Behind the Times

Yes, I admit it, I did not read this op-ed article in the NYTimes until today. I am certain most regard it as a dated thing of the past (it is from the week-end), but in case you, like me, are behind in every aspect of life at the moment, you may have missed the Brooks-ian analysis of who is voting D versus R this year. What is neat about reading with a delay is that you can immediately click onto responses (full text here) to the article. I am including fragments of the Brooks piece and snippets from the four letters published a few days later. Emphases are my own.

From Brooks:

There are two sorts of people in the information-age elite, spreadsheet people and paragraph people. Spreadsheet people work with numbers, wear loafers and support Republicans. Paragraph people work with prose, don't shine their shoes as often as they should and back Democrats.

C.E.O.'s are classic spreadsheet people. According to a sample gathered by PoliticalMoneyLine in July, the number of C.E.O.'s donating funds to Bush's campaign is five times the number donating to Kerry's.

Professors, on the other hand, are classic paragraph people and lean Democratic. Eleven academics gave to the Kerry campaign for every 1 who gave to Bush's. Actors like paragraphs, too, albeit short ones. Almost 18 actors gave to Kerry for every 1 who gave to Bush. For self-described authors, the ratio was about 36 to 1. Among journalists, there were 93 Kerry donors for every Bush donor. For librarians, who must like Faulknerian, sprawling paragraphs, the ratio of Kerry to Bush donations was a whopping 223 to 1.

… Accountants, whose relationship with numbers verges on the erotic, are now heavily Republican. Back in the early 1990's, accountants gave mostly to Democrats, but now they give twice as much to the party of Lincoln.

…[as for academics:] University of California employees make up the single biggest block of Kerry donors …All but 1 percent of the campaign donations made by employees of William & Mary College went to Democrats. In the Harvard crowd, Democrats got 96 percent of the dollars. At M.I.T., it was 94 percent. Yale is a beacon of freethinking by comparison; 8 percent of its employee donations went to Republicans.

Readers’ comments:

[from Mass:] … It seems to me that the statistics show a correlation between education and political support regardless of numeracy or literacy. The fact that corporate chief executives and accountants are more likely to support George Bush is consistent with this observation: they are probably best educated that a third of his tax cuts go to the richest 1 percent.

[from a Yale astronomy prof:]… David Brooks classifies professors as "paragraph people." But even here at Yale, an institution known for its focus on humanities and arts, the majority of the faculty are scientists, medical doctors or involved with economics or business.

Our non-teaching duties involve fund-raising, personnel management and gigabytes of data, not unlike other "spreadsheet people."

Why, then, is the professoriate so united behind John Kerry (far more so than we were for previous Democratic candidates)?

Perhaps because teaching and research require open-mindedness, reasoning from facts rather than from ideology, nuanced interpretation of complex situations, and the ability to change one's mind - all traits that the Bush team has displayed less of than any administration in my lifetime.

[from a sociology prof and a management consultant:] While "spreadsheet people'' may be Republicans by and large, George W. Bush is not a spreadsheet person; his fiscal policy cannot withstand a quantitative analysis.

Nor is he a paragraph person - one could not find the prose to justify his conflation of Iraq with the war on terror. So what is President Bush?

David Brooks's framework leaves out an important group, what we label the PowerPoint or bullet-point people.

Bullet-point people traffic in the meaningless business-speak of the management consultant, language that eschews equally the nuance and hard numbers of reality...

[from Atlanta:] ...Academia is full of very smart people earning very little money relative to what they could earn. They are curious people, dedicated to pursuing the truth and teaching others.
Business is full of very smart people whose sole responsibility is to make money, for stockholders and themselves. The first group supports Democrats. The second group supports Republicans. Draw your own conclusion.