Lots of things are important, but some are more important than others – often by orders of magnitude (for example, causes of death).
One frustrating thing about the news is that the amount of column inches and airtime a topic gets seems to bear little relationship to how significant it is to the world. Obviously I’m not talking about tabloid showbiz gossip, or sports commentary: these don’t even implicitly claim to be focussed on what matters. But I have different expectations when it comes to flagship BBC current affairs shows, or newspaper editorials, and certainly what gets onto the House of Commons order paper.
Salience and importance
I think quantifying this discrepancy might be an interesting project. You could calculate a salience / importance ratio for different topics, and see which are disproportionately over- or under-represented in the media.
This is similar to, but distinct from, the first two components of the importance-neglectedness-tractability framework in Effective Altruism. The main difference is that my model focusses primarily on the political, as opposed to looking at all problems facing humanity. Rather than thinking about importance in an ultimately moral sense, as the INT framework does, I want to use it to roughly point at « if people were better informed on matters of fact, but had the same ethical views, this is what I think they’d spend their time caring about » (see more in the sidenote below).
How would one operationalise the measure?
- Salience (i.e., amount of media attention)
- Importance (i.e.,
how much does the issue matter)
- The number of people affected
- Number of DALYs or QALYs or WELLBYs
- Proportion of GDP
Some speculation
Calculating the ratio would be easiest for economic policy questions. I’d be interested in any ideas about how to determine it more objectively/accurately. Absent that, or the time to spend figuring it out, I think some candidates for a high (i.e. over-represented) salience-importance ratio are:
- Inheritance tax
- ULEZ
- Fishing rights during Brexit
- The Rwanda asylum seeker deportation policy