As headlines of tariffs and deficits dominate the news, I continue to grow anxious about our national economic uncertainty. When I doomscroll through social media, I know I am not alone. In fact, some of my online peers deem recent trends, such as Kesha’s new song or gray clothing, as recession indicators. Inspired by the online discourse and recent articles, I noted the decrease in nail salon visits and Lululemon sales as key examples of declining consumer sentiment, although I could be over-assigning meaning to these behaviors.
But while trying to predict hypothetical recessions, I overlooked the debilitating long-term consequences if this economic event became a reality: job losses, decreased income and financial instability. We forget that we want our forecast to be wrong, given the downturn’s potential to cause economic disruption across the country.
Financial newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal and CNBC, reinforce this fixation on numbers. In doing so, financial journalism overlooks the human impact by detailing the consequences of current events on profits and stock prices instead of on people’s lives and communities. Many business students or professionals have an overreliance on financial news, learning to analyze current events based only on their value to generate portfolio returns or impact a company’s profitability. When we lose this human focus, we become unaware of these problems and stop thinking about ways to help.
As readers of business news, we can correct this blind spot by reading from a diverse set of outlets and recognizing the intertwined nature of finance and social impact.
Remembering the human perspective is especially important due to the shortsightedness of business thinking. Financial journalism and business students alike predominantly focus on making money or maximizing profits. Even if corporate leaders only depended on profit when making decisions, each choice impacts the company, its stakeholders, its employees and the surrounding community. When we read news that exclusively covers the financial perspective, we fall into traps of close-mindedness.
For instance, despite employee concern and outrage, Google reversed its prohibition on developing artificial intelligence for military weapons and surveillance, joining other big tech companies in partnering with defense agencies. Turning profit into the only perspective facilitates a wavering ethical stance that increases the company’s potential to do harm, such as creating mass surveillance technology. The shortsightedness also perpetuates a company’s tunnel vision of beating earnings and enlarging their bottom line, turning people and communities into collateral damage.
Financial journalism fortifies this tunnel vision. This area of journalism often prioritizes the profit motives of current events at the expense of recognizing the human impacts. For example, during the brief Israel-Iran conflict, some writers documented the rise in oil prices and supply chain disruptions yet overlooked the devastation of communities and civilian casualties.
In addition, other writers highlighted the economic consequences of natural disasters. During the tragic Palisades and Eaton wildfires earlier this year, some journalists focused on the resulting financial liabilities for insurance companies and their stock price drops, excluding information about the destruction of communities and widespread neighborhood displacements.
But prioritizing monetary impacts over human ones is not always intentional. Since the human perspective is often less quantifiable than the financial one, authors may gravitate toward hard numbers.
However, paying attention to human issues drives financial prosperity. We often believe the business and human perspectives to be at odds, but this trade-off may actually be less significant than we believe.
Ideas like the “triple bottom line,” which aims to maximize profit while helping people and the planet, gained traction as the three perspectives often work in tandem to yield sustainable success. For instance, companies that prioritize sustainability often see positive market returns by increasing efficiency of resources and minimizing waste. Therefore, broadening our analysis of current events beyond the financial lens means recognizing the importance of understanding the humanistic perspectives in driving a more sustainable and prosperous world.
We do not have to link the human experience with bottom lines or sales targets to prove that it’s valuable; recognizing humanity in others is important as is.
Reading beyond the profit motive diversifies our palate. For instance, NPR’s “Planet Money” podcast and Vox articles emphasize the entwined nature of human and financial impacts. Furthermore, reading beyond front-page news sections to other parts of our favorite papers, such as the Financial Times’ “Moral Money” section and Bloomberg’s “Equality,” are steps in the right direction for highlighting the human side of economic news.
We can also participate in impact investing or buy green and social bonds. While these investment practices draw criticism for impact washing and greenwashing, the solution is not to become disillusioned with any opportunity for change. All solutions will be some level of imperfect, and cynicism and inaction have never solved problems.
However, diversifying our news to truly understand the human condition is hard. We cannot psychologically process the large amounts of news that happens every day due to media overload. Recognizing the full extent of an event’s consequences on people is challenging given the speed of the news cycle and the sheer amount of stories that deserve our attention.
Starting with just a few personal issues to read about is enough, and we can find these few issues by thinking about our own communities. Whether we realize it or not, almost all economic headlines impact us in some way, and we can better understand the human consequences when we think about how national news affects us and our neighbors.
As I rethink our national economic health, I find that inflation charts and GDP contractions, though important, are less helpful for understanding the news than seeing more expensive groceries at Kroger or a decrease in job postings. Similarly, whether we read about natural disasters or international wars, a more human perspective helps reground us on the loss of life and devastating impacts on communities.
While reading the news may not help solve all of the world’s problems, each article is an opportunity to think beyond words on a page and gain a greater understanding of the challenges that communities like our own face. Although small, this action motivates the next one of asking how we can help — a critical question in our media culture that is needed to regain sight of what matters.
Sarah Zhang is an Opinion analyst who writes about history, gender and campus culture. She can be reached at sarzhang@umich.edu.