The New Yorker's Assumptions

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2011/08/the-new-yorker-assumptions

The New Yorker magazine out today has pieces by two different writers that display a similar attitude.

The first runs under the headline "Why Wall Street Should Fear the Tea Party." It includes the sentence, "the austerity advocates will also be emboldened in their attacks on the Federal Reserve, which they argue has been overly loose in its monetary policy (when in fact it's been too tight)."

It may be the writer's opinion that the Federal Reserve's monetary has been too tight. But to say it's a "fact" is something that it's strange got past the New Yorker's vaunted fact-checkers. Interest rates are near zero, with the Fed's "zero interest rate policy" even generating a zippy acronym, "ZIRP." Gold has already soared to record highs against the dollar. The loose policy has consequences, both in terms of the low return on savings accounts pushing savers further out the yield curve, and in terms of a weaker dollar. Maybe there's an argument for a looser monetary policy, but if the New Yorker wants to make it, it should do so, rather than merely stating it as a "fact" without any further explanation.

The second piece runs under the headline, "How Bad Is It?" It includes suggestions for jobs and growth, followed by this sentence, "Most of these things would involve the federal government's borrowing and spending more money, but that, of course, is what governments are supposed to do in an economic downturn." "Of course" that is what governments are "supposed to do." It's the "of course" part that really grated on me there, another way of saying what the "in fact" did in the other article — these are my assumptions, and I'm not going to bother to really argue them, I just am going to assume my readers share them.

If I ever fall into those patterns of writing or argument here, I hope community members will point it out in the comments.

by Editor  |  Aug 8, 2011 at 9:08 am Related Topics:  Federal Reserve, Government Spending, Press receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list