Brooks tries to square the circle

[dano]

David Brooks is spreading confusion again these days, regarding Obama's
inequality speech. He says that reducing income inequality is somehow
opposed to increasing social mobility, or at least unrelated.

Dead wrong.

Less income equality provides the opportunity for more social mobility
because it reduces the economic distance to get from A to B, and it creates
a place to stand in the middle.

If you take Brooks' advice and focus on things like education to the
exclusion of corrective redistribution, then you end up with highly
educated citizens without high-skill jobs available to take advantage of
those skills.

You gotta do both together. Enable capacity-building at the individual
level, and then provide a place for that capacity to express itself at the
collective level.

Like a game of musical chairs, it doesn't matter how well everyone is
educated if it's a winner-take-all market structure. Everyone other than
the Winner(s) will lose, no matter how well they might be prepared, because
the market just can't fit them in at that level. You get PhDs driving cabs
and waiting tables, "overeducated" for the market. And similar cascade
effects all through the economy.

The squeeze on the middle class has nothing to do with any lack of
education, and any claim to that effect is mistaken or misleading.
Education has been fairly stable as the middle class has gotten squeezed in
recent years. That *can't* be the reason. Get real.

The fact that Brooks doesn't "get" this is a measure of his continuing
blind spots regarding economic policy, even as he seeks to present himself
as "moderate" and "reasonable" -- it's still thoroughly ideological and
partisan.

Not that we should necessarily expect anything different from him. But to
protect those who might be taken in by such rhetoric, we should smack it
down sharply and powerfully. Don't let this destructively false meme
spread, because it has just enough ring of plausibility for people to
subscribe to it.