Is The Economist Always Wrong?

kybernetikos

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.

mrkeen

The internet of 2026. Betteridge's law wrapping a paywall wrapping an AI piece masquerading as domain-specific analysis.

lowbloodsugar

It’s always wrong when it really matters.

sapphicsnail

https://archive.is/dFnBu

thescriptkiddie

rare example of a question in the headline where the answer is yes

atoav

"We investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong"

epolanski

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).

testdelacc1

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.

mcintyre1994

> 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.

t43562

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.

memoriyato3

to quote Taleb: those who can, do (trade). those who can't, write about it (financial press)

WithinReason

They should have checked if they are more accurate than the consensus, the data doesn't show this.

roenxi

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?

delis-thumbs-7e

I’ve noticed The Economist having odd ways of interpreting statistics and data, and this article makes me even less trustful.

ZeroGravitas

What a slimy headline. You can imagine some narcissistic abuser saying the same thing. Maybe "not always wrong" isn't the bar you should be shooting for.

andyjohnson0

Disappointingly this is merely about the accuracy or otherwise of The Economist's predictions, not the rightness or otherwise of their world-view.

NordStreamYacht

> By contrast, when we suggested in April that oil prices were likely to rise further, we were out on a limb. Alas, we were dead wrong. Why "alas?" They wanted an economic collapse?

SanjayMehta

Most of the time, especially when it comes to China. Every front page article on China has been wrong for at least the last decade.

spwa4

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?

loughnane

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.