The Economist ‘Checks & Balance’ podcast about US politics is well worth listening to. Literate, witty and well-informed, they sometimes do ‘specials’ on single topics. This letter was in response to one such podcast and addressed to one of the podcast’s regular participants.
To Charlotte Howard 10 Feb 23
Hi
I’m a longtime (since 1979) Economist subscriber and, over the past few years I’ve become a fan of your Checks & Balance podcast. Just as I’ve always taken issue with the paper’s right of centre stance while appreciating and enjoying its writing and reasoning, so I enjoy the podcast while making mental notes – often unfortunately mislaid – of criticism and disagreement. This is one such that survived until after my podcast alleviated travel.
Your episodes on Alaska were exceptionally good journalism. While you did include the mandatory ‘personal’ trials and tribulations you underplayed them with authentic NYC wit. Your interviewees were well chosen. The Governor’s fatally flawed logic and climate denialism was clearly more than distasteful to you and I’m sorry that, once again, the now customary framework allows for no challenge – even to the most barefaced untruth or misrepresentation. It seems to me that one casualty of US polarisation has been the demise of challenge interviewing. I don’t think it is just age-induced sentimentality that has me recalling interviews in the 60s and 70s, on both sides of the Atlantic, where misrepresentations and evasions were confronted, politely but firmly, with documented facts. I like that the Economistinterviews people with extreme or deluded views but regret that – perhaps as a condition of interviewing in a Twittering world – no challenges are allowed.
One key point from your Alaska pieces. Towards the end of Part 2, you spoke of the contradiction between preserving the environment of that vast state while continuing or even increasing the production of the fossil fuels that the rest of the USA needs. That’s where i would challenge you. For me there is a world of difference between what a person or a society ‘needs’ and what it ‘wants’. At a personal level I want a new car but, since my current one still runs, I don’t need it. A society may want tax-free booze but it is hard to argue that it needs it. This conflation goes to the heart of the Economist’s – and many economists’- philosophy. If a person has money to pay for something they desire then they need it. This person, unlike someone starving and penniless, has ‘effective demand’ and it is the God-ordained role of the market to fulfil their desire and collect their money. Once we allow some distinction between need and want, life becomes more complicated and more humane. Getting back to your quandary about destroying Alaska (and the world) to feed gas-guzzlers elsewhere in the USA, we have to ask does a person need a 4 litre pickup truck or do they just want it? Do they need to have cheap gas or just want it? Conceding this point means the government must regulate the market in some shape or form – perhaps through differential taxation; provision of selected infrastructure or public persuasion. And I suppose that, in the theology of the Economist, that conclusion is heretical. As I know you are concerned and knowledgeable about both energy markets and the coming climate collapse, might you consider some radical amendments your paper’s fundamental beliefs?
Keep up the excellent work. —
ktr2016 