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Is The Economist Always Wrong?

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Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#11

Post by hliyan »

epolanski wrote: post #8

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 (Stellant…

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.

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#13

Post by hliyan »

testdelacc1 wrote: post #10

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…

This is a very charitable reading of why The Economist does not have bylines.

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#14

Post by 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.

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#15

Post by amarcheschi »

hliyan wrote: post #11
epolanski wrote: post #8

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 (Stellant…

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.

I don't know why this is downvoted, in italy agnelli owned via Gedi group various newspapers and as you can imagine it's not ideal - although since this march group Gedi changed owner

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#16

Post by pydry »

epolanski wrote: post #8

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 (Stellant…

If you find a topic where reality lies outside of the overton window for western elites at the time theyll reliably get it wrong.

There are a number of examples of this (e.g. the Afghanistan and Iraq wars).

They usually use a lot of hedging language to cover their behinds when they make predictions, though, so their predictions are usually more nudges and winks than they are commitments.

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#17

Post by 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.

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#18

Post by IshKebab »

kybernetikos wrote: post #2

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.

There aren't that many points. It looks fine to me. (But I agree that is a common mistake.)

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#19

Post by SpecialistK »

hliyan wrote: post #13
testdelacc1 wrote: post #10

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…

This is a very charitable reading of why The Economist does not have bylines.

It is, and I'm aware of the less charitable (perhaps more likely) readings. But much of the time it isn't difficult to know who to attribute because they are explicitly featured in podcasts about the respective article.

Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?

#20

Post by hgomersall »

jimnotgym wrote: post #12
thescriptkiddie wrote: post #6

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

Isn't that the nature of futurology. You are always wrong in some way. That doesn't necessarily make it useless

Given that many economic predictions are really about pushing an agenda, they are not at all useless, or at least, would be better measured against that criteria. I suspect the reason we still have neoliberal economics is precisely because despite its manifest failures of prediction, it still pushes the right agenda to be supported.
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