The ever-changing economic ideology of the chattering classes
Some thoughts on the concept of “mediamacro”
Around the time of the 2015 General Election, the Oxford professor Simon Wren Lewis coined the phrase ”mediamacro”.
Exasperated by the way journalists were covering the Coalition Government’s austerity regime, he defined media macro as “a set of ideas about macroeconomics promulgated by the media that seem very different to the macro taught to economics students”.
This set of ideas basically concerns the alleged necessity of eradicating budget deficits, and the importance of using public sector cuts to placate financial markets in times of economic trouble.
Mediamacro also implies a degree of ignorance about how governments actually raise the money they spend. You can perceive the ideological shadow of mediamacro every time you hear a BBC journalist referring to the ‘nation’s credit cards’ being maxed out, or opinion about chancellors being ‘generous’ and ‘loosening the purse strings’.
There is no doubt that mediamacro exists. For various reasons the media has, since 2008, absorbed some strange and heterodox ideas about how the economy works. This is a real thing, and it’s important that we have a word for it.
However, there are some features of the economic ideology of the chattering classes that I think are missed by Wren Lewis’s definition of mediamacro.
Malleable principles
My main quibble is that, from where I’m sitting, the macroeconomic framework of the media is a lot more flexible than the above account suggests.
The best way of demonstrating this is by playing the history forward from when David Cameron won his majority… because if you go back and look at the kinds of things journalists were saying about the economy around the time of the 2015 General Election, it’s feels like your consuming news from another planet.
The budget deficit was the issue of the election. The importance of allowing the Tories to implement their ‘long term economic plan’ was reinforced by everyone from The Economist to The Sun, and from the Financial Times to The Express. The unhinged notion that Labour spending in the early 2000s (which the Tories at the time had pledged to match pound for pound) caused a global financial crisis was accepted and repeated by supposedly impartial broadcast outlets.
This was the context in which the idea of mediamacro was conceived. However, in hindsight, rather than a period in which a hard ideology set in, the period around 2015 now feels more like a time of mass hysteria. A small group of influential people worked themselves up into a frenzy, repeating and one-upping each other’s increasingly incoherent claims about macroeconomics.
Since then though… that same group of people have not stuck to their apparent convictions.
During the 2017 General Election, mediamacro talking points faded into the background. Things that had been presented as iron laws of economics during in the period 2010-2015 suddenly became fungible concepts - things that can be bent to will of a nation pursuing its sovereignty via Brexit. The deficit and the national debt went from the key political debate, to concepts that were essentially not mentioned at all.
Things took another turn after Boris Johnson’s ascension to Prime Minister. We started talking about investment again, about infrastructure and about levelling up. Questions of ‘how are you going to pay for it’ stopped being asked, and the power of the state to shape the world around it was once again recognised.
Perhaps the most startling demonstration of the changing macroeconomic beliefs of the media came when they recognised as sensible politics Boris Johnson’s government dusting off some of Ed Miliband’s 2015 manifesto pledges – policies which they had formerly been denounced as communism.
What to make of this?
It’s not so much that the fundamentals of mediamacro have changed during these periods of change. At no point have oppositional statements (eg investing in a recession is a good idea) been accepted as common sense by the media at large.
It’s more that at various times, mediamacro has been turned up to 11, and at other times it’s been turned down to a mere whisper. And what has determined where the dial has been set at different points? Essentially… the electoral strategy of the Conservative Party.
When they wanted to prosecute an argument about fiscal responsibility, and mediamacro was useful to them, mediamacro got itself into gear. When they wanted to leave the European Union or remake their electoral coalition via ‘levelling up’, suddenly, mediamacro fell into the background.
This is not a conspiracy theory. BBC journalists do not decide what to cover based on what they think will help the Tories win. This is instead a story about who journalists listen to. They do not, on the whole, talk to academics. They talk to people in Westminster – to politicians, to think-tanks and to those who lobby on behalf of big business and the city.
In these spaces, the Conservative Party enjoys major structural advantages… and through these channels, they shape the way the media covers the economy.
As such, mediamacro is less “a set of ideas”, and more an absence of ideas. That absence creates a vacuum. And that vacuum is filled by those with the resources to fill it.
An understanding of this should shape the approaches of economics policy wonks everywhere.