That's a disappointing chart from the economist. When you have a lot of points, you can't show them as dots that occlude other dots, or the reader can't get much more of a sense than 'none / some / lots'. What you need to do is bucket by region and do a background heatmap with small dots added, or use a different level of opacity on the dots.
I really like the economist, they are quite centric in their views but don't hide a certain bias for strong representative democracies, deregulation, globalism and open (publicly traded) markets.
Their writing style is probably the cleanest in the industry and they always point out potential conflict of interest even though I've never seen the write anything really positive about the companies Exor controls (Stellantis, Philips, etc).
The Economist Group is largely owned by the Agnelli family ("Italy's Kennedys"), Canadian billionaire Stephen Smith, the Rothschilds and others, which is likely a significant factor in those biases.
One things I like is that when the economist talks about a business or an author, they mention if there is a conflict of interest (this and that works for this or is owned by that)
Nah, even as a leftist, The Economist is mostly in the "enlightened centrist" area. I'd say they're a reliable source of facts as long as you know where their bias is.
Indeed. I unsubscribed (after many years) out of frustration at their incessant and unquestioning incantation of orthodox economic dogmas, in particular economic growth (which is at the very least a flawed indicator). This is what religion looks like. I was paying smart people to do some of my thinking for me, yet I couldn't help but conclude that my mind was more open than theirs.
Still, the quality of The Economist's writing is in a league of its own. No denying that.
The Atlantic. Excellent writers, excellent editing. But as a European I find the US slant is a problem. I do miss The Economist's international coverage.
After reading some of that article and the one from Current Affairs in the other comment, I decided I don't have much of a taste for that genre. They may have some decent points, but it's such toxic bickering.
They are not "quite centric" politically, unless you are a liberal. Contrast the number of times the phrase "far-right" appears with the equivalent (far-left, progressive, radical left, etc..). They go out of their way to use negative adjectives describing right-wing (US definition) people or concepts, but not so much the left. The "Lexington" column is completely devoted to liberal (not classical liberal) ideas, and I would challenge anyone to note a right of center view (US definition) in that column over the last ten years. I've subscribed to the Economist on and off for twenty years and definitely noticed a change in bias when Zany took over.
We do read the Economist in the US, and Lexington in particular in the US section. I use the US definition of right wing because I'm in the US and didn't want to confuse Europeans that have a different definition of what "right" is when I use it in a sentence.
All I was doing is correcting (and providing evidence for) the reference that they are "quite centric". They are not anywhere near the center of issues consistently.
If you want more evidence, Allsides also rate it left of center, https://www.allsides.com/news-source/economist-media-bias
I notice it because I've been reading it for 20+ years. In the last 10 years it has taken a notable turn to the left. Whatever your viewpoint, the "tone" and "lean" of the magazine has shifted in the last decade. It's still a good source of information and I do read it every week.
I love that the top two (currently) replies to this claim that the Economist is ‘centric’ are one that’s arguing that it’s obviously too left wing for that label, and another arguing that it’s obviously too right-wing.
I don’t see any other publication doing this kind of analysis of themselves, pointing out the mistakes they’ve made in the past.
Even in this article they mention “The Economist was convinced by the false claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction”, something they remind the reader of each time the Iraq War is discussed. I remember an article from 2017 that said the Economist got it wrong, while a less honest publication wouldn’t have.
It’s more remarkable considering that the economist’s articles and opinions are published without the authors details. So when an article gets it wrong, it reflects poorly on the economist as a whole. They can’t simply blame the previous guy, it’s their fault.
They’ll be talking about how they got the Iraq War wrong as long as someone mentions it even in passing 50 years from now. That’s candour I appreciate.
> We asked it [GPT-5.5] to assess whether each leader had made a falsifiable claim about the future as part of its main thesis. About 1,400 did. We then extracted those predictions, and asked the AI to mark out of ten both how contrarian the leader’s outlook was at the time and how accurate the prediction turned out to be. We ran those queries several times and took an average.
I understand why it wouldn’t be feasible for a human to do this, but I’m quite sceptical about an AI assessing how accurate predictions turned out to be/how contrarian they were at the time. It seems like that would depend a lot on what sources it chooses, be liable to hallucination or getting poisoned by bad sources, etc. They don’t mention whether they used independent queries for each prediction either, or whether it was doing multiple sequentially.
Given that LLMs can’t really distinguish prompt from instructions etc, I’m sceptical that they can reason particularly well about things like how contrarian a view was at a particular point in time.
I thought the same while reading this - I can easily imagine the AI using hindsight to affect "how contrarian the leader's outlook was at the time", in a way that's similar to how we often do the same.
Would be interesting to do a similar analysis but maybe pushing the AI to search the web for articles/other reporting written during that time, to at least correct for that bias a little bit.
> We ran those queries several times and took an average.
The whole thing is bizarre. They could at least have drawn 100 samples and evaluated the model's response. But no, they ran it a few times and hoped that the slight randomness in sampling magically resulted in a balanced assessment of accuracy and contrariness, at some point in time for which we don't even know how much training data there was, nor if that data accurately reflects the opinions of that time. But hey, we've got a graph, so it must be true.
How can people be so stupid?
> cheap bioethanol ... [has] yet to bring about the breakthroughs we prophesied.
> I understand why it wouldn’t be feasible for a human to do this, but I’m quite sceptical about an AI assessing how accurate predictions turned out to be/how contrarian they were at the time.
Quite the contrary actually. The economist has a fairly consistent editing style that gets enforced, so its writing style is very linear and very consistent, fairly easy to “understand” for and advanced llm like GPT-5.5
You assert that, but can you prove it? Likewise I can say that the model is biased towards rating the Economist's claims as 'mainstream' and 'bang on' because as a high-profile publication those claims are repeated elsewhere and hence up-weighted.
I could be wrong - my point is, how would we know?
> The reason why the Economist articles all read the same is that they go through a process called "subbing" or sub-editing by the same small group of editors who own the Economist's "voice".
> I interned at the Economist one summer in college and wrote two articles for it - the published articles bore a small relationship to what I had submitted. The sub-editors seemed to be mostly George Smiley-type Oxford and Cambridge PhD's of a certain age with an eclectic range of expertises, as far as I recall.
One should do this analysis for various politicians, political parties, TV and news media and so on.
How do we know how good or bad the Economist is if we have no other source to compare against? Presumably it isn't trivial to predict the outcome of millions of people's reactions to all the complicated things that are happening to them.
I like to say, traders and people you put money on the line are often far more honest about economic policy, than economic influencers like The Economist.
Taleb made a lot of money trading, his firm failed but running a successful business is not trivial and his ideas ended up working when he took up an advisory role rather than an executive role. Unlike other financial "influencers", he actually seems to understand mathematics to a high degree.
They are the consensus. Making up stories to support the consensus is their job.
Of course they're reliably wrong. The stories are immoral by default and often objectively insane. But the Serious People either believe them, or put a lot of money and effort into making sure politicians and the media repeat them.
The public don't set policy and don't read The Economist, so they're handed their beliefs by other means.
The major crime of media is misframing as opposed to being wrong.
> The Economist was convinced by the false claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction
The issue here is not whether or not the Iraqis had any weapons of any type, the issue is whether the US has a basic right to travel to the opposite side of the globe and invade random countries. One of the issues the anti-Trump crowd has right now coming down on his crazy and unprovoked attacks on Iran has been that it is absolutely an established pattern of US behaviour and he's well within normal practice. Trump is even claiming it is because of WMDs! Again! Eventually at least, after he tried a few other excuses first. "He's lying" doesn't cut much ice because that is pretty normal when the US goes to war and it usually isn't particularly subtle. The only difference from the Economist's perspective is how enthusiastically the reporters want to pretend they believe the obvious mistruths.
Anyway, that rant aside, the issue is more that the Economist is pretending that the unknowable is knowable rather than that they get it wrong more often or not than anyone else. It doesn't seem theoretically possible to predict the price of things more than "up", "down" and "assume it does what it always does". Mapping out the supply/demand curve and confidently forecasting how it could shift in the short term requires knowledge of all actors, their preferences, options and operational constraints. Even for a relatively superficial forecast. Who's got that sort of modelling firepower?
They had some months ago an article about affordability crisis in US and a lot of statistics how it is not a thing. Seemed very convincingl but then when you looked at the numbers more closely, they didn’t seem to give att all as strong support to their claims as they. I can’t remember details anymore, but I would wager it came down to the fact that US has insane amounts of wealth, but a lot of Americans are not very well off, and healthcare, debts etc. weights down pn even the middle class. To my memory none of this was in the article, which seemed a blatant omission to the point of making the whole thing more a piece of propaganda.
I somehow expected them to have statisticians and data journalist working for them, but perhaps my assumption was just silly. This article seems to point that they do not, because as pointed elsewhere, this sort pf LLM-heavy approach is far from trustworthy.
They're capitalists before they're economists. If you predict the future correctly, you can make money. If you predict it incorrectly, you lose money. Alas.
Lol @ the use of "bête noire", which is of course a way to avoid the old racist saying of you made a hugely and catastrophic mistake ... saying you were black-faced. But surely in French, it's fine, right?
Long-time economist subscriber here. This feels too much like a "look what the AI said" sort of article for my tastes.
That said, though The Economist clearly has flaws I have yet to find something better. A weekly, sober, well-written newspaper is a hard thing to find.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 61.5 ms ] threadBetteridge's law wrapping a paywall wrapping an AI piece masquerading as domain-specific analysis.
Their writing style is probably the cleanest in the industry and they always point out potential conflict of interest even though I've never seen the write anything really positive about the companies Exor controls (Stellantis, Philips, etc).
There are a number of examples of this (e.g. the Iraq war).
They also use a lot of hedging language to cover their behinds when they make predictions. Most of them are winks and nudges.
Still, the quality of The Economist's writing is in a league of its own. No denying that.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-worst-magazine-in-am...
I notice it because I've been reading it for 20+ years. In the last 10 years it has taken a notable turn to the left. Whatever your viewpoint, the "tone" and "lean" of the magazine has shifted in the last decade. It's still a good source of information and I do read it every week.
Even in this article they mention “The Economist was convinced by the false claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction”, something they remind the reader of each time the Iraq War is discussed. I remember an article from 2017 that said the Economist got it wrong, while a less honest publication wouldn’t have.
It’s more remarkable considering that the economist’s articles and opinions are published without the authors details. So when an article gets it wrong, it reflects poorly on the economist as a whole. They can’t simply blame the previous guy, it’s their fault.
They’ll be talking about how they got the Iraq War wrong as long as someone mentions it even in passing 50 years from now. That’s candour I appreciate.
I understand why it wouldn’t be feasible for a human to do this, but I’m quite sceptical about an AI assessing how accurate predictions turned out to be/how contrarian they were at the time. It seems like that would depend a lot on what sources it chooses, be liable to hallucination or getting poisoned by bad sources, etc. They don’t mention whether they used independent queries for each prediction either, or whether it was doing multiple sequentially.
Given that LLMs can’t really distinguish prompt from instructions etc, I’m sceptical that they can reason particularly well about things like how contrarian a view was at a particular point in time.
Would be interesting to do a similar analysis but maybe pushing the AI to search the web for articles/other reporting written during that time, to at least correct for that bias a little bit.
The whole thing is bizarre. They could at least have drawn 100 samples and evaluated the model's response. But no, they ran it a few times and hoped that the slight randomness in sampling magically resulted in a balanced assessment of accuracy and contrariness, at some point in time for which we don't even know how much training data there was, nor if that data accurately reflects the opinions of that time. But hey, we've got a graph, so it must be true.
How can people be so stupid?
> cheap bioethanol ... [has] yet to bring about the breakthroughs we prophesied.
Oh.
Quite the contrary actually. The economist has a fairly consistent editing style that gets enforced, so its writing style is very linear and very consistent, fairly easy to “understand” for and advanced llm like GPT-5.5
I could be wrong - my point is, how would we know?
> The reason why the Economist articles all read the same is that they go through a process called "subbing" or sub-editing by the same small group of editors who own the Economist's "voice".
> I interned at the Economist one summer in college and wrote two articles for it - the published articles bore a small relationship to what I had submitted. The sub-editors seemed to be mostly George Smiley-type Oxford and Cambridge PhD's of a certain age with an eclectic range of expertises, as far as I recall.
How do we know how good or bad the Economist is if we have no other source to compare against? Presumably it isn't trivial to predict the outcome of millions of people's reactions to all the complicated things that are happening to them.
Hardly your typical economist op ed writer.
Of course they're reliably wrong. The stories are immoral by default and often objectively insane. But the Serious People either believe them, or put a lot of money and effort into making sure politicians and the media repeat them.
The public don't set policy and don't read The Economist, so they're handed their beliefs by other means.
> The Economist was convinced by the false claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction
The issue here is not whether or not the Iraqis had any weapons of any type, the issue is whether the US has a basic right to travel to the opposite side of the globe and invade random countries. One of the issues the anti-Trump crowd has right now coming down on his crazy and unprovoked attacks on Iran has been that it is absolutely an established pattern of US behaviour and he's well within normal practice. Trump is even claiming it is because of WMDs! Again! Eventually at least, after he tried a few other excuses first. "He's lying" doesn't cut much ice because that is pretty normal when the US goes to war and it usually isn't particularly subtle. The only difference from the Economist's perspective is how enthusiastically the reporters want to pretend they believe the obvious mistruths.
Anyway, that rant aside, the issue is more that the Economist is pretending that the unknowable is knowable rather than that they get it wrong more often or not than anyone else. It doesn't seem theoretically possible to predict the price of things more than "up", "down" and "assume it does what it always does". Mapping out the supply/demand curve and confidently forecasting how it could shift in the short term requires knowledge of all actors, their preferences, options and operational constraints. Even for a relatively superficial forecast. Who's got that sort of modelling firepower?
I somehow expected them to have statisticians and data journalist working for them, but perhaps my assumption was just silly. This article seems to point that they do not, because as pointed elsewhere, this sort pf LLM-heavy approach is far from trustworthy.
You can imagine some narcissistic abuser saying the same thing.
Maybe "not always wrong" isn't the bar you should be shooting for.
Why "alas?" They wanted an economic collapse?
That said, though The Economist clearly has flaws I have yet to find something better. A weekly, sober, well-written newspaper is a hard thing to find.
they are good at schemas that contain specific criteria, a list of objectives that apply to the whole dataset
that then can be reduced to a fraction, 1/10, 8/10, 9/10
they didnt do that here so run the query again when your rate limit is lifted