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David Brooks and decline: Blame it on the Huxtables

by Robert Teitelman | Published September 10, 2010 at 12:59 PM

The New York Times columnist David Brooks loves to wander among the bookstalls of academia, gathering material for one popular theory about our current condition or the other. Sometimes it's fun; occasionally it's revelatory; today, well, it's a mess. As the week concludes -- and a very strange week it's been -- Brooks launches a big think about what ails America. His text: a study by Northwestern economic historian Joel Mokyr called "The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850," which examines the transition in Britain to a full-fledged, rapidly growing, world-dominant industrial economy. Mokyr has long studied the subject of the industrial revolution and has long argued against a kind of simpleminded determinism -- geography, ethnicity, politics or markets -- brought forth to explain why some societies, like Great Britain, developed into industrial dynamos, and others did not. Mokyr, hardly alone, emphasizes the intellectual component of that transformational change: The transition to capitalism was, in many ways, a mental journey.

Brooks, however, picks up Mokyr's argument and quickly, and ruthlessly, simplifies it. "The crucial change" in the industrial revolution "occurred in people's minds," he writes. "Because of a series of cultural shifts, technicians started taking scientific knowledge and putting it to practical use. For example, entrepreneurs applied geological research to the businesses of mining and transportation." Brooks then races to his conclusion: "Britain soon dominated the world. But then it declined."

Boom. That was fast. Brooks, of course, could care less about Britain. He cares about America, which he argues -- agreeing with 65% of polled Americans -- that the nation is in decline, mostly because of "structural, not cyclical" economic problems. He then goes on to argue, without offering a single fact to back it up, that Americans have rejected what he calls "commercial values," which seems to mean to him that they have abandoned good jobs in "industry" or the technical fields for Wall Street or consulting, or flocked to "prestigious but less productive" jobs like law, finance, consulting and nonprofits. Even Michelle Obama gets some blame for urging young people to work for the community, in social work or teaching.

Almost every statement Brooks makes can be debated or discounted. He has taken Mokyr's sophisticated synthesis of an enormous historical literature and distilled it down to "the British disease." Britain's decline, which was helped along by the devastations of two world wars and fundamental changes in economic drivers like technology (not to say the ideological revolution of de-colonialization), was not particularly evident in 1850 when Mokyr wraps up his history. The subject of decline, like the Industrial Revolution, is large, complex and contentious. Brooks makes it seem as if Brits at some point simply walked away from commercial values that made them dominant. Does anybody believe that fairy tale? Yes, Britain became less competitive over time, exacerbated in part by a restrictive class structure and other social woes. But mostly it found itself up against larger, wealthier, more resource-rich nations like the U.S. and Germany. It's like saying Japan slid into its two-decade-long slump simply because it got affluent and decided to go into social work.

When Brooks tackles America, it gets even murkier. Nearly every fact he offers for decline consists of a tissue of anecdote and stereotype, like the anxiety over finance. There are too many communications majors. There are too many mortgage brokers. There are too many lawyers. And my favorite: White-collar parents absorbed their lifestyle from the Huxtables of "The Cosby Show," not the Kramdens of "The Honeymooners." So it's Bill Cosby's fault that Americans consume too much, have too much debt and run a trade deficit -- not the stagnation of wages, the polarization of incomes, the broad destruction of middle-class corporate jobs (including, but not exclusively, union jobs), the rising cost of education, healthcare and retirement. No, Brooks would argue that Americans were first Huxtabalized -- when exactly is left vague, but practically speaking, it would have had to occur before the show actually aired -- and then all these bad things happened. In his phrase, Americans, Brooks says, riding the coattails of George Santayana, have become "genteel."

Like any cliché, this argument contains strands of something approaching truth. But it's a profoundly simplistic argument for a terribly complex phenomenon. How many of these symptoms of decline are tied to rising economies around the world? How much of this is attributable to the U.S. as the world's policeman and the dollar as the world's reserve currency? Have Americans truly abandoned the practical, hardheaded commercialism that Brooks nostalgically believes once characterized the society? (It seems to me that, the large role of finance notwithstanding, America remains an intensely commercial economy; Brooks, a communicator of sorts, just doesn't like the kind of commerce folks decide to pursue.) And probably most important, while giving full credence to the importance of cultural or intellectual factors, isn't there a major role for the powerful shaping influence of, say, rapidly evolving technologies? At several points, Brooks seems to suggest that America can regain industrial jobs by simply toughening up and making the effort.

In the end, Brooks is confusing the kind of fundamental transformations in the way folks apprehend themselves and the natural world with lifestyle changes. Brooks wants more machinists trained, and he wants more Harvard grads moving to Akron to manage tire plants. But isn't the first commercial instinct to seek out your self-interest? And why would someone voluntarily take on jobs that might be gone tomorrow or that might offer years of little or no wage increases? Indeed, there are structural problems with the economy. And yes, Americans took on too much debt (which, historically speaking, is a very long and rich American tradition). But once you get past the gloom, it's not that far from the more optimistic view of demographers like Joel Kotkin who see a vigorous, entrepreneurial, well educated, strikingly diverse and, relative to a number of national rivals, younger workforce in the U.S. (4)

Oh, but it turns out Brooks himself is "not convinced we're in decline." Still, he does believe in his "gentility shift" and wonders if anything can be done about it. He sounds tired. Well, at least "The Honeymooners" is still in reruns. - Robert Teitelman

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