These days, we take for granted the ease with which we can communicate ideas to others all over the globe. Just a hundred years ago, radio was state of the art and television had yet to be invented. Today many of us carry access to a world of information and instant communication in our pockets.
When we talk about the channels through which information flows, and the ways that the channel itself might alter or control the narrative, we are referring to media. Just like a medium is a person through whom some people try to communicate with those who have died, media (the plural of medium) are channels of communication, as mentioned earlier. The integrity of the medium is critical. A scam artist might make money off the desire of grieving people to contact a lost loved one by making up the information she passes on. The monarch and clergy who channeled the narrative of the Holy Roman Empire were motivated by their wish to hold on to power. Think about water running through a pipe. Maybe the pipe is made of lead, or is rusty, or has leaks. Depending on the integrity of the pipe, the water we get will be toxic or colored or limited. In the same way, the narratives and information we get can be altered by the way they are mediated, by the channels, or the media through which we receive them.
As we will see, in today’s digital world, there are so many channels of information that it is all the more important that people check the integrity of the media they use in order to understand the narratives those media may be pushing.
Politics and Economics
Whereas politics is concerned with the distribution of power and resources and the control of information in society, economics is concerned specifically with the production and distribution of society’s wealth—material goods like bread, toothpaste, and housing, and services like medical care, education, and entertainment. Because both politics and economics focus on the distribution of society’s resources, political and economic questions often get confused in contemporary life. Questions about how to pay for government, about government’s role in the economy, and about whether government or the private sector should provide certain services have political and economic dimensions. Because there are no clear-cut distinctions here, it can be difficult to keep these terms straight. We can begin by examining different economic systems, shown in Figure 1.1.
economics production and distribution of a society’s material resources and services
The processes of politics and economics can be engaged in procedurally or substantively. In procedural political and economic systems, the legitimacy of the outcome is based on the legitimacy of the process that produced it. In substantive political and economic systems, the legitimacy of the outcome depends on how widely accepted is the narrative the government tells about who should have what. The outcome is based on the decision of a powerful person or people, not a process that people believe is impartial. In procedural systems, the means (process) justify the ends; in substantive systems, the ends justify the means.
Figure 1.1 A Comparison of Economic Systems
President for Life In March 2018, China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, voted to change the country’s constitution to eliminate the existing ten-year presidential term limit. This step toward authoritarianism sets up President Xi Jinping as a potential president for life.
Capitalism
Capitalism is a procedural economic system based on the working of the market—the process of supply and demand. In a pure capitalist economy, all the means that are used to produce material resources (industry, business, and land, for instance) are privately owned, and decisions about production and distribution are left to individuals operating through the free-market process. Capitalist economies rely on the market—the process of supply and demand—to decide how much of a given item to produce or how much to charge for it. In capitalist countries, people do not believe that the government is capable of making such judgments; they want to keep these decisions out of the hands of government and in the hands of individuals, who they believe know best about what they want. The most extreme philosophy that corresponds with this belief is called laissez-faire capitalism, from a French term that, loosely translated, means “let people do as they wish.” The government has no economic role at all in such a system. However, no economic system today maintains a purely unregulated form of capitalism, with the government completely uninvolved.
capitalist economy an economic system in which the market determines production, distribution, and price decisions, and property is privately owned
Like most other countries today, the United States has a system of regulated capitalism. It maintains a capitalist economy, and individual freedom from government interference remains the norm, but it allows government to step in and regulate the economy to guarantee individual rights and to provide procedural guarantees that the rules will work smoothly and fairly. Although in theory the market ought to provide everything that people need and want, and should regulate itself as well, sometimes it fails.
regulated capitalism a market system in which the government intervenes to protect rights and make procedural guarantees
procedural guarantees government assurance that the rules will work smoothly and treat everyone fairly, with no promise of particular outcomes
The notion that the market, an impartial process, has “failed” is a somewhat substantive one—it is the decision of a government that the outcome is not acceptable and should be replaced or altered to fit a substantive vision of what the outcome should be. When markets have ups and downs—periods of growth followed by periods of slowdown or recession—individuals and businesses look to government for economic security. If the market fails to produce some goods and services, like schools or highways, individuals expect the government to step in to produce them (using taxpayer funds). It is not very substantive—the market process still largely makes all the distributional decisions—but it is not laissez faire capitalism, either.
Socialism
In a socialist economy like that of the former Soviet Union, economic decisions are made not by individuals through the market but rather by politicians, based on their judgment of what society needs. In these systems the state often owns the factories, land, and other resources necessary to produce wealth. Rather than trusting the market process to determine the proper distribution of material resources among individuals, politicians decide what the distribution ought to be—according to some principle like equality, need, or political reward—and then create economic policy to bring about that outcome. In other words, they emphasize not procedural guarantees of fair rules and process, but rather substantive guarantees of what they believe to be fair outcomes.
socialist