Ach, I wish a subscription to the New Yorker from outside the U.S were not so expensive. Such articles would be perfect for reading in the train, I can't read it now with so many shiny things on the internet.
I read that in a book (http://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Ingenuity-Solve-Problems-Smal...) that the usual TV station makes less than a dollar for an hours advertisement per viewer. The Economist makes more than five dollars in advertisements per issue.
Most people would rather spend a dollar to get rid of one hour advertising on TV, but not many would spend more than five dollars to get rid of the relative unobstrusive ads in the Economist.
It's still significantly more expensive than the average magazine in the States.
http://www.micro-gems.net/servlet/the-386/The-Economist-1yr-...
Now certainly $80 is affordable (if you have a job), but most of the magazines I used to subscribe to, I paid $5-$20 per year.
By the way: There is a website to the 'Why not?'-book (http://www.whynot.net/). It tries to be a web-2.0 idea exchange. But browsing it did not gratify me as much as reading their book.
Especially I like 'What would Croesus do?' (How would you solve your problem if resources were unconstrained?) and 'Find new problems for your solutions.'.
I agree it's well worth it. My original argument was that it's expensive compared to most magazines, which it is.