David Brooks has put himself in the precarious position of defending Charles Murray's new book Coming Apart, indeed one of the few people to do so.
After a massive backlash from just about everyone with an abbreviation after their name, including a refutation by former Bush speech writer David Frum, in five parts, Brooks is upset.
In a second op-ed for the Times, Brooks attempts to refute what he calls "economic determinism" or the idea that "It’s all the fault of lost jobs."
For one thing his logic is itself based on a fallacy, the fallacy that lost jobs are "deterministic" and that we have no choice but to accept it.
As anyone from William Julius Wilson to Kate Bronfenbrenner to Barry Eichengreen will say, very little of the outsourcing, capital flight, de-unionization etc. is because of "natural" or "deterministic" forces, it's because of the dismantling of the Bretton Woods System and the capital controls* that went along with it.
From the Second World War to the early seventies, capital was caged and forced to invest in the United States instead of going abroad where labor costs were cheaper. However, by the Nixon and Reagan administrations, all that had been reversed and capital was allowed to invest where it pleases, resulting in stagnant wages and high unemployment for the vast majority of Americans.
It was a policy decision, not an economic law of nature.
But perhaps the most ironic part of Brooks's piece is his insistence that to suggest any kind of economic cause is to to be stuck in the "seventies" line of thinking. As he puts it, "the public debate is dominated by people who stopped thinking in 1975."
The exact reverse is true. Scholarship that even began looking at economic causes of social problems didn't come out until after the 70s.
Both of William Julius Wilson's seminal works,The Truly Disadvantaged and When Work Disappears came out in 1987 and 1996 respectively, which changed much of our understanding social problems. If anything, the seventies were dominated by "law and order" politics and a radical shift towards victim blaming.
David Brooks needs to reevaluate what he and many others think of, or claim is deterministic when it in fact isn't. There's no reason why we can't have a similar arrangement to prevent job flight and rebuild the working class today.
* Capital controls were restrictions on foreign ownership and by extension, outsourcing and job loss. It was enforced through punitive measures based on requirements from Bretton Woods. Among these included the Voluntary Foreign Credit Restraint program and Interest Equalization Tax.