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David Brooks on economic metaphors

by Robert Teitelman | Published December 28, 2011 at 12:37 PM

In The New York Times Tuesday, David Brooks attacks the analogies and metaphors of the Obama administration, only to promptly slip into the metaphor abyss himself. It's an interesting example of the treacherous ground (metaphor alert!) characteristic of economic metaphors generally. Brooks first tut-tuts that the White House regularly once compared the financial crisis of 2008 to the Great Depression of the '30s. In this, of course, the administration was not alone; there was a time when seemingly every pundit with a discernible IQ, including many in the New York Times, chattered sagely about the bank holiday, the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt's 100 days and the second Great Depression in 1937. (I haven't had a chance to check Brooks' record on Great Depression and New Deal references, though even conservatives embraced Amity Shlaes' tendentious "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" as a relevant revision of conventional wisdom about the Great Depression and the New Deal. Why would it be worth reading if there weren't parallels to our own woes? This also applies to Brooks' own op-ed stablemate at the Times, Paul Krugman, who published "The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008.") Every report of more bad economic news was prefaced by, "the worst economic slump since the Great Depression."

And, yes it is true: 2008 was not the Great Depression, despite some parallels such as, as Brooks himself writes, "great concentrations of wealth, especially at the top." (Where else would wealth concentrate if not the top? At the 7% level?) But the White House has apparently dropped that metaphor, says Brooks, and embraced another one: "[T]hey have started making analogies between this era and the progressive era around the turn of the 20th century."

This too, Brooks insists, is deceptive and perhaps even fraudulent. Brooks doesn't say this, but correspondences between different historical eras are never perfect (which may be why we call them analogies). History, contrary to popular wisdom, never really repeats itself, it flashes elusive patterns that seem vaguely familiar and that may provide some insight. But the deeper you look, the greater the differences appear. The Arab Spring might have seemed in some ways like 1848 or 1968, but it's really quite different, in ways large and small. Perhaps 2008 was more like 1870 or 1891 or 1975 than, say, 1933. World War I was not World War II or the Cold War, despite certain rhetorical similarities. Vietnam was not Iraq or Libya. Indeed, what Brooks is really doing here is suggesting what is true, but generally beside the point in the realm of public and political rhetoric: that all uses of historical analogies and metaphors are, at some level, potentially misleading. The trouble is Brooks himself doesn't quite realize that, because he quickly tumbles into the same metaphorical swamp as the White House.

This occurs after several paragraphs in which he enumerates all the ways 2011 is different from, say, 1900--including arguing that our inequality is no one's fault really but is not the same inequality as that of the Gilded Age. No top hats; lots of trains. "Today's economy is not a jobs machine and lacks that [1900 or so] bursting vibrancy. The rate of new business start-ups was declining even before the 2008 financial crisis. [I'd like to see how he defines that and over what period, but whatever.] Companies are finding that they can get by with fewer workers. ... Moreover, the information economy widens inequality for deep and varied reasons that were unknown a century ago." Well, maybe we should revert back to the '30s analogy, which did feature lots of unemployment. At the very least, his description of the financial crisis, with its emphasis on lousy job creation and inequality, is strikingly simplistic. But let that go too. For Brooks now starts to sink into the muck by the weight of his own metaphorical chains.

"In the progressive era, the economy was in its adolescence and the task was to control it. Today, the government is middle-aged; the task is to rejuvenate it."

Metaphor alert! Metaphor alert! What does this mean? Can economies be compared to the life cycle of man or animals? Yes, economies and markets are clearly and so far, inescapably cyclical. But can we anthropomorphize them into young, adolescent, middle-aged and decrepitly old? If the American economy was adolescent in 1900, what stage was, say, a much older intact nation-state like Britain or relatively recently unified states like Germany or Italy? Was the former middle-aged and were the latter adolescent? Where was China in 1900? Ancient and doddering or young and primitive? And pre-revolutionary Russia? Are we talking life-cycle stages that align to the evolution of technologies: agriculture means young, industry means middle-aged, services means old? Or does each stage have its own life cycle like a Yeatsian gyre--the poet's cycles told to him by his wife in a spasm of automatic writing? And if that's the case, how do we account for the fact that farming and manufacturing continue in eras dominated by IT or services--that developed economies are rich mixtures of complexity? Given that lives are defined by the fact that they end, how can we apply Brooks' life-cycle metaphor to economies that arguably have no necessary and discernible (or forecastable) end, except for the belief, offered by George Harrison in a song once, that all things must pass. Perhaps in the long sweep of an unknown future, we are, in actuality, still economic teenagers going through a bad stretch of pimples and low energy. We certainly didn't feel middle-aged in the '80s and '90s, though we did in the '70s.

One further point: Is Brooks saying that we don't have a control or regulatory problem? Is he suggesting that markets, shades of Alan Greenspan, are now self-regulating? I hope not.

Brooks is wallowing in the hindsight problem, which pundits are particularly susceptible to. The endpoint is the present; the past can be divided up any way you want to produce the future you imagine but will never know for certain. Who can be wrong? Economies are not people. Economies are cyclical--this appears as empirically true as the circuit of the sun--but economies that, as even Brooks declares, can "rejuvenate" themselves have the capacity to break the bonds of nature, to defeat death, turn back time--metaphor alert!--and suddenly go from violent youth or failing old age, to adolescence or a midlife crisis. That's not a life at all. That's a terrible metaphor used to undermine an imperfect historical analogy.

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Tags: financial crisis of 2008 | The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression | the Great Depression | The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 | White House

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