I completely agree. It’s worth noting that journalists are largely in the business of entertainment while providing people the feeling of getting informed and not in the business of exposing their readers to potentially taxing policy tradeoffs where the right answer isn’t clear. Readers care a lot before US elections about who’s going to win and the newspapers pander to that desire. The stories are also much easier to write given that they don’t require doing background research on the merits of policies which is hard.
When it comes to creating big change it’s not required that the policy proposal is viable today. Having policy proposal in the drawer for times when the political winds change is very important for creating large changes. If you look at a very influential person like Milton Friedman, that’s how he worked.
There’s the quote from him around which Naomi Klein wrote a book: “Only a crisis-actual or percieved-produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”
I completely agree. It’s worth noting that journalists are largely in the business of entertainment while providing people the feeling of getting informed and not in the business of exposing their readers to potentially taxing policy tradeoffs where the right answer isn’t clear. Readers care a lot before US elections about who’s going to win and the newspapers pander to that desire. The stories are also much easier to write given that they don’t require doing background research on the merits of policies which is hard.
When it comes to creating big change it’s not required that the policy proposal is viable today. Having policy proposal in the drawer for times when the political winds change is very important for creating large changes. If you look at a very influential person like Milton Friedman, that’s how he worked.
There’s the quote from him around which Naomi Klein wrote a book: “Only a crisis-actual or percieved-produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”