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| Economics, Great and small How Housing, Health care, innovation and policy drive the numbers and shape our lives |
My old boss Dave Wallace gave up a job covering economic policy in
Washington to join BusinessWeek, and told us he never regretted it because
economics is best covered from the grass roots up, not from Washington
down. That's my approach too: Learn the microeconomics of major industries
that make a state or a nation go, and understanding its macroeconomics just
kind of happens. Ignore the foundations of what really makes housing or
business investment move, and you end up like a congressman -- emitting
lots of blather, but not much information.
I know a half-dozen major sectors well enough to translate their
inflections into trend stories that let readers find investments, jobs and other
opportunities today -- and tomorrow. My big industries include technology
(about $2.4 trillion in annual U.S. sales, or 16 percent of the economy);
health care (about 17 percent of GDP); housing/real estate (as much as 20
percent of GDP), travel and tourism ($300 billion in sales or 2 percent of
GDP) and Wall Street, which funds everybody else. Plus, of course, my own
media industry, whose ad sales are about 1.1 percent of GDP. All of these
have implications for the broader economy. And each of them routinely goes
to Washington for help from policy makers, in the name of promoting
macroeconomic health, naturally.
At BusinessWeek, part of my beat was the transformative effect of
Internet technology on the microeconomics of other industries, which led me
to stories about everything from jewelry to health care to independent film.
My stories helped rehabilitate the Internet industry by demonstrating that
Brookings' 1999-2000 estimates of the Web's economic impact proved,
during the Net bust, to be too low and not as wildly high as others said;
inform national debate on policies to stimulate technology investment that
flagged under the consumption-driven tax policies of the early 2000s
(Brookings and the Business Software Alliance put out papers following this
piece); and convinced Hillary Clinton's Senate staff to have the doctor I put
on BW's 2005 Digital Hospital cover help draft legislation to promote
health-care information technology. That bill grew into a $35 billion piece of
2009's stimulus package. If the technology has the effect advocates say it
will, then my stories will have helped change everyone's care for the better.
A lot of these stories looked pretty micro. But as Ev Dirksen used to say, a
billion here and a few hundred billion there and soon you are talking about
real money. Macroeconomcs always, always springs from microeconomics.
Always. You can't cover the beat without it.
I also jumped into BW's coverage of housing when it became the hot
story, assisting in cover stories like this one. That was a return to my days
covering housing and real estate full time in the 1990s, when I developed
expertise in home building, real estate markets and commercial real estate
alike. I also did some blogging after the house I grew up in went into
foreclosure the year after we sold it..And of course covering the stock market
can be hard to extricate from covering macroeconomics.
Covering economics leads naturally to covering policy and politics. At the
state level, I wrote about how the emerging biotech and communications
economy in Maryland was shaping where jobs came from (and why the state
Chamber of Commerce's predictions of disaster reflected only that its
members were concentrated in sunset industries) and how the same
transition was shaping local and national politics. (By the way, this 1992
piece anticipated Karl Rove's party-realignment strategy by a decade). At
the federal level, I won four Best of Bloomberg internal prizes for 2009
stories about the intersection of economic policy and businesses like energy
(see link above), technology (ditto) and health care reform public and private
-- pretty good, considering I didn't work in Washington. Organizations from
BusinessWeek to the New Republic and Pro Publica followed these stories.
The way I cover economics blends a little bit of short-term thinking about
interest rates and the like with a whole lot of long term thinking about
geography, technology and comparative advantage. It also blends straight
news, analysis, commentary and blogging in a way that will stand out in a
crowded media landscape, and fit smoothly into emerging strategies for
remaking traditional franchises to survive as new media. The idea is that my
readers can come away with insights they'll still be using long after they've
recycled this week's papers.
Washington to join BusinessWeek, and told us he never regretted it because
economics is best covered from the grass roots up, not from Washington
down. That's my approach too: Learn the microeconomics of major industries
that make a state or a nation go, and understanding its macroeconomics just
kind of happens. Ignore the foundations of what really makes housing or
business investment move, and you end up like a congressman -- emitting
lots of blather, but not much information.
I know a half-dozen major sectors well enough to translate their
inflections into trend stories that let readers find investments, jobs and other
opportunities today -- and tomorrow. My big industries include technology
(about $2.4 trillion in annual U.S. sales, or 16 percent of the economy);
health care (about 17 percent of GDP); housing/real estate (as much as 20
percent of GDP), travel and tourism ($300 billion in sales or 2 percent of
GDP) and Wall Street, which funds everybody else. Plus, of course, my own
media industry, whose ad sales are about 1.1 percent of GDP. All of these
have implications for the broader economy. And each of them routinely goes
to Washington for help from policy makers, in the name of promoting
macroeconomic health, naturally.
At BusinessWeek, part of my beat was the transformative effect of
Internet technology on the microeconomics of other industries, which led me
to stories about everything from jewelry to health care to independent film.
My stories helped rehabilitate the Internet industry by demonstrating that
Brookings' 1999-2000 estimates of the Web's economic impact proved,
during the Net bust, to be too low and not as wildly high as others said;
inform national debate on policies to stimulate technology investment that
flagged under the consumption-driven tax policies of the early 2000s
(Brookings and the Business Software Alliance put out papers following this
piece); and convinced Hillary Clinton's Senate staff to have the doctor I put
on BW's 2005 Digital Hospital cover help draft legislation to promote
health-care information technology. That bill grew into a $35 billion piece of
2009's stimulus package. If the technology has the effect advocates say it
will, then my stories will have helped change everyone's care for the better.
A lot of these stories looked pretty micro. But as Ev Dirksen used to say, a
billion here and a few hundred billion there and soon you are talking about
real money. Macroeconomcs always, always springs from microeconomics.
Always. You can't cover the beat without it.
I also jumped into BW's coverage of housing when it became the hot
story, assisting in cover stories like this one. That was a return to my days
covering housing and real estate full time in the 1990s, when I developed
expertise in home building, real estate markets and commercial real estate
alike. I also did some blogging after the house I grew up in went into
foreclosure the year after we sold it..And of course covering the stock market
can be hard to extricate from covering macroeconomics.
Covering economics leads naturally to covering policy and politics. At the
state level, I wrote about how the emerging biotech and communications
economy in Maryland was shaping where jobs came from (and why the state
Chamber of Commerce's predictions of disaster reflected only that its
members were concentrated in sunset industries) and how the same
transition was shaping local and national politics. (By the way, this 1992
piece anticipated Karl Rove's party-realignment strategy by a decade). At
the federal level, I won four Best of Bloomberg internal prizes for 2009
stories about the intersection of economic policy and businesses like energy
(see link above), technology (ditto) and health care reform public and private
-- pretty good, considering I didn't work in Washington. Organizations from
BusinessWeek to the New Republic and Pro Publica followed these stories.
The way I cover economics blends a little bit of short-term thinking about
interest rates and the like with a whole lot of long term thinking about
geography, technology and comparative advantage. It also blends straight
news, analysis, commentary and blogging in a way that will stand out in a
crowded media landscape, and fit smoothly into emerging strategies for
remaking traditional franchises to survive as new media. The idea is that my
readers can come away with insights they'll still be using long after they've
recycled this week's papers.