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Comment by GiraffeNecktie | Hacker News Reader

Headline fail. If they're going to introduce an article with the words "What about economists?" they should maybe quote at least one (rather than make a vague hand wave to "critics say")

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You have to interpret the headline in the context of the publication. It's an article in The Economist, whose main target group, not surprisingly, is economists and people who are generally interested in economics. In the headline, when they said "economists", they have clearly meant their readers. The article leaves it to its readers to decide whether BitCoin is exciting or not. In context of all this, I think it's a good subtitle for this article.

Economists are no more the target audience of The Economist than they are of The Wall Street Journal.

The Economist originated as an organ of the free trade movement, particularly concerned with the repeal of the corn laws. I believe that the title was meant to articulate that free trade was a more principled and intellectually defensible political position than protectionism.

I can't say I think the title reflects the contents of the article well enough, but I guess The Economist is suggesting that their evaluation is economically sophisticated.

Cf. http://mitpress.typepad.com/mitpresslog/2007/01/from_corn_la...

While the historical context you have provided is certainly very interesting and it's something I didn't know about, I stand by my assertion that, at least today, the target audience of The Economist is economists and people who are generally interested in economics.

Critical thinking fail--just because an article quotes an economist doesn't mean that economists in general believe something. A journalist can almost always find a token quote to support a position. Token quotes don't prove anything and you should not be demanding them.

You're making a straw-man argument. GiraffeNecktie isn't asserting that a quote would prove something, just that the headline "What about economists?" would lead the reader to expect the opinion of at least one economist to be referenced in the body.

Where do you see that I was suggesting that having a quote from a single economist proves that "economists in general believe something"? My complaint was that the headline lead me to believe that I would get some perspective from at least one (and hopefully more than one) economist. Instead, it seemed to repeat the criticisms that I've read on a few random blogs (i.e. from non-economists).

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