Is The Economist Always Wrong?

53 points | by nreece 2 hours ago

35 comments

  • ggm 39 minutes ago

    I'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 26 minutes ago

      Yes.

      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.

  • claw-el 39 minutes ago

    The 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.

      Spooky23 5 minutes ago

      [delayed]

      CGMthrowaway 24 minutes ago

      A 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.

        claw-el 16 minutes ago

        Yes, 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.

        jjmarr 13 minutes ago

        Alan 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

        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.

        VladVladikoff 20 minutes ago

        Strange to eschew the only actual power they have. Interesting times.

      Mistletoe 16 minutes ago

      I don’t think The Economist has that kind of power. More likely that when they make covers like these every normie feels that way and it’s going the other way soon, as it has exhausted every buyer or seller and it has reached the ends of your earth and your Mom and Dad even feel that way.

      https://www.readtrung.com/p/the-economist-cover-curse-explai...

        junkaccount 8 minutes ago

        It does not by itself but it is often just siding with a narrative that lot of other media houses and political parties are supporting as well.

        CursedSilicon 11 minutes ago

        Sorry, but

        ...Normie?

        What does that even mean in this context

          allthetime 6 minutes ago

          Someone without a deeper understanding of markets who is just reacting superficially to news, headlines, mainstream information etc.

  • latch an hour ago
  • diego_sandoval 43 minutes ago

    They're wrong more often than random chance, yes.

  • m348e912 7 minutes ago

    Here is a mirror of the article without a paywall.

    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.

  • tedmiston 29 minutes 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_headline...

      MarkusQ 8 minutes ago

      Which 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.

  • jdw64 an hour ago

    I think the question was wrong. The problem is that the important things are wrong and the trivial things are right, which causes confusion.

  • nnurmanov 15 minutes ago

    We will never know as the article is behind a paywall:)

  • skywhopper an hour ago

    Wow. “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?

  • iamanllm 39 minutes ago

    there should be some law where publications have to track their brier scores

      tccole 17 minutes ago

      I’d be surprised if they knew what a brier score was

  • SanjayMehta 27 minutes ago

    Yes, because they lie all the time.

  • Insanity 34 minutes ago

    Betteridge's law of headlines :)

  • lalitium an hour ago

    Please don't put anything with the paywall here.

      left-struck 38 minutes ago

      Sorry, who are you exactly to give people orders?

        lalitium 2 minutes ago

        If 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.

        MarkusQ 6 minutes ago

        "lalitium" -- it says so, right above the text.

  • davidw 36 minutes ago

    After 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 32 minutes ago

      What is “both sides” about that article?

      robomc 29 minutes ago

      yeah imagine thinking biden was too old and infirm

      narism 13 minutes ago

      Just because Fox News crowed about it doesn’t mean it’s bad journalism. Arguably toeing the party line is what resulted in Democrats being in that situation (fielding a weaker candidate against Trump) in the first place.

      next_xibalba 31 minutes ago

      Wait, 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-...

        SanjayMehta 24 minutes ago

        I missed that as my subscription ran out in 2017. Hilarious. Would have framed that cover.