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Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?

#261

Post by wpietri »

musk_micropenis wrote: post #257
wpietri wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that I disagree with some of the right-wing framings, but I don't object on that account. I've never entirely agreed with The Economist, but that hasn't kept me from enjoying it and finding it useful. But the US right has from my perspective gone insane. Take as an example the belief that Trump won the 2020 election. A majority of Republicans (and only Republicans, not independents, Democrats, or people ou…

> And unfortunately, it's not confined to the US. From Boris Johnson to Jair Bolsonaro to Viktor Orban and well beyond, there are a lot of politicians on the right who you can't really call conservative in that they, like Trump, have repudiated a lot of traditional conservative values like honesty, accuracy, and integrity. > My problem is that the Economist, whose tone for me has always been one of cool reason, whose…

> So your claim that The Economist is determined to "both-sides" every discussion

This is not a claim I made. And you generally don't seem to have come to grips with my point.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?

#262

Post by nuc1e0n »

I have similar feelings about the magazine. I think a lot of the oddness of their views are down to the writers not really being 'digital natives'. There's a hint of them being slightly confused and fearful when it comes to stories with a technological angle to them.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?

#263

Post by musk_micropenis »

dpacmittal wrote: post #48
nerdawson wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …would like to see an alternative that is at the same quality level as the Economist (but with more neutral reporting and individual author names given)… More publications should remove the byline. Individual attribution incentivises journalists to try and stand out which typically means making intentionally inflammatory statements.

Interesting, my first thought was that attribution will add accountability and authors would be more careful of their words.

Many journalists today seem more interested in increasing their Twitter followers than being accountable.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?

#264

Post by rcarr »

Had a quick look and couldn’t see this suggestion anywhere else so apologies if is has already been mentioned. Why not bypass these kinds of magazines all together and subscribe to a few writers or publications on substack? There is some very high quality stuff on there and you can explore your particular interests deeper. Some good places to start might be the Pragmatic Engineer for tech posts and Glenn Greenwald for investigative journalism.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?

#265

Post by otikik »

slowhand09 wrote: post #191
crazygringo wrote: post #162

I see this claim in nearly every HN thread about the Economist -- that it's declined in quality. And it baffles me because, having read it for 20+ years and gone back for research to read plenty of articles from further back... I just don't see it at all. It's the same market-based, socially progressive, pragmatic international strongly opinionated journalism it's always been. Sometimes I think the way it characteriz…

I think its perspective. Drawing a parallel to Elon Musk. He says his political leanings haven't changed. Draw a line marked Far Left, Left, Sort of Left, Middle, Sort of Right, Right, Far Right. He says he was Left or Sort of Left, but somebody dragged the line way to the left. He is where he always was, but the line has moved.

Well there’s no “left” on the United States, so he’s partially right.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?

#266

Post by Manuel_D »

wpietri wrote: post #252
Manuel_D wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More reputable sources find that polarization is largely symmetrical: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/section-1-gr...

That is not a more reputable source. The XKCD thing is a graph of highly regarded and more rigorous social science work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_(scaling_method) Further, I think the Pew stuff is flawed in a number of ways. One, it comes after the Reagan era, missing a time DW-NOMINATE shows as important to right-wing polarization. Two, it doesn't include the Trump era, when polarization hugely spiked.…

DW-NOMINATE didn't create the buckets "far-left", "left", etc. DW-NOMINATE is just a method of marking plots on a graph [1]. The categories of far-left, left, etc. come from drawing boundaries on that graph and giving everyone inside that region a label. Where to draw these boundaries hugely influences the results. Give someone else task of defining the boundaries and you can easily achieve the completely opposite result: like gerrymandering, you can define boundaries on the DW-NOMINATE chart to fit your desired outcome.

Furthermore, there's only 535 members of Congress, out of 300+ million Americans. DW-NOMINATE only examines a very very narrow segment of the population.

By comparison, the Pew survey was based on directly asking people their positions on various issues and measuring political uniformity. This didn't involve the highly subjective task of drawing regions on a chart and deciding these people are center left, these people are far left, etc. Instead it examined how likely people were to have uniform versus heterodox views. It also didn't exclusively study on politicians, it used representative sampling of the general population.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_(scaling_method)#/med...

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?

#267

Post by otikik »

wpietri wrote: post #223
slowhand09 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its perspective. Drawing a parallel to Elon Musk. He says his political leanings haven't changed. Draw a line marked Far Left, Left, Sort of Left, Middle, Sort of Right, Right, Far Right. He says he was Left or Sort of Left, but somebody dragged the line way to the left. He is where he always was, but the line has moved.

Nah. We live in an age of asymmetric polarization. XKCD has a good rendering of the DW-NOMINATE data. Look especially at the US House since Reagan: https://xkcd.com/1127/ The right has moved far more than the left. Just looking at today's news, we find a prominent right-wing activist was convicted of plotting to overthrow the government: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63802649 The only area I think you coul…

The Democrats are seen as right wing where I’m from.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?

#268

Post by otikik »

biophysboy wrote: post #208
scythe wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I noticed about The Economist is that every so often they'll bring up some interesting criticism of a widely held view. Then a few days later they'll publish an article vigorously supporting the Current Thing. A particularly obvious example was when they had a column about Ukraine from John Mearshimer, and the various follow-ups. They also ran that takedown of Mohammed bin Salman but periodically tout the u…

This is an interesting perspective. Is it harder to maintain these relationships now than before? If so, why?

Concentration of wealth could be one reason. Getting one petrol mogul angry in the 80s was no biggie, today’s billionaires will literally buy your whole newspaper out.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?

#269

Post by systemvoltage »

slowhand09 wrote: post #191
crazygringo wrote: post #162

I see this claim in nearly every HN thread about the Economist -- that it's declined in quality. And it baffles me because, having read it for 20+ years and gone back for research to read plenty of articles from further back... I just don't see it at all. It's the same market-based, socially progressive, pragmatic international strongly opinionated journalism it's always been. Sometimes I think the way it characteriz…

I think its perspective. Drawing a parallel to Elon Musk. He says his political leanings haven't changed. Draw a line marked Far Left, Left, Sort of Left, Middle, Sort of Right, Right, Far Right. He says he was Left or Sort of Left, but somebody dragged the line way to the left. He is where he always was, but the line has moved.

These days, I agree more with Republicans than Democrats. It used to be exclusively Democrats during Obama days.

I've always been a classical liberal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

These values are unthinkable for progressives today.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?

#270

Post by otikik »

peteey wrote: post #149
throwaway2037 wrote: post #123

You might add https://www.spiegel.de/international/ to your list. It is free and well written. The good thing about Financial Times: It is a UK publisher, not US-based, so the reporting on the US is more skeptical and nuanced. Less screechy. To be fair, I avoid almost all of the opinion pieces except for Martin Wolf, because he is basically writing an economics column. The rest is rather inflammatory (much lower edit…

>more skeptical and nuanced Than what? The Economist is UK based too. The Economist tends to favor the US because the Economist supports liberal democracy and free trade worldwide. The Unites States is the only country who can and does defend those values. Europe cannot arm Ukraine against Putin. Japan cannot dispute China's claims rights to Taiwan or the ocean.

I don’t need to read the Economist any more because everything I needed to know was on this comment.
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