David Brooks is a conservative pundit liberals like. His writing displays an urbane wit and an almost-academic collegiality. He is also, as his latest column on “the culture of debt” demonstrates, a sort of neoconservative postmodernist.
Says Brooks: Some people, presumably dogmatic liberals and leftists, blame our growing debt crisis on the fact that “predatory lenders” seduce us with “too-good-to-be-true credit lines and incomprehensible mortgage offers.” Others, old-school conservatives, fans of “individual choice and responsibility,” blame the debtor for his or her debt problem. But Brooks, in predictable fashion, discovers an enlightened third way and makes the following miraculous discovery:
Decision-making–whether it’s taking out a loan or deciding whom to marry–isn’t a coldly rational, self-conscious act. Instead, decision-making is a long chain of processes, most of which happen beneath the level of awareness. We absorb a way of perceiving the world from parents and neighbors. We mimic the behavior around us. Only at the end of the process is there self-conscious oversight.
The answer is “culture,” you see. Why we commit sin is complicated. We are not perfect totally-in-control moral-economic agents but rather are even sometimes shaped by our environment! Our problem is that we have turned away from our Puritan roots toward an ethic of hedonistic “retail therapy,” though this debased cultural environment presumably categorically omits government regulation of the credit card industry and corporate practices from that “long chain of processes” that affects borrowing behavior. The idea that corporations might be held responsible for our cultural environment is unthinkable to Brooks. No, it’s all the fault of our changing norms.
Brooks doesn’t take the next obvious step in this type of conservative culturalist argument–to claim that our problems can be laid at the feet of feminism, affirmative action, hedonistic anti-war activism, and the like–but you can rest assured that our long slow cultural decline began in the ’60s. Fear not, though. This latest market correction will punish “many of those seduced by financial temptations” by helping them to “feel the heat.” As Brooks tells us:
[S]ocial institutions are trying to re-right the norms. The government is sending some messages. The Treasury and the Fed are trying to stabilize the system while still ensuring that those who made mistakes feel the pain.
In other words, the government is bailing out those institutions that were predatory lenders, but offering tough love to those culturally corrupted borrowers who gave in to temptation because of their debased “norms.” The former are by definition not part of the “long chain of processes” that led to our problems, the latter are.
I assume then Brooks must agree with the following proposition: if the police allowed an arms maker to put a loaded machine gun in a public square, then some psycho gives in to “temptation” and uses that gun to kill people, we ought to blame the “culture of murder” whose corrupted norms were part of the “long chain of processes” that caused the shooting spree to happen. To blame the gun-maker or the police would be crazy-talk!
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In related news, Stephen J. Dubner tells us on the Feakonomics blog: “Don’t Throw Away Your Capitalism Just Yet.” Some people, apparently, are getting a wee bit mad with the market following the subprime crisis–one wonders why!–but we should not be such sissy whiners because “capitalism is inherently turbulent” and “[n]ot only must eggs be broken to make an omelet, but sometimes people may decide they want their omelets made with no eggs at all.” Creative destruction, all that. So clever! By way of evidence of the virtues of capitalism, Dubner compares our current system, which is melting down before our eyes, to centrally-planned Soviet Communism.
I wish I were making this up, but no, I’m not.
Dubner apparently cannot imagine any economic system that might lie between totalitarian central planning and unregulated financial markets of the sort that led so many eggs (read: the lives of people) to be broken (read: totally devastatingly destroyed). No sir, we just don’t have any choice. We either embrace (totally preventable) human-created financial disasters that swallow whole the lives of the poor, or we have to march everyone off to the gulag. Do we hold to account those regulators and institutions that helped cause the crisis? What unthinkable communist nonsense! Should we “bail out” poorer sectors of our population the way we bail out gigantic financial institutions? Why, that would lead to what economists call “moral hazard”!
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This is then what passes for economic wisdom in the New York Times: capitalism for the poor dolts, socialism for the rich. Brilliant. Is there any wonder that when “conservatives” call our “newspaper of record” elitist and out of touch, these accusations resonate at a gut level with many Americans?