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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (44625)	9/18/2003 3:47:11 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

I Don't Understand Reporters I am coming to the conclusion that I will never understand reporters. Specifically, I will never understand their desperate fixation on "he said, she said" clashes of opinion. (1) When they find a story in which pretty much everybody agrees, they still tend to turn it into "he said, she said." (2) And when they find a story in which one side is clearly lying, they still tend to turn it into "he said, she said." Paul Krugman has a joke about this: if the Bush Administration were to announce that it thought the earth was flat, the next day's headlines would read: "Opinions Differ About Shape of Earth." This article does trick (1) to me and Greg Mankiw. (This is an example of trick (2).) Greg and I agree on a huge amount of stuff. I think that the 3.5%-4.0% growth we are likely to have over the next couple of years will produce employment growth (an average of perhaps 120,000 a month) but will do little if anything to reduce the unemployment rate. He thinks that the 3.5%-4.0% growth we are likely to have over the next couple of years will produce employment growth (an average of perhaps 140,000 a month) but will do little if anything to reduce the unemployment rate. So what does the reporter write? The reason for the bleak [unemployment rate] outlook... boils down to basic math. The number of new workers is climbing about 1 percent a year. If productivity increases by an annual rate of 3 percent -- and the rate has been above 5 percent both this year and last -- economic growth, as measured by gross domestic product, needs to be significantly more than 4 percent next year before there is drastic improvement in the unemployment rate. "I don't see where the demand is going to come from to produce a falling unemployment rate," said J. Bradford DeLong, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley. "Very few people are predicting real G.D.P. growth of more than 4 percent." White House officials dispute that prognosis. If productivity and growth are rising, they contend, then new jobs will follow. "There is a very strong correlation between real G.D.P. growth and developments in the labor market," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. "We will see employment picking up by the end of the year, and we will see very strong advances in employment in 2004." There's one problem: There's no White House official disputing the prognosis. The White House official and I agree pretty much completely. In an earlier part of the interview not quoted, I said that I expected to see employment picking up--just not enough to significantly reduce the unemployment rate. In his interview with the reporter, Greg says that we will probably see employment picking up--but is careful not to say a word forecasting a significantly falling unemployment rate. He can't do so because his projections of the distribution of outcomes over the next year are the same as mine: a 20% chance of rapidly-rising unemployment and a significantly-falling unemployment rate, a 60% chance of rising unemployment and a roughly stable or slightly rising unemployment rate, and a 20% chance of falling employment and a relatively rapidly-rising unemployment rate. Yet somehow the "White House officials dispute that prognosis" has to get into the story. Somehow the story is not complete if it says that White House and Democratic economists all agree that employment is likely to grow but the unemployment rate not likely to fall over the next year or so. Somehow the story must include an "Administration critic says X, Administration rebuts part." Posted by DeLong at 06:07 PM