… but their content stinks. Here’s an example, from an opinion piece in today’s Boston Globe.

The title tells us The Way to Fight a Recession. The way to fight a recession is for businesses to keep going, expand, never say die, beat back their fear, etc. There’s a coffee shop chain that’s doing just that, and the writer commends them. But there’s another business, a developer named Harvard, that isn’t doing that, and the writer berates them.

… I’m standing along Western Avenue in Allston, construction site of Harvard University’s much trumpeted science center. The new complex is just the first part of what has been promised to be an epic transformation of the area. Or at least, that was the hope. The tall red construction cranes are still busy clearing the area, but Drew Faust, Harvard’s president, has just announced that the university is putting on the brakes. For the moment, work proceeds, but at the end of the year the school will reassess. This has come as a shock to many, especially Allston residents, who now fear they may be stuck indefinitely with what some call the Harvard Hole. And the rest of the projects? No one is saying, but things don’t look good.

Both of these are recession stories, tales of two significant organizations (Harvard, America’s oldest college, and Nespresso, a unit of Swiss food giant Nestle) with two different approaches to the economic crisis. One bulls forward. The other quails. [Yeah, what’s Harvard afraid of? Ain’t it a for-profit corporation just like Nestle? Isn’t it all about the bottom line, just like Nestle?]

… A reported 30 percent drop in the value of its endowment seems to have thrown the university into a tizzy. [A few hundred million off their bottom line and look what the weenies do! A tizzy! Don’t they know they’re a money-generating multinational that has to keep going in order to do what they’ve been created to do — generate money?]

… Economies are strange things. Sophisticated computer modeling, Nobel Prizes, and great thinkers notwithstanding, no one can really explain how to make them grow or why they shrink. Presented with an illness, a group of doctors would pretty quickly figure out how to assess, diagnose, and treat. That’s because medicine really is a science. Economics, pretensions otherwise, is not. Put 100 economists in a room, and the only sure thing you’d get would be 100 different theories. One can see this in today’s throw-it-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach to economic policy making or in the profession’s slippery language: consumer “confidence,” “virtuous” circles, “giddy” (or “panicked”) investors. There’s an almost self-fulfilling, touchy-feely quality to this: If we believe things are going to be good, then they will be. If we believe otherwise, then they won’t be. [Put aside the fact that medicine — especially that queen of twisted research and conflict of interest, psychiatry — is a notoriously inexact science. Concentrate only on the nonchalance with which this writer dismisses the many economists who warned money managers like those at Harvard that their risky investments would implode.]

So when a company such as Nespresso spends money and makes plans, it sends a message — the bad times will end, growth will resume. If enough companies behaved the same way, then indeed, the economy would turn. Harvard, too, is sending a message. “If Harvard can’t build, who can?” worried one construction industry publication. Perhaps, many will conclude, no one can, and, as a consequence, no one will. [Yes, the American construction giant Harvard needs to set an example, so that other construction companies around the country — Yale, Princeton — and other more specialized builders — for instance, sport franchise/construction ventures like the University of Georgia and the University of Minnesota, can be emboldened by Harvard’s business plan and keep growing.] …