Your quick mention of “left-wing moral relativism” feels like nothing more than a red herring, like you just couldn’t compose an essay without taking a(n) (unwarranted) potshot at the left.
Doesn’t morally untethered capitalism itself explain our current sorry state of affairs? (“Morally untethered” need not be based on relativism; for example, a “non-partisan” moral apathy could be at play.)
48
Isn't this what Obama was saying when he said, "You didn't build that!"? To the universal contempt of the right?
47
I find it hard to see any evidence that the left has influenced the market unless you count Obama's failure to put even one banker in jail.
28
Brooks fails to examine why his cherished moral institutions have apparently failed. If those traditions and institutions were so effective and credible wouldn’t they continue to hold society together?
The fact is the hypocrisy of traditional conservative institutions is being exposed:
• Religion and the moral order it claims to provide – yet churches, grounded in paternalism, suppression of women’s and sexual rights, and false hope allow for a sliding scale of adherence subject to one’s political agenda.
• Worship of governmental institutions like the Constitution which are routinely manipulated and exploited – documents governing today’s reality with 250 year-old mechanisms.
• Values like “patriotism,” touted as unifying forces, but are really implements of control and suppression.
• Respect and blind obedience to governmental institutions that send men and women off to winless, never-ending wars, wars justified by lies and corporate profit.
• Belief in the free-market system that left to its own devices plunders many for the profit of a few.
• Worship of individual freedom which produces a disjointed collection of individuals rather than a cohesive collective society.
• Blind adherence to tradition and a world that never changes.
• The “mythification” of history into a white-washed fantasy of glorious unity that ignores the brutal facts.
These are the institutions that Brooks touts as being the social glue that holds us together. David,care to address this?
48
“We” did not abandon a moral lens. That was the work of the late unlamented University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. He wrote an op-ed piece published in this newspaper on September 13, 1970 headlined “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.”
His writing is a foundational idea of the present Second Gilded Age, in which big companies and their executives amass vast hoards of cash.
Is it possible Friedman was shortsighted? Let’s hope so, for the alternative conclusion is likely to do serious damage to capitalism.
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html
34
Interesting point about Apple. How does Mr. Tim Cook over there respond to it, I wonder?
4
Mr. Brooks, First you lampoon unions for being "greedy" and argue that those wanting to fix issues within capitalism as part of an "era of emotional tribalism." So, two groups offering solutions towards amoralism in capitalism are wrong in your view. I would expect for you to offer an alternative route for fixing amoralism, but instead all you say is "we need embedded moral norms," but don't tell us how to get there.
Boo!
14
Yes, let us bring our religious values, esp. Old Testament morality that condones slavery and genocide, and condemns gays and unbelievers to swift death, to our free market.
David Brooks, you are such a brilliant man! How do you come up with this stuff that might have been something Ronald Reagan would have loved, if he didn't have 1000 advisers telling him the same thing.
Mourning in America!
8
Milton Friedman is a face you put on for nothing counts but shareholder value.
4
Brooks' accusations of the alleged moral relativism of the Left as somehow responsible for every idiocy and failing of the Right are so tiresome. I suppose it's asking too much of him to accept the truth that it was free-market capitalism and the utter failure of Republicans to regulate the greed that fuels it that brought about the 2008 Great Recession, and that Leftist morals played no role whatsoever in causing that debacle.
29
Remoralizing the market comes to remoralysing the rich. Beautiful dream!
6
How can we have a good society with this amoral and incompetent president? Tone at the top, indeed.
7
It seems to me that this amoralism — corporate and personal — comes in part from huge and rapid economic, technological, informational, and social change: everything is swirling and changing. In some ways, it's harder to hide bad deeds, but in the 24-hour news and social media cycle, it's harder to focus or care. We're on to the next thing!
5
Not a bad commentary for a Republican. But I have a few disagreements with it. For one, the comment regarding unions becoming too greedy. Unions made our country great and more equitable. Look at Europe where they have union representation on their boards of directors. Then senile Republican Reagan set about breaking the unions and the entire party jumped on board. Then there is your comment about Left-wing moral relativism, whatever that means. The Republican party is the root of this mess, giving handouts to the wealthy and large corporations while leaving crumbs for everyone else. Which brings me to ask David, if you believe everything you wrote. why are you still a Republican? Your party , the party of amoral, unethical, inhumane, racist, misogynist, actions has destroyed the very fabric our country is based on.
19
This entire column could be used as a set of talking points for Elizabeth Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act introduced in the last Congressional session. It handles all of the points mentioned, from obligations to workers and communities to balancing needs of the shareholders with the needs of everybody else.
If you haven't read it already, David, I highly suggest you do so. The original is at https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/3348/text and isn't an overly long read for a bill.
Come to the Democratic side. We have better corporate governance and responsible capitalism. And cookies.
15
It seems specious to try to spread the blame for amoral capitalism equally, when the GOP has been the primary driver of the reorientation of all policy around what benefits the wealthy. And there is no bigger mascot for that drive, and no bigger proponent of moral relativism, than Trump (or perhaps moral narcissism, in the sense that all morality is based on what benefits Trump personally). At times the GOP wants to preach morality, but only in a strict evangelical Christian sense (white men are in charge, family is good, sex and drugs are bad, gay people aren't really people, etc.), and even then in a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do sense.
All of which is to say, your thesis is not wrong – but unless your party dramatically changes its principles, none of the rest of this is going to change.
11
Brooks never admits the almost exclusive involvement of the Republican Party in creating the mess the condemns.
11
A bit too fondly nostolgic, don't you think? Ah, those halcyon days of robber barons , sweatshops, slave foremen, no minimum wage, union-busting.... The norms that you remember were paid by blood and toil. The ability to use global markets to vastly increase wealth hasn't unleashed a new era of greed. Greed is endemic to the human condition. How do we move forward? By understanding how the present rules of the game enrich the few, and changing those rules.
12
I cannot count myself among your "we" doing all these destructive, selfish, short-sighted things. Most of us are powerless to have any effect—good or bad—on the systems that control our lives. We just get batted around in our individual micro-universes without even knowing who's wielding the club.
8
Left-wing moral relativism? Relative or not, I only see morality on the left, not on the right.
6
Reagonomics started us on a path of enormous deficits whereby we keep spending more as a nation than we earn. This is immoral. Our deficits are out of control and we are living in glass houses.
5
Tucker Carlson is worth an estimated $20 million. Convenient of him to get a moral backbone now that the bear market is creeping into play.
6
I wonder how many Apple employees, enjoying good salaries, vilify Trump for using the tax laws to enrich himself.
2
As is often the case with David Brooks, this column makes a few good points but at its heart is deeply disingenuous, intellectually dishonest, at the service of an agenda.
For example, Brooks said:
"Social trust arises from a covenant: I give to my company, my town and my government, and they give back to me."
And... Brooks said:
"there’s been a striking shift in how corporations see themselves. In normal times, corporations serve a lot of stakeholders — customers, employees, the towns in which they are located. But these days corporations see themselves as serving one purpose and one stakeholder — maximizing shareholder value."
this is Elizabeth Warren's fundamental message, and she has proposed innovative legislation, The Accountable Capitalism Act, to address the imbalance. But Brooks instead characterizes her as a purveyor of "tribal emotionalism" at the very start of the article.
Oh, there are loads of other intellectually dishonest sleights of hand in the article: The claim that Reaganite capitalism unambiguously "worked" (wages stagnated for 30 years; inequality vastly increased; the middle class lost ground). The dishonest statistic that wages are now rising at 3.2% a year, after decades of stagnation. His chastising the Apple employees, who should be "humiliated and ashamed"... without mentioning that it is the multimillionaire Apple BOSSES who parked all the money in Ireland. the rank and file employees had nothing to do with it.
57
Relevant piece given the current state of affairs. We have a president who doesn't pay taxes, whose charity is (was) a joke-fraud, who established a ripoff/fake university, and stiffed the architect who built his golf club (for other smarmy high rollers who wish to associate with him). This is the example we look to at the top of our pyramid. And then we have the vastly overcompensated CEOs of this nation - who certainly don't begin to earn their obscene keep. Our Billionaires don't even begin to scratch the surface of directing their winnings to good causes. Horde. Me. Money. More. Meanwhile, we have TSA employees making $33k a year (less than $3k a month pre tax) with no paychecks.
27
When the Supreme Court gave the almighty dollar the same rights as free speech, that certainly made a bad situation worse. Because of this decision, corporate interests were irrevocably tilted strongly in favor of those who care about money more than morals.
Somehow we need to get back to the fact that corporations are granted rights by people. Once that is clarified we can start trying to address the moral side once again.
19
Mr. Brooks, people are not greedier when they pay their fair share of taxes or make decisions based on environmental exigencies. The beauty of capitalism is that it ADAPTS. It does so in response to either sensible regulation or no regulation. We know empirically now how it turns out when there is not enough regulation. It crashes. As FDR’s VP John Nance Garner said, it’s like a poker game where one or two guys have all the chips and the rest do not have the wherewithal to acquire any. The game comes to a halt. Put the playing field in an unregulated arena, and it will happen every time. These regulations and taxes are the hallmark of an advanced civilization, not the GDP growth when the economy is doused with gasoline. This debate is really over. Let’s get on with reality.
17
"...Apple parked its intellectual property in an Irish subsidiary so it could avoid paying taxes in America..."
Well, David, yes you could point out the perfidy of the most successful company in the history of the world, OR you could at least mention that it was a bought-and-sold Congress that wrote the tax laws that encouraged such behavior.
19
The shedding of religious life coincided with this trend. One might think that a departure from these social norms of the era you glorify might also play a role. Communities of faith and family might have a role to play, but are instead mocked and vilified by progressives whose moral authority stems from a bumper sticker purchased at a Phish concert. Secular culture and today's capitalism aren't just ironically on the rise, they are correlated.
1
The secularisation of the West is one of the greatest phenomenons to happen in the 20th/21st century. You are religious? Fine, pray with your friends/family, but don’t force it down my throat via schools or any public institutions. That is ‘authoritarian’. Respect private liberty.
7
My dad spent his career at Phelps Dodge, and was in senior management (and a lead labor negotiator) during the 1980s. PD argued that the union was unnecessary because PD ’took care of its own,’ paying good wages with lots of benefits. What I saw growing up in a company town in the '70s largely validated that claim.
But the paternalism was expedient. I asked Dad once about PD’s responsibilities for environment remediation. (Some scary stuff took place in those copper mines.) He looked at me as though I were speaking a foreign language. He said that the company's ONLY true obligation was to its shareholders. Profit was everything.
And in many ways, the past community values Brooks cites were pretty thin by current standards. At PD, back in the day, women and Hispanics were barely represented (if at all) at the management level. Health effects of dangerous mining conditions were dismissed.
One could argue that the earnest public face of big companies nowadays is all an act. That the full-page NYT ads they buy during a scandal are just window-dressing. But there was a time when companies didn’t even need to do THAT. Now companies know people are watching. They can’t expect to sweep an environmental disaster under the rug, or commit rampant employment discrimination without consequence. Big companies may now be worse in some ways (executive compensation, dark money politics, cheap labor overseas). But in other ways, society is forcing them to behave better than ever before.
14
I prefer Gramsci's theory better:
Every class-divided society depends on two elements to survive on the political sphere: 1) brute force (i.e. the monopoly of it) and 2) consensus (i.e. the exploited classes must wish or at least agree with being exploited by that particular dominant class). The dominant class which has both has the "hegemony", i.e. absolute power.
No dominant class can rule with just one alone, but they are inversely proportional: a dominant class which is very unpopular (i.e. has very little consensus) must compensate it with more brute force, and a dominant class which is very popular doesn't need to use its brute force.
What determines if a dominant class has consensus? If it represents a development of the productive forces: the exploited classes "agreed" to be dominated by the bourgeoisie because the feudal system was in terminal decline, and it "offered" a solution upwards.
When an economic system is declining, the dominant class which represents it loses consensus, thus having to resort to ever more brutal tactics to maintain the system.
After 2008, the capitalist class lost a lot of its luster. The USA has had much graver social unrest before - but its existence was never questioned because the economy was booming, so everybody could tolerate each other. Being a Christian was ok, because Church was only on Sundays, and in the rest of the week you were just a normal suburban, productive paterfamilias. With the economy gone, not anymore.
3
In 70s CEO of National Semiconductor, Charlie Spock had a rule that all employees should fly economy to keep costs down. He himself would fly only economy even when he was traveling on vacation.
Andy Grove, an immigrant, refugee from Hungary, CEO of intel drove Dodge Omni (one of the cheapest car Chrysler made in 70s). He did not want to be measured what car he drove: he would rather be measured by how he contributed to his company, betterment of employees, industry and his adopted country.
Role models such Charlie or Andy are hard come by nowadays. Today's business leaders would rather be measured by how many $billions they have.
15
Mr. Brooks you definitely hit the nail on the head when it comes to the disease (GREED). But in your voice I still detect a Reagan republican who is still beaming about the grandiose accomplishments of capitalism. Yes, capitalism has lifted the poor and the rich to new heights. But this same capitalism, unless republicans rise ethically, could also be the death of us all. What the world needs NOW is love, generosity, and, yes, a good dose of socialism.
19
There is a principle of economics called Gresham's Law which has repeatedly demonstrated itself to be true. In a nutshell, the principle says that "bad money drives out good". If two things have a similar perception, but one is cheaper to obtain, that cheaper currency will drive out the more costly one.
It's fine to speak in self-aggrandizing tone about the idea that everyone should not just obey the law, but also consider the broader society in their decisions. But again, bad money drives out good. As Brooks stated in the article, Apple domiciled itself in Ireland saving $7 bn/yr. Does anyone think that has negatively affected Apple's reputation ?
Yes, corporations used to weigh the interests of their community as well as themselves. But remember that such thinking largely came as a result of a post-war America that faced little competition from damaged Europe and Asia. The former CEO of GM, Charles Wilson, said "What is good for GM is good for America ... and vice versa."
But this type of linkage receded when overseas competitors got back on their feet in the 1970's. You cannot afford to pay unionized employees $72/hr (as GM was doing) when you are losing market share.
Things are what they are. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle. If people want more rewards, rather than rely on corporate philanthropy, they need to improve their own skill via education and family.
2
I suspect Milton Friedman, who Brooks reveres, would wonder why Brooks thinks it’s possible to re-moralize markets, as if they were ever moral or ever could be. I suspect Friedman would also be incredulous that institutions he believed could be trusted to keep markets, corporations and populist presidents in check, like Congress and the Supreme Court, by creating and upholding laws that balance the interests of markets and everyone else, including future generations, would ever become so incapacitated by political forces controlled by corporations and one-percenters.
12
The basic concept behind the primacy of economics to the organization and functioning of society, government, law, and culture is the rational agent. The rational agent is supposed to dominate in the behaviors that produce economics. The rational agent is entirely predictable and acts according to reason that can be described precisely with mathematics. Von Neumann, the legendary mathematician from the mid-twentieth century, asserted that without rational agents markets cannot be predictable.
Well, people can be rational agents when they can think reasonably and coldly, without fear and without hope, but it's unnatural and never can be maintained for long. The result is that economics cannot predict human behavior without abandoning rational agents and incorporating human psychology. That's why economics by itself cannot produce societies in which anyone can live.
1
Reconciling morality with the market (economics) in the U.S.?
A great step forward would be made by admitting we know nothing really about morality, about the Good, meaning we really, as human beings, have quite a bad record when it comes to the decision making process. In fact many people who admit that humans could use considerable improvement in making decisions ironically turn right around and talk and act as if they know all about morality, about what's Good.
There is no real morality, obvious good, if we are honest with ourselves. There is no obvious, consistent, and without error path forward. All we can do is work toward making the least amount of damage to ourselves and the world around us. There is no way to remain innocent, there is no obvious innocent and saving path forward. There is only constant attempts to improve thinking and working toward improving decision making ability.
Probably the greatest harm in reconciling morality with the market comes from those people who for some reason think they know all about the Good. Whether they are religious or just right wing or socialists there are any number of people who for all their lackluster decision making ability in everyday life somehow when it comes to society as a whole know the Good, and of course when it comes to a pure discussion of morality are suddenly experts beyond society, transcendent in their knowledge.
I trust now only those people who are willing to realistically admit their decision record.
1
Great observations about a central dynamic in our current cultural problems. Capitalism is dynamic and productive, but needs "to be embedded in moral norms and...a larger social good." In a time when religion is fading as a central cultural feature, these moral norms and social goods need to be in established in our civic culture. That's a big challenge. I do disagree that "left-wing moral relativism led to a withering away of moral norms." The left is advocating for a capitalism with social goods. It's the right that is advocating for unfettered capitalism.
7
David Brooks again attempts to deflect attention from the important issues. He says that "remoralizing" the economy must be the great project. That is nonsense. The market economy never was and never will be "moral" - a purely human quality.
The "great project" is, and has always been, to create a government that places people before profit, and that goal requires rigorous oversight of the economy (which will always put profit over people). Deciding how that oversight is to be done is the issue now and in the future.
14
You have identified the problem, but not exactly how it came to be and what should be done. Originally the intent of Wall Street was to facilitate the operation of corporations. Today it is expected that corporations should facilitate the operation of Wall Street. More specifically the problem is that Wall Street values short term profits over long term gains. There is nothing wrong with capitalism; the problem is that trading is not the same thing as investing. We need to discourage the form and encourage the latter. A good place to begin would be a tax on every Wall Street transaction and a tax penalty on profits on stock held for less than 5 years.
5
David is correct that the primary value of our day has come to be greed. Unfortunately, as David often does, he offers no real prescription or recommendation on how to reinsert morality into our economy and society. Pointing out failures and problems is easy. Offering workable solutions is the challenge.
5
This article is light on specific policy prescriptions. If you're advocating a law that allows (or directs) corporate officers to use corporate resources entrusted to them for "social good," you're destroying our systems of stability and accountability of corporate governance. As a lawyer, should I be able to use my client's money for things that I deem "social goods"? That only works if you're wiling to destroy the trust that makes the legal system possible.
The perspective taken in the last paragraph is key. The economic system should be serving society's purposes, which include other dimensions besides the exchange of goods and services, not the other way around. There are interesting parallels in this article by a leading advocate of MMT: http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=25961
It's good to see a conversation about the amoral nature of current economics get more sunlight. Although I disagree with some elements of the essay, it's good to see the amoral nature of current capitalism unveiled.
More please.
2
I think the companion question to “Can American Capitalism Survive?” is "Can American Democracy Survive End-Stage Vulture Capitalism?"
Wall Street is laughing all the way to the bank, David. THIS decade. What about the next?
4
Classic 'both sides' David Brooks. Tax rates too high in 70's. Evidence? None, of course. Destruction of social norm of equitable pay for CEO's. All under Republican watch. Busting labor unions a la Reagan. Did Dems do this? Brooks doesn't like the way market capitalism has worked out in the U.S., but can't bring himself to admit that his earlier self was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Howard Chernick
2
David Brooks doesn't know much about the "Left Wing." What he calls "moral relativism" is just abandonment of traditional religion. What he misses is that the "Left Wing" substituted values thought to be religious (hard work, fairness, personal responsibility, commitment to the community) for those "ordained by God." The Left has ALWAYS been about moral values.
2
I guess I don't share David Brooks's lens of rose-tinted glasses and Pollyanish faith in a fundamental and benign American Ethic. Rather than deregulation and an effective austerity pushed on the non-10% being high endeavors on the part of altruistic "leaders" like a saintly Ronald Reagan and "practically-minded" "Democratic" centrists, I see them as part of the raw retrenchment from the New Deal by powerful moneyed interests. The Reagan Restoration of laissez faire Gilded Age freebootery. Robber Baron Redux abetted by Rockefeller Republicans in drag such as the Clintons and Obama. These presidents weren't leaders in financial and economic matters, they were owned frontmen.
For evidence of the real power posing as populism, we need look no farther than the hijacking of the Tea Party by the Koch brothers et. al. through the agency of Dick Armey, and the recent tax cuts accomplished not by Donald Trump but by Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, corporate and plutocratic lackeys if there ever were any (the precursor to which were the 2nd Round Cheney cuts that had even W gagging).
David, take off the blinkered innocence and follow the big money.
3
Please Mr Brooks, i can accept less ink from you if less means more quality. You’ve stated the obvious which really only requires one paragraph.1970s was the pivotal point. Appreciate the history. Now, get your thinking cap and start covering pathways to equilibrium. Is there a single think tank that cares about updating capitalism? I’ve been waiting for well over a decade to hear more than whining and grand gestures. Now is the time for that good idea. Greed is good is not doing so well. The free market unfettered is on path to destroy our economy, our nation, and ultimately the planet. Flesh out a few good ideas. Get a move on it!
4
Markets were never moral, which is why they need to be regulated by government. Also the financializing of life, besides being unfair has made life boring. I just read an article in the Times, whose authors assumed that people used to come to the major coastal cities from the heartland to 'better themselves'. Wrong. It was because those major coastal cities were where it ws 'happening'. They were primarily looking for fun & excitement. That's what's been forgotten in the financializing of life - not morality. But speaking of morality, I was surprised when you talked about the Israeli day care center thing (I'd heard it before) only in terms of caring about the workers. How about your kids? you know that the kid who's always picked up last is full of shame, because the other kids think no one cares about her.
2
David--again you fail to locate the source of the problem. You write: "Somehow over the past 40 years economic priorities took the top spot and obliterated everything else. As a matter of policy, we privileged economics and then eventually no longer could even see that there could be other priorities." The "somehow" is the endless greed and lies of the Republican party that told people that tax cuts would benefit everyone and not lead to deficits and that Greed is Good. Why can't you simply accept that your Republican party in both its politics and economics has destroyed this country? When you say "we" you really just mean the Republicans. Carter cut taxes but Reagan tilted the tax code leading to the massive deficits of today and the tremendous rise in income inequality. Stop whitewashing the truth!
3
It is time for Moody's and S&P, which rate U.S. Treasury securities at Aaa and AAA respectively, to announce a credit watch. The Trump administration, in consort with a flaccid U.S. Senate majority, has shown more than enough incompetence and material misstatements to warrant a downgrade. Put simply, you don't earn a triple a by issuing fake numbers and governing by brinksmanship that changes almost daily.
Not that the rating agencies have been paragons of objectivity or courage. But as their best they can alert the market ahead of a financial and management calamity. This isn't a government at the moment --- it's a dig kennel. (My apologies to the dogs.)
Come on. rating agencies: Send these clowns a message.
2
"In an era of tribal emotionalism, you’re always going to be able to [reduce] a complex problem to a simple narrative that separates the world into the virtuous us, and the evil them (the bankers). But I’d tell a third story...which is neither economic populism nor free-market fundamentalism."
Good thing 'neither left nor right but a complex center' isn't a "simple narrative" trotted out by Johnny-One-Notes who shoehorn evidence into the same simple thesis to arrive at exactly the same conclusion, week after week, huh, Mr. Brooks?
2
Contrary to Mr. Brooks' elitist fantasy, for the US working class majority, there have not been three long economic booms since the 1970s, but rather one long decline in living standards--as wages have remained flat, while the costs of food, fuel and housing have increased several or many times over. The Democrats went along with the destruction of the labor movement and the enormous gains in productivity made possible by technological advances have gone almost exclusively into the pockets of the top 1% . . . . Fortunately, the younger generation favors Socialism--though, after decades of Marxism being banned from mainstream media, they have little knowledge of its doctrines. But one thing they perceive very clearly: that capitalism offers them no dignity, no justice & no future. It is not possible to reform the present system: it must be overthrown & replaced with a humane society, not based on profit.
2
Lord, you just can't help yourself can you? I note several examples of how "right wing free market fundamentalism" contributed to the loss of some moral center in corporate culture but NOT ONE example of how "left wing moral relativism" ( a once extinct dinosaur of a notion from the '70's, BTW) did so. But you still felt the need to drop that little bomb anyway. Funny.
One father of the obscene corporate culture we see today (liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican has no analog in this sphere) is Milton Friedman. The insanity of free market fundamentalism is EXACTLY what leads to this sort amoral "Crony Capitalism". It is he that said a corporation MUST ONLY be concerned with shareholder profit maximization. In fact, he said it was their duty to ignore any consideration but that (which, in the long run is bad business anyway). And it was he that promoted (along with Saint Ronnie) the Gospel of Trickle Down; a false doctrine demonstrated over and over in the last 40 years to be a lie.
Finally, although I am somewhat heartened by a trend toward "conscientious capitalism" by some companies, the only real solution to changing corporate culture is to put some sort of check on it by the public sector. How much of a check would depend on different variables at different times, but -just as our government works on checks and balances between our three branches of gov't- there has to be some sort of check and balance between the private sector and the public sector.
2
Capitalism is not a system it is a method for making money by means of investing in other people's wealth creating activities by lending them the means to operate. It offers no organizing principles nor social agreements to cooperate for common advantages and common benefits. It lacks even any principles to assure that economies will grow to serve the benefits of all. The strategy of capitalists is whatever they wish to choose. It may be to incorporate a living a good life or to just burn through whatever wealth that they have acquired on short term pleasures. Basically, the strategy of free markets is chaos where the wealthiest and most powerful do as they please and everyone else must find a way to get by or perish.
3
"But capitalism needs to be embedded in moral norms and it needs to serve a larger social good. Remoralizing and resocializing the market is the great project of the moment."
Notice your use of the word "social"? A nice word, "social", found in other pleasant words like "society" and "ice cream social" and "well-socialized" and, oh, my, in that bogeyman, "socialism".
The best system is well-regulated capitalism with a good dose of moral socialism in which socialism means that everyone chips in together and combines forces, you know, like at a box social lunch?
137
@Heather
It's revealing that Brooks calls for changes in capitalism which essentially describe socialism.
Concerning your request for "well-regulated capitalism," the question is whether capitalism can be regulated to serve the larger social good and still be capitalism. If the hope is that the excesses and societal neglects of capitalism can be corrected by laws, then capitalism is inherently a failing societal system. Laws come only after their need is apparent, and by that time, the harm's been done. Besides, determined capitalists will always find ways around existing laws.
We need an economic system not based on the capitalistic creed that you're free to make money any way you want as long as it's not illegal. Capitalism, supposedly tempered by morality, won't get us there because too many choose money over morality. And capitalism, supposedly tempered by law, will also never work because people will find legal ways around laws to make money.
10
Surely the widespread discarding of morality and religion in every part of life must have been a major factor. When nearly everyone is good and moral, or at least pretends to be good and moral, corporations go along, or at least pretend to go along. There were plenty of sharp operators in the 40s and 50s, but they weren't open about it, and tried to keep their bad practices hidden, because they were considered disgraceful.
Oh, they were such hypocrites! Nowadays, people do their own thing and let it all hang out.
A regulatory state is a puny thing compared to the social norms. If you have a bunch of sharp lawyers, you can pretty much steal to your heart's content.....or engage in any other sort of bad behavior, if you're into that.
32
@Jonathan I agree with you, but I feel that religion/morality has been co-opted in many ways by expediency and a sort of blind-sided viewpoint that ends justify means. You might argue that this is not true moral behavior, but it is what passes for such in current times, although I believe the true morality still exists.
1
@Jonathan
No, no, no... The hypocrisy of the morality of the old days led to its discarding. We are building a morality based on facts and equality now, and that will lead to proper regulation of business maybe.
8
"Pure" capitalism, unregulated capitalism, laissez-faire capitalism--that's what Mr. Brooks is criticizing. The antidote to that has been around since a great, Republican President--Theodore Roosevelt--used government to balance the needs of ordinary people against the power of monopolistic corporations. In the last few decades, as a result of global economic forces, Supreme Court decisions, unrestrained corporate lobbying and political contributions, and good old fashioned greed, the balance has swung too much towards the power of capital. The government needs to restore the balance between capital and labor. Through changes to laws, through regulations, through opposition to monopolies. Call it populism, call it socialism, call it anything you want, but it is necessary to reduce the inequality that threatens our democracy and to harness the power of a free market economy to benefit all.
187
Easy to write about, very hard to do.
31
@David Shulman
Even easier to comment on than to write about or do anything - that is the problem with social media. It is too convenient with little risk. The question is how do you change the collective mindset? I would argue we all need to start picking up our pens and phone and letting our representatives know that the economy is here to support our collective social well being, not visa versa.
7
@David Shulman
Start with yourself, your family, your company.
Pay it forward. Ask yourself if you'd like to be in someone
else's shoes. If not, help, pitch in, every day,
every people, no matter age or color and background.
Let it ferment for 20 years.
That is how we start.
5
Interesting that so many are so intent on assigning blame for our current predicament. Historically speaking it is a complicated story with multiple villians and more than enough blame to go around. I am most interested in how we get out of the conquer, destroy and pillage mode that characterizes the leadership in this country and our species generally. We need to figure out how to get along in so many ways before mother nature and or human nature takes care of the problem, and that wont't be pretty.
1
What is excluded from this very prescient piece is how this plight has impacted the political process, which has become necrotic from the overwhelming amounts of cash needed to stay in office. As a result, both parties are horribly compromised and in no position to lead a "remoralization" movement. We desperately need a third way which encompasses a more compassionate version of capitalism as well as a rejection of moral relativism. These concepts are not mutually exclusive. They are both necessary if we are ever going to re-establish a sense of community in this country.
2
We would do well remembering that Capitalism actually exists by permission of Democracy; nowadays, it seems to have become our Democracy existing by permission of unbridled Capitalism. This can only end badly if we don’t compel the dog to once again wag the tail of Capitalism. The Capitalist tail has no business wagging the dog of Democracy. The most successful Capitalists understand that Capitalism flourishes in a strong Democracy. We are seeing many negative side-effects of this new, topsy-turvy reality daily.
5
Your implication that the left wing is committed to moral relativism is dishonest. The left wing argument against capitalism is that the kind of despair and suffering we feel now isn't explained by some unusual failing on the part of individual capitalists who "ripped the market" out of its moral context; it's explained by the dynamics of capitalism itself - the way it necessarily works. That's not an argument for moral relativism, it's a premise in a substantive practical argument. The basic form of the argument is this: nobody is free until everybody is free; under capitalism, at least some people (i.e., the workers) are necessarily unfree; therefore, nobody is free under capitalism, and we have to overcome capitalism in order to realize our freedom. And you're afraid to engage with that argument, because you're comfortable with the violence and exploitation upon which your mythical "moral market" is built.
2
"It basically worked. We’ve had four long economic booms since then. But there was an interesting cultural shift that happened along the way. In a healthy society, people try to balance a whole bunch of different priorities: economic, social, moral, familial. Somehow over the past 40 years economic priorities took the top spot and obliterated everything else. As a matter of policy, we privileged economics and then eventually no longer could even see that there could be other priorities."
It is no wonder that everything has been reduced to economics, because capitalists have been attacking every other sector of society, from the arts to education to science, for decades. You can't earn a decent living in professions that promote other cultural values, and life without a good income has become nearly impossible in the United States. This is a very expensive society to live in. Most of us are now stuck sacrificing our lives on the altar of capitalism, regardless of where we would prefer to apply our dynamic energies. The system does not serve us; we serve it.
5
What is missing here is that free market capitalism works to curb the returns to stockholder and senior management through competition but competition does not work in the monopoly/oligopoly environment of today. This is compounded by the use of the relevant economic rents to curb any effective anti trust enforcement.
1
Mr. Brooks, don't blame "left-wing moral relativism" for the supposed lack of morals you decry. The fault lies with the Republicans, who have proven themselves enamored by free markets and their cruel degradation of the social safety net rather than empathy for the common person. Democrats' "moral relativism" is undertaken out of a respect for differences between different kinds of people and is a commitment to morals, not their absence.
6
As a confirmed centrist, Mr. Brooks is forever committed to finding equivalencies on "both sides" even when the stretch to do so is enormous. Mr. Brooks says his story begins in the 1970's, but this particular starting point is in service to his prejudged allegiance to the "balanced" narrative that has captured his full faith,and rendered his columns tiresome.
So many glib statements follow, but so little is documented. One might argue that Brooks is simplifying in order to elucidate a larger truth, but the supposed truth he sees is predetermined and promoting it invariably requires a bushel of literary tricks, starting with suspension of disbelief.
4
I agree with the overall point of this column, even though it is guilty of the typical David Brooks bothsidesism. It is the Fox News - Wall Street Journal Editorial Page - Right-wing axis of evil that is the main force behind the current market immorality, and unless they are held accountable, I don't see anything changing.
3
Mr. Brooks confuses capitalism with democracy. Democracy is a wonderful system. Capitalism requires the constant consumerism of the new and disposal of the old of its adherents creating false and shallow values, greed, poverty, self-loathing, rampant pollution and global climate change in its wake - truly NOT wonderful.
4
Your words and thoughts are so quickly tarnished by not owning up to the great damage that is done by your party. But we never get that from you - we get nothing but false equivalence. You try so hard, but fall so short, again and again and again. Walk around your house, find a mirror, take a good long look - and recognize how you and your party are so heavily responsible for where we find ourselves. Do it....it will feel so much better afterward. Who knows - you may even recognize that your PBS sparring partner Mark Shields is more often than not correct in his ideas and views. And that you are not.
5
As a person who has a small business on the side, a couple years back I visited my first professional accountant. He showed me that if I just set up as an S Corp I would save me around $10,000 of tax bill and he would only charge me $2,000 to set it up. It seemed totally strange that simply filing papers in a different way should make that much difference. If we want to have a moral system then it seems that we need to figure out more fair taxation. We want people to create something of value and yet the system greatly rewards passing the buck.
5
Welcome to the party, Mr Brooks. Those of us in the workforce have been aware of and yelling about this for many years. Work and workers are not held in the same regard as investors. I have switched careers three times and seen and felt it in each industry.
The pursuit of profit became accepted as the new morality. Good luck turning that around.
3
Mr. Brooks, I continue to appreciate your point of view on these matters, and must admit that I find myself agreeing with your point of view. Although you do not offer a solution, your article is reassuring in itself by offering up a potential cause. Unfortunately, upon reading all the comments, I instantly realize that we are so torn apart in our opinions that we stand little chance of even starting a discussion. When will the "left" and "right" realize that they are equally to blame for bringing us to our current state of affairs?
1
David Brooks wrote a terrific piece here. He leaves us hanging at the end. Is the solution different incentives and regulation. Or will the pendulum swing back and society self corrects. It took Teddy Roosevelt to break up the trusts and end the Gilded Age. But it was society who elected him to do it. The “resistance” had a heart attack when the market dropped 20% before Christmas. It’s unclrear how deeply felt the complaints really are. A lot of readers probably like the economy just the way it is. They just pine for the polite veneer that Trump ripped away.
2
@Walter Well said, sir
A recent edition of the Economist contained an opinion piece that observed that the Citizens United decision had the effect of eliminating the so-called "creative destruction" feature of the free market capitalism. In other words, corporations can now insulate themselves from market forces by using political contributions which makes us all 2nd Class Citizens.
7
Though I largely agree with this assessment, I would take it back further, as Paul Krugman has done, using the term, the Great Compression, as I recall, to describe inhibition against inequality that permeated our society after the Great Depression, and WW II. That period, of roughly 40 years came to an end around 1980. Before the Great Depression, we had a period of say, 40 years, comparable to the 40 years since 1980, of right-wing free-market fundamentalism, (but perhaps no comparable left-wing moral relativism). Apparently, right-wing free-market fundamentalism, was sufficient alone, to corrupt our society.
2
Why would Apple employees be "humiliated and shamed"? It wasn't as if the company execs took a vote of the labor force when deciding which tax shelter to exploit.
Shouldn't it be the Apple stockholders that should be shamed?
That would fit the ethos of this piece better. As increased stock value based on the tax savings is a purely economic benefit derived from what amounts to in Brooks's words an immoral decision. See also poor labor conditions in China and elsewhere.
Whereas an Apple employee (yes there is overlap with stock holders), puts in a days labor for an agreed upon wage. That doesn't seem immoral.
4
"Capitalism is a wonderful system."
David Brooks has come completely unwound.
Capitalism is a social process, like fire is a physical process. Humans identified and used both, and have found great power therein.
Primitive humans, at various times and places, deified one or the other.
Educated people have not made either mistake for a long time.
Certainly any study of the history of economic development from the mid-seventeenth century till the present could not possibly conclude that capitalism is wonderful. Fire is useful too, but we don't sacrifice virgins to satisfy the god inside internal combustion engines.
David, you should see somebody.
"Capitalism is a wonderful system" Really?
2
The ultimate goal of capitalism is slavery. Maximizing profit and minimizing costs, period. This article is Brook’s attempt to create a romanticized revision of labor history.
5
Great column. I agree with most of it. But I don't understand where Mr. Brooks is running into these left-wing moral relativists. The left-wingers I know all have strong moral compasses. In fact, I have never met anyone who espouses moral relativism except for a few criminals.
2
You need to work on this a bit more, David. You do a fair job of explaining the right-wing free market fundamentalism part of this argument, but there is nothing on left-wing moral relativism.
Sorry Dave, but it was you and your "conservative" colleagues who set this plague upon us. Trump has become the ideal of what it means to be a conservative. He's your guy. So what have you done lately to get rid of him?
2
"How can we have a good society? How can we have a society in which it’s easier to be a good person?"
"Jesus wept."
1
"In an era of tribal emotionalism, you’re always going to be able to make a splash reducing a complex problem to a simple narrative...."
You mean like building a wall to deal with immigration?
As for remoralizing the markets - the people who created the amoral mess we now call our economy, where selfishness and greed trump all else, are incapable of fixing it. Because they, like the broken capitalistic cesspool they created, are immoral.
It's like asking a sociopath to do something altruistic.
2
The moral lense is insufficient. Honestly Mr Brooks; a govenment shutdown, and this is what you choose to write about? Capitalism needs a functioning and effective government. Without it, we are subject to the wiliness of lowest common denominator. Please bring your conservative voice back to the discussion of current events.
1
This strikes me as an argument against itself.
Does the name of a candidate for the Presidency come to mind when you read this important and appalling editorial ? Elizabeth Warren is speaking specifically against the evil that David Brooks inveighs against. If the U.S. really wants to remain a capitalist economy, it is badly in need of the kind of reform that Elizabeth Warren is talking about.
2
My colleague Phil Nichols (Wharton School Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics) and I have been thinking for several years about your proposition “capitalism needs to be embedded in moral norms.” We have proposed a counterweight to the all-powerful shareholder value goal: a stakeholder trust metric. Our premises are that that fast-falling trust levels in both the US and globally threaten the ability of society to function; that stakeholders – not managers -- are the best judge of corporate culture; that trust can serve as a proxy for ethics and is measurable; and that, for better or worse, metrics often drive behavior. The good news is that stakeholder trust and shareholder value are complementary: companies with high stakeholder trust usually create more shareholder value. If the market were to demand such metrics, we believe a significant culture change could begin.
1
@Patricia Dowden Shareholder value over the long term is unquestionably affected by trust, one of the issues is the short time horizons of investors and many CEOs. Trust is a reliable proxy for many tangible indicators of value, for sure.
Educated Americans have history. At one point in US history, corporate morality meant workers worked 60+ hours a week, 6 days, 10 hours. No safety regulations. No holidays. No vacation. No medical insurance. Forced to live on company property, buying everything from the company store. America in the late 1800's. Corporate morality said it was OK for them to pack rotten meat in cans, and sell it. Free Market. And then there is the dumping of poisons into the air and water, because that maximizes profits. That is what corporations wanted then. It is what they want now. Unfortunately for American Capitalists, legislation prevents this. There is no corporate morality. There never has been. Conservatives want to sell a myth that they care.
4
I'm in the rare position of agreeing with one of David Brooks' columns. The change in corporate culture is one that I've experience in my own lifetime. I started at one job when the company was still owned and managed by one of the original founders. Over time he retired and the company became part of a large multi-national. And the shift to a single-eyed focus on short-term corporate profits as the single company goal was just as Mr. Brooks describes it. I'm retired now and live on investment income, so I suppose that I'm one of the lucky baby boomers who benefited by demographically tracking social trends. But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I was glad to wash my hands of corporate employment when I retired.
1
Spot on, Mr. Brooks. I am so glad you tackled and "wrastled" the giant. You have earned the name David. Thank You.
And, it does have resonance with the vital Me Too movement which crosses all borders; and this brings us to any and every issue that crosses all borders: corruption and the necessity for the foreseeable future of government, oversight, and regulation.
Moderation in all things, including capitalism. Mom doesn't want to over regulate.
British capitalism was the cause of the American revolution; and for lack of a better title Southern Capitalism and immoral slavery was indeed the cause of the American Civil War; and the wars in Europe - for centuries. These were causal of the terrible outcomes in Germany, so we still have these ghosts. To handle our collective ghosts is THE imperative empathic challenge.
We know that Darwin discovered evolution. I think he also wrote about the spiritual nature of that but it was ignored as anti Age of "reason."
Are these elements complicated? Absolutely! But they are also elementally basic. At issue is healing our differences and separations at no sacrifice of cultural essence and beauty.
The founders knew about balance of power. Destructive, ruthless power and greed are always clandestine, dishonest, extremely harmful. Always.
Power in balance requires the vision that those suffering the abuse of power, wherever located are precisely the ones who hold society's solution, no matter if unrecognizable. IMHO.
Moral relativism was always with us, but the old style moral relativism was also dishonest and pretended not to be. We used to believe that we believed that all men were created equal, even while we denied equality to women and blacks; somehow, they did not count. We used to believe that sexual assault, mental illness, drug addiction, and cancer were horrible, so horrible that they should not be talked about, thereby guaranteeing our inability to do anything about them.
This morality was in fact relativistic because it did not make sense and did not admit that it did not make sense. It is the morality of the Catholic Church, condemning Machiavelli as being immoral while being the most Machiavellian of institutions and protecting priests who disgraced their vows.
Moral relativism is a breath of fresh air. It clears the air to admit that for some, Purdue Pharma is a classic capitalist success story while for others it is evil. This makes our choices clear: either we put up with our Purdues and clean up after them or we create a higher authority than the market and give it the right to find out what the market players are up to (by violating their privacy rights) and stop them when they damage or threaten the common welfare (by violating their property rights and freedom). Since this higher authority itself is dangerous, we have to make choices and these choices must be based on reality rather than illusions manufactured by everyone's propaganda machines.
2
In his 1974 book,"Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered" British economist E.F. Schumacher presciently warned,"If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures. If whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence. The GNP may rise rapidly as measured by statisticians but not as experienced by actual people, who find themselves oppressed by increasing frustration, alienation, insecurity and so forth. After a while, even GNP refuses to rise any further, not because of scientific or technological failure, but because of a creeping paralysis of non-cooperation, as expressed in various types of escapism on the part, not only of the oppressed and exploited, but even of highly privileged groups." My question is, what will it take for the "privileged groups" residing within the GOP to wake up to the existential threat posed by President Trump's "take whatever you can, make someone else pay for it, and blame others for the disastrous consequences" methods.
1
First of all, capitalism has contained the most immoral acts from the beginning -- imperialism, colonization, genocide of indigenous people, slavery, sweatshops, child labor, Pinkerton union busting, etc. Making capitalism moral can be done, but it will be a new thing.
Second, deadly right-wing free-market fundamentalism has certainly been a cause of this immorality. Left-wing moral relativism is a much more limited and nuanced issue.
Put the blame where it belongs, please.
3
Thank you for a clear explanation of why the philosophy and values of Ayn Rand are invalid.
1
"How can we have a good society? How can we have a society in which it’s easier to be a good person?"
The corporate morality question got a lot blurrier once privatization of government functions opened a whole new market.
Contracting out parts of government with any moral component introduces a conflict of interest in terms of ethics but none for the corporation, whose goal remains to profit.
Privatizing prisons, military functions, many aspects of health care and coverage, disability services, and so on introduces a third party into life-and-death decisions that used to be between society (in the form of government) and an individual member. Even when these interactions were colored by budgetary aspects, they represented or symbolized our collective ethos.
The privatization movement preached that the private sector, via modern management and other tools developed to maximize profits, was much more efficient than government. It sounded good to government-suspicious pols, and even better to the corporations that subsidize them.
But we didn't ask enough questions about either arithmetic or ethics. In the healthcare debate, for example, the privatization side brushes over both, dismissing Medicare's substantial "administrative" savings and obscuring the ethical choice between a bureaucracy that will profit from its decisions and one that doesn't.
1
Mr Brooks, agree completely with your article and very satisfied that one leading conservative has finally seen the light. But also unfortunately you still have a tendency to refuse to admit that although both parties, Democrat and Republican, share the blame for their complicity in the ongoing deformity of Capitalism and Democracy, it is currently the Republicans who refuse to even recognize their total capitulation to the extreme right, Trumpism and its especially despicable form of populism.
2
Dear David, why are you reluctant to name the villain of the this story? Milton Friedman.
On too-willing ears, MF used his credentials, experience, and gravitas as an economist and preached far and wide that the raison d'etre of a corporation/business was not to make a better widget, was not to provide jobs and wages that fuel the America economy and workers, and was not to pay its fair share in maintaining and building the infrastructure of America.
The sole and primary job of business is to maximize shareholder value. Nothing else mattered, and nothing else was important.
"Greed is good."
5
You have identified the problem -- amoral corporate behavior -but do not suggest a remedy. I suspect it is legislation, the kid proposed by those you would label economic populist. I seriously doubt it would help to put our CEOs in a room and lecture them to reciprocate loyalty shown by consumers and employees.
1
Capitalism is a strong motivator because it is essentially selfish and selfishness is a very fundamental part of humanity. Altruism is not as fundamental to the human condition and leads to an imbalance of the distribution of the profits of capitalism. Selfishness preserves the individual and altruism preserves society. Government is the way society imposes altruism upon that society. Our government has declined in its ability to impose altruism because the members of the government have been corrupted by greed within our politicians.
6
In America, business ethics is an oxymoron. Indeed free marketeers view even the most basic regulations as job and profit killing red tape. What I have learned in dealing with business men - it's mostly men - is that all laud their own professionalism yet some tolerate unethical and even criminal behavior in themselves and others. Indeed we have a President whose main claim to fame lies in his unethical business dealings.
There is a solution - we license doctors, lawyers, public accountants, airline pilots and ship's captains. We demand responsible and ethical behavior from these professions. What's wrong with licensing those in charge of businesses and corporations that are publicly traded or privately held and that exceed a threshold number of employees or gross income? The license could have basic requirements for managing businesses including college degrees, an exam, a misconduct board and exclusions for felons. It can be a federal requirement for publicly traded corporations and yet granted and administered by the states. It's time for business men and women to start doing the hard work of truly professionalizing their own profession and drive out the con artists and fraudsters. BTW - they could start with the current WH occupant.
4
Every time Brooks uses "we" he refers, in fact, to a small faction of wealthy people whose interests have dominated the Republican party at least since Ronald Reagan.
It is most strange of him to assign blame for the "demoralization of the market" to so-called "left-wing moral relativism." I wish he would explain. Is he trying to say that market forces have become cruel and destructive because it is no longer a moral default to stigmatize and fear gay and trans people? Or by "left-wing moral relativism" does he mean Bill Clinton's embrace of an amoral neoliberal economic ideology?
Increasingly, the kernel of every column Brooks writes is "I now what is moral and you do not. You must become moral like me and then we--or 'We'--will have solved all society's problem." It's quixotic, simplistic, egoistic, and, not least, totally wrong. But he just keeps cranking them out.
5
Well done, Mr. Brooks, but your attempt to drag your view of moral relativism into the discussion reeks of a self conscious attempt to share the blame for what has rightly been a Republican led free market, Ayn Randian obsession with self interest and greed that paved the way for DJT, billionaire hedge fund managers and the Kardashians to name but a few.
Refreshingly honest and timely opinion piece, however, by any measure.
3
Also the Citizens United case that gave corporations the rights of human individuals, endowing them with a soul they never will possess.
4
Firstly let me say if the world survives Ronald Wilson Reagan will go down in history as the worst President in history with nearly universal agreement.
It would do Mr Brooks good to study history as the free market today is much more moral than in the heyday of neoliberalism when the bottom 20% of the Irish population disappeared because potato blight arrived in Europe. Today starvation occurs because of war and social upheaval not because of the market demands for a growing economy.
Eighteen forty five to eighteen fifty Ireland's food export economy boomed even as 20% of its population died from starvation or were sold into the hellholes of newly industrialized cities. The Economist led the cheering section in the cry to not feed the hungry and the absentee Irish landowners were quick to gobble up the land formerly occupied by the Irish peasantry to produce more of the quality food for export that Ireland was famous for.
In 1896 William Jennings Bryan coalition of democratic socialists and devout Christians ran under the Democratic banner trying to address the poverty most Americans knew at the turn of that century.
Mr Brooks' and his cohorts propaganda has just about destroyed America. Edmund Burke was a liberal regardless of what sayeth David Brooks. I don't know if David is ignorant or malicious but believing false history is destroying America and America was not great when less than 10% enjoyed America's bounty.
3
I remember, in the good ole times, when corporations talked about being a good corporate citizen of their community, then came the late 1990's, when computer companies seem to change that PR corporate citizen MO.
1
'Re'-moralization? Re-? There is nor has there ever been any 'moral' on Wall St., only profit and the manic pursuit of it. Moral? C'mon David. To quote that once-famous tennis guy, you can't be serious!
1
Again Mr. Brooks is pining away for an America that never was, looking backward to times when corporations and capitalism were virtuous stewards of social and political life. He's Making America Great Again in his own rose-colored rear view mirror.
2
Now that the Trump train has jumped the tracks and is heading for a major catastrophe, conservatives and their cheerleaders have adopted false equivalency and moral relevancy to justify the Trump Administrations egregiously corrupt actions.
An old Southern saying sums up their current predicament, to wit: "that dog don't hunt".
3
One of the reasons for the lack of morality is corporate personhood. If you rob people through a corporation, pollute etc and the executives and shareholders don’t have any obligation when things go bad. They extract wealth from the community at the expense of it and then socialize the losses. And their earnings are protected because their wealth is outside the company. If you want a return to some morality you have to actually go after the people who benefited and take that wealth away as well as charge them personally with appropriate crimes and be able to win after going through their army of lawyers.
6
I'm not really sure about the mixing of populism and "left-wing moral relativism" to create the business moral environment we find ourselves in. If we are going to be extemporizing about the how we have gotten into the 1% driving the economic beat, I would go with the increased number of MBAs running businesses. This has led to group think on the emphasis of shareholder return and having the CEO's compensation tightly linked to shareholder return. And we have gotten exactly that (weaker oversight, reduced labor power, greater poltical candidate reliance on wealthy donors) with a dash of right wing objectivism/liberterianism/individualism thrown in to make the 1% feel morally superior. In my view, the only failing on the left was to not fight harder. My bad. Will do more.
2
So Mr. Brooks are you under the impression that Capitalism was a "moral" undertaking prior to the era of Sander, Warren and Trump? When was the term "robber barrons" created? Think about that. Why were labor unions created? Was it for the perks or was it to keep children from dying in mines and factories.
I agree that we need to shift our priorities, but I disagree about who the problem is?
3
I’m thinking of the corporate mentality that overtook higher education in the 1980s. We suddenly went from academics running institutions (i.e., holding executive office while on leave from teaching duties), to MBAs, without any allegiance to academia per se and without any concomitant values, now in charge of operations What followed, almost immediately, was executive salaries, pensions and perks became outrageously engorged. University presidents making 7 figure salaries today is unconscionable and students graduating with disabling, lifetime debt is a direct and disgraceful result of that.
3
The logical conclusion from both Brook's and Carlson's opinions is that we amend the constitution so that corporations are no longer considered "people". They then lose the rights of people. Citizens United goes away since corps no longer poses the right of free speech. That after all is why Citizens United survived the Supreme Court. This in itself will go a long long way into removing Corps caustic effects on our government. Corporate lobbyists would no longer write our laws through their legislative pawns. It's not the entire solution but it'll go a long way toward bringing the power back to where it belongs. With the people!!!! We are supposed to be a government of the people, by the people and for the people. But today we are a government of corporate pawns, by corporate lobbyists, for corporations.
4
All of this could be remedied by a correction from the Reagan-era "tax cuts pay for themselves" / "greed is good" fantasy, which was renewed during both the Bush and Trump eras. Eisenhower-era (a Republican) tax rates were as high as 90%. Not only do "trickle down" taxes cause gross income inequality, they have ballooned our nation's debt.
3
There is no better example of where society is heading than Airlines industry.
Companies will go overboard to please the 1% AKA First Class passengers. From champagne, to large seats and spaces, etc.. If they could they could offer private massage.
While, the 99% AKA economic class passengers have to contend with less leg rooms, small seats.
The thing is , when a plane crashes, it makes no difference whether you are in first or economic class.
My point is, the 1% will suffer the same consequences if capitalism crashes.
2
The honorable Mr. Brooks says, "Somehow over the past 40 years economic priorities took the top spot and obliterated everything else", as though its a mystery how this happened. Do you think it was democrats who encouraged corporations to ignore all civic responsibility, and embrace the mantra that short term profit is everything? Do you think it was liberals who who argued that all problems should and must be solved by the "Free Market"? Do you think it was unions who kept stricter pension laws from being passed? Dude, this is all at your feet. Moral relativism is not the source of this problem. Conservatism and Libertarianism as practiced by republicans for the past 40 years get the credit here.
6
Why does the left always have to be complicit in the right's sins? "Greedy unions" share equal fault with "bloated corporations." Brooks conveniently leaves out the fact that Carter and Kennedy's actions helped lead to the "malaise" that helped kick Carter out the door and bring in Reagan, who doubled down on bad policy and lit a match to what is now a moral inferno. Fact is, through American history, right wing "leaders" have fanned the worst aspects of capitalism into incendiary and destructive policy, in terms of economic fairness and wealth distribution; the leaders Brooks somehow calls "populists" have always managed to pull America back from the brink of an all-consuming fire of inequality. Now, I'm not so sure. I truly hope some brave legislators step up to stop the madness and re-establish some balance in what has clearly become a dynamic economy for the few, but we may be too far gone.
5
Honestly, has Mr. Brooks never heard of or read "The Powell Memo"? Written in 1971 by Justice Lewis Powell it is an anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to "retake" America. How can he have written this column without mentioning that memo, which became the foundation of the American conservative movement and right wing think tanks and lobbying organizations such as The Heritage Foundation and ALEC.
3
Markets have never been moral and never will be. As the bible says, the love of money is the root of all evil. Corporations will pursue profits, because that is their purpose as a matter of law. What we need to recognize is that the hand of capitalism is not just invisible, it is also blind. If we wish to harness capitalism for the dynamism it brings, we must also create safeguards against the excesses and perverse outcomes we seek to avoid. This is why social democracies with well-regulated corporations bring the strongest economic dynamism, while delivering solid social and economic benefits. France, for example, is every bit as productive as the U.S., but has vastly better social and economic outcomes. The U.S. went comprehensively wrong with its deregulation agenda, which led to great increases in productivity, but marginal improvements in the material circumstances of most circumstances of most citizens. Frankly, if capitalism doesn't deliver benefits for most people, then it has little to recommend itself over, say, feudalism or Soviet communism.
The record is clear: capitalism is a lot like nuclear energy or any other powerful technology. Harnessing its potential benefits requires strong and significant safeguards or the results can be catastrophic. That can't be done by making a fetish of the "free market" but only by crafting policies to keep the excesses and bad outcomes of the market safely contained.
3
Funny, no one mentions the fact that so-called "free trade" removed the barriers so that corporations could relocate in other countries and not pay the cost for sticking it to the home country. Without trade barriers, only the richest, biggest capitalists benefit. The rest of us just get cheaply made, inferior goods from downtrodden workers.
3
The problem with ANY of these arguments about populism, or whatever other denotation you want to come up with, is that there is one conversation that we never seem to have.
To have such extreme wealth such as a billion dollars for any one person or family (let alone multiples, or hundreds thereof) is one of the most extreme obscenities we have as humans. (especially in relation to such hardship, disparity, and crushing poverty not only in the 3rd world, but in the 1st)
This is also a discussion that we are not having in relation to the disappearing resources (let alone fowl and fauna ) of our earth. Consumption, and human actions leading to climate change are destroying our milieu.
By all means though, please let's have yet another column that decries such horrendous burdens there are on people that may have to pay a few percentage points more in tax rates.
We continue to have the wrong discussion.
5
It's an old saw but needs repeating based on this statement by Brooks -
"A deadly combination of right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism led to a withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct."
The old false equivalence. Then he goes on to show how right-wing free-market fundamentalism has run amok. But what problems have left-wing moral relativism caused. None, if any, because it has never had a chance to flourish and any hint of it is automatically called "socialism" or even more inaccurately "communism" by Brooks' friends in the Republican Party.
4
The U.S. has never been richer; our problem is inequality. Total household net worth (financial and real estate assets) recently hit $107 trillion, about $850,000 per family if split evenly. However, the median (50th percentile) family has about $100,000.
We can fix this pre-tax (e.g., higher minimum wage, stronger unions, anti-trust enforcement) or after-tax (e.g., more progressive income and wealth taxes).
We can start with a 50% marginal rate for the top 1%, eliminating their tax expenditures/loopholes, a wealth tax of 0.5% per year on financial assets over $1 million, a 20% tax on stock buybacks, and removing the cap on the payroll tax (affects the top 6% of wage earners, those earning over $132,900 in 2019) to make it a flat tax rather than regressive.
This basically makes our budget deficit sustainable for the foreseeable future while covering about 70% of the Social Security shortfall.
4
Ayn Rand created a new ethical basis for behavior in her writings. She extolled selfishness and disparaged charity. She viewed all actions of government and business that are done to the benefit of others to be wrong headed. She proudly saw herself as the anti-Christ. Her ideas found root in the thoughts of many people including Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan. Economists like Milton Friedman reduced human motivation down to rational self-interest and built their economic systems on this basis. Thus we heard pronouncements from the likes of Ivan Boesky that greed is good. Friedman, himself, promoted the idea that the only responsibility that a corporation has is to its shareholders. Consideration of responsibility to employees, the environment, the community, the state, or the nation disappeared from the halls of corporate boardrooms and Wall Street. David Brooks was as much a part of that movement as any other conservative thinker over the years. However, if Mr. Brooks stopped and listened to the voices of Social Democrats rather than stereotyping them he would find that they are attempting to infuse our system with the very moral fiber that he now laments was stripped away. Mr. Brooks would be well served to own up to his own complicity in helping to bring about this state of affairs.
4
Why should Apple employees be ashamed that Apple parked its intellectual property in Ireland?
They didn't make that decision. Apple's management did, with the help of enabling loopholes in tax policy.
But when the left talks of embedding externalities into the market -- think universal basic income or carbon taxes (which used to be a right-wing thought) -- the right screams that such things will disincentivize work. It's like they don't think we can appreciate money unless we've been impoverished...
5
Brooks, I hope you're not just getting this now. It was crystal clear in 1980 when Reagan ran as the apostle of selfishness (back when you were still in thrall to Mr. Buckley). During Reagan's reign, corporate chiefs began to realize they could get away with obscene levels of self-administered rewards and nothing would stop them. Their mantra may have been "maximization of shareholder value," but in reality that came second to maximization of manager looting. Market fundamentalism used the phony specter of socialism (you know, progressive taxation and acknowledgment of non-equity stakeholders) to trample all decency underfoot. Reagan's was a gospel of selfishness. Some of us have known this all along. Welcome to the planet.
4
All my fellow leftists taking shots at Mr. Brooks here need to chill. This column is major. A real conservative is admitting that the quest for profit is not enough to make everything work beautifully. He has rightly diagnosed in very broad terms the problem of economic inequality that torments this country, and is declaring that capitalism must be accompanied by real moral obligations to community, workers and country. Let’s not shoot this down, in the kind of sarcastic hatred that we find coming at us from the right constantly. This is what leads to civil war, and believe me, you don’t want civil war. Listen, give and take, be open.
@Mr. Little
I don't see many solutions here. Brooks may say some unpleasant things about Reaganomics and Milton Friedman, (and takes a gratuitous shot at something called left wing moral relativism) but he seems to think that all he has to do is ask his capitalist hoards to be socially responsible.
CEO's take much of their pay in the form of stock options. They get money by concentrating their efforts on increasing short term stock prices. It used to be illegal to pay CEO's with stock options but Reagan changed all that.
That is the problem. Conservatives -- even conservatives who write for the Times -- just don't get it. We will have to restructure our economic system to reward corporate policies that help the 99% and punish policies that don't. Asking corporate predators to take on "real moral obligations" is really shorthand for begging sharks to be vegetarians.
3
They are concerned because they are seeing society move towards modern fascism. If you have corporations run or owned by the few like Trump you end up where we are. Or in Trumps case he would be aristocracy, “heirestocracy”. The problem with unfettered unregulated capitalism is it constant puts the majority of us in the position of having our lives dependent on tyrants.
The worst part is wealth at some level is meaningless in the normal sense and simply becomes political leverage. The greatest to our liberties is that wealth would be concentrated in the hands of the few.
2
People are getting upset about the "left-wing moral relativism" comment. There is an explanation.
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Pre-1965, men were taught they had an obligation to protect women because they were weak in body and intellect. Though not universally observed, this code put certain limits on date rape and harassment. When women demanded the end to inequality and paternalism, men also abandoned their obligation to protect. In other words, if she's my equal and she got drunk, why not do whatever I want with her? This is what Brooks means by moral relativism. We need to teach men that they have obligations to women not because they are weak and helpless, but because they are humans deserving respect. We're still working on this problem today, 50 years later.
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Similarly, companies used to be run by an exclusive club of rich white men who didn't compete very hard, and mostly worked to maintain the status quo. They knew that they had an obligation to their workers, neighbors, and society that came with this comfortable state. At the same time women were gaining equality, reformers like Milton Friedman insisted that fixing sickly American business meant abandoning paternalistic crony capitalism, and he was right. The new breed of managers competed fiercely and revived American business post-1980. But they were not paternalists, and felt no obligation to society. We have to decide what their new obligations are, without returning to sickly American business circa 1975.
1
This is a lovely myth. Capitalism was never embedded in a moral norm. After the Civil War as first industrial and then commercial capitalism arose what drove many including both Th. Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson was the view that the norms of America were being destroyed by the Robber Barons and only the government could lean against such changes. Capitalism has always been the great destroyer of moral and social norms.
In the 70s and the 80s there was a revolt against over regulation. Then came Republicans and the Reagan revolution. Not greedy unions. Unions were virtually destroyed and Drexel and Michael Milken provided a means of Icahn and other rich people to loot pensions and drive many businesses out of business. With this "greed became good" insurance companies and banks when public enriching its executives. On and on, corportations made employees, CEOs very rich, and their backs on every constituent group but shareholders.
3
The economy took off in the late 70s, 80s , and 90s primarily because of the personal computer which drastically increased productivity at minimal cost. Not because of Regan or Clinton. The priority should be on having ideas drive the money - not the other way around.
1
First: NOBODY should read Brooks before one's morning coffee…
Between 1936 and 1980 the top marginal tax rate was at least 70%, at times even higher. America prospered. Does the Interstate Highway Project ring a bell? Today the top marginal tax rate is 37%. State of America’s infrastructure?
Historians, economists and sociologists will point to the period from 1945 to 1979 as being the high water mark of the American middle and blue collar working classes as well as being an aberration in America’s social and economic history. Unions were strong, work was plentiful and well paid.
In 1980 the US elected a president who would make eviscerating unions politically and socially acceptable and who would unabashedly appeal to the baser sentiments of those most impacted by his policies.
Also in the '80s Milton Friedman espoused a new corporate view of the economy that was developed, and embraced, by the Reagan Administration and neoconservatives. Friedman radically posited that corporate directors had a single obligation: maximize shareholder returns. Moral/fiscal obligations to employees, customers and the community were minimized, then ignored entirely.
From the Pew Research Center (8/7/2018): "Today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers."
Now time for coffee...
3
Why do you pick on Apple? The blame ultimately rests with the Congress and the Presidents who crafted the rules that permitted US-based multinational corporations to engage in such activities. These things should be decided through our democratic institutions, not left to the whims of corporate Boards, shareholders, etc. The latter creates a free-for-all where the results will meet some moral standards and fail others.
2
The blame rests on American voters who elected those who see every problem as an issue that government alone can address, often by throwing money at it. The blame rests on unions that extorted unrealistic wages - a Ford assembly line worker in Dearborn is making $28/hr right this very moment, plus planned future raises, a pension and full benefits while also at this time, the same tasks are being performed in Mexico for $6/hr with no raises planned and no benefits. The blame rests on Baby Boomers and subsequent generations who feel they’re entitled attend college like the Greatest Generation, wholly ignoring that fact that our grandparents EARNED the GI Bill.
I think the Mexicans are being paid to much. In China they can live on less than a few dollars a day.
Of course they would starve to death here but that inequality of market leverage seems to no lost here.
I don’t believe that it was ever easier to be a ‘good’ person. (Nor do I believe that it necessarily should be.) The notion of social contracts is what Brooks seems to suggest has died. The idea that we agree to cooperate in exchange for benefits. Apple Corp has lost all notion of a social contract with American communities separate from consumers. But ‘goodness’ — that’s always been a result of effort or pressure not ease.
"It basically worked."
Sure did. For the banks, coastal elites, hedge fund managers, millionaire congressmen, lobbyists, consultants, Beltway contractors, etc.
But it left regular Americans with NEGATIVE real wage growth over the 30 years that the “next“ elite enriched themselves. Solve one problem, cause another.
4
It's not about morality. Morality is related to self-regulation of behavior, which, while laudable, doesn't provide a clear means and precedent for sanctioning bad behavior. Basically, this is libertarian economics dressed up in moral language - "We must appeal to corporations to act in a moral fashion."
Nope. We don't need to ask corporations to behave - it works about as well as nicely asking the schoolyard bully to behave. Instead, we as a society need to COMPEL corporations to behave.
The way we compel corporate behavior is via regulations, variously statutory, CFR, and others. Regulations set clear criteria and boundaries, and when the boundaries are broached, provide both clear standing and (ideally) prescribe appropriate sanctions for doing so.
What Brooks is conveniently ignoring (again) is that when the schoolyard bully (or other juggernaut, like a corporate entity) acts badly, there are a limited set of options. First is to knuckle under, which is what happens when there's no sanction for bad behavior. Second is confrontation, which is a poor choice as bullies tend to show rhetorical skill in terms of distributing or mis-assigning blame. Third is to call attention of an authority figure to the behavior as it's occurring and let them, using reasonably clear evaluative criteria, curb the behavior, lay sanctions, and take note for future such incidents.
4
Thank you for a thought provoking essay.
One solution is to require corporate charters assigned to corporations of a certain size to be issued by the Federal, not State, government. That charter which grants certain rights could also delineate certain duties to customers, employees, communities as well as shareholders-thus reversing the Milton Friedman policy.
Another possible solution. Many years ago the US Supreme Court granted corporations personhood and Property Rights under the Law. A questionable decision but one we live with. Recently the Court granted corporations Liberty Rights under the US Constitution. Another questionable decision but we have it. Until now no corporation has exercised its Liberty Rights under the 13th Amendment to shed the yoke of shareholder Property Rights. No person can own another person or command involuntary servitude. Remember that corporate persons are not shareholder persons. And Liberty Rights trump Property Rights.
It would seem that the 13th Amendment applied to corporate personhood destroys shareholder Property Rights of ownership and command. Now that would change things.
See what the Court has done by granting Liberty rights to a corporation.
Once again observations that are largely untethered from valid conclusions. Much misunderstanding of Piket on rentier income and inequality and its corrosive effects on society.
1
One major flaw in this article is that capitalism is not including the cost of creating a sustainable policy of holding global warming under control in order to assure that the temperature increase below 1.5 degrees Celsius. It is as if a factory did not maintain its equipment even though it knew that if the equipment reached a certain level of disrepair it would reach a point at which it could no longer be repaired. The problem with this analogy is that whereas you can close the factory and start over, we can't move to another planet. The reason capitalism can't address this issue is that it is a competitive system not a collaborative system.
This brings to mind the other flaw in the article and that is it does not address democracy. Democracy should address the common good, but democracy in a capitalist society assures that government will look after the interests of the capitalists as the system by definition indicates that they hold the capital. Those with the capital can fund campaigns and pay for lobbying of politicians.
Although the will of the people can sometimes overcome these odds this is not always assured.
1
Brooks states: "capitalism needs to be embedded in moral norms and it needs to serve a larger social good."
But the basic tenant of capitalism is not about moral norms or social good. The basic tenant of capitalism, as Brooks notes, is: anything I do to make money is ok as long as it's not illegal. And it's been that way all the way back to Columbus, who searched for new lands, not to benefit the indigenous people there, but to attain wealth for himself and the Spanish monarchy. Brooks' hope of capitalism finding moral, selfless guiding principles is fantasy.
If you want to help the poor and the working class (ie, the majority of Americans), you have to give them the predominant voice in government and in their jobs. As any Republican and centrist, corporate Democrat will tell you, that's socialism, not capitalism.
"But these days corporations see themselves as serving one purpose and one stakeholder — maximizing shareholder value."
Where did this notion come from? I don't read much economics, but I read somewhere that this idea came from an economist in Austria. What were the cultural assumptions behind him, and are they compatible with US ideals?
The driving force of capitalism is the duty of directors to "act in the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders." This, coupled with a securities law which encourages mergers and acquisitions, creates a system where directors have little reason or incentive to worry about anything other than return on investment--profit.
A simple first step towards correcting this would be to add these words to the duty of directors--"BUT NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF: the environment, human rights, public health and safety, dignity of employees or the welfare of the communities in which the corporation operates."
Historically, corporations were required to respect the public interest, but this changed in the late 19th century when our various states engaged in a race to the bottom to attract more business. This turned out to be a mistake.
Adding these 28 words to the corporate law of each state would reverse the mistake and change what has become a predatory form of capitalism into a form that is more protective of the public interest. Indeed, more human.
See, "Time to Change Corporations: Closing the Citizenship Gap."
1
Not a word about the economic effects of the Vietnam War, or of the two Saudi-led boycotts and oil price shocks. Brooks is reaching a new level of dissembling.
Oh yes, Reagan tax cuts were just dandy - for those who benefited big time - and the proto-globalization that was started under his presidency ensured that labour "greed" was turned into worker despair as evidenced by stagnant real wages for nearly 40 years.
Tucker Carlson, of all people, seems to be more honest about the ruthless use of market forces. The financialization of health and education, for example, is just fine as long as the hedge funds can turn human suffering into profits.
Capitalism is not a "wonderful system"; it is a set of institutional arrangements that give the owners of financial capital control over the owners of labour, simolar to the control that owners of land had over serfs. The only change that capitalism offered over feudalism is that the exploiters changed.
I have come to an ever increasing appreciation of Mr. Brooks assertions that our institution need a moral lens in order to work.
I remember learning that corporations have a social role to fill, a moral one to do the right thing when Johnson and Johnson went to the expense of protecting their products( tylenol) from tampering.
So I too have noticed corporations have been given protections and obligations to serve in society. I think they do have a responsibility to earn profits, but they also have a responsibility to employees and customers, and to government agencies that make commerce possible.
We need to understand I think that capitalism is good, socialism is good, populism is good, and expertise ( elites) is good, government is good but only when they are mixed together and do not stand alone.
I appreciate, perhaps with confirmation bias, or perhaps with reassurance, that a thoughtful Mr. Brooks points this out..
2
Ruthless, selfish abandonment local communities, offshore tax havens, excessive salaries and bonuses, all for the benefit of shareholder interests, seems too simplified a connection. Yes, excesses exist and always have existed. These excesses can be and have been corrected in the past by regulation and tax law wherein remedies remain - what is necessary is good current leadership in government. However, shareholder interests have built up pensions, 401K's and IRA's to the benefit of many workers and their families.
@Tim Goldsmith I'm not sure I see how you are contradicting his point. He says that there is a lot of good about capitalism (as you note in your final paragraph). He notes only that there are other goods as well. How are you disagreeing?
>How can we have a society in which it’s easier to be a good person?
One condition would be recognizing that it's not easy to be a good person. Maybe we challenge ourselves again--"Ask not what your country can do for you..."
1
A major problem with this argument, David, is that capitalism itself doesn't care. It never did and it never will.
We should not be surprised when its a- and im-moral heart attracts and rewards those with no social conscience. That, too is not new. It always has and always will.
Much as I'd like to blame him for all its evils, capitalism's socially destructive behavior did not begin with Ronald Reagan, who while he did manage to place temporarily a sunny face on its usual depredations, hardly created its engine of destruction.
The primary counter to capitalism's nasty tendencies here in the United States was that once we destroyed the native cultures and took their lands, we could distribute immense wealth in land and resources to millions of mostly white people who had nothing. That redistribution, probably the greatest in history, kept the lid on for a time.
Now , the the Age of Trump, when we're hurrying to distribute public land and wealth to the already wealthy, the the lid is off.
2
Mr. Brooks, I am amazed at you do not seem to see the connection between deregulation of business, and the lack of "morals" in the marketplace. Perhaps it is regulations, and not "morals", that keep businesses from behaving badly. For example, various environmental regulations limit the ability of businesses to pollute the environment. Absent those regulations, the business is free to do as it wishes. In general, the profit motive will then become paramount., and businesses will foist onto the public the cost of "externalities", such as environmental damage.
Thus, I do not agree that capitalism "needs to be embedded in moral norms", nor do I think that would ever be possible. Rather, a functioning society needs to have adequate societal (i.e. governmental) oversight of business and markets.
Dee, Esq.
5
Thank you! There was something in the back of my head telling me that “morals” was the wrong angle here. I agree that regulations are the key. They’re somewhat enforceable and speak to companies’ bottom line.
1
@Dee but did regulation keep oil companies doing the right things that caused major oil spills? Regulation didn't cause them to do the right thing until they were caught doing the wrong thing. The courts then had to settle it. One cannot dictate morality and regulations are only as good as the enforcement of such regulations. I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, but it's what corporations do, because they are not people they cannot have a moral compass. They only have profits/losses, and even if the lawsuits and fines are hefty, generally they don't bankrupt them. Look at Exxon. Punitive damages where astronomical. Exxon wrote a check, and went back to work. Punishing them doesn't even work. Closing them down might, but there's a cost to such action as that.
1
@HB But the regulators need to be moral to resist the blandishments of lobbyists.
1
I think your story is much closer to the story Elizabeth Warren is telling than you might think. She adds a layer to your analysis which is that this de-moralization of the market was accompanied and accelerated by specific policy choices that are now embedded in federal laws and regulations, as well as the laws and regulations of a number of states, and that the re-moralization you seek will have to be accompanied by and accomplished through fairly specific changes to these laws and regulations. I encourage you to do an in-depth interview with her soon to explore these issues further. I think you would find that you have a lot in common.
3
I am not sure that Mr. Brooks actually repudiates very effectively the initial premise he wishes to argue against: "American elites are using ruthless market forces to enrich themselves and immiserate everyone else." Although I prefer the even more "simplistic" argument that Mr. Brooks notes, that corporations are currently driven almost entirely by desire to increase shareholder profits, and that on a quarterly basis. I would need to see a much more detailed explanation of the effects of "left-wing moral relativism" to see it as somehow co-responsible for the decline of the sorts of values that previously included a repugnance for exploitation.
The dangers of the degree of income inequality that we see now are historically evident. We don't have a lot of time to come up with answers, and the right response to economic populism probably involves some fast redistribution of wealth. Universal health care might be a good place to start.
3
I believe that for all the faults of the left, you are grossly misrepresenting it. They are the force behind health care for all, fair salaries and other "moral" decisions. They even have a proposal for having workers represented in the board of a public company. And they are for empowering women.
Their relativism is regarding about morality seen exclusively through a religious view, that condemns people that does not "fit" their norms, like the LGBTQ group.
2
The real source is "money in politics", whether during the electoral process or K Street.
The symptoms you outlined will not change until the source is addressed.
3
One problem with the Israeli day care center example is that they didn't fine the parents enough, so they were not paying a fine, just for additional childcare. The second problem is that they should have had a policy that let the parents know that Child Protective Services (or the equivalent) would be called if they were late picking up their children. I was on the board of directors of a childcare center and we used the second policy, but not the first. We were flexible with emergencies or when something exceptional occurred, but had very few problems with late pickups.
2
Interesting but I get the sense that Brooks is arguing for an appeal to the better angels of corporations in lieu of stronger regulation.
The perceived “moral,” if not legal obligation, of publicly-held corporations to maximize shareholder value to the exclusion of all else, including the long-view sustainability of the corporation itself, is so entrenched as to render Brook’s appeal to shame as a major market force naive at best. Like our president, how do you correct behavior when there is no capacity for shame left at all?
Brooks writes: “The populists are perpetually living in 2008, when the financial crisis vindicated all their prejudices.”
First, how are hard facts on deregulation, or lack of regulation, and the consequential economic meltdown, merely “prejudices?”
He continues: “They ignore everything since — the 19 million jobs that have been created, the way wages are now rising at 3.2 percent.”
But where have those jobs been created, and for whom? Predominantly for the lowest paying service sectors, or to a lesser extent, the highest paying highly skilled sectors leaving a big hole in the middle. And this ignores the large mass of the workforce that has either completely dropped out or is woefully underemployed. Rising wages? Yes, regional increases in minimum wage and the movement for “a living wage,” have helped. But those are regulations, not better angels.
But, of course, let us be thankful for the scraps for which we are about to receive.
4
"We turned off the moral lens."
"Society came to be seen as an atomized collection of individual economic units pursuing self-interest."
"Anything you could legally do to make money was deemed O.K."
"But today the amoralism of the trading floor governs corporate decision-making."
The is the economic side, the same must be said about the political side, but alas, editorials can't run past a certain word count. Yet, what Mr. Brooks did in the first paragraph of this editorial is discount the political side, basing on the rightwing and leftwing accounts by calling the political concerns the "populism."
The first definition for populism that comes up from a google search is: "a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups." And that is loathed by the elite and erudite. I declare that it is Mr. Brooks who "turned off the moral lens" by disparaging populism.
We call it the "political economy" because the gestalt of our society is in the two forces forming a single force that is the alpha and omega of our lives. Morality, ethical systems, and our social relationships are under the control of this force, and to deliberately ignore the political aspect is to give such power and control a free pass to go on unregulated, unlimited, untouched, indeed to go about with impunity to prefer the elite and erudite at the expenses, literally, of the "ordinary people."
2
Once when asked to describe my political ideology, I replied neo-Hobbesian, in the sense that I believed my fellow man required watching. Mr. Brooks seems to think that by some marvel of revelation our business community might start acting in the interest of our society, rather than just pursuing profits. That seems unlikely without the strong hand of government intervention. Nothing is going to happen as long as Republicans dominate government, but if Democrats ever regain power, maybe they could fire a warning shot. Nationalizing big pharma might send the right message, but that's just one thought.
3
You want social justice? Then tackle capitalism's most pressing, and odious, issue, inequality.
3
Brooks decries the lack of morality, but perhaps the problem is that morality has been twisted into something ugly. Political correctness prevents us from even discussing the needed changes.
We have divided Americans into two groups, the minorities and those who enjoy "white privilege" or "male privilege."
With this distorted lens a man who asks a woman out on a date, and the woman regards him as repugnant, can be accused of sexual harassment. In older times, there might have been a trial. Feminists have replaced actual trials with public media shaming. Yes, some of the accused are guilty. But are ALL guilty? Feminists seem to believe there is something evil in the nature of men.
We have 2.2 million Americans in prison, perhaps an additional 4 million on probation or parole, mostly men. Our incarceration rate is 14 times that of Japan! Larger than any other large nation, except perhaps for North Korea.
Octomom had six children but she wanted more. So she got fertility treatments, so that she had eight additional children at one time. Did ANYBODY regard this as wrong?
No. Motherhood can NEVER be wrong! Yet too many children is what causes global warming over the long term. Population growth sends hundreds of millions in the third world to early deaths.
Having too many children should be regarded as morally repugnant.
Instead, those who even discuss population growth are called racist. While those like Roseanne Barr who make bad jokes get fired.
And who do you think will "remoralize" the markets, Mr. Brooks? The Party of Trump? Or the party of AOC?
176
@Philip
I agree with your thought. But the question is whether the current Democratic Party, led by corporate "centrists" like Pelosi and Schumer, will allow the Democratic Party to become the party of AOC.
9
@Steve C That might be a concern in the short run, but probably not in the long run. Pelosi and Schumer are both in their 70's. AOC isn't even 30 yet. Including Trump and AOC into my response was more of a rhetorical flourish anyway. I trust Dems to "remoralize" the markets way more than I trust the GOP.
17
@Philip
I'm always amazed that people keep treating Brooks like he's the spokesman for the White House, when he's been a consistent critic of Trump from the very beginning, even back in the birther days. Why do these comments receive a "Times Pick"?
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As Brooks made clear, the reform of crony capitalist American business in the 1970s and 1980s was a mission undertaken by both parties, a necessary corrective to make it competitive again. The new competitive American business proved to be good at making money, but lacking of the sense of obligation that the old paternalistic crony capitalists had. If we are to decide on new standards of obligation to society for corporate America, we will have to do it as a people, and both parties will have to embrace it. This can happen, just as both parties ushered in deregulation when it was necessary in the late 1970s. Politics is about more than who wins the next election.
16
I do not see nor understand the term "the left-wing moral relativism led to a withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct." Over the recent decades what has the left advocated for improving the economic environment? Corporations be environmentally responsible and not pollute air, land, and water so all citizens can live safe. Advocate for a fair wage for all, equal pay for all genders, and a safe work place. Products that are produced be scientifically proven to be safe ala, seat belts in automotive vehicles, tobacco linked to cancer, and coal and fossil fuels damage the earth. Invite the business community to participate in active philanthropies to better our world by addressing poverty, health crisis, and land reclamation. None of these positions whither the moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct. The old order hid scientific research on tobacco and cancer and climate change. That is what is withering away. The old order built atomic power plants on the San Andreas Fault line and dumped enough chemicals in a river so it could catch fire and burn a bridge down. The left has always advocated from the country's beginning "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" for all its citizens.
5
Brooks worries about lack of morality in the markets. I worry about the wrong morality which stems from listening to too many experts, and refusing to think for ourselves.
The experts in question are the economists. Nobel Prize winner David Romer has written an essay entitled "the Trouble with Macroeconomics," which argues that macroeconomic models have very little predictive value in spite of the prodigious work that has gone into creating them.
Macroeconomic models almost always focus on equilibria in the short term. Such models might be useful in adjusting interest rates by the Federal Reserve. But since even short term predictions are hard to make, macroeconomics focuses almost solely on the short term.
Population growth, one of the most important macroeconomic variables in the long term is simply ignored.
Readers of the NY Times tend to be well-educated. They tend to believe the pronouncements of economists. And yes the economists seem to be right on many issues, like the damage that tariffs can do to an economy.
But nobody worries about the long term, except when it comes to global warming. And nobody seems to draw the obvious conclusion: global warming is just one consequence of too much population growth.
When David Thoreau wrote his essay on Walden in 1854 the US had a population of about 25 million. Poor people could move West. But now homeless encampments plague Los Angeles and Seattle. The residents who try to move west encounter the Pacific.
1
E.F. Schumacher's ideas outlined in his book "Small Is Beautiful" was a real eye-opener for me. He taught us that all economic systems are human constructs and humans can construct any kind of economic system they want or value. All economic systems begin with a set of power relations among the players and evolve from there. In the capitalist game, social power is quantified through property ownership. The more you own the more powerful you are, and so it goes. The board game of Monopoly expresses the idea simply. Ownership of property is used to produce more wealth through rents. The more you own the more others pay you in rents and user fees. Eventually you win if you own everything.
I enjoy the scifi tv show 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'. When you think of it, most of the characters live out their lives on the Enterprise but nobody owns much of anything except for a few personal items. Fulfillment iand power s based on adventure and exploration and not ownership. If you want something to eat, you press a few buttons and the dinner and drink appears in the molecular food synthesizer. That could be the model for a future society if we ever get off of the ownership treadmill.
Most characters on Star Trek are in the military on a long, long mission. In the 21st century, people in the military on a mission go to a mess hall and someone gives them food. The few Star Trek characters not in the military seem very focused on making money, to my recollection. Ownership has been part of humanity since the Neanderthal people. It will be with us until the last one of us dies. He or she will then own it all. Game over.
David Brooks is like a music journalist who covers hip hop, but where every article is him wishing the music had more acoustic guitars, talked about pick-up trucks and was performed by artists wearing cowboy hats. You are literally describing another kind of music that already exists! Why do you keep going to hip hop shows?
Similarly, Brooks seems entirely unaware that there is a whole party, one that the majority of this country is aligned with, that fits most of his descriptions for what he believes is lacking in America today. I feel like if you introduced this man to the current leaders of Democratic Party and told him they were Republicans, he would finally find the peace he has been searching for.
4
"As we disembedded individuals from traditional moral norms we disembedded companies from social ones. "
We disembedded SCOTUS, or at least 5/9ths of SCOTUS (maybe 6 now) from traditional moral norms as well. Corporations as individuals/persons? Money=Free speech? C'mon. Do you hear me, Hon. Mr. Roberts?
1
Why should Apple employees be ashamed? They work for a paycheck like everyone else. It's the Apple executives who should be ashamed. Lots of luck with that one.
2
The highest good in capitalism is profit. That is the moral code by which it operates. The corporate misbehavior that Brooks writes of is encouraged by the system. George Bailey only exists in movies and, apparently, conservative nostalgia.
"In an era of tribal emotionalism, you’re always going to be able to make a splash reducing a complex problem to a simple narrative that separates the world into the virtuous us, and the evil them." Polonious couldn't have said it any better.
More dishonesty from Republican Party man Brooks. Democrats’ moral relitivism? It is his right-wing Party that has abandoned its thin tissue of morals in favor of grabbing as much money from the next guy as it can. No mention that every Republican tax cut for the rich Republian donor class has lead to a major recession, a greater wealth gap, and a diminished middle class. Corporate greed? Brooks needs to read a little history to learn that focus on the quarterly bottom line is a Republican business model. But then, Brooks is paid to create false narratives that blame the Left for the sins of the Right, not to talk about the truth.
One wishes that David Brooks would read the comments on his writings here. Could he summon more than the occasional “tsk tsk” to the criticism of his Republicans? Might he discover the admiration that readers like myself have for Warren and AOC? Would his stomach stop giving an uncomfortable lurch at the word “Socialism”?
"A society in which it is easier to be good": Peter Maurin, co-founder, with Dorothy Day, of the Catholic Worker Movement, and whose Progressive values of "gentle personalism" (universal, non-sectarian values) are, indeed, the antidote to the greed of Capitalism.
Moral hindsight is indeed 20/20. Where were you, Mr. Brooks, and your fellow right-wing pundits, when all this was happening, right before our (and your) eyes?
1
At first, I liked the essay. I believe in a lot of what *should* be the goal our society, where everything is just and fair. But then ....REALITY CHECK.
Not 'all' liberals are blaming 2008 and stuck on Exxon Mobil Valdez. Some of us were screaming and shouting the warning just two years ago. And now the enabling idiot-in-chief has an entire cadre of greedy goons wrecking every regulation in hope of tearing the heart right out of the central tenant of your nice essay. Capitalism is dead. Autocratic cronyism is in!
Capitalism will never be able to be 'good' or 'moral' on its own. We need to enable regulators to put bad actors out of business, and good political messaging to incentivize moral behavior. EPA, CPB, those types of agencies need to be strengthened or made very difficult to tamper with in the political dog-fights. We need to carefully and methodically plan a great comeback, and put people in places that bring trust, competence, hope to the market, and America *would* be great again. As a moral world leader. There are plenty of good ideas - Stop the environmental destruction. Solve world hunger. Create more partnerships to develop better technologies to replace coal / gas / nuclear as energy sources... oh wait.. we had someone championing that once.... (and we will again I reckon)
I fear capitalism will never ever be able to get back there on its own. The balance is too far tipped. Bad actors are running the country.... into the ground.
1
"Systems could be built, and rules could be made –if we could only get rid of consciousness. What makes mankind tragic is not that they are victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of the earth is very well –but as soon as you know of your slavery, the pain, the anger, the strife –the tragedy begins."
Joseph Conrad
1
When David Brooks says “left-wing moral relativism” he means “standing up for LGBT rights.” That this is a non sequitur in a discussion about workers’ rights — something the left is committed to by definition — reveals a lot about David Brooks as a spokesman for the moral point of view.
2
Left wing moral relevance describes things like the attitude of “If it feels good, do it!” that is applied to individual acts but is criticized when business does it.
From today's eTimes Opinion sidebar headlines:
Fact: Netflix Chose a New Market Over Free Speech. That Sets a Disturbing Precedent
Fiction: The Remoralization of the Market
'Nuff said.
1
David nonsense.
When in our county's history has there been an era of capitalist benevolence?
Reagan took it up another notch?
Yes. Right up to the extremist capitalism the rest of your column describes.
Your failure to see the obvious is consistently astonishing
1
Actress Mae West answered your question, David. "Goodness has nothing to do with it." Morals are now a matter of the past, and nothing reflects that loss more than our less-crowded churches and synagogues.
We are, each of us, the master of our own destiny. But destiny with a capital D is far different from what drives us today. Small letter "destiny" stands for securing more dollars.
Our own Destiny is secured by our own good acts, ones that serve the common good. The Golden Rule has been forgotten in this #MeFirst world. Seeking a Destiny with a capital D is the answer to our own remoralization. Dollars can't do it, but Doing Good can.
1
Rescind the misguided "corporations are people" doctrine. Until corporations can be executed in Texas for committing capital crimes, they aren't.
1
Can I just say that the baseless anti-liberal slanders David Brooks routinely injects into his articles are offensive and insulting?
Claims like that "left-wing moral relativism" (whatever that is) are partially responsible for "withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct" are slanderously insulting. Brooks provides no firm definitions, no examples, no evidence.
And even by common definitions of "moral relativism", the left is defined by its absolute values:
- care and feeding of the poor,
- empathy and support for the downtrodden,
- just/non-exploitative economic treatment of the poor and middle class,
- treating everyone in society decently and civility (even the 'others' in our society.)
David Brooks cannot seem to write a single article without including some false/slanderous attack on liberals. He should ask himself why that is.
2
@John C
And Brooks's charges aren't just insulting; they are also woefully uninformed.
The "left-wing moral relativism" he so often invokes (he sometimes calls it "cultural Marxism" has almost nothing to do with what left intellectuals actually claim and discuss. It is worlds away from just "no truth exits" nihilism or relativism.
Brooks readily accepts the findings of psychologists who tell us that human rationality––among even intelligent, educated people––is all but impossible to disentangle from emotions and cultural conditioning. Yet somehow *that* doesn't count for Brooks as relativism or nihilism, even though it is quite close to what left intellectuals often argue.
1
Apple is easily the most ruthlessly capitalistic and amorally arrogant company in America. No other comes close.
Yet how many “progressives” carry iPhones in their pockets and bags because it’s the cool phone and a status symbol?
Apparently the “i” in iPhone stands for ironic.
2
Two answers to Brooks's concouding questions: taxation and regulation.
How does Brooks square this with his previously unceasing support for Republican 'values'? By now ignoring he ever did.
2
Egalitarian social democracy.
Without left-wing "relativism" conservatives would still be banging rocks together in a dark cave.
Conservatives do not want anything to improve; the world is already perfect enough. Re-moralization is an endearing euphemism for the desire to return to the cave.
Capitalism that is “embedded in morality” is a business in bankruptcy. Immorality is the key to success in a capitalist system. Brooks’ pretzel twisting logic only operates in the refined portions of his dark brain where he doesn’t need to define terms like “the left”. He knows what he means. We don’t.
Wow, I am continually amazed by your views. Well, not really, you are one of the faux intellectual stooges of the way it is, the status quo.. Greedy unions, economic booms, I suppose, but it depends on how you measure the booms and who you label greedy, 'Goldman Sachs and all those banks who received the freebies would be on my big-greed list. And who these 'booms' benefit is significant. Booms that provide low wage, no benefits, and little security or future- jobs are not booms in my book. It is clear that our society has gone backwards, since Regan. The middle class has been wiped out largely because of the destruction of those 'too greedy Unions' you mentioned. I suggest you listen to Richard D Wolff's, recent lecture from the Judson memorial church, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOCIeunmObk
1
The desperate need of Mr. Brooks to find "both sides are at fault" in everything borders on the ridiculous. To fault, even a little "left-wing moral relativism" is silly on its face.
1
"How can we have a society in which it’s easier to be a good person?"
It's called Democratic socialism, Dave. You should visit Norway some time.
1
David lists the right-wing's sin as merely economic fundamentalism. That is one, certainly, but it also hypocrisy, racism, and dishonesty. tRump is a creature who crawled out of the swamp the GOP created.
1
Why should Apple employees be "humiliated and ashamed"?
Tim Cook, Katherine Adams (General Counsel), Luca Maestri (CFO), Al Gore and the other members of the Board of Directors are the ones who should be humiliated and ashamed.
Who is calling them on it?
Dan Kravitz
Another one of Mr Boorks oddly distracted and abstract essays that pontificates and moralizes but has no discrete calls for action...that would be openly abandoning the bankrupt (morally) policies fo the right and supporting the centrist thrid party or the democratic agenda. And that would mean he loses hsi psioiuton as op ed writer for the Times with his faux representation and arguably increasing disingenuity as an avatar of conservatism and the right.
Yes David, yes. One of your better pieces. It feels as though we are in social and moral decline while drowning in all the bright shiny stuff.
The market fundamentalism that has been guiding US policy and government for 40 years does not have much to do with the Democrats or the left. It is the political right that originates and sustains beliefs around “markets know best”. Yes, sometimes the left pitched in: Obama did not jail a single banker and Clinton (Rubin, really) vaporized Glass Steagall. But, the right owns market fundamentalism (MF, mother......) and its effects. Enough of this fairy tale that the right and left somehow both equally own MF, which is just not true.
1
David you easily mention supposed gains by the peasants since 2008 but you don’t mention that they were not bailed out for hellish things they were largely blameless for whereas “the banks” were to the tune of trillions when you add up their subsequent post bailout profits. But then again you are called Lord Brooks by Socrates for good reason.
"Somehow over the past 40 years economic priorities took the top spot and obliterated everything else. "
Somehow? SOMEHOW???
Reaganomics and Repubs. Spare us the false equivalencies.
Capitalism is the false idol of our society. It's a great tool for creating wealth but a poor tool for distributing it.
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@Paul
"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." And capitalism -- dependent on cheap fossil fuels -- will bring us to the end of a livable world.
8
@Paul
Does it create wealth, or just distribute it upwards?
3
@Paul
The goal isn't to distribute wealth. The goal is to acquire wealth. Waiting for others wealth to be distributed is pathetic.
4
This is a good article, and necessarily incomplete simply because the contributing factors are so many they cannot all be detailed or even mentioned.
Like many things that get "out of balance", this amorality contains the seeds of its own destruction. The enormous wealth of successful companies means many people earn far more money than they can imagine spending. After a few years of such earning, priorities shift and it is just not that hard to tell an employer to "buzz off" when decisions create ethical or social problems.
Many conservatives such as Brooks and Tucker Carlson are finally discovering, however late, that corporations are running our economy and lives, and ruining our democracy, realizing and speaking out about how right wing/libertarian deification of markets is sick. Even writers in William F. Buckley's National Review.
Conservatives in places like Pat Buchanan's American Conservative got there a long time ago, being more thoughtfully "conservative" than Republican.
Patrick Deneen wrote a powerful, slim volume last year, "Why Liberalism Failed," which slams what Europeans (more correctly) call economic "liberalism" (while shredding other aspects of hyper-individualism that is embedded in Enlightenment values). JD Vance, the writer of "Hillbilly Elegy," has written about the human costs of amoral capitalism at length.
My point: Please let's celebrate that many on the right are finally getting this and speaking out, and move forward with them, rather than berate them.
If there is going to be a way to heal the rift in the country, and unite this truly, ever-diverse nation, it will be around our collective recognition that we need to return to making markets slave to human needs, not the other way around.
I have some questions:
1. how much did the move to 401Ks rather than pensions has pushed this "Immoral Market" because of pressure from investors (including funds) who sense that their retirements are based 100% on how much their 401Ks appreciate in value?
2. When pensions were offered, did people constantly monitor investments?
3. Were there as many activist investors forcing companies to act in ways that benefit investors rather than the company?
4. In the past, did managers of investment funds directly pressure companies to reward investors at the expense of workers -- to the extent that they do today?
5. How much did companies spend on employee benefits prior to the move to 401Ks?
6. Has R&D suffered because of the constant pressure to reward investors rather than reinvesting funds in the company? If so, what are the consequences of the lower quantity and quality of R&D to the companies, the workesr, and the communities?
7. Is there a limit to how much investment dollars the "market" can successfully handle (i.e., satisfy their investors) without driving companies to short their workers, their communities, and their country?
8. To what extent did the decline of pensions and other worker incentives play into the the rise of CEO and executive pay?
1
David's emphasis on the underlying moral and ethical causes of our social problems is essential. It will also always annoy zealots on either side.
Mr. Brooks, I like your honesty and decency. Your discussion with Shields on PBS on Fridays is one of my favorite shows.
But, you are making a mistake here, hopefully not a deliberate one.
You are equating the Milton Friedman principle of shareholders being supreme with the left's moral relativism. I know journalists are supposed to balance but this is a false equivalence.
MF principle has devastated societies and countries as the corporations have single mindedly pursued profits. They have reduced wages, they have given astronomical compensation to their executives, they have moved their monies to off shore tax havens, they have taken pride in paying as little taxes as possible using every legal loophole possible.
I do not see this devastating destruction of social structures, environment matched by anything that the left may have possibly done.
The only reason that moderate Republicans like you are even giving grudging acknowledgement to the fact that corporations have eviscerated society is because the elites are now beginning to get scared at the backlash that is being seen across the West.
Please, don't try to find false moral equivalence. Admit that right wing went overboard in pursuit of wealth. It is OK to say you are sorry.
407
@Meenal Mamdani
Friedman's economic fundamentalism would never have become accepted wisdom in a society that still prized hierarchical families (and our obligations to them), religion and clerics (and respect for their absolutist morality), and the noblesse oblige of the permanent ruling class (which came with white male privilege). In dismissing these absolutist social structures which upheld sexism, racism, and classism, we embraced moral relativism to fill the vacuum of traditional morality. If individuals did not owe respect to families, god, and if their position in society was to be determined by merit alone, and not their color, sex, or family at birth, then how could we expect companies to have obligations beyond following the law and making a profit?
.
This is what Brooks means by moral relativism. Just as individuals have belatedly found that they have obligations to our new more meritocratic society, companies must be shown they have obligations too. But those obligations are different than they were in a more paternalistic time, just as individual obligations have changed. Society has yet to decide what all they should be. So don't dismiss Brooks' moral history timeline. This is not a left/right thing. The re-assessing of the role of the company in society is very much in parallel to re-assessing the role of the individual in society, and is driven by the (necessary) chaos that resulted from tearing down the old paternalistic system.
28
Bunk. Humans can be moral with totems and shibboleths.
Promulgate a culture of caring and empathy instead of fearing institutions, and see how equality of income and education, not fear, can make a population succeed.
18
@Tom
Thanks - interesting and helpful. But corps are not people, and people make up corps. I don't think corps need to be given a chance to learn - if people are moral they will run the corp properly (ie by lobbying for appropriate regulations).
14
Were Americans a lot less moral a century ago during the Gilded Age, an age of greed and inequality like our own? Certainly traditional norms of family, sex, and religious commitment had a lot greater force at that time. And yet there was still rampant economic selfishness––land grabs, sweetheart deals for the richest men, monopolies that tried to crush rivals at any cost (and often did).
Capitalism was "remoralized" from the outside––by reformers, anti-monopoly activists, unions, and eventually by law and government. It has always taken non-market activists and institutions to keep a check on the inherent amoralism of markets and the greed of the savviest market actors.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, Brooks cannot seem to give up his idea that capitalism is, by itself, inherently just and serves the common good––or that is could and should (a "remoralized" market) even when it is clearly failing to serve the common good as in our moment. Yes, capitalist forces can serve more than the richest capitalists––but only when those forces are made accountable to the outside powers of government and civil society.
1
Either Brooks has become untethered from reality or his salary for making things up has increased lately. He is like the blind man who grabs a elephant by the tail and thinks he's holding a snake. The four economic booms he talks about have been accompanied by four recessions including in 2008 the mother-in-law of all recessions since the Great Depression. Please excuse my grumpiness Mr. Brooks but I'm still not OK with how that last one turned out.
The old and tattered Republican boiler plate about free markets and supply side economics has been so thoroughly debunked by the actual results that I am amazed anybody would still be flogging that dead horse.
Yes there is a decided lack of morality in the people who have seized control of our economy through their ability to buy our government but suggesting that we should all just try to get along is like thinking that thoughts and prayers are going to solve the problem of mass shootings in public places.
3
What do you mean "we"?? Some of us have worked mighty hard to keep our heads, and hearts, co-operating over the last forty years, keeping people in the center and profit as just part of the story. Capitalism as a system in the U.S., ignores all the socially-provided goods and services that prop it up--government supported schools, government grants, roads, police, the health system, and thousands of things capitalists don't create, but take for granted, that help them pile up the cash. Don't forget all the hardworking people who helped make them rich, who now struggle to pay the bills. If you want to wail, "I was wrong!" then do that--but don't put us all in the boat with you! Some of us have been trying to do the right things all along, but are barely keeping our heads above water.
2
Let me ask my question another way: what happened 40 years ago that sanitized greed?
2
Although he described it, not once did Brooks use the word Neoliberalism which looks only to the bottom line regardless of everything else. There are no moral norms in Neoliberalism. There is no serving the larger social good. Such “niceities” get in the way of profit. Neoliberalism has become entrenched as the way to operate in many countries. In America, corporations like Apple, to use Brooks example, legally, but immorally sidestep laws and the social good to increase profits. And what about the latest revelations of Facebook? Republicans as well as Democrats walk hand in hand embracing Neoliberalism. The Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain was a Neoliberal and the Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair who followed her was also. They both bought into rapacious, immoral practices that disregarded community and individuals and this “disease” is what is deeply embedded in the American way of doing business and managing government.
1
Pace this article, the truth is that Brooks and his conservative cohort always claimed that capitalism made people more moral. Social conservatives like Brooks joined fiscal conservatives in arguing that success in a capitalist system required bourgeois values like hard work, responsibility, punctuality, thrift, etc. Forty years later, we discover that the greedy, selfish part of capitalism overwhelmed its other values.
Yet Brooks, as he often does, attempts to revise history to obfuscate the part he and other social conservative played in serving as apologists for selfish greed.
1
Slowly, slowly conservatives like David are coming to admit the failure of the GOP dominated government to be a fair referee for our version of capitalism, a failure which has led to gross inequality. But, like other conservatives, David still can't let go of the moral relativism in this confession; somehow they still want to blame the victims. As in, the Apple employees who should be ashamed by what their board of directors did. What should they have done - quit?
Please.
And stop using the term "lefty" economic populists as if they are preaching some type of unbound socialism. They just are asking for reforms to bring back the lost regulations, laws and norms you now mourn.
2
David, I like your columns but this time you went on to revisionist history. Your 4 long economic booms plus the worst recession since the depression and several sharp recessions between booms. Read Dr. Krugman or walk down the hall to t as ok to him to better understand how taxes are almost completely disconnected from economic activity.
In In Search of Excellence we argued that the best companies treated all their stakeholders as important, the same argument though less elegantly put, that Brooks is making here. Earlier Herb Simon had made the same argument, which won him a Nobel prize. Let’s hope we can get back to that understanding soon.
Bob Waterman, co-author In Search of Excellence
Would that Brooks would read the comments his perennial false equivalencies evoke. They are the structure if every column he offers, but he is so blind to them and the perversion of logic and truth they display that he continues apace despite being rejected and taken to task hete every week.
He obviously does not read the responses to his moral posing. Or his program of ideological aversion to the obvious overrides and protects him from it.
“A deadly combination of right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism.” Brooks wants to ensure the Left shares the blame here. But, in his hypocrisy, Brooks won’t admit that it is bedrock conservative principles – chiefly the worship of individual freedom - that drive our current moral climate.
In 1971 Lewis Powell wrote his infamous conservative manifesto which equated the “enterprise system” with the ultimate conservative value: individual freedom. Powell claimed that freedom was under attack by insidious elements nurtured by college campuses: “Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system” i.e. Brooks’ ”left-wing moral relativism.”
The memo energized powerful business interests who, with the help of Reagan’s “hands-off business” philosophy, began to aggressively shred the social contract they had with their employees and society in general.
Nowhere in the memo is the Viet Nam war – at its height in 1971 – mentioned. Yet, it was the war that caused campuses to roil in response to its gross immorality and government lies. Brooks also fails to mention this or any other cause of distrust of moral tradition. Instead, he does what he accuses others of doing: “reducing a complex problem to a simple narrative.”
Let’s be honest David: Conservatism hasn’t lost its way; it’s found its stride. Our current tragedy is the logical conclusion of an ideology that privileges the individual over the collective welfare.
2
Homo Economicus has been around since the Victorian Age, when some of the richest capitalists of all time reigned. From John Stuart Mills, on Political Economy: he was proposing "an arbitrary definition of man, as a being who inevitably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial with which they can be obtained." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus
Uh, "regulation was too tight" in the 1970s? You mean like Nixon's creation of the EPA and OSHA -- boy, those agencies sure damaged the U.S.! But Nixon DID set in motion the deregulation of the financial markets...which gave us what you now call a "Society [that] came to be seen as an atomized collection of individual economic units pursuing self-interest. Selfishness was normalized."
Yes, the economic lens *is* the only one we have now -- and that's totally owned by the rich and powerful, who had the money to buy their desires through both market and political forces, and were *already* convinced that money was the be-all and end-all. STOP with the false equivalency; the left's "moral relevatism" was about *choice* -- should a mother stay home with the children, for example, or continue her career? -- and not the markets-and-money-always-first diktat of "right-wing free-market fundamentalism."
The right alone is responsible for the modern economic-only lens, and to blame the left equally for that is shockingly shallow history, and much like Trump saying there were "very fine people on both sides" of the 2017 Charlottesville right-wing march and killing. No: don't add to the fake news, David, you're (often) better than that!
Oh, David, you would have credibility if you honestly (morally) laid the problem at the feet of where it truly belongs: the GOP.
I lived through the 80s, the 'greed is good' decade, Reaganomics. I remember what life was like before Reagan and how he in his sunny way made everyone feel okay about dumping their morals and jumping on the greed train.
1
Mostly agree with this article.
"In normal times, corporations serve a lot of stakeholders — customers, employees, the towns in which they are located. But these days corporations see themselves as serving one purpose and one stakeholder — maximizing shareholder value."
This is sham perpetrated by Friedman. Libertarian Capitalism will destroy capitalism. Ironic that Marx still may be right...
"A deadly combination of right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism "
Yes the former no the latter. How many "left-wing relativists" speak of putting kids in cages? This will come as a shock to Daivd but people can be non-religious and still care for people, even more than people who claim to be religious.
Wages are not up.
1
"We" didn't turn off the moral lens. The whole country hasn't forgotten that government protects us from harm. But a wealthy minority has worked relentlessly across decades to control the government and the media. Decades: see media concentration and the Fairness Doctrine, and Rupert Murdock.
Brooks cites airline deregulation as a success. Have you bought a ticket lately, David? Are you tired of winning yet?
And, trademark Brooks, he wrings his hands over our moral failings. If only we could resurrect our moral compass! "O tempora! O mores!" In 800 words, the only moral failing he cites is corporate responsibility, yet somehow it's all our faults.
No. The effort to commandeer our media, to purchase congress, to elevate corporate rights, to liken money to speech, to undermine unions and replace the American worker with foreign labor and machines has been going on for decades. We didn't always have Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. We didn't always have Marketplace Morning Report on NPR. We didn't always have PACs. We didn't always admit authoritarian regimes to trade organizations (China, WTO). Those are the products of years of sotto voce work by organized money. The result has been 35 years of wage suppression, with all benefits to economic, tax, and trade policy -- all benefits to 128% economic growth -- going to the top echelon, and most of that to the top 0.01% income bracket.
It's a political, not a moral failing. Don't wring: act.
1
This analysis of the dangers of a capitalism which is not constrained by either underlying cultural values, or/and by strong countervailing government, is correct and timely.
But the ridiculous addition of "left-wing moral relativism" -- clearly for purposes of false equivalence -- is absurd (and beneath Brooks' usual standards).
Forty years of Republican brain-washing are behind our current dangerous situation.
1
Wow... perhaps David should get about rewriting American economic history in my hs history text book from this moral and social capitol point of view.. I can't wait to see how he explains American capitalism and slavery! ... After that challenge... perhaps he can explain the American Railroad industry and the Robber Barron era as a high water mark of "moral" American capitalism.
American capitalism has always been amoral...
What to do about this limitation that cost communities as the markets globalize... Perhaps another chapter in my hs history book.... antitrust and environmental regulation are imperfect tools that should be invigorated!
"In a healthy society, people try to balance a whole bunch of different priorities: economic, social, moral, familial. Somehow over the past 40 years economic priorities took the top spot and obliterated everything else."
This feels like an accurate and astute observation - and I appreciate it being made and with such clarity.
Certainly, the economy is important. It's tough to have a society with order and security when people are struggling with their income. But we need to support families and the reject the notion of
This reminds me of Berkshire Hathaway's treatment of the poor in his mobile-home business as decsribed by the Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/the-mobile-home-trap-how-a-warren-buffett-empire-preys-on-the-poor/
I haven't heard of other publications scrutinizing or criticizing him for this. Instead, Warren Buffett is held up as a great person.
Shame on him!
David, you are wrong to pin moral relativism on the 'left wing'. The moral hypocrisy of today's evangelical community is as stunning as anything we have seen in American politics. The erosion of a shared moral compass is due to many factors, not the least of which is the corrosive effect of our form of runaway capitalism. If everything is a commodity, then nothing has value apart from its cost.
Amen for asking the right question.
It is apparent that the Republicans are more wedded to money than any other higher calling. How ironic since they include the moral majority in the fold. What a bunch of hypocrites.
How wrong headed to decry as socialist anything other than a profit motive. Profit is the root of all that is good in the eye of the Reps.
The only hope for a representative government is to remove all influence of private money, big donors, and foreign influence peddling. We must fund all representative government campaigns with tax payer money alone. K street consultants don't have to close their mouth for hire, but that's next. Give up all hope for a just and fair government until that day.
I'm genuinely astonished that Brooks can go immediately from a column excoriating Nancy Pelosi for her "inane" moral view of Trump's wall to the next column arguing that we need to restore morality to our society. Is morality the unique preserve of conservatives?
Walt Kelly's Pogo ruminated, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
When The Dalai Lama was asked what was the most pressing issue facing humanity, he replied, "Only two things are happening in each moment: we are either inhaling or exhaling."
Each moment as individuals, we make choices that set the course of society, of history, by becoming what we think. Who sees one's self in all others, bends us toward justice and well-being.
1
Brooks has spent his career as an apologist and propagandist for capitalists - the members of society who control a significant amount of capital. He describes a process in which capitalism became disconnected from moral issues, a process that unfolded over decades. Where was he during those decades? In a coma? No. He was cheering for the very people he now derides.
Capitalism is a "wonderful" system? Why? It is simply a system in which all economic decisions are made by those who control capital. Only a fool would be surprised if those who control capital make decisions about the economy that benefit themselves and people like them. During the Cold War, when there seemed to be a real threat from an alternative economic system, capitalists were willing to make some decisions for the benefit of workers to keep workers from supporting that other system. When that threat ended, there was no longer any reason for capitalists to concern themselves with the needs of anyone but themselves, and they ceased doing so. Is there anything surprising about any of this? Not really.
7
So the story is:
We made a bunch of dramatic changes in the 70s to US tax policy, that limited unions ability to work, and that lowered corporate responsibility for their actions.
and somehow along the way
Corporations became incredibly selfish and wealthy.
The richest people in the country became wildly rich.
And "average" Americans saw their economic status become unsure.
Hmmm, did the government policies that "basically worked"
also basically support the "moral decline"
Because reversing this policies are core to progressive politics. So those of us on the left think those policies didn't basically work, they empowered the few at the expense of the many; which is basically the moral wrong that is available to government.
So the argument here makes NO SENSE.
3
"But capitalism needs to be embedded in moral norms and it needs to serve a larger social good."
This is precisely what capitalism cannot abide. What you have seen in the last four decades is capital reclaiming its rightful priority over social life, momentarily interrupted by the New Deal.
And leftist moral relativism? Capitalism relativizes all values to be measured against the absolute value of profit and private property, or individual utility. Ask any libertarian.
Progressives are the first to make the move you want to. They believe in fundamental human rights and goods that can only be achieved when capital is regulated and taxed in the appropriate ways so that our institutions reflect other goods besides growth in GDP. Why do you think they rail against making profits on kids through selling schools technological curricula that makes a few rich while *actively undermining* the cognitive skills of children according to every empirical study?
Progressives are the most vehement critics of the atomization of humans into homo economicus , based on a fuller, richer conception of human flourishing.
I appreciate so much your public struggle to come to terms with the devastating consequences of capital's increasing control over social life.
But you are so out of touch with how the large majority of Americans are doing. And it's largely the result of capital capturing the legislative process and steering policy away from the social values you champion.
5
When I invest in the equity of a company, I expect that the company has a fiduciary duty to maximize my investment. If paying employees more achieves that goal (see, e.g. Costco, who pays more and gets rewarded with lower turnover, etc) then I am all for it. Likewise if being socially conscious gives them a marketing benefit that outweighs the cost, that's fine with me too. What I'm not okay with is their making decisions that are against my interest as an owner. I also think placing some amorphous "moral" overlay on companies will lead to sclerosis and a lack of willingness to change and compete globally.
1
Likewise, in 2016 when Walmart announced that they were increasing their starting wage to $11, the market responded with a severe drop in their share price, causing something like $20 billion in market cap to be vaporized inside of a four hour period. That’s detrimental to shareholders AND a direct message from the market that the action was not only wrong but repugnant.
This is a very thoughtful piece. But for the life of me, Brooks and other self-identified conservatives can't write an article without taking a low blow to liberals, e.g. "left-wing moral relativism led to a withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct." As a progressive, this is offensive, but more importantly, it's not true. The withering away of moral norms was affected at least as much by unbridled market forces and the political propaganda necessary to make them acceptable to gullible working people, whose lives began to fall apart. Progressives want moral norms too. We should all agree that capitalism should be framed within a constellation of social values and you won't get that without some form of effective government. The fact that those on the right have trashed government for the past 40 years has made that a harder sell.
5
Insread of going back to the seventies, let’s try the early thirties, when the economy was truly “broken” thanks to a decade of unbridled capitalist profiteering under a succession of small-government Republican presidents. Guess how we instilled a greater degree of moral responsibility into that economy? FDR’s “left-wing” New Deal, of course, the primary purpose of which was to save the capitalists from themselves while averting a socialist revolution. So if Brooks had any sense, he would be demanding similar solutions today, which he must recognize are socially conservative, just as the New Deal was: raise taxes on the rich and corporations to the levels of the 1950s, regulate the big corporations and banks, break up or regulate monopolies to protect consumers, restore an effective social safety net now including universal healthcare, and above all restore and protect the rights of labor to receive a viable minimum wage, to organize, to bargain collectively, and to strike if needed. THAT is how you get a prosperous and “moral” economy with a strong middle class.
FDR feared communism, not knowing that it would impoverish millions and eventually collapse under its own failures. However, he did burden us with the cost of SS, arbitrary labor laws (how does my work suddenly become 50% more valuable after 40 hours and why FOURTY?) and the foundation of the pervasive entitlement mentality.
Giving corporations humongous tax breaks for doing absolutely nothing different than they've been doing was a further acceptance of the lack of accountability in corporate America.
Social responsibility could very well have been one of the caveats to those companies who received the largest of tax breaks. Giving back to communities, supporting their workers with health insurance or paid time off, helping their workers become better workers, giving them incentive to want to climb the ladder to success all could have been included in a path to lower taxes, but alas, the people who voted yes didn't see this. If we can't force corporations to treat their employees and consumers better, maybe bribing them should be the next best practice.
1
When Sears was at its peak, a career salesman could retire with about $1million in today's dollars worth of Sears stock.
Now all that money goes to reward shareholders and senior C-suite execs. How do you fix that and bring back a moral commitment to share the success with the every day worker?
2
A lot of this stems of decades of Republican propaganda that government is bad. Why should Apple pay their taxes if it our government that is the problem?
Politicians have pushed this ideal of individuality forever, while demeaning government and in turn community. Universal programs enacted by the government promote a sense of togetherness and community. We've done the opposite, gutting programs and unions.
The markets can't just simply change to become "moral". Government needs to set the rules for that to happen.
2
A corporation is neither moral nor immoral. A corporation is not a human being. A corporation is a legal abstraction designed to allow a group of human beings to avoid legal and moral accountability for their actions. The tool has proven extremely effective for some. Without accountability there is no morality. Every action becomes an abstraction.
That's not an economic question though. Brooks is talking about finance and business organization. Both rely on economics. However, whatever economics Brooks is talking about is not the economics I learned in college.
Economics is the study of human decision making given limited alternatives. Nothing in that definition requires money, corporations, or capitalism. Economics is a social science. Economists study human behavior in the same way a primatologist might study macaques. The methodology is different but the basic idea is essentially the same. We are trying to understand why animals behave the way they do.
I'll give you an example. If you offer one person an apple provided they share some portion of that apple with someone else. Business theory would have you cut out one apple slice, give it to the other person, and eat the rest yourself. Using actual humans though, the person given the apple almost invariably cuts the apple in half. This is almost universally true. Humans, as social animals, possess a sense of fairness.
Equity is currently popular because humans can sense the unfairness in our society.
2
@Andy and yet, I know many who'd slice the smallest possible portion to share, keeping the vast majority for themselves, not because they are the hungriest, but because they fear not having another meal again anytime soon.
Thinking of one particular person I know, I'm not sure if it is a result of growing up in extreme poverty and having overcome it (purely an anomaly among his ancestors) or if it's genuine greed.
@Amy
It happens. Outcomes vary depending on how the experiment is organized. If the person is allowed to decide in private for instance, the person is more likely to keep a greater portion of the apple for themselves. If they are forced to make the decision in public, they tend to be more generous. The social value of generosity is worth more than the apple.
Statistically speaking though, cutting the smallest slice is an anomaly. Cost optimization tells us this is the correct choice and the other person should be happy too. Any apple is better than no apple. However, that's not how things work out. The person who cuts the smallest slice is socially abnormal.
I agree with this as it mirrors my own observations over the years that America has lost its moral compass. We ought to be able to make a decent product, pay a decent wage to our workers and give a decent return to our investors.
1
Mr. Brooks conveniently forgets what was really going on in the 70's. The great sinkhole of money in Vietnam hadn't been paid for, it was all on the credit card. Then there was the oil cartel driving fuel costs through the roof and Carter was desperate to turn things around and nothing he tried actually worked. Then Reagan came along riding high on his payoff to the Iranians for the hostages who increased the debt even more by throwing more money at the defense department, again on the credit card because, well we all know lowering taxes and flooding the country with borrowed money is a sure fire stimulus for the economy.
I find it amazing that people get jobs writing opinions built upon nonsense.
4
Yes, something is "out of joint." Here we are experiencing one of the greatest markets and business prosperity we've ever seen and yet running deficits that will surely someday bankrupt our whole system. Lord Keynes had it right; prepare in good times to provide in the poor. Things have gotten out of hand and we will all pay for it.
1
Well regulated markets work well. Unregulated markets are merely enabling fraudsters. Unfortunately, the Republican Party has been taken over by the fraudsters
5
"But capitalism needs to be embedded in moral norms and it needs to serve a larger social good. Remoralizing and resocializing the market is the great project of the moment. The crucial question is not: How can we have a good economy? It’s: How can we have a good society? How can we have a society in which it’s easier to be a good person?"
A society where the basic needs of every citizen are..........what? What is the good society? Education, health care, affordable housing, job with a living wage........are these the elements of a good society? Is a good society a level playing ground for the pursuit of these elements? Define please. Can you trust the creation of this level playing field capitalism, to the marketplace, to a survival of the fittest mentality? What is the "good society" you envision where it is easier to be good? To love they neighbor, to do unto others, care for others as much as self, to adhere to those "morals" that most would agree are intrinsically good? Is that what we are after? Can you really envision capitalism with morals? What is it you want, what is that good society? Define it. Then at least suggest some reasonable path to it. If you put this in the hands of the right or the left, if you had to choose one, what would you choose? The Great Project: Remoralizing the Market? How about remoralizing people. That may be the Great Project.
1
Nice try. The genie of rogue capitalism is out of the bottle and there is no going back. "Citizens United" pretty much sealed that deal. It's all about the money.
1
I find their no more perplexing commentator than you, Mr. Brooks, because for every call to our better angels, whenever it comes to a single policy proposal you seem utterly averse to anything that even hints at intervention. I don't remember you rallying for the Affordable Care Act, which would seem to me to provide the kind of social good you call for. I don't see you do much of anything but lament over why can't we all just individually promise to do better, when it should be pretty clear that they only path to his better society of yours is through collective actions. You want to be a progressive, David -- so just do it. Stop tearing yourself apart trying to marry some long-held dream of principled conservatism that never came to pass and accept the fact that there's a lot we can do when we have a strong, active government helping those who need help and leveling the playing field when it becomes pitched. For every call to our better angels you issue, your every policy observation leaves us all shaking our "collective" heads. Always provocative; always infuriating-- that's how I describe your work.
5
More false equivalence from a member of the right. Maybe Brooks forgets the 70's was a paradigm shift in energy costs. It caused the recession then as discretionary income dropped along with the beginning globalization effects. Reagan attacked the unions, initiated deregulation, and massive greed and corruption left us with a savings and loan crisis adding at least 500 Billion in debt, a stock crash in 1987 and the government's national debt quadrupled by "voodoo economics" with the "right" clamoring for more tax cuts. When the Koch's could not get elected themselves in 1980 they began corrupting the Republican party which is now illustrated by their annual event which is a sacrosanct calendar event no one in the Republican party dares not miss. We have seen time after time, the failures of libertarian economic policies to create a fair and just society. This has nothing to do with what ever Brooks thinks "left wing moral relativism" actually is. The left believes in science, facts, that outcomes matter, that we should ask ourselves first what kind of society we want and then look to figure out how to fund it while not burdening future generations. We should protect society from the cost of negative economic externalities created by businesses in their business operations so they don't get to privatize profits while socializing costs. A just American society would have medicare for all and free higher education like Europe. And those things would make us truly free.
5
I appreciate David Brooks plaintive call for morality in an inherently immoral system. Many of us feel similarly, directly, or indirectly.
Isn't it clear however, that effective governmental limits on rapacious behavior create a more equitable, if not moral, environment?
I find it curious that Mr Brooks steers clear of this fact. Similarly puzzling is his argumentative incorporation of "left -wing moral relativism." What on earth does this vague concept have to do with the painful greed of corporate America?
5
Our CA example of an unaccountable corporation that has broken it's compact with their employees and "other" stakeholders is PG&E. Many of our mega fires can be traced to their gutting of a decently paid and accountable work force tied to local communities where they have power plants and grid lines. A management team driven by maximizing short term profits has abandoned a moral obligation to take care care of their own due to criminal neglect of their infrastructure resulting in historic fire disasters. And the logical next step? They now want to break up into smaller companies to protect themselves from an estimated $30 billion in liabilities and set the stage for a government bail out. And who is now appearing on ambulance chaser ads in the state, no other than Erin Brockovich! Should be interesting.
1
In 1961 JFK opened with:
"The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe — the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God."
Closing with:
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
"Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own."
WE are what happens between those lines.
3
"remoralizing" american capitalism will be accomplished by responsible government regulation. this includes legal consequences for corporate misbehavior. the essence of morality is accepting responsibility for one's actions. our government does not require this when it reaches settlements with malefactors who can deny responsibility.
2
Mr. Brooks is mostly on the right track here. But not completely. He speaks of how "we" have gotten off track, with "a deadly combination of right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism." Mr. Brooks still seems to think to be taken seriously, or to be actually right, one must criticize both sides. But there is no moral equivalence between a corporate executive's desire for another few million dollars in compensation, and an average American's desire to avoid bankruptcy, homelessness, or going without medical treatment. Some economic desires are sufficiently morally justified to deserve priority from government, and others aren't. It's not that wanting to be rich is immoral per se; it's just not a moral priority deserving of special solicitude from society or government. Criticizing all desire for money as morally equivalent just won't do.
2
Marx 101 - profit comes from "surplus value," which is really theft by capital from those not powerful enough to demand fair exchange (workers, ecosystems, etc). Further, "surplus value" flows to the top (statistically, white men) through a ladder of social inequalities - i.e. sexism and racism are used to devalue (sometimes enslave) groups of people and stereotypical job associations to keep costs in the "secondary labor market" very low.
A system that only survives due to surplus value extraction and a society that legally mandates that corporations prioritize shareholder value (because that was foolishly seen as a social good) is directly, fundamentally, irredeemably at odds with morality. In principle, what we see now is simply the logical extreme of what began with predatory mercantilism several centuries ago, with some periodic attempts at "balance," e.g. New Deal.
While markets are not inherently problematic (companies can be co-ops, non-profits, etc), capitalism is fatally morally flawed and needs to end. Ironically, it is perhaps morality that needs deregulation - free public corporations from the legal profit imperative and see if the un-chained good in human nature might actually make positive changes for the good of society. Break the stranglehold of massive banks and turn them into credit unions. Real people and real businesses will do the right thing under the right macro circumstances.
1
Tucker Carlson is exactly right when he says, "In his now famous monologue on Fox News, Tucker Carlson argued that American elites are using ruthless market forces to enrich themselves and immiserate everyone else."
The only answer is to purge all the crooks from the system - as Robert Mueller is doing with OUR investigation - regulate the hell out of "markets" and tax back all the inherited/stolen wealth that is being used by the International Mafia to try to destroy OUR United States of America and governments around the world.
Vote only for Socially Conscious democratic, independent and republicans (if there are any left) who will work for 99.9% of us. Meantime, fight like hell to preserve/restore the one thing you love about life in America -everything is in danger of destruction by those demented with greed.
3
David, how quickly you forget your history! What about The Gold Rush, slavery, indentured servitude, sweat shops, the lawless frontier, Robber Barons, government corruption, millionaires living in the midst of the Great Depression, and on and on? One could argue that the period after WWII was actually an exception - a period of "moralism" in America. Or one could argue that, after WWII, due to unions, a less interdependent world, and millions of stable small businesses and farms, the economy was more "moral". Today the growth of giant multi-national corporations, the weakening of unions and small businesses, the rapid continuous transformation of the economy and unbridled competition, and the transformation of the working class makes it much harder to create a moral capitalist society. If you want to continue this conversation, why not highlight "enlightened" businesses? Why not highlight proposals like Elizabeth Warren's that would require corporations to have 40% of its Board Members represent workers? David, I hope you will follow up this idea with a series of op-ed pieces that put the moral capitalism age in perspective and write about good ideas that would bring us closer to an enlightened, moral age of capitalism.
3
That’s exactly the right question: How can we have a good society?
What does it mean when my libertarian relative says To each his own, ‘the others’ - the poor, the brown, the old, the sick aren’t his problem.
What does it mean when you don’t know who lives next to you or you can’t afford to live near good schools or health care?
What does it mean when a population ignores the mental health crisis?
What does it mean when 80 thousand people die of drug overdoses in a year.
What does it mean when nothing matters to politicians but tax breaks and corporate donations.
What does it mean when millions of people vote for a criminal billionaire to be President of our country?
There are many good good people doing good good things, but as a country, we are very broken. How can we find a way to say Yes instead of No. Love instead of Separation. Courage instead of Fear. Human interest instead of Economic.
1
So it always happens around the 5th paragraph. DBrooks says something so obviously false, or so smug, or so absurd, that the rest of the argument melts away.
"It basically worked."
Right around the end of the 1970s, average family income started to plummet, economic security demanded two-income households, and those big booms we've enjoyed? They were great for stock market speculators and great for the wealthy, but they have left an awful lot of people behind.
So maybe massive deregulation, and de-unionization, and wealth consolidation aren't the magic formula? And maybe the way we become a "good society" starts with an ethos of economic fairness. It sure is easier to be a good person when you aren't living from payday to payday, ground under mountains of debt, and left to fight for the scraps left behind by the wealthy in a race-to-the-bottom cage match.
2
"It basically worked." Not for the average middle class family. In 1970, a one income family of 5 could afford a house, good education for the kids and save for a decent pension. In 2019, even with two incomes many families struggle. And it is even worse for those who are young now.
"Capitalism is a wonderful system." Capitalism is good at some things, such as encouraging risk taking and innovation. But most of our economy is devoted to reproduction. In agriculture, health care, education, policing, prisons, fire fighting, etc, there is (some but comparatively) little profit to make from increasing production by innovation. So we should have a rational debate on which parts of the economy are better served by public services and which parts are better served by competitive markets.
2
Capitalism IS a wonderful system but we have created many wonderful systems.
For 20,000 years hunter gather tribalism was the predominant system. It worked for so long because all members of a band knew each other - there was no way to exploit or take advantage of others and all contributed to a common goal.
Ever since grains were domesticated in Mesopotamia 12,000 years ago we have had to develop complex systems to deal with surpluses, trade, private property and inheritance (Capitalism) but also moral systems to allow us to place our trust in the actions of complete strangers.
History since then repeats itself.
A story or myth arises for a people to organize around. First we had gods and demons that would reward or punish in the afterlife, in more modern times monetary, legal and political stories reward and punish on earth.
Some systems drive behaviors that make one society more successful than others. In all of them a conflict eventually arises between elites and everyone else.
Stability + time + capitalism= concentrated wealth and power. Concentrated wealth and power leads to abuse. When abuse is prevalent popular uprising follows. Once the old edifice is burned to the ground a new one is built and the cycle repeats.
So far Democracy has allowed us to change stories without the edifice burning part.
However, wealth and financial systems are now global while political and regulatory systems remain national.
Interesting times to follow.
1
As a newly minted MBA, I worked for Safeway stores when KKR rode into town in 1982. The bloated corporation I saw and hated was ripe for the picking. KKR and their advisors made huge money on the financial engineering. Stockholders did fine. Oh, and the workers, not so much. Divisions were sold, stores were closed, and factories were shuttered. Creative destruction of the working class resulted. Middle class union jobs were the main loss. You can be sure top management did fine.
In hind sight, I realize I supported this action. My MBA taught me that the capital market was efficient and was appropriate guidance for investment. Nothing else mattered. At least nothing that we were taught. How I shutter today, realizing the fallacy of that argument.
The market is not efficient. It has been corrupted by power and politics. AND, there needs to be some consideration to the societal costs associated with maximizing shareholder return.
3
The reason that capitalism works is BECAUSE people are greedy. And that is the very reason why we need strong government policy regarding health and safety, quality control, operational regulations, and yes, an extremely progressive tax policy, rising to 70 or 80 % on incomes greater than about $10,000,000. This worked under Eisenhower. Why are Republicans so adverse to it now?
And, we need a level playing field — which means low cost education and healthcare for all. Middle income people deserve similar opportunities for advancement that are automatically provided to the wealthy.
2
Thomas Piketty noted that a tax on wealth is the solution to income inequality. Such taxes are necessary since human beings when left to themselves will mostly choose scarcity and fear over generosity and hope. This human response is one result of original sin or what the Greeks call hubris.
1
Good luck with that. Now that doing anything in business is justifiable if it makes money, there's no going back. The fact that government enables and cheers on this immoral behavior is just an unpleasant fact. No one is motivated to do anything about it. Get used to it.
1
Consider this old rhyme from the 1700's (paraphrased and modernized):
The law will surely jail someone
who steals a goose from the commons.
But still the man is running loose
who stole the commons from the goose.
The scale of things is larger but basics have been with us for centuries.
2
Mr. Brooks, I think you are not considering the extent to which the adoption of "regulation is bad" and "taxes are bad" as articles of secular faith during the Reagan era started us on the very road to the immoral, atomized marketplace that you describe.
And the Carter tax cuts and the Reagan deregulation didn't even work well at the time. As the Reagan administration began, the economy was famously in a state of "malaise" with interest rates spiraling out of control. Airline deregulation democratized travel with cheaper fares, but airlines remained extremely volatile as an investment proposition. Every major airline except Southwest has been in and out of bankruptcy since deregulation, and the only thing that seems to stem the traffic in and out of the bankruptcy court has been mergers that have facilitated deeper cuts in customer amenities and nickel-diming with fees.
3
If the system in which one operates is amoral (economic, political, or social), then it stands to reason that only those that are the most amoral will be the most successful. There are countless examples to be found throughout history the fate of such systems that lost their moral compass.
2
It's nice to philosophize about corporate "morality". But, sensible taxing of business and finance will get the job done.
There is one and only one equitable and fool-proof way to tax business activity: it is the Value-Added Tax (VAT). The VAT is a fair fee for participating in our consumer market. It works well in other advanced economies, and produces lots of government revenue.
Attempting to tax corporate profit is a mistake that encourages undesirable corporate behavior and produces too little revenue. Corporate profit is an accounting shell game for large multi-national companies. It encourages companies to distribute assets to minimize tax rather than promote efficiency. That's why Apple is headquartered in Ireland. That why thousands of corporations are, or used to be, headquartered in post office boxes in Grand Cayman.
By the way, that Israeli day care should extend their hours, and, regrettably, VAT may not be permitted by our Constitution.
Globalization was seen as a business opportunity to off shore manufacturing to cheap labor countries to increase corporate profits, raise stock prices and bring cheap goods to the market. Finance capital in the same period tried to sell the idea that mortgage debt could be bundled and sold as bonds. So the craze was on to sell houses no matter whether the buyers had the wherewithal to pay back the loan. The economy is run for the richest people by paid off politicians. Clearly the forces of capital have changed the country's finances and sharing of the wealth in the country. As T. Edsall quoted yesterday, "money does not guarantee the outcome but helps reinforce inequalities."
1
@c harris. Mortgage debt has been sold as bonds for over 50 years, So what?
Many of us struggle to understand these issues. One factor that intrigues me is the fact of globalization and the economic advantages for many including countries from specializing. There are scale issues when a company with a great product goes from selling in a state to selling in a nation and then to the prospect of selling to the world. Imagine a CEO paid according to sales gains and 5,000% increases occur and his salary goes from a mere relational number associated with selling in one state to selling to the world! Giga bucks. Same for singers, song writers, basket ball players, soccer stars. Most of this has no relation to the workers in the manufacturing plant in the home town of that now mega corporation. Those salaries are related to hundreds of supply chain inputs to the final product and diverse markets.
Global supply chains cannot be compared with those original companies. We have no useful metrics to do this calculation. Even those mega billionairs don't know how to handle this flood of money. Gates is learning to give in mega buck ways; and guess what, the Billionaire Buffet, the is giving him more Billions to invest in making the world better.
So changes coming no relation to the old one town models with owners and workers and customers being closely related. Perhaps we need new rules. But perhaps we should see how the newly world rich play out their role. In many ways, Gates is giving to the world, the world where he earned the money.
Excuse me, Mr. Brooks, but when was capitalism ever embedded in moral norms? It has always required government-established guardrails to protect the commonweal.
2
In the case of the day care centers, I am wondering whether the parents thought that the workers who stayed late would be paid overtime and did so by choice. If so, then altruistic motives could have entered into their behavior.
I don't deserve the money that someone else has earned. However money that I earn for someone else should be properly divided. Clearly dome people don't even have the common sense to allocated shares correctly. This particularly long arc of history appears to be bending towards economic equality.
Mr. Brooks writes “Somehow over the past 40 years economic priorities took the top spot and obliterated everything else.” My observation as a mid-centurion is that this statement is correct. The nagging question to my mind is “what was the tipping point?” When did obscene greed, the lust for money, become life’s organizing principle?
1
When Reagan made it acceptable to flaunt wealth—I’m 80 and I remember a time when rich people were discreet about their money, and when corporations had a sense of obligation to employees, customers, and their surroundings.
I remember it well.
3
American elites have a weird and rather ostentatiously self-serving religion. They talk about "economic growth" as if it were an end in itself. Why is that? Is there some inherent good in companies getting bigger and richer, in more stuff being bought and sold? Does that inevitably make people happier? And they go on and on praising the "work ethic," as if employees were monks, nobly practicing self-denial in order to serve the good of the employer. Why would we celebrate people who skip vacations, interrupt family events, and work 60 hours a week? I can see why the investor class would praise "work ethic"--they are the ones who get to keep all of the excess profits the worker bees generate. But the average worker gets no benefit from this bizarre secular religion.
3
This is a column with a secret thesis. The true thesis is revealed by substituting the word "GOP" for "We."
Did WE really "privileged economics and then no longer could see that there could be other priorities?" No, we did not. My family did not. Most of our friends did not. The GOP did. Democrats have always been for healthcare for all, civil rights, family rights, quality of life, regulating capitalist excesses, and a just, and fair society.
WE did not "turn off the moral lens." The GOP did.
WE did not "rip the market out of its moral and social context and let it operate purely by its own rules." The GOP did.
Selfishness was NOT moralized by all of us - just the GOP.
WE did not disembed individuals from traditional moral norms and companies from social ones. The GOP did.
Apple employees should NOT be humiliated and ashamed. The GOP should be deeply ashamed of deregulation that encouraged "sleazy behavior" by corporations.
David says a "covenant was broken". This is simplistic and inaccurate. What has happened is the age-old tale of the corrupting influence of power. The GOP got into a cycle in which they wanted increasingly more power and felt increasingly that the ends justified the means. Part of this pursuit has included massive propaganda, and this has succeeded in fooling many people. Finally, some people who are not fooled by propaganda still go along with this unending power grab, out of wishful thinking. I believe this column falls into that category.
3
Mr. Brooks: I agree with what you see but not with how you think we got here. You link the development of this purely economic lens and the withing of the moral norms to "left-wing moral relativism". I don't accept the premise. Please argue your point.
5
It has been my contention that Mr. Brooks has been wandering in an intellectual desert, looking for what, the meaning of life perhaps(?), ever since The Donald was elected. That election effectively destroyed whatever moral rectitude remained in his beloved GOP, turning said party into a spineless morass of sycophants. But rather than just attack Republicans for this, his columns always have to find some left-of-center concept to revile, as if that restores some socio-political balance to his world view. Hence, the reference to "left-wing moral relativism", whatever that means.
Businesses exist to make money, and any attempt to attribute moral obligations to business, such as concern for its employees or the communities are mere add-ons that make people like Mr. Brooks feel better about their blind obedience to capitalism. Governments, on the other hand exist to serve the needs of its citizens. One need look no further than our Constitution's "mission statement", that is, its Preamble, where we find that our government is directed to, "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty" to all of us, in perpetuity. Our government is what provides the necessary check and balance to free market capitalism, irrespective of the anguish of small government lovers like Mr. Brooks. Big business necessitates big government. It's really that simple.
6
I agree completely with David Brooks about this. I wrote a similar piece called "The Golden Rule and the Spirit of Capitalism" which appeared in Perspectives: a Journal of Reformed Thought in June 2017. In it, I argue that capitalism only works when the gains from trade (not just international, but between persons and institutions as well) are split between the parties. This is what the Golden Rule calls for: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It is the foundation of Christian morality.
1
Thankfulness. My community built the most incredible public swimming pool. I am retired. I love to swim in the lap pool and socialize in the walking pool. I am there 2 hours a day five or six days a week. The pools enriched my life. I am thankful in a socio economic way. A year after I retire the pool is ready. Amazing gift. But, here's the deal. I no fool. I realize the pool was built on tax payer money. For each of them I am grateful. But, that doesn't do it for me. I feel thankful that I live in a society that made the pool possible.
Please tell everybody.
2
"Remoralizing and resocializing the market is the great project of the moment."
Perhaps we can start by enforcing laws against criminal behavior. Massive corporate frauds, tax evasion by the 0.1%, white collar financial crimes in general almost never result in jail time. Hell, you can even be a career white collar criminal and grow up to be president.
Our government rarely even bothers to investigate white collar criminal activity at the highest levels. We cut the IRS budget. Deferred prosecution agreements are the norm when the criminal activity becomes too big to ignore -- fine the corporation (paid by the shareholders) and let the crooks go (sometimes with a big severance payout)
Not all corporate misbehavior is criminal (or should be criminal) but we may find that the credible threat of jail time may get that "remoralizing and resocializing" ball rolling.
Think of it as a reverse "broken windows theory" for the c-suite. Stop the most egregious corporate crimes and quality of life will improve for everyone.
5
Capitalism created great wealth and in the 19th and early 20th centuries a growing middle class. But that was not its intent. Capitalism has always served greed first, from the Robber Barons to today's Russian Oligarchs [as well as Trump]. This is nothing new. It only responds in a caring way in a crisis that threatens its existence. Then it may throw a bone to the 99% or as in the case of the Depression or the Great Recession the government may step in to curb its natural tendency to put greed ahead of what's good for the society. I hope people like Elizabeth Warren and AOC can reign in capitalism's worst behaviors. Just to provide a concrete example, check out what the Wells Fargo Bank has been, and is, doing over the last few years and then try to tell me that capitalism doesn't need to bd regulated.
2
“Regulations were too tight” but they are one of the ways we try to rein in amoral Capitalism. The tax code and higher tax rates were part of our system to limit the amoral greed of corporations. People will always wish they weren’t taxed or regulated. But the period from the 1930s to the 1970s with higher taxes and regulations established the relatively beneficial society and social trust Mr. Brooks writes about. I think that we ignored the the corrosive effects of greed and trusted that Capitalism and corporations would adhere to values which they really believed stood between them and fulfillment of their greed. Economic populism was and is again a response to this unrestricted selfishness and greed.
2
The moral failure in America was on the part of corporations. Their executives and their shareholders who abandoned all pretense of serving anyone but themselves.
1
I asked a conservative-thinking executive why a person who already has more money than he could possibly ever use would desire more and more.
He said “It’s how you keep score.”
@Nancy Rathke
Yes it is, so it doesn't matter how high the tax rate is as long as they can show the zeroes on their bonus checks, it won't demotivate them in the least, might even increase their motivation to work harder to catch up to the really wealthy.
To shift back toward a moral context for the economy, we need to replace "homo economicus" (the wealth-maximizing human of economic theory) with "homo salutaris" ( the healthy human). Sweden has already done this, and looks at all policy through the lens of how it will improve the health of individuals, social systems, and the environment.
4
You say "It basically worked"....but I would say "For whom?"
Around that time in the late 1970s is when women, who previously might have had a choice about going to work (women's lib. sort of choice, perhaps) had to go to work. The "good" union jobs which, when performed by the husband, enabled the wife to stay home and be a mom, started vanishing. Tax rates went down, "greedy" unions were demonized and decimated. And yes, as you happily make the point, it wasn't all Reagan - it was also Carter and Kennedy.
So to say it basically worked, I ask you again "For whom?" and also "At what cost?" As de-regulated capitalism has run rampant in the Western world, with all those decent jobs shipped to the East, we've ended up with vast income inequality, gig jobs, a gigantic military (instead of a "peace dividend"), and no corporate or government moral lens. Capitalism is so wonderful?
2
You state, "My story begins in the 1970s," great, because my story starts in 470 BC with the birth of Socrates. Socrates would go on to demolish the elaborate and baseless arguments made by the paid pundits of his day, the Sophists. Little did Socrates know that nearly 2,500 years later Conservatives would take up the mantle of the Sophists and use specious arguments for things like "Trickle Down Economics" to advance inequality.
You employ a host of the rhetorical tricks which Socrates dismantled. For instance, when you state, "as an entire society--we switched to a purely economic lens," where is the factual information to support this?
Socrates disliked the ancient Sophists intensely for a specific reason; they were rhetoricians paid by the wealthiest and most powerful patrons in the ancient world to construct and then advance specious arguments which were only justifications. It is why Socrates, in employing reason, shattered those assertions. The foundation of an argument must be true or everything flowing from it is false, so when you falsely argue that "as an entire society--we switched to a purely economic lens," yet have nothing to support it, everything which relies upon it necessarily falls.
Perhaps, like the wealthy patrons of the Sophists of old, the wealthiest today wanted a "purely economic lens." However, you argue that somehow all are equally responsible for the greed of the wealthiest, when there's no support for that assertion. It is pure sophistry.
2
To borrow from Adam Smith, untethered capitalism is the bane of a well balanced and functioning society.
Now my spin, untethered capitalism is the path to:
—riches and power for most politicians;
—high paying jobs for many spouses and children of members of Congress, judges and political appointees;
—outlandish executive salaries, bonuses and golden parachutes when they fail or retire.
And on and on.
After 70 years of traveling the world, reading, thinking and observing it is clear to me that a balance between capitalism and socialism would best serve the common good of of any society.
3
To have a productive discussion of capitalism, we need to get rid of the "...isms", capitalism, socialism, relativism, and communism. These words polarize the discussion, as if the things that they identify were cast in concrete.
It would be more productive to discuss what things we hold as individuals, what things we hold in common, where to draw the boundary, and who enforces the rules. Then, instead of getting tangled up in what type of society we want, we can decide how to manage the society that we have, with its greedy people, its do-gooders, and everyone in between.
From the point of view of game theory, most people are grudgers. That is, they'll treat you honestly until you cheat them out of something, then they'll treat you like a cheat. Half the country believes that the corporations are cheating, half the country believes that the government is cheating, and a significant percentage of both camps believe that corporations control the government. Untangle that knot, and you might be making progress.
3
That David Brooks genuinely believes that late capital can somehow reacquire its lost moral compass is an astonishing premise.
While he and his ilk are waiting for capitalism to return to its wholesome moral roots, I'll sign up for the economic populism.
2
Exceptionally well stated. Although there is a lot more to it than David can include in an introductory column about the problem, the conclusion is stark: the American style of capitalism is seriously broken. Republicans need to learn how to help fix it, or they will stand in line for the guillotines.
2
Come on David - the changes started by Reagan, and made worse by the corrupt GOP did not "basically work," because we've had a few economic booms (driven by tech, which had nothing to do with these changes, and unregulated banking). Booms (and resultant crashes) are not evidence that an economic system or policies are working. The "rising" (and falling) tide has not lifted all boats. Middle earners have not gained since the 60's (when high income tax rates were 70%+): http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/
4
So, Mr. Brooks has just described the ramifications of conservative and libertarian policy and tried to blame it on liberals. Give me a break. Will conservatives ever accept responsibility for anything? Our economic picture is exactly what conservatives have been striving for during the past 40 - 50 years. Now you got what you wanted and you say it's Democrats fault. Please.
3
How many times can Brooks absolve himself and his life's ideology from the current state of things which he obviously hates? He is 100% correct that this country has obsessively placed economic concerns over all but how dare he blame the left. Though often times misguided and mishandled, the left has always pursued policies intended to make people's lives better and the right has consistently attacked these attempts at every and any chance. Equal right, women's rights, gay rights, religious freedom, affordable education, subsidy for the poor, worker's rights, a fair minimum wage, affordable health care, access to the arts - I could go on but where was the right in each and every one of these cases - AGAINST because "it was too expensive". Didn't matter that arguments could be made that there was a financial return for every dollar spent (not counting the non-financial benefits). But the moral relativity arguments of same sex love or abortion could be made and were used to the benefit of the right who politicized all of these things. Pro-life, pro-gun, colleges indoctrinate liberal ideology, homosexuality is anti-religion, welfare queens, liberal media, urban decay, socialism, tax and spend, takers, climate hoax - again I could go on and on but what is the point.
Adam Smith warned of the ills of capitalism at its creation -that it required an enlightened self interest but the right has constantly taught and expounded a wholly bankrupt and unenlightened view.
2
Is there a plan? Are corporate executive in leadership groups reading your article and coming up with ideas supportive of a "good society" where fewer people fall through the cracks and go unnoticed. Where are the leaders in government who are presenting the needs which will face our society in the years ahead and developing strategies to do something worthwhile.How about the media which presently seeks viewers rather than presenting news that is not divisive and confrontational. How about our political parties?Ugh!!Where are our leaders in the parties and why are they not emerging to bring cooperation in society.
I read in the times of a corporate president who realized that his employees needed a minimum of 75,000 dollars a year to live a life. He did something about it. Where is he and the company.
David,please get the ideas out there. New York times you know what to do ---do it!
2
The liberal “moral relativism” Brooks disingenuously decries does NOT equate to amorality. It equates instead to morality that results from good faith discussion, consensus building, and collective action rather than the authoritarian imposition of a morality dictated by folks convinced they have a direct pipeline to a diety... or who are able to convince others that they speak with such authority. I’ll take the liberal version any day, thankyouverymuch.
2
Reconciling morality with the market in America, or aiming for optimal combination between morality and economics?
The biggest obstacle to gaining clarity and therefore optimal combination between morality and economics is the Easy Answer People, and unfortunately they are the most likely people to gain power and control in America. By Easy Answer People I mean the religious, those who deal with contradiction, paradox, complexity between morality and market by having some people prosper and with millions of others subordinate and with their reward largely in heaven rather than on earth.
By Easy Answer People I mean nationalists who set up one group of people against others and finagle morality out of it by painting the others as evil (religion does the same in its way). By Easy Answer People I mean socialists who come up with these ridiculous schemes about how all can prosper only if we do this and that, as if no painful tradeoffs are in existence, and of course these socialists when it comes right down to it fall back into the same old censorship, persecution, propaganda, control which plagues religion, nationalism, etc.
The fact is there is no Easy Answer between morality and market. Distrust Easy Answer people. The fact is the human race is a species with an incredibly bad decision making capacity as witnessed by "loving parents" having children in abject poverty, condemning them, and even smart and prosperous people with no real concept of how to have/raise children.
Good analysis. What should Mr. Brooks do? He cannot support the Republican Party. Cannot realistically suggest he become a Democrat. Can he identify someone who can lead a third party based onn moral, civil conservative values?
1
The day care story is interesting. Does that mean that if we fined people when they failed to vote that they would view it through a profit/loss lens?
2
Mr. Brooks' column and many commenters are simply muddled. Don't know where to start. I should give examples, but there you are.
One point about corporations looking after employees as well as shareholders: Suppose you have a trucking company or airline with truck drivers and pilots represented on your board. Exactly how should those employee/directors vote when self-driving trucks or drone aircraft become possible?
The problem with the Republican party for me is their abandonment of free enterprise capitalism. Are tariffs on steel and aluminum done strictly to appease a voter block capitalism? No, it's a tax on the other 99.9% of us. Had Obama done that, the "capitalist" Republicans would screamed "socialism!" all the way through the 2016 election (and they would have been right). The tariffs are but one example of free market abandonment.
The Republican part as it is current configured should and will eventually die (absent gross gerrymandering). The best hope for a free enterprise capitalist such comes from within the Republican party. Will someone emerge who is is dedicated to free trade, FAIR taxation and responsible budgeting? Eventually? The progressive wing of the Democratic party only wants to vilify business and manage it from the Ivory tower in Washington - which will only make us less competitive. But until the free enterprise Republican party returns, I'll take the progressives over the hypocritical authoritarians that control the Republican party currently.
1
Hang on there. You say left-wing moral relativism helped ripped the market out a moral/social context that kept it in check. Sorry, but it is hard for me to see how the left's general value of humanity and justice (including economic justice) for all being anything but a moral stance. I guess you could argue that the left tends to buck dogmatic traditions that conflict with those values, but hard to see how that is relativistic. And it is harder to see how it has to do with atomistic self interest or the amoralism of the trading floor. I always thought that the collapse of the USSR and the general sense that communism had failed unleashed forces on the right against evil government, as I believe Ronny Reagan called it. Minds set against the idea of government as a potential force for good have led us to the vast economic disparities we see today. And finally, finally, people are starting to wake up to the idea that maybe we need to do something about that.
3
Good luck trying to reconcile Capitalism with moral duty. The minute you try and impose such moral norms is the minute the Capitalist starts trying to eliminate them.
1
The populists make a more convincing case than you do, David. In fact, you didn’t exactly point out any ways to insert a sense of morality back into the market. Probably because outside of regulation, there isn’t any such way?
Apple, et al, are not going to be shamed into being good guys. It hasn’t worked, and it’s not going to work. Just as these companies won’t be shamed into leaving behind destructive cost cutting measures, the impulse toward monopoly, or - increasingly - buying and selling our personal data in ways that mock their own “terms of service.” It’s incredibly naive to think, in spite of all available evidence, that the ruthless corporatist capitalism under which we currently live will be tamed without heavy interference.
1
Interesting that you quote Carl Icahn. I remember the pain in my gut when he and his cronies under St. Reagan feasted on hostile corporate takeovers, and after their gluttony dissected long established and people centric companies. They raided corporate America and left human wreckage in their path. All hail Gordon Gecko!
There is no moral equivalency to be made between the right and the left - though you and your cohorts repeatedly insist on trying. Good old Reagan Republicanism launched the decline of socially and morally responsible corporate America as we knew it.
3
Brooks writes:
A deadly combination of right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism led to a withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct
Why caveat it with "free-market"? It's far more accurate to say:
A deadly combination of right-wing fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism led to a withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct
If, when faced with persecution, a group of people move to a new place and evict the existing residents who figure out you are there to take their land.... if that doesn't create a sense of morality in you, I don't know what to say...So if some of the people take all the money leaving everyone else with little, why should that be a problem? If you are at the table and the pie for dessert is being sliced and as you watch the person cutting it up and see , with each meal, your slice gets smaller and smaller and the person across from you gets a bigger and bigger slice and the slicer says "Don't worry he will share", why wouldn't you believe him? The Native Americans believed that at first...Look how far they have come...they are no longer even sitting at the table. No pie for them. And for everyone else...the pie doesn't get any bigger. So when your slice gets small enough you will be faced with a choice... Reach across and stick your hand into that bigger slice and shovel a large scoop into your mouth or get up and leave the table and let the other guy have the whole pie. Americans feel doing the former is immoral. The latter, now that is as American as apple pie.
1
This is a long winded way of saying Capitalism has no conscience. It's practitioners must give it one or it's simply Darwinian economics. Even our present Darwinian version of Capitalism is distorted by monopsony, which only makes our present situation worse. Not a pretty picture.
"Moral relativism." Is that like Christians supporting an abomination for president because it gives them power Mr. Brooks? Because I can't name a single moral hedge that the left has engaged in that is more consequential to Democracy and future generations than the moonwalk of moral disgrace the right has engaged in.
1
"The crucial question is not: How can we have a good economy? It’s: How can we have a good society? How can we have a society in which it’s easier to be a good person?"
If I even had the answer to that (aside from what I do as a practicing Conservative Jew, which gentiles [and sadly, some Jews of all denominations feel that they] have no obligation to follow), no one would listen as I have neither money nor influence. I vote for people who seem to live closer to the values I feel are important; sometimes they win and sometimes they don't.
So David Brooks, what is your take on this? How do you think we can have a both good society and a society in which it’s easier to be a good person?
I await your answer.
As I read the comments on David Brooks' columns, I often wonder why so many people seem to read only to find every word choice, every example, every concern of his that they can vilify. Folks, he's a Republican, he's a conservative, and he's also clearly a person who cares deeply about community, ethics, fairness, and cooperation.
Aren't liberals always complaining that conservatives are mean-spirited, selfish, I've-got-mine sorts of people whose morals are all show and priggishness? Here's one who cares about our nation as a society. Why not engage with him rather than kvetch about his stubborn refusal to be you?
This could be a conversation instead of a grudge match
3
What? The banner of trickle-down economics waves again? Surely, Paul Krugman and others have proved this is wrong. Trickle-down has been promoted since the 1920's and it continues to fail over and over again. Regulations are not a burden. I proved this in an article I wrote for a technical journal: companies get used to it.
So, what else do you have to sell?
1
Mr. Brooks...do you have an opinion on Elizabeth Warren's proposed Accountable Capitalism Act? You made no mention of it in your column; odd because it addresses the issues you raise head-on. Assuming you are aware of this proposed legislation (which McConnell will never allow to come to a vote), I'd be eager to hear your thoughts in a follow-up column.
1
What do mean when you say "we", Mr. Brooks?
Seems to me that the Mitt Romneys and Ronald Reagans of your world led the way while those darn libruls fought for child and health care. There's morality out there, but the trumps and McConnells know that power before party before country serves them better than any public service.
Corporatation are profit centers. That's what they do. Politics, due to Citizens United and naked power grabs has become a profit center as well. Until our government returns to working for the general welfare, nothing changes.
Instead of disparaging the new congressional members, listen to them.
3
It never ceases to amaze me how David picks and chooses and moralizes in the most amoral manner. The word "capitalism" did not exist at the time of the creation of America. Adam Smith was well aware that those with wealth colluded to control markets and fix prices. Living conditions at the bottom were revolting. Capital punishment for theft and prison for those in debt was common. Sending men and women to Australia for crimes was deemed social progress. Except for the Aborigines.
So what is the purpose of America David? The preamble talks about "the general welfare". This is now education, health care, social security, care for the elderly and disaster assistance among others. The distribution of the wealth created by that society is another issue. The gross measure of that maldistribution is inequality and national debt. The ten percent on top consume the national wealth and benefits and don't pay for the benefits that they reap from the rest of us. They strip wealth out of the middle and lower classes. The economy and general welfare doesn't grow for the rest of us.
Look at the recent Atlantic article on the 10 percent. Whew.
The 10 percent now own congress and the supreme court. This is class warfare and the 10 percent on top won! The rest of us see our roads and cities crumble.
David tosses in a couple of statistics and thinks he is competent as a journalist. This is a grade C high school economics report.
Vietnam Vet
1
What is this word you use Morality?? Sorry to say morality is about as relevant to business today as buggy whips. And used about often. And the author should take note there is NO such thing as an "American" multinational corporation. The Multinationals Bank in bermuda, Pay what taxes they pay in Ireland, Their boards meet in Brussels, There accountants are in Switzerland. American companies hardly. Multinationals have No nation, No Morality, No ethics, merely a bottom line. the same is true of their executives. Morality in business?? In what world? Not This One!
1
Somebody translate "left wing moral relativism" for me . I haven´t a clue as to what that even means. Of course I do know that Brooks always needs two sides to be able to say both sides are to blame. I say"HUH?" At very least he could define what he is talking about, but then maybe his arguments might not hold water.
1
How can you write an entire column lamenting the dearth of morals in the business world and not mention Trump once?
1
Your last two phrases sum up our predicament, a Machiavellian society where the end, financial greed, may be intimately attached to capitalism 'a la Milton Friedman', unregulated, and exempt from social values. If we cannot transcend our own petty interests...and recognize we belong to a diverse, and rich, population, where solidarity ought to be a given, we shall remain caught in our own labyrinth of economic despair, where we never have enough material wealth to fill our spiritual emptiness. If avarice is what guides us, we shall remain monsters in a broken society, a choice we make at our own risk. Sad as it is, it is now multiplied by an amoral weasel of a president that is normalizing this violence at our peril. This institutionalized violence is noxious to our youth, already predisposed to accepting Trump's abuse of power as a natural result of people's choice in electing a vicious demagogue mortgaging our souls; witness a study made to check on the honesty of students revealed that, when asked if cheating on exams was O.K., they said: it's O.K. as long as you don't get caught. Awful, and compounded by a runaway 'bull in a china shop' supporting sleaze as a matter of course. Unless we reverse all this, we shall fall into disrepute, wake up in a nest of snakes, ready and willing to bite each other...into oblivion. Now, we can be better than that, right? But, do we have the will?
1
How the middle class was born and destroyed. Namely after 1935 when FDR started the social security system, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage and federal work programs, Socialism at its best. Why did FDR do it? He was pushed from below from people that identified from the Communist Party, the Socialist party and the unionists. He understood in order to save capitalism from its own destructive nature he had to give the people something back. Hence the middle class was born, he went on to win four presidencies. After his death in his fourth term the capitalist seized on a divide and conquer strategy, first go after the communist, then the socialists, then the unionists, it worked very well hence, the decline of the middle class. Capitalism in its present form is in the last throes of life. They are now consuming all smaller companies and the middle class that provides their money. In fact they have infiltrated government and are dismantling it from within and enriching themselves on what was once the peoples pride and property. By the way if you don't like democratic socialism then you do not like the military, the police, the fire department, the highway department, the CDC, and civilized government itself: the list goes on. Civilization requires government rules and intervention. Out of control capitalism will be the death of the USA.
2
Give the instructor an Apple (share). As is often said at Penn Charter. "Good instruction is better than riches."
I agree with Mr. Brooks about the core symptom of the problem;
"In normal times, corporations serve a lot of stakeholders — customers, employees, the towns in which they are located. But these days corporations see themselves as serving one purpose and one stakeholder — maximizing shareholder value."
Grow! Grow! Grow! has become the mantra for corporate profits (and also livestock and crops). We ignore natural limits, and overpay executives to set the same Sisyphean goal for corporate workers, time and again -- growth! (Remember the Wells Fargo of a few years ago, when employees were tasked with the impossible goal of unrealistic account growth.) We ignore that some markets are naturally waning and deny that good things take investment. We park so-called corporate values on websites while filtering all of our real decisions through one word -- growth!
If we want to explore better models for the future, we should look more at B-Corporations. https://hbr.org/2016/06/why-companies-are-becoming-b-corporations
To be clear David, the Wall Street meltdown made it painfully evident that market economies require adult supervision ... otherwise, they devolve to ferality. And, they did ... and, they certainly will again under the morally corrupt and destructive laissez-faire nostrum which is antithetical to good society.
1
David Brooks wrote:
"You’re always going to be able to make a splash reducing a complex problem to a simple narrative that separates the world into the virtuous us, and the evil them."
^ Is this supposed to be a clever meta-comment by Brooks explaining the success of his own columns?
I can recall over two dozen op-eds where Brooks simplified complex international situations into "the good guys vs. the bad guys," "the Axis of Evil vs. the Coalition of Freedom," et cetera. He loves depicting one side as clean-cut heroes in white hats fighting one-dimensional villains in black hats. Brooks’ mindset exemplifies the Manichean tendency that Zbigniew Brzezinski often lamented about the Bush Administration.
To see Mr. Brooks suddenly decry reductionist thinking is to cross into a parallel universe where Dick Cheney is the Poet laureate of Wyoming and is feted as the Conscience of America.
Mr. Brooks: your diagnosis of the problem is correct, but not the cause.
"We ripped the market out of its moral and social context and let it operate purely by its own rules."
What do you mean WE did this?!!!
Big businesses have been backing Republicans for years, but since Citizens United granted them "person-hood", their exercise of "Free $peech" has given them even more power.
They got the representatives they paid for. Their lackeys have responded by reducing their portion of the tax burden while easing as much regulatory drag on their earnings as possible.
In Wisconsin and across the nation, Republican governors and legislatures have crushed union power and stacked the deck against the little guy.
We need a new revolution to change the dynamic before the little guy is completely driven under.
3
Mr. Brooks,
If economic populism is being evoked by both ends of the political spectrum, why get in the way? If fairness and honor mean anything, your support is needed now , not a sophist, rhetorical exercise using false equivalency to make an absruse point.
1
Have we forgotten that trust is essential to markets that work? Even Adam Smith himself could not imagine markets without morality. I appreciate this reminder from Mr. Brooks.
1
How absurd. The only way to get a fair distribution of corporate profits is to regulate it. Nothing else works in the real world. Positive redistribution looks like Scandinavia. Allowing corporations to govern themselves looks like Saudi Arabia.
1
Better to live in 2008 than the 1890's. And Frankly, I will take the Democratic Hope of 2008 over the Republican racism and hate of 2016. I will also take the modern progressive victories of 2018 over it too.
Mr Brooks has all the morality of the gilded age, and none of contemporary life. Mr Brooks prefers a world designed for the plunder of white men.
One could ask Mr Brooks, how many billions per a few white men is enough. What are the workers actually owed?
But then, if you look to the gilded age, you find the answer. There is no end to Mr Brooks greed, because greed isn't a sin if you're a white man. To him it is a deserved privilege.
David, you should thank Tucker for getting your message out so people will understand it. Let's hope it does not get re-drowned by something Trump does.
Brooks rightly criticizes Apple for avoiding billions in taxes and then write "Apple employees should be humiliated and ashamed." No, not Apple employees, Apple corporate executives, Jobs and the rest who made the decision. That is a key point in understanding who is responsible for the mess we're in today. Brooks wants workers and capitalists to share equal blame, when workers have little power to make decisions that affect their lives.
1
" You probably know the example of the Israeli day care centers. Parents kept showing up late to pick up their kids. To address the problem, the centers experimented with fining the late parents. But the number of late pickups doubled. Before, coming to pick up your kid on time was a moral obligation — to be fair to the day care workers."
Mr. Brooks, you have a great sense of humor. Why should most of these readers know anything about Israeli daycare centers and their problems? What you describe is true. But I was waiting for the punchline. What was done then to solve the problem? The problem still exists. Harried mothers (usually mothers), trying to get back from their work on time and juggle other professional and work commitments, fighting traffic or inefficient public transportation are often late. Those who can afford it hire secondary caretakers to pick up children. In the old days grandparents help, but many still work (such as this commentor).
In any case, thanks for the irrelevant plug. If I were an editor, and still used a red pen, I would have erased that paragraph.
It is irrelevant. But thanks for the trip down memory lane for me.
1
Capitalism is the de facto secular belief system. A sort of pseudo religion that applies whether one is an atheist or a devout Baptist. As such, like theological matters, you cannot pick and choose which facets so support and which to ignore (“cafeteria Catholics notwithstanding). Capitalism is best defined not by what it is but by what it is not: it rejects all principles of communism, collectivism, fascism, socialism, Marxism and other economic systems. For better or for worse, Americans need to be ardent supporters of the free market.
Capitalism is not "a wonderful system." It is literally a form of cancer on the social body driven by a logic of limitless growth without regard for the larger, ultimately lethal, consequences.
It wasn't rendered immoral by the Reagan administration, much less by "left-wing moral relativism." Its emerged in the 16th century on the bloody foundations of the conquest, slaughter and colonization of indigenous lands in the Americas and the trade in African flesh to work those lands under the lash. It has only ever been constrained by popular struggles -- by slave revolts, labor strikes, and urban rebellions.
Its true that things got worse after the 70s as a result of an assault on the gains of a decades of social struggles. Of course you yourself have been a leading apologist for the resulting order for a couple decades now, your endless pious chattering about the importance of "community" notwithstanding.
The market is the enemy of community. It atomizes us and tranfsorms all of relations into relations of exchange. As the planet hurtles towards climate catastrophe the young are increasingly rallying around the only serious alternative: socialism. Hopefully they aren't too late. But make no mistake, Lord Brooks. You are a big part of the problem.
Moralizing the market is a fools errand.
David, who taught you American History?
Donald Trump or was it your patron saint, Milton Friedman, by way of the University of Chicago?
Here is a very simple way to look at our system from its inception David.
When our glorious founders created and ratified the Constitution, full rights were only bestowed upon 6% of the US population, or, to put it another way, white property owners created a system in which they protected their status and wealth in life, while the other 94% served their interests and some were even slaves David. Slaves David, slaves!
In other words, this does not sound like a very moral economic and/or social system to me David.
My advice; stop watching endless reruns of Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best. It has given you a rather distorted view of the American experience.
"Selfishness was normalized"
There was a shift in values that took place in the eighthes in this country. A cynicism that took over popular culture that didn't exist before. From "Andy Griffith" to "Married with Children" the mood took a dramatic turn.
At the end of the seventies there was a song called "What's so funny about peace love and understanding" and change was in the air.
1
As a Vanguard client for more than 20 years, I was deeply disappointed in the result of a proxy vote in November 2017 on a proposal to divest in companies that were believed to “substantially contribute to genocide or crimes against humanity.”
The trustees at Vanguard recommended a “No” vote on the proposal. Their reasoning included the following statement:
“As an investment firm with a very large client base, Vanguard is periodically asked by clients to modify our investments for a variety of reasons—from environmental and social issues to humanitarian and political concerns. We
simply cannot manage the Funds in an effective manner that would address all of these issues as well as, or better than, policymakers while fulfilling our fiduciary obligation to shareholders. “
The Board of Trustees at Vanguard are paid better than the justices who sit on the United States Supreme Court. Yet, they couldn't even recommend a vote against genocide, because in their minds they couldn't address other issues, like the environment. That's how bad things are. I don't know where this all leads, but in my mind, a "Yes" vote was a no-brainer, and that's how I voted. The trustees at Vanguard are a joke which is why I voted for each one of them to be removed from the board as well. I failed to get them fired, but they should be.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vanguard-funds-meet-quorum-proxy-vote-genocide-measure-fails-210014331.html
1
You write as if the corporation has been sent from god for the pleasure of the entitled. And blame it on the left.
The seventies were the woke moment for the oligarchs, ‘to much democracy’, remember the Powell Doctrine Mr. Forgetful.
Nixon took you off the gold standard and OPEC was formed to beat back the voraciousness of the Entrepeneurs ( actually jus franchisees, the dawn of MacDonalds and the tax rate of 45%.
When you go off like this sir, are you aware of the price of a carton of milk. I like to research and pontificate but ...let’s get the facts straight.
Home of the thief, land of the slave.
1
The opposite of left wing moral relativism is right wing moral relativism. There are no moral absolutes.
1
The Market was never moral to begin with. Brooks is wandering in the wilderness again. Remind me, just area is his Ph.D. in?
David Brooks writes that, "Somehow over the past 40 years economic priorities took the top spot and obliterated everything else." Somehow? Somehow?! As though it's a mystery which people, corporations, legislators, Justices, broadcasters, intellectuals, and pundits did this. And then he writes that those lefty "moral relativists" are "somehow" every bit as responsible for our increasingly amoral and unequal society as the rightwing capitalists. For years now, David Brooks has claimed that the left deserves as much blame as the the right for our problems. It is not. For years, he has blamed lefties' "moral relativism." Dear Mr. Brooks: Leftists are not moral relativists. They just don't subscribe to conservatives' definition of what is "moral." One final gripe: I wish Mr. Brooks would spend an hour or two learning about the history of "populism," a word he has grievously misused for the past few years.
1
I think about Reg Jones, former Chairman and CEO of General Electric as the last great business leader who believed the corporation had a social and moral responsibility. Jack Welch followed him, and look at GE now
Good column, Mr Brooks. Throw in Citizen United and all of our complicity in “the race to the bottom” and you may have a book there.
Unsure what the author is driving at. Is he saying a lack of personal morals on the left (moral relativism) has made us self centered and greedy? Is he saying not attending church is the root cause of our immorality? That one must believe in a god to be or act moral?
Again, when did you say that golden age existed?
Tucker Carlson matters how? Is he all the rage?
How do you select ideas?
Do ideas propel the shift of a paragraph?
How do you explain it in an interesting way?
Remember, you aren't James Joyce.
1
Who is "we," kemosabe?
You are referring, I assume, to yourself and your conservative buddies, because the poor salaryman buying Chinese goods at Wal-Mart... sure, they helped... but wasn't it up to our leaders to do the right thing? The ones who could AFFORD to do the right thing? The ones with the fancy education? The ones spouting Christian values (remember the Moral Majority?).
You are right, "we" (or a lot of us on both sides) did it, but enough with the false equivalence. "We" all should know who is really responsible for this fine kettle of fish.
I remember when Ronald Reagan first ran for president. He made it sound as though it was ok to think of yourself first and foremost with everyone else a distant second. I bought the rhetoric. I voted for myself not my country. I did it again 4 years later. Then, I woke up.
Well, here we are. This is Ronald Reagan's America - me, me and more me. He did a a great and lasting disservice to our country. I'm embarrassed that I voted for him.
1
Your diagnosis is correct, but how do we shift corporations into a societally altrusitic framework if not through government intervention? I don't own an iPhone and I'm not on Facebook, but I'm not naive enough to think that my nephews are going to stop buying the cool new apple gadget because Apple is stiffing them on tax revenue. Economic populism still seems like the best solution to this problem, regardless of the causes.
1
Besides the morality of our Government protecting citizens from Corporate excesses - the Wall Street focus on quarterly earnings, and the immoral corporate raiding based on those calculations is not just hurtful to American society, but INEFFICIENT as well. It stifles long term planning and investment. Pure Capitalism is Greed - and will naturally harvest us all if allowed.
1
@T. Schwartz: Agreed. The natural end point of unfettered capitalism is slavery. It needs what Robert Reich calls a countervailing force to keep it within reasonable limits.
Even in politics/society, there is a reaction to every action. The behavior of corporations and banks have put socialism and Marx back in play.
2
By and large a pretty good diagnosis. One criticism, though.
You say "Unions got greedy" in the 70s. Nope. The unions were trying to offset inflation. From 1% in 1961, inflation (CPI) reached 4% by 1969. Over the whole 8 years, prices rose 20%. Following the 1% 1950s, this was a substantial destabilizing change.
And it was worse than that. To get to higher growth, without having tight labor markets drive up wages, frustrating the whole project, JFK made a solemn agreement with the unions to keep wage increases at about 3.5%, the productivity increase, so that prices would stay constant.
When the war came, 1965, the agreement was violated by LBJ, with deficits that pushed inflation up a point, which wiped out the real wage increase from the agreed 3.5% to 2.5%.
Rather quickly, labor raised its wage demand from 3.5% to, say, 5.5%, to fight past and future inflation. But, this intensified the inflationary pressures.
Added to this, the war absorbed more and more, and the deficit continued to grow, from $1 billion in 1965, to $25 billion in 1968 [As Senator Dirksen might have said, "Now, back in the sixties, $25 billion was real money"].
Labor, management, and government chased each other, and the economy chased its tail faster and faster. By 1979, we were looking at "double digit inflation".
Throughout, from 1965 to 1980, labor's actions were defensive, not greedy: they were trying to overcome inflation.
But, Reagan/Volcker whacked them anyway.
@alyosha: It just might be keeping up with inflation using only money does not scale. Individuals can do it but the larger society can not.
Money only addresses the demand side of the equation; to prevent inflation, you have to address the supply as well. For example with housing, if you increase the minimum wage in a tight housing market, the landlords will capture the extra money by raising the rents. To prevent this scenario, there has to be enough housing for competition to hold the prices down.
1
I think Mr. Brooks makes good points in this piece. And while I would agree that government regulation is probably the most effective strategy to “remoralize” the market its not the only approach. Perhaps we could learn from the social impact investors and the social mission focused organizations they support, many which are nonprofits or hybrids that promote values of family and community. We’ll probably never return to the corporate cultures of the 70’s but these new models offer some promise.
2
The description of our current state is correct. However, we still should not expect Corporations to act morally if any costs or economic competitive negatives are involved. It is the role of OUR Government to manage the economic fairness in our society, as raw Capitalism is very Darwinian and would lead us back to Industrial Revolution excesses. Child exploitation, etc. did not go away because Corporations decided to be 'moral'. No, the Progressives of that era, then FDR addressed those excesses and the very disastrous effect they had on the entire country. If fair regulations/limits for ALL corporations were enforced, then the Corporations could compete within those rules - the same for all. Keep in mind also, that what used to be big American Corporations are now Mulit-National Corporations, reducing any 'moral / patriotic' behavior as well. Government is NOT the problem for its Citizens - but should be for exploitive corporate behavior.
2
Come again with how "left wing moral relativism" accelerated corporate greed? How did our finally recognizing that, as an example, gay love is no different than heterosexual love lead to Apple parking its intellectual property in Ireland?
You think any the corporate excesses you discussed has anything to do with anything other than greed, the fact the corporations own half of Washington, and the the Republicans will give them whatever they want? When Kavanaugh was on the appellate court, in split decisions where he was the dissenter he never sided with humans against a corporation. Never. In every case where there was a disagreement, he sided with the Corporations 100% of the time. That's why he's on the Supreme Court.
1
Mr. Brooks, thank you for writing this piece. We need more of this thinking, particularly from those considered to be on the conservative side of the political spectrum. But I worry about the implication that strict compliance with ethical standards somehow takes away from economic success. Obviously corporations need to make enough money to stay in business, but as a society we have allowed ourselves to redefine business success as almost exclusively a matter of profits and shareholder return. To me, what should be the primary goal of businesses is that of making products and services of value to the consumer. Viewed from that lens, treating employees fairly can lead to better made products, having a diverse board and senior management can broaden a company’s potential customer base (and lead to better designed products), and investing in good community relations can facilitate operations and diminish the possibility of being sidetracked due to public opposition. Adherence to ethical standards should not be viewed as taking away from having a successful business. Please write more about how the social norms you advocate for actually foster the quality of a company’s output and increase the chances of its long term success.
1
Brooks on Apples' avoidance of taxes via Ireland: ''Apple employees should be humiliated and ashamed."
What about the blame and shame of Apple's leadership and shareholders? The employees did not make the decision to avoid taxes in Ireland.
Brooks writes "As we disembodied individuals from traditional moral norms we disembodied companies from social ones." He has the causation inverted -- historically the moral disembodiment started with the shift to shareholder interests over the interests of employees and the common good.
His trumpeting of capitalism ("wonderful system") and post-2008 job and income growth ignores the inequality created since 1970 and ignores how the current economy fails to change the ideas and rules that perpetuate our ongoing income and asset inequality. Does he think that job and income growth under our current system will solve our on-going internal colonial opiate war being waged on working and middle class America, climate change, voter suppression, etc?
In his conclusion, he inverts the questions -- it's not how to make society easier to be a good person, but how can we make a just society. It will never be easy to be a good person in society that has an unjust economic system. Sorry, David.
Sadly, Brooks continues to be a New Mandarin who reinforces our current form of dysfunctional capitalism, blames the people, and ignores the decisions by elites to create, protect, and maintain their hegemony.
Brooks - a captive of his own ideas.
2
"How can we have a society in which it is easier to be a good person?"
Societies are comprised of people. Perhaps the question is what individual charges do people need to make to create a "good society"?
I'm with jclarke below: Moral relativism is not a "left-wing" phenomenon but has been part of capitalism from the start; as Voltaire put it, at the end of the day the market cares only about who made money and who lost. To condemn the entire market system, as Marx and other "left-wingers" did and do, requires precisely that you not be a moral relativist.
David Brooks has (I am sure) accidentally shown just how innate his need to create a false equivalency:
"Tucker Carlson argued that American elites are using ruthless market forces to enrich themselves and immiserate everyone else. On the campaign trail, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are telling left-wing versions of the same story."
There is no left wing version or right wing version of the story. There is one sad and truthful story of corporations and their government sponsors abandoning any concern for working American men and women. The problem is obvious and undeniable, regardless of the political philosophy of the messenger.
1
The old "me first" vs "we first" argument. The more important discussion is whether GD (good debt - infrastructure, education, job training investment) can create more deficit without harm if growth rate outpaces interest rate.
1
Good column, though I do have a couple of quibbles. I don't think Apple employees should be ashamed, just the executives and board, and they have their mounds of cash (or stock) to help them overcome their shame.
Also, the fact that wages are finally rising, at 3.2 percent as noted, should not be used to support the health of our current system. Wages barely budged for a decade! I don't understand why conservatives refuse to address this fact. When there is a decade in which the wealthy do well but in which everyone else struggles, it is not good enough to say "but it's over now, so why are you still angry?" We're angry because a 3.2 percent rise in wages in one year out of 10 (which may be temporary if the current economic outlook is any guide) doesn't help us forget the rest of the decade. To me, it also speaks to the thesis of your article. Stocks were shooting up, corporations were sitting on record amounts of cash, but wages barely budged. Why is that? Because corporations have lost any sense of moral responsibility to their employees.
5
It might be useful for us to distinguish between free enterprise and capitalism. The first is a natural expression of the survival mechanism and exists within the context of society, the latter, in particular in its corporate form, is a financial and legal construct intended to assist that process devoid of any social obligation per se. True, the concept of noblesse oblige might persist, but in the Randian view of Republican America, where greed is good, freedom should be unfettered, and corporations are people too, any ethical considerations have been severely excised from the nexus. Ultimately, of course, as has happened before, the process tends to monopoly as corporations seek to fulfill their core objective, which is market domination. When that happens capitalism becomes the enemy of free enterprise, crushing the ability of local entrepreneurs to compete.
2
American capitalism doesn’t sit in a mid-20th century bubble with America as king and the rest of the world either rebuilding or communist.
Capitalism has always been like natural selection, and now that we have a global, instantly-connected economy, things have further intensified and created one global ecosystem. Pick your favorite invasive species (eg rabbits and their intense breeding in Aus) and you have your corporate match in technology, shareholder value, etc. Winning strategies are just that. These strategies can’t be toppled globally by caring more about your local community or legislating that you do - that’s the way to corporate death. It’s sad that GM closed plants recently, but it’d be worse yet for them to keep them open, making cars people don’t want, as that hands the industry to non-American companies who deliver what customers/shareholders want and will pay even less tax. You can point to Apple and other anecdotal examples, but even they have shaved hundreds of billions in value recently because of market forces. Everything is temporary.
In the calls to become Europe, we must remember their lack of economic dynamism, the few innovative companies that come from this area, and the fact that their best and brightest end up in America. It’s a trade off, and with the mounting debts of this country, we’ve already placed our chips on economic growth. We can’t let ourselves and China make us into Europe.
The question is the answer. Your piece is a start by raising the issue to a conscious level and provoking thought and discussion.
"How can we have a good society? How can we have a society in which it’s easier to be a good person?"
A: By regulating commerce, businesses. By taxing the rich more and using the monies to benefit all, including the rich. By investing in an advanced educational system which teaches morality, civics, sacrifice and public service. And not home schooling which breeds tribalism and racism. Unfortunately I seem to recall Republicans have been against this.
2
Where can we begin to undo the catastrophe that has developed around us?
I have two suggestions.
First: The question: “am I my brother’s keeper” needs to be looked at more closely. If the answer for some doesn’t come from a sense of shared humanity, then the argument needs to be carried further: the children of an uneducated and impoverished bum are the future muggers of your grandchildren. Such needs to be taught beginning in kindergarten.
Second: We should we ask law schools rethink their curricula. The football motto “winning isn’t the main thing; it’s the only thing” can’t be painlessly transposed to the political and social world. Our lawyers are not trained to seek truth or justice in a legal proceeding; they are trained to win. 57% of the last Senate were lawyers.
.
2
Capitalism, like democracy is not a static thing but a dynamic ecosystem. This is how we got where we are. All enterprises, social and commercial are conceived in passion, born in communities of trust, grow through the application of reason and mature in power. Here they tend to get stuck in systems traps, which sets them up for crisis, confusion and destruction but with the possibility of renewal.
This is what we are looking for: renewal. It will take an ecological-adaptive approach, a social movement with a new narrative to embrace and contain the excesses of capitalism and put economics and markets in their place as servants, not masters.
Philosophically American Pragmatism and virtue ethics show us the way. "Nothing lasts unless it is incessantly renewed".
1
The problems with Capitalism have been known and analyzed for a long time, tendency towards unequal distribution of wealth, the need for ever expanding markets, and the immoral potential of a system based on greed. And yet Capitalism also has shown to be highly effective in raising the living standard of almost everybody if properly balanced with the moral norms of fairness and responsibility and empowering the workers through unions, and even socializing a few key services like infrastructure, education, police, and healthcare. But it takes government to create and enforce this balance. This all seemed to be common understanding among the educated when I was young, and the government seemed to take seriously this responsibility.
The power of wealth has worked to undermine this understanding and the results over the 60+ years of my life. When young a single worker in most jobs could raise a family with a middle class life. In my middle age 2 workers were needed for most to raise a family in the middle class. Now it is increasingly difficult for 2 working class jobs to provide a middle class life style.
2
The problem currently is that we've got the wrong type of people leading the national government. They're business people. They should be back in the marketplace doing business. And I'm not concerned too much about their morality. Government should be populated mainly by people who choose a career in public service instead of profit. Then government will be able to do what it's supposed to do: regulate. A solution to the moral question is implicit in this equation.
2
David, what Carter, Kennedy, Reagan and even Clinton could not foresee was the massive destruction of the middle and working classes by the advent of technology, telecommunications and the resultant globalization of markets.
Since you use examples let me use one to illustrate. General Electric one of America's greatest legacy companies is struggling right now under enormous competition. Their biggest competitors are foreign companies like Germany's Siemens corporation. Many of these foreign corporations enjoy much more favorable tax treatment, regulatory freedoms, state sponsored workforce vocational training programs, etc., etc. Siemens and most German corporations have a symbiotic hand-in-glove relationship where the German government does everything to help their corporations be profitable in return for German corporations being good citizens. The German public and private sectors are on the same team.
Compare and contrast with the U.S. In the U.S. we have an adversarial relationship between the public and private sectors not cooperative. We treat our corporations as the enemy of the people ,as evil, we see corporate profit as a bad thing, and those corporations see government likewise. Can this type of private-public American styled capitalism survive in today's global capitalism competing with the likes of the Germanys? I have my doubts.
2
Brooks' account of economic history is nonsense. Among other things, starting in the late 60's through the 80's, as the country turned away from New Deal policies and toward conservatism, real wages froze and inequality, which had been decreasing, started increasing. GDP growth since this turn has been worse, on average, not better. The "four long booms" have not compensated for the losses in the recessions, and the recent recoveries, though long, have been very sluggish will little increase in wages. Where are the fact checkers - is Brooks immune?
The "populistic" movement is mostly a return to the things which worked for the great majority of people in this country during the pre-70's era. Since then things have only been working for people at the top of the economic scale.
2
When the agents of societal rot are allowed to rise to the top would you expect anything other than what has happened? When a totally bought and paid for political party grabs the levers of power would you expect them to pull those levers against the interests of their patrons?
The infatuation with "free markets" is now extended to our entire political system. It's just a commodity to be bought and sold by corporate interests. Government is simply another factor of production to be managed along with capital and labor. And when money is declared to be speech, and corporations are deemed to be people by the Supreme Court no one should be surprised by the resulting mayhem. Until Citizens United is overturned don't expect anything to change.
Morality and societal norms work great, until they don't. All it takes drive the whole thing into the ditch is a class of people without morals and no sense of shame whatsoever. Right now we have that in spades.
1
Once again David blames a growing moral laxity of the public as the requisite cause of the decline of an economy he paradoxically claims is running along just swimmingly. He hurls his most pointed criticism at the left for merely pointing out that a strong GDP says nothing about inequality by itself. Alas, he has yet to understand that institutionalized avarice kills the conditions that give rise to social trust and cooperation.
“There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching an economic democracy.” Theodore Roosevelt
“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court justice and anti-monopoly crusader
2
"Anything you could legally do to make money was deemed O.K."
Correction David: ANYTHING those corporations could do to make money--period. Many of our leading corporations have no sense of patriotism, community, commitment to law or ethical mores.
In a relatively short period of time much of American capitalism went from private enterprise to a soulless, insatiable, economic ogre.
Profits are good and wholesome--they make the economic world work. Humane considerations are just as important. Civil decency and fairness make a society vigorous and productive.
1
I like that David Brooks started with the deregulation under Carter, but I think this is a misreading of the economic history.
"My story begins in the 1970s. The economy was sick. Corporations were bloated. Unions got greedy. Tax rates were too high and regulations were too tight. We needed to restore economic dynamism."
A lot of what Brooks calls bloat actually was the necessary savings in defined benefit pension plans. During the hostile takeover phase under Reagan, many of these plans were gutted, with the proceeds transferred to the corporate raider. This did nothing to improve productivity and ruined the lives of many who relied on their pensions. But it was permitted because of the myth the Brooks perpetuates.
I did a quick survey of some friends today about the Airlines Industry and whether flying now is better than it was 40 years ago. Most said it is worse now. The economy grew under Reagan, yes, but a lot of that was the personal computer revolution. The story is similar a decade later, this time with the Internet.
We can't learn the right lessons from the past if we don't get the facts straight.
1
I watched my old CEO hop and jump to the tune of the analysts who visited from Wall Street. They knew little about the chemical industry (R&D, long range planning, market forces), but they knew where the easy money was. I have wondered through the years where Wall Street got the power to call the shots. My thought has always been that as most of us invest in IRA’s, unlike with individual stocks, we hand the proxies over to the fund managers. And after 40 years of the IRA plans being in existence, a huge portion of stockholder power is now proxied to the fund managers, who are most definitely in the game of getting stock prices as high as possible regardless of other downsides. Did a system designed to provide a stable retirement end up being the monster that ruined our corporate community?
While this piece has some good points, it loses any relevance with the typical "both sides" blame. Who do you think is trying to put the moral lens back in place? Elizabeth Warren. Who argued against companies focusing on short-term results and "quarterly capitalism"? Hillary Clinton. Who has worked hard to gut financial regulation over the last two years? Trump, Ryan, McConnell and Trump's Republican party.
Give me a break.
5
OMG, David has finally hit on the point that I have been focused on for years ( with my liberal relativism?)
Once upon a time, corporations were evaluated on their role as benevolent citizenship, not just on quarterly profit numbers.
Once upon a time people were evaluated on their roles as members of a community, not just as consumers.
Honesty, fairness, compassion, knowledge, long term investment and progress toward a more just and caring world.
Now what?
1
You are correct Mr Brooks - both sides are wrong - side A and B
A : greed is good
B : Universal Health Care
A: Corporate money should be unlimited in politics
B: There should be limits on contributions
A: Remove Fairness Doctrine from media so they are "free' to make more money
B: limit corporate influence in the News, require accountability for decimating information
A: Limit access to voting
B: make voting more accessible
A: Lower Income Tax, Corporate Tax , Inheritance Tax
B: Keep Inheritance Tax, Raise Corporate Tax , make income tax fairer
A: Privatize Public Educations ( so its a profit machine )
B: Fund Public Education
A: Privatize Social Security & Medicare
B: Do I really need to write the answer?
David, the list is near endless - but I guess as usual you're correct - its both sides.
5
I'm just spit-balling here, but i imagine there must be an argument for how western social and moral codes of conduct were wiped off the radar of our American corporations when globalization forced our companies to compete with those in other cultures; when accepted standards are erased essentially overnight, what were our business leaders expected to do?
@dafiedler I dare say the infection was the reverse of what you posit: American corporations led the way in globalization, and our previously good citizen corporations voluntarily morphed into the profit driven ogres they are today and then hungrily turned their eyes on other cultures..sorry about the rather mixed metaphor...
Unfortunately, it is our government that decides the moral rules for business. Our government made it easy to move and difficult to stay. Did the nation do anything to stop the loss of these good jobs? No. In fact, we all encouraged it. We liked our retirement IRAs growing and still do. The service jobs that remain are no match for the manufacturing jobs that have disappeared. Business plays by the rules that government makes. Like the Progressive Era, companies will not see the moral daylight unless or until the government changes the rules.
David refuses to look at history except through his distorted lens where liberal and conservatives share equal blame for the state of our country. Sorry David this mess is all the right and you can thank yourself for promoting the ideology that led to our downfall. It was Republicans who screamed and whined about the cost of anything and everything Democrats promoted from healthcare to living wages to affordable education to environmental protections. It was Republicans who looked at everything in terms of the almighty dollar and judged that many things that could make Americans' lives better were too expensive. "Let people keep the money they made and that would do all" - except people didn't make enough money.
And the moral relativism includes equal rights, gay rights, women's rights, abortion rights which did overturn a lot of precedent but most of these things were in the service of attempting to make people's lives better. It was these attempts which were taken by the Republicans and politicized to their advantage turning Americans against one another. Just watch Fox News or listen to Right Wing Media (which were given free reign by Reagan's killing of the Fairness Doctrine) which demonize any liberal concept without attempting to see or understand the desire behind it.
Yes, I have spent my words lambasting the Right but these are facts that have been obscured and manipulated leaving us with income inequality so vast it had to be engineered and yet silence.
2
We are not born with morals. Morals are learned through observing others, a parent, a friend, a teacher, a mayor, a congressman, a President. We become what we repeatedly observe. Measure the level of anger in a society and you measure the level of morality. The part of the brain that promotes reason shuts down when angry. Repeatedly watch cable news, listen to the President, and you will become angry and eventually amoral. Reason requires WORK. Anger only requires energy. Thanks for the work, David.
2
OK, enough of this! David, you started by lobbing an offhand comment about economic decay in the 1970s then proceeded to applaud both Jimmy Carter and, especially, Ronald Reagan for moving toward a better economic model … before showing it wasn't so. In short, you started at the wrong place and drew the wrong conclusions.
The real disconnect began in the late 1960s, as industry began its move from labor-friendly states to the right-to-work sunbelt. That was the first shot, and the rest has been a genuflection by the entire country to the power and ineffability of 'business'. That's when the average worker began to see her paycheck stagnate so the rich could get richer. Lowering taxes on unearned income just made the insult worse.
We're now at an inflection point. Expect a serious correction, or a decline into Fascism. Take your pick, but don't assume it will be anything other than messy.
3
@Marx and Lennon And the disconnect was complete when the IRA was foisted upon us, and companies no longer had to be responsible to their employees in the form of pensions!
Absolutely priceless! Brooks at his best.
It turns out that "moral relativism," which has been in full flower in Western culture since Nietzsche, was actually invented by the Democrats.
But that isn't half as absurd as the expectation that everything will be find just as soon as corporations get back to behaving "morally."
Business will never behave morally, that is to say, it will behave only as morally as the law requires.
5
Brooks’ points are obvious and well known. The problem is what to do.
Capitalist economics is a complex adaptive system, like evolution, and it is therefore an example of the most productive and creative type of process we know. It is our main advantage over authoritarian economies.
But like evolution it seems wasteful and red in tooth and claw. Unless both winners and losers are willing to live with the carnage, we need to moderate the ill effects without gumming up the works too much. That’s tough, because fighting a complex adaptive system is tough. It requires complicated laws and an endless struggle with self-interested, well-financed capitalists. I question whether enough voters are able to see the issues sufficiently clearly.
The virtual repeal of the estate tax is an example.
2
“We?” Actually we liberals resisted the right-wing push to make the bottom line the only goal of capitalism. It was you conservatives, Mr Brooks, who kept telling us that it was the only thing that matters. It was Reagan who atomized the country by his relentless attacks on the common good, by his insistence that the government (of the people, by the people, and for the people) was the enemy, and not the expression of our common purpose.
At some point I wonder if David Brooks will ever admit that the current situation, which he so vehemently deplores, is one he has spent his whole career helping to create.
5
"A deadly combination of right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism led to a withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct."
This reader finds a great deal of evidence of the former cause and very little of the latter in the essay. Thus we find yet another instance of Mr. Brooks' penchant for false equivalencies in searching for the root of a problem.
4
"It basically worked. We’ve had four long economic booms since then." Utter and preposterous nonsense. If it had worked, Trump would not be President.
We have seen our society poisoned by an explosion of wealth inequality. Public colleges have been starved of tax revenues, resulting in only the fortunate being able to attend them without taking on ruinous debt. Millions have no health insurance, and millions more have no pension or retirement security; this was not at all the case before the innovations that Brooks is so cluelessly applauding.
When I was a young man in the 1970s in Michigan, a high school graduate with a union card could support a family very comfortably on one salary and send his kids to college. Unions have been gutted in an initiative that Reagan spearheaded ("deregulation"!), that way of life has been obliterated, and Trump narrowly carried Michigan in 2016.
5
Congratulations to David for a summary of why the economic populism ends up hurting the very people who vote in favor of economic populists (like Trump).
"these days corporations see themselves as serving one purpose and one stakeholder — maximizing shareholder value." Consider two additional pieces of data. Over 50% of the public are not stockholders either directly or indirectly (almost all in the bottom 60% of income) so who benefits from shareholder value? Inflation adjusted wages for the bottom 80% have not risen since 1980 is one of the outcomes.
"Anything you could legally do to make money was deemed O.K." Which is why we hear the constant Republican refrain of regulations. Pollute more to make more money, damage and extract natural resources without any regulation, stick the taxpayer with the bill for cleanup, of course.
5
David Brooks shows that he knows nothing about our economic history. It was Jimmy Carter's appointment of Paul Volcker as Federal Reserve chair that turned around our economy.
The driving force behind Carter's 1978 tax bill was a surge in corporate influence, triggered by the Powell memorandum, that continues to this day. See "Winner Take All Politics" by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson.
3
In today’s column, Brooks implies that people and their behavior were somehow different, morally superior, some unstated number of years ago. I’m not so sure. I am sure there are numerous companies, likely smaller companies, which still adhere to David’s moral priorities. Larger companies, however, those publicly owned with global markets operate with different priorities, with the highest priority being shareholder value. This public ownership is supposed to democratize the benefits of capitalism, to spread the wealth and allow anyone to participate in the economic benefits of a company’s success. What we’re seeing, however, is what Marx predicted. Capitalism, and its tendency toward monopolization, is destroying itself from the inside out and will continue to do so until government steps “back” into the picture and forces a more equitable distribution of wealth. Communism has proven to be untenable and intolerable, but capitalism in its current American iteration cannot survive if it ends up creating a huge gulf between the haves and have-nots. Wealth does not miraculously trickle down. When Gekko proclaimed, “greed is good,” that was a warning not a creed. We don’t need some vague remoralization. We need our government to step back in and ensure wealth is shared widely enough to promote a general sense of security, opportunity and well-being. It is a matter of survival.
3
Adam Smith insisted that for capitalism to work well at its base had to be "moral obligation," to use Mr. Brooks' term. Interestingly, Karl Marx condemned bourgeoise capitalism for dehumanizing human beings. That is, the capitalist system had lost its sense of "moral obligation," to return to Brooks' terminology.
I have a question, however. Can someone explain what Brooks means by "left-wing moral relativism" in this context and how it has equal culpability for the degradation of business morals? I think it's the "left-wing" modifier I'm objecting to. Maybe it's the false equivalence. After all, e.g., philosophical relativism at America's universities was never as pervasive as is the amoral business ethics (e.g., the maximization of shareholder value as the only value) dominating America's schools of business.
442
@jclarke
I agree that the moral relativism is puzzling. Neither party is morally relativist, both can be hypocritical, which is different, and I thought the colleges were politically correct, which is not morally relativist, however wrong one thinks it is. Philosophical relativism (not sure what that is, but I assume it means moral relativism in philosophy departments, where it has very few supporters.
12
@jclarke
Moral relativism makes the claim that any moral position can be justified just by the sincere belief that someone has that it is correct.
eg. genital mutilation is morally ok because some people really believe that it is acceptable.
There is no such thing as 'philosophical relativism'
There is relativism - which makes the same claims as moral relativism but just in a more general sense.
All relativism rejects the sensible idea that there is actually one universally good position on a particular idea.
That is why most folks think that relativism is a rationally bankrupt idea.
26
@jclarke
As someone who taught philosophy at three American universities, I can tell you that I never met a faculty member who taught that moral relativism is correct. On the contrary, we found that many students entered with relativistic notions about ethics that they likely picked up back in grade school where they were taught that everyone's ego had to be boosted no matter what they thought. We explained to them that (whatever validity relativism might have in other areas of Philosophy,) relativism is a nonstarter in the field of ethics--just as Socrates showed to Thrasymachus in the first chapter of Plato's Republic.
85
As long as we're engaging in false equivalencies, aren't journalists like David Brooks and Alex Jones both part of the problem of media in our country? Why are they both creating such division?
Just as President Trump said after Charlottesville, there are good and bad people on both sides. Right, Mr. Brooks?
6
"Capitalism is a wonderful system. The populists are perpetually living in 2008, when the financial crisis vindicated all their prejudices. They ignore everything since — the 19 million jobs that have been created, the way wages are now rising at 3.2 percent."
And you, like the rest of the political class, are ignoring the fact that many of the jobs created don't pay enough to keep body and soul together, they are not permanent, that wages have been stagnant for decades and haven't caught up to the actual costs of living. It must be nice to live in Lalah land where, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor, all the important people are billionaires, all the workers are subservient, and no one ever asks why.
599
@hen3ry
I don't often feel sorry for David Brooks. I do now. A mind is indeed a terrible thing to waste...
79
@hen3ry
I agree- somehow, people miss that while wages may be rising at 3%, how much has health insurance risen? Or worse yet, rents and home prices rising at 6-10% + a year, and more in places where jobs are being formed. Or things like college tuition. These days, to get your foot in the door for work pretty much takes a $30k to $40k outlay on tuition of some sort. Then we have requirements to be in the work force- you need a cell phone, you probably need a car. You need flexibility in terms of scheduling.
So yes, you got a 3% raise, but your rent went up 6%, you have $40k in college debt, your health insurance went up 10% and you need a $70 a month smartphone plan to get your work schedule.
54
@hen3ry
Brooks' claim about the wonders of capitalism must have come right after he read all about it in the Business Pages of the New York Times. One never reads much of a doubting Thomas about the state of those "wonderful" jobs reports there.
10
Embedded in capitalism are the seeds of zero-sum/greed is good thinking ---without strong moral boundaries---the logical extension of capitalistic thinking is the CEO of Amazon making 1.3 million dollars an hour while his employees make minimum wage. Conservatives look to soft cultural influences---religion, family, etc.---to mediate the natural capitalists acquisitiveness, but as Mr. Brooks points out these influences have withered away. We do have hard governmental strategies---tax policies, antitrust regulation---which, unfortunately, Republican congresses have also allowed to wither away---so here we are--gross inequality and a gross capitalists as our President.
3
Capitalism is a game that needs adult supervision.
The belief that somehow multi-stakeholder capitalism will rise again is a fantasy. Like the idea that self regulation works. Waffling about morality is not going to change anything.
If you want a to retain the benefits of capitalism without the nasty consequences, a strong government is needed to set the rules.
Many European countries have been moderately successful at this, but since Reagan and Milton Friedman, this has not been the American way.
647
@Frank Bannister,
The problem is litigation. Say you're a refinery that got 20 people killed because of a careless savings of maintenance costs. You can't win so you delay. You throw people under the bus. You hire PR agencies and K-street to protect you. In 5 years the sting is gone and you settle out of court. The managers involved get promoted or retired. Nothing happens. No perp walk.
We need to streamline the process. Prevent long delays. Require closures of businesses that fail again and again to meet regulations.
25
The government can not legislate morality. I wish it could, but only a totalitarian government can set the rules for individual behavior, and it can only do so using propaganda, suppression, imprisonment, and murder; China and Russia for example. Morality starts at the home, is emphasized at school, church and community, and can be maintained only if there is general agreement that right is right and wrong wrong. Reagan and Friedman may have empowered capitalism, but it is the liberal philosophy that there is no absolute right or wrong, only how I feel, that has freed capitalism to pursue only economic ends without moral guidance.
7
I agree, but would state it somewhat differently. We used to have a weak federal system, with three co-equal branches. Instead of a strong central government, such as Russia or China has. Now, our constitutional republic — our moral governance — over a democratic capitalist system has long been undermined, by a strong “central power.” An amoral, corporate power. Determined to further their cause by undermining the Republic. And President Trump is doing everything he can to support their agenda — by thumbing his nose at the executive and judicial branches, and the Constitution itself. With a lot of help coming from the GOP to do it. And now, to equivocate about the Republican Party’s role in this epic play, going on since Newt Gingrich demanded no one in the GOP ever comprise with Democratic lawmakers, is dishonest, yes. But, more importantly, and more worrisome, the process of undermining our moral system is cruelly and unapologetically marching forward. And still the Republicans stand firmly together with our country in chaos. Unwilling to act. As fixed and unable to flow through this crisis of immorality as a frozen tundra. There is nothing at all godly or moral in that, except the tender hope of their repentance. So I say, Democrats and Republicans have nothing to lose by firmly standing up for decency, for humanity, for love of our fellow man and woman. To protect the communal soul of our Nation and the Republic itself.
20
Capitalism is a great engine to create wealth, but how that wealth is distributed is the key question. In the past, this was basically a political discussion. Corporations had limited input as the two political parties talked it out with Republicans representing the corporation's interests and the Democrats representing the worker's interests. All that has changed, and that dynamic is no longer relevant today, thanks in large part to the Citizens United decision. Now, corporations and the oligarchs of those corporations have been allowed to go out and purchase both political parties to vote in their interests. The rise of the corporate state has basically been accomplished. The dismantling of unions was a crucial first step starting in the 80's. Next came the erosion of the Democratic Party from the party of FDR and the workers to the party of Clinton and middle managers. The final nail in the coffin was Citizens United. We now live in what I call a "zombie" democracy. It's basically dead but just doesn't know it, having been replaced by a plutocracy and an oligarchy, a dystopian Hunger Games-like society, only our tributes are sent to die in some foreign land. You know sometime is wrong when we long for "our" billionaire to take on "their" billionaire to represent our interests. It's in the interest of the plutocracy to keep us divided because they do not want us to realize that we have become a society of the haves and the have-nots, not so much conservative/liberal.
8
How do you propose to "remoralize" corporations, Mr. Brooks?
Do you support Sen. Warren's bill that would put the federal government in charge of chartering corporations, set standards for responsible corporate behavior, and require that 40% of corporation boards consist of employees?
681
I'm genuinely interested in how your experience in the corporate world would make this work.
There is no organizational model that I've seen in practice where these suggestions would ever work.
Do the Joint Chiefs have their meetings made up of 40% junior officers? Do you honestly think Apple or Samsung would have made the products that enable our incredible lifestyle if the government (at the time quite beholden to Ma Bell) needed to charter them?
Practical matters aside, do you ACTUALLY want the government setting standards for what is "responsible behavior"? Do you not see how Orwellian that is??
For an ideology that claims to want power returned to the people, you guys sure tend to favor solutions where an unaccountable bureaucracy dictates the rules...
9
@Arturo
There are many examples of successful shared governance, but allow me to address another of your phrases: "Unaccountable bureaucracy."
More government regulation, such as progressives propose, is accountability. The unaccountable bureaucracies are the mega-corporations, governed by cronies, accountable to no one but themselves. Corporate boards are comprised of other executives who profit from the same rigged game. Executive compensation is not set by shareholders. It's doled out by compensation committees populated by other multi millionaires who get their backs scratched in return.
The government is accountable, if we pay attention to the constitution and use the powers our representative democracies grants us as citizens.
Portraying the government as "them" is intellectually dishonest. It is "we." "We" should dictate the rules. "We" should charter corporations conditioned on their commitment to serve the common weal and behave ethically.
61
Thanks for the response! Here's the issue:
Private companies are accountable because they need to make payroll every 2 weeks. If they are not making products/services people want to buy, or are egregiously mismanaging their resources, they will go out of business. Its objectively fair.
If the GS13 at the Department of Labor responsible for writing "social responsibility" rules for a given sector writes bad rules, or stifles innovation, that person keeps their job.
In government, short of outright theft of government property there is NO accountability. Strong unions have made firing public employees essentially impossible
I'm not some Rick Perry disciple who thinks all government is bad. But if you think the way government jobs are doled out, and the complete lack of accountability by anyone less than an SES isn't a problem, you're kidding yourself.
Even if there was malfeasance, uncovered by investigative reporters and actually given a hearing in Congress (this is asking a ton) your Representative has no power to remove a government employee from their post.
This is what I mean by lack of accountability. Government bureaucrats are sheltered from market forces and legislative oversight that matters (i.e. losing their jobs).
If you can't lose your job, in my book that means unaccountable. But maybe you and i just disagree on semantics
10
Irving Kristol made this argument first, in Two Cheers for Capitalism, which was published back in 1978.
But Kristol understood what Brooks does not, that capitalism itself inexorably subverts the moral standards which keep rapacious self-interest in check.
You cannot simply wish fellow-feeling into existence. The incentives created by unregulated capitalism --the free market idealized by Republicans --promote the very attitudes and behaviors that Brooks condemns.
The solution lies in the policies Brooks associates with the left and contemptuously dismisses out of hand: strong laws and government regulations with teeth that restrain predatory capitalism. When markets incentivize bad behavior, only the law can provide a counterbalance. No heartfelt appeal to the conscience of corporate chieftains will make them pause in their unyielding pursuit of profit at any cost.
Good laws will not necessarily make us good people. This is the fallacy of morals legislation. But good laws can deter bad behavior and incentivize socially beneficial conduct. The period following the Second World War saw tremendous economic growth and diminishing inequality. It was a happier time for the nation not despite higher taxes on the rich and heavier regulation of finance and industry, but because of these things.
If Brooks really wants to reconcile free markets and socially responsible conduct, he should endorse the left's agenda to reestablish a check on capitalism.
14
The contradictions in Mr. Brooks position are amusing. His core argument is that capitalist free market systems need to be counter balanced with high moral standards, that these standards used to exist (not supported by history), and that the fix to this problem is a renewed moral awareness that reduces the importance of economic outcomes and includes quality of life. Then he argues that capitalism is a 'wonderful system' because of the jobs and money it has created. No mention of global warming and the devastation of ecological systems, the level of abject poverty in our country, and the inability for the system to cover basic medical needs of children. His argument is that we have a wonderful economics it has created, but we shouldn't just focus on the economics. Weird.
1
Capitalism is not a "wonderful system" as Mr. Brooks posits. A forest is a wonderful system. A barrier reef is a wonderful system. A tundra is a wonderful system. In none of these systems, is there any excess or any waste. In capitalism, there is an extreme amount of waste and of excess.
In order to prepare for and avert some of the disruption of climate change, we need to shift away from mass consumption and mass waste. We need new ways of thinking about the economy
to meet these challenges.
How do we aim for livable environments in the future?
Capitalism isn't going to get us out of this mess. It has been part of the reason we're here in the first place.
489
@francesca. America went from Identifying itself as a democracy to identifying primarily as a capitalist society. And that’s why America is dying. Extreme capitalism is killing us.
44
@francesca
A forest is a wonderful system characterized by a ruthless competition for resources (mostly sunlight), where the strong outpace and overpower the weak, who then must wait for decades in the shadows (literally) for their turns. A wonderful system where the decaying corpses of the old (Sears) are transformed into the thriving bodies of the young and new (Amazon). A wonderful system where some trees support their neighbors in distress with nutrient transfers through inter-root connections (many species), but where other trees poison the ground around them so nothing else can grow (Eucalyptus). In sum, a thoroughly amoral system, but one that works beautifully if you ignore the suffering of any individual in the system (maybe trees suffer?).
So yes a wonderful system, but a bad metaphor if you're advocating for a moral framework to tame (as Brooks would have it) or replace capitalism (as you imply you'd have it) with the aim of more humane outcomes for individuals, which is a thoroughly human concept.
16
@Charles, I agree. The only reasonable definition of "wonderful system" I can think of would be a "successful system" with "positive outcomes". And "success" as in nature might only be defined as "stable".
Life is stable in general; some life (my son) is delightful, some (mosquitoes) is dreadful. Different outcomes.
Free market capitalism is seen by its proponents as both stable and wonderful (optimal outcomes). The stability part might be true, but we have no examples, because modern history is filled with market interventions. And what optimal means is up to us. We apply forces to direct the outcomes of the market, just as a farmer selectively breeds livestock. But why do free marketeers think that the only way to apply these forces is through some collective, unconscious, blind, human nature-inspired behavior instead of conscious thought, planning, regulation, incentives....?
7
What utter nonsense. More apologies for a rapacious terrible economic system.
What David Brooks does not understand is that it is the nature of Capitalism to sweep away any moral, institutional, cultural or ethical barrier to profit. That is what it does. So, families, communities and the values that support them are swept away in the pursuit of economic gain.
Hoping for some magical rebirth of morals and decency among these vultures is not going to happen.
What will work are stiff regulations, laws and a tax code that will redistribute wealth, the enforcement of strict environmental protections, stripping corporations and individuals of wealth and property that try and leave the country in response and most important of all: long prison sentences and the forfeit of property for those who break these rules.
9
“I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world."
In general, people don't trust other people and they do trust profits and money. People betray and the "market" is a social place where betrayal is the principle. Zero-sum. "I buy Stock X from you because I think you're stupid to sell it, but I won't tell you that, personally."
Economics means people get what they trust (money and profits) without having to be honest about how it affects others, whom they do not trust. A good market is when people can make money by producing and selling things that are good for the market, first, and maybe somewhat good for the people. Economics is an abstraction that lets us do what we want to the people we don't trust by exchanging what we don't trust for what we do.
3
The market has never been moral, not in the history of the world. It has always been about me making as much profit as I can, getting mine and putting one up on you. President Trump is merely the market personified and so are many others today. The problem is that our world can no longer allow this to be so, because the current crop of robber barons care not one fig about their fellow humans, their employees, their neighbors, or even their planet. The entire earth is being ruined and may not be livable by the time our grandchildren want grandchildren of their own. "The market" has gotten too big and our ability to control it has been stolen by the thieves who have convinced the less intelligent of us that regulation is always bad.
2
One way to have a moral society is to have a moral government that protects citizens against the selfish greed of capitalists and corporations. Sadly, government today seems to see itself as an enabler and defender of capitalists rather than citizens.
2
Most of what corporate America does is legal. As your fellow columnist Edsall illustrates, an army of elite lobbyists puts forward legislation that serves their basest economic interests.
We are a nation of laws. The laws have been hijacked by lobbyists serving the richest players.
We need to redefine what qualifies for corporate status in America. We can start by looking at the B-corp model and seeing if we can enshrine that into law for everyone. This is how a moral lens works in pragmatic terms.
3
One thing that those who, as you report, put shareholder value above all else use (and indeed to the exclusion of all other values) ignore a fundamental fact about corporations when they argue that, legally, companies have no other purpose or duty than to reward their shareholders. The public through its laws has granted corporate charters that permit multiple shareholders to operate businesses with no resulting personal liability for corporate acts beyond their actual investments -- a privilege under law none of them would have acting in their purely personal capacity! The grant of that privilege BY THE PUBLIC -- intended to facilitate thee growth of commerce -- is at the heart of the argument that corporations owe some level of duty -- beyond that to shareholders -- to their communities and the public generally, so as to conduct their affairs and relationships with all stakeholders in accordance with the special privilege enjoyed by their shareholders. Capitalist apologists largely have conveniently forgotten that legal fact. Yes, in some sense "corporations are people, too" but they are people with a special privilege -- a safe harbor in terms of personal liability for their companies' conduct unless they are also officers or directors or controlling holders. Those who assert the sovereignty of shareholder value are conveniently ignorant of the foundational legal premises of the corporate form.
1
What David describes is but one more example of the worst aspects of human nature run amok. To me, until we ALL unflinchingly examine what 'makes us tick' we will never be able to harness those darker aspects of our nature.
Hence, look forward to power to continue to flow to the already powerful and for the pathetically powerless to continue to be bamboozled by the powerful into blaming others with even less power.
Maggie Thatcher, of course, declared that there is no such thing as society. And if Britain is to go on depending on her privatized rail system, there will be no functional society. All hail Brexit! I congratulate Brooks on making his way to the shores of the sea of revelations. And BTW, one way to help more to choose morality is to become again a nation of laws, not a nation of lying frauds.
2
As Brooks points out, corporations used to serve three stakeholders equally: owners; employees; and customers. You could also include cities, I suppose. The three legged stool became a one-legged stool in the 1970s because of an article in this newspaper by Milton Friedman advocating that it was in fact *immoral* for corporations to serve anyone but shareholders. Harvard Business School et al lapped this nonsense up madly. Today this idea has somehow become religion in America, even outside of the CEO suite. It has even infected our legal system. Unfortunately for Mr. Brook's conservative ideology, the only cure for this is an activist government (stripped of Citizen's United) to come and bust these trusts up. This happened in the first decade of the 20th century, when a Republican named Teddy with a strong moral compass decided enough was enough. We need another strong leader who serves the people, not companies, to perform the same duty.
3
It's even worse. In business school they teach if there are "external" costs to society of doing business, such as the collapse of employment, or pollution, these external costs are the government's job to address; but the same political party that thinks "freedom" means let businesses do whatever they want, also thinks government should be drowned in the bathtub.
3
Another great piece and so true.
What we as Americans seem to forget is that we are the ones who are responsible for setting the standards that govern our society. Admittedly the Constitution has built in mechanisms which make change difficult but change is possible.
The problem we are facing now however is that corporations and the wealthy are now so powerful by the accumulation of wealth and Citizen's United that it has become increasingly difficult to get control of the monster we unleashed on ourselves.
We are now seeing that quality of life may increase as economists define it but quality of life as families and human beings define has plummeted.
And of course Donald Trump is the perfect personification of just what David is talking about. A wealthy con artist has risen to power based on a mix of lies, disinformation, economic populism, racism, and fame derived from playing a fictional business genius (which he is not) on an unreality tv show.
Just following the publicly available information on the Mueller investigation, you get the sense that we are sliding toward a reckoning with all of this greed and corruption. Let's hope it sparks a wave of reform so powerful that even the GOP can't stop it.
1
Mr. Trump is showing that many people are perfectly accepting of changing narratives, which is my euphemism for falsehoods. Those same people will have little use for morals if they prevent them from doing or believing what they want.
Good points as usual, but where do the hypocritical Evangelicals fit into the equation? Why do they continue to avoid issues regarding fairness and buy into the "gospel of prosperity"?
They remain overwhelmingly dedicated to the worst president in our history!
1
Mr. Brooks' analysis of the current corporate ethos is keenly observed. But even as he articulates the need to "remoralize" the business community, he offers little in the way of specific solutions to the problem and ends with a series of unanswered questions: how can we?...how can we?
Perhaps the system can -- at least to some degree -- heal itself. The success in the last few years of "socially conscious" (or ESG) mutual finds and ETF's has shown that "doing well" is, quite simply, also "good business." More power to 'em -- and may their tribe increase!
"A deadly combination of right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism led to a withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct."
Whenever our Mr. Brooks decides to gingerly criticize a Republican sacred cow, he always hedges, taking care not to burn his bridges with the other Republicans, by doing a bothsiderism shuffle, blaming "the liberals" or "the left wing" for doing something at least equally destructive -- although it never was.
In this case, it's been ONLY "right-wing free-market fundamentalism," since 1980, that has: shipped millions of jobs overseas in search of cheaper labor, destroyed industrial cities from Detroit on down by first moving operations to non-union red states, and then to Asia, fought to keep the minimum wage as low as possible (or eliminate it) at home; and--
lobbied for the removal of environmental protections, worker protections, investor protections, and for the removal of most safeguards against financial misdeeds by banks and Wall Street-- which brought on the Great Recession and almost took down our country and the entire global economy; and-
has fought for tax cuts on corporations and the wealthiest people in the country, sold with lies and paid for with deficits, that has bought Congress, bought the White House and planted its agents in charge of so many agencies (to destroy them); collaborated with our enemies; and so much more!
The "moral relativism" is all on the right wing, not the left!
David, vulture capitalism is the inevitable result of unrestrained capitalism. And it will take a real revolution to restore the social compact we once had.
The justice Democrats are coming.
2
Mr. Brooks essentially makes the argument that many liberals like Sanders and Warren make about corporate and billionaire amoral money worship. But (again) he can't resist saying the left is as wrong as the right-- for being simplistic. Calling out the steady growth of ruthless capitalism and naming its perps is not equivalent to being a ruthless, amoral, and often criminal, capitalist.
1
Mr. Brooks, you value the framework of morality that religion provides - but the Puritan work ethic has been increasingly warped into a prosperity gospel, and the increasing belief that those who prosper are beloved by God, and those that don't aren't.
Admit that one of the sources of your own moral compass is compromised by greed and selfishness as well.
1
Mr. Brooks, I think you are off a bit on this one. Taxes may well have been "too high" back in the days of Kennedy, but the boom that you charitably say started with the work of Jimmy Carter, actually started quite a bit before that. And as for corporations seeking only to maximize profit, Friedman said that in 1962 (Capitalism and Freedom).
Unfortunately, we ought not be talking about right and left wings but rather the need to be pragmatic. People will pursue ever greater wealth, regardless of how much harm they have to overlook as they do it. In the absence of a government willing to re-balance the playing field, making it harder to get rich on the back of everyone else, it will. Just. Get. Worse.
Strong column. I agree completely except for the comment about "left-wing moral relativism." The two-word phrase "moral relativism" has historically been a euphemism for Republicans' hatred of homosexuals, women who have had abortions, and secularists in general. I'm not seeing the connection to the amoral self-centrism about which you're otherwise astutely writing.
Mr. Brooks, moral relativism of the left? You are deluded and posturing. The amoral, if not immoral, extreme individualism of today's society is a product of right wing conservativism. The left has consistently stood up for the disadvantaged, the poor, those who cannot access power to be heard through other channels. Tolerance and diversity are not moral relativism. Go back to Philosophy 101. Your moral lens is apparently broken, but mine is not. Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Barak Obama; is their morality lacking.... Elizabeth Warren's? Bernie Sanders? Nancy Pelosi? None of them seek for themselves. And do not point to abortion as evidence of declining morality on the left.
Do not confuse support for a woman's right to choose with moral relativism. No body "likes" abortion. But, no one except the woman herself knows when it is the best r only viable choice. Who are the hypocrites? The anti-abortion forces on the right are anti-life when it comes to birth control, capital punishment, war mongering, anti-welfare programs, and the list goes on and on.
From the right we have the argument that profit "trickles down" from the wealthy despite historical evidence to the contrary. There is no compassionate conservativism. There is compassion from the left. Tolerance and appreciation of diversity is not moral relativism. The left has not abandoned civic virtue.... profit and concentration of wealth is strictly the business model of the right.
1
Global collusion among billionaire oligarchs now pits human workers against each other, everywhere. China’s billionaires reap their trillions from powerless workers and pollute air and water with impunity. US corporations off-shore US jobs, pushing US workers down, to accept lower pay, fewer benefits. Oligarchs in Russia, monarchs in the Middle East, break international laws unabated. Our own billionaire President eases sanctions on a Russian oligarch who is already sanctioned by our government for breaking our election laws.
This is not a social morality issue.
It is an international criminal issue.
3
Mr. Brooks blames the lack of morality on "right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism". He gives plenty of examples of the former but none of the latter.
There's a reason for this. "Moral relativism" means that morality depends on society: for example, it is immoral for Jews to eat pork but not for Catholics. The cases Mr. Brooks cite all concern lack of moral compass in toto, which is the exact opposite of moral relativism.
1
It is just no end of an irony to read these words from this author. Then again, we live in the age of irony, and he writes in what is the chief means of advancing an ironic world view.
I understand that you don't read comments to your column, but I wish you'd read mine. I had wonderful opportunities growing up in the fifties and sixties. I was smart enough to go to an Ivy League engineering school which was still reasonably affordable if I worked summers and part time. My graduate work was done at a free public university. I was able to take care of myself--get my own apartment, save money, eventually buy a house, marry, retire comfortably.
While I worked, at least in the earlier years, if I made'x' dollars, my division chief who oversaw a couple hundred engineers made '3x' dollars. He had '10x' the worries, so it seemed more than fair to me. If he made '100x' I'd be looking to take him down. Competition instead of cooperation, ruthlessness instead of respect would have been the norm among my peers.
What kind of world is that, exactly?
So, picture me, a lifelong Democrat, fuming more and more over the years as the Clinton types extol wealth at while our unions disappear and our college educations become not only expensive but also worthless as they dumb down curricula so everybody can go.
Picture me getting aggravated as this weird notion infects America that people who work for the government of the United States are obviously second rate because otherwise they'd be making a bundle in business.
Tucker Carlson is just a huckster who changes his shtick to suit his career needs.
Bernie told the truth. If the truth hurts, tough.
3
You described an anomaly in human history that came to be due to the GI Bill (which was EARNED by the Greatest Generation) and the industrial collapse of most of the world outside the US. The post war years resulted from a confluence of factors that we’ll never see again. No generation since has done as they did and so no generation since can expect similar outcomes. We should be happy they lasted as long as they did.
What you are describing is cancer in the social body. In biological cancer, individual cells lose the ability to function in a co-operative and mutually advantageous manner and go "all out" for themselves, individually. The result is that while they thrive for a while, the organism dies, and with it the very cells that killed it.
When the sick objective of individual cells (persons) to aggrandize wealth at the expense of all other values rules, the results are the same. As the institutions and practices that depend on mutual trust and general good will are sacrificed in a mad race for more zeroes in a computer memory (which is where wealth resides these days) the whole social body functions less effectively or not at all, and the society dies, replaced by a Hobbesian world of the war of all against all.
The present occupant (and defiler) of Abe LIncoln's seat is a prime exemplar of this result, a creature of malice and envy, an avatar of the worst characteristics of humanity. Some cancers can be attacked only by removing the tumor. It is past time to start.
1
Read "What Money Can't Buy: Moral Limits of Markets" by Professor Michael Sandel of Harvard.
Our transition from a market economy to a market society -- where friendship, parenting, education, civil responsibility, access to the arts, environmental stewardship -- all have a monetary equivalent and a transactional complexion is sobering. No "answers", but it's worthwhile to pose the questions -- especially when the top is either too unaware or too self-interested to do so.
3
@minkairship Correction: CIVIC, not "civil" responsibility -- though there's probably an argument to be made for both.
Mr. Brooks,
The average US growth rate from 1980 to 2017 was 2.82 percent. The average from 1950 to 1979 was 2.91. Explain to me how cutting taxes and deregulating worked? The evidence seems clear, it had no effect at all on the growth of the economy. It immigrated millions, and dramatically increased inequality. But the basic economy was the same, it just redistributed the wealth dramatically.
7
@Jeff M. Immiserated, I have no clue why auto correct didn't like that.
3
@Jeff M
"Immiserated, I have no clue why auto correct didn't like that."
You used a term not in the text editor's wheelhouse, I suspect. Thanks for the clarification. Completely agree with your comments. Too bad Mr. Brooks will not see them. I understand he ignores his readers' observations here. Keeps him clear eyed in his insistence on false equivalence and the generation of counterfactual conclusions.
2
"Shareholder value" has become a surrogate for executive greed. The governance of corporation with board members chosen by CEO's, the agenda and information controlled by them, the renumeration for sitting on your hands and even the number of meetings held have made a joke of corporate governance.
It's been turned into a 1% incestuous process of paying each other off. This money is stolen from research and development, product price and quality, the employees and even the shareholders. All with a one dimensional dance that economics and a false reading of Adam Smith justify. When I hear "shareholder value" I think of Wells Fargo, GM circa 2007, Enron, healthcare/insurance corporations and all their administrators, cable providers, skimpy cell phone service...
7
Mr. Brooks is missing one piece of the puzzle:
Corporate Fiduciary Duty
This basically means a public corporation must at all times act to maximize profits and shareholder value at the expense of everything else. If they don't, they can be sued by investors and become the targets of activist investors.
So if for example an Irish tax dodge exists which will save Apple money, executives have no choice; they must use it or risk lawsuits.
Of course, executives are shareholders and therefore have a financial motivation to maximize value for themselves as well. But even without this, the legal imperative of fiduciary duty would dictate they act in the best interests of the bottom line 100% of the time.
2
@Chris Manjaro
Not so. Fiduciary duty is not the one-dimensional mandate you make it out to be. Above all, the LONG-TERM good of the company mandates that it treat its employees, its consumers, the local economy, and the nation itself fairly in order to maintain the reputation and good of the company. Apple and others have simply thumbed their noses at this version of fiduciary responsibility, and the real culprit is, as you concede in your final paragraph, the practice of tying executive compensation to SHORT-TERM stock performance, which ought to be outlawed.
5
@Chris Manjaro
To think that it is the duty for corporations to maximize profits even to the detriment of the society that supports it is insane. (We need to spew poison into the air and water because it maximizes profits!!). But, here we are.
1
All true but this is all the construct of 80's Reagan-Thatcher capitalism and it's apotheosis. We need leaders who will rebalance the scales. Unfortunately money is in the courts, in the legislatures and literally in individual stock portfolios.
Hedonism and self interest is what capitalism does best. Extracting that influence at this point will be almost impossible.
3
Yikes! This column has so many inaccuracies, it's hard to determine where to begin:
1. The focus only on profit isn't a recent phenomenon; it started back in the 1970s when economists started spouting Milton Friedman's philosophy.
2. Tax cuts and deregulation were the main drivers behind economic growth. Where have we heard that one before?
3. Under the last four Republican presidents, there have been severe recessions (Trump's is coming) and widespread scandal (Iran-Contra, Iraq war, Trump, etc.).
4. Public polling shows overwhelming support for things like universal background checks for gun purchases, expansion of Medicare, limits on corporate campaign spending. Yet none of those ideas are even considered by legislators -- mainly GOP legislators. The one program, the ACA, that helped people afford health care, has been under constant assault by Republicans.
David, please stop with the both-sidesism. While some Democrats have gone along, only one party has completely been bought by corporations and the special interests. The GOP answers for everything are tax cuts for the rich and more war overseas. It doesn't matter what the questions are. The only goal is to make as much money as you can, as quickly as you can.
41
Milton Friedman got it started. There's a saying that it takes about two generations to bring a great family business to ruin.
The GOP has made it its business over the last 40 years to try it out on the full economy. They've proved it.
Now, as David writes, Conservatives want to pretend that no one who's worth listening to saw it coming.
Read Robert Reich. And Henry Blodgett. And a number of Nobel Prize-winning economists, at least one of whom is on your staff...
16
@WJL
The other saying about great wealth is that behind every family of great wealth is a great crime.
Trump's grandfather, for example, entertained the men of the Alaska gold rush by feeding them the flesh of the horses that could not survive the conditions of their labor and topped off the meal with the "companionship" of women of easy virtue.
Capitalism, especially the laissez-faire version, is not about morals; it is about profits. To capitalists, the Almighty Dollar is more sacred than Mother Earth or human life.
10
Wealth is the only legitimate scorecard in capitalism. Every other measure is subjective and therefore meaningless.
5
How about economists and nature? How about economists and patriotism? They are not botanists or birdwatchers. They think that reducing poverty in the world at the price of reducing their own countrymen to poverty is an achievement?
They have only one thought in mind: the growth of the economy. Has anyone asked what is the optimal population in a country and what is the price we have to pay for too many people in our own country and the world? As long as you can pay a worker without papers less, it is alright—let’s open the borders!
Are these moral concerns?
This is indeed the composition of the United States. The balance between capitalism and a democratic republic. Conflicts galore! This is the experiment of the United States. Balancing these seemingly contradictory concepts is the success of the greatest most powerful country the world has ever seen.
It's not one versus the other. It's not to choose which one concepts wins and the other losses. Its about putting them together to work for all Americans. It's not about classes of people. It's not about races of people. Ironically it's not about how much money you make. It's not about the ruling people in Washington.
America has indeed with these conflicts before and the people decide the direction not the self appointed elite people in Washington and not the financial elite in New York/California.
Its about the rights of the people combined for the greater good of the republic which happens to be based on capitalism and democracy. Its all about balance.
It's about the
1
The rights of the people are to both succeed wildly or fail catastrophically. Of their own motivation, intelligence, ambition, pedigree, education, personality, ability and need, all without the nanny state hand of big government. They are opposite sides of the same coin. Anything else is social engineering with the resultant unintended consequences. The issue with liberal opposition to this comes down to one of or a combination of three factors: 1) liberals believe they have absolute moral superiority and thus, if you don’t politically agree with them it is out of immorality or ignorance or racism; 2) liberals believe that if only we were all as intelligent, erudite, worldly, empathetic, educated, unbiased and generous as they are we would fully agree with them; or 3) liberals want to compete in business and academia but don’t have the killer instincts necessary so they’ll happily handicap everyone else to ensure they can advance.
@From Where I Sit
Ah, the right wing makes up rubbish about liberals, then blame liberals for that rubbish. This liberal believes that businesses should enhance the society that supports them, a partner in society. And since businesses tend to believe they should make a profit even if they harm that society, they need to be regulated.
I believe that the way to increase civic virtue in our society is to require some sort of mandatory service. Yes, that would be a draft for military duty and/or civic duty...I feel that this would lead to better choices in both foreign and domestic affairs if every citizen knew that they would be directly involved..
5
A resumption of the draft is long overdue but allowing other alternatives undermines the principle. Who would join the Marines to experience multiple overseas deployments over a six year enlistment if they can teach reading to third graders a mile from their childhood home?
America has faced these kinds of questions before, of how to keep the forces of economic brutality from overwhelming all considerations of humanity, intelligence, and decency - the institutions of slavery and the abusive industrial practices prior to the labor movements come to mind.
In those cases, the solution was ultimately institutional - courts and the justice system stopped enforcing claims to the ownership of slaves and started enforcing basic labor rights.
Likewise, the solution to brutal plutocracy/kleptocracy is for the justice system to stop enforcing the excessive property right claims of plutocrats/kleptocrats the same way it stopped enforcing claims of slave ownership.
Obscene levels of property right claims are de facto illegitimate, because they by nature override every other human, moral, existential, or ecological consideration.
A society that doesn't limit the property rights claims it enforces inevitably becomes as brutal as one that allows legal slavery and other abusive labor practices.
My hope is that given the miraculous modern technology we have that our predecessors didn't, it's possible for these necessary institutional changes to come about through democratic legal means rather than bloody conflict as was necessary for prior generations.
Money and economic security are just the beginning of human life, not the be-all-end-all of it. It's again time for the justice system to prioritize actual justice over economic brutality.
7
Brooks seems to miss that the point of a competition is to win it.
As businesses continue consolidating their respective markets into the hands of a few mega players, they can charge more, innovate less, and use their size and political connections to stop new competition from materializing. The strategy changes from 'provide value to the customer to compete' to 'don't compete too hard, let's all raise prices and use our market power to extract'
It's not that markets have lost their morals, they never had them to begin with.
1
Publicly-held companies have an obligation, first and foremost, to earn money for their shareholders. Left to decide how to allocate resources, that's what they will do. Apart from the usual public relations nonsense. That's what we need government regulation. Republican leaders as diverse as Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon recognized the need for regulation -- despite frenetic pushback from regulated businesses. Non-military government spending increased during the Reagan regime -- regardless of his mantras. Business leaders will continue to support Trump is his anti-regulatory crusade as long as it doesn't hurt them -- as it's doing with tariffs. As we know by now, if our populist-seeming president sees that his policies are perceived as having gone too far, he'll simply declare "Mission Accomplished" and move on.
1
And the Republican party elected a person with none of the moral values that Mr. B enumerates. The Party continues to support him, attacks those like Sen. Romney who tries to point out the lack of morality, and continues to promulgate laws and regulations that value money and profit over people.
The other side is the same? Really?
5
Recently, I retired after 41 years working in the human resources profession. Early in my career, I recall sincere discussions regarding budgets and the obligation to be fair with employees. During that period there was more of a balance between financial priorities for the employees and shareholders. Unfortunately, the latter part of my career the scales of balance were weighted in favor of the shareholders.
8
I find myself sharing some of David's criticisms of the left these days, even though I would place myself somewhere in that "left" position. When I do agree with him, it tends to be when he laments an uncritical multicultural relativism. Today, however, your arguments make zero sense, David. You say the left is as guilty as the right in slipping into an economic moral relativism. Your evidence is merely the fact that Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy supported some market-oriented reforms in the stagflation 1970s, paltry evidence for your claims about Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren (and, implicitly, others like Robert Rich) who have consistently advocated the kind of moral economy and the values you endorse here. I appreciate that you are the Times conservative columnist, but it's disingenuous for you to lump together these outspoken people who advocate a moral economy with those who have promoted and personally benefited from the short-term profit principle you lament. Search your soul a little deeper on this one, David. Neither conservatism, liberalism nor populism are as rigid ideologies as you portray populism today.
4
@Robert T. Schultz That's Robert Reich
mr. Brooks column reminds me of the George Orwell essay on Dickens critique of capitalism a constant theme in his novels. capitalism is a great system for creating wealth and well-being but it's practitioners need to practice a sense of fair play or let the other fellow win one once in awhile. the long-term survival of any firm is often linked to non-economic considerations not every good thing could be measured and economic terms.
3
The top executive of American Airlines in the 80s and early 90s (Robert Crandall) acknowledged that American Airlines had an obligation to its shareholders, employees, and communities, i.e. "stakeholders." He, however, put more weight on the obligations to shareholders.
Once again, Brooks identifies the problem but avoids putting the blame squarely where it belongs. It is not a "deadly combination of right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism" that "led to a withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct." The blame rests solely on free-market fundamentalism, the kind advanced especially by Brooks's hero, Ronald Reagan, and most of the GOP since. Here's what happened:
Greed, once one of the seven deadly sins, was rehabilitated into a new virtue called "enlightened self-interest." Ethical decision making was reduced to market competition between individuals each striving to maximize his or her self-interest. We were told that market competition among greedy individuals was the only way to achieve social good and that any attempt to regulate, limit, or tax this behaviour was harmful. The results of the essential immorality of Reaganism and the Republican value system should surprise no one—and certainly have no root in the values of liberals.
16
@617to416
Moreover most of the corporate boards are manned by people who do not even pretend to protect individual shareholders. Many have ethical conflicts. Many if not most companies are actually owned by other institutions, not by living, breathing "people."
The stock market is manipulated by "buy backs." Whose stock is being bought back? Certainly not individual investors.
Corporate America saw the GOP cut its highest marginal tax rate cut from 35% to 21%. The huge huge huge tax cut was justified by the GOP with promises that corporations would hire more people and give raise-starved workers a raise. Are you trying to suggest that a meager 3.2% wage increase - after a generation of productivity increases and wage stagnation - vindicates the moral compass of American employers? Please keep it real; the robber barons are still running the show and calling the shots. The Paul Ryan inspired GOP tax cut is the product of his decades long effort to serve the rich.
20
Please identify one, just one, other group of people who we can freely describe by pejorative titles like “Robber Barons.” It isn’t allowed for race. Or gender. Or orientation. Or other status than wealth.
This snippet is quite revealing: "My story begins in the 1970s. The economy was sick. Corporations were bloated. Unions got greedy. Tax rates were too high and regulations were too tight. We needed to restore economic dynamism." Interestingly, my father, a blue-collar guy raised a family on his one income and, despite what Mr. Brooks remembers of those days, we were a far more balanced society in the 70's. Also, why is it, when workers (with unions) fight to be paid more, they're considered "greedy" and when corporations "maximize shareholder value" (by trying to pay nothing), they're the heroes?
47
To answer your question, it is because labor cannot be given equal or similar weight to capital lest we begin a dangerous descent down the slippery slope to communism. Virtually anyone, with the exception of the truly infirm, can perform some sort of labor. From stuffing envelopes to mopping floors to welding to brain surgery, nearly all of us can perform one or more labor task with some level of proficiency. However, the number of Americans with the financial wherewithal to invest huge sums is minuscule. This, labor is ubiquitous while capital is rare.
1
@From Where I Sit, "investing" is not the same as working. Solid economies are based on "making things." Making things often requires labor. No labor, no capital. Of course, capitalism always attempts to "get something for nothing" by paying labor little to nothing. Capitalists are the original practitioners of wanting something for nothing.
1
@From Where I Sit Baloney. Work is as valuable as capital, and it is only our lack of recognizing it that is off. When I sweat 40 hours a week, what I offer is worth every bit of your $40 per share in some company, and even more.
3
Clearly Mr. Brooks, you've strike a chord here with this essay. My criticism is that it's a bit late in the game. Many of us recognized this American transformation during the Reagan years. In fact I began calling our country aMErica. Yuppies were in vogue. The elites took over. The Koch brothers began their buying of the Congress and waged a war joined by their cronies against the mixed economy that made us truly exceptional. Government became the enemy. The Right's leaders Ryan and McConnell played to the donors, ignored our moral fabric and empowered Trump to flourish, now spinning out of control in his attack on our institutions, the last hope of the democracy. You need to make amends, Mr. Brooks. For decades you sat back in your elite chair in your ivory tower and supported a Conservative movement that totally eschewed the social contract you speak of.
11
Just enforce the laws already on the books (i.e. why weren't the banksters of 2007 - and subsequently [e.g. Welles Fargo nefarious accounts] given merely fines ... which didn't even come out of their own pockets ... vs jail time?) Capitalism per se isn't the problem: A) it's the non-enforcement of laws (of which the Dems are guilty) B) Lack of transparency (of which the GOP is guilty - e.g. stifling the Consumer Bureau of Financial Protection)
1
Self interest makes capitalism efficient.
It does not make it just.
3
Right on, Mr. Brooks. "Remoralization" will come with reregulation of capitalism and increases in progressive tax rates not substitution with socialism not the continuing roll-over of the federal debt.
2
There is another moral covenant governing for-profit corporations. In exchange for granting them the right to exist so they may better serve us, we allow them to make a profit. No corporation has a right to exist. No corporation is a natural being with a right to make a profit. They are legal entities, but always subservient to us...legally (as the Trump Foundation found out), morally, and ultimately, politically.
This, of course, is pending the next applicable SCOTUS decision, Till then, if we want a good society, one enabling good people, boycotts, bad PR, etc are not the answer. Direct and organized political action forcing change is. We allowed, we created these institutions. We can change them.
7
@Dr. Bob I agree. Take all the government provided benefits and charge accordingly. How much is limited liability worth to the CEOs of the Fortune 500? How about patent protection? How about use of the courts to enforce property rights - intellectual or other? It might just be less expensive to readjust their workers' pay scale.
The survival of capitalism, as Brooks implies, ultimately depends on its subordination to moral norms which will curb its worst tendencies. Free enterprise, in its pure form, operates by the amoral principles of the marketplace, according to which self-interest, not commitment to the welfare of one's community, dictates behavior.
The erosion of moral restraints on economic behavior stemmed in part from Reagan's infamous claim that government intervention, far from countering the harmful effects of corporations' relentless pursuit of profits, contributed to market inefficiency. The president's speech may have resonated with many people because excessive regulation did hobble businesses unnecessarily.
But his blanket assertion implied that Washington could not effectively enforce moral norms, that the ignorance or bias of public bureaucrats corrupted their attitudes toward entrepreneurs. The gradual discrediting of the state's role as a monitor of business behavior, a process to which Democrats as well as Republicans contributed, weakened the legitimacy of the standards, themselves, leaving the market as a wholly inadequate substitute.
David's column omits the role of human actors in altering popular attitudes toward government's role as an enforcer of moral norms. But changes of this magnitude don't just happen. Reagan served as a midwife in the birth of our present system, and he should receive proper credit.
5
I would like a World Series ring. Furthermore, I’d like it to be inscribed that I was a NY Yankee gene I won it. But I can’t hit the side of a barn with a basketball at twenty feet, I’m that athletically challenged. So, I do not belong on the field at the Stadium. Or on a Little League field when I was that age. So, I do not belong there. Likewise, I not only do not possess the killer instinct to succeed at business but also lack a college degree. My family couldn’t afford it and I needed to begin earning immediately after high school. So I didn’t belong in college and I don’t belong in business. That’s how life works. Further, what’s the point of achievement if the very government that confiscated your wealth and income then uses those dollars to fund equal access (to not only education but to housing, medical care, etc as well) for someone who hasn’t achieved or has even failed?
I fail to see the existence of the Left's "moral relativism," or how such a (nonexistent) "relativism" could contribute to what Mr. Brooks says ails us today. Indeed, there is no mention of what said such "moral relativism" is in this opinion piece, or how it might have contributed to our present winner-take-all economy. If Mr. Brooks would like to treat the non-elites fairly, he should call for a living minimum wage, stronger unions, higher tax rates on the wealthy to maximize revenues not personal income, taxation of labor and capital at the same rate, elimination of non-compete contracts and mandatory arbitration clauses, healthcare for all, and I could go on. Yet he espouses none of those things. Hence: crocodile tears, he allegedly yearns for outcomes that cannot possibly be achieved through the policies he espouses.
8
19 million jobs flipping burgers. 3.2% wage growth (for one quarter) with inflation at 2.5% in October. All of this based on more unattainable tax cuts...mostly for the rich. Ya, wonderful system we've got running now!
7
Getting a corporation to be more "moral" can ONLY be done by regulation, not by emotional appeal or personal ethical accountability. Allowing individual corporations to decide on their own what is "moral" pay, benefits, and treatment of employees, as well as their own safety of products and their manufacturing process just means the most ruthless corporation will put the others out of business.
(They can make a cheaper product by destroying the environment and underpaying employees, and cut costs by exploiting available tax loopholes, etc.) Consumers can't research every single product they buy, they have to rely on FDA to ensure their products are safe, and rely on other government rules and regulation enforcement to ensure workers are treated fairly and the environment isn't trashed in the process--because we all want to breathe clean air and drink clean water, and a corporation pays their fair share of taxes.
It's silly to think a corporation would voluntarily do the most ethical thing when its competition is under no such obligation. That's capitalism: without regulation, there is no moral obligation, only the obligation to generate money by producing the best product for the cheapest price.
Brooks says "somehow over the past 40 years economic priorities took the top spot" as if he is mystified how it happened, when he just pointed out that deregulation and tax cutting happened at the same time. He just refuses to see the cause and effect staring him in the face.
9
If you want to have morals infused into our economic system, then you have to be willing to enact laws and regulations that codify those morals. You can't expect people to "just do the right thing" because capitalism is a competitive system. Without laws to enforce these norms, the good guys who do the right thing will always be at a competitive disadvantage. So you can't have it both ways. A deregulated economy that is at the same time capitalistic and upholding moral standards will simply not exist.
11
"A deadly combination of right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism led to a withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct. We ripped the market out of its moral and social context and let it operate purely by its own rules. We made the market its own priest and confessor.". The free market is THE implementation of moral behavior.
2
As one who working for a fortune 500 US multinational experienced it, look no further than the definition of so called Globalism. A well marketed model. A model marketed by Western Democratic Governments, they refer to it as trade . So called outsourcing of jobs, and using tax havens are the result. Our so call inter connected world, provides a labor market of billions . Sourcing labor in low wage jurisdictions, void of benefit cost, is all enticing, has ended up with our two tier society. Ride Amtrak routes and witness the devastation of community after community with the odd Wal Mart dotting the landscape. If you fly from NYC to say San Francisco you won't see America.
1
The key insight of this column to me is the "deadly combination of right wing free market fundamentalism and left wing moral relativism" (AKA Materialism and Individualism). The two frames of reasoning together slowly and inexorably have come to dominate the way Americans think and act in daily life. It shows up not only in policy conversations but in most every aspect of society. A careful read of the NY Times (and other reputable media outlets) and the reasoning behind different perspectives shows this.
1
We started to regard capitalism in religious terms, as belief system. We layered on a lot of people who for some reason did not outgrow Ayn Rand in high school, like you are supposed to.
And we started to regard people as prey, or at least as a herd to be milked.
And the result was that it became legal to prey on people. It is legal to raise the cost of a life saving drug like epinephrine, which costs pennies, to beyond what a person can afford, because the market will bear it.
And it became legal to put a person into indentured servant debt on short term loans, because there were desperate people with no other options.
And it became legal to sell off traffic monitoring to private companies who could shorten the cycle on a traffic light increasing injuries along with revenue.
And it became legal to off-load prisons, armies, to private companies and look at selling off roads and dams and bridges too. And water companies. More prey, more cows to milk.
The trick is to remember that "communitarianism" is not communism. Supporting the community is and old fashioned Christian core value.long felt to be the core of a strong nation.
We don't live in a nation in which the community stands first when we have a President who will hold hundreds of thousands hostage to his vanity project, and threatens to build his vanity project with funds taken from disaster victims, while the GOP Senate and House members sit on their hands.
9
People, including David Brooks and all NYT columnists, need to start discussing the elephant in the room. Big money in politics has turned our democracy into a plutocracy. It will take changes in the law and maybe changes in the constitution but until our politicians, at least the Democrats, start to work for the middle class and the poor and not the upper 1% our tribalism and political polarization will not abate. Until we figure out a way to bring civil dialogue back to life our nation's outlook looks bleak. This president and the repubs certainly won't fix it. The American voter will have to fix it by taking the corrosive nature of money away from Congress.
K Street lobby money and PAC money owns and controls congress. The American voter has no power or influence in Washington. Until we reverse Citizens United our country will continue to implode. Wake up people!
4
THE TURN OF EVENTS Is related to the shift from a balance of the value of the worker versus the profit to the owners and stockholders. Reagan eliminated the first clause in the articles of incorporation, that the corporation is being formed to improve the availability of goods and services to the community. The notion of good corporate citizenship was removed surgically. So the dynamic balance between the welfare of the community and workers was considered alongside the benefit to stockholders and corporate owners. Beyond throwing workers out of their jobs, workers were sought in countries where there was no historical balance between workers and owners. In so doing, the changes enabled the corporations to focus exclusively on quarterly earnings reports. Now in the last century, a number of inventions were developed using citizen funded research. They were the semiconductor, the solar cell and the laser, which have become so a part of what keeps big data moving that the fact that the licensing to corporations to manufacture things discovered by taxes paid by workers has been lost. So self-destructive were we that we handed China the solar cell technology on a silver platter, with the result that China is now the world's top producer of solar panels, moving us toward sustainable energy. Also, the stock marker is a place of shared risk, meaning that it can be viewed variously as a way of improving the lives of workers or profits to the few. We're severely unbalanced.
3
A century ago Keynes foresaw that productivity gains would permit workers to enjoy a 15 hour week. This prediction was based on a slow and steady increase in GDP of 2% annually resulting, over the decades, in an economy where everyone would be able to "live wisely and agreeably and well".
The productivity gains have occurred but the distribution of wealth is clearly lacking. Asian countries that have embraced market economies are cheerfully mass producing everything we need at ever shrinking costs, leaving us with a race to the bottom to compete.
Keynes himself saw the withering away of capitalism as its incentives to produce were less and less necessary. This may be seen in the social democratic policies of the Scandinavian countries which seem to also rank very high on education levels and happiness.
We Americans, on the other hand, have a large, stubborn and reactionary bloc that chooses to blame our ills on immigration when we are not even replacing ourselves and labels attempts at universal healthcare as communism.
Brooks appears to blame our failures on the "deadly combination of right-wing free market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism". He is half right. Reactionaries in this country, like Trump, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, are recklessly playing havoc with our economy to reinforce the divide that keeps us gridlocked and ensuring that wealth continues to flow to the 1%.
4
Maximizing shareholder value isn't the problem. In the accounting of costs and what the products are worth, if you do things more effectively or less wastefully, the place that shows up is shareholder value. If the system worked right, shareholder value would be maximized by serving the customer.
The problem is that the system doesn't work right. Markets are supposed to be regulated by government, not by expecting foxes to virtuously guard hen-houses. Companies are too big, too monopolistic, and too powerful for markets to work well.
3
So true! I remember back in the 1980s when a recruiter for a national association of small businesses tried to get my mother to join with a pitch that the organization would fight to lower taxes on small businesses, he didn’t know how to react when she said “I believe in paying my fair share of the taxes to fund our country “. Today, people and corporations are cheating and challenging taxes more than ever with the burden falling increasingly on the middle class. We should control spending but make tax minimizes like Apple pay for their evasion. This President is the last one to lead that charge.
6
When you think about the amoralism of capitalism spare a thought for the fact that most technological advances that have made those billionaires and whole new industries without social values, sense of community and morality are either partially or fully due to your socially and community conscious tax dollars: public research funding. That's right folks, the useless, leaching state is able to take risks that no private company would and can therefore deliver unexpected massive payoffs that have paradoxically contributed to amoral markets. How's that for sweet injustice?
2
You seemed to have avoided the corporatization of the political parties which have become factions in themselves - a discussion of how ethics and morality in the political realm at the cost of any concept of the common good might also be worth mentioning. Oh, and let's not forget the dumbing down of the American people by reducing all language and narratives to the narrow parameter marketing - the identity of a human in America today has been reduced to a brand - specifically, the market value as a brand. Our politicians and elections are about branding and statistical marketing. Thge problem is not limited to the creation Ayn Rand utopia but limiting humanity, our understaning of humanity to its branding and market value.
1
Who are the "we" you speak of, exactly, Mr Brooks? Surely not Democrats, who have doggedly continued to try to make the American economic system more fair and just. I recall Hillary's 5-point policy nerd response to virtually any question you asked her about economic fairness and justice, for example. No, the "we" you have in mind are Republicans, who have become the party of the 1%.
7
Thank you for using Carl Icahn as an example. Many of the younger generation blame the Boomers for this attitude when it really was started by the Silent Generation who did not sacrifice much during WWII and woke up to an America that was the only standing industrialized country in the world...then took full advantage.
1
Morality and ethics continue to exist in all of the small businesses I know. In corporations and on Wall Street in particular, there is amorality: money is good, lack of money is bad and the world really is that simple. T
The same applies to sports: winning is good, losing is bad and the world really is that simple. But with sports is not just pro sports, a "winning is the only thing" attitude has infected much many youth sports too.
I believe it matters how we play the game. It's harder to make money and win when seeking fairness and playing by the rules, but it feels good to be decent and that has value too.
6
David,
"It basically worked. We’ve had four long economic booms since then."
This statement is false. It is a lie to yourself and to me.
Here is what actually happened.
Jimmy Carter presided over the economy that was still impacted by the oil embargo. To alleviate that he took the steps you mentioned.
Then, Paul Volcker killed inflation in the early Reagan admin with high interest rates that also killed the economy. There was a huge recession you do not mention in 1982. That recession lasted until 1987. Most of the Reagan adminstration.
While Reagan's sour economy wended its way from 1982 to 1987 Reagan began the most rapid expansion of deficit spending in history while also saying he would cut spending.
At the end of eight years of lackluster economy and huge deficit spending on the military by Reagan, Bush took over and kept the same sour story going.
Then, Clinton took over and raised taxes. The economy improved. But, Republicans proposed and Clinton signed the repeal of the Glass Steagall act setting up the crash of 2008. But, Clinton, like Jimmy Carter, ended with a balanced budget, unlike any Republican President in my lifetime.
Stopy lying about Republicans to yourself and to me. I know the truth.
29
@Michael Sorry, you don't know the truth. There was a recession from 1980 to 1982, but the economy was very strong from 1983 through 1990. The 1990-91 recession was very weak but enough to deny Bush 1 reelection. After 1991 the economy continued strong, with another weak recession in 2001. The only significant economic reverse wasn't until 2008.
Reagan, with some earlier help from Carter, got us out of the malaise of the 1970's.
@Michael Also, repeal of Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with the financial crisis of 2008. If it had, why wouldn't Obama reinstate Glass-Steagall?
@wnhoke
I think you forgot the crash of 1987 and the overall malaise of employment and economy between 1982-1990. Military contractors did ok although there was no war. That's it.
As fellow commentator Yuri Asian points out, capitalists were never truly altruistic, there were forces that made folks who ran large companies that no longer exist. Up until the 1970's, top managers earned 35 times the average workers salaries. Though well off, they participated in their communities in much the same way their workers did. Now those ratios are more like 350 the average, so top management (in most cases, no longer founders with their own capital at risk) is insulated from common needs of their workers. Their children can go to private schools, medical care is lavishly provided, and their chauffeurs deal with the pot holes in their roads when they're not jetting around in private planes. Moral concerns and necessities are often bound together. Those who direct our economy are no longer subject to the same necessities - and we're paying the consequences.
4
Brooks' call for morality among capitalists would be more poignant if he used global warming as an example. The "Green New Deal" will combine free market profits, morality, and the "popularism" of the survival instinct.
1
DeBeers magnate Cecil Rhodes needed workers for his diamond mines. But Black South Africans didn't need jobs because they didn't use or need money. They were self-sufficient and bartered.
Rhodes got officials to levy taxes, initially on dogs, and later on nearly everything. Black South Africans now had to earn money to pay taxes. Rhodes got his workers, a vast fortune and control of the global diamond market.
Henry Ford did the same thing. He paid his workers enough to afford a Model T.
Rhodes and Ford are examples Brooks could cite as moral capitalists. Rhodes brought S.A.Blacks into the cash economy (because white settlers wouldn't work in mines). Henry Ford paid his workers enough to buy the product they built (and launch a middle class mass market for mass produced cars).
Any public good is tactical or accidental and unintended.
Corporations are the engines of the market. They've never been responsible stewards of the commons or even pay taxes. In fact corporations are intended to insulate management, employees and investors from any company liability -- the corporate shield.
There isn't a land, far, far, away where businesses are altruistic, bosses generous and kind, and their beautiful children go to public schools.
Environmental titan David Brower called corporations a device to separate a person from their conscience.
And their conscience from their morality.
26
@Yuri Asian
Money, coins and such, was actually invented as a way for governments, and feudal lords, to tax commerce and the general economy. When someone barters the government gets nothing. But use a coin and the government can chip off a piece.
And that is how civilization came to be.
I don't know what to say. I am progressive, always have been, capitalist, too. I've had a pretty interesting work history. I have been a tradesman (welder, journeyman carpenter). Been a Union member for a number of labor unions. I started my own companies, been a professional and a consultant. As a tradesman I looked for work that would give me the highest pay for my skill level. As a professional I was paid for how much value I could bring to the company that I worked for in my area of expertise. As a business owner I paid my employees what I thought they deserved based on how well they were able to do the work I hired them for. More than once I did not pull a paycheck as boss so I could make the payroll and pay invoices and bills. I have to admit that I was not aware of the covenant "I give to my company, my town and my government, and they give back to me." I, first and foremost, needed x amount of dollars to keep the wolf from the door. Once that was taken care of, I could devote my attention to doing the best job that I could. As a tradesman, and a business owner, Unions set the pay scale and the fee structure in all I did. That still guides what I think is fair pay for services. I pay what I think is the fair price asked or I negotiate. I am retired, comfortably, and I still get requests for work for which I charge what I believe is a fair charge for the work requested. I have never been denied my fee. So, I don't really understand the platitudes being discussed here.
7
In the Carter/Reagan economy, there was a lot of money in consumer hands, and plenty of demand. The economy stalled anyway because supply was choked off.
The remedy to free up supply fit that situation.
Today supply runs free. No problem with supply. Demand is choked off. Consumers don't have purchasing power, and are reluctant to extend themselves even when they do.
The remedy is to free up demand, not supply. What Carter and Reagan did for that very different problem is relevant only as proof that we should not do that today.
We've had forty years of growth, more than doubled the economy, and consumers got none of it. Household income adjusted for inflation has not grown at all -- zero. No wonder the vast new supply isn't pumping this economy -- they don't buy it, can't buy it.
The larger social purpose depends on the larger social need of the moment. Today, it is economic justice for household income.
3
@Mark Thomason: that is very simplistic, though definitely the "paradigms" of the 70s are worth discussing because they have had repercussions for 40 years now.
I don't know how old you are, but anyone who was an ADULT by the end of the 70s knows the real problem was terrifying, rampant INFLATION that seemed to have no end, and be running wild out of control by any source -- government, business, stock market, individuals.
It's been over so long, that everyone seems to now have collective amnesia about it. But I remember a time when you'd go to the supermarket and a can of soup had 10 price stickers on it (*pre barcoding) with each one a steep increase in price....and no matter how many cost of living raises you got at work, it could NEVER keep you up with these huge increases.
You cannot look at either Carter OR Reagan and judge them independently of inflation, and that whether right or wrong, many of the actions taken in the Reagan years were to try and STOP inflation.
One of the ways we tried (and in some cases did) stop inflation was to start buying and producing goods in third world countries at third world wages vs. high American (union) wages. It did lower costs, but at the price of destroying many good American jobs and businesses and sending countless jobs overseas.
Now today it is LIBERALS and Democrats like Hillary who can stand up and tell us with a straight face that "The jobs are never ever coming back!" and the left seems content with that.
1
Capitalism is perhaps a wonderful system, both astounding and terrifying in its achievements, but a mixed system is much better, and what makes our capitalism somewhat tolerable are the government parts of the system. What is natural in a competition is that someone wins, and government prevents this natural result and keeps competition alive. So only a mixed system can remain capitalist; pure capitalism is unstable and turns into something else if left to its own devices. .
The mixed system embeds capitalism in moral norms and is the only way to do so. Pure capitalism has no moral norms, and oligarchy's are the norms of preserving current privileges, sort of like honor among thieves.
Social trust should be based on trustworthiness; otherwise it is gullibility. Our elites have shown themselves to be untrustworthy in many ways; trust will return after they have shown themselves trustworthy by admitting and explaining their previous untrustworthiness. They keep looking for some magic of marketing and advertising, pretense and illusion, by which they can regain our trust without transforming themselves so they are worthy of it.
4
Sorry Saint David, it was not tax policy that that began the redistribution of wealth. It was the shift begun after the cancellation of Bretton Woods in 1971 from an industrial base to the fictionalization of the economy. The curves of productivity and wages, which used to tightly align, diverged and the wealthy began the engorgement that has reached crisis levels.
That is the real hidden agenda.
8
To have a society in which it is easier to be a good person, capitalism must be embedded in moral norms. If this embedding is not supposed to occur via government regulation, it must occur by peer pressure within the corporate world that is separate from pressure to get the government to do something. Corporations would have to rat each other out about violation of standards, and some would say anything about other corporations (and particularly about the competition) that was likely to be believed.
Capitalism needs to have itself embedded in moral norms by government; no one else can or should do this essential job. This means that government must be independent of business, in the same way as referees (except in pro wrestling) are independent of the players and teams. One way for a company to make money or get a competitive advantage for itself or its industry is to corrupt or bamboozle its regulators, so our bureaucrats must enjoy the support of elected politicians when they do their jobs and make a company or industry unhappy.
Capitalism without moral norms will try to corrupt and weaken government. In a competitive economy our heroes must be the referees, and we should welcome the howls of the players as they are roughly but fairly penalized, as signs that the referees are doing their jobs.
3
While Mr. Clean wishes to appear above the GOP shenanigans, he is part of their convulsed thinking and continues to paint "conservatives" rosy while peering through pink glass. He is a bright and skillful orator, but on the wrong side of the tracks.
2
"How can we have a good society?" Note Mr. Brooks' conspicuous avoidance, here and in previous columns, of the secular Enlightenment terms "social contract" and "social compact." Where does he think he is going with this repeated "covenant" shtick? He now and then fawns over the mystical appearance of grassroots do-gooderism but almost never has a practical proposal, for most things practical in a diverse, multi-cultural, class-structured society involve that heathenish triumvirate of legislation, regulation and taxation. Perish the thought. If only we were all, amoral floor traders and ungrateful populists alike, suddenly called to God. If only the state could compel everyone to attend church, preferably the same one to avoid the historically obvious bloodletting entailed by competing zealotries. The market might be "remoralized." Populists might shut up about 2008, forget being right, and, singing hosannas for two and three part-time jobs to make ends meet, remember their place as "good people." He would deny it, but theocracy seems the only end point to Mr. Brooks' long-running Jeremiad.
5
Once again Brooks is teasing with me and the NYT readership but doesn't come out and state categorically that monetizing anything and everything - something that he and other conservative pundits have been in favor of for a long time - is not right or fair or, to use his word, moral.
It is high time for him to stop teasing and calling a spade a spade. Unfettered deregulation is not right, fair or moral. Privatizing social security and other publicly funded safety nets is not right or fair or moral.
C'mon Mr. Brooks, you surely can say that liberalism is more fair and moral even if imperfect.
21
As someone else commented in another column, daily meditation will shield me from the daily irritations of Trumps tweet, but is powerless against the monstrous anger that afflicts me when I read Brooks rationalizations and moral equivalences between the right wing and the progressive elements in this country.
11
"But capitalism needs to be embedded in moral norms and it needs to serve a larger social good."
Sorry, David. These things are mutually exclusive to the people who have all the money.
Bernie is right. The only thing that will save this country is socialized democracy.
Enjoy the stock markets while you can because they won't be around much longer.
9
Mr. Brooks writes: "Somehow over the past 40 years economic priorities took the top spot and obliterated everything else."
Hmmm. Somehow.
Despite his cherry-picked examples -- wasn't it Reagan that cut the top tax bracket from 70% to 35%? -- this 'prioritization' has been the modus operandi of the Republican Party's market worship and Ayn Rand-like economic policy-making since 1980.
Capital and labor together produce wealth. Politics and policy dictate how wealth is shared. Wages have been flat for 40 years and capital has done quite well over the same period. That the rich continue to get richer is the result of policies like tax cuts for 'job creators' -- i.e. the already wealthy -- by Presidents Reagan, the Bushes, Trump, and Republican-led Congresses for decades plus policies like the elimination of the Estate Tax (aka the Death Tax in Republican parlance) which have massively benefitted the rich to the detriment of everyone else.
That's how, Mr. Brooks. As the old saying goes, "Follow the money."
"How can we have a society in which it’s easier to be a good person?" Mr. Brooks asks.
One solution that might help would be to get the influence of money out of politics and make it more about ideas. Guess which party is opposed to that? I'll give you a hint: one of the men most responsible for killing the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation now heads the U.S. Senate.
74
In this piece, David Brooks again tries to project that there is a moral equivalence between liberal populists and free market libertarians in America. And, he continues to cling to the notion that American capitalism "basically worked" in recent decades. For who, or is it, whom did it work? Middle class wages have stagnated and income inequality grew. In fact, income inequality in recent years has increased more rapidly in North America, China, India and Russia than anywhere else notes the World Inequality Report 2018 produced by the World Inequality Lab, a research center based at the Paris School of Economics. Most importantly, for American voters, the difference between Western Europe and the United States in this regard is particularly striking: “While the top 1% income share was close to 10% in both regions in 1980, it rose only slightly to 12% in 2016 in Western Europe while it shot up to 20% in the United States. Meanwhile, in the United States, the bottom 50% income share decreased from more than 20% in 1980 to 13% in 2016.” Your not gonna get your "remoralization" of the American market, Mr. Brooks, without the kind of government policies advocated by progressives within the Democratic Party. Your conservative friends in the Republican Party aren't even in the ballpark with their libertarian con, epitomized by the Trumpster.
8
Yes, clearly "left-wing moral relativism" is what led to corporations becoming ruthless entities focused only on making money and not caring about society.
David Brooks seems to think that by citing Apple, he's providing evidence of this left-wing moral relativism because he thinks Apple is a bunch of hippies. Or something. Rather than a corporation as bent on making money as all the others are.
Steve Jobs was many things, but a left-wing moral relativist he was not. He once told Barack Obama that regulations made it impossible to have factories in the US. This is as conservative Republican as it gets in terms of viewpoint.
Corporations now pay CEOs hundreds of times what their impoverished workers make. This is a huge shift, and it has nothing to do with left-wing moral relativism, I promise you.
David Brooks' both-side-ism is truly like an obsession, and reaches comical proportions here. Warren, Bernie Sanders, and bizarrely enough, Tucker Carlson, are right. Even Carlson didn't try to blame it on 1960s hippies, but Brooks sees absolutely everything through that filter.
15
Regan and his greed-head cronies, were the trendsetters for the the situation you describe. Not well meaning conservatives with the best interest of America at heart. See the pulitzer prize winning book "America, What Went Wrong" or look no further than the S&L debacle, the prelude to the 2018 disaster. He eviscerated the unions and brought Milton Friedman into his policy making circle and Friedman famously said that the CEO has one job and one job only, increasing shareholder value. Not equity, not continuity and development, not the community and certainly not the employees. Then the supply side myth was pushed into the consciousness of people who sheepishly bought it and it remains, the raison d'etre for every tax cut since. Still hasn't worked. Let's put the blame where it belongs, with Republicans who were and are bought and sold by corporations and Democrats who, while less slightly so, were too weak and incompetent to put up a fight.
4
As always, Mr. Brooks blaming both sides equally. Does this song ever get tired. The conservative movement is the one that pushed the markets to abandon reason and moderation.
20
"Biologically rational decisions may not be politically possible once investment has occurred." (Science, 315:45 (2007))
I have more respect for Mr. Brooks than some here, despite the fact that he makes his living as a Republican pundit, which puts him in a morally ambiguous position. Republicans could use a good few more people who mean well and work to make it better. Unfortunately, that train has left the station. He is stuck justifying the unjustifiable.
That said, I strong recommend that he make a serious study of climate change/global warming and other environmental degradations that are threatening our hospitable habitation. It should scare the bejesus out of him.
Then he might realize that the primitive exploitation recommended by Genesis, "dominion", is a threat to said hospitable planet.
We need a sharing economy where waste is anathema. Nothing less will do!
3
Brooks, what is your fetish with the term "moral" almost to the exclusion of related qualifiers? It gets ponderous and vacuous after a bit. This is a conceptually broad and nuanced area so more diversity of terming might be useful for understanding and consensus building. Virtues and virtuous always come to my mind. Ethical. Civil. Polite. Synergistic. Responsible Holistic. Mutually beneficial. Equitable. Egalitarian Accommodating etc.
9
It was conservatives that promoted the idea that government should be run like a business and that a businessman would be a good president. This idea is at the heart of the rot that Brooks sees but does not understand. Business and the market should have been under the control of government because government is the people - looking out for them and protecting them from the ills both external and internal. Sure, it is responsible for watching how our tax dollars are spent but if that money is spent in service of many then it is well spent. Business looks through the lens of profit - there is no profit in government.
Morality comes from understanding we are all connected -that what you do to one you do to all. The right has promoted the idea that we look out for ourselves and if everyone did that then it would all be good. When the founding fathers wrote "all men are created equal" obviously that ignored financial/physical/ intellectual/ social realities but saw deeper to a core where we all are human and it is there that we as a government should strive to begin. But this society has instead looked at what makes one superior and manipulated the system to serve them.
Today the Right could care less about people. Just look at the shutdown where hundreds of thousands of people are harmed and many more connected to them. The Senate could pass a bill, have it vetoed, and then override the veto and get people back to work. But they won't because they don't care.
25
@Lucas Lynch
Yours is a far-better commentary!
Keep it up!
Is it just me or do I detect another influence in Brooks' writings? He seems to stage a defense for Trump's possible indictments.....
modern moral relativity is the defense for everything?
Remoralization of the market will take regulations, mandates, big government. If we let it run wild, we will continue to get inequality, pollution, corruption,a boom bust cycle that benefits the wealthy because they have the means to capitalize when the market busts. So, any solution should focus on the systemic dysfunctions that make the rich get richer every generation. A moral market means a neutered, tamed, boring one -- one that favors the poor and middle class in the long run. One that doesn’t colossally bust.
The argument against this is a hyper-controlled market is that it stifles innovation, no incentive to take risks. But, maybe an emerging incentive is not hoards of cash for individuals, but hoards of stable communities for cities. No excessive poverty, no excessive wealth. Roofs overhead, warmth, bellies full, meaningful work available, books for everyone, produce at the market, yoga studio where Starbucks use to be. Wishful thinking perhaps, but that is my hope. Put all our energy into cooling the planet. Focus on carbon capture, renewables. Everyone slows down, hangs out, talks, jams in a drum circle as the sun sets...
But, of coarse, then I wake up from my dream to see Trump's orange hair blowing as he shouts about walls. And I see Bezos with 137 billion. Oceans warming faster. Pompeo throwing Obama under. The drum circle jam turns to seed metal, as I navigate the traffic to Starbucks, guilty of supporting the same old market.
6
You want to re-balance our priorities, David, and re-moralize our discussions?
How about, for starters, making our political process devoid of those economic imperatives?
We all know how pernicious the effect of unlimited private and organizational funding of our election cycles is--it's impossible for our legislators to be for sane policy when their corporate and oligarch benefactors are against it. So, once again--
--Publicly funded elections, with low three digit limits on individual campaign contributions and NO corporate, organizational, church, or (yes, even) union contributions. No PAC's, 501's, or any other letter/number combinations.
--Reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine.
--Legislative repeal of the Citizens United decision.
Think these would be a good start?
26
For your next reading exercise Brooks, you might try David
Riesman's the "Lonely Crowd".
Riesman drew attention to two very different sets of mores. One crowd was inner directed. They were imbued with a set of values, which were internalized and guided them. The other group was outer directed. They pretty much accepted a moral code based on what was commonly accepted and could change with time.
The left has pretty much become the outer directed group. What is right; is what is now accepted. This clashes very much with the more inner directed rights philosophy.
I personally am more sympathetic to the right. They can take up the cause of issues where greater understanding may call into question the basis on which those values arose but on balance ... those values arose over millennia and carry a wisdom that often transcends the trendy elites epiphanies.
Having a sense of inner morality leads to a degree of humility, in that one always recognizes ones failings.
I attend Yom Kippur services at a very liberal Temple. The
Rabbi no longer leads the congregation in asking forgiveness of our sins but rather seeks credit for the good things we have done and Gods understanding for where we have 'missed the mark'.
And the thing is both groups have come to lose trust in the other, because of this schism. And trust is the glue which holds things together.
3
@Ben Ross
That institution as you describe it doesn't sound like a very serious place, one perhapsinfected with the "economics is everything dogma."
Go to an Orthodox shul, and you'll learn that life is a perpetual project of trying to realize the principle of "Justice, justice shall you pursue," and "Love your neighbor as yourself" and "What is hurtful to you do not inflict on your neighbor." This seems possibly simple, but it's a lifetime's project to understand and fulfill, both of which at best can be only approximately achieved by the best of us.
It seems safe to assume that commiting one's life to greed and money and hedonistic satisfactions, and pretending that this way of life is a form of public service falls very short of the mark. So we can assume many or most economists were leading us in the wrong direction. Likewise any pseudo-clerics who accepted those ideas and failed to challenge them adequately from the moral tradition they inherited and were supposedly educated in.
3
@Ben Ross
You could also read "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think" by George Lakoff
1
"How can we have a society in which it's easier to become a good person? " Perhaps if workers got a living wage from only one full time job so that person had enough to buy their own food, healthcare, education and perhaps save for retirement, instead of focusing every second on how to pay the bills. Oh, wait, that's socialism. Can't have that. The billionaires would not be able to trickle down on the workers then.
26
The world is much smaller than 1979. Why does Apple owe it to America? They sold as much in the EU and China as they did the USA.
The economy is now global. Why should a global company care more about communities in California when small amount of money make a much greater impact to a community in Asia?
Technology made the world more connected, but disconnected us from our own communities.
3
Election night 2016 I went back and reread Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind". Many of the flaws in higher education and the looming dangers had already been laid out clearly by him more than three decades earlier.
America needs enlightened leaders, toughened by education and/or life experience, not pampered by it; leaders able to make value judgments, not market assessments.
A return to liberal education; mandated national service for all young people. Those would be some good starting points for making America great again.
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@Eitan
Same is true of Robert Sternberg and his ideas about our education system turning out "Smart Fools."
His lecture is worth a listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn6XEYnAU1g
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The morality of the system lies in economic fairness. And that fairness is grounded in government programs subsidizing the poor and enhancing equality. We don’t help the needy because we are Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. We do it because it’s our obligation to assure that the poorest among us can still get by. Our system is not built on individual morality and the morality of our corporations. That would be a fragile foundation indeed. Mr. Brooks wants a system built on good do bees, individual and corporate. That is about as naive as it gets.
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@michjas It's not naive. It's the system that ensures that they who got, keeps.
We will have a good society once we have good government that truly represents the interest of all of it's citizens. The reason apple and other companies behave as they do, taking advantage of the social pacts that allow them to be successful in the first place, is because we allow them to. This is a failure of government.
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Good follow up to your editorial about the wolves.
Statistics indicate that approximately 3% of the population is antisocial. Of course the banking and investing professions are not immune. They are the wolves, but many, many resemble Pavel and Peter if danger presents itself.
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