David Brooks makes my brain hurt

David Brook’s column in yesterday’s New York Times really made my brain hurt.  Brooks starts off well, noting (as I have in a recent post) that the magnitude of the disaster in Haiti is in large part man-made:

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services…

So far, so good. Brooks next discusses the challenges we face in Haiti because we have very little understanding of how foreign aid can reduce poverty:

…we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty…

In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results…

I think he goes a little to far, but he is being polemical, so it’s no big deal. The real problem starts four paragraphs later when Brooks begins to contradict himself completely:

…programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement – involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance.

It’s time to take that approach abroad, too.

At this point, I became utterly confused. A few paragraphs ago he seemed to be saying that we have no idea how to reduce poverty, now he says we do. What is Brooks trying to say?  He might be saying that economists are too narrow in looking only at developing countries. Aid has worked to reduce poverty in the US, so perhaps we can learn what might work overseas by looking at successful programs in the US. Yet this contradicts his argument that we don’t know anything about how to use aid to reduce poverty. I am not being polemical. I am genuinely confused. Is the article just a cheap shot at development economists?

Maybe he thinks the program in Harlem is not aid, although I don’t know what else to call it. It is a government program to reduce poverty. True, it’s domestic aid, not foreign aid, but that’s largely beside the point. Even worse, many foreign aid projects like the one Brooks describes in Harlem already exist. Micro-credit, which he acknowledges works but is insufficient, is one type of program like this. So are programs that link access to things like subsidized food to school attendance. Participatory development is a third example.

It’s also important to point out that Brook’s argument fails on his own terms. Economists have long acknowledged the micro-macro paradox: projects may work on a local level to reduce poverty, but generally fail to show up at the national level. The program that Brooks discusses in Harlem may succeed there, but it will not show up in changes in US GDP or measures of poverty at the national level. In fact, poverty is rising in the US. To have a large and sustained impact on poverty reduction, the program needs to be replicated in thousands of places across the country and tailored to local conditions. That is not an easy task. There are lots and lots of articles that make this point.

Brooks’s thesis utterly fails. He first tells us that aid can’t do anything to reduce poverty, then he tells us it can, when it fact research shows that the programs he suggests tend not show large scale reductions in poverty. So he’s actually right in the first place, but doesn’t realize it. He either doesn’t know what he is talking about, and/or doesn’t understand he is contradicting himself. How could this get past the editorial board at the New York Times?

Finally, I have a message for the Times’s editorial board. I would love to have a column in your newspaper. I don’t know if I have anything interesting to say, but I am confident I can write 1000 words without contradicting myself, getting the facts wrong, and confusing all my readers.