Archive for April, 2009
Why I don’t write about politics.
Sometimes I get requests to comment on matters of political economy, like what course of action the White House, the Fed, et al. should take. I have a shorter answer and a longer answer.
The short version: It’s a business blog . . . there are plenty of politics / policy / political economy blogs out there already . . . D&B and Hoover’s don’t take political stances on any question . . . and I’m not qualified to comment on much of this stuff, anyway.
The longer version comes in parts:
- What do I know? Probably I know more about policy than some, because I’ve spent the past several years working part-time on a Ph.D. in U.S. history, with an emphasis in foreign-relations history since World War II. So I know a couple of things. But I’m no economist, and while I do try to make sense of the implications of current doings in policy as they apply to the business word, all too often the news out of Washington (and Whitehall etc.) is more about political rhetoric and ideological positioning than it is about what actually matters in your life and mine. This makes it hard to know what to think on many of these issues.
- It’s not information that’s useful to most businesspeople in the course of doing their everyday jobs. It’s often hard for me to see how having a highly informed, devoutly held opinion on, say, agricultural trade between the United States and Latin America, or the role of labor unions in the U.S. auto industry, matters to your working life or mine. Unless, that is, you happen to have a vested interest in one of those topics, in which case (a) you’re likely better informed about it than I am, and (b) you likely have access to specialized sources of information and analysis on it that are certainly better informed than I am.
- Free speech is a great concept, devoutly to be defended . . . but noise isn’t helpful. Hoover’s tries to cut down the noise by offering you the information you need on a company you want to do business with, or an industry you’d like to explore. I talk about that sort of thing, and about business problems that I take to be more or less universal — inbox trouble, busy-ness overload, how the media reports company news, where social media is taking us, how we can use our brains better to work better, and so on. These are things that might be helpful to you whether you’re conservative, liberal, anarchist, libertarian, Marxist, Martian, or whatever. Offering my two cents’ worth on whether President Obama should or shouldn’t be condemned for pursuing Policy X . . . what business problem does that solve?
- Your attention (and ire) would be better invested elsewhere. Walking around angry is a poor way to get ahead in life, and a crazy way to do business. Yet a lot of the political conversations I encounter online are pointless — unless the point is to convince the combatants that the folks on the other side indeed are demented, wilfully blind, and the Sworn Enemies of All That Is Good. Even the discussions that avoid the blame and the name-calling . . . how is having a strong view on TARP going to help you make your next sales call, or code the next feature of your app, or answer a customer’s burning question? There are better uses of your time.
My plate is full enough — with both blog topics and other duties — that I could avoid loaded questions of political economy forever and still have enough to talk about. So I do avoid them.
And there you have it.
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