I don’t believe Brooks is suggesting that people who favor “radical labor market reform” are against “human capital” policies. That would mean that people who favor rolling back NAFTA are against spending more on education. Does that sound like something Brooks would think, when the evidence — left-wingers clearly want both — runs to the contrary?

The debate, in Brooks’ column, refers to a difference in emphasis between Democrats who favor worker re-training to help workers who lose their jobs to overseas competitors, and Democrats who favor erecting trade barriers to keep those workers employed in their old jobs.

I agree that Brooks isn’t directly advocating investment in education, but I think he is suggesting that Obama’s proposals to invest in early childhood education grow out of research that Brooks himself endorses. The op-ed effectively supports Obama’s proposal to invest in early childhood education.

Perhaps my support for Brooks’ column derives from my ideas about how Democrats should fight for improvements in education. Spending more money on education in a general way may be a good idea, but politically it’s a loser. In order to convince the American voter to support increased spending on education, a politician needs one or more clear ideas about what’s not working in education, and what will fix it. Obama’s emphasis on early childhood education has the potential to be politically successful in a way that general efforts to increase school funding could never be successful, in my opinion.

Brooks is a conservative, and there’s no doubt that he and I would disagree strongly about many things. But I think he did the country a real service by putting Obama’s proposal in a context that makes it digestible for conservative-minded people who may be suspicious of more spending on schools. Obama isn’t just throwing money at schools to satisfy teachers’ unions in an election year; he is trying to apply the results of research to public policy.

Brooks claims that there is a “debate” inside the Democratic party and says one side of this debate advocates “radical labor market reform.” That is *his* term.

I don’t know exactly what he’s thinking when he uses this term, but I assume that by this Brooks is referring to the usual bogeymen of the right: pro-union laws, a social safety net that helps people who fall off the wagon, regulating international capital flows.

Brooks’s argument about this so-called “debate” is coherent only if those who advocate “populist” positions are against “human capital” arguments. But that’s an absurd position for him to take, in my view. Regulating capital and investing in education are very compatible positions to take. Investing in human capital does not preclude labor market reform, radical or otherwise.

But I think it’s a mistake to think that Brooks advocates investing in education. Brooks emphasizes–again revealing his culturalist bias–that it’s not a lack of money that is at the root of our educational crisis but a “devaluation” of education in the family environment.

What else does Brooks mean when he writes this?:

“It’s not falling school quality, [Heckman] argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.”

In fact, Brooks is saying this: We can reduce inequality in this country without “radical labor market reform” by focusing instead on “human capital.”

My question is, what do you mean by “radical labor market reform”?

What I was complaining about is Brooks’ effort to draw an either/or distinction between “populist” ideas and “human capital” ideas.

Again, Brooks writes: “Some populists emphasize the destructive forces of globalization, outsourcing and predatory capitalism. These people say we need radical labor market reforms to give the working class a chance.”

Brooks seems to assume that “radical labor market reform” and “human capital” policies are mutually incompatible. I do not.

First, the column says there’s a strong relationship between our country’s commitment to education and our economy. This is something I agree with. Brooks explains Goldin & Katz’ ideas about technology and education, saying the economy grows when more of our people are skilled enough to compete in high-tech industry – another strong point. He talks about unskilled workers having “little bargaining power,” which reflects a left-wing attitude toward the relationship between workers and employers.

Furthermore, I think it’s true that inequality among the nation’s 5 year-olds in preparation for school is a major factor in determining the quality of American education. In saying that Obama’s policy proposals flow directly from this research, Brooks is throwing his weight behind Obama’s proposals to invest heavily in early childhood education. In that way, Brooks is actually endorsing a plan to invest in the future of poor children. In saying Republicans are inept at talking about human capital policies, he is rejecting the Republican talking point of just not spending money on schools. To say “human capital policies” doesn’t mean anything isn’t fair to Brooks.

Lee’s idea that “education follows development” doesn’t seem right to me. Does that mean we should stop funding schools and just invest in business instead, with the idea that development money will trickle down to the schools? To say education had no impact on economic development is just unfathomable: does that mean we should abandon the concept of public education altogether?

Brooks is up to more or less the same thing he was up to in the debt column, albeit in a more subtle way. But not much more subtle.

First, Brooks asks the question, “Why did the United States become the leading economic power of the 20th century?” and stipulates the answer: that “[t]he best short answer is that a ferocious belief that people have the power to transform their own lives gave Americans an unparalleled commitment to education, hard work and economic freedom.”

This is a complete misreading of economic history. The US became a great world power because of private-state coordination of the economy during and following World War 2. Remember, it wasn’t the New Deal that brought the Depression to an end but the (something like) quadrupling of industrial production of the wartime economy plus the utter destruction of Europe. We’re still on the same war footing we were in after World War 2.

Did education matter? Absolutely, but only in the context of broader state planning of the economy. Brooks would have us believe that the economy did well because of our pluck and gumption–implicitly, that government got out of our way and we made it happen–rather than the truth: that the actions of government–yes, big government–were what resulted in our high-tech, high-productivity economy.

The Goldin and Katz research has gotten a lot of press. They are arguing that we overestimate the effect of technological development as an explanation of inequality but that education is a more important factor. Many see this study as evidence that we have woefully underinvested in education in this country, that we need so-called “big government” to step in and improve our educational system. I agree completely, but Brooks tries to link this initial study to a completely different study by Heckman.

“It’s not falling school quality, [Heckman] argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.”

Notice what Brooks has done here: He has accurately described a problem, one that is too obvious to ignore, but has now stipulated, using Heckman as an authority, that (i) spending more on education won’t help us and (ii) lowering tuition won’t help us. The blame again is laid at the feet of “family environment” which has “deteriorated over the past 40 years.”

In other words: culture. Those who are poor are poor *because* they are from families with deteriorated educational values, not because they live in economically depressed parts of the country, which have historically not received the same subsidies other regions of our economy have, or because we don’t invest as a society in the future of our poor children. For Brooks, solving this problem is an either/or question: either “populist” investment in schools or “pragmatic” investment in “human capital.”

On one side: “Some populists emphasize the destructive forces of globalization, outsourcing and predatory capitalism. These people say we need radical labor market reforms to give the working class a chance. But the populists are going to have to grapple with the Goldin, Katz and Heckman research, which powerfully buttresses the arguments of those who emphasize human capital policies.”

On the other side are people who say: “It’s not globalization or immigration or computers per se that widen inequality. It’s the skills gap. Boosting educational attainment at the bottom is more promising than trying to reorganize the global economy.”

In other words, some people (”populists”) want people to take control of the economy and want us to use our tax dollars to improve educational facilities–and our schools are hugely under-resourced, especially poor schools–while other people don’t go in for all that “big government” stuff and are moved by the research to invest in “human capital.”

The false choice that Brooks is posing is between government action and “human capital policies,” which sounds nice but has very little content in this column beyond not spending more tax money on schools.

I don’t know what Obama’s education proposals are–the media seems more interested in talking about whether Obama is arrogant or not–so I can’t say how accurately Brooks is characterizing them.

But Brooks’ assertion that “populists are going to have to grapple with the Goldin, Katz and Heckman research” is unpersuasive.

And Brooks’ assertion that “America rose because it got more out of its own people than other nations” is also pretty much wrong. Education had an impact on rates of equality, perhaps, but not on economic development. Education follows development, not the other way around, as far as I can tell. And investing in human capital, as good an idea as that is (depending on what it means), is not a silver bullet to our woes.

But the context of Dubner’s post is our present-day dissatisfaction with the market after the recent subprime and lending meltdowns. I would like to meet the person who is advocating, in response to these recent financial disasters, a turn to Soviet-style central planning of the American economy.

In fact, the (liberal) response is more often this: let’s regulate financial markets, which have evolved enormously since the Depression, and have exceeded our regulatory frameworks. I am arguing that Dubner, perhaps unintentionally, but nonetheless, implicitly aligns such calls for regulation with total central planning of the economy.

That, it strikes me, misrepresents our situation badly.

where he uses a similar ‘human capital’ argument around education in the U.S.

I believe the crux of the argument is that, children, in families which encourage and support their education, do significantly better in school.

Additionally, Brooks writes, “…it’s worth noting that both sides of this debate exist within the Democratic Party. The G.O.P. is largely irrelevant. If you look at Barack Obama’s education proposals — especially his emphasis on early childhood — you see that they flow naturally and persuasively from this research.”