In its more serious moods, the news seeks to explain the world to us, which means attempting to sift through the dramas, hyperbole and clamour of every new day in order to direct our attention to the handful of developments that could turn out truly to matter. There is so much we might find engaging (a couple has jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge; several bits of Tasmania are on fire; a Mexican industrialist has shot and killed a rival), but what in the news is really worth focusing on?
We are the inheritors of an idea, endorsed by both the right and the left wings of the political spectrum, that the most fundamental reality of nations is their financial state – and that economic reporting should therefore be recognized as the most important facet of all news output.
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Economic data can rupture the sense of scale we ordinarily rely on to make our lives feel meaningful or hopeful. Our sense of purpose can be crushed by the unimaginable dimensions of the system in which economics reveals us to exist: one where world GDP stands at $70,000,000,000,000, where the global bond market is worth $100 trillion and the derivatives market $791 trillion, where world debt is measured at $50 trillion, EU debt at $17 trillion and US debt at $16 trillion (spending a dollar a second, a trillion dollars would take 31,000 years to run through); where a billion people live in poverty while an elite made up of the wealthiest 2 per cent owns more than half of all wealth. Such figures have some of the numbing quality of the statistics of astronomy, when it informs us that the Milky Way contains 400 billion stars or that it would take 93 billion light years to cross the universe. Our minds are not well fitted to contemplate our condition from such perspectives. Our aspirations become laughable, if not absurd, played out against such a canvas. We grow newly humble and supine before a sense of our utter nothingness.
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In the more ambitious news outlets, our eyes are regularly directed towards a variety of key indicators on the economic dashboard, including the money supply (M1, M2, MZM), central bank reserves, factory orders, the consumer price index (CPI), building permits, jobless claims, the deficit, the national debt and, most significantly of all, the GDP.
The numbers can be disorientating. To assess a nation through its economic data is a little like re-envisaging oneself via the results of a blood test, whereby the traditional markers of personality and character are set aside and it is made clear that one is at base, where it really counts, a creatinine level of 3.2, a lactate dehydrogenase of 927, a leukocyte (per field) of 2 and a C-reactive protein of 2.42.
Like blood to a human, money is to the state the constantly circulating, life-giving medium in which some of the most telling data about the future is carried in encoded forms. Sampling it is the task of the great government financial labs: the Office of National Statistics in Britain, the Department of Commerce in the United States, L’Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques in France and the National Statistical Office of South Korea. Every week, their statisticians will survey the economy; in the UK alone, taking in data from 6,000 companies in the manufacturing sector, 25,000 service firms, 5,000 retailers, 10,000 construction businesses and 4,000 government projects in agriculture, energy, health and education. With gigantic computers helping them to process their harvest of information, the statisticians will publish some astonishingly abbreviated yet deeply resonant findings. The GDP figures might, for example, inform us that the financial value of all work done across the entire country over the previous quarter had risen 1.1 per cent or (heaven forbid) dropped 0.5 per cent, figures beneath which will lie tens of thousands of meetings, anxieties, quandaries, ploys, boardroom discussions, early morning commutes, sackings, initiatives, launches and disappointments, all now harnessed to and confined within a mere two digits.
Distillation is familiar from other areas of science – the discipline to which economics aspires. In chemistry, too, we are invited to look beneath the confusion of physical reality to uncover a mere 118 elements which underlie matter and can, with an almost artistic grace, be ranked according to their chemical properties, atomic numbers and electron configurations into the columns of the periodic table.
~~The News: A User's Manual -by- Alain De Botton
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