“The key to progress is information — making ourselves better informed,” David Brooks writes in a column (2/22/18) that systematically disinforms its readers.
We would usually expect that a 12-year-old kid would be taller than a 6-year-old kid. However, if a 12-year-old had only grown one inch over their last six years, we would probably be somewhat worried.
David Brooks devotes his most recent New York Times column, “The Virtue of Radical Honesty” (2/22/18), to presenting data from Steven Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now, which purports to show that things are better than ever. Most of the data has the character of boasting over our 12-year-old’s one inch of growth over the last six years.
Brooks tells us:
For example, we’re all aware of the gloomy statistics around wage stagnation and income inequality, but Pinker contends that we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong. A third of American children lived in poverty. Sixty percent of seniors had incomes below $1,000 a year. Only half the population had any savings in the bank at all.
Between 1979 and 2014, meanwhile, the percentage of poor Americans dropped to 20 percent from 24 percent. The percentage of lower-middle-class Americans dropped to 17 from 24. The percentage of Americans who were upper middle class (earning $100,000 to $350,000) shot upward to 30 percent from 13 percent.
The problem with the Brooks/Pinker story is that we expect the economy/people to get richer through time. After all, technology and education improve. In the ’50s, we didn’t have the Internet, cell phones and all sorts of other goodies. In fact, at the start of the ’50s, we didn’t even have the polio vaccine.
The question is not whether we are better off today than we were 60 years ago. It would be incredible if we were not better off. The question is by how much.
In the ’50s, wages and incomes for ordinary families were rising at a rate of close to 2 percent annually. In the last 45 years, they have barely risen at all.
It’s hard to see the steady march of progress when you look at the US poverty rate over time. (chart: Wikipedia)
This fact can be seen even looking at the numbers that Brooks is bragging over. While it’s not clear where they got their poverty data, the child poverty rate comes closest to the numbers in the article. This was at 22.3 percent in 1983, it was down to 21.1 percent in 2014 and fell further to 18.0 percent in 2016.
Should we celebrate this reduction in poverty rates over the last 33 years? Well, the poverty rate had fallen from 27.3 percent in 1959 (the first year for this data series) to 14.0 percent in 1969. That’s a drop of 13.3 percentage points in just ten years. The net direction in the last 47 years has been upward.
A larger share of the population is earning over $100,000 a year. This is due to some growth in hourly wages, but also due to more work per family. A much larger share of women are working today than 50 years ago, and a larger share of the women working are working full-time. If family income had continued growing at its pace from 1967 to 1973 (the last years of the Golden Age), median family income would be almost $150,000 today.
There are a whole range of other measures which leave real enlightenment types appalled by the state of the country today. While Brooks/Pinker tell us “only half the population had any savings at all” in the 1950s, a recent survey found that 63 percent of the country could not afford an unexpected bill of $500. The homeownership rate is roughly the same as it was 60 years ago. Life expectancy for those in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution has barely budged in the last 40 years.
In short, a serious analysis of data shows that most people have good grounds for complaints about their situation today, since they have not shared to any significant extent in the economic growth of the last four decades. But apparently there is a big market for the sort of dog-and-pony show that Brooks and Pinker present, trying to argue the opposite.
A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (2/23/18).
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTOpinion). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
David Brooks is an arrogant, rigid-minded, party-line Republican. Every time I hear him speak, I cringe.
Thanks Dean Baker for this honest and well-deserved challenge to Brooks.
I agree. In fact ALL those right-wing conservative pundits are ultimately a bane to the interests of anyone in the lower 90% of the earning/wealth scale. I won’t even bother to watch or read them anymore because it’s like listening to a time-share condo salesman or infomercial huckster — they’re slick and they SOUND like they’re making sense, but it’s all deceptive and predatory in the end.
hear hear! couldn’t agree with you more :)
right on!
The other problem with comparing US poverty rates is the formula for the poverty line hasn’t changed even though our economy has. When the formula for the poverty line was first created, food was a much bigger part of people’s expenses than today.
“Current poverty thresholds were established in the 1960s. At that time, research indicated that the typical family spent about one-third of its income on food, so poverty thresholds were derived by multiplying a low-cost food budget by three. Since then the thresholds have only been adjusted for inflation. A family is considered poor if its pre-tax cash income falls below the applicable poverty threshold.
…
“The thresholds are low. Living costs and standards have changed in many ways since the 1960s. Food now comprises only about one-seventh of an average family’s expenditures. The poverty line represented nearly 50 percent of median income for a family of four in the early 1960s, but now represents only about 28 percent of median income. So the level at which a family is considered poor has fallen further and further outside the mainstream.”
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2009/08/25/6582/its-time-for-a-better-poverty-measure/
Monica, The article you referenced is from 2009. In 2010 the Supplemental Poverty Index was introduced to correct the problems with the old measure. Overall poverty is slightly higher with the new Index (interestingly, child poverty is significantly lower because the new index takes account of all income and goods received, which the old one did not). Because the Supplemental Index takes the cost of living into account, high cost of living areas are now correctly measured as having higher poverty rates – e.g. California has the highest poverty rate in the country, at over 20%.
…and Mr Brookes belong just where he is…PBS and NPR. Oh those leftist liberals.
Is this some bogus and laughably lame attempt to tie lying and”fake news” to liberals? Brooks is a dye in the wool establishment Republican with a penchant for peddling conservative hosesh-t with the must bucolic of language. The only reason he gets paid to live in his rotted tower and dispense his intellectually vacuous opinion is that the “liberal” NYT and NPR are sadly afraid of being labeled biased towards the left. Something, they are always accused of anyway such as is demonstrated by your comment. That or he knows where the bodies are hidden because there’s no reason someone like a David Brooks or a Bill Kristol, and others like them, who have been demonstrably wrong about every thing they’ve ever said or written, still have such high profile careers.
One fact from Brook’s article not mentioned by Dean Baker: In terms of consumption, i.e., actual material well-being, 90% of 1960 poverty has disappeared. Monica, you allude to that with your statistics: to be above the 1960 definition of material poverty required half of median income, today that level is achieved with only about a quarter of median income. You may perversely wish to deny it, but poor Americans today are overwhelmingly better off today – materially. Steven Pinker is a classical liberal thinker; Brooks diverges from Pinker’s thesis in that he sees the limitations of the purely rational and material, and sees the need to focus on the “moral, social, and emotional spheres” of our public lives. P.S. to other commenters, David Brooks is miles away from being “right-wing” or “party-line Republican”.
“poor Americans today are overwhelmingly better off today” what do you even mean by this?
These graphs clearly show little to no real income progress over the course of 30 years for poor to middle.
http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2016/06/branko-milanovic-elephant-chart-brexit.html
You seem like a smart guy? Regulation, unionization and redistribution keep the Pareto effects at bay.
From 1941 to 1970s is the golden age. After the market liberalization in the late 70s you have the new period.
Why would you not expect the gains to be Pareto distributed once the mechanisms to prevent it have been removed?
To be clear, I’m not saying the U.S. doesn’t have significant structural challenges, but the sky isn’t falling either. Real median household income is at an all-time high, despite falling household size, see https://www2.census.gov . Vastly more accurate than the official poverty index, the Supplemental Poverty Measure shows a consistent downward track of poverty for more than 50 years, see courseworks.columbia.edu . What the chart you referenced shows is the remarkable growth of income by most of the planet from 1988 to 2008. The exception is the stagnation of incomes of unproductive labor in rich nations. Unless you are a Donald Trump fan and believe we can build a wall around the country, globalization is here to stay and Americans who want high pay for unskilled labor are living in Bernie Sanders’ dreams.
That Columbia University link didn’t take, here it is:
https://courseworks.columbia.edu/access/content/group/c5a1ef92-c03c-4d88-0018-ea43dd3cc5db/Working%20Papers%20for%20website/Anchored%20SPM.December7.pdf
60 years ago was 1958. You think we’re “better off” than we were 60 years ago? Back in those days a schoolteacher had an income that could support a family, pay off a mortgage an put the kids through college. On a single income. Kids had more parent involvement because the parents had more time and society had norms. True one of the norms was the overt oppression of minorities and women but except for those two changes we are not “better off” as a society than we were 60 years ago. Sure technology has advanced but the living conditions for the bulk of the population are measurably worse.
Paul, That’s exactly David Brooks’ point. Teacher pay has risen against inflation over that period (though not as much as many other professions). Teachers in 1958 satisfied their needs with a small fraction of the material goods we enjoy today. If anyone truly doesn’t understand the gap between the 2 eras they need do some research. Brooks’ point is that, as you put it, “society had norms”. Those norms have changed or been cast aside altogether. Examples: square footage of single family home space per occupant has tripled over those decades. Percentages of single parent with children households have quadrupled and of single person households tripled. And don’t even get started with all the luxuries we now consider to be necessities of life.
You’re right, people can totally get more Big Macs and Ipads for their money now.