Does economics have a major humility problem? For the last two weeks economists on BlueSky have been fighting a rearguard action attempting to persuade the public that their senses lie to them and that - in fact - Brits "never had it so good". Th...

Economics has a major humility problem. Latest from @paulhebden.bsky.social
www.linkedin.com/pulse/does-e...

Obligatory Louis Theroux "Manosphere" blog We're all marks aren't we? Not just the young men who buy into the type of toxic influencers that Theroux at times struggled to depict in this documentary. Now, I love Louis Theroux.

We're all marks aren't we? A blog on that Louis Theroux documentary about the "Manosphere" that everyone is talking about.

www.linkedin.com/pulse/obliga...

Narratives are a battlefield—and timing is everything.

HT @groundwork.bsky.social

.... What story about this crisis do WE want to become common sense?

Because once that locks in:

- It shapes policy space
- It defines who gets blamed
- And it determines what solutions feel legitimate

If the last inflation cycle taught anything, it’s this....

7/

CEO statements, earnings calls, dividend data is all abstract theory.
- Make it kitchen-table real
- Fuel bills, food prices, commuting costs.
- Message discipline
- One clear story, repeated everywhere.

The strategic question for progressives isn’t just “what do we think?”

It’s....

6/

In terms of progressive comms in this moment, what worked and will matters now is accepting that:

- Speed beats perfection
- The first coherent explanation of this crisis often wins.
- Show, don’t tell

5/

But there are alternative frames sitting there, waiting to be developed:

"Who is benefiting from price spikes?"
"What are margins doing vs costs?"
"Where is pricing power being exercised?"
"What choices are firms making under cover of crisis?"

4/

That narrative didn’t emerge naturally. It was built, fast, & with discipline. The lesson:

- If WE don’t define what’s happening, someone else will.
- The risk is a passive narrative:

Oil prices are “just global markets”
Energy firms are “price takers”
Pain for you & me is “inevitable”

3/

We’ve seen this movie before. During the last inflation spike after Russia invaded Ukraine, progressives were initially on the back foot - until a new narrative took hold:

👉 Corporate pricing power and profiteering

2/

In crisis moments, when prices spike, the narrative vacuum opens fast.
And gets filled just as quickly:

👉 “It’s global forces”
👉 "It's wages"
👉 “Nothing can be done”
👉 “Households need to tighten belts”
👉 “Government support is the problem”

1/

50 local news stories may now be more influential than a single national headline. That headline above sounds counterintuitive. But in the age of AI search, generative answer engines and AI-mediated discovery, my bet is that it is true.

"... Any organisations that can consistently deliver stories to news desks at unassailable speed is a communication superpower."

Latest Campaign Salience Newsletter:
www.linkedin.com/pulse/50-loc...

First mover advantage is everything in today's media / information space. Personally (this is me @paulhebden.bsky.social ) I've given up asking for permission to do it. I'm building my own systems, my own nascent narrative infrastructure, my own means of creating narrative real estate.

A form of "supply side" approach to narrative, if you like.

This idea is at the core of everything we do now. We don't want the "best ideas" to sit gathering dust inside think tanks. We want the techniques that underpin those ideas mobilised to win hearts and minds at massive scale.

Rather than tweaking other people's tropes we should be synthesising data at scale to create our own informational terms of debate.
We should refuse to accept that our only job is to fight over other peoples' narratives, and rediscover how to build our own systems that generate our own narratives.>>

It should be a strategic priority that every economic model a progressive organisation builds be equipped to live and prosper in some form, at scale outside the seminar room, outside a Whitehall meeting, outside a think tank shared drive. >>>

Journalists are under constant pressure to generate stories but have less and less time to understand information.
The leaders of our movements show little sign that they get this. We keep our best minds and ideas locked away in pdfs that struggle to make a mark on the public's consciousness. >>

It is futile to try to meet a hegemonic opponent on its terms. And so it is with the tech platforms and media. Instead you meet them where they are weak.

Modern media ecosystems are open about this. Local newsrooms are under-resourced. Information is hard to find at is often complex. >>>

This means we’re always responding to terms of debate someone else set, rather than forcing them to respond to us.

It's a dead end. Instead of asking “how do we craft better messages?” we could be asking “where are the structural gaps in the information system?” & "can we exploit it?" >>>

We're always trying to win attention inside systems we don’t control. We long since gave up trying to build the hard & expensive things (newspapers, TV channels), but we also seem to have given up thinking about what our strengths might be amidst conditions of platform/media asymmetry >>

For a while much of the progressive communications world has drifted into a reactive mindset. Too much time obsessing about messages: framing new platforms, new influencers. Always jumping on trends that others mastered years ago (see the current vogue for digital content producers). >>>

Climate change is 'driving more train delays and cancellations for Brits' Warning that train users are "seeing more and more disruption to their journeys as a result of heavy rain and flooding".

There's been rising concern that parts of the media were suppressing mentions of "net zero" or "climate change" in stories about the UK's increasingly floody and wet weather.

So we were particularly happy with this piece we landed in today's Daily Express:
www.express.co.uk/news/politic...

Always a sign of a job well done when you start to hear the framings and language you dreamed up, repeated back to you!!

Who Owns Britain? How the radical experiment of privatisation transformed society and reshaped our lives.

If you want to learn more about @cmmonwealth.bsky.social campaign, visit their amazing website and story telling dashboard here:
www.common-wealth.org/interactive/...

Thanks for watching our TED Talk! If you want to know more... get in touch!!

Closing quote:

Learning from the opposition: YIMBY's

A quick note on "enemies":

We prefer the term "opposition" - every campaign needs an opposition.

We mapped the following groups each of whom, in different ways, we represent groups that maintain the rigged system we are living in.

The Message:

Our Approach (ctd)

Crucially: avoid the kind of conspiratorial approach used by the right "it's immigrants." etc

Avoid scapegoating individuals without also making clear the role of those individuals in a system that has been designed through law, policy etc, to rig the system.

Our Approach:
1 - Lead with emotion: use those everyday frustrations as a starting point. Speak to people's reality today.

BUT THEN:

2 - Offer a systemic diagnosis (Privatisation) for why people feel so frustration. Give people an explanation for why the water is full of sewage etc.