Disappointingly this is merely about the accuracy or otherwise of The Economist's predictions, not the rightness or otherwise of their world-view.
Is The Economist Always Wrong?
41–50 of 84 posts
Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?
#42One 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.
Economists actually don't do that. They only use math. It's why they always get it wrong- they ignore the social sciences.
That's not true at all, first of all economics is a social science, secondly I think what you think is ignored is the whole branch of behavioural economics.
Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?
#43I 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…
Nobody ever recognizes themselves as extremist.
I'm pretty sure some people do. Luddites, for example.
Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?
#44> 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 feasibl…
> 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.
Oh.
Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?
#45I 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…
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.
Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?
#46I 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…
Nobody ever recognizes themselves as extremist.
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.
Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?
#47> 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?
Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?
#48I 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…
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…
Having similar thoughts at times. What are you reading nowadays?
Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?
#49> 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?
Maybe the Economist wanted to provide good analysis for their readers and they feel sorry that they failed.
Re: Is The Economist Always Wrong?
#50Most of the time, especially when it comes to China. Every front page article on China has been wrong for at least the last decade.