September 16, 2011
David Brooks piece today is titled “the planning fallacy.” The gist of it is that because of the financial crisis the gods have dictated that the United States simply must experience a prolonged period of high unemployment.
In Brooks view, the only problem is that the Democrats are stupid enough to rely on the actual history of the New Deal, and mountains of other evidence. They therefore believe that we can actually do something to bring down the rate of unemployment to more acceptable levels.
While a prolonged period of high unemployment may be the gospel according to Brooks’ god, it is easy to show that there is no logical reason that the rest of us should accept this line. In fact, we also have good evidence that the stimulus thus far produced as many or more jobs than the Obama administration had predicted. Its problem was that it under-estimated the size of the hole created by the collapse of the housing bubble, not excessive confidence in the ability of stimulus to get us out of the hole.
Brooks’ seemingly deeply held conviction that the country is condemned to a prolonged period of high unemployment would be more convincing if he would volunteer to share in the sacrifice. I’m sure the NYT would have no problem finding a currently unemployed columnist with far greater knowledge of the issues Brooks writes on.
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