Moral panics and the madness of crowds

The 'nappers are on the loose. Just recently in NSW there has been a spate of attempted child abductions. (Worrying things, spates.) All over our state dangerous strangers are trying to lure children into their vehicles with a variety of ham-fisted strategies.

The warnings first started a little more than a week ago; by last week, there were new reports every day of fresh attempted nappings. There seemed to be little connection between the attacks, which were carried out by a variety of creepy looking men: the man in black, the bug-eyed Asian. Some stories were exposed as rubbish, but still each day brought fresh stories of adults with malign intent trying to lure or force children into cars.

To accept this we must believe that across NSW, as if by some co-ordinated plan, a bunch of latent child-kidnappers decided in unison to put their evil fantasies into action. Fortunately for public safety, all the nappers are completely useless. Despite their twenty or so efforts over the past week and a half, not one has been able to actually kidnap a child. Not to be put off by their failures, nor by the subsequent massive media attention, they've kept on with their attempted nappings, along with their hapless lack of success.

Previously, a child being abducted by a stranger was a rare and unfathomable thing, so unusual that when it did happen, it was always a news story. Now, suddenly, it's a fashion. It's happening on every street.

The other possibility - more likely, perhaps - is that we are experiencing a moral panic. It seems to fit all the criteria (from Wikipedia):

Moral Panics have several distinct features:

• Concern - There must be awareness that the behaviour of the group or category in question is likely to have a negative impact on society.
• Hostility - An increase in hostility towards the group in question and they become "folk devils". A clear division forms between "them" and "us".
• Consensus - Though concern does not have to be nationwide, there must be widespread acceptance that the group in question poses a very real threat to society. It is important at this stage that the "moral entrepreneurs" are vocal and the "folk devils" appear weak and disorganised.
• Disproportionality - The public is given statistics that are disproportionate to the actual threat posed by the accused group.
• Volatility - Moral panics are highly volatile and tend to disappear as quickly as they appeared due to a wane in public interest or news reports changing to another topic.

You have to be careful of this shit. This is how Nazi Germany started (sorry to drag the Nazis into it, but it really is - mass hysteria aimed at an imagined bogeyman.)

Normally the big pushers of moral panics are the watchdogs of public decency at Today Tonight, a show I get a real kick out of. Strangely, this week they didn't have much to say about the 'nappers. Instead last night they were getting-up their outrage against lawless teenage gangs, a perenial subject for moral panics.

If a moral panic is a sort of hysterical mass paranoia, then its opposite might be a mass hysterical enthusiasm. In economics, these cause bubbles. Here too, Today Tonight likes to get whipped up along with its audience. Incredibly, I thought, they chose the same day on which plans for a mammoth bail-out of the US financial system were discussed in Washington - a global panic stemming from the collapse of the US real estate bubble - to return to one of their favourite story-prototypes: housemums making millions investing in real estate. In what must surely be a piece of dark humour, they set the story to The Beatles: "It's Getting Better All the Time".

I really think that tabloid-television stories such as this, as well as those late-night "Success from Scratch"-type infomercials, are a hidden cause of the housing market bubble, at least here, but possibly in the US as well (I just assume they had the same noxious stuff there, and probably far more than we do). These schemes push the idea that you can get wealthy very easily through investing in real estate. Anybody can do it. Their idea is to borrow against a house to buy another, and to keep doing this, with ever-increasing leverage, until you're worth millions. It's a great theory so long as housing prices continue to go up faster than interest rates. And if everybody just keeps believing the same thing, they do go up, at sometimes dizzying rates - for a while. Then it all collapses. This is what recently happened to the US property market (obviously, there were lots of reasons for the residential bubble - Greenspan's low interest rates, the rise of mortgage backed securities, etc - I don't mean to oversimplify or suggest it was all caused by people leveraging up on real estate).

The real estate market hasn't collapsed here, yet, and they're still showing that late-night infomercial. But consider: mortgage stress is a real problem in Western Sydney, and it's the centre of Australia's (admittedly small) experiment with US-style no-doc home loans. The US economy is tanking, the world economy is in trouble, and housing in Australia is at historically and abnormally high levels as compared against average annual incomes.

So Today's Tonight is telling its core demographic - those Western Sydney battlers/"working familes" - that they should gear up and buy residential investment property - that it's "getting better all the time". That's some nihilistic Today Tonight producer's idea of dark satire.

posted by Nicholas @ 6:53 PM