Economic Equivocation

There needs to be a sea change in the way that the American media discusses current economic issues. The propensity towards equivocation is apparently too great to resist for most journalists and commentators, as they show no issue or qualm with their current coverage and behavior. This attitude and brand of reporting is pernicious in that it oversimplifies the complexity of American macroeconomics, and it asserts a semantic equalization of all historical economic issues with those current, without giving credence to the environment and context that precipitated the past events.

The concrete example which started this trivial line of thought was the cursory way in which Joel Kotkin, a guest today on KUOWs “The Conversation,” dismissed the reality of the recent housing market collapse, and the pecuniary issues that followed in its wake. Kotkin implies rather magically, and this is paraphrasing, that America “overcomes”, when he says

“[America] experienced a lull in the 70s, but we came back in the 80s, and we experienced more economic hardship in the 90s, but we rebounded from that as well.”

The problem, however, is that in providing no context for the economic conditions he is setting them all equal, which has significant implications to understanding the events for any interested party. Additionally, the use of vague terms—like “came back” and “bad”, which would be better served in sports commentary—underscores the innate and bizarre need to oversimplify problems of this magnitude.

The bottom line is that without acknowledging the reality of an economic crisis you work to poison the national debate with the underdeveloped arguments spewing from your pen and mouth. The term “caveat emptor” seems finally adequate to be extended to intellectual discourse in this most contentious time.