New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote the kind of piece today that really infuriates me. It angers me not because it’s completely wrong. Stuff without any redeeming value is easy to move on from. Rather, Brooks’ essay gets me in a tizzy because in some ways it’s very good. However, at the end, it completely goes off the rails in ways that are not only quite wrong, but really damaging as well, despite Brooks’ sincere efforts to make a positive contribution.
Brooks begins by making a very convincing case that the reason we still have so much deep poverty isn’t because we haven’t spent enough money to make it go away. By his estimate (no sources given), the United States has spent half-a-trillion dollars on anti-poverty programs during the last century. He also notes that federal spending on anti-poverty programs has increased dramatically since 1980 (though he doesn’t mention how the spending has changed in important ways), and that in 2013 the feds spent about $13,000 per poor person on such programs. He says it might’ve been more effective to just give poor people the money, and he might be right.
Brooks even provides a nice case study of Freddie Gray‘s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood in west Baltimore. During the 1980s and early 1990s, a tremendous amount of aid poured into the neighborhood. And while it did lead to some improvements, in the end it didn’t work out as planned; the neighborhood is still deeply impoverished. He claims that for too many poor people, most of that money has been more of a cushion to poverty instead of a ladder out of it.
That’s a serious idea and deserves serious consideration.
Okay then, so what lessons are we to draw from this? Could it be that instead investing more money in anti-poverty programs, we need to spend it more wisely? Or could it be, as I talked about in my Baltimore riot essay, that there are larger social forces at work: namely, the U.S. economy has fundamentally changed since the 1960s, making it nearly impossible for unskilled and semi-skilled workers to earn middle class wages; that this has been devastating to Rust Belt regions like Baltimore; and that since the 1980s, the ravages of drug addiction and the drug war have compounded matters dramatically?
No. None of that seems to matter to Brooks. His big lesson from all of this is that poor are just really screwed up. Or, to use his language, these are merely:
matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighborhood that either encourage or discourage responsibility, future-oriented thinking, and practical ambition.
For some people, the first urge might be to think Brooks is racist. You know, the problem is just that these black people have lousy values and aren’t very bright. But if you read Brooks with any regularity, you realize he feels exactly same way about poor whites, say in Appalachia. So this isn’t about racism. This is about class bigotry in a broad sense, and middle-class narcissism specifically.
Brooks’ infatuation with middle class “norms” as a panacea for poverty is incredibly dated. This kind of thinking is as old as the modern middle class itself, which in America dates back to the mid-19th century. But beyond being more behind the times than dancing the Charleston and wool bathing suits at the beach, it’s also incredibly self-absorbed.
The basic assertion is: Gosh, if you people just had MY values, MY beliefs, MY ambitions, MY norms, why, none of this would really be a problem. You just need to be like ME!
That alone makes his thesis fairly repugnant. But perhaps worst of all, it’s simply wrong.
Yes, deep poverty, particularly when compounded by the kind of violence, incarceration rates, and addiction rates bought about by the drug trade and drug war, can in many ways cripple a community like Sandtown-Winchester. And yes, over decades and generations, this cauldron of violence and poverty contributes to certain kinds of dysfunction. How could it no?
And all of this is further compounded by a fact Brooks completely ignores: once a poor neighborhood enters a death spiral, almost all of the people who are talented and lucky enough to get out, do. Indeed, in many poor neighborhoods and poor small towns, the credo becomes talented kids should aspire to move on to something better. The unstated flip side of that credo is: cause it’s not going to get any better here.
As I talked about in my essay, the society becomes broken.
But it’s broken in many, many ways. In most ways, perhaps. And so it’s really mind boggling when someone as smart and well-meaning as Brooks says the only relevant reason poor people in impoverished neighborhoods remain mired in poverty, despite all the anti-poverty spending, is because they have band norms and values, because they’re irresponsible and have the wrong kinds of goals.
Gee wiz, you think closing the world’s largest steel plant had anything to do with it? Or the dozens and dozens of other factories? Or the loss of thousands of good dockworker jobs?
There are actually lots of reasons why most poor people remain poor. Those reasons run the gamut from economic to cultural to social to political factors. But to pin it all on a pet socio/cultural 
abstraction is beyond ludicrous. It demands refutation and explanation.
The issue is exceedingly complex and there’s no silver bullet we can shoot to slay poverty in America. But I do know this: If there were good-paying jobs all over this country for people of all skill-levels, and if we ended the drug war and medicalized addiction instead of criminalizing it, then poverty would be a fraction of what it is today, whether or not poor people absorbed David Brooks’ precious bourgeois values.
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Updated 3:01 PM: The Center for Economic Policy and Research has posted a rebuttal to Brooks, disputing his $14,000/poor person figure. Turns out 40% of that is Medicade payments to doctors, and many states have eligibility cutoffs for Medicade that are well above the poverty line. Other programs, such as food stamps, also have eligibility cutoffs above the poverty line in many states, meaning not all of this money is actually benefiting poor people. You can read the brief response from CEPR here. Thanks to Reader Wordy Ginters, via Dean Baker, for point it out.