I know the tendency on the intellectual left is to dismiss the conscious production of targeted propaganda as an important factor in the US news system--but I'm finding myself more and more leaning to the "schemers in a locked room" model, that most of this junk is just churned out by PR firms and other propagandists and printed almost verbatim. Are journalists really THAT stupid as to labor who-knows-how-many hours to produce crap like this "poll"?
----Original Message Follows---- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: Question on happiness Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 18:34:11 -0400
Jacob Segal wrote:
>Forwarded article from Robert Samuelson in this week's Newsweek. He refers
>to a study on the "happiness" of people in the US versus Europe. My
>question is what do people think about the validity of self-reporting on
>happiness, given the being unhappy is something of a mark of shame for many
>people in this culture.
Pollsters say answers to "global" questions are extremely unreliable. And answers to one as loaded as this one - it's un-American to be unhappy! - has to be extremely unreliable.
> By and large, Americans see the United States as a more "mobile
>society than Europe," write Alberto Alesina and Rafael Di Tella from
>Harvard
>and Robert MacCulloch from the LSE. Americans think they "have more
>opportunities to move up (or down)" than Europeans, who are more fatalistic
>about their place on the economic ladder.
Yeah, they think that but it isn't true. American society is no more mobile than European societies.
>The United States is a middle-class nation, and most Americans want
>it to stay that way.
Another untruth. Measured in income terms, the U.S. has a smaller "middle class" (hi Carrol!) than any other First World country. All those bad redistributionist social democracies have much larger middle income brackets than the Land of the Free.
> No one wants a society starkly split into "haves" and
>"have-nots." The obsession with "rising inequality" plays to these fears
>without addressing them. It is mostly a moral self-indulgence: a way of
>demonstrating superior "caring."
I hope there's a special circle of hell for people who make arguments this spurious.
> It implies that the rich are somehow
>responsible for the plight of the poor
Heavens! Not that!!
Doug
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