Of the Faking of Brooks

With a timely note on plagiarism

It’s David F. Brooks of The New York Times, with a big proposal for the 2024 presidential campaign (“What Biden Needs to Tell Us”), but first he needs to fill us in on some of the background:

Sometimes social revolutions emerge from ordinary ideas. In the 17th and 18th centuries, thinkers like William Petty, David Hume and Adam Smith popularized a concept called “division of labor.” It’s a simple notion. If I specialize in doing what I’m good at, and you specialize in what you’re good at, and we exchange what we’ve each made, then we’ll both be more productive and better off than if we tried to be self-sufficient.

Actually, some kind of division of labor is found in all human societies, if only on a sexual basis (as in the cases where men supposedly did the hunting and women did the gathering, but that’s not the universal pattern it was once thought to be), and likely farther up the evolutionary ladder than that (as observed particularly among chimpanzees and bonobos). More complex divisions were closely examined in antiquity, by Plato, Xenophon (who was very enthusiastic about the skill of specialists), and Augustine of Hippo, and later by medieval Persians.

Petty got his start as an entrepreneurial intellectual as secretary to Thomas Hobbes and may be said to have invented scientific economics and what he called “political arithmetick”; his big contribution to the theory of division of labor began with his observation of Dutch shipbuilders and their technique of assigning the work to specialized teams for particular tasks so that a yard was able to work on a lot of ships at a time and be hugely more productive. He applied the idea to his own later work of surveying Ireland for the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, not on the basis of dividing the work up between “what I’m good at” and “what you’re good at” but rather making as much of it as possible doable by people who didn’t have any training, so he was spared the trouble of educating them and able to pay them less, if you know what I mean.

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That is the revolution in the division of labor that took place in the 17th and 18th centuries, dramatically improving industrial productivity, but radically de-skilling most of the labor force, as we call it nowadays, and preparing society for the coming revolution of steam power, where jobs would be reduced to the mindless repetition of a single gesture, hundreds of times per day.

As Adam Smith, the great economist and moral philosopher, recognized:

Smith criticised the division of labour, saying that it makes man "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become" and that it can lead to "the almost entire corruption and degeneracy of the great body of the people.…unless the government takes some pains to prevent it."

Prefiguring the thinking of Karl Marx, who used Smith’s idea as the basis for his concept of alienation:

workers become more and more specialised and work becomes repetitive, eventually leading to complete alienation from the process of production. The worker then becomes "depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine."

David F. Brooks, as you can imagine, hasn’t given a lot of thought to that aspect. After all, division of labor is a principal weapon in the arsenal of capitalism for its miracle of making something out of nothing, another thing of which Karl Marx was very aware (“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”). Like, why would you do anything but bow down before it, in gratitude and awe?

It seems banal, but division of labor was part of a constellation of ideas that liberated our civilization from the savage grip of zero-sum thinking. For millenniums before that, economic growth had been basically stagnant. Many people simply assumed that the supply of wealth was finite. If I’m going to get more of it, it will be the result of conquering you and stealing what you have. In a zero-sum mind-set, the basic logic of life is dog-eat-dog, conquer or be conquered. Property is theft. Predators win.

Division of labor, on the other hand, and the other principles that underlie modern capitalism, encouraged a positive-sum mind-set. According to this way of thinking, the good of others multiplies my own good. Steve Jobs got to enjoy a fortune, but I get to enjoy the Mac I’m now typing on and tens of thousands get to enjoy the jobs he helped create.

Why shouldn’t Steve Jobs get billions if I get a MacBook and everybody in Shenzhen gets money to send back to their children in the countryside as compensation for the fact that they only get to see their parents two out of fifty-two weeks, at the Lunar New Year?

In this kind of society, life is not about conquest and domination but regulated competition and voluntary exchange. Not about antagonism but interdependence. In this kind of marketplace, Walter Lippmann wrote in the late 1930s, “the vista was opened at the end of which men could see the possibility of the Good Society on this earth.”

And so Brooks asks Biden to campaign as a “liberal version” of Ronald Reagan, with the twin issues of law and order on the one hand (division of labor is mysteriously failing to make us all happy, particularly in places where criminals exist, so “we” have to do something about them, meaning as always that those of us as has must be ready to stomp down on those as has not), and the “spirit of enterprise” on the other, meaning we should shut up about the ferocious inequalities from which we continue to suffer, even though “The world is so full of a number of things,/ I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings!”

Sure, David, that’s bound to do it.

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But there’s something else I feel obliged to talk about, and it’s pretty unpleasant:

Brooks’s argument that we shouldn’t be complaining about the inequities of capitalism because capitalism is really a “positive-sum” game, as illustrated by the value-creating operations of increasing the division of labor, is dumb, but it’s also not original. In fact, it’s stolen, from the investor and author George Gilder, as put forward in his Wealth and Poverty (revised edition, 2012).

Gilder pulled the 1937 quotation from Lippmann’s The Good Society, including its reference to the division of labor concept—

—and Gilder associated it with the contrast between the zero-sum and positive-sum game

Brooks, starting with the division of labor question, moving on to a piece of the Lippmann quote, ending up with the reference to the zero-sum model, and failing to mention Gilder at all, constructs a pretense that he’s created it all himself, though he clearly got the whole thing from Gilder and doesn’t have anything to do with it himself. That’s plagiarism. He has stolen Gilder’s idea (again, a kind of garbagy idea, I may say, but that’s not the point).

I’m giving it so much time because the talk about plagiarism in the light of the Claudine Gay case seems to me seriously misdirected: everybody’s acting as if leaving out quotation marks in an otherwise proper citation is a big moral issue, and it isn’t. The issue is theft of ideas, which you’re not likely to find in somebody’s boring PhD dissertation. You find it all the time in Brooks’s columns, if you’re looking (I’ve got lots more, if anybody’s interested).