TEMPERING SCHOLARSHIP WITH OPPORTUNISM?

Some years ago, Elizabeth "Fauxahontas" Warren, in collaboration with her daughter, wrote a book that might have been a way of coping with their mid-life crises, or perhaps it was serious social science.

Here is the review of the underwhelming conclusion of The Two Income Trap, complete with a link to the promising beginning; and, as I'm such a link-slut, here are your opportunities to read the details and compare prices, both of which have the potential to bring me even more readers.

Now, though, she wants to be this cycle's hectoring schoolmarm running for president, and both David Brooks and Ben Shapiro have caught her disowning her book.

Here's Mr Brooks.

She has made sure that her policy views conform to progressive orthodoxy. This is an important transformation for Warren. When she emerged on the public stage she was a completely heterodox thinker, who deviated from the liberal mainstream with abandon.
br>Warren’s breakthrough moment was a 2003 book called “The Two- Income Trap,” which she wrote with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi. That book centers on an astonishing statistic. In 1981, about 69,000 women filed for bankruptcy. By 1999 that figured had jumped to nearly 500,000. This was happening despite the fact that women’s wages were rising rapidly.

The conventional view at the time was that Americans went bankrupt because they spent too much on fancy cars, vacations and baubles. Warren and Tyagi exploded that myth. Instead they pointed to something more paradoxical. The surge of women into the work force had made many women’s economic situation worse.

Many women entered the labor force to give their family more financial security. But an ironic thing happened. All the new dual-income families started bidding up the price of housing in neighborhoods with good schools. They started bidding up the price of day care and college tuition. Two-income families found they had less economic security, not more. “Even as millions of mothers marched into the work force, savings declined,” Warren and Tyagi wrote. This is the two-income trap. And the results were especially devastating for single-income families and single mothers who had to compete in the hyped-up, dual-earner world.

Warren did not argue that women should leave the labor force. Instead, she favored helping parents by providing them with school vouchers and school choice. “Fully funded vouchers would relieve parents from the terrible choice of leaving their kids in lousy schools or bankrupting themselves to escape those schools,” Warren and Tyagi wrote.

"Bidding up the price." If only we had a way of understanding why that follows, and why attempting to supply the services with taxes and transfers is doomed to fail.  At The Federalist, Chrissy Clark takes a first cut at detailing the failure.

The solution to the “Two-Income Trap” seems simple: to help parents save money, allow them to keep more of their own money.

“They have little money left to build their own safety nets, and government policies tax most of their efforts to provide for themselves,” Warren writes with her daughter on page 70.

How did we get from a Warren who inadvertently highlights how big government ruins the nuclear family to the 2020 Warren who wants to raise taxes to create Medicare for All programs, bail out student debt, and push an even more progressive tax system — a burden so high it must inevitably fall on the working class she writes about?

Because when one is running for president as a Democrat one pretends that the rich can be soaked for the taxes?

Mr Shapiro is surprised to discover laws of conservation in economics as well.

The book posits that women entered the workforce figuring that by doing so, they could have double household income. But so many women entered the workforce that they actually inflated prices for basic goods like housing, thus driving debt skyward and leading to bankruptcies for two-income families. The book argued that families with one income might actually be better off, since families with two incomes spent nearly the full combined income and then fell behind if one spouse lost a job. Families with one income, by contrast, spent to the limit for one income, and if a spouse was fired, the unemployed spouse would then look for work to replace that single income.

The political economy of the homemaking spouse, usually Mom, seeking some sort of work when Dad got laid off was onerous in its own way, which is one reason women of the American High sought paid work and careers of their own.

Political economy, however, is more difficult to reduce to sound-bites than political campaigning.  Mr Brooks accordingly grouses that the revised edition of the Warren family book is a clunker.

The original book described a complex world in which people navigate trade-offs and unintended consequences often happen. The new introduction describes a comic book world, in which everything bad can be blamed on greedy bankers.

It's unlikely, though, that Mr Brooks, a Sunday show regular, will suggest that the role of national politics in shaping peoples' lives be diminished.