Proxy indicators. The economist writes on topics on which I am an expert. It writes on many topics on which I am not. The topics on which I have expertise I fi

Proxy indicators. The economist writes on topics on which I am an expert. It writes on many topics on which I am not. The topics on which I have expertise I find to generally be (a) reasonably well-written, and (b) incorrect within the recognizable error-margins of "well researched, clearly spoke to a lot of people that knew their shit, didn't see much in the way of terrible mis-comprehensions." That's better than the vast majority of published material on the topics on which I have expertise. I take that as a proxy indicator of the quality of information in the remainder of the magazine. It's not particularly known as being expert in My Topic, so if they handle that well, the rest is reasonably unlikely to be trash. It can, of course, be trash, and this doesn't guarantee any particular piece of writing isn't, but on the whole, I think my conclusion is reasonable.