March 10, 2015
David Brooks’ used his column today to bemoan the fact that the vast majority of children of parents with just high school degrees grow up in single parent families. By contrast, the vast majority of children with college educated parents grow up in two parent families. Following Robert Putnam’s new book, he refers to a long list of disadvantages faced by children of non college-educated parents compared with children raised by college-educated parents. His column then turns to the need to have a moral revival to break the spiral whereby disadvantaged children have disadvantaged children.
“Next it will require holding everybody responsible. America is obviously not a country in which the less educated are behaving irresponsibly and the more educated are beacons of virtue. America is a country in which privileged people suffer from their own characteristic forms of self-indulgence: the tendency to self-segregate, the comprehensive failures of leadership in government and industry. Social norms need repair up and down the scale, universally, together and all at once.”
This is an interesting appeal for restoring social norms and responsibility, but apparently Brooks doesn’t intend for it to mean things like locking up, or even criminally prosecuting, bankers who violate the law. But that aside, there are some things that can be done to improve the plight of the disadvantaged other than lecture them on values. Of course better education and child care would be a great place to start. Also, more family-friendly work places would be a good idea, since that might give some single parents more time to spend with their kids, one of the problems cited by Brooks. And then there is the question of letting their parents have jobs.
This is where the Federal Reserve Board comes in. If the Fed starts to raise interest rates over the course of this year, the point will be to keep workers from getting jobs. This is the logic of higher interest rates. They discourage people from buying cars and homes, they discourage businesses from investing, and they discourage state and local government from borrowing for infrastructure and other purposes. With less demand in the economy, there will be fewer jobs and therefore less upward pressure on wages.
The people who are most likely to face job loss and to have their bargaining power undermined are less-educated workers; you know, the ones who David Brooks wants to see have a moral revival. (Yeah, I know he wants that for everyone.) So here we have a story of the advantaged (in fact very advantaged since almost all of the people calling the shots at the Fed are in the one percent) acting to undermine the economic and social condition of poor and working class people.
And folks wonder why the disadvantaged won’t listen to the moral appeals of folks like David Brooks.
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