Is The Economist Always Wrong?
economist.com
economist.com
Of course, making money doesn’t necessarily mean having access to the best unbiased information, sometimes it simply means onboarding onto a bias before everyone else does (aka market intelligence).
And the “almost” is simply because often the articles are very well written and a pleasure to read even when the actual topic and argument are deeply deranged. Amazingly this was especially true when Boris was the editor!
The problem is he is also almost amoral, and should never have been allowed to occupy a position of authority. He has some charming qualities, and he has some deeply unpleasant ones. (at least, from what I know of him from reading online, having never met him in the flesh)
[0]: "My Boris Johnson Story" by Jeremy Vine: https://spectator.com/article/my-boris-johnson-story/
> and should never have been allowed to occupy a position of authority. He has some charming qualities
I personally prefer this form of government over other popular choices. But ignoring this aspect is exactly what leads to unqualified people being elected to office.
Is it?
I get that being charming and literally convincing voters it a prerequisite for the job. However the idea that even despite having those qualities there are parts of his character that should disqualify him as a candidate seem equally plausible.
Charles Manson was very charming, but he should still not hold office.
Similarly, Obama or Mamdani being charming is not what gained them interest in progressive circles.
I recall a story about Calvin Coolidge, who had earned the nicname "Cool Cal" for his standoffish attitude, about a dinner party he attended. Another guest bet him they could get him to say three words to them by the time the party was over. He didn't say anything in response, then found them at the end of the party and said, "You lose."
From monarchs to pure direct democracy, decisions have to be made. But how?
I see "government" as a kind of consensus algorithm. Policy work, adjudicating, record keeping, legislating, appropriations, etc. It's all just one big data processing machine, trying to discern signal from noise (information), hopefully learning stuff (knowledge), and occasionally acting.
For all our history, we've experimented with strategies for reducing transaction costs. Building trust, predictability, and stability.
How do you think we've done so far?
IMHO: Government, and especially bureaucracy, ain't great. But the alternative of no government isn't acceptable.
> How do you think we've done so far?
There is form and there is content. Poor content is more dangerous with alluring form. Some declared having witnessed a bewildering scientific ignorance ("He can't understand data representations").
Peter Oborne on resigning from the Telegraph, 10 years ago: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/why-i-have-resigned-from-te...
Before reading them you're merely uninformed, after you're misinformed which is far worse
Human knowledge is siloed and you need to already be well-informed to judge the quality of information (this is the cause of the dunning-Kruger effect, if you’re really bad at something you lack the tools to understand just how bad you are).
So imo you have to accept you’ll always be ignorant of most topics and get comfortable with thinking “I don’t know”.
Within your own specific areas of competence you should be able to identify independent sources of information that add value and consume those while discarding the rest.
Also when it comes to politics and international affairs: no substitute for travel. Go to lots of places with different systems, talk to people and you will learn a lot more than you will from reading the economist
Ok but I have to (or rather - I am expected to) vote on those topics. And not just during the elections or referendums, but also figuratively with my wallet and attention. In other words, my actions will be driven by how (mis)informed I am.
And even though I am comfortable with being ignorant, from my experience other people aren't comfortable with me being ignorant. Saying "I don't know, I haven't thought about it" is often met with shock if not anger. I don't have the luxury of dropping those people from my life either.
As for the travel, the perspective of a tourist is different from a person who lives there even for a few months, much less a few years. I agree it beats reading third-party summaries, but I don't think it gives you a much better clarity.
There's a softer middle ground. You could try to deflect or say that you'd rather not talk about it.
And honestly, it would be a pretty big issue for me if someone in my life got angry at me for saying "I don't know" or "I'm not sure".
Maybe it's the "I haven't thought about it part" that is triggering them? It sounds like you have thought about a lot of these things.. it's just that they are genuinely difficult in many cases.
But I hear you. I've had similar thoughts and struggle with it as well.
P.S. Btw, here's a big one: Finding common ground by agreeing on certain core facts or values is usually very appreciated. This alone can dissolve the tension much of the time, especially when done with humility and grace.
Unless of course you’re dealing with a zealot who gets angry if you do anything other than passionately agree with them, but there’s not much you can do in that case anyway
The pink is also wrong more often than not when they're talking about non-European issues.
When they talk about Europe they lie.
Subtle difference.
I tend to think this is true. The economist doesn't project into quite the same mindset of outcome, so I still think (despite your polemic) it's less likely the fin randomly lies about things, but I'm prepared to consider it on it's merits if somebody gives me better reasons than what I am afraid is just .. ranting.
I find that pretty convincing and I do check out such papers occasionally for that reason.
They did publish a correction. Some pithy blurb like "Blah blah blah, we regret the error."
To their credit, most warmongers didn't have the stones to do a mea culpa.
Regardless, I unsubscribed and never looked back. (Ditto The Atlantic, for the same reason. Impotently, I didn't have a NY Times sub to cancel in protest.)
During the run up to Bush's Folly, one of their wizened writers related how The Economist regarded the Vietnam War, noting the similarities, noting The Economist's moral failings, wondering if they'd repeat the same mistake.
The study shows that they weren’t wrong or right in equal measure, they were right more often, considerably so. But that doesn’t mean that they were always right.
Were they wrong or were they insincere/dishonest?
I used to read it regularly. I can’t imagine anyone looking to them for predictions, as even a casual reader could probably outline the magazine’s views on most any topic. Let me skim 4-5 recent issues, and I could probably replicate anything they would predict with like 85% accuracy!
I will say that my favorite part of the magazine was the wacky ads for big shots working for African countries, various UN things, NGOs, etc.
https://www.readtrung.com/p/the-economist-cover-curse-explai...
...Normie?
What does that even mean in this context
Like, if you output a probability distribution among n options, and then there is a continuous map from the probability distribution you describe in your output, to another probability distribution over those options…
Err, hm, maybe you need a stronger hypothesis on the continuous map? If it is contractive then it will definitely have a fixed point. I don’t remember the hypothesis needed.
Also, consider the game of hunter-and-prey from my reply to the sibling comment. Again, the prediction that the prey will make some choice is arguably not a prediction at all.
Now, if the hunter can accurately predict the prey's choice, they obviously simply need to select that same choice to always win. The similar logic works for the prey; but this means they can't both be perfect predictors of the future — if the hunter predicts that the prey will choose T, they will choose T as well, but that means the the prey will predict the hunter choosing T and will choose F instead, so the hunter has actually to predict that the prey will choose F, and so they will choose F as well, but that means the the prey will predict the hunter choosing F and will choose T instead...
Now being serious, LLMs are nondeterministic loosy compression algorithm which return "what a plausible answer to that question would be". They have no world model, no truth verification and formally will be excellent while having no verifiable content.
"There is a book about a boy in a magical school, with friends, who fights a big bad and its called ..."
should have Harry Potter as the highest possible response. But that is not the answer based on a truth model, just a statistical average. You could have been looking for Earthsea series. Or it could have the heat turned up and decide to go for a hallucinated answer over the statistically most likely token.
If you want a verifiable answer your best options would be to have the heat turned to 0, but that means it cannot create new responses. Or if you have heat, to ask 4 times and sample the avg. But at that point what is the advantage over just googling it?
And one shooting your answer and hoping its the bell curve answer is going to have decent results but its also proveably going to fail in a non insignificant number of cases
I don't see how that helps? If you just want the same answer multiple times in a row, you could just write down the seed of your pseudorandom number generator?
> And one shooting your answer and hoping its the bell curve answer is going to have decent results but its also proveably going to fail in a non insignificant number of cases
Setting the temperature to 0 doesn't guarantee you get a good answer either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedspeak
Quote from Greenspan himself:
> As Fed chairman, every time I expressed a view, I added or subtracted 10 basis points from the credit market. That was not helpful. But I nonetheless had to testify before Congress. On questions that were too market-sensitive to answer, 'no comment' was indeed an answer. And so you construct what we used to call Fed-speak. I would hypothetically think of a little plate in front of my eyes, which was the Washington Post, the following morning's headline, and I would catch myself in the middle of a sentence. Then, instead of just stopping, I would continue on resolving the sentence in some obscure way which made it incomprehensible. But nobody was quite sure I wasn't saying something profound when I wasn't. And that became the so-called Fed-speak which I became an expert on over the years. It's a self-protection mechanism ... when you're in an environment where people are shooting questions at you, and you've got to be very careful about the nuances of what you're going to say and what you don't say.
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...
"Notably, in 1974, Federal Reserve chair Arthur Burns felt it necessary to make clear that high nominal interest rates would need to continue “for a time” as an anti-inflation measure;"
"A later chair, Paul Volcker, having presided over a period of very restrictive monetary policy, chose in March 1982 to make an explicit indication that nominal interest rates would and should fall in the period ahead."
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2021033pap...
Yes.
I did feel with the change in editorial direction a while back that they lost some of their edge. I've since mostly just stuck to the Financial Times. It feels less worldly, but the content of the articles feels better.
that said, they gave generally good briefs about topics but I found whenever it was anything I knew about they tended to be fairly one-sided. Often they'd acknowledge the other view, in half a paragraph, and then immediately ignore the entire argument and keep on harping about whatever their particular axe to grind was.
having it around did help literacy in high school I guess.
I like the disclosure at the top, saves time.
The fact that a publication would think that using AI to "confirm" a forecast bodes poorly not only on the publication, but also on those who would rely on such a forecast.
Who cares if they're right about something? Are they putting money on the line? What is their P/L for being "right"?
The Economist does not need to be right, they only need their readers to believe they are right. That's not quite the same thing, and that small difference is what separates "skin in the game" from not having it.
They can get readers to believe they're right either by being right, or by being ambiguous enough to appear right in multiple futures. Professions where there's skin in the game don't have ambiguity and persuasiveness as an escape to the same degree.
But I get what you mean!
If you predict an event E the juice is in the reasons that make it possible, and in the hurdles and dynamics that might make that not happen. (That is especially bewildering as it disregards the influence of the paper, as if separated from the world it comments about.)
Maybe write a better Economist->Kindle transformation with Claude or something to make it better.
Now I just live under a rock, and don't read any news.
> To assess our record with something approaching neutrality, we took the 7,000 or so leaders The Economist has published this millennium and fed them into GPT-5.5, an artificial-intelligence model.
"This millennium" is 26 years old. This millennium is still getting charged extra for renting a car. This millennium never saw the Soviet Union. This millennium never used a payphone, doesn't know what a collect call is, and doesn't know why you might need to make one.
This millennium is also entirely, utterly, absolutely defined by the short-sighted ideas of the economist.
The Economist was founded in 1843 and draws its name from a then-current term for something like a 'free-trade liberal' (with perhaps a fiscal conservative bend). Not the modern day field of economics.
Their big beef at the time of founding was a fight against the Corn Laws, a protectionist tariff against importing grain into Britain.
> This millennium is also entirely, utterly, absolutely defined by the short-sighted ideas of the economist.
I think you give them more credit than is due.
(And for all their faults, I don't think you can accuse them of eg having caused covid or started the war against Ukraine or turned China towards greater autocracy again.)
Even a fool will be right sometimes
Why not just report the facts, and stop trying to predict the future
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Mainstream predictions are easy, usually it means predicting status-quo. It's the out-of-consensus that matters (right 2 quadrants) and it looks like they are slightly worse than 50/50 on those.
Props for publishing it though.
It seems it may also be used for really embarrassing things that will make powerful people mad if you just state them outright so it is necessary to state it as a question when you know the answer is yes.
Of course any yes or no question can be answered "no" but Betteridge, as we know, means a factually correct answer, and so there are these edge cases where the question mark is used for slightly different reasons than the law assumes and can be answered "yes".
𐞸 https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2020/05/27/book-rev...
𐞸 Maybe outdated regarding the later conflicts (tbh i don't know, i didn't follow their positions on the Ukraine and the Middle-East wars).
The Economist is partly owned by the Rothschild dynasty and was chaired by Evelyn de Rothschild for 17 years, so I've always just assumed it is going to tell you whatever would favor the global elite banking class.
The Economist is part of The Economist Group, a private company with a special ownership structure designed to preserve editorial independence. Its shareholders date back more than a century, and include great names in British business, such as the Sainsburys, Cadburys and Schroders. Other shareholders today include funds owned by the Agnelli and Rothschild families. Many staff of The Economist Group also own shares, which are privately traded twice a year.
The company’s constitution does not permit any individual or group to gain a majority shareholding, and no shareholder can exercise more than 20% of voting rights. The editor is appointed by trustees, who are independent of commercial, political and proprietorial influences. This structure ensures that The Economist can take an independent view of the world—free to challenge conventional thinking and concentrations of power. Its role is to inform, not to serve vested interests.
https://myaccount.economist.com/s/article/Who-owns-The-Econo...
You were meant to ingest the word "Rothschild" and then immediately cease all thought and begin your 60 seconds of hate.
My view is that anybody is free to give commands if they feel like it, just as I'm free to ignore 'em.
When you see the title, you are excited to read, then you're hit with a paywall. Such a bummer.
They were always overt about being Liberal, though.
When people disagree about something, hearing from both sides is important. Can this ideal of openmindedness be cynically abused by strawmanning one side while steelmanning the other? Yes, but in that case the appropriate response is to criticise the specific ways that one or both sides were misrepresented -- which is also the appropriate response to a piece that only presents one side, and does it badly. Muttering about "both sides" never adds anything to an argument. All it does is signal a deep commitment to remaining entrenched in your current position.
In the real world there are many perspectives on a given issue, and a lot to be learned by everyone through open discussion. "Both sides" mentality discourages this, and also tends to give too much airtime to extreme views.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
It's fine if you're talking about something where there are a broad spectrum of fairly reasonable policy positions. It's not fine when you have a TV segment that's like "here's Christina, an astrophysicist from Stanford, explaining how we measure the circumference of the earth, and up next we'll have Bob from the flat earth society"
People did actual research on how much the 'old!' thing was very inconsistent in narrative and framing:
https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in...
No, you’d be serious about picking the best candidate you’ve got to stand up against the formidable foe. If all you’ve got is a corpse you might as well not bother.
For those unaware, the economist ran this [1] image after Biden’s historically disastrous debate in ‘24 (as a result of Biden’s age based senility being on full display after months of party and media complicity).
[1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/07/04/why-biden-must-...
(Not just The Economist, mind; almost every MSM outlet has mostly ignored Trump's mental inadequacy from the moment he came down the escalator. If they'd reported on it honestly from the start, there would be no Trump presidencies.)
Biden was clearly experiencing major cognitive decline over the course of his presidency. Trump was/is not. I've not seen any serious argument or evidence that Trump has experienced a cognitive decline, whereas the evidence for Biden's decline was his every public appearance. Are you being facetious, or is this your actual belief? If so, what is the evidence?
I don't know what to tell you if you can't see it from literally every public appearance he makes.