It is 4am when my alarm goes off. This is hideous. Four in the morning is a time when no one should ever be awake, and yet off I go, in my suit, through the eerie streets of London, down to a deserted Westminster.Even the birds are still asleep.

I’m heading to the Sky offices, where I’ll be shadowing Sky’s Political Correspondent, Sophy Ridge, who has responded to my demanding/badgering emails by inviting me into the office, rather than by telling me to piss off and leave her alone. Persistence clearly pays off. Sophy works the 5am shift and is all alone in a giant newsroom full of empty desks and flashing screens when I arrive. This is the Westminster office, base camp for many of the correspondents, although the programme is mainly broadcast from East London. I am given the task of scanning the morning papers for any unnoticed news stories, and although In the end it seems that Sky has already noticed all the stories of the day, at least I get to read the morning papers over my toast.

At 6am, the ‘Sunrise’ morning news show comes on air and goes live to their Political Correspondent in Westminster for the latest. Sophy has written out her story and now delivers it from behind the studio’s newsdesk. I suddenly notice that I’m in the background of the shot, and try to look casual-but-important. As the morning wears on, the office starts to fill up a bit. No major stories break and so I don’t get to see reporters rushing around making important phone calls and having witty high-speed arguments a la Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom, but the everyday bustle is enough to keep me entertained. A minister has given an interview – but where has the footage gone? How should a poll question be phrased for maximum impact without being overly biased? How important is the latest bout of violence in the Middle East? And what kinds of amusing names can you have written on your Starbucks cup?

The correspondents also have to keep the Sky website updated with news and analysis, so Sophy suggests I come up with some ideas for articles that she could write. I have a think and pitch some to her – she’s enthusiastic about them all, which is gratifying, but she may well be humouring me. In any case, it’s fun to have something to do which seems vaguely useful and which doesn’t fall into one of the pitfalls of shadowing: either you’ll come too far out of the shadows and get in the way, or you’ll stick to the shadows and never see a thing.

Next, we go to Parliament, and in the company of a political correspondent I get to see far morethan you do on your average school trip. We stride through the corridors of Westminster, visiting the MPs’ bars, the newspapers’ offices, the press gallery of the Commons chamber, and at one point end up on the roof (with a close-up view of Big Ben). These halls of power feel like hallowed ground, upon which I must walk reverently. Naturally I must also snap as many photos as possible on my phone.

Sophy gets permission to take me the ‘lobby briefing’, where the Prime Minister’s spokesman briefs the press. In a small and fusty room full of chairs and sofas, journalists gather with their notepads and voice recorders. The spokesman (Steve Field) arrives, and from this point no one can leave the room or make contact with the outside world; nobody gets a head start on the story. And so the battle begins. The reporters try to extract something quotable from the spokesman,while he doggedly sticks to what he wants to say and holds his ground. In one particularly great exchange, almost every journalist in the room asks him whether the PM thinks that a policeman accused of involvement in the Hillsborough cover-up should be stripped of his knighthood: they cite the Fred Goodwin case and try to establish how the procedure works, but all they get is ‘that is a matter for the Forfeiture Committee.’ It’s such a parody of political question-dodging that I have to try very hard not to giggle. He does, however, say something very quotable about the security of diplomats in the Middle East, and so once the doors are open we dash out and call the newsdesk.

Back in the office I eavesdrop, read articles online, and look over people’s shoulders to see what they’re up to. These are areas in which I already excel so I’m happy enough to showcase my skills inthis capacity. Lunchtime arrives, which is great, because I’ve been ready for lunch for about three hours (I feel jetlagged). We go out for lunch with Deputy Political Editor Joey Jones and Business Correspondent Alistair Bunkall! This is very exciting. Going out for a gossipy pub lunch with a bunch of journalists is an unexpected bonus. And the gossip is great (if only I could keep track of all the names mentioned…). There’s talk of affairs and confrontations and unwanted advances – the world of politics and journalism seems very tight-knit and scandalous indeed. I listen intently, wide-eyed over my orange juice.

We do try our best, but we just don’t get this calibre of intrigue at Cherwell. Then the conversation turns to talk of journalism as a career, which is ideal, because (no prizes for noticing) I am pretty keen on this profession. These three are far more positive about the future of the press than most journalists I have met, who have been talking doom-and-gloom about theindustry for a while now. I gather the following: postgrad courses in journalism can be useful; you absolutely have to master the Twittersphere as a wannabe journalist; even if you graduate without much experience, there’s still time to try; and if you’re good, there’s no reason you shouldn’t succeed. All very cheerful and comforting. It feels strange to finish work in the early afternoon when the office is busy and London is still bustling with people on their lunch breaks, but I’m very satisfied with my day at work. Maybe I’ve been seduced by the feeling of being right at the centre of everything, but I just can’t imagine ever getting bored of this world.

Tension has got to be running high at the world’s most valuable company about now. Sales of the clunky, rickety old iPhone 4S took a big hit last quarter, with Apple missing their 28m target by 2m, and resultantly falling short of their profit forecasts by $1bn. Though their fleecing of Samsung in the US courts reimbursed them in damages here, this by no means will form an unproblematic blueprint for future litigation worldwide, and Samsung are poised to take revenge if any new Apple products are deemed to have infringed on their strong 4G patents.

It seems that Apple’s courtroom victory was a pyrrhic one – the case has chipped away at the veneer of mystique surrounding Apple, its products and its practices, leaving many cynical about its creative credentials. Consumer technology companies seem to be digging themselves into the trenches, armed with all the esoteric tech patents they can stockpile, in the hope of destroying their competition in a legal world war of attrition, rather than outperforming their rivals on the innovation front. A lot is riding on the commercial success of the new iPhone 5 over the coming weeks, having been announced on September 12 to a less than overwhelming response.

Furthermore, new research says that the US economy could enjoy a substantial material benefit from iPhones if they fly off of the shelves this autumn. In a recent research note, JP Morgan’s chief economist Michael Feroli estimates that iPhone 5 sales “could potentially add between 0.2 and 0.5%-point to fourth quarter annualised GDP growth.” The sums are quite straightforward: 8m in Q4 sales, times $400 (the approximate retail price of $600, minus the $200 worth of components sourced from abroad) equals $3.2bn, or $12.8bn annually. Obviously this is not going to ‘singlehandedly rescue the US economy’, but with recession fears flaring, and a ‘fiscal cliff’ looming at the end of the year, any boost is not to be scoffed at – “The third of a percentage point lift would limit the downside risk to our Q4 GDP growth projection, which remains 2.0%,” as the analysts’ note says.

Now, this is just guesswork, and has already come under scrutiny. Some have questioned the high sales figures, as well as the premises underpinning their conclusions, pointing out that if people buy iPhones with money they would have just spent elsewhere, there would be no GDP boost, just displaced spending. But there’s the rub.

The classical liberal economist Frederic Bastiat wrote in his 1850 essay ‘That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen’ a fable called ‘The Parable of the Broken Window’ to illustrate why the destruction of assets can never be of net benefit to society. Suppose a shop window is broken. It costs six francs to repair the damage, and therefore six francs are transferred from the pocket of the shopkeeper to the pocket of the glazier. The breakage encourages trade to the amount of six francs. Furthermore, in a world of unemployed glaziers, smashing windows can rattle the economy by putting the unemployed back to work. They too then spend the money they make from fitting new glasswork.

However, Bastiat warns, if you then come to the conclusion that it is a good idea to go around breaking windows to cause money to circulate, remember that it is not necessarily true that the six francs spent by every shopkeeper with a brick-shaped hole in his shop-face would not have been spent on something else anyway, like books or clothes or pretentiously marketed consumer electronics. This is called displacement.

Right, but does Bastiat’s fallacy hold? With consumer confidence in a ditch and banks warily sitting on their hands in the wake of the subprime mortgage meltdown of 2007-8, there is evidence that savings are being hoarded, and capital is clogged. Uninvested reserves can be noxious to an economy – smashing windows is like coercing confidence in spending. But wouldn’t it just be easier to say to a glazier, “don’t smash my window, and I’ll give you fifty quid”?

Sadly, alternation between fenestration and defenestration initiatives doesn’t make for sustainable policy. And if I just donate to glaziers, that isn’t trade, and could cause protection racketeering and the formation of a vicious glassmaker mafia. Both charity and creative destruction have very little stimulative effect because they don’t address underlying and long-term problems. Prosperity is best served by innovation and productivity.

Is this relevant to Apple? It depends what you think about ‘upgrades’. You might consider each new reincarnation of the iPhone to be a new product in its own right, in which case upgrading is not so much a case of replacing a broken window as it is investing in a brand new shop front. Or, like me, you might think that it’s a shocking waste of money to throw away your expensive phone to buy a more expensive phone on the strength of minor incremental improvements to its specifications. You might think that buying a new iPhone amounts to breaking your own window just to have it fixed. The point is that the broken glass model’s applicability is contingent upon the belief that the iPhone’s saleability has little or nothing to do with the intrinsic quality of the product, and more to do with the fact that you idiots will go out and buy one anyway. Pressure’s off for Apple then.

But it gets me thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if we, and our friends across the pond, could rely on recovery through intelligent stimulus projects – investment in useful stuff like infrastructure, encouraging employment and growth – rather than on our periodic trashing of old capital.

If it ain’t broke…