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cthulu2016

(10,960 posts)
Tue Oct 30, 2012, 11:41 AM Oct 2012

Krugman: Analysis of publicly available information trumps "insider" Scoops

Very true stuff. Many people think that the truth is a secret held by authority, rather than being what the world all around us actually is. And inside trading model of reality.

"The home sales numbers say one thing, but my cousin is a banker, and he says the housing market is..." Sorry, but who gives a fuck? Your cousin may watch Fox news all day. Your cousin may be regurgitating what he read somewhere. Your cousin's personal experiences with home sales may not be representative. Nothing your cousin says or thinks trumps actual asking prices, actual sales in the actual housing market.

And don't get me started on "internal polls." Who would pay the slightest attention to what the most interested parties (campaigns) say about polling they did that you cannot examine? Yet every election cycle we get this stuff about the secret numbers campaigns have. (Even after Karl Rove said that he had the "real" numbers in 2006 showing that Democrats would not take the House, reporters still want the "real" numbers.)

...A lot of political journalism, and even reporting on policy issues, is dominated by the search for the “secret sauce”, as Martin puts it: the insider who knows What’s Really Going On. Background interviews with top officials are regarded as gold, and the desire to get those interviews often induces reporters to spin on demand.

But such inside scoops are rarely — I won’t say never, but rarely — worth a thing. My experience has been that careful analysis of publicly available information almost always trumps the insider approach.

This is sort of obviously true in election season: in a vast, diverse country, no amount of talking with big shots (who are pushing an agenda) — or for that matter hanging out at campaign events and trying to assess the mood — is a substitute for polls that collectively sample tens of thousands of voters.

It’s even more obviously true on economic matters, where top officials basically work from the same data everyone else has, and a smart economist is almost always a better guide than the Minister of Silly Walks.

Remarkably, it has even been true for national security. Reporters with top-level access got completely snookered by the lies about Iraq, while many ordinary concerned citizens, looking at what we actually seemed to know, figured out early on that the Bush administration was cooking up a false case for war...

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/scoop-dupes/

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