Following David Warsh’s recommendation, I am currently reading Partha Dasgupta’s Economics: A Very Short Introduction (US edition here). Warsh writes:
Dasgupta is supremely well qualified to write an overview of economics for the layman. Originally, he says, he had it in mind to lay out what he understood to be the research frontier.
“But even though the analytical and empirical core of economics had grown from strength to strength over the decades,” he writes, “I haven’t been at ease with the selection of topics that textbooks offer for discussion (rural life in poor regions – that is the economic life of some 2.5 billion people – doesn’t get mentioned at all, nor with the subjects that are emphasized in leading economic journals (Nature rarely appears there as an active player).”
The result is a serious textbook treatment shaped around the lives of two ten-year-old “literary grandchildren,” Becky in a small Midwestern suburb where her father works for a firm specializing in property law, Desta in a village in southwestern Ethiopia, where her father farms half a hectare of land.
There is a lot in here to chew on. But to give you an example of how elegant the book is, here is a little adaptation of Dasgupta explaining fads, to illustrate (very simply) the herd effect in editorial decision-making:
Imagine that each [editor] can choose one of two stories A and B. Suppose that everyone has an intrinsic preference for A, but that they also like to conform.
To model this, imagine that each editor would choose story A over story B if the proportion of people wanting B is expected to be less than 65%, but that each editor would choose B over A if the proportion is expected to exceed 65%.
The figure 65% is a critical mass … simple herd behaviour could lead every editor to run story B, even though they and their audience would have preferred story A.
So now you know why stories no one seems to like stay in the news…
5 responses to “The simple economics of editorial decision-making”
Speaking of economics, recently I had an argument with a colleague whether advocacy journalism media has more potential for commercial success than media whose mission is to to be “objective”.
Couple of thoughts…
Objectivity does have value in say, business/financial markets reporting.
Or in aggregated sports reporting…
So what are the market conditions for objectivity?
Good morning,
Facts are a lot easier to come by today, in the era of the Internet. Simply citing financial markets data is not going to add value to your business publication. I wonder why the Financial Times continues to publish their lists of stock prices. Who would read these lists nowadays? (ok, perhaps individuals like Warren Buffet:)
People on the other hand like to read stories they identify with, arguments that reaffirm their beliefs. Therefore, I think, advocacy journalism is perceived as more valuable to readership.
There is also another effect: media built around advocacy journalism appear more coherent, have an image that is more ‘alive’. The first example that comes to mind is The Economist. I think they’ve become so successful precisely for this reason.
The FT has toyed with replacing them, but the stock tables are a kind of information furniture.
Partisan/advocacy journalism is a segmentation strategy.
Objective journalism flourished in an environment of low unit costs, high barriers to entry and near monopoly conditions (e.g. late 19C newspapers, and 1960s US TV, Britain’s BBC influenced markets).
If you’re looking for other accessible introductions to the mindset of economists, “The Armchair Economist” by Steven Landsburg is absolutely fantastic – it’s witty, engaging and gets straight to the core of the counter-intuitive nature of economics.
And explains why popcorn’s so stupidly expensive.