The Economist: classic or dud

don t see the lack of ideology there, the ideology (and its prettyy blatant to me) is pro-business all the way...commerce is king. but that can be ignored, like any other publication with a totally obvious agenda (ie al of them)

Of all of the 'news magazines' (time, newsweek), it seems to have more comprehensive coverage of international news.

"In the issues of December 16th 2000 to November 10th 2001, we may have given the impresssion that George Bush had been legally and duly elected president of the United States. We now understand that this may have been incorrect, and that the election result is still too close to call. The Economist apologises for any inconvenience."

Not a classic, either, because its general pro-globalization slant strikes me as soulless, even if it leads to interesting cover stories like the drug legalization feature last summer.

Pick it up on the subway once in a while.

Classic I guess for depth of foreign coverage that you don't get in any other publication you can buy at a subway station convenience stand. Dud because it's a bit dry and its take on everything is sort of predictable and safe.

Classic for the reason that Hurting gave, but I wanna add that NYT foreign coverage always shocks me with how good it is.

"One the one hand, lowering trade barriers and tightening fiscal policy would bring greater prosperity to (x)'s population. And by population we mean companies. On the other hand, the government shouldn't be so draconian that they rouse the ire of the little people. So a little altruism is actually good for business!" Repeat x FOREVER

Yeah, their take on world power + economies are kinda staid and repetitive, but I love how they basically write about the entire world, and how strong their coverage of names/events/places are. You can actually be a human being who knows something by reading it week to week (my mission in life lol).

I'm glad it exists and I read it, but it's not entirely classic.

It has a bland uniformity which lends plausibility, until you read articles about subjects you know a lot about yourself (e.g. internet, technology issues, some UK political stories) where its lack of expertise is wobbly. Equally annoying is that a lot of the articles don't actually say anything - a brief canter through the issues and end without any conclusions or opinions offered.

Equally annoying is that a lot of the articles don't actually say anything - a brief canter through the issues and end without any conclusions or opinions offered.

Yeah this is the worst thing about it. Also, its deficit hawkishness has really annoyed me, given the number of economists that disagree with it. The idea of the Economist speaking with one voice falls down here, in that it isn't really a forum for debate. I'd rather read Martin Wolff in the FT these days.

i'm aware that there are other forums for good political reporting, but the economist is the one i've found to have the best facts/opinions ratio and measured, distanced voice (of those i've read). the sublety of the ideology is a bit dangerous to folk like me who rely on it almost exclusively, but there are worse people to be brainwashed by

tracer, why complain about the repetitiveness of the line? at least you know what you're getting, which beats a lot of media orgs out there.

I don't like to know what I'm getting!! That's why I don't read Kos or Washington Monthly or digby any more

I'm also realizing the value of stuff like The Economist as I enter the "professional world" as it were, since you can kind of just glance through it and thereby avoid risking not knowing what people are talking about if you get into a discussion of international affairs.

Which is inextricably intertwined with why it's also slightly dud, imo.

Read it occasionally on airplanes, and I like the relatively broad international news and reasonably good book reviews and obituaries. Was surprised, though, to hear a work colleague say he couldn't read it any more 'cause it was too "biased". In his case, meaning "liberal", and not in the global economic sense. OK, he's an asshat, but it was still surprising to hear someone say that about the Economist, fer crying out loud.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/business/media/09economist.html

I try to warn people off of the Economist, but they rarely listen.

This:

Free trade always and forevah. It is not an angle so much as a particular program of economics: Smith was right and all else is corrupt.
― Sterling Clover, Wednesday, July 10, 2002 7:00 AM (8 years ago) Bookmark

And what Tracer said.

Years ago, during my undergrad, I subscribed to it on a student subscription.
The reporting was broad, and seemed to be very well informed, but the way the articles were edited started to really bother me and eventually I got freaked out.

Today, I avoid the magazine.
Simply, It's wrapped in the kind of economic orthodoxy and neo-classical group-think that serves to effectively stifle hetrodox imagination on important global issues that aren't getting solved by free trade.

No matter the event they report on, they couch their writing in the language of the "rational" economic thinker pseudo-academic hack. Above all else, the theory is their style guide.

Here, taken from their "about us" page

Established in 1843 to campaign on one of the great political issues of the day, The Economist remains, in the second half of its second century, true to the principles of its founder. James Wilson, a hat maker from the small Scottish town of Hawick, believed in free trade, internationalism and minimum interference by government, especially in the affairs of the market. Though the protectionist Corn Laws which inspired Wilson to start The Economist were repealed in 1846, the newspaper has lived on, never abandoning its commitment to the classical 19th-century Liberal ideas of its founder.

http://strangersihaveloathed.tumblr.com/post/6279397739/9-19am

I'll put a kind word in for the Economist audio edition, which runs about 4-6 hours each week and is ideal for wee hour dog-walks and late afternoon lawn mowing. Its well produced, the readers have that calming BBC world service diction, and the moderate neo-liberal/pro-science stance noted above in this thread doesn't trouble me (I wish more US Republicans were exposed to pro-business voices where anthropogenic climate change and biological evolution were taken as givens).

It generally finds its way onto file sharing sites a few days after release, but I broke down and got a rolling digital subscription (which includes the audio edition) a couple of months ago and don't regret it.

very informative

my wife gets the audio edition and i agree, it is very well done.

plus - no cover to look at!

http://www.economistgroupmedia.com/research/audience-profile/demographics

87% male
13% female

lol that is totally unsurprising

did you read the economist when you were an econ major iatee? or do you now?

i still have a subscription even though i find myself annoyed by the superior tone of their us coverage

ya im subscribed, too. ive been thinking about cancelling it, though not for that reason

almost all of my reading is online and/or on my phone, so I read the economist when a econ blog links an article, which is often enough, but I don't pick it up and read it cover to cover, tho I actually did a few days ago on a train. I read it about as much in college.

ryan avent is super great tho

I feel like the value of something like this has dropped so much, like in 1995 picking up the economist would have been this crazy valuable source of information on the world, but now it's like, a buncha dry articles and opinions that are 4 days too late to matter

yeah idk i dont really like blogs as a source of information so i still really appreciate the reporting in the front half of the mag

the econ/finance/science/arts sections are p worthless although i kindof value seeing what movies/books/art they consider worth reporting on and the science stuff can be surprisingly considered

is find the science writing is often too geared towards innovations in efficiency/business-oriented for it to really blow my mind

ryan avent is super great tho it's true

http://nationalinterest.org/bookreview/voice-the-new-global-elite-7348?page=show

Admittedly, there are times when the Economist leans a little heavily on plummy English props and mannerisms. Michael Lewis, the popular American financial writer and author of Liar’s Poker, once attributed the magazine’s sometimes laboriously polished prose and tone to the fact that the Economist “is written by young people pretending to be old people,” adding that if American readers “got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions.” This may be the reason almost all of the publication’s articles still lack bylines, much less accompanying photos of the writers.

Having just read the surprisingly good N+1 piece on Pitchfork (which gives by-lines but, in the estimation of N+1, creates a kind of predictable, semi-anonymous music writer), I think this description could go for the Economist as well, subbing in mild-form libertarian policy for indie rock or something:

Pitchfork couldn’t develop intelligence on the individual level because the site’s success depended largely on its function as a kind of opinion barometer: a steady, reliable, unsurprising accretion of taste judgments. Fully developed critics have a tendency to surprise themselves, and also to argue with one another, and not just over matters of taste—they fight about the real stuff. This would have undermined Pitchfork’s project.

Some Puerto Rican bonds that are just dyin' to meet you

did you mean that to be in the Finance thread, or is this something that was in the magazine?

that is funny mookie

i unsubscribed from this mag this year, rip economist

that was a subhead in the magazine

'too drunk to frack'

also http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21594257-our-wildest-fantasy-if-only-french-ran-america-la-maison-blanche

http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/full-width/images/print-edition/20140118_LDP006_0.jpg

Unlike Mr Thomas, Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21615482-how-slaves-built-american-capitalism-blood-cotton

wow, fuck off unnamed book reviewer.

the comments in that article are pretty good: "Let's hear Hitler's side of the story!".

i like the economist, or have historically, for its coverage of foreign affairs (i haven't found a better way to get as broad a view of IR than with this mag) though recently i have replaced it somewhat with financial times.

i really want a frequent news source without native ads that gives the kind of international attention that the economist does but i have so far struggled to find it, so for now i lean on imperfect sources

Apology: In our review of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward Baptist, we said: “Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so. Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil. We regret having published this and apologise for having done so. We are therefore withdrawing the review but in the interests of transparency, anybody who wants to see the withdrawn review can click here.

that apology just makes it worse

read a v bizarre economist article yesterday abt how the american regulatory system was a mafia-style shakedown under which bewildered american businesses like bank of america were being forced to pay enormous out-of-court settlements for allegedly defrauding the public according to arcane and unfollowable redtape laws, and that a "good first step" towards greater fairness had been proposed by, waitforit, elizabeth warren, who wanted to force disclosure of the terms of these settlements, which would force the regulators to submit to public scrutiny and thus reveal their predatory caprice -- and it was like, my obviously economist-unaligned sympathies aside, everything u are saying about cause and motive here is just brazenly inside-out

That's their answer to everything. Literally. Drought in Uganda? Privatise and deregulate the water market. Decline in the number of pandas. Privatise and deregulate the panda market, etc.

It's hugely to the right of the Financial Times, which is pretty clearly free-market itself, and hugely out of step with the professed cultural values of the parent company that owns half of it. Iirc, though, the other half is owned by a mixed selection of dodgy plutocrats.

it's always neat to see how long it takes them to recover from setbacks. sure, iraq was a disaster, but that doesn't mean America should stop intervening! sure, market forces were unable to keep investment banks from making disastrous gambles that wrecked the economy and required massive government intervention to prevent a depression, but that doesn't mean government should get in the way of the free market! sure, republicans are insane and wrong about immigration/climate change/abortion/the gays, but if they're willing to cut regulations/taxes/unions and intervene everywhere, then that's what really matters!

The Economist can be pretty good and informative as long as you never read the last paragraph, which as ShariVari says is basically ALWAYS THE SAME.

The FT's news is pretty much the most balanced and impartial newspaper reporting you can read in the UK, because it already assumes its readers are pro-capitalist (maybe not dyed-in-the-wool free-market) and don't need converting. They need accurate reporting on what's happening in the world so they can make investment decisions. Plus it has Martin Wolf, whose anti-austerity columns I respect hugely.

The Economist exists solely for the promotion of a single economic school of thought but its faux-objective tone of voice (plus the irritating lack of bylines) just cloaks everything in a bogus calm rationality. It's the hubris of the profession writ large across every issue. It also takes the examples of successful non-freemarket states (even relatively successful ones like Botswana) with astonishing bad grace, and throws its toys out of the pram every time eg Francois Hollande does something that suggests that the free market isn't the single most important issue in the entire world.

Its sub-editors, though, are top-class. I have nothing but respect for whoever it was who used the header 'The Invisible Handjob' in their article about the online sex industry.

I remember someone pointing out that the identical last paragraph thing always made it read a bit like a trot newspaper, but with 'this shows the need for deregualtion' in place of 'this shows the need for a fighting labour party that will nationalise the commanding heights of the economy; like you'd get in Militant

The Economist can be pretty good and informative as long as you never read the last paragraph, which as ShariVari says is basically ALWAYS THE SAME.

this is the same of a lot of left-wing outlets e.g. the World Socialist Web Site where you'll have e.g. a review of Guardians of the Galaxy which ends, inevitably, with a paragraph about how capitalism is in crisis and artistic works while inadequate cannot but reveal the grave dissatisfaction of the masses which only awaits an awakening of revolutionary consciousness.

i should note that the WSWS is an explicitly trotskyite publication

Some commentators say he is a fascist -— an idea he encouraged by inviting his followers to pledge their allegiance to him with a fascist-style salute at a rally in Florida. This seems like an exaggeration, however, and, given his hunger for a grievance, self-defeating. There is, similarly, no reason to suppose he is racist, as many have. But a significant minority of his supporters are -— 17% of them consider ethnic diversity bad for America, a strikingly high number —- and Mr Trump’s dog-whistling on immigration seems at least partly designed to appeal to them. No wonder 86% of African-Americans and 80% of Hispanics have a negative view of him.

a lump of the purest economist

"Indeed Trump has personally befriended more than one person with brown skin in the course of his life, as can be verified by the many photos taken of him with such people."

neat contrast in that graf between the magic-eightball diction of the first part ("seems like an exaggeration"/"no reason to suppose") and the bustling percentage signs of the home stretch

"no reason to suppose" except an endless stream of racist dog whistles and overt invective...

"Mr Trump's dog-whistling on immigration" is a pretty funny thing to call the extortion-funded anti-rapist wall

dogs for miles like

http://38.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltk3flAj7M1qd8i3ko1_500.gif

"...and overt invective"

tbf they do think trump and his rise is a disaster, though primarily because he's an uncouth protectionist

really wonder who The Economist would have endorsed had it been Sanders Trump

Why it is closing time for so many London pubs https://t.co/6paPkSgeSM

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 10, 2017

Typical Economist article that doesn't provide the explanation it promises.

I love the confident conclusion:

Many of London’s social woes, such as its persistent housing crisis, are blamed on the rich. But it appears that the fall of the pub should not be counted among them.

Ahem - luxury flats....

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DNExVC9XUAEle8h.jpg

Classic Economist.

the chef will be wearing this

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/519eddUvVdL._SY355_.jpg

looking forward to the 'beyond burger index' of local purchasing power

fuckin doors, how do they work

The pandemic is like a doorway. Once you pass through, there is no going back https://t.co/Pco8283aa4

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) December 28, 2021

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F0kVIVNaUAAw4eU?format=jpg&name=medium

By Invitation

https://i.imgur.com/v616MXX.jpeg

great that life expectancy is up, would hate to die before I got to see climate catastrophe destroy human civilisation