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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy David Brooks Shouldn’t Talk About Poor People
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David Brooks has developed a reputation for wisdom as a writer for the New York Times. Its true that he occasionally stumbles upon insights, as he does, for example, in his writing on emerging neuroscience. But he is consistently wrong-headed when he takes on issues relating to poverty. His instinct is always to discuss the problem in terms of virtue and morality; material factors and structural conditions are afterthoughts. Thus his columns on the poor end up being something closer to 800-word rants masquerading as high-minded journalism. Its never enough for him to batter you with erudition; he insists on moralizing as well.
On Friday, Brooks published another fatuous piece about poverty. This time, naturally, the subject was Baltimore. Brooks tried to undercut the popular trope that funding poor communities like Baltimore will improve conditions. He writes:
The $15 trillion spent by the government over the past half-century has improved living standards and eased burdens for millions of poor people. But all that money and all those experiments have not integrated people who live in areas of concentrated poverty into the mainstream economy.
This passage is instructive for a couple of reasons. First, it illustrates Brooks tendency to say something true without offering anything resembling context. For instance, he notes that poor people havent been integrated into the mainstream economy but fails to ask why that is. Weve tossed all this money at the problem, he seems to suggest, yet things arent better. How could that be? Perhaps it has something to do with history, with the residual effects of institutionalized racism and the array of structural problems that have plagued Baltimore and communities like it for decades. Dumping federal dollars into a city doesnt erase these things.
What Brooks wants to do is advance a pleasant-sounding bootstraps argument: Those poor people just need to lift themselves out of poverty through moral education and self-reliance. He continues: But the real barriers to mobility are 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. Here Brooks identifies the real problem with poor people: They lack high-quality relationships and strong familial ties. Thats not entirely false, but its also embarrassingly incomplete.
Source.
onecaliberal
(32,862 posts)KG
(28,751 posts)freshwest
(53,661 posts)merrily
(45,251 posts)Why David Brooks Shouldn't Talk
eridani
(51,907 posts)jwirr
(39,215 posts)and still get any kind of assistance.
Gothmog
(145,293 posts)jwirr
(39,215 posts)got that money and see what the city did with it. How it was used and how it impacted the community. What went wrong and what went right. One program that was utilized was called revenue sharing. It did have an impact but it was often used for bricks and mortar rather than people programs so it failed to reach the people except as temporary jobs.
We used to send money to poor countries overseas and hear the same tripe about that. When we looked into it what happened was that we would send the money to the government of these countries and it never reached the objective - the people. Food programs often had this problem.
Someone needs to take a look at one of the failed areas and then at the successful areas (if there are any) and see why this did not work.