One last thing on yesterday's David Brooks column. My friend Reihan Salam wondered why I was so dismissive of the piece, and he was right to. In short, I've done a lot of reading into the economic literature on inequality and never, ever come across what Brooks was saying. Moreover, I'd read a fair amount of Lawrence Katz's work on inequality and it also failed to support Brooks' thesis. Something seemed wildly awry.
So I employed the top secret journalistic technique of picking up the damn phone (or PUDP, in TAP office parlance), and gave Katz a call. His answers confirmed my suspicions. Before he even talked about the column, he e-mailed to say that "I obviously don't have anything to do with the "spin" [Brooks] gives the material and certainly nothing to do with the numbers he cites in the first half of his column." And when I got him on the phone, he repudiated nearly every aspect of the piece. "There are," he said, "clear market forces that have to do with the demand for talented individuals, but the current period is not that different from the past for that type of thing. In the past, however, we've done a very good job expanding access to education to keep up with growth, providing bargaining power to those left behind, and using government policy to help them. What's changed in the last twenty years is that we've eroded those ameliorating institutions."
In other words, Brooks used Katz as a good example of "the second and much more persuasive school of thought on inequality" that rejects the decline in unions, increases in CEO pay, loss of wages, and all the other standard critiques of the left. The only problem? Katz is not that sort of economist. He mentioned the importance of unions four or five times during our ten minute talk, and kept returning to the idea that the demand for new skills is nothing new and nothing specific to America-- what's different is its translation into rampant inequality. He is also a former Clinton administration economist, and so the distortion of his views gave a bipartisan imprimatur to Brooks' remarks, allowing Brooks to place a wedge the good "Clinton" Democrats from the bad, populist liberals.
