Yves here. This is a wonderfully acid piece on what The Economist has always amounted to. Enjoy!
By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of numerous works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011), A Banquet of Consequences RELOADED (2021) and Fortune’s Fool: Australia’s Choices (2022). His latest book is on ecotourism and man’s relationship with wild animals – Wild Quests (out 1 May 2024)
The Economist has reputedly over 1.6 million subscribers globally. As of May 2024, it has one less. My cancellation brings to an end over 35 years of reading The Economist. Originally the subscription was a present from a relative who passed on the pre-digital print version to me weekly. After she died, I continued until recently.
Wanna-be?
Founded in 1843 by Scottish economist James Wilson The Economist describes itself as a ‘newspaper’ rather than a magazine. With its fire engine red masthead, sometimes striking covers and distinctive typeface, The Economistis a publishing success.
Its ubiquity was brought home to me some two decades ago in Madagascar – a location not noted for availability of the printed word in any form. Our travels required frequent transits through the capital – Antananarivo. At the threadbare international airport, a teenage vendor inevitable had copies of The Economist. We came to recognise each other and he would supply the newspaper, both the latest edition and back issues that I had missed.
Today, via its print and digital editions, it claims a readership of 6.5 million. For much of its history, it had a modest circulation. The expansion seems to date from the 1980s.
But throughout its history, The Economist’s reach has been less important than its readership. Its target audience has always been the elite, originally the higher circles of the landed and monied interests. Politicians, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Benito Mussolini, George W. Bush and Angela Merkel, and business leaders were/ are regular readers. In a profile in the New York Times Magazine, Bill Gates, then a young prodigy, claimed that he did not have a TV because it would prevent him from his cover-to-cover reading of The Economist each week.
Half the readership is estimated to be in North America, a fifth in the UK, and the rest split around the world, concentrated in Europe. Less than 30 percent of its readership is women.
Its audience would self-describe as: management or professional, high income and high influence. James Fallowshad a different take. Readers, particularly American and non-UK buyers, were buying into certain myths. One was snobbery – anything English must be better. Another was status anxiety. Readership, like other luxury brands, offered differentiation. Aspirants imitated their rich and influential role models.
Throughout its history, The Economist’s marketing has used these subliminal concerns. One ad read: “I never read The Economist.” The speaker is: “Management trainee – aged 44.” Another ad proclaimed: “It’s lonely at the top, but at least there’s something to read.”
Oxbridge Blues
My earnest and careful readership did not deliver the coveted affluence and influence. Over time, disappointment permeated my view of the newspaper which has prominent critics –Alexander Zevin’s book Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist as well as pieces from Fallow, Adam Tooze and Pankaj Mishra.
The initial attraction, other than imbuing me with the sought-after intellectual rank, was The Economist’s coverage of global affairs beyond that featured in other media. But it was, I discovered, an economics oriented version of the Readers Digest. It enabled you to say you were across issues when, in reality, you were not. It was an older version of scrolling through headlines or newsfeed.
There were other weaknesses. As a weekly published each Friday, it is ideal for Rip van Winkle readers who are asleep for most of the time awaking intermittently on publication day. While less problematic when news sources were slower, instant news and 24/7 media cycles can make The Economist appear dated. A multiplicity of newsletters that subscribers can sign up for provide more timely coverage. But this means large portions of the weekly edition is often redundant appealing mainly to readers with memory issues.
The content is allegedly the work of around seventy journalists mostly working out of London, although increased data and graphical intensity may have increased numbers in recent years. The model presents available information in The Economist style rather than original reporting. It is a human version of artificial intelligence (AI).
The Economist has a limiting homogeneity, in part, because of the remarkable longevity of its editors. In its 180+ year history, there have been only 17 editors. Articles lack the customary authorial by-line. The anonymity is puzzling as the correspondents and writers are actually listed on its website.
John Ralston Saul in his 2002 The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense questioned the attempt to fake the appearance of a single sagacious personality. He thought that hiding the names of the authors was designed “to create the illusion that they dispense disinterested truth rather than opinion”. Michael Lewis suggested that the anonymity covered the callow youth of The Economist’s staff. He told Fallows that it is “written by young people pretending to be old people”. If readers, especially Americans, “got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions in droves”.
The journalists are predominantly white and mainly educated at Oxford, especially Magdalen College, and Cambridge. Qualifications seem heavily skewed towards “ a First at Oxbridge”. This selection bias is similar to the British intelligence services (remember Philby, MacLean and Burgess) and the civil service (described by Dominic Cummings as a ‘horror show’ or ‘weirdos and misfits’). This lack of diversity is apparently advantageous producing an uniform point of view, even if it is wrong.
The style is Oxbridge undergraduate – obscure vocabulary, tendentious wordplay, self-conscious understatement, unconvincing self-disparagement, mordant wit and irony. Leaders offer strong opinion consistent with the gospel. Stories desperately seek informative and quirky anecdotes to highlight the author’s cleverness. The Obituary section strives constantly to surprise the reader with obscure departed. The tone is frequently condescending and clubby – the reader, a part of a select group, is being let in on precious secrets.
The opinion column labels summarise the stylistic tendencies. Bagehot which comments on Britain is named for the 19th-century British constitutional expert and one-time editor of the newspaper. European commentary is titled Charlemagne after the Emperor of the Frankish Empire. Chaguan, named for Chengdu’s traditional Chinese Tea houses, is where observations on China are placed. Banyan which provides opinions on Asia takes its name from the eponymous tree common to the region. Buttonwood provides analysis of financial matters. It is baptized for the tree where early Wall Street traders gathered. Schumpeter is the opinion column for business matters.
The phrasing struggles with the anonymity – “your correspondent“, “this reviewer” or “[name of column] was informed..” etc. The most characteristic aspect of the writing is its certainty. The Economist combines reporting, commentary and fearless didactic prescriptions for every problem to nations, policymakers, businesses and individuals despite uncertain domain expertise.
A former writer summed up this glibness as the author knowing that three steps must be taken but unsure of what they are. An ability to re-write history or self-justify, especially its often inaccurate forecasts, is a feature. An expensive education provides one alibi: “as Lord Keynes stated ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ “. The statement may in fact be that of Paul Samuelson not Keynes.
The sought after effect is of omniscience that the newspaper believes plays well with its reader. The Economist’sbest-and-brightest ivy league educated staff are always right. The formula of hiring well-educated graduates from the best schools to regurgitate information or specialist publication is profitable. But this best practice modern journalism has risks not least of all its susceptibility to AI-driven substitution.
Opinionated
For ancients like me looking for mundane facts, The Economist’s frequent inability to differentiate between datum and opinion is unsatisfactory. Despite protestation of a time when publications recited facts, journalism has always been biased. Historically, it has reflected the opinion of media owners and their agendas. The troubling aspect is the confusion between fact and opinion, the author’s seeming inability to tell the difference or superimposition of editorial views on events.
The philosophical blinkers are consistent with a publication created to muster support for abolishing the British Corn Laws (1815–1846), a system of import tariffs. It is combines some version of conservatism, free markets, free trade, free immigration, deregulation and globalisation. On social issues, it espouses individual rights and vague liberal values.
Former Defence Secretary Robert Gates once noted that President Joe Biden had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades”. As Zevin’s analysis reveals The Economist has often found itself similarly wrong-footed on pivotal issues throughout its existence.
Democracy has been relegated behind property rights and commerce. The newspaper was less than supportive of universal suffrage masking its opposition behind questions of what democracy required and meant. In the American Civil War, it sympathised with the slavery-supporting South on the grounds of free trade – the cotton planters needed export markets.
The Economist justified empire and colonialism on grounds of economics and stability. Global wealth creation demanded imperialism vindicating invasions, annexation, occupation, pacification, violence and exploitation. The struggles and rights of colonised people were barely acknowledged.
The newspaper likes most wars involving the USA and the UK. It opposed the two twentieth century world wars because of the threat to trade and capital flows. The Economist saw World War Two as a welcome opportunity to revive liberalism following the stagnation of the 1930s.
During the cold war, the newspaper was rabidly anti-communist, conveniently mislabelling nationalism and the liberation fight of colonised peoples to provide an excuse for intervention. It unabashedly supported dubious policies – the US orchestrated removal of Mohammad Mosaddegh’s elected Iranian government and replacement by the Shah; the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo; the replacement of Sukarno by Suharto in Indonesia; and the bloody right-wing coup led by General Pinochet that overthrew Chile’s Allende government. Apocryphal reports suggest that an editor danced around the office in London when the news of Salvador Allende’s apparent suicide was received shouting: “my enemy is dead.” Violence and foreign interference was justifiable where economic success was at stake.
During the Vietnam war, the newspaper supported the US. The My Lai massacre was the fog of war. Saturation bombing of North Vietnam and the expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos (where ordinary people are still being injured and killed by US mines and unexploded munitions) was insufficient for The Economist. Much of its war reporting of this period has been characterised as little more than propaganda served up by the US intelligence services (surely an oxymoron).
The 1989 fall of the Soviet Union and allied eastern European regimes was celebrated by The Economist as a victory of democracy and free markets. It cheered on Western economists’ ‘shock therapy’ to transition these economies to market-based structures. In the Soviet Union, deregulation and privatisation transferred large swathes of national wealth into the hands of oligarchs. In Russia, Anatoly Chubais is reviled as the politician who sold off state assets at bargain basement prices. The Economist admired his dynamic vision. The steep social costs were the price of progress which the newspaper bemoaned was taking place too slowly.
The editorial policies place blind faith in markets, which are assumed to nearly always be more efficient in allocating resources. The approach dismisses the role of states in allowing an economy to flourish through the provision of essential economic and social infrastructure.
The Economist embraced global finance although its understanding was incomplete. Its 2012 Special Report on Financial Innovation, argued that financial innovation was positive: “Finance has a very good record of solving big problems, from enabling people to realise the value of future income through products like mortgages to protecting borrowers from the risk of interest-rate fluctuations.” The Report confidently stated: “The evidence … suggests that the market does a brilliant job of nurturing and refining instruments that people want.” This was despite conceding that it was difficult to actually measure the benefits of financial innovation. The newspaper followed Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956: “Here is the conclusion on which I base my facts.”
The faith in markets and financial wizards did not preclude unfettered support for massive government bailouts of financial institutions after the 2008 financial crisis. There are, the newspaper declared, no atheists or laissez-faire advocates in foxholes. Pragmatism not political or economic dogma, was required because only governments could restart capital flows in a crisis. The fault was people not the system or the underlying ideology. The newspaper once supported Mussolini for sorting out the Italian economy and making the trains run on time.
The Economist’s record on social issues is equally equivocal. Voting rights for women, described as having no capacity for reason, were resisted. It rushed to the defence of climate sceptic Bjørn Lomborg on the grounds of freedom of speech. When it finally succumbed, devoting an issue to the climate emergency, the emphasis was on market-based solutions and ‘wunderwaffe’ technology, much of which did not exist at least on a commercial scale.
Criticism of specific editorial positions could be defended on the grounds that it was the orthodoxy of the time. But as critics, like Zevin, point out it was something fundamental – an ambivalence to facts and an overweening ideological certainty . Manichean perspectives on Afghanistan, Iraq, the Ukraine war and the Gaza genocide show that old attitudes persist. In economic and financial matters, The Economist has become an apologist for a system unconstrained by moral or ethical concerns and uncontrollable by elected governments. During the Covid-19 pandemic, it questioned government intervention such as social controls, subsidised vaccine production and unprecedented income support on the grounds that it was meddling in markets and restricting personal freedoms.
Events now defy neat categorisation heightening editorial confusion. The US, which has not prevailed in a military conflict since World War 2, if you exclude Panama and Granada, is flailing. The UK has receded into impotent and comic irrelevance. The rise of and unpleasant dependence on China, which has steadfastly refused to embrace The Economist’s prescribed path to prosperity, is galling.
Adulation of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan is difficult to square with a legacy of unsound finances, political instability and policy drift. The degeneration of unfettered finance into highly leveraged speculation and repeated episodes of instability and disorder was unexpected. Tensions between demographics, immigration, trade restrictions, sovereignty, security, rule of law, regulation, incentives, inequality and sustainability are often irreconcilable. To paraphrase William James, the newspaper’s thinking seems like a rearrangement of prejudices.
Adding to the muddle is the aging and dying male readership. Attempts to widen its appeal to women and other nationalities and the influx of bright-young-things with more contemporary preoccupations risk alienating the existing readership.
The Economist struggles to understand why a superior viewpoint is reviled by the vast majority of people, who have been left behind. It deplores the disparity between their perfect system and public dissatisfaction manifested in growing populism and voter acrimony and which it is unable to either explain or offer an antidote to. The newspaper seems trapped between celebrating the past, lamenting the present and its extravagant hopes for the future.
It risks becoming a mouthpiece for an isolated rich, powerful, and networked power clique without connection to the societies in which they operate. It exemplifies Keynes’ view that capitalism cannot survive if its workings are reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means of getting wealthier.
Whimpers
Despite my growing distrust and dislike, the subscription rolled on. There was comfort in reading a Soviet-era Pravda-like publication – providing clarity about what was untrue and knowing the official view on things. I fretted about the pros and cons of alternatives which were plagued by problems. There was sloth. There was fear that I would miss out on the one item of knowledge that would assure my wealth and power. My eventual cancellation was not from principled pique but for mundane reasons – whimpers not bangs.
On or about 12 April 2024, I was unable to access my digital weekly edition. I assumed some software update or technical gremlin. When the problem continued, I contacted the help desk and was diverted to a site in Southern India. The online chat – real or mechanised – suggested reboots, changed passwords, deleting cookies and caches. When the problem continued, it was elevated to the technical team. The promised rapid fix did not eventuate.
Over the next few weeks, I settled into a routine of emailed complaints which were met by implacable form responses without resolution. It was unclear whether the problem was unique to me or a wider glitch. Finally, I rang The Economist in Singapore threatening cancellation. My problem was further escalated (my issue had risen to heights higher than the Burj Khalifa).
There being no further communication or progress, about 1 month after the start of these problems, I rang to cancel my subscription and arrange a refund. This focused attention. There was much consultation with supervisors. I was offered a half-price renewal if I did not cancel. The fact that a renewal without access was useless had to be explained carefully and repeatedly to different staff members who were miffed at my lack of gratitude for this generous concession. I gave them 3 business days to restore access.
Nothing happened and I rang to terminate. Like HAL, the customer service person couldn’t do that. His supervisor would get back to me. Threats of a nuclear strike led to a manager coming on the line. The supervisor big-heartedly (he told me so) agreed to the cancellation and backdating the refund to the time of lost access. I was welcome to re-subscribe but only at full rates. I thought it wise to agree the amount due to me. He demurred as this was done automatically.
The refund was A$11.92 short. I emailed my highly-technical calculations (amount paid divided by the number of issues paid for multiplied by the number of missed issues). The shortfall, presumably validated by some human or artificial intelligence, was eventually paid ending my decades old relationship with The Economist. Regular emails arrive now asking me to ‘rate’ the newspaper’s customer service!
It seems fitting that The Economist was undone by the things it espouses. I had exercised my freedom of choice. The Economist will not miss me but the sentiment is mutual!
© 2024 Satyajit Das All Rights Reserved
An earlier version of this piece was first published on [date] in the New Indian Express.
Pure anecdote re Economist. In 1990 I was interviewed at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, for a potential offer to read Economics. The microeconomics Fellow asked me what economics newspaper/journal I read.
I said “The Economist”. The temperature dropped by 20 degrees. He said “whilst we here don’t agree with a lot going on we at least read things that people who want facts on the ground read. Start reading the FT”.
Multiple lessons learnt. (I got in…the profoundly macro/economic history Director of Studies spent years educating us in the last 5 minutes of every supervision about MMT…..before MMT was a thing).
Few are so fortunate to have such an astute Director of Studies, and sadly the history of economic thought has been almost entirely banished from the Economics academy altogether.
Fifty years ago my mother ended her second marriage. She moved into a rented house with her two children. I think that she wanted to improve herself. Maybe she wanted to attract a higher-quality man. Someone told her that smart people read the Wall Street Journal. I remember when it started coming to the house every day. No pictures. Bad deal. It piled up.
A decade later I was out of college. Someone told me that smart people read The Economist. I subscribed. I didn’t feel smarter. Maybe other people were smarter. The Economist did not seem relevant to my life.
Were we looking for Naked Capitalism?
I have my own service horror story. Verizon cut my service and kept charging me. It wasn’t actually Verizon; it was Frontier. Frontier cut service to my copper landline. I had kept the landline because I was using it for DSL internet. Last year AT&T stopped providing DLS service. My copper landline was no longer necessary. When I went to use my landline and cancel it, I discovered that it was not working and that it had probably been cut months before. Frontier, however, had kept charging me. My complaints to several departments won me a debit card with $40. The sign over the gates of hell reads, “Verizon.”
If you come up with a publication that tried to justify some of the worst evils inflicted on humanity, the Economist would be it.
British imperialism, inequality, exploitation by the rich, and rent seeking are all hallmarks of what the Economist advocated for.
Ultimately, as Das has noted, the Anglo – American empire that the Economist advocated for is collapsing and they are deeply alarmed, but ultimately helpless to do anything about it.
What’s missing is any self-reflection as to how the crisis happened. A deeply unequal society means that the working class would have no reason to keep the system that exploited them going, whole the double standards in international law, and decades of imperialism were bound to make many victims around the world angry.
It’s remarkable how much the Economist has been on the wrong side of history. One can only hope that many others will join Das in not subscribing and the publication will fall to irrelevance, being remembered as a propaganda outlet for the Western elite.
I read Economics, then gradually moved via higher degrees into health/medicine-adjacent fields. However, I’ve always proclaimed what I did NOT know (which is a lot).
A couple of friends of mine did not read Economics but think that they are entitled to lecture me on stuff because they have a subscription to the Economist. These days I have people who have wisdom and advise me to cut these Economist reading folk out of my life. Something to think about…..
The microeconomics that the “Federal” system (top level) at Cambridge attempted to brainwash (ahem) teach me is nonsense. Yet there are a lot of people who would describe themselves as progressive etc, who swallow The Economist nonsense as fact. They get very very antsy when I give recommendations like Yves’s book, ones on MMT and indeed ALL of Adam Smith’s writings, not just the “pin factory” stuff that is controversial at best.
> not just the “pin factory” stuff
And comes from al-Ghazali’s needle factory, anyway.
I read the Economist when I was a loathsome and militant Thatcherite teenager. It was a wonderful weekly dose of affirmation in the school library.
I continued reading it in college but I had begun to think about the meaning of money and of the physical and particularly the energy microfoundations of economics and I spent the summer in transition Russia (staying with a babushka one weekend in Moscow who showed me how to cook in her kitchen because the idea of any meal out, let alone eating out all weekend, was inconceivable) and the Economist seemed narrower and narrower as my horizons got wider. Indeed, it represents a sort of crystalline delusion of the world. Pace St Paul, “Now I am an adult, I put away childish things….” etc.
Ironically, my disillusionment with the neoliberal Readers’ Digest came at the time all my contemporaries were fawning over the election of Tony Blair. I warned them but they didn’t listen!
I never had any trouble cancelling though. I think I just failed to renew. UK consumer protections might be quite tough in this regard.
Altandmain: the Anglo – American empire that the Economist advocated for is collapsing and they are deeply alarmed, but ultimately helpless to do anything about it.
Don’t you believe it, dear boy. Early days yet, but on the London end of that ‘Anglo-American empire’ ….
https://www.londonstockexchange.com/raise-finance/debt/our-products/renminbi-bonds
The first offshore Chinese renminbi (RMB) bond was issued in 2014 by the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Since then, London Stock Exchange has become the global hub for renminbi bonds and the leading offshore RMB trading hub outside of Asia.
London RMB Business Bi-annual Report May 2023
London RMB Foreign Exchange Market During 2022, the average daily CNH FX trading volume in London stood at GBP105.95 billion, up 30.44% YoY. During 2022, about 46% of all CNH spot trading on EBS
The City of London was what it was long before George Washington was running his real estate swindles on War of Indendence veterans and Thomas Jefferson was screwing his slaves. It’ll likely be the City long after the American empire disappears into the garbage can of history.
Well, as the UK empire has virtually disappeared (only Scotland, NI, Gibralter, the Malvinas and a few minor tax havens left), and as UK manufacturing is now in the same state as the US’s, and the same rule by incompetents prevails here, I trust that your forecast for ‘the City’ will prove to be on a par with the forecasts of the Economist.
This was a fun read. When I went off to university, my father recommended reading The Economist weekly as a good way of staying abreast of current events. And so I was a loyal subscriber from the mid-80s till 2014. My first doubts re The E arose in the late 90s while living in Russia; the chaos I saw daily clashed with The E’s praise for Yeltsin’s policies. The wars in A-Stan and Iraq (supported eagerly by The E) led to more doubts, followed by the financial meltdown of 2008 (for which The E offered no facile explanation). The last straw for me was the Maidan coup in Ukraine and The E’s screaming cover featuring Putin and the headline “A Web of Lies.” And so I cancelled my subscription. At which point my cell phone (which I had provided to The E as a phone contact) began receiving a flood of daily phone calls from a series of +44 numbers. It was quite the deluge, easily 10-15 calls daily for about a week, until I finally answered and told them to stop pestering me (whilst blocking all the constantly changing numbers).
A few months ago, Offspring No.1 read an issue of The E that she found while traveling. After which she told me that she was amazed at what c**p it was. So I’m glad that I’ve successfully inoculated at least one of my DNA carriers against this garbage.
My take on The E is as follows. 99.9999+% of humanity views free markets and private property as means to an end; even hardcore libertarians and strict Marxists would agree on this point (though disagreeing on what ends are to be pursued). But the staff of The E are different: they view free markets and private property as ends in themselves. Once your society has unfettered free markets and universal private property, you have reached Nirvana. That might sound absurd, but that’s essentially how The E portrayed Yeltsin’s Russia. The fact that both China and Russia are doing just fine (despite flouting all the rules of the neoliberal Washington Consensus) drives the editors of The E absolutely bonkers.
“But the staff of The E are different: they view free markets and private property as ends in themselves.”
I know of at least one other very small yet formerly influential group that has essentially the same view: hardcore Russian liberals in the Gaidar-Chubais mold. Perhaps Gaidar especially, if his characterisation as an incorruptible ascetic market fanatic has any basis in fact. He certainly was less self-aggrandising than many other Russian reformers at the time, because he wasn’t in it for the money; he was in it for the Market. Like recognises like, of course.
Oh yes, and how The E loved Chubais & Gaidar. It was either The E or Larry Summers who referred to Yeltsin’s early 98 reformers as The Dream Team (Chubais, Nemtsov, Fyodorov, and Kiriyenko, IIRC). And when Russia’s financial markets imploded in August 98, The E was genuinely shocked and disappointed. Russia’s phoenix-like recovery post-1999 (under Putin) has never been properly acknowledged by The E, and probably never will be.
As you likely know, Kiriyenko long ago changed his tune re neoliberalism and has had a long career in government service under Putin, with a reputation as a competent technocrat. Whereas back in 1998, he was regarded as a joke by most Russians (nicknamed “Kinder Surprise” after the children’s candy). Some people do learn.
Nemtsov was a comparative newcomer and more of a conventional crook, though I don’t think that necessarily precludes being a fanatic. But yes, by 1998 his star was rising among the liberal reformers. IIRC he also cooperated with Putin for a while afterwards, but couldn’t take Putin’s turn away from fanatical liberalism. Some other liberals could. Chubais, of course, hung around near power for a while; it took the SMO to finally chase him off, certainly a silver lining from where I’m standing.
“But the staff of The E are different: they view free markets and private property as ends in themselves.”
Not really. In actuality, the style and tone of the whole publication is produced by “The Mothers,” the older female copy editors and lifetime employees at THE ECONOMIST, who basically rule the roost there.
As for “the staff of the E,” as the OP theorizes, they’re 90 percent drawn from under-30-year-old Oxford graduates simply needing a job, and trying to sound older than they are. Of the Oxford students who have to go into journalism, they’re not even the brightest — I’ve known a few and, in my day, the FT and even EUROMONEY were better places to be
Very informative, and I was already critical of the Economist.
“…The Economist has become an apologist for a system unconstrained by moral or ethical concerns and uncontrollable by elected governments…”
Yes, and that’s a very polite way of saying it.
In the book Spooked, (2016, Nicholas Schou) quotes former company man Frank Snepp as feeding stories he wrote directly to the Economist, which they published. (and other news outlets). Snepp said that while not a total dupe of the CIA (and MI6), they were a preferred outlet.
For a tragically humorous example of the Economist, this link has a list covers featuring Vladimir Putin, or characterizations of him. https://www.google.com/search?q=the+economist+issues+with+vladimir+putin+on+the+cover&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwiQzfeSl_yGAxUJKUQIHQLMCSoQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=the+economist+issues+with+vladimir+putin+on+the+cover&gs_lp=EgNpbWciNXRoZSBlY29ub21pc3QgaXNzdWVzIHdpdGggdmxhZGltaXIgcHV0aW4gb24gdGhlIGNvdmVySMN4UIUOWLx3cAZ4AJABAZgBkQOgAZ8tqgELMzkuMTQuMi4wLjG4AQPIAQD4AQGKAgtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ8ICBRAAGIAEwgIHEAAYgAQYGMICBhAAGAgYHsICBBAAGB6IBgE&sclient=img&ei=QJB9ZpCtJYnSkPIPgpin0AI&bih=615&biw=1366&client=firefox-b-1-e
Johnny J
That is a priceless collection of covers.
All anyone needs, if they want to die homeless on the streets or in a nuclear fireball, is a dual subscription to the Economist and the Atlantic.
The Atlantic used to be a decent magazine, but over the past two decades it has gone over to the Darkside with its support of the establishment aka the Atlantic Council. Much like how NPR and PBS slowly went from being liberal, moderately left of center, to establishment shill with some identity politics added.
No longer with its basically honest, reliable viewpoint and reporting. It was how I truly understood how deep the propagandistic rot had spread. I really liked thirty years.
“[…] if they want to die homeless on the streets […] in a nuclear fireball […]”
Lol, slight alteration there has the perfect imagery.
The Economist is the voice of free market liberalism. There is something almost admirable about its undisguised ideological purity, if only by comparison to something like The Guardian, which I think can be attacked on many similar grounds but hides behind radical pretensions. I’d say that makes it useful as a way of quickly finding out the opinion of free market liberals on any given issue, although in practice I’ve soon found it too predictable to bother with most of the time.
I used to receive their newsletters in my email. I think I must’ve signed up for something on a whim long ago, though I certainly didn’t pay for it. Checking now, they stopped sending me their revelations abruptly on April 1st 2019; funnily, the last email was about how a comedian might get elected president in Ukraine.
Daniil Adamov,
The Economist is in favour of free trade when it benefits USA and UK – but as soon as trade restrictions benefit USA and UK The Economist embraces them and calls them “sanctions”.
I subscribed for a couple years, despite being low-income, low-status, and low-influence. It was purely opposition research on the ruling class. I try to read very broadly, well beyond my own ideological comfort zone, which spans from ulta-left to left-liberal, so I don’t get very easily offended by views donsonsonant with my own. The Economist published a cartoon in October or November of last year which depicted Gaza as a shield being held up by a sinister-looking, ski-mask clad Hamas giant, and being pummeled by airstrikes. They offered me a half-price subscription, but I canceled it and gave my reason. I now occasionally browse it at the library where I read the NYT and the WSJ, for free.
I think young people today read the FT. You can’t lie too much to the people who are reading your stuff to make money.
Another anecdote. I used to fly between SYD and LHR via Singapore. A lot. I only rarely had enough points for an upgrade (SIN are very stingy re airmiles since their Econ class is above most others). However, I could use their lounges. The most prominent “free reading” was The Economist.
Which instantly made me start questioning my Singapore friends about stuff that seemed “odd” to me. So, my previous warnings about this toilet paper were borne out.
A TOWERING EXPOSE’!
I personally have never read the Economist. (Full disclosure: I am not a member of the elite class so never felt obliged to.) And, judging from the comments here, I didn’t miss anything. Whatever the paper published that was of relevance to me was either explained nicely here at NC – which I have been reading for 10 years – or critiqued enthusiastically. I don’t think I’ve missed anything. In addition, the money saved was put to much better use here at NC.
Valuable mainly for people with memory issues is nicer I guess than reserving its use for lining birdcages. I will say, the Economist is the first media I saw that called out rising house prices as being asset inflation.
Current Affairs sells Death to The Economist bumper stickers.
I always felt like paying for a subscription to The Economists would be like paying to listen to someone scream “tax cuts” all day.
I subscribed for some years to the economist digital version, enjoying the comments space. SLowly, but shurely one could see a big gap being created between the readership and the journal, with about 90% of the comments to most of the articles at odds from the embedded opinion.
And then The Economist removed the comments section and I abandoned them.
I did got one interesting thing that I used it in my work, a review of a scienctific article looking at age differences between sexes for species from different phila, based on the xx/xy (female/male) or zz/zw (male/female) chromosomes. XX/ZZ live longer…
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1911999117
March 23, 2020
Sex differences in adult lifespan and aging rates of mortality across wild mammals
By Jean-François Lemaître, Victor Ronget, Morgane Tidière and Jean-Michel Gaillard
Abstract
In human populations, women consistently outlive men, which suggests profound biological foundations for sex differences in survival. Quantifying whether such sex differences are also pervasive in wild mammals is a crucial challenge in both evolutionary biology and biogerontology. Here, we compile demographic data from 134 mammal populations, encompassing 101 species, to show that the female’s median lifespan is on average 18.6% longer than that of conspecific males, whereas in humans the female advantage is on average 7.8%. On the contrary, we do not find any consistent sex differences in aging rates. In addition, sex differences in median adult lifespan and aging rates are both highly variable across species. Our analyses suggest that the magnitude of sex differences in mammalian mortality patterns is likely shaped by local environmental conditions in interaction with the sex-specific costs of sexual selection.
Xirocostas ZA, Everingham SE, Moles AT. 2020 The sex with the reduced sex chromosome dies earlier: a comparison across the tree of life. Biol. Lett. 16: 20190867. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0867
Many taxa show substantial differences in lifespan between the sexes. However, these differences are not always in the same direction. In mammals, females tend to live longer than males, while in birds, males tend to live longer than females. One possible explanation for these differences in lifespan is the unguarded X hypothesis, which suggests that the reduced or absent chromosome in the heterogametic sex (e.g. the Y chromosome in mammals and the W chromosome in birds) exposes recessive deleterious mutations on the other sex chromosome. While the unguarded X hypothesis is intuitively appealing, it had never been subject to a broad test. We compiled male and female longevity data for 229 species spanning 99 families, 38 orders and eight classes across the tree of life. Consistent with the unguarded X hypothesis, a meta-analysis showed that the homogametic sex, on average, lives 17.6% longer than the heterogametic sex. Surprisingly, we found substantial differences in lifespan dimorphism between female heterogametic species (in which the homogametic sex lives 7.1% longer) and male heterogametic species (in which the homogametic sex lives 20.9% longer). Our findings demonstrate the importance of considering chromosome morphology in addition to sexual selection and environment as potential drivers of sexual dimorphism, and advance our fundamental understanding of the mechanisms that shape an organism’s lifespan.
This rings a bell.
Read the Economist for many years, got so nauseated with their Ukraine coverage that I wanted to drop it in 2022. One of their half price offers made me stay for another year, but when I had to page through half of an issue without reading anything to avoid throwing up I finally summoned up the courage last year!
Their science coverage was pretty decent, though it got worse over the years, too.
I followed the Economist off and on through the 90’s and even had a subscription around the turn of the Millenia. Sometime between Iraq and the Financial meltdown, it began to dawn on me that they were completely wrong about everything. What really upset me much more than discovering that the Economist was a complete rag was when the WSJ sold to Murdoch, and they fired all the good financial reporters and replaced them with editorial page clones. The WSJ used to be a good paper with some real reporting on occasion so long as you ignored the editorial page.
Same timeline here.
I’d just under-graduated Econ, had fired Time magazine when it started morphing into People and opinion, and subscribed to The Economist. It affirmed my Neo-liberal education. Per Das:
I cancelled them when they advocated for the Iraq 2003 war, claiming it was legal and justified.
Somewhere along the way, I “woke” up (in the original sense of that expression).
(Take a bow, NC & commentariat.)
Over the years, I’ve had to cancel the NYT, Globe and Mail, BBC, and The Guardian, all for straight out lying.
Yes, now that I think about it, what the Economist offered was coverage of new events from around the world, not just USA or even Europe. However, as ignorance declined, even this began to bother me because of the biased, and sometimes completely distorted to the point of dishonest way they covered the world.
I read a few issuesin the ‘90s. Found Economist to be lacklustre in opinion and reasoning. Derivative might be the best description. Could not be bothered to subscribe.
“In 1846 The Economist magazine declared that Irish distress was “brought on by their own wickedness and folly”. Such attitudes were not uncommon in the British media during and after the Famine […]”
https://www.rte.ie/history/famine-ireland/2020/0917/1165825-their-own-wickedness-how-the-british-press-reported-the-famine/
Precisely, it was perfectly in tune with the opinion of the (then-nascent) free market liberals (e.g. Charles Trevelyan), and remains so to this day.
Entertaining although unsurprising. The thing that strikes me is how long it’s been around, despite, or perhaps because of, its flaws. Almost two centuries!
Taking the overall impression from Das’s review of its historical positions, I’d have to conclude that it always has been, and that that’s the reason for its success.There will always be funding for a propaganda vehicle for the moneyed class disguised as journalism.
“There will always be funding for a propaganda vehicle for the moneyed class disguised as journalism.”
So much this.
I read the Economist religiously between about 1989 and 2000. In addition, I acquired an uninterrupted set of back numbers going back to 1967, which have since been sent to landfill.
By the late 1990s the scales had fallen from my eyes, especially when the paper declared that the bonus culture was a Good Thing, or that global warming might be tolerable because a vast plume of industrial pollution would hang over China, keeping the temperature low. The coup de grace was the agitation from the mid-1990s against Saddam Hussein because he was ‘certain’ to have a nuclear capability. The paper was in the vanguard of the confected WMD hysteria and read like a house journal of the neoconservatives. I then concluded that it was written by and for idiot savants and poseurs, and that its journalists were either bought and paid for, or else they were so deluded that they believed their own falsehoods and half-truths. Moreover, the whole doctrinaire presumption that free trade is always and everywhere a good thing (though the paper has sometimes wobbled over infant industries) puts it in an intellectual straightjacket, with often imbecilic results. However, it took several years for me to abandon it, and I still scan it in supermarkets, but only for a few seconds, as there is usually scarcely anything worth reading in it. Having read Ruth Dudley Edwards’ weighty and sympathetic official history (1993), I read Zevin’s book with relish, and it affirmed my loss of faith – though in fairness on a few issues (like Suez, as Keith Kyle discovered to his cost) the paper had been right, unlike the vast majority of Fleet Street in 1956.
However, I no longer have much truck with the FT either. It was marketed on much the same snobbish, de haut en bas prospectus as the Economist (“no FT, no comment”). Its op-ed section is now as dismal and almost laughably asinine as that of any other paper, and a monthly article by John Plender is not nearly enough, especially now that John Dizard has left, to make the steep sub worthwhile.
In truth I was sceptical about the Economist from my first acquaintance with it. It was all too pat. Its chief value, for me, was the fact that it at least provided some reportage of countries outside the North Atlantic region, and there was something to be said for its country reports. This was really faute de mieux, as most of Fleet Street closed their overseas desks in the 1990s and coverage of Latin America, Africa and much of the rest of the world vanished from all of the mainstream press. Even when wedded to it on a weekly basis, I had to read it with circumspection.
The conventional British media is truly on a short road to nowhere.
http://www.ft.com/alphaville
That’s the only good bit left to read and it’s free! You will need to register but it just asks for a username and password, not a life history. And, as with all the best places, the comments are the best bit. Much less hive-minded than the main Ft.com site and usually backed up by some direct, albeit usually finance-related, experience of the topic in question.
I first picked up The Economist in the uni library in the late ’60s. I found the adverts for watches on every other page most fascinating. All I could figure was that the mag must have been aimed at third-world bourgeois wanna-be’s.
From 1848 to 1853, one of The Economist’s up-and-coming young writers was one Herbert Spencer. Some things don’t evolve.
I have a cute anecdote. I was a print subscriber starting in the late 1980s, and I wrote them a letter complaining that the delivery service was sometimes delayed, and I could see the print edition on news stands for some days before I got my copy.
I got a response from a charming young lady and we carried on an increasingly flirty correspondence every few weeks or so, until one day she wrote that she had decided to resign and get married, but that she had really enjoyed our correspondence and wished me a good life.
She never did fix the delivery problem, but that’s okay.
Wow. How times have changed.
Can you imagine this article getting written even 10 years ago?
It reads like a story of infatuation and then the awful, rocky road to disillusionment .. as a cultural icon at the center of the village crumbles and discolors, until finally no one loves it anymore.
An identity – or at least a major pillar of one’s identity – is a wrenching thing to lose.
A while back I wrote that one of the biggest factors in the Wests recent troubles is our tendency to self-delusion.
The Economist carried a lot of the freight for maintaining our delusions.
I subscribed to the Economist for a few years in the 80’s, ya never knew when somebody would need an assistant finance minister in Djibouti or those other equally exotic want ads in the back of the mag. Sometimes the articles were quite clever, and I feel certain that when I let my subscription lapse, they sold my name into white slavery, er, that’s when I started getting the Nigerian Letter, which had the most interesting block printing typically, with a cut in it for yours truly if I played along.
Thanks for this, Yves. A compelling and convincing indictment. As an economist I find myself in complete agreement with the critique of both style and substance. Many years ago, I was alerted that I was cited in connection with my work on the whole outsourcing and offshoring phenomenon. The way it was done was as if they had interviewed me. I had no memory of that whatsoever, and I wrote complaining to them. No response. It has not been on my reading list before or since.
I myself grew tired of The Economist and its one-note act at least 30 years ago, and Das absolutely nails it across the breadth of this piece, most pithily here:
“The Economist struggles to understand why a superior viewpoint is reviled by the vast majority of people, who have been left behind. It deplores the disparity between their perfect system and public dissatisfaction manifested in growing populism and voter acrimony and which it is unable to either explain or offer an antidote to. The newspaper seems trapped between celebrating the past, lamenting the present and its extravagant hopes for the future.
It risks becoming a mouthpiece for an isolated rich, powerful, and networked power clique without connection to the societies in which they operate. It exemplifies Keynes’ view that capitalism cannot survive if its workings are reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means of getting wealthier.”
Good riddance, and no loss …
I first subscribed when I was doing my PhD. I fancied myself at a pinnacle of sophistication – studying physics and getting the Economist, too.
The affair flourished through the triumphant post Thatcher/Reagan decades of oil- and finance-drenched de-industrialization and smug celebration of the inversion what it means for markets to be ‘free’ and the resulting creeping growth of inequality and meta-crisis.
Sometime in the 90s it occurred to me there wasn’t a world problem that could not be solved by the Economist in one page. And I thought back to A-level essays, ‘blah, blah, blah – discuss’. And what it took to get an A – less facts and reason than toeing the line with due erudition and aplomb. Ah, of course!
I haven’t bought a copy of the Economist in over 25 years. Mind you, I did shell out for, ‘MMT, Key Insights, Leading Thinkers’, last year, and am now having difficulty with MMT, too, being blind to the socio-political storm that is brewing.
There was a time when I might still have picked up an Economist in a dentist’s office. No more, although I might have another go at Keynes General Theory. And, I’m told, Marx. To be honest, though, I don’t think anything can save us from the building meta-crisis, although I’ll bet you good money the Economist will have its usual 1-page answer.
Now do “New Scientist”.
Lots of fake science there.
I agree with article and the comments that The Economist has always been simplistically opinionated, has generally failed to forecast trends reliably, and has recently seemed a little sloppier in its writing.
However, I never read the “leader” essays, as I don’t look to The Economist for policy advice. Nor do I trust or need its political and economic predictions, though some of them have turned out to be broadly correct. Its free market biases are fairly transparent even in the reporting, so they don’t seem insidious, just wrong.
None of these objections outweighs what The Economist, in its modest way, does better than any other single source I’ve found: direct my attention to recent events in regions I’d struggle to hear about otherwise. My countries of interest — Pakistan, Peru, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Rwanda, and Ethiopia — all appear in The Economist more often than in all my other sources combined.
I’ve been reading The Economist since 1982, and will continue to do so, with a salt cellar nearby (as soon as I can find a salt cellar).