And that’s the problem in Duhigg’s piece. While creditors are savvy and ingenious in the way they track data about their customers and train their personnel to make sure they can push the right buttons, consumers are tragically under-informed. And this imbalance goes sadly unmentioned in the article. Yes, creditors are devilishly clever, but cleverness and virtue are not the same thing. As the recession eliminates jobs, customers face ballooning interest rates allowed by fine print in complex contracts with clauses written in dense legalese. Because, unlike the creditors, they don’t have teams of analysts. Instead, consumers expect to rely on journalists to help them understand devious business practices and expose the devil in the details.
Campaign Desk
11:00 AM - May 19, 2009
The Psychology of Collections
NYT Magazine humanizes credit card companies instead of consumers
‘See you on the other side’ - Meet Jessica Lum, a terminally ill 25-year-old who chose to spend what little time she had practicing journalism
#Realtalk: This is the best moment to be in journalism - The old stuff isn’t coming back, but that’s okay
Streams of consciousness - Millennials expect a steady diet of quick-hit, social-media-mediated bits and bytes. What does that mean for journalism?
Sticking with the truth - How ‘balanced’ coverage helped sustain the bogus claim that childhood vaccines can cause autism
An ink-stained stretch - Can Aaron Kushner save the Orange County Register—and the newspaper industry?
This is the best moment to be in journalism (25)
The WSJ editorial page hits rock bottom (19)
What was James Rosen thinking?
How much of Rosen’s trouble is of his own making?
Cat Fall: A modern tragedy
Max Fisher and the problem with foreign-affairs blogging
“I hope my nudity doesn’t bother you. We’re completely committed to openness here”
CJR's Guide to Online News Startups
Uptown Messenger – Hyperlocal news for a neighborhood in New Orleans
Who Owns What
The Business of Digital Journalism
A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Questions and exercises for journalism students.
Science--in this case, psychology--can always be operated to advantage the powerful. Indeed, that is its primary purpose: to increase power for the powerful. If it should also occur that there is some benefit to the rest of us, wel, shit happens.
M. Foucault talks about this a lot, claiming finally that the ultimate purpose of ALL "human science"--mainly psychology, but also sociology, anthropology, etc--is to improve official surveillance, and to reduce populations to more easily manipulable "data points."
#1 Posted by Dr.Woody, CJR on Tue 19 May 2009 at 11:05 AM
Interesting premise underlying the criticism, that there is only one correct way to frame this story. Nevermind persons whose 401k's and mutual funds hold stock in those companies and who would really like their nest eggs preserved. Nevermind that the defaulters took someone else's money, promised to pay it back, and now won't. The dogmas of journalism must be maintained at any cost, like "all companies are evil" or "if a person is in pain it must be someone else's fault". No other thoughts are permitted.
#2 Posted by JimSpiel, CJR on Wed 20 May 2009 at 11:12 PM
JimSpiel argues with the utmost simplicity:
"Nevermind that the defaulters took someone else's money, promised to pay it back, and now won't."
the problem isn't that people can't or won't pay back what they borrowed -- most folks can pay back the principal of their loans along with reasonable interest. the problem is the hidden fees and exploding interest rates designed to trap borrowers in a perpetual cycle of debt, which puts them at the mercy of still more hidden fees and exploding interest rates. Many credit card borrowers who are now over their heads in debt have paid back what they actually borrowed. Yet their debt is still at $10,000 or $20,000, thanks to overlimit fees, late fees, and 29.99 penalty rates etc etc.
#3 Posted by mwh, CJR on Thu 21 May 2009 at 12:15 PM