I’ve written before (I think) about Gillian Tett’s old FT article where she stood in front of an audience of the UK’s movers and shakers, and asked how many of them were effectively innumerate. When a majority of hands when up, the audience laughed, but Tett was astonished at how leaders are willing to shrug off their own inability to use math as part of the daily decision-making process.
The New York Times leads this morning’s edition with an article I found deeply frustrating, because it reflects a more dangerous version of that same trend.
The clickbait title of the American Dream belonging to the Chinese didn’t help.
As part of their ongoing “How China Became a Superpower” series they produced a number of graphs showing the growth of incomes in China, as well as inequality in income distribution. The graphs were good, but not groundbreaking (they owe much to Picketty) but the text was deeply misleading, in my opinion, as it asked a number of quasi-rhetorical questions that I interpreted as inherently criticizing the American economic system. I think there are a lot of good – and difficult – questions to ask about our domestic economy, how we balance growth and equality, and why optimism seems to be at an ebb just when the economy is at a peak. I think the NYT’s piece obfuscates asking (and trying to answer) these questions by using recycled charts and data, and shrugging off information that might not be obvious to a lay reader, for example:
- Growth from a lower base as opposed to starting as the richest economy in the world
- As a democracy, should Americans value 800 million people being lifted out of poverty
- The Chinese still live under one-party rule and re-education camps are alive and well
- Other “quality” vs. “quantity” arguments a la RFK’s speech about what GDP does not measure – pollution comes to mind given the air, water, and soil pollution that are rampant in the country
The offhanded comments meant to defuse foreseeable criticisms of this article also fall far short of what they should be:
China’s progress is especially remarkable given how the government has used social engineering to restrict where people live and how many children they have. Loosening those constraints could accelerate income growth.
If the author is referring to the one-child policy, the most infamous piece of social engineering, they are of course years late to the reform party. It’s also disingenuous: China is aging far more quickly than other country’s like Japan and Korea that also broke through the middle income trap. The reference to where people live and the hukou system is more relevant, but how that inputs into income growth is a much more complicated question. While an entire paragraph (read that sarcastically) is given over to addressing these challenges, the author shrugs it off with all the panache of a journeyman financial writer:
Yet for now, the economic arc seems ever upward.
Oh, well then!
The NYT never had primacy as a business paper, but if they continue to pass off decent infographics and lazy “extrapolate from the past” narratives to go along with them, they risk losing even the veneer of respectability of such coverage.
smq.world 