David Brooks and the Infrastructure of Technocratic Control
One thing I wish decent liberals would get a handle on is this: the idea of the state as a benevolent scientific administrator of all aspects of the lives of its citizens is not a liberal idea. There is nothing about this conception of state power that tends, in principle, to promote liberal values. The values it will promote will be the values of the people who control it. Moreover, science isn’t partisan. Once we have created a infrastructure of technocratic control, if the science happens to say the economy will do marginally better if, say, more women spend more time in the kitchen, pregnant, rather than competing for social esteem on an equal footing with men, then the state is ready with its managerial tools to reshape our incentives, our lives, and our social structure. We need only wait for a faction to come to power that finds that this or that bit of science (or “science”) conveniently reinforces their prior impulses, and then those tools will be deployed.
These are the thoughts I had reading David Brooks’ play at writing John McCain’s domestic policy in his latest column. I don’t have time to pick through the trainwreck, but let me just note that Brooks is in favor of mandatory national service, no doubt to help shape young people’s conception of who they really belong to, and what their lives are really for. And he wants to send government agents into “chaotic” homes, so that the children there “have some authority in their lives.” Brooks is very keen to ensure that we all have a great deal of authority in our lives, it seems, and I’m afraid that John McCain is too.
February 15th, 2008 14:33
This is a great point.
And, it affects most people who would like to impose their schemes coercively on others (liberals and conservatives alike). They always imagine that the people in control are like them and will only use their power to further their good ends.
Actual experience contradicts this fantasy every day, but people keep it anyway because it’s so damn comforting.
February 15th, 2008 18:51
[...] I: Will Wilkinson with a critique of Brooks’ op-ed from the libertarian viewpoint. [...]
February 15th, 2008 19:59
Gil, Kip Esquire calls that “Kip’s Law“.
It’s not quite the same thing but I’d like to reiterate my statement that “Part of being a libertarian is recognizing that public policy is not a fantasy story in which you may enact your whims, especially the more spiteful ones.“
February 15th, 2008 20:24
It’s too bad that you are in breezy dismissal mode for any policies that might come from a backer of John McCain, will. National service I’ll grant you as a dangerous boondoggle, but most of what Brooks suggests in that piece is basically unobjectionable from a classic liberal standpoint. We already use the coercive power of the state to fund schools and compel children to attend, so it might as well be education that actually benefits them to some degree.
There’s also a bit of crying wolf here. You scare quote “chaos” but I am sure you will grant that many families provide really terrible, damaging environments for children. Real chaos is not hard to identify. Is it your position that every department of social services is a net negative on the lives of the children they remove from abusive families? If not, why do you think other, less invasive interventions are doomed to failure, or a doorway to oppression?
February 16th, 2008 12:55
Libertarians like this argument a lot, but I wonder if it works. Suppose it is true that a cultural liberal has a preference ranking (cultural liberals control political power, area of dispute is kept out of politics, cultural conservatives control political power). That only recommends a strategy of keeping the area of dispute out of politics if doing so makes the least favoured option less likely to a degree that more than compensates for the lost chance of the favoured outcome. But, in fact, the libertarian compromise position often seems like the least likely thing to happen, and pursuing it doesn’t make the other side winning the political battle any less likely.
February 16th, 2008 13:20
There are two meta-problems with the Brooks article and, as I see it, you only address one. You’re right that many of these ideas tilt dangerously in the direction of giving too much authority to the political class. (This is bad for a half-dozen reasons.)
Another problem with this article, perhaps even more fundamental, is not that all the proposals are bad (they’re not) but they’re all undefended. This isn’t a real agument, it’s an outline for a real argument.
Given the space constraints, I don’t think Brooks could do better. But wouldn’t it have been more useful if he could make one coherent argument for 800 words rather than string together what are little more than slogans?
If he’s serious about ideas, Brooks should promote them in some depth in the Weekly Standard or something. That would be the honest and brave thing to do. Blurting out bullet points in his column is just glib sophistry.
February 16th, 2008 14:08
Ben A said,
“Is it your position that every department of social services is a net negative on the lives of the children they remove from abusive families? If not, why do you think other, less invasive interventions are doomed to failure, or a doorway to oppression?”
I have no idea what Wilkinson thinks, but framing it this way distorts the issue. If we were discussing the issue of whether or not police are excessively violent and aggressive, it would be missing the point to ask, “Are you saying police use of force is a net negative for society every time a policeman subdues someone who is about to commit murder?”
Of course social service departments are not a net negative if you only count the cases where they succeed- that’s true of anything. The relevant question is not whether “every department of social services is a net negative on the lives of the children they remove from abusive families,” but whether such departments are a net negative or positive in total, which includes the times when they screw up. Are such departments a net negative for children mistakenly removed from non-abusive homes, or children physically or sexually abused by foster parents, or parents who lose their children because of a mistake by the government’s investigators? Most likely, yes. Does the harm caused by such incidents (and any other costs associated with these programs) outweigh the good done when the government gets it right and saves an abused child? I have no idea. Strengthening these agencies may be a good idea, but we won’t know if we don’t count costs as well as benefits.
February 16th, 2008 15:18
The thing about you, Will, is that you’re such an amazing combination of perceptiveness and gullibility.
How you can write a paragraph like your first above, two days after linking approvingly to this appalling ort of Brezhnevian agricultural propaganda, is quite beyond me. Physician, heal thyself!
Perhaps the trouble is that you have not applied your critical energies aggressively enough to the the problem of drawing the line between science and “science.” Feynman may be of some assistance in this matter. How much of what you see as science, rather than “science,” is the product of uncontrolled experiments or subjective judgments? And what happens to your worldview if you shove it back over the line?
Imagine a Brezhnevian world in which the State released a single number every year. Call it a Goodness Index. The point of the GI is just to tell you how well the State is doing its great, fatherly job. Who could doubt that this number - calculated, of course, by scientists, using only the most rigorous scientific procedures - would increase every year? Convince your subjects to believe that the Goodness Index really does represent honest-to-godness Goodness, and nine-tenths of your “infrastructure of technocratic control” is ready and waiting.
Try taking a closer look at even the economic statistics that you regularly see in headlines - GDP, CPI, and the like. Are these science, or “science”? What does an increase in GDP actually mean? I think you’ll be surprised at the similarity between these figures and the GI.
The idea that “public policy” can be formulated objectively by scientists was the great delusion of the twentieth century. Remove it and you start to see what our system of government actually is. And it doesn’t look good at all - at least, not to me.
February 16th, 2008 16:12
John,
I don’t think we are much in agreement. I agree one shouldn’t take a limit case (policeman shoots murderer in the act) as the model of state behavior. My phrasing here was really just raising a strawman to fight Will’s strawman. Brooks isn’t advocating a fascist state. He’s advocating more support for kids in disastrous family situations. That may turn out net negative. Like you, I’m for looking at costs and benefits (and that was indeed what I meant by net negative — social services on the whole being negative). The way Will wrote treated this issue, and Brooks generally, just felt like a dodge.
February 16th, 2008 16:13
Sorry, John. “I don’t think we are much in disagreement” is what I meant to write!
February 17th, 2008 17:47
I have to say, I rather enjoyed the use of the term “positive government” in that statement. I guess since the Bush years have more or less defiled the term “compassionate conservatism” as a political slogan, this is what Brooks and his allies have fallen back on.
The fact that “positive government” is a term that was about equally likely to appear in a Paul Krugman or Frank Rich column should tell you just about all you need to know.
February 18th, 2008 00:39
I sometimes like David Brooks, and think that he can be very perceptive at times. However, this column was a disaster, start to finish. He spends most of it on the fresh idea of putting education at the top of a Republican president’s agenda. Wasn’t Bush th Elder the “education president”, and didn’t Bush the Younger give us NCLB as part of the centerpiece of his domestic program? So the schools must be fixed by now, I would assume. Then Brooks trots out the stale, horrible idea of “National Service”, as if giving that large a pool of labor would be used well by the government. Ugh.
February 19th, 2008 17:50
Mencius, goodness is normative. Social science tends to follow the lines of Milton Friedman’s “Essays in Positive Economics”.
February 20th, 2008 17:52
“if, say, more women spend more time in the kitchen, pregnant, rather than competing for social esteem on an equal footing with men, then the state is ready with its managerial tools to reshape our incentives”
Yup.
February 20th, 2008 18:07
Hey Kip, FYI, I wrote about that here.