Hacker News Reader

Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

I feel the Economist is very behind the times on this and is actually one of the key magazines read by empty suits, who have been at the forefront of 'office theatrics' (as the print edition of this article was titled), for decades.

Internet connectivity has undoubtedly added a valuable dressing up box of tools for this type of person/cliques but the fundamentals have been taught by HBS's various publications for decades also IMO

View on HN

Disagree with everyone here. I actually love the Economist. It is short bite sized articles that gives you a good overview of what's going on in the world. I admire how they correct themselves, how picky they are about British English and generally have broad scope of a particular topic, presenting multiple sides. Consistent styling and plots, excellent typography to top it off. There is nothing like that out there. Similarly, people of HN love the New Yorker and I find it unbereable. I like my news like a datasheet. Short, concise and to the point; not a long winded vocabular pornography.

This and most other mags sometimes present good starting points to do further reading, but someone who only reads magazines and thinks they even got the gist of some topic doesn’t know what they don’t know. Which is dangerous.

> I feel the Economist is very behind the times on this and is actually one of the key magazines read by empty suits, who have been at the forefront of 'office theatrics' (a the print edition of this article was titled), for decades.

It absolutely is... when I was in the Navy, a hotshot Academy grad got command of our unit and we ended up volunteering for every goddamned mission that Bravo Oscar needed done. It was fucking miserable. I saw him reading The Economist, Foreign Policy, and Financial Times every chance he got.

Bravo Oscar?

Bravo Oscar was the call sign given to the commander of Collation forces in the Middle East when I was over there.

Presumably Barack Obama

> I feel the Economist is very behind the times on this and is actually one of the key magazines read by empty suits,

Absolutely. With their views on bullshit jobs (no such thing as per them), remote work they are very much a establishment sockpuppet. If their coverage of things which I know a bit first hand is so shallow/wrong, I wonder if even stories on international affairs are any solid at all.

The Economist used to be pretty solid IMO until about 12 years ago, about the same time the Harvard Business Review started to morph into a business version of Oprah! magazine.

These days The E, HBR, MIT Review etc are mostly like last century women's magazines, complete with agony aunts and advice. The Economist's geopolitical stance seems to be closely aligned with the WEF along with the FT ( slogan 'A new world is possible. Let's not go back to what wasn't working anyway').

End of an era for these legacy media companies...

What do you recommend instead?

I tend to rely on online recommendations of specific articles- including the Economist - and try to read as many views as possible. I feel for now the era of legacy media 'packaged' information and views that newspapers, magazines and TV became is over, and that mastheads have lost a huge amount of their prestige. (Joe Rogan's Neilsen ratings versus cable is pretty astonishing for example).

Having said that I get up in the morning and look at the FT, WSJ & Zerohedge in that order and then typically read all sorts of things online throughout the day, often based on recommendations (thanks HN!) Twitter etc. My mother worked for the UK conservative party before I was born and taught me as a youth to read the Daily Telegraph 'so I would know what the buggers are thinking'. This rather cynical view is how I tend to consume most establishment products...

Regarding the Economist I used to like their 'Schumpeter' free market ethos which they seem to have lost recently

I used to subscribe it. Ended up cancelling a couple of years ago because even though it does give some coverage on what's going in the world, most of the articles aren't anywhere as deep as I'd like them to be. There are also lots of very shallow, write and forget type of articles. I'm having more luck with the Financial Times but they too gone off the rails a bit.

The author states as much:

> Theatre has always been an important part of the workplace.

They're expounding that it's gotten worse during the pandemic, which I think most of us would agree with.

I find it horrendous, it reminds me of Readers Digest, summarizing local stories from around the world into blancmange prose for people who aspire to global leadership.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com