Now With Charts

Brendan Nyhan gears up for battle with David Brooks' anti-neo-populism and he's backed up with a whole bunch of charts.

This is a reminder, I think, of why we should look forward to the day when the op-ed column is a dead format and everyone just blogs. Brooks' original column would, obviously, have been better if it -- like Nyhan's reply -- had come with links to data and charts. What's more, it'd be good if we could expect Brooks to reply to the sort of criticisms he's getting from Nyhan, Dean Baker, and others. Maybe he has something fascinating to say on his own behalf. But the way the columnizing world works, there's almost no chance he'll address his next column to trying to rebut the critics of this one. But a back-and-forth debate on this subject with links and charts and data would be much more interesting than what we're going to get instead where liberals decide Brooks is a liar and Brooks remains convinced that liberals are crazy.

Comments

Brooks, like Jonah Goldberg et al, is a dildo. He should be treated with nothing more than mocking contempt. Perhsps someone should ask Mr. Brooks if the people in 18th Century France, 13th Century England, Markos Era Philippenes, Gulded Age USA, etc., were merely rabble-rousing class warriors (and de facto Commies) who made mountains out of molehills.

Posted by ed | July 24, 2007 12:22 PM

Maybe he has something fascinating to say on his own behalf. But the way the columnizing world works, there's almost no chance he'll address his next column to trying to rebut the critics of this one.

Of course, there's not anything stopping Brooks from starting a blog and addressing Nyhan there!

Posted by right | July 24, 2007 12:27 PM

Does Brooks like to have back and forth discussions? I've watched him on PBS and the Sunday talk shows, and he's mostly unresponsive to the points people bring up on the panels. His role seems to be to get a list of talking points from the RNC, file the rough edges off them, and then push them into the discussion.

He gets flustered and freezes if someone questions a talking point with facts or logic. For example last Sunday, Bob Woodward (sp?) on Meet the Press questioned Brooks' assertion that 10,000 Iraqis per month would die when the US left Iraq. Brooks got all turned around about it. So, he didn't come up with the 10,000 number himself, and since he didn't, he didn't have a good response thought up to counter a basic question.

Brooks flourishes when debate is just a recitation of opposing talking points.

Posted by stm177 | July 24, 2007 12:30 PM

But Brooks is a liar. He is not interested in having an honest debate. He's a propagandist for the GOP. And the notion that he would ever come back with something "fascinating" is too much too contemplate. Maybe something about a really cool gas grill or the signficance of Restoration Hardware. He is a mendacious tool.

Posted by KTLN | July 24, 2007 12:39 PM

See, Matt, as HeiGou argued, this just goes to show why Op-Ed columns are much more dependable and accurate than academic research, since the columns get picked over by political enemies, while peer review is just one continuous mutual-backrub session!

/snark

Brooks (and Goldberg) don't exist to convince anyone. They exist to provide talking points to reinforce the beliefs of their conservative readers. They don't even need to be right about what they're saying. The important thing is that their conservative readers have a retort handy when they're losing an argument and that they feel better about themselves and more secure in their horrid, horrid political decisions.

Posted by Tyro | July 24, 2007 12:46 PM

Tyro and KTLN have it. The functions and goals of a GOP commentator are not the same as those of liberal bloggers.

Now, this is not an immutable, eternal principle. There may come a day when the Democratic Party is in the thrall of anti-empirical, obfuscatory, ideological extremists.

But that is not how things are right now.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | July 24, 2007 1:21 PM

i'd like to say something original about brooks qua brooks in this context, but all the key points have been made: he's not interested in the facts as such.

so i'm reduced to noting that if the publishers of the ny times and the wapo weren't idiot sons but rather people who were interested in adding value to the franchise they inherited, eliminating the op-ed column would be the world's easiest call. who actually buys the times to read brooks? or the wapo to read krauthammer? and yet these are very expensive people whose productivity is astonishingly limited (and yet who seem not to have the time to learn much about most of the subjects upon which they opine). can the times and wapo really be making that much money off syndication?

there may once upon a time have been an argument for the twice or thrice weekly deepthink by a certified "wise person," but precisely because of the world of political blogging, there would be zero loss to public discourse if this set of tenured positions were eliminated.

Posted by howard | July 24, 2007 2:23 PM

I have often wondered if bloggers email their posts to the person they are blogging about. Does Brooks even know that Dean Baker and Brendan Nyhan are responding on the net to his column?

Posted by thedeadcanary | July 24, 2007 2:24 PM

I'd guess that if they looked into updating this, we'd find that the trends identified by Cox & Alm have continued:
http://www.dallasfed.org/fed/annual/1999p/ar97.pdf

either way, Bill Nordhaus was right all those years ago:
William Nordhaus (1997), "Do Real Output and Real Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not, "

Posted by Chris | July 24, 2007 2:34 PM

chris, not that the report you linked to isn't full of rather fascinating tidbits, but it's completely non-germane. the issue at hand isn't whether, compared to 100 years ago, people aren't better off. hell, compared to 30 years ago, the median household is better off even as its real income has stagnated, because it has benefitted from the hedonic adjustment over time.

but that's irrelevant to issues of income inequality: i live better than my grandparents. various well-known hedge fund managers not only live better than their grandparents (even were their grandparents andrew carnegie and john d. rockefeller) but live way better than me.

and it's not all because the market just happened to value their skills so much more than mine....

Posted by howard | July 24, 2007 3:34 PM

Matt, any particular reason you're bending yourself into a pretzel to avoid calling out David Brooks as a hack who isn't interested ina real debate? I mean, "the way the columnizing world works, there's almost no chance he'll address his next column to trying to rebut the critics of this one."? That is MIGHTY charitable. As is the assumption that Brooks WOULD provide citations for his flimsy facts if only the mean old format of the written column would permit him (because we all know no one ever cited anything before the Internet was invented).

Posted by Jake H. | July 24, 2007 4:20 PM

Brooks may indeed be a propagandist for the GOP, but at the very end of his column he says that it's too late for the GOP in 08. Even a GOP propagandist knows that Dems are going to romp in 08.

Posted by lyofbrooklyn | July 24, 2007 4:27 PM

I think, of why we should look forward to the day when the op-ed column is a dead format and everyone just blogs.

I sort of like the concept of op-ed columnists-- people whose thoughts and opinions are valued enough by major news organizations that they're given a regular space to spout off in. My complaint is not that Brooks, Friedman, Dowd etc. exist and are given space by major papers, it's that, intellectually, they really suck--their columns are seldom well thought out, and often make no sense at all.

Allowing for immediate commentary and feedback, as blogs do, seems no guarantee that the intellectual level of the content will improve. It would be great, though, if the Times and Post hired op-ed columnists who didn't mostly talk out of their asses.

Posted by James Gary | July 24, 2007 5:07 PM

My complaint is not that Brooks, Friedman, Dowd etc. exist and are given space by major papers, it's that, intellectually, they really suck--their columns are seldom well thought out, and often make no sense at all.

True. I'm not sure when the shift occurred or if it has always been that way. It seems that from the Clinton impeachment on they have been putting out the most pathetic, unsupported and delusional crap.

Posted by Fledermaus | July 24, 2007 6:54 PM

there may once upon a time have been an argument for the twice or thrice weekly deepthink by a certified "wise person," but precisely because of the world of political blogging, there would be zero loss to public discourse if this set of tenured positions were eliminated.
Posted by howard | July 24, 2007 2:23 PM

This is the tragedy of the op-ed. I don't believe that the format is a problem, I mean novels still work in a world of TV and Radio, right? What I see is a small tragedy, where something that was very powerful and useful, the true expert opinion of a wise person in a large national newspapaper was seized on by the organized right as a vital tool for controlling public opinion in the USA, as a precondition for conservative policy and electoral success.

The Op Ed was something that existed under the liberal consensus of the 1960s to primarily inform the active voting element of the US citizenry into making informed decisions. This was co-opeted and corrupted by movement conservatives in the 70s to serve a purely political and propagandistic end. At first it was under the guise of 'balanced' debate, but the dishonesty inherent in so much conservative argumentation invalidates this claim.

In this sense Brooks is part of the corrupt present of fake experts and Krugman is a throwback to the earlier tradition of qualified expert. Hopefully, the media owners will get a clue and value the true over the useful, but Rupert Murdoch is not a good trend in this regard, maybe his sons will rebel against conservative orthodoxy?

Posted by Northern Observer | July 25, 2007 12:16 PM