Now With Charts

Brendan Nyhan gears up for battle with David Brooks' anti-neo-populism and he's backed up with a whole bunch of charts.

This is a reminder, I think, of why we should look forward to the day when the op-ed column is a dead format and everyone just blogs. Brooks' original column would, obviously, have been better if it -- like Nyhan's reply -- had come with links to data and charts. What's more, it'd be good if we could expect Brooks to reply to the sort of criticisms he's getting from Nyhan, Dean Baker, and others. Maybe he has something fascinating to say on his own behalf. But the way the columnizing world works, there's almost no chance he'll address his next column to trying to rebut the critics of this one. But a back-and-forth debate on this subject with links and charts and data would be much more interesting than what we're going to get instead where liberals decide Brooks is a liar and Brooks remains convinced that liberals are crazy.