mediamacro

English

Etymology

Coined in 2014 by Simon Wren-Lewis. Compound of media +‎ macro (“macroeconomics”).

Noun

mediamacro (uncountable)

1. (politics, economics, media) A narrative or set of beliefs promulgated as factual by news media that distorts macroeconomic consensus, e.g. often presenting the (total) government deficit as a prime economic indicator and invoking analogies between governments and households on debt.
   • 2014 November 24, Simon Wren-Lewis, “Why We Need Our Fiscal Policy Instrument Back”, in Social Europe:

     Politicians who appeared to deviate from the new ‘mediamacro consensus’ of deficit fetishism suffered as a consequence.

   • 2015 February 19, Simon Wren-Lewis, “The Austerity Con”, in London Review of Books:

     Mediamacro has a number of general features. It puts much more emphasis than conventional macroeconomics does on the financial markets, and on the views of participants in those markets. It prefers simple stories to more complex analysis. As part of this, it is fond of analogies between governments and individuals, even when those analogies are generally seen to be false by macroeconomists.

   • 2015 May 4, Paul Krugman, “Mediamacro Crosses the Atlantic”, in New York Times:

     Simon Wren-Lewis has been on a lonely crusade against “mediamacro”, a narrative about the British economy that is untrue — or at the very least easily challenged and at odds with textbook economics — yet is stated in the news media not as a hypothesis but as a fact.

   • 2016, Felix R. FitzRoy, Elissaios Papyrakis, An Introduction to Climate Change Economics and Policy, Routledge (2nd revised ed., 1st ed. from 2009), →ISBN.

     This has been particularly striking since 2010, when most left-of-centre parties such as Labour in the UK and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany have embraced the conservative-populist arguments for deficit reduction and austerity of the mainstream media, or ‘mediamacro’, which are rejected by almost all academic macroeconomists (at least in the UK and US, though not in Germany).

   • 2018 November 4, Ben Chu, “We need to learn that the real economic gamble is sometimes too little government borrowing – not too much”, in The Independent:

     A key element of mediamacro is the naive assumption that higher government borrowing is inherently dangerous and that lower borrowing is always praiseworthy.