The Slow Cousin Begins To Grasp The Obvious

The Economist news magazine belatedly wakes up to reality

Image credit: The Economist

I’ve subscribed to The Economist news magazine for more than forty years and in that time I’ve watched it slowly decline as editors chased larger audiences and therefore were obliged not merely to dumb down the content but to make it more trivial. Nevertheless, it remains the only English-language news publication aside from The Financial Times to even make an effort to provide a little context and to cover topics of global importance.

That said, over the last few decades I’ve come to regard The Economist much as I’d regard an extremely slow-witted distant third cousin: well-meaning but hopelessly dim. In my extensive years of readership I’ve noticed that The Economist generally takes between two to five years to wake up to what ought to have been blindingly obvious. Thus while I correctly called every major geo-political event of the last twenty years, The Economist incorrectly called every single one.

The reasons for this are many: a desire to conform to whatever the generic media narrative happens to be at the time so as not to confuse readers and thus potentially lose them. A focus on the ultra-short-term that precludes coherent thinking about inevitable consequences. Perhaps also the sparkly girls and boys at The Economist are simply not as bright as they…