The Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles About the Limits of Policy in Governance of Minorities. We Must Preserve their Social Capital.

Abstract: David Brooks attempts to sort out some of our ethnic differences and finds that some attributes, both negative and positive, seem to follow members of a distinct culture across the globe and that their generations seem to share a similar outcome as those who spawned them.  Apparently slavery is the cause of the inability for black minorities to assimilate in the US because certain social bonds were broken and lost. He probes several ethnic compartments in our society [white and Asian] but cannot seem to mention the culture in our inner cities that are dominated by black leftist politics. He cannot seem to even approach the political Snake Pit created by The Bell Curve and proven differences in innate intelligence averages among racial groups that must be included in any discussion of cultural differences. He avoids the tasks that might directly influence and upset the very outcomes he is looking to prove. He is cherry picking. He appears to scrounge for data to support his predetermined conclusion. As a novelty, and being progressive, he gropes for some new social metric called ‘social capital’ to explain his sifted and typed  ‘findings’ and proclaims that governmental policy decisions should not perturb these essential social attributes very much if such a program is  to be successful. He concludes, inter alia, that “Bad” policy can decimate the social fabric, but good policy can only modestly improve it.” Such an unsubstantiated conclusion properly allows social disasters like the condition of many inner cities to remain above criticism for the direct actions of the inhabitants or for the liberal policies that created these hell holes.  Thus, a new liberal escape mechanism is born that explains why many progressive social programs have dismally failed and offers liberals more flexibility and new reasons to conjure new social programs that will enhance,  maintain or possible reconstruct the elements of the lost  ‘social capital’ nostrum they just invented.  All the wonderful social programs so far have failed for certain minorities so we must try again. They need more taxes from us. We can, once more, blame slavery for the manifold ills of black minorities in this country.

The self-inflicted political torments celebrated by the far left in the near-bankrupt New York Times—aka the Walter Duranty Papers[1][2]-- have little ability to drive them off their progressive stools and redirect their course to enlightenment.  They love to wallow in misery. Anguish is such beautiful sorrow. They finally get somebody to win an election against the backdrop of frustration, ignorance and failure of the Bush administration and thus they  put in some noisy activist from the street-level community organizing communes with no history, suppressed credentials, sealed birth certificate and closed college records  or much else to view.  Obama was a ‘community organizer[3]’ and promised change. That was all it took. It hard to believe that George Bush did not graciously but sorrowfully  assist the far left with this political exercise grounded in sympathy, doubt and guilt. Bush must have crawled around for years to open all these doors for the drooling left. He was truly a failure.  The idea that McCain could fix anything with his spendthrift attitude and maverick gyrations is a joke and this was obvious to all viewers from the beginning.[4] We have spent too much money and too many RINOS have gurgled and bought into the silly nostrum that government can do anything possible if we just throw enough money in the pot and endanger the future finances of our offspring. Bush and McCain were ready and willing to give illegal aliens the vote among other frightening and revolution-tempting gestures.  Bush refused to veto the huge spending bills in Congress so he could go play war in the Middle East and work on regime building while his own regime crumbled and now rots.  So, now we are bankrupt.[5]

So, we got something different—but not so different.

The net result of the last election was to purely endorse spending and more spending and astronomical debt and this is the very favorite non-debatable subject of the Times.  But today our Chief Babbler David Brooks[6][7][8][9][10] broaches the outer walls of the socialist redoubts that inspire our leaders to spend more money and pretends to instruct us on broken societies that probably stem from our much earlier misguided government policies. Brooks, in this episode, manages to sneak around the process of laying blame and substitutes some pretentious mumblings that government policies work only slightly (at best) to influence the outcomes of the lives of our ethnically diverse society. This is almost heresy. This comes very close to a criticism of the left as most social programs and failure and all were derived from the sweating inspiration of Democrats. We need to look closely at this one.  He has something deeper in mind.

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[I offer extensive quotes in this blog so that the reader can view the exact language and can be confident that nothing was taken out of context or that nobody was misquoted. The easiest way to take in the salient points is to read the emphatic points in the quotes and then peruse my comments. Comments on my comments are always welcome: ryckki@gmail.com.]

So, today we will inspect our Babbler’s Babblings and insert some comments and ask a few questions that should have been addressed in this ragzine.

We begin our dissection of this rubbish:

“Roughly a century ago, many Swedes immigrated to America. They’ve done very well here. Only about 6.7 percent of Swedish-Americans live in poverty. Also a century ago, many Swedes decided to remain in Sweden. They’ve done well there, too. When two economists calculated Swedish poverty rates according to the American standard, they found that 6.7 percent of the Swedes in Sweden were living in poverty.”[11]--The Limits of Policy By David Brooks Op-Ed Columnist Published: May 3, 2010 [Emphasis is mine in all quotes.]

The central tendency of his point offered here, festooned with far too many words injected and not enough data or neuronal power to make his point very convincingly, is that all cultures [and all that baggage] retain some attributes, positive or negative, when they are transplanted willingly or not into different societies. He does not dig deeply enough into history to show that the US is a melting pot and a major transformation event for millions of poor people who were escaping tyranny or poverty. He seems to forget that many ethnic identities, customs and such were scrapped right off the boat. For the Irish in 1848, the choice was starvation or a dismal life as serf on some British-owned plantation or to take their chances in America as we read in The Great Hunger.[12] The  US Irish are not ignorant peasants subsisting on potatoes any more. And what about the Coolie Chinese in San Francisco and the general Bay Area compared to their ancestors? This place was a new experiment where the Old World had little influence upon us until World War I when the progressive failure Woodrow Wilson got us entangled with the problems of Europe for a price of only 160,000 dead. He drones on about little things and ignores larger issues but rushes to his conclusion a bit too soon.

Here, he signals he is about to sum up:

“A similar pattern applies to health care. In 1950, Swedes lived an average of 2.6 years longer than Americans. Over the next half-century, Sweden and the U.S. diverged politically. Sweden built a large welfare state with a national health service, while the U.S. did not. The result? There was basically no change in the life expectancy gap. Swedes now live 2.7 years longer.

Again, huge policy differences. Not huge outcome differences.”-- The Limits of Policy

Here, Brooks treads on dangerous political grounds because he fails to acknowledge and celebrate our cherished social programs like welfare, prison life, education, drug rehabilitation, juvenile detention and more that were specifically designed to ‘help out’ and change the future of the little guy. He stubbornly ignores heredity here. But, he is priming his own pump with an excuse.

And more:

“Asian-Americans have a life expectancy of 87 years compared with 79 years for whites and 73 years for African-Americans.

Even in struggling parts of the country, Asian-Americans do well. In Michigan, for example, the Asian-American life expectancy is 90, while for the average white person it’s 79 and for the average African-American it’s 73. Income and education levels are also much higher.”-- The Limits of Policy

Brooks divides up the life spans and other ethnic attributes during some Ouija Board séance and sorts a few of them by race in limited cases. Do we hear an echo of The Bell Curve[13][14][15] here? He apparently unwittingly sorts out groups of people by superior ethnic cognitive skill averages and then seems to stare at their geographic locations of origin, compares this to their present location and dismisses  what influences education, self care, employment, the dreaded religious practices and other factors that might be in force here. Intelligence must definitely not be any factor however remote we must presume from his silence. I wonder what he would say about why the Amish or Mormons and if they are much are different from their ethnic origins and why they are omitted from this Opus Magnus.  Did America give many a chance to scrap some of their social bonds and form new ones?

Avoiding the politically trappy notions of differential cognitive skills Brooks babbles on with a grand introduction of a new metric: “social capital.”

“When you try to account for life outcome differences this gigantic, you find yourself beyond narrow economic incentives and in the murky world of social capital. What matters are historical experiences, cultural attitudes, child-rearing practices, family formation patterns, expectations about the future, work ethics and the quality of social bonds.”-- The Limits of Policy

It is culture he tells us—not heredity. He blatantly leaves out the importance of superior cognitive skills and religion again! These two are an obvious ethnic and social division metric  that could be placed in his list to muse about, but are painfully missing some  inspection by our Babbler are the ugly cases of the US  inner cities of several states where the government is completely controlled by black left wing Democrats. We can stare at the crime statistics, sloth, over the top murder levels[16], health problems from AIDS and VD, drug addiction rates, chronic unemployment, poor educational performance and other metrics of this group and compare that outcome with Brook’s conclusion. Does he dismiss this sector because he must think that life in the concrete jungles of Oakland and Baltimore reflects life in Gold Cost or Ivory Coast of the 15th century? We have several dozen to a hundred cities to cite with the kind of data that Brooks files to cite in this op-ed! The top 10 cities in crime metrics all have left liberals at the helm and only NYC has a white mayor in this cohort. We might also want to compare the outcome of places like Los Angeles with their social antecedents in Mexico City and border towns along California and Texas. Can we draw any conclusions from an analysis of California[17][18][19] and their ‘ejukashon’[20] process and wonder if this expensive jumble is constructive in the retention of any social capital terms?  Why do Asians populate the University of California at Berkeley more than 50%?

Is poverty being deliberately imported into California? Is that the social legacy they brought here? Is that a valued piece of social capital we must preserve? How about drug addiction? Does that help or hurt some of these pleasing social attributes he places into context for us? Was the failure to implement Ebonics[21] a mistake?  But, Brooks fails to probe these waters and answer other obvious questions. He is content to keep his essay as politically correct as possible [the censors are watching] as he carefully avoids the inevitable conclusion that our social experiments in the major cities with ‘education[22]’, welfare[23], drug rehab, job training and other worthless social programs are massive failures.  New Orleans is exactly what the crime-besotted and drug-crazed leftists want for their ‘chocolate’ city and they love the welfare, drugs, corruption and massive bribes to voters loosely disguised as tax revenues that sustain this outrage. Baltimore, Philly, Detroit, Atlanta, Oakland, San Francisco and many other places seem to share this progressive view of governance. They are the ones going bankrupt too. How can we show where this prevalent social capitalistic metric came from as we look at the successful in our society? Where did the tax and spend mantra come from? George Washington? England? Germany? Did the current welfare system destroy social bonds? How about affirmative action or busing? Did those programs stigmatize blacks and rupture their social bonds?  How would Brooks explain American exceptionalism as viewed by Alexis de Tocqueville  only 50 years after our democratic experiment started?

The Prisons:

We can easily view the statistics of persons in prison for various crimes by race although some sites carefully suppress the ethnicity ratios of inmates.[24] It turns out that the ethnic distribution of groups in the prisons is remarkably different from their fractional representation in the general population.[25] Here, we see that blacks are arrested 36% of the time while their fractional representation in the general population is only 12%.  It is also true that of all the murder victims tabulated 47% were black showing, clearly, that this interaction is highly intraracial. It appears that Brooks is using a form of political masking here commonly seen in the writings by others at the NYT or ‘Old Gray Lady.’ He omits significant evidence from his work for political reasons. Going a bit further we note that his colleague Maureen Dowd, the Old Red Lady [26][27][28]of the Old Gray Lady, has conveniently provided us with her ‘Unspoken Words Theorem.’ She has the supernatural but politically stimulated ability to hear what is not spoken and provide us with an analysis and we might borrow this method to print herein what is not mentioned in this op-ed today.

What is not there can thus be extracted:

Here is a good example of how this interesting process works:  In a rage, Maureen added new information to a recorded quote by Joe Wilson who yelled “You lie!” at president Obama during an address to Congress, [but Obama really didn’t lie she states.]  Quoting Dowd: “But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!”[29]]—and here it is! She has the proof!

Brooks conveniently avoids any mention of this propensity for violence and crime in the black population because if he did he would be obligated, following his own theory here, to compare the US crime statistics with the history of Africa and make some sober conclusions. He could also avoid the crime statistics in Europe as well as it pertains to blacks and other minorities who can burn 100 cars every night in Paris for a week and not elicit a response from the governments in charge.[30] Was, or is, Africa as violent as we might think a few centuries ago and is this violence an intrinsic part of the social capital of minorities as they cannot seem to adjust to our western culture? Thus, he falls silent on this topic and finds ways to blame whites. This services the old progressive political theme. But, we can use the Maureen Dowd process and find numerous unspoken words in this Brooks piece, fair or unfair, as it makes little political difference in the slant here and we can conclude with confidence that Brooks is saying this:

“We cannot find a way to assimilate blacks in our society in terms of education, work ethic, violence and other social metrics so we need to invent some restricting factor that is not inherent in their culture and blame that factor on whites so that we can excuse blacks from any blame.”

This restricting factor, of course, is his buzz words “social capital, “which was destroyed by slavery. This, of course, calls for more taxes and more affirmative action programs and more government to search for ways to restore what was lost three centuries ago.

A rule:

“Therefore, the first rule of policy-making should be, don’t promulgate a policy that will destroy social bonds. If you take tribes of people, exile them from their homelands and ship them to strange, arid lands, you’re going to produce bad outcomes for generations.”-- The Limits of Policy

This current snippet is so narrow and myopic it stands by itself as one of the most foolish statements ever printed in the Walter Duranty Papers. This snippet also does not explain the similar violence and glaring inability by black minorities to assimilate into European societies such as France, Germany and England. If minorities are violent and cannot pass tests and perform on the job in France then how can this be explained when they willingly and eagerly came into the country with no hint of slavery to force them? What social bonds were broken here by the French, Germans, Belgians and English? Perhaps the premise is just pedestrian-level progressive baloney politics. That assumption fits better into the mainstream of NYT outputs.

One obvious implementation of this ‘rule’ might be to halt the invasion of illegal aliens into the US so as to preserve their ethnic social bonds in their existing homelands. Why ruin a good thing? The central mumbling vector here seems to point to the very aspects he ignores and refuses to discuss and that could be that if blacks had their former ethnic identities scrambled and corrupted during slavery that this must play some major role in the utter failure and criminality of the current generation. Their failure to assimilate is thus our fault. Thus, an excuse is offered, however adroitly, to ‘prove’ to us that we need more social programs to address those disadvantaged for being exiled from their homelands and that relocation produced these bad outcomes for many generations. It must be the fault of the white people again and we must include capitalism. We must have spoiled the system in Africa that made them so successful. Blame us and start all over again.

People with low intelligence have difficulties assimilating into any culture except peasantry.

Liberalism destroys social bonds and ethical standards of conduct. Why not reform that?

Today Brooks glides mindlessly into the narrow slip stream of progressive politics where the quest for more taxes is paramount and blame for any failure on the left is transferred, even over the centuries, to others. He is a useful tool at best.

Raise our taxes and start over with new social programs.  We must, again, redress the sins of the past.

rycK [a 5^th generation Californian in exile]

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