Matt Yglesias is messing with my cake
I see Matt has started up blogging again. One of his first posts cuts right to my raison d’etre as a blogger: One of the weirdest things about political punditry is that “the status quo should remain the same!” or “I’m taking the side of the powerful and wealthy interests who currently control American public policy!” can ...
I see Matt has started up blogging again. One of his first posts cuts right to my raison d'etre as a blogger: One of the weirdest things about political punditry is that “the status quo should remain the same!” or “I’m taking the side of the powerful and wealthy interests who currently control American public policy!” can be packaged as bold and contrarian. But this is not weird at all. As I've said recently: There is... a selection bias at work in IR punditry. In my experience, TV producers and op-ed editors aren’t interested in hearing you say, “nothing has changed” in response to the news du jour. Therefore, one is more likely to hear and read statements by pundits who genuinely believe that recent events are threatening. Matt's talking about normative punditry ("we should do something!") whereas I was talking about, for lack of a better phrase, positive punditry ("something important is happening!"), but the idea remains the same -- there is a persistent pundit and political bias in favor of proposing change. Similarly, saying that, "the wealthy and the powerful support policy X!" is a brilliant way of making policy X unpopular. Surely, if the rich and powerful support a policy, then it must mean that they've been using that policy to hoard all the wealth and power to themselves. Whether this is actually true is another question entirely. To be fair to Matt, the flip side of this perceptual bias is the stone-cold reality of how the political system works. In the American political system, the status quo is really, really hard to change. And the rich and powerful make out pretty well. So while the pundit bias is in favor of change, while actual reality favors stasis. Which only increases the frustration level for most pundits.
I see Matt has started up blogging again. One of his first posts cuts right to my raison d’etre as a blogger:
One of the weirdest things about political punditry is that “the status quo should remain the same!” or “I’m taking the side of the powerful and wealthy interests who currently control American public policy!” can be packaged as bold and contrarian.
But this is not weird at all. As I’ve said recently:
There is… a selection bias at work in IR punditry. In my experience, TV producers and op-ed editors aren’t interested in hearing you say, “nothing has changed” in response to the news du jour. Therefore, one is more likely to hear and read statements by pundits who genuinely believe that recent events are threatening.
Matt’s talking about normative punditry (“we should do something!”) whereas I was talking about, for lack of a better phrase, positive punditry (“something important is happening!”), but the idea remains the same — there is a persistent pundit and political bias in favor of proposing change. Similarly, saying that, “the wealthy and the powerful support policy X!” is a brilliant way of making policy X unpopular. Surely, if the rich and powerful support a policy, then it must mean that they’ve been using that policy to hoard all the wealth and power to themselves. Whether this is actually true is another question entirely. To be fair to Matt, the flip side of this perceptual bias is the stone-cold reality of how the political system works. In the American political system, the status quo is really, really hard to change. And the rich and powerful make out pretty well. So while the pundit bias is in favor of change, while actual reality favors stasis. Which only increases the frustration level for most pundits.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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