…were based on the theory that the key is to improve the skills of workers. Expand early education. Make college cheaper. Invest in worker training. Above all, increase the productivity of workers so they can compete. But a growing number of populist progressives have been arguing that inequality is not mainly about education levels. They argue that trying to lift wages by improving skills is an ‘evasion.’ It’s ‘whistling past the graveyard’…

Who are these “populist progressives”?

Well, they are, among others, Lawrence H. Summers:

It is the “whistling past the graveyard” that is the flag.

If you are an insider you know that Brooks is talking about Larry. If you are an outsider, you don’t. And if you are an insider, you also know that Larry Summers is much more often classified as a “neoliberal” than a “populist progressive” in intellectual beastiaries. So something is going on here…

Brooks continues:

The real problem, some of them say, is concentrated political power…. Others say the problem is stagnation… the private economy isn’t generating jobs. Or it’s about corporate power…. People in this camp point out that inflation-adjusted wages for college grads have been flat for the past 14 years. Education apparently hasn’t lifted wages. The implication? Don’t focus on education for the bottom 99 percent. Focus on spreading wealth from the top. Don’t put human capital first. Put redistribution first…

And here I gotta say two things:

1. No quote–not from Larry, not from anybody else. The “don’t focus on education for the bottom 99%” isn’t Summers–or any other “populist progressive”. It is Brooks’s research assistants failing to find words in the record, and Brooks resorting to putting words into the mouths of others.

2. If Brooks had insisted on a quote from the author of the “whistling past the graveyard” phrase, he would have exploded his thesis sky high.

From last month:

Lawrence Summers and Ed Balls: Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity: “Many kinds of public investment–including spending on public transportation, water, power, education, and research and development–have positive social rates of return when executed well… and such investments may even pay for themselves….

…Expand educational opportunity to increase human capital and support economic mobility: Supporting early childhood education: …Evaluations of high-quality preschool programs in Boston, Massachusetts, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, showed that children gained an additional year of learning in language, reading, and math. These gains in the early years go on to positively affect everything from high school graduation rates to lifetime earnings… make the most profound difference in the lives of low-income children and children of color….

Eliminating financial barriers to higher education: As recently as 1996, the United States had the second highest share of adults who earned postsecondary education credentials and the highest share of adults with university degrees…. The United States is also showing more-pronounced downward educational mobility. Twenty-nine percent of American men and 17 percent of American women had less education than their parents, compared with the OECD average of 19 percent for men and 13 percent for women…. We should make higher education virtually free at a community college or a public four-year college so that all high school graduates and their families have no doubt that they can afford higher education….

There is a clear need to develop and expand the skills of workers who do not go to university…. Apprenticeship is good example of skills training that has worked in many advanced economies…. Switzerland, Germany, and Austria have long-established apprenticeship systems that are renowned for their high quality. A majority of young people from these three countries enter the workforce through apprenticeships, which are available across a wide range of sectors and occupations…

Does that sound like: “Don’t focus on education for the bottom 99 percent. Focus on spreading wealth from the top. Don’t put human capital first. Put redistribution first…” to you?

I thought not.

Those quotes from the Center for American Progress’s Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity are as accessible to Brooks’s research assistants as is the “whistling past the graveyard” quote, which comes from Summers’s argument that education policies have limited–not zero, limited–purchase on reducing inequality. Not limited purchase on spurring growth, mind you. Limited purchase on reducing inequality.

So then Brooks half-backtracks:

Over the past few months a stream… have moved from the human capital emphasis to the redistributionist emphasis. (It’s a matter of emphasis, not strictly either/or)…

But then re-reverses and says not that the need for redistribution is overemphasized but rather that it is “wrong”:

Unfortunately, this rising theory is wrong on substance and damaging in its effects….

And Brooks then proceeds to make a remarkable statement:

Since 2000, the real incomes of the top 1 percent have declined slightly. If you limited your view to just those years, you’d conclude that there is no inequality problem, which is clearly not true…

He is looking at the white-triangles line in this graph from Piketty and Saez–a graph he does not link to, and which he does not cite:

Brooks does not remind his readers that the year-2000 was a boom year, in which capital gains realizations boosted the incomes of the financial sector and of the superrich in general above their trend, while 2013 was not. A global warming denier might look at the white-triangles line and say that there is a sense in which the rich today have lower incomes and are less well-off than the rich of 2000. Nobody else would.

And, indeed, if Brooks had printed that graph alongside his column, he would have exploded his thesis sky high–for the trend of the income of the top 1% since 2000 has not been a slight decline but a rise.

I find it… distressing and disturbing… that Brooks refers to this graph without providing his readers with a link to it.

I find something else more disturbing: Only somebody who knew that starting in 2000 misrepresented current trends would even think to start in 2000–rather than in 2003, for the past ten years of data, or 1995 or 2001 or 2004, to compare mid-business cycle observations. Only somebody really up on the data would know that the just-released 2013 Piketty-Saez estimate is lower than the 2000 number. This is not a calculation that you would think to make and report unless you already knew that it tended to produce a distorted impression in your readers.

Makes it damned difficult to have a good faith, substantive policy dialogue.

Just saying.

Brooks continues:

The redistributionists seem to believe that modern capitalism is fundamentally broken. That growth has permanently stagnated. That productivity should no longer be the focus because it doesn’t lead to shared prosperity. But their view is biased by temporary evidence from the recession. Right now, jobs are being created, wages are showing signs of life. Those who get more skills earn more money. Today’s economy has challenges, but the traditional rules still apply. Increasing worker productivity is the key. Increasing incentives to risk and invest is essential. Shifting people into low-productivity government jobs is not the answer.

It’s clear why Clinton might want to talk redistribution. On substantive policy grounds, it would be destructive to do so. And, in the general election, voters respond to the uplifting and the unifying, not the combative and divisive.

…He ran as a figure who could overcome partisan polarization, yet he has instead presided over more of it despite accomplishing the majority of the substantive agenda he promised. Obama and his spokespeople have spent most of their administration quietly at war with the conventional wisdom in Washington over the cause of this failure…. Structural forces… rising polarization… the disintegration of restrictions on campaign finance… the news media… people select only sources that will confirm their preexisting beliefs. All of this combined makes communication with Republicans mostly hopeless…. Demographic change will eventually force Republicans to compete with Democrats for some of the same voters, reopening a national political conversation….

The original premise of Obama’s first presidential campaign was that he could reason with Republicans…. It took years for the White House to conclude that this was false, and that, in Pfeiffer’s words, ‘what drives 90 percent of stuff is not the small tactical decisions or the personal relationships but the big, macro political incentives.’ If you had to pinpoint the moment this worldview began to crystallize, it would probably be around the first debt-ceiling showdown, in 2011…. Ever since Republicans took control of the House four years ago, [Obama’s] attempts to court Republicans have mostly failed while simultaneously dividing Democratic voters. Obama’s most politically successful maneuvers, by contrast, have all been unilateral and liberal…. ‘There’s never been a time when we’ve taken progressive action and regretted it.’ This was deeply at odds with the lesson Bill Clinton and most of his aides (many of whom staffed Obama’s administration) had taken away from his presidency. But by the beginning of Obama’s second term, at least, the president seemed fully convinced…

>…a poster child for the clear articulation and active supervision standards required to determine whether an anticompetitive policy is indeed the policy of a given state, and entitled to immunity…. North Carolina’s Dental Board functioned more as a trade association with super powers granted to it by the state–apparently with an open-ended portfolio of responsibilities relating to dentistry in the state…. The dissent argues the delegation was valid….

>Whatever you think of the dissent, Justice Alito is spot on when he notes that the majority opinion is potentially quite disruptive for state medical licensing boards… long… under full sway of the regulated health professions…. We have almost no tradition of genuine state regulation of doctors, dentists, and optometrists other than the North Carolina Dental Board model…. If we aim to take it over it will not be a taking it back, but a taking it on–an invention out of whole cloth.

>…In 2006… the North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners banned salons, spas and other businesses from offering teeth-whitening services…. The FTC sued, arguing that the move constituted unfair competition…. The upshot…. Many professional boards in the U.S. will be vulnerable to antitrust suits for anticompetitive regulations…. The stakes are high, as roughly 30% of the U.S. workforce needs an occupational license….

>The changes that states must enact to immunize boards from litigation will make regulation more transparent…. Boards comprised of some licensed professionals–not a majority–and rounded out with members representing other interests such as consumers or safety experts are more likely to be immune from lawsuits…. States could also avoid antitrust lawsuits by actively supervising board activities… review the substance… not simply the procedure…. The states have another option: Do nothing…. If board regulations are designed to address real problems, as the professionals often argue, they have little to worry about…. The Supreme Court… has taken an important step toward restoring competition in these licensed professions.

…That will give congressional Republicans the only chance they may get all year to impose their preferences…. Budget resolutions can’t be filibustered… [are] a concurrent resolution…. In theory, therefore… both houses [should] adopt a Republican-preferred version of a budget resolution…. But… it’s not obvious that any budget resolution acceptable to Senate Republicans will go far enough to appease the House GOP…. This will be the GOP Congress’ best… opportunity…. If they can’t even agree on a budget, it will be the GOP itself that is to blame and damnation will likely be ahead.

…Compared to these women, we are lucky…. We are equals under the law. But the promise of equality is not equality…. Men run the world…. I recognize that [today] is a vast improvement from generations in the past…. But… women became 50% of the college graduates in this country in 1981, 30 years ago. Thirty years is plenty of time for those graduates to have gotten to the top of their industries, but we are nowhere close to 50% of the jobs at the top. That means that when the big decisions are made, the decisions that affect all of our worlds, we do not have an equal voice at that table. So today, we turn to you. You are the promise for a more equal world…. Only when we get real equality in our governments, in our businesses, in our companies and our universities, will we start to solve… gender equality. We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored…

…But I say, oh yeah? I’ll see your Dick Morris (who cares, really?) and raise you a… Paul Ryan: ‘Thirty Years Later, a Return to Stagflation.’ That was, if you check the date, six years ago. But it’s worth remembering that not all prominent Republicans were predicting 70s-style stagflation; some of them were predicting Weimar-style hyperinflation instead…

…and his dithering endorsement of chaos in the region will send oil and gasoline prices skyrocketing, triggering a massive bout of stagflation… [which] will cripple the American economy for years to come. This is Obama’s true legacy…. $4-per-gallon gas, soon to go up to $5 or $6!  And the fuel-price increases will take their place alongside food-price rises. Food prices for corn, soybeans, wheat and other basic crops have almost doubled in the past year. (The Consumer Price Index deliberately understates fuel and food inflation in its formula to avoid triggering cost-of-living adjustment increases in private pay and government programs.)

Finally, he has encouraged the Federal Reserve Board to almost triple the money supply, over $1 trillion of it based on the purchase of worthless mortgage-backed securities…. Reduced confidence in the dollar (at home and abroad) and the rises in fuel and food prices will force up prices as costs push them higher.

Already, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has pressed for the replacement of the dollar as an international currency by ‘drawing rights’ printed by the IMF…. U.S. inflation can only fan that movement…. The Fed has got to stop printing money soon–lest it become wallpaper–interest rates, too, will rise…. But the economy cannot afford to pay these higher prices…. Political pundits have wondered if the economy would improve, helping Obama’s reelection chances. It now appears that the exact opposite is likely and that his reelection chances will be washed away by a massive flood of inflation as a consequence of his misguided policies.

Obama will doubtless blame oil companies and speculators… but his role… is apparent enough. He put the demand of the Egyptian people for political change ahead of America’s need for financial stability…

…The package threatens a return to the kind of stagflation last seen in the 1970s…. The headline price tag of $787 billion doesn’t include… [what will really be] as much as $2 trillion more. Add in the billions that are being used to prop up the financial system, and when the dust settles on 2009, with millions of baby boomers retiring and entitlement spending exploding, taxpayers will face a financial nightmare…. Advocates of borrow-and-spend… argue that for the United States, borrowing is uniquely cheap. But what happens when there is an excess supply of bonds on the worldwide markets?… Our fears will turn to inflation….

How high will interest rates rise? And more fundamentally, who will have the money to buy our bonds?… Pressure to ‘monetize’ our debt…. In fact, the Fed is already suggesting that it will buy long-term Treasury securities in order to lower borrowing costs…. Inflation is a destroyer of savings, a killer of wealth, a crusher of confidence…. Combine high inflation and high unemployment and you have stagflation…. Soon we may again find ourselves watching a rising ‘misery index’ of inflation and unemployment together…. Keynesian stimuli based on borrowing and spending have not worked and will not work…. Marginal cuts in tax rates do. We also must lower our job-killing corporate income tax rate…. We should also re-establish the sound dollar. For the past decade, the Federal Reserve has manipulated interest rates and vastly over-expanded the money supply…. Finally, we should tackle the entitlement crisis…. Then our credit will improve, the cost of necessary borrowing will drop, and we can stave off stagflation.

…amount together to a new history of the 20th century: the American century, which according to Tooze began not in 1945 but in 1916…. Yet Tooze’s perspective is anything but narrowly American….

Tooze’s portrait of Woodrow Wilson is one of the most arresting novelties of his book. His Wilson is no dreamy idealist. The president’s animating idea was an American exceptionalism of a now-familiar but then-startling kind…. Rather than join the struggle of imperial rivalries, the United States could use its emerging power to suppress those rivalries altogether…. What went wrong?…

Tooze writes…

the failure of the United States to cooperate with the efforts of the French, British, Germans and the Japanese [leaders of the early 1920s] to stabilize a viable world economy and to establish new institutions of collective security….

Peter Heather, the great British historian of Late Antiquity, explains human catastrophes with a saying of his father’s, a mining engineer:

If man accumulates enough combustible material, God will provide the spark

So it happened in 1929. The Deluge that had inundated the rest of the developed world roared back upon the United States. The Great Depression overturned parliamentary governments throughout Europe and the Americas….

In seeking to explain the urgency of Hitler’s aggression, historians have underestimated his acute awareness of the threat posed to Germany, along with the rest of the European powers, by the emergence of the United States as the dominant global superpower

Tooze writes…. [Hitler] dreamed of conquering Poland, Ukraine, and Russia as a means of gaining the resources to match those of the United States. The vast landscape in between Berlin and Moscow would become Germany’s equivalent of the American west, filled with German homesteaders living comfortably on land and labor appropriated from conquered peoples—a nightmare parody of the American experience with which to challenge American power.

Could this vision have ever been realized? Tooze argues in The Wages of Destruction that Germany had already missed its chance:

In 1870… the populationsUnited States and Germany was roughly equal…. Just before the outbreak of World War I the American economy… [was] roughly twice the size of that of Imperial Germany. By 1943… almost four times….

Germany was a weaker and poorer country in 1939 than it had been in 1914. Compared with Britain, let alone the United States, it lacked the basic elements of modernity… just 486,000 automobiles in Germany in 1932…. Yet this backward land, with an income per capita comparable to contemporary “South Africa, Iran and Tunisia,” wagered on a second world war even more audacious than the first.

The reckless desperation of Hitler’s war provides context for the horrific crimes of his regime. Hitler’s empire could not feed itself, so his invasion plan for the Soviet Union contemplated the death by starvation of 20 to 30 million Soviet urban dwellers after the invaders stole all foodstuffs….

On paper, the Nazi empire of 1942 represented a substantial economic bloc. But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy…. The Hitlerian vision of a united German-led Eurasia equaling the Anglo-American bloc proved a crazed and genocidal fantasy. Tooze’s story ends where our modern era starts…. Yet nothing lasts forever….

America’s… unique economic predominance… is now coming to an end as China does what the Soviet Union and Imperial Germany never could…. When it does, the fundamental basis of world-power politics over the past 100 years will have been removed. Just how big and dangerous a change that will be is the deepest theme of Adam Tooze’s profound and brilliant grand narrative.