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Comment by jakozaur | Hacker News Reader

I am long-time fun of Economist, but unfortunately the quality decreases. E.g. last issue EU is frozen and claim so many people will die in Europe due to high energy prices.

First, I find they did not explain their model well. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Second, the correlation does not imply causation or whether extrapolations are solid. It looks like there might be mistakes on that front and there are many spurious correlations (e.g. high energy in the past might mean high unemployment).

Third, so far the country experiencing freezing is the Ukraine due to power outages. Just one sentence mentioning, whether in Ukraine for sure many people are going to die due to distrusted power, heating or water supplies.

So far on general economics, I love: https://noahpinion.substack.com/

Though, it is hard for me to find comprehensive Economist replacement.

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> First, I find they did not explain their model well. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

It's not an extraordinary claim tho. Literally, every year old people die because of cold weather and not being able to afford the proper heating. This is basically old news. The cost of living "crisis" means that the price of energy is not becoming a matter for the average working person. This isn't really extraorinary to claim since salaries aren't exactly high and many people struggle to pay their bills by default with the price of food, energy, etc all going up while their salaries aren't going up then it clearly means some people will struggle to pay for the heating.

I agree that more people will die, but the Economist claim is that 100k more will die: " Hence the energy crunch this year could cause over 100,000 extra deaths of elderly people across Europe. "

Article shows some modelling, but I was not convinced and can point some holes: https://www.economist.com/interactive/graphic-detail/2022/11...

> Literally, every year old people die because of cold weather and not being able to afford the proper heating.

Yes, but the problem is not explaining that people aren't dying because of the cold itself. The way you wrote this and the way the media portrays the problem makes it sound like people will die from freezing to death, which is just not true.

Pretty much all reporting forgets to add the nuance that deaths in colder months increase because:

1. If it is colder, people are more likely to stay indoors and that increases viral infections

2. Cold makes our immune systems not work as well, which increases the chances of serious complications from infections

3. Cold environments keep viruses around for longer.

4. Cold weather also causes blood to thicken, which can lead to an increased chance of things like strokes (which then lead to higher death rates).

This is the nuance that reporting feels to present.

> The way you wrote this and the way the media portrays the problem makes it sound like people will die from freezing to death, which is just not true.

This is true. Old people freeze to death every year.

> makes it sound like people will die from freezing to death, which is just not true.

It's 100% true in my part of the US.

Economist usually has some seriously bizarre articles about EU with a massive pro-USA bias when attempting any analysis. That ultimately made me stop reading it since it's not a very useful viewpoint if you actually live in Europe.

Any examples? I'm a European with a pretty chauvinistic pro-EU meh-USA attitude and I've never found the Economist's Europe section to be "bizarre" (been reading for about a year)

> EU is frozen and claim so many people will die in Europe due to high energy prices.

This complaint is one that (jokingly) makes me ask if you're new around here. the Economist is almost pathologically pessimist. I sometimes think they should call themselves _The Cassandra_, as they are constantly forecasting doom over every scenario.

I enjoy how they summarize background information and the candor of their analysis, but when it gets time to make long-term predictions I tune them out because they're about 0-50 on the number of times I should have been walking knee deep through rivers of bodies and economic collapse.

Interesting, on Twitter Noah Smith has become a laughing stock.

I will say that generally, non-print media like Substack, personal blogs and Twitter can be a much higher quality replacement. Requires a little digging though.

I've found the opposite. Print media publications seem to be higher quality with better editorial review. There are of course exceptions and outstanding blogs out there.

I've seen some reporters go from working at a "big" publisher to Substack and I can tell the difference in their writing. Usually more extreme and alarmist. I chalk it up to less review.

I agree the individual pieces are less polished and tend more towards alarmism or outrage. I still find it overall better, because logical inconsistencies and wrong facts will get called out viciously and without mercy. The result is a more correct worldview, but one needs to keep some distance, otherwise it can get unhealthy.

Its the difference between a university debate club and an MMA cage. The MMA filter is much stronger, but there tends to be a lot more blood.

> logical inconsistencies and wrong facts will get called out viciously and without mercy

Even here, inaccuracies are promoted as fact regularly. I don't count on the social media herd as a compass.

Other than this site I avoid news that comes with a comment section because internet anons have their own biases and agendas and aren't representative.

You end up with nuance swept aside and extreme unflinching loudmouths getting the most visibility. A lot of this goes hand in hand with quitting social media.

The print media is getting increasingly biased as well though! The NYT used to be the „paper of record“, not anymore.

Just a personal opinion, but I'd characterize Noah Smith as "uneven", not "laughingstock". He hits enough high notes that I would be quite sad to see him go, even though I find him very unreliable.

> E.g. last issue EU is frozen and claim so many people will die in Europe due to high energy prices.

I haven't seen the article, but it's not a _completely_ outlandish idea; consumer energy prices are up a lot, and in countries where governments haven't taken step to subsidise and/or control energy costs, particularly for elderly people, you would expect deaths.

Now, in practice most countries _have_ taken such steps; if that was left out of the article that would certainly be a concern.

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