Complexity, & BBC bias

We heard yesterday a neat example of BBC’s ideology. On Broadcasting House, Paddy O’Connell asked people about the “personality of the market”:

It’s an angry toddler, a fickle teenager, an ex-lover you can’t shake off, your master, your slave…an attention-seeking drama queen (21'03" in)

The horrible mixedness of this metaphor should draw attention to a big problem. The stock market is NOT like a person. Share price moves are the product of complex emergent processes which cannot simply be reduced to individual behaviour. Sometimes, stupid investors can generate a rational market, and sometimes rational investors can generate a stupid market: this is the message of Schleifer and Mendel’s paper, Chasing Noise.

What’s true of the stock market might be true of goods markets too. Alan Kirman’s study of the Ancona fish market has shown that there’s a negative relationship between price and quantity bought only in aggregate data, and not for individual buyers. The downward-sloping demand curve is, then, an emergent phenomenon.

The thing about complex emergent processes is that they are hard to understand – there’s a complexity brake – and even harder to forecast. This might explain why economists have generally failed to predict recessions in a timely manner.

This is why I say the BBC is guilty of an ideological bias. In not even considering the question of emergence, and instead pretending that markets are like people, it is assuming that complex social phenomena – not just markets but perhaps political behaviour too - are understandable and predictable.

This is no mere innocent error. If markets are like toddlers or teenagers, it’s possible to understand and predict their behaviour and so Very Serious People can claim to possess expertise and hence a legitimate right to power and influence in politics and business. If, however, they are instead complex processes they might not be predictable – except in the sense that we might know the probability distribution of possible outcomes – then those VSPs are in fact mere empty suits.

As Alasdair MacIntyre wrote:

Do we now possess that set of law-like generalizations governing social behaviour of the possession of which Diderot and Condorcet dreamed? Are our bureaucratic rulers thereby justified or not? It has been insufficiently remarked that how we ought to answer the question of the moral and political legitimacy of the characteristically dominant institutions of modernity turn on how we decide an issue in the philosophy of the social sciences. (After Virtue, p 87)

In unthinkingly denying the very possibility of complexity, the BBC is therefore helping to shore up the power and prestige of the ruling class. That’s a profoundly politically biased position.

You might object that I’m reading too much into what was just a jokey little piece. I’m not sure. Ideology reveals itself not just in our deliberate statements, but also in what we do unthinkingly. And it seems that the BBC’s unthinking position is one of excessive deference to false experts.

Comments

[Dave Timoney]

You could take this further (go on, let's) and note that the BBC's choice of the personality trope reveals not only a deference to the VSPs, but a profoundly monarchical bent. Their hosting of SPOTY (and anxiety over Tyson Fury) is of a piece with their indulgence of the Royal Family and their "courtier" approach to political coverage.

[redpesto]

Frankly, that 'personality of the market' line sounds like pure Chris Morris (see Collaterlie Sisters and the 'Currency Kidney')

[Peter Smith]

Surely you fall into the same trap by assigning the BBC one personality. Sure there is a culture, but underneath it is a collection of thousands of independent minds. No one person could approve or direct every word broadcast or guest chosen, so you can find examples of whatever biases you would like to project on it, just as you could the NHS or Politicians or Estate Agents.

[Adrian D.]

I can find nothing to disagree with in your post - with the BBC 'flagship' Today programme set up almost perfectly to entrench this. Much of the first half hour of any day is taken up with a series of bods from Sumsuch Asset Management making their sage predictions and framing everything from tax to industrial relations in their neoliberal context.

As an aside this follows another bastion of BBC ideological/institutional bias - Farming Today whose concentration on smaller, mostly family owned, enterprises gives a wholly misleading impression of the way most of our food is produced these days.

[Churm Rincewind]

I can't quite see that one passing remark in one Radio Four programme amounts to any sort of evidence that the BBC is "helping to shore up the power and prestige of the ruling class" and that "that’s a profoundly politically biased position".

The BBC has always made the point that it aims to show no political bias ASSESSED ACROSS THE RANGE OF ITS OUTPUT.

A single remark is no proof of bias, and to argue otherwise is paranoid in the extreme.

[TickyW]

@Churm

The BBC fails even in that modest aim.

[Churm Rincewind]

@TickyW

And your evidence for that assertion would be - what?

[TickyW]

@Churm

It's the BBC making the assertion of being unbiased accross its output range. You should really ask the BBC for evidence to support that assertion.

In the meantme, I can indicate to you why I believe the BBC fails in its claim to be unbiassed.

Right wing commentators / Promoters of bourgouise values
1. Nick Robinson;
2. John Pienaar;
3. John Humphries;
4. Martha Kearney;
5. The Andrew Marr Show,
6. The Archers (promoting a twee middle class ideal)

Left wing commentators.
1. Er;
2. That's it

[Tonybirte]

@Churm

This.

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/breadth_opinion/content_analysis.pdf