17  Young people are particularly reliant on social  media, with 28% of 18-24 year olds saying it is their main source of news, putting it ahead of television (Chart 1). Media has always been open to the criticism that it tells people what they want to hear rather than 18  the difficult truth . But the selection and delivery of news by algorithms which guess users’ preferences based on content they have previously read and liked would seem to dramatically increase the risk of living one’s life in an informational echo chamber. 14  Estimate by Harvard School of Public Health cited in Nichols, Thomas (2017), The Death of Expertise, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 15 Popper, Karl (1963) Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, London: Routledge. 16 There have been several recent examples where the release of data and attempts to replicate results has fostered healthy debate. See for example Reinhoff and Rogoff (Growth in the Time of Debt, NBER Working Paper No. 15639) and Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin (Does high public debt consistently stifle economic growth? A critique of Reinhart and Rogoff, Cambridge J Econ (2014) 38 (2): 257-279), and Picketty (Capital in the 21st Century, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Harvard University Press) and Giles (‘Data problems with Capital in the 21st Century. See https://www.ft.com/content/9bb07a8f-11bc-366b-98bb-fb2d450f1189). 17 Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Levy, D.A., Nielsen, R.K. (2016) Reuters Institute digital news report 2016, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Certainly, the more flexible is your economy (in terms of public finances, the labour market, and so on), the easier it is to cope with shocks and the less monetary policy is needed. However, the case of the Eurozone shows how tricky it is when the absorber in the form of monetary policy is switched off and nothing replaces it. The shocks are bigger and hurt more. Listeners themselves can answer the question of whether the labour market and labour law are likely be made more or less flexible (and dismissals made easier) in the future. In doing so, they will answer the question of whether there will be a need in the future for more or less domestic monetary policy in the Czech Republic, a country whose conservative population is so averse to upswings and downswings. 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  The “convergence trilemma” The standard “monetary trilemma”, which you know very well (a country cannot simultaneously have a fixed exchange rate, an open capital account and autonomous monetary policy), is accompanied in a converging economy of our kind with something I call the “convergence trilemma”. No country can simultaneously have high convergence growth, a fixed exchange rate, and low macroeconomic imbalances, be they internal or external. In our case, catching up with our wealthier, low-inflation Western peers means a long-term tendency for our currency to appreciate. This is hardly consistent with a permanently fixed exchange rate.