The Grand Illusion
In the April 22nd and 29th issue of The New Yorker, in “How Gullible Are You?”, Manvir Singh writes about “misinformation and the nature of belief.” It’s a decent article, in which Singh discusses misinformation, some of its recent history, and discusses French philosopher and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber’s distinction between “factual beliefs” (i.e., chairs are real) and symbolic beliefs (God is real) as well as the efforts of various theorists who offer ways to combat misinformation.
Singh points out that virtually all efforts to fight false fabrications and misinformation rest on the assumption of human gullibility while ignoring “the far larger forces that drive the phenomenon,” particularly the lack of trust in government and other social institutions. And essentially, that’s where the article ends.
What he doesn’t really or fully address is why misinformation and, for example, Donald Trump’s insistence that major media peddle “fake news” have gained such a hold on so many people.
The answer, as I considered the matter, is actually simple, and, in a way, profound. Much of what the media and the Democrats are pushing is in fact “fake news” to the people who endorse the Trumpist and MAGA rhetoric.
Declining unemployment is “fake news” to people who don’t have jobs and who live in situations where they cannot get decent paying jobs. In more than a few parts of Appalachia, jobs requiring college degrees or even graduate degrees pay less than what coal truck drivers used to make. In fact, one of my wife’s cousins made more driving a coal truck than she did as a tenured college professor. But most of those coal jobs vanished with the closure of the mines, and the inadequate “reclamation” and the massive rains of two years ago have destroyed thousands of homes, with no repairs or replacements. Tell all those people that times are better, and they’ll likely think you’re purveying fake news.
Tell all the young people who’ve mortgaged their future to get higher education and graduate degrees and who can’t find jobs paying enough to service their debt that times are improving, especially when we’re producing more college graduates than we have higher paying jobs for.
Inflation rates are down, but food prices and housing costs are not, and telling people that inflation is down doesn’t agree with what they are paying for groceries and lodging, and that equates to “fake news” in many people’s minds.
The only thing that will change the views of most of these people is real improvement in their lives, and that’s unlikely to occur any time soon, given the multiplicity of factors compounding the problem, ranging from high housing and transportation/relocation costs, the mismatch between skills and/or lack of skills and existing job requirements, to the unwillingness and/or inability of unemployed or underemployed people to relocate.
All that means that “fake news” will remain “fake news” for the foreseeable future.
Boy Orange calls it fake news because he arranged with a publisher to have favorable stories published and damaging stories about him squashed while doing the reverse for his foes. In the click bait era we live in, news organizations chose the stories that generate the most clicks or views and not the most important or fair coverage. Often the titles are outrageous and don’t match the stories within. Boy Orange projects his experience to all news.
Your concern that people’s experience doesn’t match the message of the Biden administration is valid. One of the problems of the inflation rate is that it is really the acceleration of the changes in prices more so than the prices themselves. So that prices come down only when the inflation rate is negative or in a relative sense when the increase in one’s income is greater than the inflation rate. The only problem is that I don’t see the Republican proposals doing anything about this except for those who are already wealthy. I am not sure the Democrat proposals will do much either, but they don’t favor the wealthy to the inclusion of everyone else as much.
While all elections are about the economy, the message in this election is about basic democracy and government authority. The party that is arguing that the president is above the law and that the government can deny medical treatment to pregnant women seems to ring louder than the tax rate especially if the president can order anyone killed or arrested.
This is a timely last sentence regarding Trump’s SCOTUS immunity argument. I get that the Trump allies believe that Trump must be assured immunity. They surely don’t believe that Biden out to enjoy that same degree of latitude. I sure wish that the Dems would subsequently argue that should the rulings move that way, then Biden would willingly take advantage and remove any oppo he faces – that includes his political rivals and the SCOTUS members themselves (recall that FDR reined in the Supreme court at the time by threats to expand the court and that was enough). Political judo is a two sided affair and Biden must be willing to provide perspective that these decisions should apply to both sides of the aisle and then maybe our current SCOTUS might decide that they outa call just balls and strikes.
This appears to be a second reason for the Supreme Court to go along with creating delays for Trump’s court cases.
For one, the conservative majority would clearly like to see the presidency won by the conservative candidate, and would like to help Trump. If they can’t decide in his favor when his arguments are clearly ridiculous without damaging their own standing, they can at least help delay the court cases until his election, when he can get the DoJ to stop most of them if he wins.
But also, a lot of the Conservative judges appear to have no problem with promoting authoritarian rule by the president and undermining democracy to promote big business and oligarchic interests, as long as he’s of their party and will rule the way they want. So they may want to give their president such unconstitutional powers, but will try to delay doing so until the Democratic president & party is out of power. Then their Republican president can use his powers to make sure their religious nationalist rule in favor of the big-money interests becomes unassailable within the law.
If they have delayed (or hedged, if they can’t delay entirely) their decision until after the election, they can still decide, or limit their earlier decision, so the new Democratic president doesn’t get that kind of unlimited immunity.
Since the shenanigans Mitch McConnel, the Federalist Society and the Republicans pulled to stack the court to enable their minority rule, SCOTUS really appears to be a fairly solid pillar of the plan to change the USA to a religious nationalist minority-rule autocracy or oligarchy instead of a democracy, and the way they are handling the Trump cases so far confirms that impression for me.
Mr. Modesitt, I disagree. It’s not that the news is “fake”.
People all across the United States are dealing with the patchwork economic recovery. A large percentage of the population looks at the stock market, the price of gas, etc., tightens their belt, and votes for policies that will continue the recovery. Another equally large percentage of the population looks at the same situation and wants to know who to blame. Is it immigrants, liberals, brown people? It must be someone’s fault, and it has to be someone perceived to be “lower on the totem pole.”
That second group, who needs someone to blame to prop up their self-image, is the one claiming “fake news” because they are exasperated and will just not listen to any explanation more complicated than “it’s the fault of whoever.”
The news is “fake” from the point of view of people who aren’t benefitting from the overall improvement in the economy, and there are tens of millions for whom this is the case. What they see and experience is not what the news reports, and therefore the news must be “fake.”
This is just another variation on people generalizing from their own experience and that of their friends.
The official numbers have for quite some time been set up so they do not provide a realistic view of the economy from most ordinary people’s view, to avoid showing too negative numbers, which would make the discrepancy with lived reality and people’s distrust grow.
They measure the state of the economy more by how high the stockmarket bubble has been blown than by living costs.
They generally do not use a realistic and representative ‘shopping basket’ for measuring the cost of living, by leaving out gas and housing costs; and numbers for unemployment do not take into account how many of those jobs do not pay a ‘living wage’.
Most of this appears to be not something the president can quickly resolve on his own or with a divided and unwilling congress; more a consequence of extreme capitalism, increasing exploitation of the ordinary people by big moneyed interest, and capture of the lawmakers by the lobbyists and PACs that serve those interests. Still it’s all projected on the incumbent president by those who elected the dysfunctional congresspeople blocking any action. So I can understand the wish to massage the numbers to avoid bad press, but it’s only made the distrust worse.
Hanneke, there are two different issues here.
The first is, as you and LEM point out, that the official measures of the health of the economy don’t show what every day Americans are dealing with. That’s true, but it’s always true.
The second issue, which is think is more relevant, is how people feel about the economy. Conservatives and liberals both face the same patchwork recovery. Both sides are dealing with more money spent at the grocery store.
The difference is that conservatives are personally offended and feel attacked, and look for someone else to kick to make themselves feel better. Donald Trump, with his toddler taunts, is just what they are looking for.
Liberals look for ways to work together so that the patchwork recovery can continue. As LEM pointed out the other day, much of inflation and higher prices is due to corporations raising prices, taking advantage of de facto monopolies.
Conservatives and liberals could work together to pressure the corporations, but that would require the conservatives to punch upwards, rather than punching down, which they prefer.
I remember a friend of mine in the military who came back from Iraq frustrated with the news media. “But we’re winning!” he said.
Well, maybe from his perspective. Or maybe he was right, how would I know?
At the same time, though, even aside from clickbait and pandering, video news always favors what has a good visual presentation, and *all* news that I’ve seen favors what can be presented in a pretty simple form.
The decades-long trends that have led us to where we are? Maybe you can find those in a magazine (maybe), but not in the news.
Wars are reduced to body counts, and decisions that affect democracy to whoever “won” the latest minor skirmish for the latest cycle. Oversimplification runs riot.
The news isn’t all fake…but some of today’s disaffection the media have brought upon themselves.
When is there a surge in religious activity? When there is no simple explanation and practical plan of correction for one or more phenomena affecting a significant percentage of a group of humans: for example pandemic, multifocal war, unfocussed terrorism; in other words – chaos (… “the far larger forces that drive the phenomenon”… and/or when we feel “uncertain and powerless” so that there is no obvious possibility of “… real improvement in (our)/their lives. …”). In general terms this represents generation of belief “cordoned off from action and expectation”; as expressed in the New Yorker article. We thus become, in turn, much more accepting of “symbolic” beliefs (with/without acknowledged inconsistencies), in order to generate “Hope”.
According to my reading of The Magic of Recluse and The Death of Chaos. Democracy is “Grey” because there is volatility of lawful order balanced with creative chaos. Democracy is constantly fighting to maintain distance from the “Black” of pure order (Rule of Law) and the “White” of pure chaos (Anarchy) both of which counter progress/improvement/evolution and “Hope”.
I agree that there is no source for a “Marshall Plan” for the USA and it seems unlikely that there will be much if any swing towards “Rule of Law”. There also seems to be no way that our world leaders of 2024 would suddenly cooperate so that national economies will support the populations creating them and diminish the percentage of poor without hope and the percentage of people without need of hope.
Again; from The Death of Chaos “ … understanding and explanation don’t always work …” and confirmed in reality(?) by Mr Manvir Singh.
True.
But I was trying to say that the way the effects on ordinary households are measured is important to believability.
Here, the National Institute for Budgeting advice has a suite of different ‘standard households’ from ‘single-parent with low income and two kids under 12’ to ‘double twice-modal income no kids’ and ‘retired couple on social security’; with realistic standardised monthly expenditures for an achievable budget. For the US, regional differences e.g.in housing costs would also be a necessary component in distinguishing between these different standardised household budgets.
When new legislation is suggested the NIBUD and CPB can figure out the effects on all these different kinds of households, and when looking at the effects of inflation, and how the economy is doing, they do the same.
This makes their numbers much more believable, and also means politicians have to take these details into account – it’s seen as a very bad result politically if the poorer groups, single low-income huseholds with kids, low-income pensioners, or middle-income families with young children lose ground in this. So laws get tweaked in ways that the more affluent groups get less extra benefits, and poorer groups get a bit more (at least relatively speaking), e.g.6% more net income for the poorest, 2% for the middle incomes with kids, and -+1.8% for the richest double incomes. Or a union would negotiate for a monthly salary increase of €160 a month òr 6%, whichever is higher, for the lowest payscales ensuring they will gain at least €160 and zome a bit more, while the higher payscales in tbe same negotiation get only the flat €160, which is less than they’d get from a percentage: propoftionately the highest paid gain the least (so causing less heating up of the market if prices are determined by true scarcity instead of greed), and the lowest paid who have the most trouble with inflation get a proportionally larger raise; so avoiding a depression).
This only works to shame politicians into working for the ordinary voters, even after 40 years of centre-right governments, if those budget-sums are detailed and realistic enough that different groups of voters can recognise their own situation in them.
But maybe that is expecting too much empathy from the better-off voters in a very individualistic society?