David Brooks begins Friday’s NYT column by arguing that Bernie Sanders can’t win a general election, because “Flyover Man” is more motivated by the culture wars than by inequality. I agree; it’s the fatal flaw in the Sanders campaign.
But Brooks goes several steps beyond that to say that American capitalism essentially gives workers what they deserve, because the evidence shows that wage increases are tightly tied to productivity. From that premise, Brooks argues that the system isn’t broken, and that public policy should be focused on increasing productivity, particularly by improving education.
There is a lot there to comment on, including the following:
1. I think that Brooks is cherry-picking his statistics. There is plenty of evidence that wage increases have not, in fact, mirrored productivity improvements since the GOP embraced tax cuts and deregulation in 1980. Most of the evidence that they have relies on less meaningful timeframes.
2. I can’t help pointing out that his beloved GOP is slashing education budgets all over the country. If improving education is the way to solve the problem, he needs to find a different vehicle to do it.
3. As several commentators have pointed out, the fact that wages for lower-skilled jobs have increased at a higher rate in recent years is due, not to the operation of the market, but to minimum wage increases that Brooks’ GOP always oppose.
4. It is practically impossible to measure productivity in many service jobs. Are teachers and health care workers more or less productive than they were 20 years ago? Who can tell? Their wages clearly aren’t dictated by productivity.
5. There is no doubt that our economy is more knowledge-based than it was 20 years ago, and that inequality has increased as a result. The real question is, what is the appropriate public response? The GOP reaction is to cut taxes for wealthy investors and services for everyone else, which, on its face, only makes things worse.
6. If you have an economy that creates high-paying jobs for a handful of well-educated people and low-paying jobs for everyone else, is improving education the answer? First of all, even assuming that it is, it will be a very slow process. Second, it isn’t clear to me that you can make major structural changes to the economy by improving skills across the board. Would a health care worker with a graduate degree be a vastly more productive, and therefore better paid employee, than one without a degree? If the health care worker with the degree decided to find a better paying job in another field, who would replace her, and how much would she get paid?
The bottom line is that you can’t solve structural problems with your economy simply by improving the quality of the workforce. In the short run, the solution to rising inequality is an increased degree of wealth redistribution. In the longer run, we need to find a way to create better jobs for more Americans which don’t require coal miners to become code writers. That is an issue the candidates for president should be addressing, but aren’t.