May 6, 2011 In a recent column, David Brooks commented on a visit to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He listened to a conference which included a representative of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and he was, for the most part, favorably impressed. That a federal department might have a clue would not come as a surprise to all, but Brooks is a conservative, so the concession is significant.
He described a program designed to provide housing for veterans which uses vouchers to provide for the housing, and observed, "Democrats seem to feel comfortable using vouchers to address housing problems but not education and health care problems." When I first read that, I thought that he might have a point, but he doesn’t, really. Vouchers are merely a method of payment. The arguments have arisen over whether proposed vouchers will provide adequate funding, and whether they serve some purpose other than payment, such as privatization. Health care — the GOP proposal for Medicare, to be specific — raises the first issue, education the second.
One question in the housing program is, apparently, whether effort should be focused on providing housing first, before addressing psychiatric, drug or alcohol problems. The current program assumes that putting a roof over people’s heads is the first priority, and that it aids in dealing with the other issues. Brooks questioned whether that was the best approach, although conceding, with perhaps a touch of sarcasm, that it "produces good homelessness data."
The big question I had was this: How large is the gap between the neatness of data on a bar chart and the messy reality on the street?
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. . . I was struck by the vast difference between the way a government sees the world — numerically and organizationally — and the gritty and unpredictable way the world sometimes looks to, say, a crime reporter or a homeless veteran himself.
If that had been offered by someone who works in the field, or by a recipient or applicant for aid, it might have force, but what does Brooks know of life on the street? I’ve just finished reading his book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, describing a social class he called bourgeois bohemians, hence "Bobos." (Those are rather quaint terms, obviously selected primarily for neologistic utility). Bobos are, in his view, the new elite; they are far removed from the streets, and so presumably is Mr. Brooks, who often referred to himself as a member of the class: " we Bobos;" "we in the educated elite;" "we . . . busy meritocrats." To make that entirely clear, and to establish the virtue of the class, he told us: "I'm a member of this class . . . . Wherever we educated elites settle, we make life more interesting, diverse, and edifying." Some time ago, I accused Mr. Brooks of being smug; little did I know how smug.
He concluded his column with this: "Amid the hot-rhetoric government wars, it was important to see the talent and commitment of real-life government workers running a successful program — and to see the limitations inherent in government planning." It is encouraging to see that a self-appointed member of the elite can find merit in a government program, but what he described are not limitations in government planning. Undoubtedly there are limitations on what any program can accomplish, but that is a rather different matter.
