here. My letter to the editors below the flip(and I sent a similar version directed to Brooks himself, and to the Public Editor).
To the Editors--
As the saying goes, Mr. Brooks is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts. Re his column about the rise of "virtue" (NYT, 8/7/05)--as usual, he both cherry-picks his stats, and then over-generalizes to score ideological points. For example, where is he getting his figures on domestic violence from? The most recent stats available through the Department of Justice do in fact show a decline in such incidents of about 21% from 1993 to 1998, but if he is making claims as to trends since then (seven years ago!), what are his sources? Particularly since your own paper has recently been reporting the increase in murders of wives by returning soldier husbands on military bases since the Iraq War began, and since historically in the US domestic violence rates have gone up during times of economic hardship and in wartime, we don't know what the current trends in "virtue" are, and Mr. Brooks should not be making claims he cannot substantiate. Rates of child victimization were 13.4 per 1000 in 1990, and were 12.3 per 1000 in 2002, hardly something to cheer about. Teenage pregnancy--well, we don't know, do we, because the current administration does not apparently collect or publish the numbers (according to the Children's Defense Fund, one out of nine children in the country are currently born to a teenage mom). We do know something about humans trafficked into the US annually right now--45,000-50,000 annually, according to the DOJ, which means there must be something of a market for such things here among our "virtuous" citizens.
And by the way, those badly-behaved baby boomers Mr. Brooks so loves to trash (is he not one of them?)--they are among those adult members of society (the social workers, etc. he tips his hat to) who have worked so hard over the years to try to make things better, and they are the ones who have helped push for better parenting skills in our society, and who were the role models for the most recent crop of young parents. No one generation corners the market on virtue, and no one generation is better than any other. To claim otherwise is simply silly. But if Mr. Brooks is going to quote statistics and studies, at least he should do so honestly.
Sincerely, etc.
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