On Reading The Economist Again:Time for Some New Clichés

I've read The Economist off and on since the 60's. I've had an unbroken subscription since 1983. About two years ago, I went paperless. And I found that my actual reading of The Economist fell to almost zero.

This is remarkable. In the old days, I tried to make time to read it cover to cover. I used to joke that I should keep all the back issues so I could finish them in retirement. I used to tell my students that there was nothing I could teach them (that they need to know) that they could not learn by a year's conscientious reading of the Big E.

Earlier this month, what with some long plane flights and some (seemingly) longer airport waiting periods, for the first time in several years I read through two issues in a row. This ought to put me in a position to assess: why don't I (want to) do this all the time? Here are the usual suspects:

1. It's the no-paper thing. You really don't read anything you can't prop up on the breakfast table.


2. It's the competition. I have 50-75 feeds in my Google reader, and I can get what I need (including some predigested Economist stuff) from these.


3. It's the magazine itself. At some point around the beginning of Bush #2 (maybe the time when they started regional editions), it lost its mojo, and so I lost my Jones.

I can't quite rule any of these out, but here is a slightly different spin: I've learned what The Economist has to teach me. I never had any formal economics training (indeed, having majored in projectile vomiting, I never learned much in college, period). So aside from pure information, The Economist gave me a potted worldview: lessons in free-market economics, partisan but non-dogmatic, coupled with political centrism and cultural catholicity.

At the risk of oversimplifying to caricature, I suspect that threesome captures me pretty well, and I think I know where I got it. The trouble is, The Economist isn't teaching me anything new any more. Oh, in detail, sure. But I'm at the point where once I scan the headlines, I can pretty much guess--in the sense of "pretty much write"--the story they are going to tell.

That's too bad. I'm an old dog, but I could still learn a few new tricks--and so could they. As we used to say in the newspaper biz: "the boss says he is tired of the old clichés; go get us some new clichés."