From 1993 to 2003 I read the Economist religiously, cover to cover, every week, for the regular reasons. This was from high school through college, grad school and early career.
Then came Iraq and WMD. WMD was so clearly a cover story, such obvious propaganda. I'd open up the Economist, expecting to read some scalding critique of GWB, and instead find them pushing the same damn line. WTF?
I'd beware of it. The corruptive power of intelligent yet intellectually dishonest argument should not be underestimated.
The key with the economist is to read between the lines. They tell you what is coming. Credit crunch? A 2006 issue talked about the "remote possibility that if housing prices came down across the board, much of the profits banks have seen in recent years will be reversed and they may have trouble getting credit." If you already knew for sure that housing was going to go down AT LEAST 10 % then you could conjecture where banks were going to head and buy put options accordingly.
Did they "shill" for the war? Yes. Was I misled by them? Yes. But in the grander scheme of things that was an excellent experience for me because it showed me to be critical of even my most trusted news sources.
I still have a well read subscription to this day, along with Harvard Business Review.
Right now if you read between the lines The Economist is clearly saying that world wide income taxes are going to start sky rocketing in 3 to 6 years. Plan accordingly. RRSPs or TFSA (Roth IRA or 401k)? Most people will keep at it with their RRSPs and cry their heart out when taxes go up.
I have found it difficult to entirely forgive The Economist for some woefully incorrect predictions (they were big on Goldman Sac's prediction for $200 oil, and did not see the credit crunch in any shape or form or give space to those who did [and there were a number]). Now they issued a lukewarm 'apology' at the start of this year, all good and well, but still it was delivered with their habitually self-satisfied, borderline arrogant tone.
The key with the economist is to read between the lines.
Why do you have to read between the lines? Maybe economists don't say things in plain English so they can always deny that they were wrong.
On the other hand, I like economists like Mike Shedlock, who crystal-clearly explains himself (Google his blog). He has been right about the coming deflation for a long time.
It's pretty hard to have only a lukewarm opinion on these issues, and there's sufficient diversity of views around here to ensure that arguments on political topics are fractious and unenlightening. So we tend to avoid those.
I highly recommend these articles, which describe a similar thought process:
And there are plenty of objective facts about the Iraq war that are known. Not all in the world is a matter of opinion, no matter how much some wingnuts (on both sides) wish it were.
We ignore this at our peril. But overall, you're right. Little is ever gained from political debate, and this probably isn't the place for it.
In reasonable people you can assume a degree of psychological integration. They probably believe what they say. It's hard to function otherwise.
Is it safe to assume the same of media outlets? My intuition says no. Management sets the tone and the editorial position. Editors and staff execute. That provides ample room for what would be psychotic behavior if management, the editors and staff were all one person.
Reasonable people can differ only if their prior information is different. Or, "People with the same priors cannot agree to disagree.", as put by Robert J. Aumann here: http://www.jstor.org/pss/2958591
> Reasonable people can differ only if their prior information is different.
Disagree entirely.
When evaluating complex choices in a chaotic world, we humans use tons of heuristics. There are a lot of things that aren't quantifiable information, but still allow two rational people to reach different conclusions: models of the universe, weight attached to different speakers, moral stances, worldviews, etc.
I think people can only agree to disagree when they can see past their differences. If it's something like which are better, tomatoes or potatoes, then it is easy. If it is something deeper to one's center like PC or Mac, or some programming language then it's harder, and conflict can end up huge if it's over life and death or reputation building. In mostly anonymous and almost random meetings, such as HN, agreeing to disagree is hard, and more often than not, conflict or alliance is expressed through moderation rather than enmity or camaraderie.
At the end of the day, I tend to view argument as vulgar, but put up with it in striving for truth.
Another thing those magazines can never compete on, anonymity.
The Economist doesn't run bylines. This is unthinkable for most journalists and publications. Without bylines, then you actually have to pay your people a decent wage. Also, without bylines, historically the Economist has been able to get contributions from people who'd rather not be recognized, foreign ministers, state department officials, people who actually know what's going on.
That's a double edged sword - if you've read their blogs, they don't have just one blog writer and at times writers actively disagree with each other. It just gets downright bizarre. Further, the lack of a byline also results in a lack of accountability/ability to deny responsibility. Frankly, I've also found their quality has gone down over the last few years since writers like Megan McArdle left.
I think the original article misses a critical point.
I WILL make time and gladly pay for any truly intelligent publication. At least in my case, it's not a fixed sized market.
But intelligent work is hard to find. You can't fake it, it's hard to buy and that's why there's so little intelligent reporting and writing. And that's why I read the economist.
I read the economist online edition. Hacked into it when I was a broke college student. I had recently arrived in the sates and resorted to hacking because I was poor and shocked by the lack of hard news in the US.
That was many years ago and now I can easily afford a subscription. I keep thinking I really should get one, it would be the right thing TM to do.
But I'm a cheapskate and I keep forgetting to pay for the Economist. Which means you'll never see me carrying an issue, or reading one. And because my memory for anything other then code is crap, I'm not going to tell you I red this or that in the Economist. You'll almost never hear me mention the Economist. Except in this post - The Economist :)
The Economist and The Financial Times are the only two publications I've subscribed to in the last decade.
I'm not completely convinced people are uninterested though. Before we met, my wife wouldn't have given the Economist a second glance. Now she's a more regular reader than I am. Often you just have to give people a chance.
Isn't a subscription to The Economist part of the standard kit for people who live "abroad" (for whatever definition of abroad)?:-) My wife is the same way.
What if you set up an intermediate magazine service? People subscribe to magazines through you, paying a hefty premium. They get their magazines with all the ads town out of them a day later than usual.
I doubt that model would hold considering the fact that ad-blockers are too cheap to subscribe to a service like that, but why not just pay the magazine a little more in subscription fees?
The aura of anti-advertising among the tech crowd is somewhat sad. The ads are on consumers' side in terms of keeping the price of content down. That being said, I too use Adblock. :) Advertisers need to bring the annoyance level down a notch (especially with those automatic-popout-video-player-banner-deals-with-broken-mute-buttons).
To me the big problem with ads on the web is that they move (or even popup/over) when you are reading text so I use Adblock. Ads in print don't move so there is no problem IMHO.
I like the economist but find the density of information in there is overwhelming (I can't seem to find the time to read the whole thing in a week). Additionally, I feel the stories hold more importance than from other news sources.
Yes it's overwhelming but that's why I always bring a copy when I fly. Great time killer, because you end up reading stuff you wouldn't read elsewhere. :)
I used to, as another poster has mentioned, pick up a copy whenever I flew anywhere.
Now I subscribe to the audio edition, which is of a fantastically high quality. Amazingly, there's more content (length-wise) that I can reasonably get through in a week of commuting, so I find myself skipping stories I'm not interested in.
Unfortunately, they don't expose their audio feed as podcast. It's available as a zipped download full of individual MP3s for each section. I've written a script which scrapes and processes it weekly and turns it into an RSS feed so I can easily consume it.
The audio really is high-quality, and their turn-around time for putting out a new edition each week is really impressive.
Every now and then their editing process slips up, and you can hear what should have been out-takes in the audio. Stuff like the speaker repeating sentences, or having a number of tries at a particularly difficult word - pretty funny, really :)
It's not just Time and Newsweek. I get complimentary subscriptions to both Fortune and Money, and I find it almost impossible to read either of them. It's like a bad television transcript.
(17 page rant about the failings of most media and media consumers implied)
I actually consider their pervasive editorializing to be their weakest point, not only because they can be quite wrong (The Iraq war as others have pointed out), but also because it actually gets highly repetitive and tiring. I like reading about political malaise in Japan or the energy industry in Brazil, but I don't like them putting the same opinion in both articles. If they left their opinions only in Charlemagne/Lexington/Bagehot, they'd be a much better magazine.
I have to disagree. Since the advent of blogging, I now prefer that style of writing. For example, the writing style in this article illustrates precisely why I no longer care for the standard journalistic style:
I have been looking for a while for a second magazine subscription I actually like, the first being The Economist. Still no luck; the closest I have come were Wired and Seed. Any advice?
I also like "top-level" academic/professional journals like Communications of the ACM, IEEE Spectrum, Science, and Nature. There are so many sub-specialties in these fields that authors put in a lot of exposition to keep everyone on the same page. The result is usually surprisingly readable, and there are a lot of implicit pointers to more information if something really catches your eye.
Harpers has moments of brilliance, but there's less there that I would consider compelling reading.
The New Yorker is too insufferably Upper East Side Manhattan Pretentious Intellectual for me - it's more, IMO, about espousing a particular world view of weary sophistication than anything else.
Then came Iraq and WMD. WMD was so clearly a cover story, such obvious propaganda. I'd open up the Economist, expecting to read some scalding critique of GWB, and instead find them pushing the same damn line. WTF?
I'd beware of it. The corruptive power of intelligent yet intellectually dishonest argument should not be underestimated.