I would agree with what he’s saying, but to say that he actually knows something about economics, and his words are ‘truth’ – well it says more about you Dan Gillmor, than Veblen.

I don’t think so.

What most of us in this thread including Takuan know is that even cynical bastards have to produce reports that basically jibe with what the other reporters publish. Otherwise, you’re sticking your neck out for a bald falsehood which is the worst way to risk your reputation.

And its true what CICADA pointed out: Different pieces of data will seem unimportant or dangerous to different parties. So we are bound to see lies by omission. That is why its important to review different news outlets and sources (and different types of sources) to get an accurate picture.

Why the scare quotes? The vast majority of things in our society are still working just fine, media appearances to the contrary.

As for the (dis)agreableness of data, it seems to me that Takuan’s point is that raw data is neutral in the sense that it is what it is, whether you like it or not, whereas Kyle Armbuster Expert Statistician’s point is that the way data is analyzed and/or presented can muddy the waters easily and substantially. These aren’t mutually exclusive points of view.

imajication
“Yeah, conspiracy theories from a hundred years ago.
That’s somewhat unfair…”

More than unfair, I’d say almost wholly false. The nature of the relationship of news media to their advertisers is hardly a secret.

one doesn’t “disagree” with information. Data is neutral.

Though, data is in the eye of the transducer.

Something we can agree upon. The information we get from our senses has already been preprocessed for us to some extent.

Political prejudices make it difficult to look at our media dispassionately, but commercial journalism has been around for a long time in many countries so it is possible to get insight into how it works by looking at what happened in places and times whose debates are irrelevant to us. A good choice is the press in the France of Napoleon III whose corruption and institutionalized mediocrity is utterly obvious in hindsight. The self-important pronouncements of its long-forgotten pundits sound like they belong on the OP-Ed pages of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. And its hardly a mystery why they defended an absurd status quo–Louis Napoleon was every bit as much of a buffoon as George Bush. It paid to be a right-thinking hyperpatriot and public sycophant just as it still pays to tell people, especially people with money, how wonderful they are. Thing is, if how this worked in 1860 is perfectly clear, why is anybody surprised at how it works in 2009?

What’s also interesting here is considering how Veblen’s analysis compares not to the periodical press, which we know is now severely crippled, but to blogs and other on-line organs of information. Does seem that they are candidates for similar analysis.

Brilliant word.

Gotta love that.

Roach, The Space Merchants was by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, not Poul Anderson and.

And yes, good point.

If you had a newspaper which ran news articles about how much the Detroit auto industry would need to cut worker benefits and salaries, some people would find that objectionable. If you had another which focused on the need to maintain worker salaries and benefits lest the Detroit economy plunge further into the abyss, you’d have people objecting to that as well.
If nothing else, there’s the disagreement as to which data are important. That makes the difference between the NYT, the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News even if all the information in each were perfectly correct.

Having recently read The Theory of the Leisure Class, in which Veblen coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption, it struck me that he pretty much makes it up as he goes along. Even if what he says makes sense, there’s no research to back up his arguments, no interviews with conspicuous consumers, just his opinions. And now it’s the kind of book that modern academic theorists might cite as gospel truth.

Thank god for…

Librarians!

They cut through the cr@p on the interwebs for you too!

http://tinyurl.com/PrimoInfo

That’s somewhat unfair, but its 5 am and I need to go to bed, so I can’t make a more nuanced critique.

I do.

I can make them say damned near anything, and it will look like solid data. I DON’T, but it’s easy to do. I’ve advised on a couple of research projects where the main researcher had basically paid me to come onto the project to cook his or her numbers, and then were furious when I wouldn’t.

So they just found another statistician who would.

Luckily, my little soft science backwater doesn’t do much to change the world one way or the other, but I also don’t think it’s any different from other fields which DO.

Data is most definitely subject to agree/disagree, because it is never the whole picture. It’s not even most. It’s a tiny, selected fraction, and it might even be phony.

In the late John D. McDonald’s “Travis McGee” series of detective novels (identifiable by the colors in their names), McGee’s best pal was a semi-retired economist named “Meyer.” Meyer lived on a houseboat that he’d named the “John Maynard Keynes,” until this boat was blown up. He soon bought a new houseboat to replace it, and named this one the “Thorstein Veblen.”