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Is The Economist Always Wrong?
- jdw64 3mo agoI think the question was wrong. The problem is that the important things are wrong and the trivial things are right, which causes confusion.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- skywhopper 3mo agoWow. “We asked the wrong question and used the wrong tool to get a questionable answer, and then decided to publish it.” I guess the answer is yes?
- latch 3mo agoRepost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48791799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48791799 (with 63 comments)
- NordStreamYacht 3mo agoAlready asked and answered. Yes.
- lalitium 3mo agoPlease don't put anything with the paywall here.
- left-struck 3mo agoSorry, who are you exactly to give people orders?
- MarkusQ 3mo ago"lalitium" -- it says so, right above the text.
- left-struck 3mo agoPerhaps you misunderstood. I know what the user’s username is. Since being “lalitium” alone doesn’t give one any authority here to give commands, hence my question.
- MarkusQ 3mo agoSorry, forgot the "/s" My view is that anybody is free to give commands if they feel like it, just as I'm free to ignore 'em.
- lalitium 3mo agoIf please helps, happy to add it. In fact I added it. When you see the title, you are excited to read, then you're hit with a paywall. Such a bummer.
- babagan0ush 3mo agoAgreed. Does someone have a summary of the article?
- diego_sandoval 3mo agoThey're wrong more often than random chance, yes.
- claw-el 3mo agoThe tricky thing about predictions made by public entity or persona is that, the fact that they are making public predictions creates a major influence on the outcome itself. People react to predictions made by them.
- CGMthrowaway 3mo agoA major reason why the new Fed chair is refusing to provide forward guidance, in a major departure from all(?) previous Fed chairs and will likely require textbooks to be rewritten.
- VladVladikoff 3mo agoStrange to eschew the only actual power they have. Interesting times.
- claw-el 3mo agoYes, one can see it this way, therefore they don’t want to provide forward guidance. One can also see it another way that ‘their job’ is to purposely use forward guidance to impact direction. Not sure which is the right way.
- doctorpangloss 3mo agoimo, its purpose is to be independent, because raising rates (combating inflation) is unpopular. otherwise, its job is pretty simple, it does't take much expertise, gravitas or technology to choose the number or to say no to the president.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jjmarr 3mo agoAlan Greenspan (fed chair from 1987-2006) was famous for deliberately confusing forward guidance. Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen are the historical anomalies for clearly communicating their intent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedspeak 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.
- iamanllm 3mo agothere should be some law where publications have to track their brier scores
- ggm 3mo agoI'd love to know if "the pink" has the same problem because I used to find the editorial very good. As a non-investor, left leaning voter, it interested me that I found much to agree with in "the financial times" while still finding much to disagree with in "the times" and "the daily telegraph" and "the spectator" -as if money was more neutrally stanced on left-vs-right.
- SanjayMehta 3mo agoYes. 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.
- ggm 3mo agoThe view amongst the economically literate left (the LSE?) when I was in the UK, was that lying about money to money-makers was counter productive. 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.
- ahartmetz 3mo agoChomsky makes the same point in his book "Manufacturing Consent": Economic papers report more truthfully than most because the truth is what their readers need to make decisions in the real world. I find that pretty convincing and I do check out such papers occasionally for that reason.
- eru 3mo agoIt's somewhat funny that the rest of Chomsky's ideology doesn't seem to really take that insight serious.
- 3mo ago
- davidw 3mo agoAfter subscribing for 15 years or so, I noped out after their "walker" cover. The world has enough "both sides" journalism, and I had thought them somewhat immune from that.
- gmadsen 3mo agoWhat is “both sides” about that article?
- next_xibalba 3mo agoWait, what? People were offended by that? It seemed an apt cover in light of the situation. 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-withdraw https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/07/04/why-biden-must-...
- SanjayMehta 3mo agoI missed that as my subscription ran out in 2017. Hilarious. Would have framed that cover.
- zimpenfish 3mo agoI think people were probably offended by the lack of such covers relating to Trump's diminished mental acuity when it was on display for all to see in the brief period of 2015-present. (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.)
- next_xibalba 3mo agoSurely you don't think the two are equivalent, right? 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?
- Insanity 3mo agoBetteridge's law of headlines :)
- tedmiston 3mo ago> Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- MarkusQ 3mo agoWhich makes the headline quite clever in this case, since people will assume that means they aren't wrong, when in fact it means they aren't _always_ wrong.
- aeternum 3mo agoNot sure it's so clever because I completed it as "not always wrong but often wrong", which their graph in the article seems to confirm. 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.
- bryanrasmussen 3mo agohttps://medium.com/luminasticity/does-betteridges-law-still-apply-7faf7f3c0bd3 https://medium.com/luminasticity/does-betteridges-law-still-... 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".
- SanjayMehta 3mo ago[flagged]
- cman1444 3mo agoWow, I find economist to be one of the best publications to read about global events. Can you say more about what you think they lie about?
- SanjayMehta 3mo agoJust take their cover pages on China over the last decade. Every prediction has been wrong. The same story for India or any of the BRICS nations. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2015/08/29/the-great-fall-of-china https://www.economist.com/leaders/2015/08/29/the-great-fall-... https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2023-04-01 https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2023-04-01 https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2023-05-13 https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2023-05-13 https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2024-04-06 https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2024-04-06
- rohitsriram 3mo ago[flagged]
- nnurmanov 3mo agoWe will never know as the article is behind a paywall:)
- m348e912 3mo agoHere is a mirror of the article without a paywall. https://archive.is/FziAy https://archive.is/FziAy 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.
- andsoitis 3mo agoThe Economist has this to say about their ownership structure and editorial independence: 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-Economist https://myaccount.economist.com/s/article/Who-owns-The-Econo...
- protocolture 3mo agoNo sorry you got this all wrong. You were meant to ingest the word "Rothschild" and then immediately cease all thought and begin your 60 seconds of hate.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- andsoitis 3mo agoPrior discussion 70+ comments (2 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48791799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48791799
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3mo agoThey aren't great on transgender topics I hear
- smt88 3mo agoI don’t know what person reads The Economist to learn about trans topics (whatever you mean by that)
- bluescrn 3mo agoProbably a reference to Helen Joyce, a prominent gender-critical author/activist. Formerly an editor at The Economist.
- idaseing 3mo agoShe’s the reason I quit the Economist. In almost every issue for a while they inserted an article about the dangers of trans people, without ever speaking with an actual trans person. Weird. So I looked it up and found out they had secretly put an anti-trans crusader in charge of trans issues, giving her the Economist’s no-byline “voice of God”. If they have become that sleazy and one-sided on issues where I know when they are wildly off, how can I trust them on obscure international issues where they are my only source?
- modo_mario 3mo ago...They have someone in charge of trans issues?
- pjc50 3mo agoI'm fairly sure the old capital-L Liberal Economist wouldn't have done that, and it's a real shame they got dragged into culture war like everyone else. They were always overt about being Liberal, though.
- papaver-somnamb 3mo agoAfter reading their newspaper (their label, not mine) for years, I've come away with three revelations: A) More than gaining insight and staying abreast of events, what I was really purchasing was the /feeling/ of being in-the-know. B) Whenever I met with "certain" people, they were likely to also read The Economist which turned out to be another, tremendously handy means of anchoring conversation. C) The trade balance tables on the inside back page were always interesting, sometimes jaw-dropping.
- someguynamedq 3mo agoThis but for every major "serious" publication
- twolf910616 3mo ago+1 on C. I actually started reading it back to front and have been having much more fun.
- eru 3mo agoObituary first?
- Yizahi 3mo agoThat obituary will be on the cover.
- red-iron-pine 3mo agoand if its on the cover chances are you won't need to even see the mag since everyone everywhere will be talking about it
- eru 3mo agoThe obituary is not for learning who has died, but for getting to read an interesting article about them.
- givemeethekeys 3mo agoThey don't have any real skin in the game. Who cares if they're right about something? Are they putting money on the line? What is their P/L for being "right"?
- bawolff 3mo agoIn theory, their reputation which is the basis for maintaining their subscriber base and hence $$$
- twolf910616 3mo agoI think that's the wrong way to look at it. They do have skin in the game, in the sense that their readers wouldn't want to pay for a newspaper that is consistently wrong. And, even if they don't, it doesn't mean that it's not valuable
- eru 3mo agoWell, I would pay for newspaper that's consistently wrong. I'd just trade the exact opposite of what they say. But I get what you mean!
- rw2 3mo agoThey are so consistently wrong and out of touch with reality they are the Cramer of publications.
- kqr 3mo agoThat's not quite what "skin in the game" means in this context. 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.
- seanmcdirmid 3mo ago
- Simpledempkin 3mo agoBernie's mittens of Fire can roundturn to Biden as dab-brushes, the economist can arrange for a formal hearing for Iowa caucuses as letters to Lagrange as first claim.
- ChrisArchitect 3mo ago[dupe] Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48791799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48791799
- roughly 3mo agoThe Economist has been publishing since 1843. As such, one could be forgiven for expecting an article entitled "Is The Economist Always Wrong?" to engage meaningfully with the track record of either the publication or the field with which it shares its name in any meaningful way. Alas. > 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.
- eru 3mo ago> [...] the field from which it draws its name [...] 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.
- roughly 3mo agoMy apologies, I've corrected my comment.
- eru 3mo agoNo worries. > 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.)
- roughly 3mo agoI’m just saying, it’d be nice to see some self-reflection once in a while.
- menachemsd 3mo agoBy making this headline, the Economist put us into a paradox. Quite clever
- zippyman55 3mo agoI have a hard time passing on the economist. Best reading out there that is condensed and to the point. The FT is great but I’m a paper guy and the font got too small to enjoy it.
- TomWhitwell 3mo agoDamn font getting smaller and smaller while my eyes stay the same
- mjt91 3mo agoThink of subscribing, anyone experience reading the economist on a kindle?
- thesimon 3mo agoI would love to, but no official Kindle publishing exists and at least the open thingys out there kinda suck. It's okay, but I don't like the formatting. Maybe write a better Economist->Kindle transformation with Claude or something to make it better.
- PsylentKnight 3mo agoThere was an official Kindle version, but they discontinued it as of a few years ago :(
- mdp2021 3mo agoIt is shocking that idle bets, nothing but after dinner games, are confused with assessments. It is not too different from confusing opinions and arguments in debates. 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.)
- drumhead 3mo agoThey're wrong and right in equal measure, but what they do is publish their opinions with conviction and back it up with sound arguments and facts. I remember reading articles they published in the late 80s about their belief that Japans economic boom was about to end, but they were also one of the biggest backers of Bush's invasion of Iraq which they were disastrously wrong about. I haven't read it for a while so I don't know what they're like now but for forward economic intelligence they were always one of the best.
- teamonkey 3mo agoI think there’s a human bias where we remember predictions being wrong more strongly than those being right. 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.
- modo_mario 3mo ago>but they were also one of the biggest backers of Bush's invasion of Iraq which they were disastrously wrong about. Were they wrong or were they insincere/dishonest?
- specialist 3mo ago> invasion of Iraq which they were disastrously wrong about 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.
- doe88 3mo agoAn outgoing foreign affairs editor suggested in 1988 that the newspaper ‘never saw a war it didn’t like’. 𐞸 𐞸 https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2020/05/27/book-review-liberalism-at-large-the-world-according-to-the-economist-by-alexander-zevin/#:~:text=an%20outgoing,%20like'%20(396). 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).
- fugaziboutit 3mo agoThey're very strongly against the Iran War right now.
- red-iron-pine 3mo agothe entire world is, except for Israel and their puppet
- ankit_mishra 3mo ago> We used artificial intelligence to test the accuracy of our forecasts I like the disclosure at the top, saves time.
- dotancohen 3mo agoSaves time, as in "no need to read any further". 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.
- cman1444 3mo agoWhy?
- fp_hub 3mo ago[flagged]
- ImageXav 3mo agoI read the Economist for over a decade growing up. It was a great way to learn about the world, who was in power where, and the challenges facing economies at the time. I found their exposition to be pretty good given the fact they were restricted to a few pages for important events. However, their proposed solutions were always the same. More market freedom, etc. 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.
- doodlesarefun 3mo agoLess worldly, how so? Been considering an FT sub.
- red-iron-pine 3mo ago"you know what would fix this problem? put the Torys in charge and let them privatize everything" -- essentially their refrain 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.
- JR1427 3mo agoI used to read it every week, and always liked the fact they stated their biases upfront - "This newspaper believes XYZ". Now I just live under a rock, and don't read any news.
- harrouet 3mo agoAs an economist, you may say what, you may say when, but never both at the same time.
- maxglute 3mo agoCue 100s of China collapse headlines, but being so consistently wrong as reliable negative indicator is itself valuable.
- ricwo 3mo agohttps://archive.is/hGfgx https://archive.is/hGfgx
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo agoThis seems like a strange question to ask Even a fool will be right sometimes Why not just report the facts, and stop trying to predict the future