David Brooks’ new column is a little surreal. Lamenting the sorry state of personal and public finance in this country, Brooks pines for a time when our “country’s cultural monitors” were more interested in guiding Americans’ economic behavior than in fighting about prayer in the schools. Why “cultural monitors” should be guiding Americans’ economic behavior is not totally clear, but the conflation between the cultural and the economic pervades the piece: if we do need, as Brooks says, a “moral revival,” I’m not sure it should be aiming at a bump in the savings rate. I’m not really sure what an “economic value” is.
He’s not wrong about where we stand and that it needs fixing; I’m just saying. There’s a way to talk about these things, and I don’t like the implication that financial discipline is only an acceptable conservative issue if it’s about values. Moral decline is not the only sort of decline this country faces.
Update— You’ll never believe it. Krugman goes with “it’s not moral decay, it’s Republicans.“
a.j.m.
