Why David Brooks Shouldn’t Talk About Poor People [View all]

[Agschmid]

The New York Times columnist believes their poverty stems from a lack of virtue.

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David Brooks has developed a reputation for wisdom as a writer for the New York Times. It’s true that he occasionally stumbles upon insights, as he does, for example, in his writing on emerging neuroscience. But he is consistently wrong-headed when he takes on issues relating to poverty. His instinct is always to discuss the problem in terms of virtue and morality; material factors and structural conditions are afterthoughts. Thus his columns on the poor end up being something closer to 800-word rants masquerading as high-minded journalism. It’s never enough for him to batter you with erudition; he insists on moralizing as well.

On Friday, Brooks published another fatuous piece about poverty. This time, naturally, the subject was Baltimore. Brooks tried to undercut the popular trope that funding poor communities like Baltimore will improve conditions. He writes:

The $15 trillion spent by the government over the past half-century has improved living standards and eased burdens for millions of poor people. But all that money and all those experiments have not integrated people who live in areas of concentrated poverty into the mainstream economy.

This passage is instructive for a couple of reasons. First, it illustrates Brooks’ tendency to say something true without offering anything resembling context. For instance, he notes that poor people haven’t been integrated into the mainstream economy but fails to ask why that is. We’ve tossed all this money at the problem, he seems to suggest, yet things aren’t better. How could that be? Perhaps it has something to do with history, with the residual effects of institutionalized racism and the array of structural problems that have plagued Baltimore and communities like it for decades. Dumping federal dollars into a city doesn’t erase these things.

What Brooks wants to do is advance a pleasant-sounding bootstraps argument: Those poor people just need to lift themselves out of poverty through moral education and self-reliance. He continues: “But the real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighborhood that either encourage or discourage responsibility, future-oriented thinking, and practical ambition.” Here Brooks identifies the real problem with poor people: They lack high-quality relationships and strong familial ties. That’s not entirely false, but it’s also embarrassingly incomplete.

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