The unbearable liteness of David Brooks

Sasha Issenberg recently wrote an article in which he tried to fact-check an old article by David Brooks. Brooks wrote an article with a number of verifiable claims about Republican vs. Democratic areas, and specifically about his visit to Pennsylvania’s Franklin County. Issenberg found a number of factual errors; when confronted with them, Brooks explained that he was often joking, and that the main thrust of the piece (lower-middle-class communities are different from upper-middle-class communities) was accurate.

David Brooks wrote a piece in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine called “Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopias” that won’t be so easily tripped up. It isn’t because he’s done the extensive research and hard work to back up his arguments. Rather, it’s because the article is so breezy and rootless, any fact checker who was assigned to this piece would be finished by noon.

Brooks’ basic thesis is that the suburbs are not dull and homogenous. Rather, they are strongly varied communities with distinct characters, as people build suburban communities around people who share similar interests. The centerpiece of the article is a long section where Brooks lovingly describes suburban/ exurban communities of granola-types, upscale bobos with German luxury cars, immigrants, obsessive-compulsive golfers, etc. We are treated to a long list of consumer goods that define each area. This may or may not be right, but it certainly sounds plausible.

Brooks isn’t going to have some smarty-pants out of j-school nitpicking this article. How could they? By my count, there are only seventeen sentences with specific, verifiable facts. In addition, there are six quotations from other authors. The article is about 4000 words. That’s a very low ratio of facts to words for a journalistic article. (Readers may argue with my choices of verifiable facts in the comments.)

And here’s the kicker: none of his facts support his conclusions. We learn that both population and jobs are growing faster in the suburbs than in metropolitan areas. We learn that a lot of people in America were born outside the United States, and we learn that Americans work longer hours, change jobs more often, and relocate more often than Europeans. Finally, we learn that a number of historians and writers think that Americans pursue their dreams.

We do not learn anything that would back up the central conceit of the piece. What are the names of some real-life crunchy/ immigrant/ golf suburbs? What’s the percentage of nonwhites in the suburbs? What suburban communities have sizeable numbers of both Nigerians and Mexicans? Are sales of German luxury cars actually concentrated in certain wealthy communities and not in others? Has he actually seen a left-wing suburb with kids “who tend to have names like Milo and Mandela”? Where? Some of these statements are obviously exaggerations or jokes. But shouldn’t he have something to stand on? A quote from an academic, a census finding, even a personal anecdote… shouldn’t there be something that can be verified?

I repeat that Brooks’ thesis sounds plausible. But having read it carefully, I can’t come up with an answer to the question “How do you know?” This is not journalism, and it’s not sociology. It’s stand-up comedy, and the New York Times is paying too much for it.

POSTSCRIPT: By my count, there are seventeen specific, verifiable facts in this article. I’m not counting general statements like “Many of us still live with the suburban stereotypes laid down by the first wave of suburban critics — that the suburbs are dull, white-bread kind of places where Ozzie and Harriet families go to raise their kids.” You could support a statement like that, but I don’t know how you would verify it:

1. Americans continue to move from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West
2. For example, the population of metropolitan Pittsburgh has declined by 8 percent since 1980, but as people spread out, the amount of developed land in the Pittsburgh area increased by nearly 43 percent.
3. The population of Atlanta increased by 22,000 during the 90’s, but the expanding suburbs grew by 2.1 million.
4. Jobs used to be concentrated in downtowns.
5. But the suburbs now account for more rental office space than the cities in most of the major metro areas of the country except Chicago and New York.
6. In the Bay Area in California, suburban Santa Clara County alone has five times as many of the region’s larger public companies as San Francisco.
7. Ninety percent of the office space built in America by the end of the 1990’s was built in suburbia, much of it in far-flung office parks stretched along the Interstates.
8. Mesa, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix, now has a larger population than Minneapolis, St. Louis or Cincinnati.
9. When the New Jersey Devils won the Stanley Cup, they had their victory parade in a parking lot; no downtown street is central to the team’s fans.
10. One out of every nine people in America was born in a foreign country.
11. No lifestyle magazine is geared to the people who live in these immigrant-heavy wholesale warehouse zones.
12. The average American works 350 hours a year — nearly 10 weeks — more than the average Western European.
13. Americans switch jobs more frequently than people from other nations.
14. The average job tenure in the U.S. is 6.8 years, compared with more than a decade in France, Germany and Japan.
15. In 2002, about 14.2 percent of Americans relocated.
16. Compare that with the 4 percent of Dutch and Germans and the 8 percent of Britons who move in a typical year.
17. According to one survey, only slightly more than a quarter of American teenagers expect to live in their hometowns as adults.

Six quotations or direct references:

18. Robert Lang, a demographer at Virginia Tech, compares these new sprawling exurbs to the dark matter in the universe: stuff that is very hard to define but somehow accounts for more mass than all the planets, stars and moons put together.
19. Albert Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge
20. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that those who ”complain of the flatness of American life have no perception of its destiny. They are not Americans.” They don’t see that ”here is man in the garden of Eden; here, the Genesis and the Exodus.
21. The historian Sacvan Bercovitch has observed that the United States is the example par excellence of a nation formed by collective fantasy.
22. Francis Parkman, the great 19th-century historian, wrote of his youthful self, ”His thoughts were always in the forest, whose features possessed his waking and sleeping dreams, filling him with vague cravings impossible to satisfy.”
23. There’s a James Fenimore Cooper novel called ”The Pioneers,” in which a developer takes his cousin on a tour of the city he is building. He describes the broad streets, the rows of houses. But all she sees is a barren forest. He’s astonished she can’t see it, so real is it in his mind already.