{"id":1549,"date":"2004-09-14T14:12:06","date_gmt":"2004-09-14T18:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2004\/09\/14\/blogging-vacation-over\/"},"modified":"2004-09-14T14:12:06","modified_gmt":"2004-09-14T18:12:06","slug":"blogging-vacation-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2004\/09\/14\/blogging-vacation-over\/","title":{"rendered":"Blogging vacation over"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

    So I took an unexpected bloggin vacation for the last couple of week,
\nbut it’s time for it to be over.  I’ll be back soon, with some
\nmore of your favorite blend of religion and politics.<\/p>\n

    If it weren’t so late, I would harp greviously on David Brooks’ column from last Friday<\/a>. 
\nThis was perhaps one of the most asinine examples of social “analysis”
\nthat I have ever seen come from Brooks’ pen.  And I generally like
\nhim, as I find much of what he has to say thoughtful and interesting
\nand informed.  “Theories” such as the following, unless he’s being
\nso subtly sarcastic that he doesn’t mean it, aren’t even worthy of the
\ntwisted anti-rational logic of a candidate’s stump speech.<\/p>\n

\n

Why have the class alignments shaken out as they have? There are a
\ncouple of theories. First there is the intellectual affiliation theory.
\nNumerate people take comfort in the false clarity that numbers imply,
\nand so also admire Bush’s speaking style. Paragraph people, meanwhile,
\nrelate to the postmodern, post-Cartesian, deconstructionist,
\nco-directional ambiguity of Kerry’s Iraq policy.<\/p>\n

I subscribe,
\nhowever, to the mondo-neo-Marxist theory of information-age class
\nconflict. According to this view, people who majored in liberal arts
\nsubjects like English and history naturally loathe people who majored
\nin econ, business and the other “hard” fields. This loathing turns
\npolitical in adult life and explains just about everything you need to
\nknow about political conflict today.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    This column, dividing the world between
\n“spreadsheet” people and “paragraph” people fundamentally
\nmisunderstands the nature of contemporary academia, business, and
\npolitics.  There are simpler explanations than Brooks’, and even
\njust one of them provide more explanatory power than Brooks’ tortured
\nscribbling.<\/p>\n

    We know from public opinion and cross-sectional
\nsurveys that as people gain more education, they tend to become more
\npolitically liberal.  You can argue about the reasons this is the
\ncase, if you like, but the empirics remain the same.  So we’d
\nexpect our most highly educated people (college professors) to be on
\naverage, more liberal.  And so we do.  CEOs have less
\neducation that professors, and we’d expect them to be less
\nliberal.  Lo, and behold, that’s what Brooks points out.  But
\ninstead of some gobbledegook about spreadsheet and paragraph people, we
\nhave a simpler explanation that explains more.  And we can do this
\nwith every example in Brooks’ article.<\/p>\n

    But Brooks’ explanation has more rhetorical zing
\nthan the better explanations.  It’s sad to see David go for flash
\nover substance, especially when it’s a fault he’s quick and insightful
\nat pointing out in political life, but that’s exactly what he
\ndoes.  The sin of spin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    So I took an unexpected bloggin vacation for the last couple of week, but it’s time for it to be over.  I’ll be back soon, with some more of your favorite blend of religion and politics.     If it weren’t so late, I would harp greviously on David Brooks’ column from last Friday.  This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-day2day"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-oZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}