Friday, February 20, 2009

Public discourse about the economy: It’s a blusterfuck

I am sarah-palin-ignorant when it comes to the economy. So are most media talkers and politicians.

The talkers and politicians pretend to know; you can tell how hard they are trying to sound schooled and certain by the way they thrust out their chins. TV talkers have to sound confident if they want to be invited back to the show. Politicians have to sound confident if they hope to take advantage of the crisis so they can trot out longheld political ideologies and try to get them implemented. Both parties are doing this.

Few are admitting we’re through the looking glass now, and I’d like to see a little more of what the philosphers union was calling for in Hitchhikers: some admission that there are broad areas of doubt and uncertainty. I’d trust them all more.

The president and the treasury secretary are allowed one measure of over-confidence each, because it’s actually part of their job descriptions to boost consumer confidence—“only thing we have to fear is fear…” and all that rot.

Think about it. Even the real experts have to question whether it’s possible to predict the outcome of any given countermeasure when there’s no exact case study to draw from.

I picture the policymakers as engineers seated before a giant economy console. The main big fader in the center is the Federal Reserve interest rate control and it’s already been slid all the way to zero. They might as well just snap the knob off so they can concentrate on blindly fiddling with the other controls, see if one of them has some interesting effect one way or another. 

I think that’s what’s happening, and I’d actually feel a little more confident if the experts would admit it. As for the cock-sure amateurs, I’ve resolved to chalk them up as trolls, especially those still holding on to deregulation after all that’s happened.

Afterthought: Jay Rosen said something on Bill Moyers’ show two weeks ago about how the media prides itself above all on savviness. Knowing the score is the currency of pundits and politicians, too, especially if it’s predictive. Watching everybody claiming to know What Will Work when it comes to the economy reminds me of everybody knowing for sure What Would Work concerning the surge in Iraq, too. Nobody really knew that either.

After that: Robert Reich doesn’t think anybody knows what to do either.