Is The Economist Always Wrong?

https://www.economist.com/interactive/finance-and-economics/2026/07/02/is-the-economist-always-wrong

by nreece • 15 days ago

138 174 15 days ago

jdw64• 15 days 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.

skywhopper• 15 days 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?

latch• 15 days ago

Repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48791799 (with 63 comments)

NordStreamYacht• 15 days ago

Already asked and answered.

Yes.

lalitium2• 15 days ago

Please don't put anything with the paywall here.

left-struck2• 15 days ago

Sorry, who are you exactly to give people orders?

MarkusQ3• 15 days ago

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

lalitium2• 15 days 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.

babagan0ush• 15 days ago

Agreed. Does someone have a summary of the article?

diego_sandoval• 15 days ago

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

claw-el2• 15 days 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.

CGMthrowaway4• 15 days 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.

VladVladikoff• 15 days ago

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

claw-el2• 15 days 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• 15 days 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.

reenorap• 15 days ago

No, only since Bernanke. So it’s very recent and not something that was historically done by Fed chairs.

Mistletoe• 15 days 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...

CursedSilicon• 15 days ago

Sorry, but

...Normie?

What does that even mean in this context

junkaccount• 15 days 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.

Spooky23• 15 days ago

The thing with the Economist is that they have a style that’s like an erudite version of the old Time magazine — that is stories written to say what the editors want. Except the economist is way more dogmatic.

I used to read it regularly. I can’t imagine anyone looking to them for predictions, as even a casual reader could probably outline the magazine’s views on most any topic. Let me skim 4-5 recent issues, and I could probably replicate anything they would predict with like 85% accuracy!

I will say that my favorite part of the magazine was the wacky ads for big shots working for African countries, various UN things, NGOs, etc.

Joker_vD3• 15 days ago

Yep. That's why predicting the future of a system you're a part of is sometimes literally impossible; it boils, fundamentally, to the fact that logical negation doesn't have a fixed point.

ngruhn• 15 days ago

That's a beautifully simple characterization. I've never heard of of that. What keywords do I need to find more on this topic?

drdeca• 15 days ago

If your prediction is a probability distribution, rather than a discrete outcome label, then, assuming the distribution over the future depends continuously on your action, there should be a fixed point, I think?

Like, if you output a probability distribution among n options, and then there is a continuous map from the probability distribution you describe in your output, to another probability distribution over those options…

Err, hm, maybe you need a stronger hypothesis on the continuous map? If it is contractive then it will definitely have a fixed point. I don’t remember the hypothesis needed.

iamanllm• 15 days ago

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

tccole• 15 days ago

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

eru11• 15 days ago

The folks at the Economist certainly know. Bunch of nerds! (And I say that in the best sense.)

ggm3• 15 days 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.

SanjayMehta2• 15 days 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.

ggm3• 15 days ago

The 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.

spikels• 15 days ago

Today both "newspapers" lie about everything. Sad.

gumby3• 15 days ago

If you’re a left leaning voter the Speccie is almost _never_ going to have an article for you.

And the “almost” is simply because often the articles are very well written and a pleasure to read even when the actual topic and argument are deeply deranged. Amazingly this was especially true when Boris was the editor!

skrebbel• 15 days ago

Why is that amazing? For all his faults, Boris Johnson is an excellent writer.

carabiner• 15 days ago

Chomsky said it was the only newspaper that told the truth.

jdhendrickson• 15 days ago

I wonder if he wrote that while on the island.

michaelmrose• 15 days ago

Human beings act as if wisdom and intelligence are general whereas in reality every single area of human endeavor requires so much detail passion and time to acquire the specific knowledge and to maintain currency as the field evolves that those speaking outside their own specific scope are mostly full of shit.

tjwebbnorfolk• 15 days ago

Chomsky is a perfect example of an academic that should never have strayed outside the academy. Everything he's done outside of his narrow field of linguistics has been an embarrassment.

jambalaya8• 13 days ago

Chomsky said that a long, long time ago. The newspaper and news businesses have almost in common with their old selves now. Though I kind of think The Economist, FT and WaPo are some of the least worst news sources remaining, once in a while. Looking at old newspapers is a good way to be reminded just how opinionated and not news news from the last few decades is.

ifwinterco3• 15 days ago

Truth is reading any of these MSM sources on either left or right is bad imo.

Before reading them you're merely uninformed, after you're misinformed which is far worse

abenga• 15 days ago

What should you read instead?

modo_mario4• 15 days ago

Is this purely because of their economic stances or did the financial times dive into social issues and idpol and maybe some of the stances where a part of the left clashes (migration and such)?

pjc502• 15 days ago

The FT's market is the small remaining group of people who actively don't want to be lied to. The latter three are basically just propaganda now. James Delingpole has worked for at least two as a climate change denial correspondant.

Peter Oborne on resigning from the Telegraph, 10 years ago: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/why-i-have-resigned-from-te...

davidw4• 15 days 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• 15 days ago

What is “both sides” about that article?

next_xibalba2• 15 days 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-...

SanjayMehta2• 15 days ago

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

zimpenfish2• 15 days ago

I 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.)

robomc• 15 days ago

yeah imagine thinking biden was too old and infirm

davidw4• 15 days ago

And now we have a guy with dementia, which got kind of ignored by the media while they hyped up the other guy's decline.

People did actual research on how much the 'old!' thing was very inconsistent in narrative and framing:

https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in...

narism2• 15 days 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.

davidw4• 15 days ago

Framing someone who supports democracy vs someone who tried to overturn a free and fair election as a 'weaker' candidate is kind of the problem though. In any sane world, you'd support a literal corpse over a guy who does not want there to be free and fair elections.

akoboldfrying• 15 days ago

For me personally, seeing the phrase "both sides" used pejoratively is a red flag telling me I don't need to read any further.

When people disagree about something, hearing from both sides is important. Can this ideal of openmindedness be cynically abused by strawmanning one side while steelmanning the other? Yes, but in that case the appropriate response is to criticise the specific ways that one or both sides were misrepresented -- which is also the appropriate response to a piece that only presents one side, and does it badly. Muttering about "both sides" never adds anything to an argument. All it does is signal a deep commitment to remaining entrenched in your current position.

mattclarkdotnet• 15 days ago

The problem is the assumption that in most debates there are sides to be taken, and that there are 2 of them. It leads to shoddy journalism where "balance" means finding someone to debate another, regardless of the bizarreness of their position.

In the real world there are many perspectives on a given issue, and a lot to be learned by everyone through open discussion. "Both sides" mentality discourages this, and also tends to give too much airtime to extreme views.

davidw4• 15 days ago

This explains the problem with it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance

It's fine if you're talking about something where there are a broad spectrum of fairly reasonable policy positions. It's not fine when you have a TV segment that's like "here's Christina, an astrophysicist from Stanford, explaining how we measure the circumference of the earth, and up next we'll have Bob from the flat earth society"

Insanity• 15 days ago

Betteridge's law of headlines :)

tedmiston• 15 days 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...

MarkusQ3• 15 days 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.

aeternum• 15 days ago

Not 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• 15 days ago

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".

nnurmanov• 15 days ago

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

m348e912• 15 days 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.

andsoitis4• 15 days ago

The 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-Econo...

protocolture• 15 days ago

No 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.

andsoitis4• 15 days ago

Prior discussion 70+ comments (2 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48791799

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 15 days ago

They aren't great on transgender topics I hear

smt88• 15 days ago

I don’t know what person reads The Economist to learn about trans topics (whatever you mean by that)

bluescrn• 15 days ago

Probably a reference to Helen Joyce, a prominent gender-critical author/activist. Formerly an editor at The Economist.

papaver-somnamb• 15 days ago

After 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• 15 days ago

This but for every major "serious" publication

twolf9106162• 15 days ago

+1 on C. I actually started reading it back to front and have been having much more fun.

eru11• 15 days ago

Obituary first?

tonyedgecombe• 15 days ago

I do too, I picked that idea up from HN. I often don’t get to the front for three or four weeks which makes the news part interesting. Last week I read a piece from early in the Iran/US war and it was telling me I wouldn’t be able to buy petrol by then but the reality was prices were already falling off.

erg0s4m2• 14 days ago

If you read it consistently you soon realize that every article has a short form summary in the front and long form article in the back, and sometimes a mid size as well, in the same edition.

fmajid• 15 days ago

The Economist is to the City of London (the financial center masquerading as a local authority, not the metropolis) what Pravda was to the Soviet Communist Party. Useless as a source of truth, but invaluable to find out who was going to be purged and you should disown stat. Similarly The Economist is useful as a barometer of conventional wisdom in as very specific demographic. Their science and arts section can be very good at times, however.

seanmcdirmid3• 15 days ago

I find that publications aimed at business people to be a bit more reliable since their readers jobs are to make money and not have their biases confirmed. If the media isn’t useful in helping them make money (by giving them too much bad information), they will simply stop using it.

Of course, making money doesn’t necessarily mean having access to the best unbiased information, sometimes it simply means onboarding onto a bias before everyone else does (aka market intelligence).

Gimpei• 14 days ago

The Pravda parallel is a stretch. It's definitely opinion, but they do consult actual research and more so than most other English language publications. As a social scientist I think they do a better job of treating research than the NY Times or the New Yorker. Often I get the sense the journalists at those publications haven't seen a number since high school. That being said, if you think the kind of statistics based research that comes out of social sciences is all bunk, we live in different worlds and will have to agree to disagree.

erg0s4m2• 14 days ago

The economist is the only paper I read where articles on topics I know about are fair, balanced and grounded in science. The opposite of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

culi• 14 days ago

You'd probably enjoy the Financial Times

givemeethekeys• 15 days ago

They 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• 15 days ago

In theory, their reputation which is the basis for maintaining their subscriber base and hence $$$

twolf9106162• 15 days ago

I 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

eru11• 15 days ago

Well, 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• 15 days ago

They are so consistently wrong and out of touch with reality they are the Cramer of publications.

kqr• 15 days ago

That'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.

Simpledempkin• 15 days ago

Bernie'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• 15 days ago

[dupe] Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48791799

roughly3• 15 days ago

The 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.

eru11• 15 days 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.

roughly3• 15 days ago

My apologies, I've corrected my comment.

menachemsd• 15 days ago

By making this headline, the Economist put us into a paradox. Quite clever

zippyman55• 15 days ago

I 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• 15 days ago

Damn font getting smaller and smaller while my eyes stay the same

mjt91• 15 days ago

Think of subscribing, anyone experience reading the economist on a kindle?

thesimon• 15 days ago

I 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• 14 days ago

There was an official Kindle version, but they discontinued it as of a few years ago :(

mdp20213• 15 days ago

It 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• 15 days ago

They'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• 15 days ago

I 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_mario4• 15 days 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?

specialist2• 15 days 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• 15 days ago

An 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-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• 15 days ago

They're very strongly against the Iran War right now.

red-iron-pine3• 14 days ago

the entire world is, except for Israel and their puppet

ankit_mishra• 15 days ago

We used artificial intelligence to test the accuracy of our forecasts

I like the disclosure at the top, saves time.

dotancohen3• 15 days ago

Saves 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• 14 days ago

Why?

ImageXav• 15 days ago

I 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.

doodlesarefun3• 15 days ago

Less worldly, how so? Been considering an FT sub.

red-iron-pine3• 14 days 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• 15 days ago

I 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• 15 days ago

As an economist, you may say what, you may say when, but never both at the same time.

maxglute• 15 days ago

Cue 100s of China collapse headlines, but being so consistently wrong as reliable negative indicator is itself valuable.

ricwo• 14 days ago

https://archive.is/hGfgx

1vuio0pswjnm7• 14 days ago

This 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

Is The Economist Always Wrong?

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