DAVID BROOKS EXPLAINS IT ALL. "My goal here," writes David Brooks, "is merely to describe the different economic policy schools that are out there." This he does by misrepresenting all the different economic policy schools that are out there. Mainstream liberals, for instance, are defined by jobs retraining, federal work programs, and tax code changes to reduce outsourcing. This is true so long as you have never met a mainstream liberal, read any of their writings, or heard one on the teevee. Here in the real world ("Earth Land," to translate into Brooks-speak), us liberals ("Volvo-drivers") tend to focus on reducing health costs ("stethoscope savings"), increasing bargaining power for workers ("card-check comrades") and moving towards a more equitable distribution of national wealth ("roquefort redistributionists"). Brooks and his "Hamiltonians," in contrast, believe that skills are the answer. It's a very convenient thing to believe if you're a highly-paid newspaper columnist. It's also without evidence. For instance, if Brooks had run this column by the Times editorial board, they might have let him look at a draft of their article on the diminishing returns to investments in skill. "[A] college degree does not ensure a bigger share of the economic pie for many graduates," sez the Times. "In recent decades...only college-educated women have seen their compensation grow in line with economywide gains in productivity. The earnings of male college graduates have failed to keep pace with productivity gains. Instead, an outsized share of productivity growth, which expands the nation's total income, is going to Americans at the top of the income scale. In 2005, the latest year with available data, the top 1 percent of Americans -- whose average annual income was $1.1 million -- took in 21.8 percent of the nation's income, their largest share since 1929." But don't worry, the Hamiltonians empower "senior citizen groups [to] mentor students to keep them emotionally engaged during college years." That'll reverse decades of wealth aggregation, skyrocketing CEO pay, mindless trade agreements, and upward redistribution. --Ezra Klein
