April 19, 2016
Okay, he does it against Donald Trump as well, but the theme of his column is to denounce both of them for pushing a “single story” for the difficulties confronting working people. While Sanders blames an economy rigged to favor the rich and Trump blames immigrants and the unfair trading practices of foreign countries, Brooks tells us that the real issue behind wage stagnation is “intricate structural problems.”
Get it? Brooks used the words “intricate” and “structural,” that means that he is a complex guy not wedded to a single story because these are big words.
Does Brooks happen to have any clue what these intricate structural problems might be? He doesn’t give any hint in his piece. Perhaps he was referring to the now disproven story promoted by M.I.T. economist David Autor about the “hollowing out of the middle,” which meant the loss of middle class jobs. More recent research shows that the only occupations seeing substantial growth in relative shares since 2000 were at the bottom end of the wage distribution, yet that didn’t stop more income from going to the top. In other words, there is no obvious story linking the growth of income inequality and wage stagnation for those at the middle to technology.
The remaining villains are items like trade, restrictive fiscal policy that keeps the unemployment rate unnecessarily high, anti-union policies that undermine workers’ bargaining power, and stronger and longer patent and copyright protection that increases the price that ordinary workers must pay for many items.
But Brooks isn’t interested in looking at these topics, that could make you a single story sort of person. He’d rather just stick with his intricate structural problems even if there is no coherence to the argument that he might make. This way you can call the people you don’t like names in The New York Times.
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