I read David Brooks so you don’t have to. In today’s offering, he regales us with a very boring and dubious-sounding story about how it took eight years for some committee in Israel to write ‘part’ of the curriculum for their high schools. By the time they were done, all the members of the Ministry of Education were dead had lost interest and the curriculum was never implemented. There might be a point to telling us about this absurdly slow performance except that it was completely typical.
Kahneman then asked the most experienced among them how long such work took other curriculum committees. The gentleman pointed out that roughly 40 percent of the committees never finished their work at all.
But what about those that did finish? The gentleman reported that he had never seen a committee finish in less than seven years and never in more than 10.
I’ll leave it to you to explain why Israeli committees need the better half of a decade to do anything. Even the sloth-like Max Baucus’s Finance Committee needed less than a year to write their portion of the Affordable Care Act.
Brooks pivots off these observations to argue that the U.S. government has been operating under fallacious assumptions about its own ability to fix the global economic slump. The problem isn’t divided government preventing the full implementation of the desired remedy. No, the problem is that the world is too complex for mere mortals to control.
The Democrats, besotted by the myth that the New Deal ended the Great Depression, have consistently overestimated their ability to turn the economy around. They regard the Greek crackup as a freakish, unlucky break, even though this sort of thing is a typical feature of a financial crisis.
I wonder if tsunamis and nuclear accidents are also typical features of financial crises. I wonder if Brooks is aware that the Great Depression and the Great Recession were not typical financial crises. But, I digress. It’s the lack of self-conscious irony in Brooks’s conclusion that really caught me eye.
Over the past decades, Americans have developed an absurd view of the power of government. Many voters seem to think that government has the power to protect them from the consequences of their sins. Then they get angry and cynical when it turns out that it can’t.
It may be true that the people have developed an absurd view of the power of government to protect them, but the government was quite capable of protecting the banksters from the consequences of their sins. I’d argue that that’s where Brooks should look for the origins of people’s anger and cynicism. Propping up the banks was a necessary evil. We needed to get them lending again. But that didn’t mean that a lot of people shouldn’t have gone to prison. And it didn’t mean that they should have been allowed to carry on much as they had before. There are some good reforms in the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, but it didn’t do enough to create accountability or to alleviate people’s cynicism.
And, really what is Brooks’s point? That planning is futile?
