February 24, 2009

The Dow

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Matt Yglesias is annoyed at the undue attention paid to the Dow Jones Industrial Average:

Not only is it obviously stupid for political commentators to be assessing the quality of economic policy by tracking the ups-and-downs of the stock market but the fact that the commentators who want to do this keep wanting to specifically use the Dow Jones Industrial Average just highlights their ignorance….Why not use the S&P 500? Or the Wilshire 5000?

To be clear, that wouldn’t make this idea any less dumb on the merits. But if we’re going to have stock-based punditry then it could at least be informed stock-based punditry. Back in the real world, the key issues are the trajectory of employment and income.

Clearly, the answer is that nobody makes or loses money based on betting on the unemployment rate.  And we don’t have exciting video of traders going nuts on exchange floors when hourly wage numbers are announced.  And anyway, all that stuff is only available on a monthly basis.  You can hardly run a 24/7 cable show based on that, can you?

In CNBC’s defense, it’s worth noting that they’re just giving the people what they want.  Lots and lots of fairly ordinary people have money invested in the stock market, but virtually nobody has a bunch of money invested in derivatives based on, say, the TED spread, even though right now it might be more important than the DJIA.  What’s more, it’s sort of interesting just how good a proxy for the economy the Dow Jones is.  Take a look at a historical chart and you’ll see that its ups and downs correlate pretty well to the overall state of the economy.  If you’re looking for a sexy, fast-moving, gut-wrenching indicator of the economy’s animal spirits, you can do a lot worse than the DJIA.

And why the DJIA instead of the S&P 500?  It’s the power of the first mover.  The S&P didn’t get started until 1923, and even then was published only once a week.  Boring!  By the time they finally got around to doing things daily, the DJIA was the king of quotes, and it’s stayed that way ever since.  And since the two indexes follow each other so closely anyway, I guess there’s never been any really compelling reason to switch loyalties.  Plus it helps when the guys who own the average also happen to own the country’s biggest financial newspaper.  That kind of synergy is hard to beat.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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