Brooks goes through a truly nightmarish series of statistics about where employment now stands here. Truly horrific.
Then he says something like: Crucial question, will leaders listen to and respond to voters' messages?
My answer, of course, is: absolutely not, even if they could.
He makes a major point about how disconnected the educated class is from the working class, and he actually makes this distinction out as the major cause of our current malaise: too much time was spent on useless liberal arts education rather than vo tech, and work has been devalued by the educated class and made unsatisfying for the working class.
He even says the college sliver built a culture, economy, and political system around itself, rather than the working class.
Brooks' answer, for reform, is: Sliver leaders need to read Cass's book, in order to listen to and respond to voters' truly tragic situation.
He says sliver leaders need to pass labor market reforms that will solve the problems he and Cass describes. He says nothing about what those reforms are, but one supposes that Cass' book is filled with good ones that can be immediately put into operation.
I just want to note that passing labor market reforms sounds easy, as it rolls off Brooks' tongue.
Then, start to think about what such a term might actually imply and implicate.
A labor market is only a small aspect of a global market system of many kinds of inputs besides labor and its costs.
So, saying what Brooks says and Cass says has little to do with how the non labor aspects of the global market function.
If Krugman were called in to critique Brooks' prescriptions here, there would be very little left of Brooks when Krugman was through with him. Trust me.
Think about what I and apparently many others have said about obsolescence of global labor, Fairmont Convention 20-80. Why give people false unrealistic hopes.
At least even Bobbitt, in Shield, was candid when he described a seething global underclass with no way now to climb out, ever.
Brooks isn't even candid........................
I will put it in a little different way:
Brooks doesn't even have the decency of candour.
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