The Semantics of Feedback Loops

People who know me well know that I can be a stickler for proper English.

Recently one particularly egregious journalistic oversight has re-emerged. I can remember reading about "negative feedback loops" between the real economy and financial markets back in 2008 (examples here and here) whereby bad economic data were leading to sell-offs in financial markets, which were in turn undermining confidence, and thereby negatively impacting the real economy. Today's "negative feedback loops" are generally between sovereign debt yields and sovereign solvency (here and here).

However, this mechanism, whereby one event causes a second event which in turns reinforces the original event is actually known as a positive feedback loop (here). A system is described as a negative feedback loop when an initial shock is mitigated by its secondary effects - such as the pancreas secreting more insulin in response to elevated glucose levels in the blood.

Journalist, bloggers, and arm-chair philosophers take note.