Populism and the media

Don’t just ask why people are disenchanted with elites, but also why they are choosing the alternatives offered by snake-oil salesmen.

This could be the subtitle of the talk I will be giving later today. I will have more to say in later posts, plus a link to the full text (the writing of which distracted me from writing posts over the last week or two), but I thought I would make this important point here about why I keep going on about the media. In thinking about Brexit and Trump, talking about the media is not in competition with talking about disenchantment over globalisation and de-industrialisation, but a complement to it. I don’t blame the media for this disenchantment, which is real enough, but for the fact that it is leading people to make choices which are clearly bad for society as a whole, and in many cases will actually make them worse off. They are choices which in an important sense are known to be wrong.

Many will say on reading that last sentence that this is just your opinion, but in a way that illustrates the basic problem. Take Brexit. We know that erecting trade barriers is harmful: the only question is whether in this case it will be pretty harmful or very harmful. Some of this is already in the process of happening, as the depreciation reduces real wages. We also know that erecting barriers against your neighbours is extremely unlikely to be offset in any significant way by doing deals with countries further away. This is knowledge derived largely from empirical evidence and uncontroversial theory and agreed almost unanimously by economists.

The moment you reduce it to just another opinion, to be balanced by opposing opinions, as happened in the broadcast media during the Brexit campaign, you allow that knowledge to be ignored when critical choices are made.

A snake-oil salesman is not a perfect analogy, because those championing populist causes often have something to work on that makes some sense to the not very knowledgeable voter. [1] It could be the idea that immigration reduces access to public services, for example. But our media should help people avoid adopting solutions that are known to be wrong, rather than assisting the process by devaluing knowledge. For example, they could continually point out that most economists think EU immigration puts in more resources for public services than it takes out. 

There is another way the media can mislead, by establishing politicised truths, which I will discuss later on. Let me end with a link to a SPERI blog post I wrote to coincide with the talk. It is about the role of neoliberalism in the rise of populism. Although it draws from some of the points in the talk, it is quite separate. I basically argue in that post that a story that recent events like Brexit or Trump are a consequence of neoliberal ideas is potentially a mislabeling, because pushing globalisation is essential a liberal rather than a neoliberal idea. Instead I offer two concrete ways in which neoliberalism, and its emphasis on shrinking aspects of the state and deregulation, did indeed help bring about Brexit and Trump through austerity in the UK and deregulation of the broadcast media in the US.

[1] Postscript 24/11/16 Actually the analogy is better than I thought: see this great post from Chris.