On writing for money

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” Samuel Johnson’s words have for centuries fueled a prejudice that paid writing is of higher status than the amateur equivalent. This should be challenged.

What I’m thinking of here is what Fred Hirsch called the commercialization effect. When money changes hands, he said, unspecified mutual obligations are diminished: “the more that is in the contracts, the less can be expected without them.” This has recently been echoed by Michael Sandel (pdf):

financial incentives and other market mechanisms can backfire by crowding out nonmarket norms.

When we write for non-financial reasons – the love of it, the need to say something, whatever – we ask: is this true? Does it need saying? Writing for money, however, is apt to downplay these questions in favour of: can I get this past the lawyers? Or: Is this what my readers want?” And: "does this fit the space between the adverts?"

As thinkers such as Michael Walzer and Sandel have argued, the cash nexus can change the very meaning of goods. Paid sex, for example, is not the same as a one-night stand. In the same way, paid writing isn’t the same as free writing.

Personally, I suspect that a lot of my least bad writing – not just here but also in the IC - is stuff I’d write even if I weren’t paid to. My worse efforts have come when I’ve needed to fill space. Might the same be true of others?

Here’s a thought experiment: what sort of journalism would we see if people weren’t being paid to do it? We’d probably not see journalists harassing the bereaved; or phone-hacking; or heavy pro-Brexit bias; or the sidebar of shame; or so much anti-Labour bias; or so much neglect of poverty and inequality; or the tiresome attention-grabbing of the likes of Hopkins and Young; or attempts to blame Ariana Grande or Jeremy Corbyn for terror attacks. The paid media gives disproportionate attention to the concerns of billionaire newspaper owners, to rich editors, and to posh Londoners – and therefore neglects others. The cash nexus, unsurprisingly, empowers those with cash.

This isn’t to say it is wholly baleful. It can elicit some good writing. Without it we’d have much less factual reporting – though the paid media has long ago cut back on investigative journalism. And motive crowding-out is far from complete: I don’t apply lower standards to my day job than to the blog, and I suspect that many columnists would write what they write even if they were freed from the dull compulsion of the economic. And of course Twitter reminds us that misogyny, idiocy, cliche-mongering and racism can thrive without the paid media.

We can put this another way. Take Habermas’s notion of ideal speech. Among the criteria for this are:

(i) no one capable of making a relevant contribution has been excluded, (ii) participants have equal voice, (iii) they are internally free to speak their honest opinion without deception or self-deception, and (iv) there are no sources of coercion built into the process and procedures of discourse.

The paid media thwarts the second and third of these, and quite possibly the first and fourth too. In these respects, it coarsens the quality of democracy.

You might think all this is familiar stuff. However, the commercialization effect bemoaned by Sandel and Hirsch doesn’t just warp writing in the media. It also afflicts academia. In many fields (pdf), the profession has a replicability crisis: results that appear even in the best peer-reviewed journals are more fragile than they should be. As Helen Dale has said:

Shit papers that don't replicate peer-reviewed by people with ideological blinkers is clearly a significant issue, and not just in predatory journals. Shit books that no-one will buy published as CV-stuffers are clearly a significant issue.

A big cause of this are financial incentives. As Helen says, “publish or perish” rules produce perverse incentives; they encourage p-hacking, neglect of best statistical practice (pdf) and a following of intellectual fashion.

The question I asked of journalism can thus be asked of academic writing: would this appear if it weren’t for financial incentives and career concerns? Again, I suspect that in many cases the answer is: no. When clever people do silly things, incentives are often to blame.

I’m not offering any glib solutions here. What I am doing is echoing the young Marx. Money, he wrote, has a “distorting and confounding” effect on “all human and natural qualities”:

Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy.

Of course, there are massive offsetting benefits to a market economy. But everything has a cost.

Comments

[César]

Another point: https://promarket.org/business-journalism-fails-spectacularly-holding-powerful-account/

[John Stephen Moorby]

Interesting example of writing to your audience in the FT today. Tim Harford, whose writing and comment I enjoy, dismisses Corbyn as a shambolic leader. But the blurb for his current book, Messy, reads: "In Messy, Tim Harford reveals how qualities we value more than ever - responsiveness, resilience and creativity - simply cannot be disentangled from the messy soil that produces them." It looks as if Harford is catering to two different audiences here.

[Alex]

***Here’s a thought experiment: what sort of journalism would we see if people weren’t being paid to do it? We’d probably not see journalists harassing the bereaved; or phone-hacking; or heavy pro-Brexit bias; or the sidebar of shame; or so much anti-Labour bias; or so much neglect of poverty and inequality; or the tiresome attention-grabbing of the likes of Hopkins and Young; or attempts to blame Ariana Grande or Jeremy Corbyn for terror attacks***

I am completely confident we would, and I can think of bloggers who actually have done all these things or close substitutes. I can think of bloggers who have done most of them. Between Chris and myself, we almost certainly know at least one candidate personally.

[Bonnemort]

"heavy pro-Brexit bias"

I find the FT and Economist to be particularly bad, don't you?