Category: politics

Kneel down

When Colin Kaepernick knelt down during the national anthem, it was cool, and a strong sign of protest against racial violence in the United States. When other athletes, in the US and elsewhere decided to copy him (and did so on their own volition), it was cool as well.

What I find not so convincing is that after the Floyd murder earlier this year, sports organisations across the world decided to institutionalise the kneel down. When the English Premier League restarted after the covid-19 induced break, it was decided that all players and referees would kneel for a minute at kickoff.

Now it seems like it has been decided that the gesture will continue for the 2020-21 season as well – players and officials will take a knee for a minute at the beginning of each game. Of course, it has also been decided to make it “non-mandatory” – players who choose not to not join the protest will be free not to kneel.

The problem with the institutionalisation of the protest is that the protest loses its information content. Prior to the institutionalisation in June, if a player knelt, he/she was making a statement that he/she believed that “black lives matter”. Now that kneeling has become standard practice, there is no way for a player to convey this information.

Alternatively, it is possible now for a player to send out the opposite information (that he/she doesn’t believe in this protest) by refusing to join the protest. However, given the PR repercussions of such a move, it is unlikely that any player is going to take that stance (no pun intended).

Actually – by institutionalising the kneel, the protest level is getting changed, from individual players to leagues. I can see why the protest is going to be continued – it will be a continuing statement by the sporting leagues that they believe in the cause. However, individual players will not have the opportunity to show their protest (or dissent) any more.

I also wonder if and when this protocol is reversed, since it takes effort for some team or league to “bell the cat”. Even saying that “this is mere symbolism” is bound to attract wrath of protestors elsewhere, so teams are all caught in a Nash equilibrium where they continue to kneel down in protest.

And the longer this kneeling down protest continues, the more the meaning that it will lose. Rather than serving to make a statement, it will end up as yet another ritual.

Unions and blacks

Did you know that trade unions were responsible for apartheid, which devastated the lives of black and coloured people in South Africa for nearly a century?

The logic was simple – black people were willing to work as miners for lower wages than white people. So the white-controlled unions lobbied to not allow black people to work in mines, so that their wages weren’t undercut. And what started as a movement to not let blacks work in diamond mines became an overall anti-black movement that led to apartheid.

This is captured in this beautiful old essay in Econlib. A couple of excerpts:

At first, however, the white capitalist could deal directly only with the few English and Afrikaner managers and foremen who shared his tongue and work habits. But the premium such workers commanded soon became an extravagance. Black workers were becoming capable of performing industrial leadership roles in far greater numbers and at far less cost. Driven by the profit motive, the substitution of black for white in skilled and semiskilled mining jobs rose high on the agenda of the mining companies.

[…]

Nonetheless, the state instituted an array of legal impediments to the promotion of black workers. The notorious Pass Laws sought to sharply limit the supply of nonwhite workers in “white” employment centers. Blacks were not allowed to become lawful citizens, to live permanently near their work, or to travel without government passports. This last restriction created a catch-22. If passports were issued only to those already possessing jobs, how was a nonwhite to get into the job area to procure a job so as to obtain a passport? Nonwhites also were prohibited from bringing their families while working in the mines (reinforcing the transient nature of employment).

[…]

To discourage mine owners from substituting cheaper African labor for more expensive European labor, the trade unions regularly resorted to violence and the strike threat. They also turned to legislation: the Mines and Works Act of 1911 (commonly referred to as the first Colour Bar Act) used the premise of “worker safety” to institute a licensing scheme for labor. A government board was set up to certify individuals for work in “hazardous” occupations. The effect was to decertify non-Europeans, who were deemed “unqualified.”

Read the whole thing. Going by modern American (or British) politics, this kind of a conflict between labour unions and blacks doesn’t make sense. After all, both these “communities” are among the biggest supporters of the Democratic (or Labour) Party, and so based on modern politics, you would imagine that they would be in harmony with each other on most counts.

However, I’m not sure the conflict between mostly-white unions and blacks has completely gone away.

I’ve been thinking of the brutal killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests all over the USA (and elsewhere) over the last 10 days. The protestors have been protesting against racism, and the many cases of abuse of black people by white policemen in the US.

While the perpetrators of the crime were all racist white men, and the victim was a black man, I don’t know how much of the brutality can be attributed to racism, and how much simply to bad policing. Keep aside the victim’s race for a moment, and think about what happened – a policeman pinned down a suspect, and then knelt upon his neck for eight minutes until he was dead.

Racism has a part to play in that maybe the policemen thought they have a higher chance of getting away with it because the victim was black, but that the cop thought it was okay to brutalise just about anyone the way he did is atrocious.

Having largely been off social media, my reading about this (and related) issues is through the blogs that I follow, and one phrase that repeatedly make an appearance in this context is “police unions”. Policemen, like many other professions, are highly unionised in the United States, and the unions set rules for how the police can be treated, what they can be expected to do, their punishments, etc.

And from the stuff I’ve read (too many to link to everything), the unions give individual cops to behave the way they want to, knowing that punishment is going to be limited.

Today I came across this rather interesting post by Alex Tabarrok about Camden (New Jersey) where policemen marched with the Black Lives Matters protestors. There is a very interesting history to policing in Camden NJ.

In May of 2013, however, the entire police department was disbanded nullifying the union contract and an entirely new county police department was put into place.

And Tabarrok’s post goes on to show that the dissolution and reconstitution of the police force (basically the dissolution of the union) has led to tangible benefits in terms of reduced violent crime.

So it appears that, decades after apartheid was (in letter) abolished, white-controlled unions continue to make life really difficult for blacks.

Expertise

During the 2008 financial crisis, it was fairly common to blame experts. It was widely acknowledged that it was the “expertise” of economists, financial markets people and regulators that had gotten us into the crisis in the first place. So criticising and mocking them were part of normal discourse.

For example, most of my learning about the 2008 financial crisis came from following blogs written by journalists, such as Felix Salmon, and generalist academics such as Tyler Cowen or Alex Tabarrok or Arnold Kling, rather than blogs written by financial markets experts or practitioners. I don’t think it was very different for too many people.

Cut to 2020 and the covid-19 crisis, and the situation is very different. You have a bunch of people mocking experts (epidemiologists, primarily), but this is in the minority. The generic Twitter discourse seems to be “listen to the experts”.

For example, there was this guy called Tomas Pueyo who wrote a bunch of really nice blog posts (on Medium) about the possible growth of the disease. He got heavily attacked by people in the epidemiology and medicine professions, and (surprisingly to me)  the general twitter discourse backed this up. “We don’t need a silicon valley guy telling us epidemiology”, went the discourse. “Listen to the experts”.

That was perhaps the beginning of the “I’m not an epidemiologist but” meme (not a particularly “fit” meme in terms of propagation, but one that continues to endure). For example, when I wrote my now famous tweetstorm about Bayes’s theorem and random testing 2-3 weeks back, a friend I was discussing with it advised me to “get the thing checked with epidemiologists before publishing”.

This came a bit too late after I’d constructed the tweetstorm, and I didn’t want to abandon it, and so I told him, “but then I’m an expert on Probability and Bayes’s Theorem, and so qualified to put this” and went ahead.

In any case, I have one theory as to why “listen to the expert” has become the dominant discourse in this crisis. It has everything to do with politics.

Two events took place in 2016 that the “twitter establishment” (the average twitter user, weighted by number of followers and frequency of tweeting, if I can say) did not like – the passing of the Brexit referendum and the election of President Trump.

While these two surprising events took place either side of the Atlantic, they were both seen as populist movements that were aimed at the existing establishment. Some commentators saw them as a backlash “against the experts”. The rise of Trump and Brexit (and Boris Johnson) were seen as part of this backlash against expertise.

And the “twitter establishment” (the average twitter user, weighted by number of followers and frequency of tweeting, if I can say) doesn’t seem to like either of these two gentlemen (Trump and Johnson), and they are supposed to be in power because of a backlash against experts. Closer home, in India, the Modi government allegedly doesn’t trust experts, which critics blame for ham-handed decisions like Demonetisation and pushing through of the Citizenship Amendment Act in the face of massive protests (the twitter establishment doesn’t like Modi either).

Essentially we have a bunch of political leaders who are unpopular with the twitter establishment, and who are in place because of their mistrust of expertise, and multiplying negative with negative, you get the strange situation where the twitter establishment is in love with experts now.

And so when mathematicians or computer scientists or economists (or other “Beckerians“) opine on covid-19, they are dismissed as being “not expert enough”. Because any criticism of expertise of any kind is seen as endorsement of the kind of politics that got Trump, Johnson or Modi into power. And the twitter establishment (the average twitter user, weighted by number of followers and frequency of tweeting, if I can say) doesn’t like that.

The corner Bhelpuri guy

There’s this guy who sells Bhelpuri off a cart that he usually stations at the street corner 100 metres from home. His wife (I think) sells platters of cut fruit from another (taller, and covered) cart stationed next to him.

I don’t have any particular fondness for them. I’ve never bought cut fruit platters, for example (I’m told by multiple people that I’m not part of the target segment for this product). I have occasionally bought bhelpuri from this guy, but it isn’t the best you can find in this part of town. Nevertheless, every afternoon until mid-March he would unfailingly bring his cart to the corner every afternoon and set up shop.

He has since fallen victim to the covid-19 induced lockdown. I have no clue where he is (I don’t know where he lives. Heck, I don’t even know his name). All I know is that he has already suffered a month and half of revenue loss. I don’t know if he has had enough stash to see him through this zero revenue period.

The lockdown, and the way it has been implemented, has resulted in a number of misalignments of incentives. The prime minister’s regular exhortations to businesses to not lay off employees or cut salaries, for example, has turned the lockdown into a capital versus labour issue. Being paid in full despite not going to work, (organised) labour is only happy enough to demand an extension of the lockdown. Capital is running out of money, with zero revenues and having to pay salaries, and wants a reopening.

Our bhelpuri guy, running a one-person business, represents both capital and labour. In fact, he represents the most common way of operating in India – self employment with very limited (and informal) employees. Whether he pays salaries or not doesn’t matter to him (he only has to pay himself). The loss of revenue matters a lot.

The informality of his business means that there is pretty much no way out for him to get any sort of a bailout. He possibly has an Aadhaar card (and other identity cards, such as a voter ID), and maybe even a bank account. Yet, the government (at whatever level) is unlikely to know that he exists as a business. He might have a BPL ration card that might have gotten him some household groceries, but that does nothing to compensate for his loss of business.

If you go by social media, or even comments made by politicians to the media or even to the Prime Minister, the general discourse seems to be to “extend the lockdown until we are completely safe, with the government providing wage subsidies and other support”. All this commentary completely ignores the most popular form of employment in India – informal businesses with a small number of informal employees.

If you think about it, there is no way this set of businesses can really be bailed out. The only way the government can help them is by letting them operate (even that might not help our Bhelpuri guy, since hygiene-conscious customers might think twice before eating off a street cart).

One friend mentioned that the only way these guys can exert political power is through their caste vote banks. However, I’m not sure if these vote banks have a regular enough voice (especially with elections not being nearby).

It may not be that much of a surprise to see some sort of protests or “lockdown disobedience” in case the lockdown gets overextended, especially in places where it’s not really necessary.

PS: I chuckle every time I see commentary (mostly on social media) that we need a lockdown “until we have a vaccine”. It’s like people have internalised the Contagion movie a bit too literally.

Post-Covid Stimulus

There are two ways in which businesses have been adversely affected by the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. Using phrases from my algorithmic trading days, let me call this “temporary impact” and “permanent impact”.

For some businesses, the Covid-19 crisis and the associated lockdown means about three months or so of zero (or near-zero) revenues. There is nothing inherently unsafe about these businesses that makes their sales take a “permanent hit” after the crisis has passed us by. Once the economy opens up again, these businesses can do businesses like they used to before, except that they are staring at a three-odd month revenue hole at the top of their P&L.

The second kind of businesses are going to be “permanently impacted”. They involve stuff that are going to be labelled as “unsafe” even after the crisis is over, and people are going to do less of these.

For example, bars and restaurants are going to see a “permanent impact” because of the crisis – people are not going to relish sitting in a public place with strangers in the next one year, and a large proportion of restaurants will have to go out of business.

Similarly any industry associated with travel – such as transport (airlines, railways, buses), hotels and taxis will see a permanent impact from the crisis. Real estate is also likely to be hit hard by the crisis. For all these sectors (and more), even after the economy is otherwise back in full swing, it will be a very long time before they see the sort of demand seen before the crisis.

Now that distinction is clear (I mean there will always be sectors that will sort of lie in the borderline), but at least we have a classification, we can use this to determine how governments respond to stimulate economies after the crisis.

Based on all the commentary going around, it seems like a given that governments and central banks need to do their bit to stimulate the economies. The collapse in both demand and supply thanks to the crisis means that governments will collect less taxes this year than expected. So while to some extent they will be able to possibly borrow more, or monetise deficit, or set aside money from other budgeted items, the funds available for stimulating businesses are likely to be limited.

So what sectors of the economy should the governments (and central banks) choose to spend this precious stimulus on? My take is that they should not bother about businesses that will be permanently impacted by the crisis – at best, the money will go into delaying the inevitable at some of these companies, and if structured in the form of a loan, will be highly unlikely to be unpaid.

Instead, the government should spend to stimulate sections of the economy where the impact of the crisis is temporary – in order to make the crisis “more temporary”. By giving cash to sectors that are going to be fundamentally solvent, this cash can be more assured to “travel around the economy”, thus giving more of the proverbial bang for the buck.

This essentially means that sectors most affected by the current crisis should not get any help from the governments – this might sound counterintuitive, but if the true intention of the government stimulus is to stimulate the economy rather than helping a particular set of companies, this makes eminent sense.

Oh, and in the Indian context, this seems like the perfect time to “let go” of Air India.

Why Trump Will Retain Power

One piece of news that might have gone unnoticed in the middle of all this Covid19 news is that Bernie Sanders has suspended his campaign to be the Democratic nominee for this November’s American Presidential elections. So it looks highly likely that Joe Biden will take on fellow-septuagenarian Donald Trump.

Thinking about it, it doesn’t matter which Democrat takes on Trump. He is going to win. I suspect that Sanders realised this as the covid crisis was panning out, and so decided to fold.

Essentially what the Covid-19 crisis has been largely positive to things that American conservatives traditionally value, and showed the perils of some of the things that American “liberals” have traditionally valued. As a consequence of this, we will find that people who are on the margin (I’m told there are very few fence-sitting voters in the US, compared to India for example) are likely to shift more conservative.

In fact, everyone will become a little more conservative (in the American sense) after this crisis is over (though most Americans have such extreme political opinions that this won’t matter). And that means that in this year’s elections at least, the Republicans are going to win. So assuming he remains healthy, Trump has four more years in the Oval Office.

So what are these “conservative and liberal values” that influenced by this crisis? Let’s make a laundry list.

  • Borders: Open borders, at state and national level are a favourite of liberals (except, in the American context for some strange reason, for skilled labour immigration). They are great for economic growth, but also for pandemic growth. We are surely likely to see tougher border controls (maybe Brexit will be followed by Nordexit? Can’t be ruled out) continuing post this crisis.
  • Cities: Conservatives are all about urban sprawl, owning McMansions and commuting by car. Liberals bat for high density cities and public transport. The tail risk of high density cities as being higher risk for pandemic spread (which had largely been hidden following the rapid advances in medicine in the first half of the 20th century) has been exposed.
  • Families: When you are isolated you would rather be living with your family (“near and dear ones” as some like to put it). The lockdown has been hardest on people living alone or living “with roommates”. American conservatives are all about marrying early and staying married and “two parent families”, which means fairly low chances of living alone. On the margin, people are likely to rediscover “family”.
  • Individualism: Sort of related to the previous one. This is something that is likely to affect me as well. Liberals have been about “breaking free of the community” and living by and for yourself. Crises like this one make you realise the value of having a community, and cultivating relationships in good times that might come of use in bad. So we are likely to see less individualism.Related to this, liberals are far more likely than conservatives to cut ties with families on account of their political leanings. The pandemic might force a rethink on this.
  • Privacy: Countries that have managed to suppress the disease to great extent (such as Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea) have done so by increasing surveillance on their citizens. As Raghu SJ wrote in this excellent blogpost, countries are facing an “impossible trilemma” in terms of protecting citizens’ privacy, containing the disease and protecting the economy.
    And he wholeheartedly agrees that privacy is the one thing that should be sacrificed now. I’m thinking he’s not alone. Moreover, instruments like Aadhaar and Aadhaar-linked bank accounts, which was vociferously opposed by privacy fundamentalists, can be of excellent use for fast direct transfer of benefits now (that India, which has this infrastructure, is only doing a tiny stimulus is another matter).
    Going forward, people will be more willing to trade off privacy (which a lot of us are already doing with Facebook, etc.) for superior service, and privacy fundamentalists will get less attention.

There are some mitigating factors as well.

  • Church attendances will go down, since religious gatherings have been shown to be a reliable source of infection spread.
  • The health crisis can mean that some sort of Obamacare might make a comeback.

On the balance, though, at least in the social sense, you can expect Americans to become more conservative. Move to smaller towns and suburubs (greater remote working will aid this), keep factories in the US (a favourite Trump theme) and become more family oriented. While all this may not last for too long, it should be enough to win Trump this year’s election.

It doesn’t matter how well or badly his government handles Covid-19.

I deliberately decided to not talk about India, since I’m not sure there’s that much of an ideological difference between political parties here. But similar trends, at the personal level, are likely to happen here as well.

The Two Overton Windows

If you want to appear intelligent when discussing something about public policy, you could do worse than uttering the phrase “Overton Window”. The Overton Window, “invented” by one Joseph Overton, suggests that there is a “range of policies acceptable to political mainstream”.

And so you frequently have political commentators talking about the Overton Window “shifting” whenever a new political idea (or person) comes to the fore. This was bandied about much when Modi became Prime Minister of India, or when Trump became President of the US, or when Jeremy Corbyn became the Labour Party leader.

While “shifting Overton window” is something you come across rather often in policy discourse, my argument is that with the rise of subscription media, the Overton window is not shifting as much as it is “splitting”. In other words, we now have not one but two Overton Windows.

Without loss of generality, let us call them the “Jamie Overton Window” and the “Craig Overton Window”. Since both the twins are right arm fast bowlers, it doesn’t matter which brother is associated with which Overton Window.

So how did we get here, and what does it mean for us?

We started with the classic Overton Window. Let’s assume that all politics can be reduced to one axis (if we do a Principal Component Analysis of political views, the principal axis is certain to account for a large share of the variance, so this is not a bad assumption). So the Overton Window can be referred to by a line which the shifts.

As long as the world was “ruled by mainstream media”, this Overton Window kept moving back and forth, expanding and contracting, but it remained united. And then with the start of subscription ad-free media (maybe a decade or decade and half ago), the Overton Window started expanding.

The “left media” (that’s a convenient term isn’t it?) started admitting stuff that was left to the then Overton Window. The “right media” started admitting stuff that was to the right of the then Overton Window. And so over time, the Overton Window started expanding. And things can’t get into the media Overton Window unless they’re part of the mainstream political Overton Window.

The thing is that as the media became subscription-heavy and hence biased, political ideas that were once on the fringe now got a voice. And so the Overton Window got larger and larger.

Until a point when it got so unwieldy that it split, giving rise to Jamie and Craig. The image on the right is an approximate illustration of what happened.

And once the Overton Window split, there was no looking back. They started moving away from each other well-at-a-faster-rate. The Jamies could not come to terms with the policies of the Craigs, and vice versa. Political analysts and commentators started getting associated with the Jamie and Craig camps.

For a while, a few commentators continued to write for both sides, but the extreme fringes, which were getting more and more extreme, started overreacting. “How can we have someone who has written 10 articles for Craigs write for us”, the Jamies asked. “Most of our commentators are Craigs, so we might as well become a Craig newspaper”, the other side reasoned.

And that’s where mainstream media is going. The Overton Window has split down the middle. Crossing this gap is considered a crime worse than crossing the floor in Parliament.

Sadly, it is not just media that is getting Jamie and Craig. Mainstream politics reflects this as well, and so across countries we get political opponents who just cannot talk to each other, since everything one says is outside the Overton Window of the other.

Maybe the only way this can end is by going across axes, or inventing a new axis even. With the current spectrum politics, there is no hope of the two Overton Windows coming to meet.

 

Why Border Control Is Necessary

India is shutting down its domestic flights today in order to stop the spread of Covid-19. This comes a day after shutting down the national railways and most inter-city buses. States and districts have imposed border controls to control the movement of people across borders.

The immediate reaction to this would be that this is a regressive step. After a few decades of higher integration (national and international) this drawing of borders at minute levels might seem retrogade. Moreover, the right of a citizen to move anywhere in India is a fundamental right, and so this closing of borders might seem like a violation of fundamental rights as well.

However, the nature of the Covid-19 bug is that such measures are not only permissible but also necessary. The evidence so far is that it has a high rate of transmission between people who meet each other – far higher than for any other flu. The mortality rate due to the illness the bug causes is also low enough that each sick person has the opportunity to infect a large number of others before recovery or death (compared to this, diseases such as Ebola had a much higher death rate, which limited its transmission).

So far no cure for Covid-19 has been found. Instead, the most optimal strategy has been found to prevent infected people from meeting uninfected people. And since it is hard to know who is infected yet (since it takes time for symptoms to develop), the strategy is to prevent people from meeting each other. In fact, places like Wuhan, where the disease originated, managed to stem the disease by completely shutting down the city (it’s about the size of Bangalore).

In this context, open borders (at whatever level) can present a huge threat to Covid-19 containment. You might manage to completely stem the spread of the disease in a particular region, only to see it reappear with a vengeance thanks to a handful of people who came in (Singapore and HongKong have witnessed exactly this).

For this reason, the first step for a region to try and get free of the virus is to “stop importing” it. The second step is to shut down the region itself so that the already infected don’t meet the uninfected and transmit the disease to them.

Also, a complete shutdown can be harmful to the economy, which has already taken a massive battering from the disease. So for this reason, the shutdown is best done at as small a level as possible, so that the overall disruption is minimised. Also different regions might need different levels of shutdown in order to contain the disease. For all these reasons, the handling of the virus is best done at as local a level as possible. City/town better than district better than state better than country.

And once the spread of the disease has been stopped in a region, we should be careful that we don’t import it after that, else all the good work gets undone. For this reason, the border controls need to remain for a while longer until transmission has stopped in neighbouring (and other) regions.

It’s a rather complex process, but the main points to be noted are that the containment has to happen at a local level, and once it has been contained, we need to be careful to not import it. And for both these to happen, it is necessary that borders be shut down.

Why Activists Should Not Be In Government

Back in 2008, Salil Tripathi had argued in an article for Pragati (RIP) that human rights activists need to be unreasonable (check page 5 of this PDF). He had written:

[…] they see their role as defending the indefensible, so that the rest of us won’t suffer at the hands of a government with authoritarian tendencies. If they were to begin appearing reasonable, they’d lose resonance. More important, nobody will be speaking out for the innocent who will otherwise go to jail.

While Salil was talking especially about human rights activists (his own profession), this is broadly true of all activists in general. It is their duty to be unreasonable, since in a lot of cases they will be defending the indefensible.

If you are an environmental activist, for example, you will want to take unreasonable positions in favour of environmentalist causes. As Salil goes on to write in his old piece, the job of being reasonable belongs to somebody else.

They may even be selective – nothing prevents from others to pick up cases and causes these individuals do not. Let the think tankers and policy-makers become practical. Because otherwise, everyone will support the idea of safety-over-liberty, and we would all be losers.

That activists need to be unreasonable also comes from Graham Allison’s political resultant model. The basic idea is that every government decision is a function of all the positions submitted to it. You can think of the final direction of the decision as being the vector sum of all the positions submitted to the government. In this case, the job of the activist (human rights or otherwise) is to present the unreasonable and extreme case in favour of the activism, with the full knowledge that the government will go with a sort of political resultant.

So what happens when an activist comes into government? Remember that the activist is coming in with years of experience of taking extreme and unreasonable positions. Taking the “resultant” and the “reasonable view” has always been someone else’s job.

The risk of such a person being in government is that they could abandon the process of taking the “resultant” (which is what governments are expected to do), and continue from within government the process of going with the unreasonable policies and politics. That, however, makes for bad government and doesn’t give the people what they deserve.

As politics has been getting more and more extreme over the years (read this lovely essay on how louder politics is making it more unreasonable, drawing from sound theory), activists have been throwing their hats into the ring. Mainstream politicians have been endorsing extreme positions rather than taking them as just one of the inputs.

The problem is that such extremism isn’t how a government usually operates, and doesn’t make for good policy. Hence, activists shouldn’t really be part of the government.

News, Subscription, Advertising, and Bias

Dibyendu Mishra and Joyojeet Pal of the University of Michigan have some very interesting research out on the political bias of Indian news publications. Rather than do complicated gymnastics such as NLP, they’ve simply looked at the share of articles from each news publication that is retweeted by BJP and non-BJP publications, to draw out a measure of their bias (see link above for methodology).

They have made a nice scatter plot (the other axis is how “popular” these news outlets are in terms of the number of articles retweeted), and looking left to right, you can see the understood (by politicians) bias of various Indian news publications. As Helmet pointed out on Twitter, the most “centrist” news outlets seem to be the Times of India and the Economic Times, both from the Bennett, Coleman and Company group, who people crib about for “being too commercial” and “having too many advertisements”.

This reminds me of another piece of analysis that was in the news a few months ago, about how subscription-driven online news has led to news outlets being politically polarising. For example, Zach Goldberg did some analysis of frequency of words/phrases in the New York Times that are associated with the extreme left.

Note the inflexion point sometime in 2012 or so, around the same time when the NY Times put up its paywall.

David Rozado has a more comprehensive picture (check out his nifty tool here).

The idea is this – when newspapers depended on advertising for most of their funding, they needed to be centrist. Taking political sides meant that large mass-market advertisers wouldn’t want to advertise in this newspaper, and the paper would thus lose revenues. Hence, for the longest time, whatever the quality of the reporting and writing was, news outlets strove to be reasonably politically unbiased – taking sides would mean a loss of money.

Once digital took off, and it became clear that digital advertising wouldn’t really sustain the papers, they started putting their content behind paywalls. And subscription revenues meant two things – news outlets weren’t as beholden to advertisers as they used to be, and it was easier to get paying subscribers if you had a strong ideology. Moreover, online you can provide targeted advertising (rather than mass-market), so you can get away with being biased. And so with the coming of paywalls, newspapers started becoming far more political as the New York Times graph above indicates.

In India, there haven’t been too many publications behind paywalls, but media is evidently getting more and more polarised over time. Papers and channels are branding themselves (implicitly) as being pro or against a particular political party, and that is driving their viewership.

While these media outlets are good for fanbois (and fangirls) of particular ideologies, the ideological bent has meant that it has become harder to get objective news.

And that’s where money, and advertising, comes in.

The positioning of ToI and ET in the middle of the Indian media ideological graph is interesting because they belong to a group that is brazen about commercialisation and revenues (from advertising). And in terms of news objectivity, that’s a good thing. Since ToI and ET are highly money minded, they want to get as much advertising as possible, and in order to attract mass marketers, they need to not be biased.

Taking a political stand means pissing off people belonging to the opposite political persuasion, and that means less readership, which means less advertising revenues. And so if you read the editorials of these newspapers (I read ET everyday), you see that they maintain a careful balance of not appearing too biased in favour or against any party. And you see them raking in the advertisers while more biased (and “ideological”) competitors are forced to request for donations, or put up paywalls restricting their readership.

Putting it another way, there is no surprise that ToI and ET are not biased in their news, and are retweeted by politicians of all persuasions. It is the classic money-driven media model, and that is the one that is capable of providing the most objective news.