David Brooks on nurturing human capital in poor people

“As a society, we are pretty good at transferring money to the poor, but we’re not very good at nurturing the human capital they would need to get out of poverty.”

Today’s NYTimes includes an opinion piece by David Brooks, “Why I Am Not a Liberal”. In his critique of liberals, he notes, “the materialist bent of progressive thought: the assumption that material conditions drive history, not cultural or moral ones.

Progressives …… are quick to talk about money but slow to talk about the values side of the equation. That’s in part for the best of reasons. They don’t want to blame the victims or contribute to the canard that people are poor because they are lazy.

But there’s something deeper. Progressivism emerges from a different lineage. Karl Marx influenced many people who are not Marxist, and he saw the world through a material-determinism lens — people’s consciousnesses are shaped by their material conditions.

What do the actions of the rich and corporations tell us?

They have demonstrated that control of the material conditions of their lives is by far their dominant concern. The rich and corporations have carried out the most successful social movement of the last hundred years. Under the banner of conservatism, they have changed the laws and regulations controlling our economy. Engaging in a very well-funded campaign, they have dominated our culture, government, and economy entirely to their benefit. Average real wages for the middle- and working-classes have grown a mere 15% since 1975. This in an economy where the per capita GDP has grown from $47,700 per person in 1975 to $82,000 per person in 2023 (in constant 2023 dollars), a 74% increase.

We have a surging population of billionaires. The Forbes billionaires list in 2019 counted 607 billionaires in the US. By April 2024, this number had grown by 34 percent to 813. In dollar terms, US billionaires held $3.1 trillion in net wealth in 2019. This figure ballooned by 117 percent to $6.7 trillion by the end of 2024. A typical CEO in the 1950s and 1960s earned 26 times their average worker’s salary. Today, that multiplier is over 350

If the productivity-income sharing trends of the thirty years following WWII had continued during the last fifty years, a median income wage of $42,000 in 1975 would have grown to $92,000 in 2018, an 84% increase, instead of the actual $50,000 (all constant 2018 dollars), a 16% increase.

The changes brought about by the rich and corporations through their top-down class warfare have resulted in the transfer of $79 trillion from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 10% – really, the bulk ended up in the hands of the top 1%.¹

If you prefer a conservative view of this heist,

look to the self-described home of conservative economics, AmericanCompass.org’s Cost of Thriving Index (COTI ²https://americancompass.org/2023-cost-of-thriving-index/note]

“The Index measures the number of weeks a typical worker would need to work in a given year to earn enough income to cover the major costs for a family of four in the American middle class in that year: Food, Housing, Health Care, Transportation, and Higher Education.

In 1985, COTI was 39.7 weeks. Costs totaled $17,586, while the weekly income for a man aged 25 or older working full-time was $443 per week ($23,036 per year).

In 2022, COTI was 62.1 weeks. Costs totaled $75,732, while the weekly income for a man aged 25 or older working full-time was $1,219 per week ($63,388 per year.)”

In 1985, a single male worker labored for 40 weeks to afford the essentials of middle-class life for a family of four. By 2022, that same worker needed to work 62 weeks (55% longer) just to cover the same basics. However, there are still only 52 weeks in a year. Consequently, he found himself $12,344 short for the essentials over the course of a calendar year.

So, yes, David Brooks, it is all about the material aspects of life

How does one explain this behavior other than as extreme greed? A monomaniacal pursuit of ever larger accumulations of money and political power. What might a conservative like David Brooks say about the culture of the rich and corporations? A wasteland built at the expense of the rest of society?

That is what the rich and corporations have been saying for fifty years! Its time for the bottom 90% to take a serious view to the material conditions and change the rules of the economy to produce far more equitable results.

See my earlier A Progressive Agenda for the US Economy – undoing the last fifty years of rule by the rich and corporations