Is The Economist Always Wrong?

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.

It’s always wrong when it really matters.

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

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).

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.