There, I just saved you a dollar.

-- SomeNYGuy

Not to worry. I am a big bad deficit spender.

;-)

I've seen a few people call Glenn a reporter, or journalist. This is wrong. Reporters or journalists dig up information that hasn't been reported before. Glenn does not do this.

-- shooter242

Shooter wants to hear more about Paris, Lindsay and Nicole.

Glenn is. You're not.

The U.S. public debt as a percentage of GDP is not especially high compared to other developed economies (nor especially low). More indebted than Japan, less than France.

That $60 trillion figure includes future entitlement obligations (i.e. Social Security) which almost certainly will be repudiated. The government is much more likely to reject claims on the fictional Social Security "trust fund" than the $9 trillion in market-traded securities: another illustration of the value of formal property rights. If those future retirees held bonds instead of Social Security cards, they'd be paid.

I expect that you're correct about currency devaluation as the most likely strategy for reducing the real debt. There are serious underlying problems facing the dollar, the euro, and the yen, though I'm not quite ready to denominate my assets in rupees or yuan. Real assets are increasingly attractive.

I also expect that the major liberal states are only about 20 years away from losing most of their ability to collect taxes, which should make the shakeout that much more violent. There's a reason that you libertarians and market fundamentalists, who are more attuned to this trend than most, are so heavily invested in gold.

As usual, people with real money on the line are paying the most attention. This is an old release (it's a propriety system and presumably ungodly expensive to subscribe to) but it gives an idea of the forces at work.

http://www.lehman.com/press/pdf/073004_Damocles.pdf

I've seen a few people call Glenn a reporter, or journalist. This is wrong. Reporters or journalists dig up information that hasn't been reported before. Glenn does not do this.

-- shooter242

Actually, he does. Beltway journalism violated one of the basic tenets of its craft and became the news. Glenn reports on that. He created a master narrative that people are anxious to follow.

PressThink Basics: The Master Narrative in Journalism

Borrowed from Lit Crit, the term "master narrative" has come into use in journalism here and there. What is it? The story that generates all the other stories. I'll explain.

Press think has terms of art, and one of them is “master narrative,” borrowed from literary critics. I use it to describe a part of the press that too easily eludes attention: the big story, sometimes the back story, often a fragment of a narrative, that generates all the other stories, which are smaller pieces...

Master narrative may have started in academic dialect. But it has crept into the language of workaday journalists as they reflect on their way of doing things. This I take as sign of a useful idea.

Canadian journalist Robert Fulford (a columnist for the National Post) writes: “A master narrative that we find convincing and persuasive differs from other stories in an important way: it swallows us. It is not a play we can see performed, or a painting we can view, or a city we can visit. A master narrative is a dwelling place. We are intended to live in it.”

Because journalists do “live” within their narratives, they often don’t see them. William Woo, former editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “The master narrative is a reason why some stories that should get in, don’t get in.” This alone is reason to criticize the press under the title above. Paul Taylor, a former political reporter for the Washington Post who covered presidential campaigns, wrote this in 1992:

Political stories don’t just ‘happen’ the way hailstorms do. They are artifacts of a political universe that journalism itself has helped to construct. They are components of a journalistic master narrative built around two principle story lines: the search for the candidates’ character flaws, and the depiction of the campaign as a horserace, full of ploys and surprises, tenacity and treachery, rising action and falling action, winners and losers.

Taylor’s use of “construct” intrigues me for two reasons. Journalists, he’s saying, help create the universe from which they draw news, which is a truthful but disruptive observation. How to report the news—accurately, fairly, comprehensively—is something we know how to teach in journalism school. How to construct the public arena (accurately, fairly, comprehensively? do these terms even make sense?) is not. It’s pretty clear where the authority to report the news comes from; it’s not clear where the authority to construct the world lies, or could lie.

This ghostly matter—of a master narrative instructing the news machine—is not debated in newsrooms the way the day’s top stories are. It is not examined at conferences. The ombudsmen do not write columns about it. The pundits don’t kick it around. Officially, it is not in the job description of the American press, and no one gets hired for a bigger salary in Philadelphia by being a good constructor of the civic universe in Scranton.

Still the construction work goes on, and only a language of criticism can hold the laborers accountable. A second telling thing about Taylor’s active verb “construct” is that it’s borrowed (whether he knew it or not) from post-modernism. The term master narrative arrives via the same route. A key source for it is Jean-François Lyotard’s 1979 work The Postmodern Condition, a classic among those who study that condition.

Now there are many literate people hostile to postmodernism and its vocabulary, but journalists are among the most vocal. The trendy postmodern academic is a much ridiculed figure in press commentary; terms like “deconstruction” are laugh triggers among the working press. Were someone to suggest for graduate students in journalism a crackling tour of postmodern thought, the reaction would likely be incredulity, panic or revolt.

Even so, the idea that news stories are “artifacts of a political universe that journalism itself has helped to construct,” these words of a reporter raised within the tribe, are a classic bit of postmodern thinking because they de-naturalize the news. In fact, journalists are among the most casual postmodernizers around, since they can always be counted on for observations like this, from Richard S. Dunham of Business Week: “Still, in politics, perception is reality, and the public remains convinced that Bush is rooted deeply in the political center.” Yes, that’s postmodern lite. Yes, it’s banal. This is my point about casual proponents in the press

Finally, what I like most about the notion of a master narrative is that in some circumstances it provides leverage against intellectual habit in the press. You can use it not only to recognize but to change things, as I tried to do in some of my own work on behalf of public journalism. One way to reform journalism is to find a group of people who do it and want a different master narrative generating the stuff they do.

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2003/09/08/basics_master_p.html