They’re taking over.

Let’s just take yesterday’s paper as an example.  The headline was the rice mortgage scheme and a second article (of four on the front page) was about the SET.  The inside pages have 2 more stories on domestic business matters, one on the maybe-they-will-maybe-they-won’t asbestos ban and another on the luxury car tax fraud.  The op-ed page has one piece on the financing of the water management and flood prevention programme, another, subtitled ‘Economics’, questioning Thailand’s claims to be greening the economy and a third on Japan’s ‘Abenomics’ economic revival plan.

Even the sports section has a piece on Lionel Messi’s tax problems and one on the footballing implications of a Scottish team’s virtual bankruptcy.  And the front page article of the Life section is about the local version of a business magazine and its new editor, whose CV lists jobs at Citibank, Robert Fleming & Co, Jardine Fleming, UBS and ABN Ambro.  But no publishing or media experience.

And the business section is of course all business and economics.  As far as I can tell no stories about football or politics or the weather are able to intrude into this part of the newspaper.

And I read this while watching the morning BBC news, which always contains a trailer for the business news programme that follows.  That’s world business news.  There are also programmes dedicated to business in Asia, business in the Middle East and business in India. 

And at lunchtime, their hour-long news programme (50% devoted to business news) ends with a few minutes discussing the leading stories in that morning’s newspapers.  For this they include a guest from outside the BBC, but this guest is almost invariably from the business world.  These specially qualified ‘experts’ comment on business stories, where they may have some expertise.  But they are also invited to pontificate on non-business affairs about which they seem to know as little as the newsreaders.

And while the world of business acts like everything is their business, it’s not as if we are being given a good breadth of coverage on things economic.  Even discounting the reports that are little more than re-edited puff pieces from the PR departments of the same companies whose advertising keeps the media financially afloat, the news and commentary in the media almost invariably wears the blinkers of globalized, corporate-welfare, cheat-as-much-as-you-can capitalism. 

The BBC’s India Business Report, for example, is presented by young middle-class women who conduct deferential interviews with the captains of industry, narrate stories on the plight of middle-class consumers, and carefully enunciate scripts about economic power moving east, or similar highfalutin waffle.  Rarely do they talk to or about farmers or factory hands or bus drivers.

The shibboleths that underpin the dominant economic structure are unquestioningly observed.  Growth is good, always and forever, even if we live on a finite planet with finite resources.  Greed is the only reliable motivation for human activity so pay for performance should be the norm (despite plenty of research that shows it often doesn’t work).  Trade unions are a market-distorting infringement on the flexibility of labour that today’s economies require.

Governments should be managed just like the corporations which largely own them, so the rice mortgage scheme is a failure because it makes ‘losses’, since this is how a business would be evaluated, rather than viewed as a method (effective or not) of redistributing income, which is of no interest to business. 

This means that when companies and consumers retrench in stormy economic times, governments are expected do the same, and even forced to do so if the IMF or European Central Bank hold any sway over them.  Such a course of action, which the economists call ‘pro-cyclical’, will generally just make recessions deeper and make asset bubbles more bubbly so you get a bigger pop when they burst. 

There is no lack of radical alternatives out there, but they appear in the mainstream media only fleetingly, and normally with a ‘how-whacky-is-this’ slant.

Now this unforced but powerful orthodoxy among those whose job is to explain the workings of the economy is not because they are untutored.  As far as I know they have been well schooled in faculties of economics and business studies.

The problem is that these educational institutions, increasingly dependent on grants and endowments from the corporate world, restrict their teaching to the mainstream view.  Any would-be economics teacher with heterodox views simply does not get hired.  An already employed teacher who develops heterodox views will not get tenure, where that still exists, and the gatekeepers of the prestigious journals will ensure that her papers never get published.

There is no mass conspiracy, no compulsion to follow the One True Path.  Just an unspoken consensus that everyone thinks this way and if you don’t agree, you’re nobody