Arthur Brooks is my favorite concern troll. On Saturday, Nick Kristoff became the latest columnist to trot out Brooks and his surprising finding that conservatives give more to charity than liberals:
“When I started doing research on charity,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “I expected to find that political liberals — who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did — would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”
Back in March, George Will, trying to be extra cute, described Brooks as an "independent" social scientist who was "mugged by data."
In real life, Brooks is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In fact, he's becoming president of AEI in about a week, and his work largely consists of making counterintuitive arguments in which positive qualities associated with liberals are actually false, or things we should associate with conservatives. A small sample of Brook's work:
"The Political Gender Gap," an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that argues gender based-wage disparities are meaningless because women actually "feel more free".
"Liberal Hatemongers," again for the Journal, in which Brooks explains that liberals are the real racists.
"Democrats and Diversity" for the fair, balanced, and now defunct New York Sun, which explains that conservatives live and interact with more diverse settings than liberals do (ROFLCAKES).
Of course, there's much more of Mr. Brooks work at AEI archived for your pleasure. I'm not a sociologist, and I'm not qualified to comment on the quality of his studies, but it seems to me like the refusal to identify Brooks as a conservative who works for a conservative think tank and specializes in trying to subvert harmful notions about conservatives and conservatism is self-discrediting. Maybe the next time Brooks is cited by one of your major newspaper columnists the paper in question will see fit to inform the reader of his background.
UPDATE: Andrew Gelman responds to Brooks here
--A. Serwer
