Comment by Ollinson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ollinson | Hacker News Reader

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I subscribed to the economist sometime in the middle of 2012 and did not have a positive experience.

I'm convinced that much of the allure of the economist comes from that it is frank contrarian news source.

I don't like the anonymous authorship for reasons which have been stated on hacker news in other economist posts.

The economist is sneaky. All of the articles are fact/numbers based and then shoehorned with a political interpretation that you can't realistically argue with unless you are an expert in the some very niche domain. This leads to many people in my field (finance) having strong opinions on an impossible variety of subjects which ultimately boils down to parroting the economist. The culture of "lying with statistics" comes to mind.

I realize many of these problems are inherent in journalism but the economist relies more than others on being opaquely unimpeachable. Reading the economist felt less like a dialog and more like "believe us or appear uninformed in public."

>I'm convinced that much of the allure of the economist comes from that it is frank contrarian news source.

Contrarian to what? It follows the Washington Consensus pretty much religiously.

It also came out in favor of George Bush and the Iraq war in the beginning (when everybody else was) and against them after (when everybody else was also).

Sticking to the theme of US elections, it also came out for Barack Obama in 2012. That's pretty contrarian considering The Economists history and Mitt Romney's policies on Wall Street.

The vast majority of economist articles can be summed up as "you thought it was that way, but it's actually this way."

Nah, Obama is a pretty neoliberal President, just a different flavor to Romney. Very bankster friendly.

If they start supporting Bernie Sanders' run, though, I'll take notice.

I was subscribed to the economist for several years, and unsubscribed once I figured out that much of their content on non-western countries is either heavily tinted, or outright false.

The economist is very good at providing readers with the illusion of being informed.

Think about how multifaceted US policy is on any given day of the year. The economist boils down similar issues to a blurb on a page with a heading that says "middle east." So now you can turn that page and be confident that for this week you know what's going on in the middle east.

The truth is the economist fills a void. Before reading an issue you know nothing about current events in India. After reading you know something. Something is vastly more power than confessing ignorance in any situation. And if anyone questions you, well, the economist said so.

In any given issue the Middle East & Africa section is 4-5 pages long, hardly a "blurb".

That's 4-5 pages that claim to adequately cover the financial and political current events of 71 countries

I think I'm justified in being skeptical.

...per week. I highly doubt their goal is to inform you on all current events in the region in a single week. But it's a weekly and over time a reader would develop a cursory understanding of events across the region (they also briefly touch on the highlights in the "The World This Week").

I think they're assuming their readers will know how to dig further on events they find relevant. Personally I find The Economist pairs well with a subscription to Foreign Affairs.

Is there any news source which gives that level of detail?

Of course you won't learn much about a country from reading a single article about it in the relevant section of a weekly newspaper. But if you read it regularly, you'll read numerous articles about that country over the course of a year - probably more than 50 in the case of a moderately powerful and dynamic country like India. Over time you'll realize that some predictions made in the articles pan out, some don't, some is consequential, some not and so on.

Reading a single issue will not make you well-informed; at most it will provide you with something to chat about at a cocktail party (if you're the sort of person who likes to chat about the news) or a point of reference if you meet someone from a foreign country and want to ask a topical question.

I've found that reading over time is advantageous, not because one collects more and more trivia about more and more places (although that's true) but because the more important themes emerge of their own accord most of the time. By this is I mean that one tends to become aware of major issues long before they rise to the top of the 24 hour news cycle.

This year, I read an article in The Economist where they endorsed the opposition candidate (Buhari) for the upcoming Presidential election in Nigeria. The article stated that Buhari had thrice contested before and lost the presidential elections and each time accepted the verdict. But that turned out to be false (and the comments in the article said so but Economist did not update the article). Each time Buhari lost the election, he challenged the results (as he had a right to) all the way to the Supreme Court.

ISTM you're both right. To challenge election results all the way up to a country's Supreme Court, if one has the right to do so, is to accept the institutional verdict on the outcome while disputing the initial outcome (of the vote count). In many developing countries, unwanted election results are followed by rioting, coup attempts, or highly public sulks and political maneuvering often enough that it's a problem for stability.

Mounting a challenge within an institutional or constitutional framework is qualitatively different - it puts the rule of law above pure power politics.

In general I agree. I stopped reading the economist since they often approach stories as if they only have 1 or 2 sides. I would rather read more nuanced long articles on fewer issues.

There is a sort of sophmoric danger zone WRT being informed on any issue. Sometimes you can be informed enough to discuss something, but lack a proper nuanced understanding from multiple sides.

I'm fickle when it comes to magazines, but I still love reading them. My latest infatuation is Harpers. However, in their latest issue they wrote a medium length piece on something in my area of expertise, and kinda did a poor job of it. This makes me question the quality of their other pieces on subjects that I am less familiar with.

I have some formal training in economics, but not enough to call myself an economist. However, even I can see that the economist performs their economic narrative generation a bit too neatly. They leave out nuance in favor of length.

I do agree that the economist is a bit sneaky like that, I think the latter part of your post is spot on. But I do feel that it's not at ALL a contrarian news source.

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