Stumbling and Mumbling

Being a news avoider

All professionals are vulnerable to professional deformation - a tendency, often exacerbated by groupthink, to fail to see that their training and experience has inculcated into them an incomplete and biased view of the world. So it is, I fear, with Nick Robinson's claim that the Today programme's ratings are falling because of “news avoiders” who no longer want to face the world’s problems.

What this omits is that many of us who want to face the world's problems are unhappy with the BBC's coverage thereof. This isn't merely because of partisan bias; or because of individual errors and inaccuracies; or because the corporation is impartial between truth and lies; or because it over-indulges ignorant, evasive or dishonest politicians; or because it is insufficiently attentive to who sets the news agenda.

It's also because of another problem.

For years, much of the public has been horribly wrong about basic facts about society. Which alerts us to the likelihood that the media does not properly inform us. Such mistakes are worldwide, so the problem is much bigger than the UK media.

This happens because even the best journalism provides only a partial description of the world. Even when the news is the truth, it is not the whole truth.

To see my point, let's start with the sad story in the summer that the head-teacher Ruth Perry had taken her life after Ofsted had downgraded her school.

This highlights two things about the news. One is its focus on human interest stories to the neglect of less salient or eyeball-grabbing facts. Teachers have for years been angered, alienated and stressed out by Ofsted, but it took a suicide to drive this onto the news agenda. The other is that the story soon disappeared, long before anyone had satisfactorily answered the question of how best to regulate and improve our schools. News inherently has a short attention span and journalists are looking for the next new story, not the old one. This lack of attention span distorts politics. The government recently had a "health week" to get the media talking about healthcare in which everybody forgot that a week of chat is never going to solve the system's problems. What we had was airtime being filled to suit the government's agenda and to replace silence.

Journalists' love of human interest stories means that something gets deprioritized. That something is often statistics, which are much drier than anecdotes. My favourite example of this statistical illiteracy came from Jeremy Vine who, after a cycling accident, said: "This was the first penny farthing injury the hospital staff could remember seeing, which suggests they are normally extremely safe to ride.” Thus giving us a perfect example of base rate neglect.

His error is however not an isolated one. The BBC Trust has found (pdf) that "the BBC sometimes falls short in its reporting of statistics." We see this in (for example) reporting of attacks by XL Bully dogs. How common are these? How dangerous are such dogs? Reports of individual instances are dramatic and eye-catching but not informative. Yes, journalists' historic blindspot about statistics is being corrected by the rise of data journalism. But if we want an accurate picture of society, all journalism must be data journalism.

Which brings us to another problem. The news reports events rather than trends. It thus foregrounds politicians' words and deeds and neglects slow-moving developments such as our almost 20 years of stagnating productivity and real wages and the associated decline in real interest rates. The upshot is that, as Phil says, reporting "caresse[s] the surface of politics" by neglecting the socio-economic forces that shape it. Laura Kuenssberg, for example, said back in 2020 that the nation's credit card was "maxxed out". She was utterly wrong, because she was overly heedful of politicians' talk whilst ignoring the long-term slump in government borrowing costs. Similarly, the BBC was caught off-guard by the rise of Corbynism because it paid too much attention to MPs who disliked him and not enough to the countless young graduates who felt alienated from the system; an estate agent's window told us more about the source of Corbyn's popularity than most news reports. And it failed to see Brexit and the rise of anti-"woke" sentiments because it failed to appreciate that economic stagnation breeds both discontent and illiberalism.

Many social developments - economic stagnation, the decline in crime, fall in global poverty and so on - are emergent. They are not the product of any single individual's actions, so the journalists' emphasis on human interest causes them to neglect them and the knee-jerk question of "who's the hero or villain?" is the wrong one to ask.

This focus on events rather than trends means that journalism often produces expiring information - things that are briefly interesting but soon irrelevant: the minutiae of the Brexit negotiations, gossip about cabinet ministers' careers or day-to-day moves in share prices and so on. Which means that wider, generally applicable lessons aren't learnt.

To see what I mean, take just two cases from this week's news. One is that the police are switching off their bodycams or deleting footage from them. In response to this Jim Colwell, Acting Chief Constable of Devon & Cornwall Police, "says the vast majority of body-worn video shows good policing." This should be a good base for a discussion of selection bias. But it's not. Equally, reporting of HS2 should be a starting point for a discussion of the sunk cost fallacy. But it's not.

In both cases, viewers could learn useful lessons they could apply in everyday lives. But the news does not provide this. Instead, what we get are isolated facts presented with little context (how dishonest or not are the police? what if any errors and biases are made in decisions about infrastructure?) or inference. This doesn't happen because of bad journalism, but because of the nature of what news is.

And that's my point. Yes, we all complain, rightly, about the BBC's flaws. Even if these defects could be cured, however, the news would not properly inform us. And I'm not sure they could be wholly cured because they perhaps arise in part from the nature of journalism itself. Journalists' lack of grounding in statistics and social science makes them vulnerable to being overly influenced by fluent charlatans, especially if all they want is a soundbite; if you think this is confined to political reporting, you've not seen financial journalism.

This is an old problem. When I was growing up I saw almost every night news reports of murders in Northern Ireland by protestants, loyalists, Catholics or republicans. "What is all this about?" I wondered. But the news never told me; for that, I needed history and sociology books. As long ago as 1975 John Birt criticized journalists' "bias against understanding". Like many of us, he was better at diagnosing than curing. But the accusation he made still holds good now. It's quite reasonable, therefore, for people who are curious about the world to avoid the news.

Against politics

On my first morning of retirement I switched from the Today programme to Radio 3 and these days I never watch any politics or current affairs programmes on TV; all I know of them are the clips I see on Twitter. I'm not interested in politics*.

This seems a banal statement; millions of people share my lack of interest.

But I'm perhaps unusual among these. I was sufficiently interested in politics to want to study it at university; I was an active member of a political party for years; and I write what many of you consider a political blog.

What's more, my reasons for a lack of interest are not the usual ones. I don't think politicans are "all in it for themselves": I suspect they are no more dishonest or money-motivated than the rest of us would be in a comparable environment. And, despite Starmer's efforts, I don't think "they're all the same" ; there are important differences between the Tories and Labour for example on net zero or workers' rights.

Instead, one reason for my lack of interest is that politicians and those who report on politics are not much interested in what interests me, namely the social sciences. As Phil has pointed out, there's excessive interest in the biographies of politicians to the neglect of emergent social trends such as the rise of immaterial labour which has contributed to "wokeism"; the economic stagnation that's led to illiberal reaction or the rise of an unpropertied graduate cohort. Such neglect has caused the political class to be systematically surprised by important developments such as Brexit, Corbynism or the toxicity of Boris Johnson.

One manifestation of this ignorance is the attitude to public opinion. Both main parties believe the "customer is king" (except, obviously, when the public want nationalization or wealth taxes) wherein their only objective is to discover what opinion is. This forgets that opinion can be multi-faceted, mutable by the economic environment, media or by political activity, and a poor guide to people's well-being.

Another manifestation is the inability to see what politics even is. We need politics because there are sometimes (often) collective action problems wherein what is rational for each individual is often bad for everybody - the sort of problems that cause public goods and infrastructure to be under-supplied and public bads such as pollution and carbon emissions to be over-supplied. The government, however, has often been unaware of this - for example when Cameron urged drivers to fill up on petrol in advance of a fuel drivers' strike; or in their belief that whilst one benefit claimant might be able to find work not all will be able to.

Perhaps the costliest example, though, was Osborne's austerity which failed because of the well-known (to us at least) paradox of thrift - that if we all try to save the result is a drop in incomes and hence lower savings.

Such economic illiteracy was however not confined to then. Having tightened policy when they should have loosened it in 2010 the Tories loosened it when they should have tightened it in 2022. This is neither Keynesian nor Friedmanite but Morecombeite - playing the right notes but not necessarily in the right order.

But there are other examples. We also see it in the idea that privatization is a magic money tree, ignoring the fact that if we can't afford state pensions and healthcare then we can't afford private ones either. We see it too in much of climate policy where, as Eric Lonergan has noted, politicians use the wrong chapter of the textbook in imposing taxes and restrictions on carbon emissions rather than encouraging the use of substitutes to carbon technologies. And we also see it in utility policy, where the importance of regulatory capture is largely ignored.

The sound of political discourse is as offensive to any economist as would be an out-of-tune orchestra to a sensitive musician. Why should any of us listen to that?

Such innocence of intellectual matters is not confined to economics, however. There's pitifully litte connection between politics and philosophy. Whereas Thatcher often cited Friedman, Popper and Hayek as influences her epigones of all parties make no effort at placing themselves in any intellectual tradition. In political philosophy John Rawls is dominant. But any politician applying his difference principle - that social and economic inequalities "are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society" - would be so far to the left they'd be accused of antisemitism.

A lack of interest in philosophy would not be so bad if it were replaced by technocratic empiricism. But it's not. As we've seen in macro policy, the economic impact of Brexit and the possible decision to have HS2 stop in the middle of nowhere the government is heedless of empirical fact. And from Labour we rarely hear Blairite talk of evidence-based policy-making or "what matters is what works", perhaps because such principles would alert us to the fact that neoliberalism has given us two decades of stagnation and dysfunctional utility and rail industries.

Instead, what we have is a descent into simple irrationalism, as evidenced by conspiracy theories about a Whitehall blob (shared by a former PM); by Telegraph drivel about "wokesters" or by the rantings of GB News or Talk TV.

Labour is also guilty here. Its claim that Truss crashed the economy is simply false: crashed the pound and gilt prices, yes, but not the economy.

But such a claim "cuts through", as the political commentators say. Which is the problem. The media fails to filter out bad and wrong ideas and claims. And not just the billionaire gimp media but also the BBC. "Too many journalists lack understanding of basic economics" found the Blastland-Dilnot report (pdf) last year:

Too often, it’s not clear from a report that fiscal policy decisions are also political choices; they’re not inevitable, it’s just that governments like to present them that way. The language of necessity takes subtle forms; if the BBC adopts it, it can sound perilously close to policy endorsement.

Since the Brexit referendum the BBC has become impartial not just between Labour and Tories but between truth and falsehood. Instead, as Patrick Howse has pointed out, it has preferred to be in a race to be first to report the Downing Street line rather than a critical reporter of that line.

Which is part of a wider problem. Our "marketplace of ideas" contains many market failures: monopoly; bad incentives; unpriced externalities; and positive feedback loops wherein lies become more powerful the more they are repeated.

It's not just in selecting ideas that politics fails, however. The important fact about Truss is not merely that she was inept but that she was elected by a big majority of Tory members and cheered on by much of the press. This shows that politics fails in selecting good people. This is partly because intelligent ones are rightly repulsed by the stupidity of politics. But it's also because political parties have become less rooted in the empirical world of business and trades unions and more dominated by narcissistic cranky fanatics who demand not competence and ability but mere agreement with them.

Even if this problem could be fixed, however, another would remain. It's that politicians are unrepresentative of the rest of us simply because wanting to go into politics even for the best of motives is associated with dubious attitudes. People are more likely to become politicians if they are over-optimistic about the potential effects of policy and so fail to see that complex systems are hard to change for the better; if they are overconfident about their knowledge and ability and so under-rate the need for policies and institutions to be flexible and resilient to error; and if they over-emphasise the potential for top-down control, thus underestimating the power of individual agency whether it be expressed through markets or worker democracy.

Of course, all professions are prone to professional deformation: economists overweight the role of financial incentives and academics overweight intellectual ability, for example. But the thing is that political journalists share these distorted perspectives with the result that the political class is insufficiently self-critical. It is as unaware of these biases as fish are that they are wet.

Which brings me to another problem. There's insufficient pressure for all this to change. Most of the people who are interested in politics are simple partisans. They regard politics as our nans saw wrestling in the 70s. They cheer the heroes and boo the heels and occasionally whack the latter with their handbags but they've no interest in how to improve the quality of the game (or even in whether it is fixed). And so important questions are neglected: how to connect politicians with rational thought; how to take money out of politics and create a proper democracy wherein everyone has an equal say; or how to improve selection mechanisms so that bad ideas and egregious incompetents are filtered out.

Of course, one might come up with answers to these. But doing so is - to paraphrase Marx - like writing recipes when you have no kitchen. Why, then, shouldn't we retreat from politics and tend our own garden?

* Note to pedants. I'm defining "politics" here as the media does - as court gossip about a handful of people in Westminster. I am interested in political matters such as how power is wielded and by whom. But "politics" is this sense is very different from "politics" in the media sense.

The politics of stagnation

The government is changing the rules of the work capability assessment in an effort to push more people into work and thinking of cutting benefits. There's a link between this and those incessant scam phone calls we all get.

To see it, remember a fact which most political journalists neglect because of their focus on the minutiae of Westminster court politics. It is that the nature of capitalism shapes politics. As the man said:

The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

So, for example, in the 50s and 60s Fordist capitalism required a mass market for consumer goods. That gave us a Butskellite consensus between the main parties upon the need to ensure full employment. But when profit margins were squeezed (pdf) in the 70s, capitalism required labour to become more quiescent. Which gave us not just Thatcherism but years of confusion and conflict in the Labour party as it debated how to react to those new times.

Today, however, the defining feature of capitalism, and especially British capitalism, is stagnation.

This stagnation isn't merely a statistical artefact - two decades of sluggish growth in productivity, GDP and living standards. Its symptoms are all around us.

One is what Cory Doctorow has called the enshittification of the internet. Platform companies are no longer growing their customer base and so must instead monetize what used to be consumer surplus, with the result that "the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit."

Another symptom has been the housing crisis. Slower growth has led to lower real interest rates which in turn has pushed house prices out of the reach of many young people; an asset price is simply the capitalization of future cashflows and so a lower discount rate (lower interest rate) means higher prices.

Yet another symptom is our (further) retreat from meritocracy. It is faster-growing industries that create opportunities for people from poorer backgrounds: journalism in the mid-20th century; finance in the 80s; and IT in the 90s. When industries are stagnating, however, bosses don't need bright young things and so can instead hire their cronies.

And another symptom is the increase in fraud. Because it's no longer so easy to make profits honestly, more people are doing so dishonestly.

Exactly why we've fallen into this stagnation is a matter of debate: an ageing population; legacy of the financial crisis; lack of innovation; falling profit rates; and so on. For my purposes now, however, this debate doesn't much matter. What very much does matter is the fact that the economy is stagnating.

And this has numerous political effects. One is the rise of far-right views. Back in 2006 Ben Friedman wrote:

The history of each of the large Western democracies – America, Britain, France and Germany – is replete with instances in which [a] turn away from openness and tolerance, and often the weakening of democratic political institutions, followed in the wake of economic stagnation.

And Markus Brueckner and Hans Peter Gruener have shown that "lower growth rates are associated with a significant increase in right-wing extremism". Subsequent evens have proved this correct. When Suella Braverman claims that the anti-muslim views of people like Douglas Murray are "mainstream", she fails to add that, insofar as this is the case, it is because stagnation has driven some people to the right.

Brexit was another effect of stagnation. I'm not just thinking here of the fact (documented by Thiemo Fetzer) that a weak economy bolstered the Leave vote. I'm thinking also of the right's motives for wanting it. The thing is that since the 80s they had been given everything they wanted; lower taxes, privatization, weaker unions and so on. And the result was still a sclerotic economy. Rather than question their entire worldview, they looked for another scapegoat - and the EU was the obvious one. Hence talk that Brexit would lead us to "sunlit uplands".

Yet another effect is the cronyism surrounding the government's procurement of PPE during Covid. Such egregious corruption did not occur under Thatcher or Major. The change is not because people have had a bang on the head and become more dishonest. It's because it's harder for companies to make money honestly in a competitive market and so they must resort to exploiting political contacts. In the 80s, capitalists could say to governments: "give us weak unions and low taxes and we can make money". Today, they cannot say that and must use government more directly.

A further symptom of stagnation is Labour's talk of NHS reform. This is partly motivated by the trivial fact that in a stagnant economy devoting more resources to the NHS requires either tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere. These are difficult choices which the party would like to dodge by thinking that it can raise efficiency - oblivious to the evidence that two decades of reforms have done little to achieve this.

But there's another motive. Except for a few monopolies and crony businesses, capital cannot make easy profits. Boosting profitability therefore requires an expansion in the number of spheres where capital operates - in Marxian terms, it requires a larger realm of commodification. NHS privatization offers just this. It's for this same reason that the political class (though not the public) supports private ownership of utilities and railways, oblivious again to the evidence of their nugatory public benefit.

It's in this context that we should also interpret attacks on benefit claimants. The combination of near-full employment which has strengthened labour's bargaining power and an inability to raise productivity means that (outside of a few monopolies) capital cannot raise profits by increasing the exploitation of its existing workers. An alternative, therefore, is to increase the number of workers who can be exploited - which is another way of increasing the realm of commodification.

One further political effect of stagnation is the rise of culture wars. Because stagnation, as Friedman showed, promotes reaction and illiberalism, it creates a constituency amenable to whines about "wokesters." Also, though, much of the political class wants a culture war because it has no economic ideas: as Stian Westlake has said, the Tories have stopped thinking about economics.

This is not to say there are no answers to stagnation even within neoliberal thinking . The problem is that such answers require governments to attack vested interests: nimbys will fight planning reform; incumbent firms don't want tougher competition policy; lawyers and accountants will oppose tax simplification; and much of the finance sector doesn't want the higher real interest rates that would follow stronger trend growth. Pro-market - let alone pro-socialist - policies would in this context be revolutionary. Why not take the easy option instead?

In saying all this, I'm not accusing our political class of an intelligent choice of responses to stagnation. Instead, I'm saying that politics is sometimes like natural selection in biology, where the environment selects in favour of some random unintended mutations. Culture wars, cronyism, commodification and a lack of ideas that would disturb the existing order are all things for which our present capitalist environment selects.

It's commonplace to bemoan the corruption and vapidity of Westminster politics. What we must appreciate, however, is that these things are products of the state of the economy.