We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. Their UK index, which goes back to 1997, recently hit an all-time peak ahead of the June 23 referendum on European Union membership much of the debate reflected in UK press coverage has turned on economic and trade policies, in contrast with the US presidential primaries.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: Policy uncertainty is rising elsewhere, too, say the economists, who have created indexes for several countries. but that can lead to dysfunction in the overall policymaking process,” he says. “There are sources of partisan conflict that are not primarily economic. This half-century rise is associated with two parallel trends: A larger government role in the economy and rising political polarization, says University of Chicago professor Steve Davis, who collaborated with Baker and Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom. Policy uncertainty has been growing since 1960, the economists find. The index itself looks back more than a century. The leveling off of the index in recent months may reflect that press coverage has moved to the personalities and issues like immigration rather than specific economic policies, he adds. But the ability to get a lot of these actions through executive order provokes more uncertainty,” he says. “There can be a lot of partisanship but if nothing gets done that’s not so much uncertainty as inaction. Gridlock can also lead to policy risk in the form of executive actions that could be reversed by the next president, according to Baker. “The uncertainties associated with political discord make the US market less attractive to invest into,” she says via e-mail.ĭitto for US companies, who reduce investment and hiring in the face of policy uncertainty, according to Professor Baker and two colleagues, who developed another newspaper-keyword index of economic policy uncertainty. It hit its peak in October 2013 when the federal government was shut down by Congress’s failure to pass a budget. The partisan index, which measures the frequency of keywords in newspaper articles back to 1981, has trended sharply higher since 2010, according to Professor Azzimonti, of Stony Brook University. Political rancor appears to keep getting worse. She found that a 10 percent rise in the Partisan Conflict Index was followed by a quarterly decline equivalent to an estimated $15.7 billion loss in such foreign direct investments. Four-day workweek: Why more companies are taking the plungeįor example: Increasing political conflict is associated with a significant slowdown in investments foreign companies make in the United States, says economist Marina Azzimonti, who developed a monthly partisan conflict index for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
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