When economics news comes out, why is it always a disaster?

Question

When some economics news comes out, there is always someone on TV who says its a disaster.

For example. When unemployment goes up, there is always saying its a disaster because the government has to pay more in benefits. When unemployment goes down, there is always someone on complaining that its a disaster for wage inflation.

Why is this?

Is there ever any economics news that is not a disaster to someone?

romanisis if you use this in a debate, can you let me know how it goes?

Thanks

Answer 1

It's the same reason that when normal news comes out, it's often a disaster. People will buy more papers if bad things happen.

Answer 2

I guess there is not - just as there is (usually) no such thing as a free lunch. Economics cares about trade-offs - inflation vs unemployment, leisure vs consumption, consumption today vs consumption tomorrow, etc.

When someone (an individual, a government, a parent, a central bank) tries to make a decision, she or he tries to find an “ideal” point, one where the trade-off between, say, inflation and unemployment, fits best her or his objective. Unfortunately, that decision taker may be not taking into account – or not weighting enough – the effects of his or her decisions in a particular group’s utility or well-being (future generations, poor people, rich people, elderly, children, you name it). Of course, the same would apply to random or unexpected changes in the economy; there will (almost) always be winners and losers.

When this does NOT happen? Economic growth and development that increase income over a long period of time tend to improve the standards of ALL the members of a community – no bad news for anyone! As to what can spark these periods of prosperity, the usual suspects are technological changes and increases in productivity – although what explains these is usually hard to detect.

Answer 3

"The dismal science is another, often derogatory, name for economics devised by the Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle. The term is an inversion of the phrase "gay science", meaning "life-enhancing knowledge". This was a familiar expression at the time, and was later adopted as the title of a book by Nietzsche (see The Gay Science).

It is often stated that Carlyle gave economics the nickname 'dismal science' as a response to the writings of Thomas Robert Malthus, who grimly predicted that starvation would result as projected population growth exceeded the rate of increase in the food supply. Carlyle did indeed use the word 'dismal' in relation to Malthus's theory in his essay Chartism (1839):

"The controversies on Malthus and the 'Population Principle', 'Preventative Check' and so forth, with which the public ear has been deafened for a long while, are indeed sufficiently mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next, is all that of the preventative check and the denial of the preventative check."

However the full phrase "dismal science" first occurs in Carlyle's 1849 tract entitled Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, in which he was arguing for the reintroduction of slavery as a means to regulate the labor market in the West Indies:

"Not a 'gay science,' I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science"

Developing a deliberately paradoxical position, Carlyle argued that slavery was actually morally superior to the market forces of supply and demand promoted by economists, since, in his view, the freeing up of the labor market by the liberation of slaves had actually led to a moral and economic decline in the lives of the former slaves themselves.

Carlyle's view was attacked by John Stuart Mill and other liberal economists."

Although economics, the Queen of the social sciences, seems depressing, its most successful godchild, capitalism, is the reason the world bears so much fruit. Many academic disciplines are optimistic, but they get nothing done and have not improved humanity, nor even successfully explained much of the social world...they're non-subjects really.

Whatever happens in the world is bad news for someone. When unemployment falls to an all-time low, job centres go titz up. My favourite example is when the Berlin Wall came down. Billions of people rejoicing, with a country reunited, and the end in sight, globally, of a terrible system of government. Yet in one of the first television interviews, that of one of the Wall's guards, the note was despondent. "Terrible," weeped the man. "Igor lose his job."

Answer 4

I stopped doing the lotto on Saturday nights.
I am now in £52 per year.That's good economic news.
Not for the Lotto! I take your point.
Good question. Don't think there is an answer even if you give money to a charity,someone,will grumble.
Never thought of the economic chain reaction like this before.
Will use it in debates,thanks.

Answer 5

Yes, I know. But it is only a disaster, until a bigger and better disaster comes along.

Answer 6

Because no one watches network news to hear about anything good.

Answer 7

to use an economic cliché, good for whom?

Answer 8

We'll probably do better when we get rid of this wasteful gov't!

Answer 9

it isn't, you dummy...........................