FT: “[Steven] Pinker argues that humans have a “mythology mindset” when it comes to things outside their personal experience: we are happy to believe things for which there is no evidence. So it is often rational to pander to each other’s irrationality: Republican politicians must pretend not to believe in the 2020 election result. “That’s why we have institutions: like science, responsible journalism, liberal democracy, a court system.” So the problem of rationality is actually a political problem of defending institutions and decreasing partisanship.”
WSJ: “Across the West, we are led by too many inferior people who shouldn’t be left in charge of a Lego set, let alone the entire edifice of national government. Governing has become a heavily performative exercise played increasingly by a cast of professional political figures who never made a payroll, donned a uniform or created anything other than a sharply worded press release. All this is exacerbated by the unseriousness of a media and political culture in which the demand for constant gratification is met by “owning” your opponent, always on the lookout to exploit some alleged grievance.”
Donald Boudreaux: “Precisely because government intervention into markets is intended to disregard or to override market signals, government officials, if they are to improve the welfare of citizens, must have access to information that is superior to that which is available on markets. But government officials, in fact, not only have no superior source of information, they have no good source of information at all. The best they can do is guess. This absence of information available to government officials is an especially acute problem for those officials who fancy themselves able to improve the economy’s performance by nationalizing industries, by using subsidies and protective tariffs, and by imposing ‘corrective’ taxes here and there. But this absence of information is ubiquitous throughout all government affairs. No matter which projects government undertakes as a government, its officials cannot really know, in the way that market participants know, just what to produce, how much to produce, and how best to produce it.”
Indrajit Gupta: “As digital transformation agendas take centre stage, the newsrooms in large incumbent news brands have succumbed to pressures of building traffic, in a bid to chivvy up digital advertising. The reliance on technology tools like Chartbeat to take “data-driven” editorial decisions are rapidly replacing human curation of the past. Journalists in such integrated newsrooms are now given traffic targets. Yet this reckless obsession with page views can be self-defeating, as a major news publisher recently admitted in a closed door session. He said his biggest challenge was retaining loyalty and driving usage. Despite publishing more than 300 stories a day, nearly 95 per cent of his readers read only two stories—and drifted off to other sites. Going forward, my belief is that this dilution of news agendas could create new niches where digitally-led magazine brands could play a big role. The focus will be on building strong communities. Rather than pedestrian, run-of-the-mill events, more engaging formats for live and asynchronous engagement will emerge. Monthly or quarterly print editions could offer a more immersive experience. And new forms of digital story-telling, adeptly curated by editors, will provide the understanding and clarity that data-driven news agenda can seldom guarantee.”
