David Brooks, "The Talent Society"

[David Shasha]

The Talent Society

By: David Brooks

 

By now close readers of David Brooks know quite well that he cannot praise the rich enough.  The rich are the best people in the world as far as he is concerned.  But we have also learned that Brooks is enamored of traditionalist religion in the guise of Conservative values.  When these two existential philosophies collide, the result is this equivocating article.

 

As the article’s title indicates, Brooks sees “talent” in a very circumscribed manner.  There is never any sense that gains might be ill-gotten; that the link between “talent” and “achievement” might not actually be as iron-clad as Brooks would like to make it.  “Talent” for Brooks is a product of success and not the other way around.

 

But it is altogether possible for a person with real talent to be rejected by the marketplace and its inscrutable forces in favor of people who are more aggressive, wily, and clever.  A clever person is not necessarily talented.  What cleverness does is to allow those who scheme and plot to use their aggression to beat down others; including those whose talents are suppressed by the very market forces that do not always work on behalf of society and serve its practical needs.

 

To cite two examples that will resonate for most of us: The auto industry and the oil industry colluded for many years to suppress innovation that would lead to any real change in the way cars are built and sold.  New technologies were not funded and innovators in the field found themselves left out in the cold.  A similar situation applies to the medical industry where innovative approaches are routinely stifled by big pharmaceutical companies looking to peddle their pills. 

 

We are left with an energy crisis and a healthcare crisis of the first order with seemingly no end in sight.  As gas prices inch ever upward leading to a rapid rise in the prices of essential goods, and when our healthcare system is in a state of peril with many Americans uninsured and in bankruptcy from health-related costs, we should keep this idea in mind.

 

Informing the idea of “talent” that Brooks presents is the morally-dubious concept of “Might Makes Right.”  As is usually the case, Brooks cherry picks the evidence in the social science research that concurs with his preset thesis.  For him there is no limit to how strongly we should support the richest members of our society.

 

True innovators – like Apple’s Steve Jobs – have found themselves bankrupt and on the edge of complete disaster and financial ruin until they made the necessary market-driven adjustments.  A product like Apple’s home computer the Macintosh was decimated by the market and failed to capture the needed market share to become a viable alternative to the PCs and the Microsoft products that we now must buy and that are less efficient than the more stable Mac architecture.

 

The products that Apple would become famous for have done little to promote true value to society; instead, those products, like the iPod and iPhone, have simply retooled already-existing technologies and made them more user-friendly.  Success was not a product of innovation, but of affirming the value-neutral dictates of the market.  Though Jobs did successfully reorganize his business after being beaten down by those with less talent, the market has taught us all a valuable lesson: The true innovators, the ones with real talent, do not often see a correlation between their genius and market rewards.

 

When looking at Brooks’ paean to “talent” we are faced with a serious clash between amoral and agnostic market forces and the necessary values of religious morality and actual intellectual attainment.

 

“Talent” here does not mean that those who succeed are either moral or intelligent.  What the article neglects to say is that those who succeed these days more often than not do so because of their fidelity to a status quo elite cadre that sets arbitrary rules not based on civic needs but on greed.  They can create financial havoc with our economic system in order to feed their own personal voraciousness.  This makes them richer than the rest of us, but it does not make them more talented.

 

What is strange here is the muted manner in which Brooks treats the issue of the nuclear family and the way it has been decimated by his “talented” elite.  Like some episode from a Dickens novel, Brooks asserts that the Scrooges of the world – those who live outside the social order – are superior to the Bob Cratchits because they are less encumbered and thus better equipped to handle the complexity of a social order based on cleverness and “Might Makes Right.”

 

It is not necessarily that people want to evolve from having stable nuclear families, it is that the Scrooges of Brooks’ new order – those he identifies as “talented” – have made such stability that much more difficult.  Keeping a job, saving income, and conserving resources are ideals rarely possible when Brooks’ “talented” elites are sucking out all the value from our economy and holding their jackboots on the necks of those they see as beneath them who are not as clever or as maliciously aggressive as they are.

 

We now live in a world that is more akin to that of Dickensian England with its outrageous contempt for the poor than that of progressive-era America and the economic reforms instituted by courageous presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  The feeble policies and weak leadership of Barack Obama is no match for the elites.  In point of fact, President Obama has been all too willing to acquiesce to these elites in his own lust of power, wealth, and status.  The Obama ethos is most certainly informed by the “talent” culture Brooks is promoting here.

 

Brooks chooses to affirm unfettered market capitalism and its false illusions of achievement rather than fight for a restoration of the older values of human dignity.  Those of us who know something about history realize that these market forces engender states of boom and bust which leave society in a state of critical exhaustion and peril.  There can be no equivocation on this point.  The article promotes the idea that the rich have achieved their gains because of “talent” and yet strangely adopts a form of nostalgia for a bygone time when there was more equity and stability in the system.

 

Since the age of Ronald Reagan, one of Brooks’ heroes, the laws and safeguards protecting the less affluent have been gutted leaving the 99% without any security in face of the onslaught of the elites.  It is not clear how Brooks would address this state of affairs given his complete fidelity to the rich and his assertion that they are the “talented.”

 

But like a game of musical chairs, it is not about any intrinsic “talent” but about the strategies and the sheer luck that the successful are able to deploy on their own behalf while leaving others to their own devices.  Resources are sucked up by a small group of elites while the bulk of the citizenry are squeezed out of the process and left to wither and die.

 

The eternal civic values of the American religion, its roots in a Hebraic sense of personhood, are once again under assault from elites who do not concern themselves with “talent” but with the imposition of a mechanistic system of crushing conformity which has been designed and executed to enrich the few at the expense of the many.  It is a system that persecutes and oppresses the weak in order to elevate and secure the privileges of the powerful.  We should not be fooled into thinking that these elites are actually innovating anything; after all, there are many ways to steal, lie, and cheat.  It does not take talent to invent new ways of being dishonest and corrupt, just a firm commitment to malevolence and wickedness.

 

DS 

 

We’re living in the middle of an amazing era of individualism. A few generations ago, it was considered shameful for people to have children unless they were married. But as Jason DeParle and Sabrina Tavernise reported in The Times on Saturday, these days, more than half of the births to women under 30 occur outside of marriage.

In 1957, 57 percent of those surveyed said that they believed that adults who preferred to be single were “immoral” or “neurotic.” But today, as Eric Klinenberg reminds us in his book, “Going Solo,” more than 50 percent of adults are single. Twenty-eight percent of households nationwide consist of just one person. There are more single-person households than there are married-with-children households. In cities like Denver, Washington and Atlanta, more than 40 percent of the households are one-person dwellings. In Manhattan, roughly half the households are solos.

A few generations ago, most people affiliated with one of the major parties. But now more people consider themselves independent than either Republican or Democrat. A few generations ago, many people worked for large corporations and were members of a labor union. But now lifetime employment is down and union membership has plummeted.

A few generations ago, teenagers went steady. But over the past decades, the dating relationship has been replaced by a more amorphous hook-up culture. A few generations ago, most people belonged to a major religious denomination. Today, the fastest-growing religious category is “unaffiliated.”

The trend is pretty clear. Fifty years ago, America was groupy. People were more likely to be enmeshed in stable, dense and obligatory relationships. They were more defined by permanent social roles: mother, father, deacon. Today, individuals have more freedom. They move between more diverse, loosely structured and flexible networks of relationships.

People are less likely to be trapped in bad marriages and bad situations. They move from network to network, depending on their individual needs at the moment. At the same time, bonds are probably shallower and more tenuous.

We can all think of reasons for this transformation. Affluence: people have more money to live apart if they want to. Feminism: women have more power to define their own lives. The aging society: more widows and widowers live alone. The information revolution: the Internet and smartphones make it easier to construct far-flung, flexible networks. Skepticism: more people believe that marriage is not for them.

But if there is one theme that weaves through all the different causes, it is this: The maximization of talent. People want more space to develop their own individual talents. They want more flexibility to explore their own interests and develop their own identities, lifestyles and capacities. They are more impatient with situations that they find stifling.

Many people have argued that these changes have led to a culture of atomization, loneliness and self-absorption. That’s overdrawn. In “Going Solo,” Klinenberg nicely shows that people who live alone are more likely to visit friends and join social groups. They are more likely to congregate in and create active, dynamic cities.

It’s more accurate to say that we have gone from a society that protected people from their frailties to a society that allows people to maximize their talents.

The old settled social structures were stifling to many creative and dynamic people (and in those days discrimination stifled people even more). But people who were depressed, disorganized and disadvantaged were able to lead lives enmeshed in supportive relationships.

Today, the fast flexible and diverse networks allow the ambitious and the gifted to surf through amazing possibilities. They are able to construct richer, more varied lives. They are able to enjoy interesting information-age workplaces and then go home and find serenity in a one-bedroom apartment.

On the other hand, people who lack social capital are more likely to fall through the cracks. It takes effort, organization and a certain set of skills to surf these new, protean social networks. People who are unable to make the effort or lack social capital are more likely to be alone. As Klinenberg and others have shown, this is especially likely to happen to solitary middle-aged men, who are more likely to lack the drive and the social facilities to go out and make their own friendship circles.

Over all, we’ve made life richer for the people who have the social capital to create their own worlds. We’ve also made it harder for the people who don’t — especially poorer children.

These trends are not going to reverse themselves. So maybe it’s time to acknowledge a core reality: People with skills can really thrive in this tenuous, networked society. People without those advantages would probably be better off if we could build new versions of the settled, stable and thick arrangements we’ve left behind.

From The New York Times, February 21, 2012