No, David Brooks, the poor are not the prodigal son

David Brooks has done it again. This time he wrote a column about how America’s class divisions are illustrated by the parable of the prodigal son: “We live in a divided society in which many of us in the middle- and upper-middle classes are like the older brother and many of the people who drop out of school, commit crimes and abandon their children are like the younger brother.” The point of his column was to exhort the “older brothers” not to be snobby moralists but to have compassion on the poor people who are like their “younger brothers.” Except that by making this blanket statement about why poor people are poor, Brooks becomes the snobby moralist he’s supposedly critiquing.

There’s no way to make a legitimate analogy between the story of the prodigal son and the class divide in America. When rich kids spend their inheritance money on drugs and prostitutes, they get to run back home when they hit rock bottom and crash-land at Mom and Dad’s house. I know because I was a prodigal son. I didn’t waste my inheritance money on drugs and prostitutes, but when I bottomed out in my mid-twenties due to clinical depression and poor lifestyle choices, I had a home where I could crash-land.

Poor kids don’t have inheritance money to squander, and they often don’t have a stable home to which they can flee in their mid-twenties when life caves in on them. It’s not that rich people need to see that they are the cruel, heartless elder brother in the prodigal son story; there are many generous, compassionate rich people. The problem is rather the stereotype that poor people are in poverty because they “dropped out of school, committed crimes, and abandoned their children.” And thus they need to “repent” by becoming middle-class because helping them before they “repent” would be “enabling” them. As long as that stereotype is allowed to represent poverty uncontested, our rich congresspeople will continue to do things like cut the food stamp program in order to “teach” poor people “self-sufficiency.” Poor people make bad choices about as readily as rich people do, but they’re born into impossible circumstances where there’s no grace for bad choices.

So here’s Brooks’ solution to the problem of poverty according to the logic of the parable:

The father teaches that rebinding and reordering society requires an aggressive assertion: You are accepted; you are accepted. It requires mutual confession and then a mutual turning toward some common project. Why does the father organize a feast? Because a feast is nominally about food, but, in Jewish life, it is really about membership. It reasserts your embedded role in the community project. The father’s lesson for us is that if you live in a society that is coming apart on class lines, the best remedies are oblique. They are projects that bring the elder and younger brothers together for some third goal: national service projects, infrastructure-building, strengthening a company or a congregation.

You can’t engage in a “community project” in an economy that’s built on the presupposition that “community projects” inevitably generate wasteful bureaucracies. Look at the awkwardness of David Brooks trying to make his “community project” work under the terms of his libertarian value system: “national service projects, infrastructure-building, strengthening a company or a congregation.” So in other words, he thinks that companies will be “strengthened” by hiring poor people to do “infrastructure building” or a “national service project” at a living wage for the good of society? Or that congregations will double their budgets and challenge their members to give 20% instead of 10% (actually 2.5%) so they can add a bunch of poor people to their payroll to do “national service projects” and “infrastructure building”? How likely is either of these to happen?

The reason that our society lacks a sense of collective responsibility for those who don’t have enough resources to survive is because they are seen as prodigal younger brothers who have squandered their father’s inheritance on drugs and prostitutes. So David Brooks’ illustration reinforces the problem that he’s purportedly trying to address. There are poor people who are poor because they made bad choices. There are also poor people who had stable, college-educated middle-class careers that were completely derailed by the Great Recession and never came back in the jobless recovery. There are also poor people who grew up poor and have stayed poor in an era when economic mobility is worse than it’s ever been. In 1987, economists measured income heritability (the likelihood that you would earn the same income as your parents) at 20%. By 2004, it had risen to 50-60%, and that was before the Great Recession.

The poor people I know already do work hard; what they lack is a job that actually pays enough to cover their needs. I know a military veteran who has been gainfully employed for most of her life. She never went crazy or got into drugs or anything like that; she just got laid off in the recession and couldn’t find a job because of her age, so ultimately she ended up homeless. Thankfully, a county program was able to get her a section 8 housing voucher, but what she’d really like more than anything is to have a steady job. I’m sure she would love to be hired for a “community project.” Maybe David Brooks is planning to start a non-profit that will pay poor people to do “national service projects” and “infrastructure building” since it’s not okay for the gubment to do things like that.