7.
WE END UP with the following situation: on the one hand, we have a news agenda dominated by reports of the workings of a highly complicated social science that wrestles with problems of near cosmic scale and incomprehensible difficulty, upon which it periodically delivers pronouncements at once pessimistic and resigned; and on the other hand, we have a host of inchoate, naive, innocent, impassioned but powerful longings that are carefully concealed and mostly go unmentioned for fear of sacrificing claims to decency and adult seriousness.
8.
OCCASIONALLY, THE TENSIONS get too much and there are explosions. A group of people collectively declare that they’ve had enough, paint some placards, buy megaphones and take their positions outside the central bank, the fast-food concession or the oil company headquarters. A few weeks later, after some moments of exuberance and struggles with heavy-handed police, the makeshift camps are hosed down and the news moves on.
These explosions are undermined by a fatal naivety: that is, by a set of the best possible intentions to improve a problematic situation – combined with a lack of any effective or forensic knowledge about what has caused it in the first place. A complaint that might have occasioned an intricate political argument instead ends up as a primal scream.
9.
THE NEWS IS partly to blame for this incoherent rage; it is the news that helps to raise audiences that cannot make sense of and feel hopeless about their condition and that are fed a diet of economic analyses that skilfully crushes ambitious considerations of how to create a more equitable world.
Occupy Wall Street, New York, September 2011.
(picture credit 9.1)
The protesters rightly recognize that there are things wrong with the economic system, but they find it hard to zero in on the specifics of the difficulties. It would take concentrated periods of guided interrogation and study to understand the mechanics of the financial machine – as well as to lay a finger on the realistic options for its reform. Tantalizingly, there are a great many very sensible options out there – which, non-coincidentally, we never hear about in the news for very long.
Most news is disinclined to provide a proper economic education equipped with a robust political dimension, either because it is itself confused and distracted about or because it benefits from the status quo.
It isn’t the task or within the power of news to solve economic conundrums by itself. Its power is more secondary, and yet still it is considerable: the news has the ability to define the agenda, by leading the attention of an audience to what it believes to be the issues of importance, and then it can deliver an interested and knowledgeable constituency to governments and corporations.
At present, mainstream news organizations chiefly track the day-to-day activities within the economic establishment. They tell us what is going on, but not with any conviction of what might or should happen. In so far as the news creates an agenda, it is a limited one: whether one should intervene to bolster the labour market or not, leave or join the currency union, remain strict about inflation or be less vigilant. The economic ‘debate’ as it is seen through the lens of the news does not stray beyond tightly defined lines which restrict both an audience’s expectations and its sense of what might be possible. Depart from the agenda (ask about reconceiving what a shareholder is and should be, for example, or question assumptions about growth and well-being) and, with bewildering speed, one ends up in territory deemed ‘radical’ and therefore ridiculous – even if most of what we now take for granted (a minimum wage, child protection, environmental legislation) started off by seeming entirely radical, if not insane, to ‘sensible’ opinion.
A perfect news service would analyse current events, but also convey a bold sense of the economic principles that should ideally underpin society. It would be guided by a sense of where one should be going, operating with an economic Utopia in mind, a community both prosperous and civilized, concerned as much with money as with its proper ends: fulfilment, fairness, generosity, beauty and kindness. It would be doctrinaire only about the destination, while remaining empirically flexible about the means of getting there – unlike right- and left-wing analyses that grow brittle and tiring through their axiomatic support of predictable means.
10.
WHILE CONTINUING ITS regular routine of analysing derivatives, yield ratios and the state of M2, economic news should not forget its ultimate responsibility to a larger quest for a world capable of sustaining less anxious and ruinous, more secure and more meaningful working lives.
Such an agenda, however fey it sounds within the context of classical economics, is at this point in our history too significant to be stumblingly raised only in private in the middle of the night or else shouted in a hoarse voice from a megaphone seconds before a police charge.
Investor News
Procter & Gamble Co. (PG), the world’s largest consumer-products company, is closing hair-care research centers in the U.K. and Japan. The operations in Kobe, Japan, will move to Singapore, and work from the facility in Egham, England, will be moved to the U.S. The U.K. facility works on styling products, and the Japan site focuses on conditioners. P&G also operates a shampoo research center in Cincinnati and a coloring facility in Germany. P&G rose 0.7 percent to $69.82 at the close in New York.
Bloomberg
1.
MANY OF THE wealthiest news organizations around the world spend the majority of their time turning out stories about what is happening inside individual companies. They cover developments within the automotive, aviation, energy, health, consumer, media and tech sectors, their focus powerfully directed by the demands of one kind of audience in particular: investors who need immediate and accurate data about the commercial fortunes of businesses to help them to determine where and how they should park their assets to grow their wealth.
Historically, the evolution of the modern news media has been closely linked to the need for market information on the part of capitalism’s banks, brokerages and trading houses. The transoceanic cables laid between the United Kingdom and the United States in the mid-nineteenth century were jointly funded by financiers and news companies (Reuters, for one). Back then, in the depths of the glacial Atlantic waters, the news stories that ran down the cables would bear answers to such questions as: ‘Is the demand for guano rising or falling?’ ‘What impact will a strike of silk weavers in Lyons have on the market for cotton?’ ‘How much revenue might be raised through a tax on malt?’ And ‘What might happen to corn prices if import restrictions were to be lifted?’
The emphasis on ‘investor news’ persists today. Even mainstream news organizations will give over prominent space to the latest numbers from the main stock markets around the world, along with real-time updates on the rising or falling fortunes of hundreds of thousands of little-known but evidently vast and important corporations which invisibly shore up our lives, from Molycorp Inc. (rare metals) to Sphere Drake Holdings Ltd (commercial property insurance).
Stocks & Indexes
What happened today, according to Bloomberg.
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