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Is The Economist left- or right-wing?
- reubensutton 13y agoI always admire The Economist's willingness to have political ideals, be explicit and unapologetic about them and to be pragmatic about them. It's an attitude that should be standard in the media.
- arjunnarayan 13y agoIt is standard in British media.
- 001sky 13y agoI always wondered if that was because the British media are full of students of English, while the US is stuck with students of journalism (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_objectivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_objectivity). The latter seems to correlate with a delusion of grandeur.
- reubensutton 13y agoI disagree, whereas it is well-known that sections of the media has a bias which colours it's coverage, it is never explicitly declared and it also tends towards the dogmatic. I would be interested to see an example where this isn't the case.
- dmazin 13y agoOh yeah. Not only is journalistic objectivity utterly nonexistent but the pretense thereof is angering and ultimately damaging to the quality and value of media.
- ry0ohki 13y agoHooray, as someone who feels similar, we don't all have to "pick a team".
- markost 13y agohttp://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/how_does_the_shutdown_relate_t.html http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/how_does_the_shutdown...
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- sybhn 13y agoAlthough I don't always agree with the Economist's position, e.g. right to bear arms, it's always refreshing to read a media that is not pigeon holed into the traditional left / right that we today are accustomed to. Liberal in values, conservative in its economic views, while not being to the extreme of today's libertarians. Total win imo ;)
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- steve19 13y agoWhat is their stance on the right to bear arms? Do you have a citation.
- dmazin 13y agoThe Economist backs gun control. Citation? It's in the second paragraph of the article this post links to.
- gte525u 13y agoDefinitely pro-gun control to the point they promote the total-ban of guns. On the other hand, and I think this illustrates a type of pragmatism, they were skeptical of proposed reforms post-Sandy Hook.
- skwirl 13y agoThey are a U.K. publication. As far as I know, there isn't much diversity of opinion on the topic of gun control in the U.K. They don't like guns, but they don't like impractical or pointless gun control measures either.
- redthrowaway 13y agoThey think only the government should have guns. They bring it up a lot. http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2012/12/gun-control http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2012/12/gun-control
- stfu 13y agoA cynic could probably describe this position also as pseudo-intellectual populism, i.e. catering to the last bastion of print magazine buyers?
- dmazin 13y agoThe Economist has held its editorial stance for over a century. Your language thus suggests that the print magazine was on its last stand even in the late 19th century.
- sybhn 13y agoNot to argue about its target audience, but the Economist is a multi platform publication at this point. Not only that but and audio version also comes default with the IOS app (i listen to it everyday on way to work).
- nickff 13y agoThis editorial is self-serving in the extreme. >When The Economist opines on new ideas and policies, it does so on the basis of their merits, not of who supports or opposes them. Last October, for example, it outlined a programme of reforms to combat inequality. Most people believe that they make judgments based on merits, but that does not make it so. Even avoiding ad hominem arguments provides no guarantee of objectivity. For example: this idea that inequality is a problem is completely normative, and the ability of policymakers to solve it from the top down is unproven, and still uncertain. In addition, making US presidential endorsements (democratic for the last 3 elections) does not help them look like an impartial spectator in the political game. The proposals which "The Economist" proposes do not always align with any specific political or interest group, but they are almost universally (monetarily or fiscally) activist.
- entangld 13y agoWho can guarantee objectivity? No one. That doesn't mean it is not possible to pursue it or even gain a good measure of it. Do you really believe it makes the Economist look partisan to support Democrats since 2004? What about before that? From 1996 - 2012 it was Dole, Bush, Kerry, Obama, Obama. http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/11/us-presidential-endorsements http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/11/us... Isn't it possible to support certain ideals no matter which party they come from? The fact that their proposals do not always align with specific interest groups supports a claim of impartiality.
- nickff 13y agoI agree with you that it is difficult, and perhaps impossible to measure or achieve objectivity, but that is what they claim to have already done. In addition, it is somewhat absurd to pretend that a magazine takes a position, when it is really the editorial board that makes all the decisions. If one wants to examine any potential biases, one should examine the record of each editor or columnist, not the entire 100+ year history of a collection of their works. I also agree with you that they may not have any source-based bias, but their claims are much broader: >The Economist has no permanent address on the left-right scale.
- nchuhoai 13y agoIMO, most people hold the described political view of being leftie in social and rightie in economic questions. To me the biggest challenge/question is how we can escape the current "local optimum" we are in in which you have to effectively choose between social and economic values (at least in the US). It seems highly unlikely that we will see the emergence of a third party, so I wonder when either the Democrats or Republicans realize the potential of being a true centralist majority party. I tend to think that Democrats are better positioned, but thought that in the 2012 Elections, the Republicans had a great shot with Huntsman.
- nickff 13y agoWhen you have two sides, there is a 'left' and a 'right'; one can capture the middle, but it will still occupy its side. Unless either party significantly expands (25%-75%), or a large third party captures one far end of the spectrum, neither Democratic or Republican can legitimately claim to occupy the center.
- djur 13y agoThat isn't a historical certainty. Even leaving the social axis aside and sticking strictly to economics, the American party system only started to fit a left/right model during FDR's presidency. Progressive Republicans started to split from the party in the '20s and eventually found themselves a home in the New Deal coalition. The big change of the post-Carter epoch is that the socially conservative, economically liberal "Reagan Democrats" have almost entirely disappeared off the map, resulting in both parties becoming more separate on social issues. I think it's safe to say that a modern representative democracy (assuming a capitalist, industrialized society) will generally have a right faction and a left faction in national politics. What makes things complicated is when you throw in regionalism, nationalism, militarism, ethnic issues, moral issues, and any other matter of controversy that doesn't always split the same way as left/right economic positions.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> IMO, most people hold the described political view of being leftie in social and rightie in economic questions. I think that, to the extent the economic half of that is true, its only on the very high level, where almost everyone holds what is generally held out as the economically conservative view of "government should expend resources only on those things which are essential government functions". What distinguishes people rather radically is what they see as essential functions of government. > To me the biggest challenge/question is how we can escape the current "local optimum" we are in in which you have to effectively choose between social and economic values (at least in the US). Its not really all that difficult: having an electoral system that produces more proportional representation results in more than two viable parties and more than one main axis of political variation. This is well demonstrated among developed democracies. > so I wonder when either the Democrats or Republicans realize the potential of being a true centralist majority party. There is no advantage to that if you have actual policy preferences that are not centralist. And there's a big disadvantage to it if political views tend to be bimodally distributed rather than normally distributed.
- cia_plant 13y agoThe economist is further left than throwback traditionalist movements like Islamism or the US Evangelical Right, on the rightward side of the consensus liberal-democratic center, certainly right of socialist movements. It uses a sort of high-handed pseudo-objective tone but is actually highly political and opinionated.
- dobbsbob 13y agoThere's a reason none of the economist articles have writing credits. It's because nobody would normally care what a 20something hipster thinks about markets and politics, and believe they are receiving wisdom from experienced economists and analysts but if you walk into their offices it's just kids having a lark, trolling away.
- leot 13y agoIf you can recommend a more information-rich resource on world affairs, I'd be delighted to hear of it.
- dobbsbob 13y agoI have to aggregate it from everywhere. For example, Le Monde diplomatique, Der Spiegel, New Yorker Magazine, Al Jazeera, The Spectator, New Statesman, any publication that actually prints names so you can check the bias of the author, or look at their other pieces to see if they are just party hacks or just making stuff up, especially when reading opinion pieces. I also have a Stratfor account that I mainly read for lulz and leak info on hacker tradecraft from :P For specific information, I contact my foreign service located in the country I want info about, and sometimes other embassies like the UK embassy. Often you can just email them and receive back a surprisingly frank and accurate account on their economy and political situation. This is open to anybody generally. I was interested in setting up a small biz in Bulgaria so just contacted my countries' trade mission there and they sent me everything there is to know about the current situation there, including underground nightclub scenes in their publication about culture, I was pretty surprised how thorough it was. When I get time I go on business school/university polisci dept websites and look at their press releases and research papers which come out steadily every week usually. Most professors write articles for the Guardian or other publications. The European, Australian, New Zealand, and Asian schools are the best, no pay walls. Jewish publications typically write a lot about human rights status in various countries, so I check those too. http://www.cjnews.com/news/hungarian-filmmaker-fears-his-children http://www.cjnews.com/news/hungarian-filmmaker-fears-his-chi... is an article I found after my country decided to refuse refugee claims from Hungary, claiming it was 'safe'. No other media bothered to cover it hardly and just accepted the government's decree.
- voyou 13y agoExcellent illustration of the fact that anyone who claims to be neither left nor right wing, is actually right wing.
- dec0dedab0de 13y agoI really like the idea of a "radical centre" even though it could mean almost anything.
- RachelF 13y agoMost party-based political systems seem to stabilize in the form two parties. Which ideas these parties support is often pretty random and is often not self-consistent.
- vijayboyapati 13y agoThe Economist paints itself as classically liberal, but this is something of a farce. They criticized Mises, sometimes called the last knight of liberalism, for his liberalism. And they have been consistently pro-war for the last decade. What is classically liberal about that? Not to mention they favour all kinds of economic interventionism - boosting demand by "stimulus" for instance, is one of their go-to suggestions for an economy in depression. Classical liberals of the 19th century would recoil in horror at the Economist's current "classical liberalism"
- dubfan 13y ago> Mises, sometimes called the last knight of liberalism By whom?
- ywyrd 13y agoOriginally by some of his European colleagues.
- npongratz 13y ago>> Mises, sometimes called the last knight of liberalism >By whom? Jörg Guido Hülsmann wrote a book titled Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (2007): https://mises.org/daily/6022/ https://mises.org/daily/6022/ PDF and epub here: https://mises.org/document/3295/Mises-The-Last-Knight-of-Liberalism https://mises.org/document/3295/Mises-The-Last-Knight-of-Lib...
- nickff 13y agoMises once got angry at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society and called Friedman, Hayek, et al. "a bunch of socialists". It is hard to imagine him describing the editorial board of "The Economist" as 'classically liberal'.
- npongratz 13y agoI'm intrigued and would like to read more about this. Would you happen to have a link to a description of the episode?
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- dmazin 13y agoHonestly, I'm a little confused about this article. It's probably one of a few fun little fluff pieces commemorating the anniversary. I don't even read it much and I've always understood, and think most readers understand, that The Economist has a somewhat undogmatic mixed left/right stance endorsing both liberals and the occasional Neo Fascist, at once backing universal healthcare (which they acknowledge in this article) and destructive warfare (which they do not).
- scrollbar 13y agoI cancelled my Economist subscription recently due to finding myself frustrated with their political bias. It seems they often assert controversial opinions as accepted truth. I would much prefer that any statements of policy preference were backed up by references, data, or at least given with a nod to opposing viewpoints. Although, that would probably make publishing on a weekly schedule more difficult.
- dbrower 13y ago"It seems they often assert controversial opinions as accepted truth." This would be my main content complaint as well. But what I really find objectionable is the non-student subscription price, > $200 for a renewal.
- Angostura 13y ago> due to finding myself frustrated with their political bias. ... in which direction?
- scrollbar 13y agoEchoing what they said in the linked article, it doesn't fit into a left/right paradigm, so "direction" might not be the right word. Instead I'd elaborate: editors there have opinions about political matters, and they frame their own political opinions as fact.
- mmanfrin 13y ago'People on the left paint us as right, but we are actually liberal in the classical sense of the term' is not a refutation of being right-wing.
- auctiontheory 13y agoI've been reading The Economist for well over thirty years. In England I think it's clearly identified as a paper of the right. (Correct me if I'm mistaken.) The only reason it might not be seen as right wing in the US, is that the right wing here is so batsh*t crazy: Banning abortion and birth control, blaming gay people for earthquakes, carrying assault rifles around in public, genuinely believing that the world is 6000 years old - these are not part of educated discourse in the rest of the OECD.
- kmfrk 13y ago(Correct me if I'm mistaken.) The problem with this classification is that the concept of left and right varies from country to country. In many European countries, most parties could probably fit in the Democratic party.
- vidarh 13y agoIt varies from country to country, but not that much. The US is in a class pretty much by itself amongst developed countries at least.
- scarmig 13y agoIt's more complicated than that: on the issues that are most controversial in the USA, it's true that other countries have what looks like a consensus by comparison. But other countries have their own issues that make Republicans look positively enlightened: see, for instance, many European countries' right-wing edge of opinion on immigration and diversity. Sure, conservatives get bad in the States--see the attempt to block building a mosque in Tennessee by a bunch of drooling rednecks--but look at things comparatively. In Switzerland, they banned building mosques anywhere in the country. In France, they (successfully?) tried to regulate what clothing Muslim women can wear in public. And even those countries are relatively enlightened for Europe: try being an immigrant in Greece or gay in Russia.
- vidarh 13y ago
- jotm 13y agoThank you Economist for saying this! I really hate when people shove others into right or left categories - that's as dumb as it gets. Like it's impossible to have different opinions on different things, or what?
- rosser 13y agoThis is one of those cases where the inadequacy of trying to describe our politics on a simple, single left-vs-right axis shines through so starkly. If we used a two-axis system, where one axis is economic and the other social, The Economist would (mostly) fall in the socially-liberal, economically-conservative quadrant.
- batemanesque 13y agothe best summation of the Economist's editorial viewpoint is that it's aimed at rich businessmen, & consequently combines tacit support for economic inequality w/ choice morsels of liberalism - viz. healthcare & gun control - in order to differentiate itself from "unsophisticated" paleoconservatives
- parasubvert 13y agoI think it's a bit cynical to read it that way: there's good reason to be anti-inequality but also skeptical of naive wealth redistribution as the solution to it. What we are left with is the European social-democratic welfare state, which seems to work well enough if you have a base of natural resources to work from. I notice the Economiat generally isn't too critical of most European tax rates (a typical cry of rich businessmen) but rather is critical of countries that have widespread and systematic structural barriers to economic freedom - the UK, pre-Thatcher, and modern France, for example. France represents a fun eternal potshot game: they keep claiming doom yet France keeps chugging along with its massive civil service, huge employment regs, and longest vacations on Earth...
- batemanesque 13y ago"naive wealth redistribution" seems to be a bit of a strawman to me. re: European tax rates, perhaps it would be more accurate to describe the Economist as supporting the current economic status quo. besides, while Europe does have a much stronger safety net, it's almost as unequal as the US - it's not like the well-off are any less hegemonic there.
- parasubvert 13y agoAdmittedly it is a bit of a strawman, because we haven't really defined "smart" wealth distribution in this thread :) Re: inequality http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/the-income-inequality-boom-its-real-and-its-everywhere/249561/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/the-inco... So you have a point that the status quo isn't actually all that great except in the one country that The Economist always yells at.... France and Belgium. Though the Scandinavian countries also seem to do well (lots of natural resources help).
- batemanesque 13y agoin other words: "bipartisanship"!
- angularly 13y ago"We like free enterprise and tend to favour deregulation and privatisation. But we also like gay marriage, want to legalise drugs and disapprove of monarchy. So is the newspaper right-wing or left-wing?" Eh what? All those stances are almost text book libertarian... so how could anyone be in doubt.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoBypass this if you dislike jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M I have to post this clip from "Yes Minister" every time there is a discussion about political bias in the media.
- dbbolton 13y ago>We like free enterprise and tend to favour deregulation and privatisation. But we also like gay marriage, want to legalise drugs and disapprove of monarchy. Sounds like they're libertarian.
- antics 13y agoAlmost a year ago to the day, The Economist ran a leader ([1], also cited at the bottom of the OP) that described itself as "radical centerist", blatantly "stealing" ideas from both right and left. The surprisingly poor article posted here not only fails to clarify or improve this position, but actually muddies the waters of discourse, because it fails to spell out what it means when it uses terms like "left-wing" and "conservative". These definitions are particular and subtle, and it is worth explaining what The Economist actually means in this article. This is especially true given the international audience of the paper (and HN), where these terms sometimes appear to mean contradictory things. I won't pretend to be a master political theoretician, so corrections are welcome, but at a high level here is what is going on. In most of political theory, the spectrum breaks down roughly into two huge types of political party (and yes this is a massive generalization): * those on the right wing, which are typically fiscally liberal and socially conservative, that is, they believe that companies should behave as they like, but people need to be told how to behave even in their private lives, and * those on the left wing, which are mainly socially liberal, that is, they believe that the government should tax and regulate more heavily, but that people should be able to do what they like privately. Across the globe what it means to be "a liberal" is different. In the US, the "liberal" signifier refers to the fact that the person believes that the government should not regulate personal decisions like gay marriage. In France, it is the opposite: the "liberal" signifer refers to the fact that they like less regulation on the markets. The Economist, simply put, is liberal in the sense that it tends to favor less regulation on both these fronts: it favors legalization of drugs and gay marriage, but also less regulation for markets. There are of course exceptions (it favors gun regulation for example), but this is basically the position that it has come to call "radical centerism". The magazine is often called libertarian, but only conveniently so -- the gun control exception in particular casts this supposition into doubt, and rather than accept this branding, the editorial staff has evidently decided to pick this new title. This is probably the right move. For all its flaws, this is something that the article did get right. [1] http://www.economist.com/node/21564556 http://www.economist.com/node/21564556
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- hugh4life 13y agoThe best way to describe The Economist is "liberal communist". They serve Samuel Huntington's Davos Man, Christopher Lasch's Revolting Elite. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/slavoj-zizek/nobody-has-to-be-vile http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/slavoj-zizek/nobody-has-to-be-v...
- fixxer 13y agoSo the Economist is like... me!
- dimitar 13y agoI think while it likes to present itself to be above the fray it actually has an editorial policy to favour and endorse candidates according to a proximity model: 1. sort politicians by perceived direction of views - PV, 0 being the most right, 100 the most left. 2. Their preferred PV* is something like 45. 3. Proximity to that number is favoured, not the actual positions. This of course is pretty easy to do and that may be the reason why editors are anonymous. You can pay relatively little to make endorsements using an algorithm. This is of course a horrible way to choose a candidate or a policy, but does it really matter? The readers seem to like it.
- eighteyes 13y agoDoes anyone remember when the media used to pride itself on objectivity?