Did you know that Boris doesn’t know who won the battle of Stalingrad? If you did not know this, please continue not to know it, because it is not in fact true. Should you encounter a reader of The Economist, however (one of life’s occasional joys of which I am now deprived by the lockdown), you may be told that Boris’ biography of Sir Winston Churchill reveals this and other remarkable lacunae in our current PM’s historical knowledge – told in a tone of great certainty and with the firmest assurance that any milder speculations you offer (for what Boris might have said to appear to mean such things) are not possible, so established are the facts.
I have never once in my entire life given money to The Economist in exchange for the doubtful privilege of reading it (and see very much less than no reason whatever to begin now), so I encounter copies but rarely in airplane lounges and on other people’s coffee tables. I therefore cannot tell you whether Economist readers believe this because an Economist writer once told them that or implied it, or merely because reading The Economist renders one credulous of such urban legends (insofar as the habit of reading The Economist does not reveal that one already is).
So astonished was I to be assured of this claim (by the undoubtedly educated and well-read) as a matter both unsurprising and beyond all doubt, that I have now once in my entire life given money to Boris (not to some cause he also espouses) in exchange for a copy of his Churchill biography – something I deduce Economist-readers are more loath to do even than I am to buy their rag. It struck me as a more primary source for verification than tracking down whatever years-old copy of The Economist had reviewed it or made a passing reference to it, or tracing the origin of its readers’ urban legends about it.
I was not surprised to learn that Boris knows what the gardener, the hairdresser and even the teenager all know – that Stalingrad did not end well for Adolf. I was not surprised to find I was correct in my pre-purchase guess that some throwaway one-liner about how far Adolf got despite Churchill (to suggest how dangerously further he might have got without Churchill) would be the sole basis for the bizarre claim that Boris didn’t. But after reading right through the book I am very surprised to discover just how vicious and/or deranged a reviewer would have to be to pretend and/or imagine that the text even remotely suggests such a thing (and likewise for the other claims).
That, however, is secondary. In her study of anti-semitism, Hannah Arendt explains that establishing the history of how ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ was forged is secondary. The historian’s primary subject is that the forgery is being believed. That someone – maybe originally some writer for The Economist but maybe, for all I know, originally just some reader of it holding forth to other readers in an upscale SW1 pub – claimed that Boris did not know a historical fact so famous that even an update of ‘1066 and all that’ might call it ‘memorable’, is secondary. The greater strangeness is that this claim is being believed – not by Jeremy two-Es Corbyn and his Momentum followers but by at least a few highly educated people who, in the late 1980s, were voting for Thatcher’s and Reagan’s economic policies even as they virtue-signalled disdain for their populism. What goes on in otherwise-intelligent minds to let a person move from that to this? How can their sense of reality be so deficient that they can be told Boris does not even know who won Stalingrad and still hear no alarm bell, no, “Maybe I should just check whether even Boris could really not know even that”?
The Economist was founded in 1843, not so long before Mill explained that democracy works best when:
“the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided (which in their best times they have always done) by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few.” (‘On Liberty’, John Stewart Mill, 1859)
By this definition, The Economist has always been just what it claims to be: ultra-liberal. It is said that a senior editor once gave a junior colleague terse advice on how to write his first Economist leader article:
âPretend you are God.â
The Economist has sometimes changed its mind in fact – it was rather late to abandon its Keynsianism for monetarism in the 1980s but it did. What never changes is the unapologetic arrogant smugness of a pretence that one suspects senior editors do not always recall is pretence. The Economist’s latest editor, a woman named Beddoes, is a Keynsian who thought Obama was wonderful. She belongs irredeemably to those whom Dominic Cummings described as:
always writing about how âshockingâ things are to them â things that never were as low probability events as they imagined
Brexit winning, Trump as president, Boris as PM – how shocking that the omniscience of pretend-God be challenged by such unforeseen events. Late last year, I was aware from my acquaintance how much Economist-readers loved Fintan O’Toole’s ‘explanation’ that Brexit arose from the idiocy of backward-looking British voters (Fintan O’Toole: ‘Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain’, published November 2019). Fintan laughed when Brexit-supporting reviewers warned him to worry instead about a real ugliness in his own Southern Irish electorate – until he was again shocked by an Ăire election result that was (regrettably but foreseeably) never such a low-probability event as he and EU-negotiation-supporting taoiseach Varadkar imagined. (Corbyn’s success in 2017 is one on-balance-hopeful analogy to draw; there are others.)
It is said of communists that they think their party is God – a God sadly lacking the attributes of forgiveness and absolution. People who have the sense to know communism is stupid can still be very wilfully deluded about how much they themselves understand and how unshocking it should be to be proved not merely wrong but clueless.
So what is the UK equivalent of ‘NeverTrumper’? We all know what ‘Guardian-reader’ means. Is it time to be aware what ‘Economist-reader’ can mean?
You sound like a young man, Niall. I mean, a man who has never come across The Economist of the 1980s and 1990s. That Economist was very much worth reading in my opinion, and in fact shaped my political views for a couple of decades. I started reading it in 1983 and only stopped at the time of the Cartoon Jihad, when The Economist complained both about the xenophobia of the Danish government, and the fact that other publications did not publish the cartoons (while avoiding themselves to show the cartoons).
The way i see it, once you embrace multiculturalism, you are bound to reject libertarianism eventually. That is as true for individuals as for publications.
But i’d like to hear Paul Marks’ opinion on when The Economist started going downhill. He is about my age, i believe.
Regular Samizdata commenter Paul Marks has been pointing out the utterly shite nature of the Economist, and its tone of a supercilious sixth-former, for many years.
I rarely bother with it.
Snorri Godhi (April 5, 2020 at 5:59 pm), one of the key points of my post is that in the 80s (which I am old enough to recall đ ), it would not have been at all obvious either to me and my now-Brexit-supporting friends, or to my and their Economist-reading friends and acquaintance, that somewhere buried deep in our respective ideas was something that could draw us so far apart politically. We voted for Thatcher and Reagan against the Dems and Labour. So did they. We mocked many a PC excess of those days. So did they.
It is true that I never bought The Economist even back then, but I was not shy of reading it when I came across a copy at a friend’s house or in a reading rack. Very little things (more often than not EU-related) that I remember clearly noticing in the late 80s as (in a consistent way) just a bit odd, just a bit off, now in retrospect seem diagnostic for who would go which different way, but they seemed small enough (when I even noticed them) back then. The strength of my critical tone owes not a little to hindsight.
Very interesting comment, Niall. Yet i am an exception: a former Economist reader who is now closer to you and your fellow Brexiteers than to The Economist. (Though i do think that too many Brexiteers get too Keynesian in their dogmatic opposition to the euro.)
Also, i seem to remember that on some issues The Economist went back and forth. For instance, the Monarchy, the EU, and global warming. The Economist stood by Bjorn Lomborg when Nature, Science, and Scientific American ganged up on him. The Economist also thrashed the EU Constitution when it was finalized.
With hindsight, the only thing (of the things that i remember) which seems problematic to me, is that they dismissed the potential problems of multiculturalism. But who cared about multiculturalism back in the 1990s? I didn’t. I should have, but i didn’t.
I used to love that magazine. Even paid for it. Back then my two favorite monthlies were The Economist and Scientific American, both of which subsequently turned into garbage.
and Eric, and Paul Marks too I think – I speculate Paul would not have written recently that he felt ‘betrayed’ by The Economist if he had not had a subscription to cancel. Yes, the experimentum crucis is not having once read it but continuing to do so. I (flatter myself that I ?) occasionally saw revealing hiccoughs in it back in the late 80s, but save for their enhancing my true-Scots reluctance to part with actual money for it, they caused me little enough concern back then.
They’re doing the same today over China, ‘evenhandedly’ urging Trump and Xi to both of them cool the rhetoric (though probably in language phrased to avoid any such plebeian spit infinitive đ ). Just another
as I (helped by Staghounds) quoted Conquest not long ago, commenting on a recent post with some relevance to this one.
You may be rght of some Brexitteers elsewhere FAIK, but Keynsians are thin on the ground hereabouts (I am certainly not one). I accept (with some regret, of course) the electoral correctness of the calculation Dominic Cummings made in 2016, and the order of events that entails.
One reason the remoaners may have thought they could pull off ignoring the electorate last year is they had recently successfully done so. The 2010 election saw a healthy win for parties with loud remedy-the-deficit manifestoes who had all the honeymoon opportunity they could wish – anyone remember “There is no more money”? The coalition, the opposition, the MSM and the civil service between them ensured that what had been voted for was not done, just described as if done – not unlike May’s Brexit deal. There is a political task of recovering from that to complete before any economic recovery can start. Pity about the finances of it, but we are where they’ve put us. I think about how much worse it could have been, swallow my chagrin at how much better it might have been, and consume my soul in patience.
I’m with Snorri.
I read the Economist through the nineties and it was a serious and informative read. Apart from its comment on events and issues with which one is relatively familiar, it also contained some very informative reporting on parts of the world of which I knew nothing. And while that could have been an opportunity for me to be misled there was a strong sense of “objectivity” in that report, in the sense of being disinterested: we don’t have a dog in these fights.
Nowadays, there is no part of its reporting (just as with everything else) that exists only to inform: reports of foreign affairs are just the raw material with which to paint a narrative that is entirely Frankfurt-school ideological indoctrination. They are not information about foreign events, they are a teaching opportunity for how to think (and who to hate).
I have no time for this rag any more. But unlike most such publications, I mourn the loss of what it used to be.
I used to read the Economist too throughout the 1990s and only stopped when it went full identitarian. In the 1980s and 90s, they were my first encounter with a right of centre publication showing concern with civil liberties in the west. They had good pieces on communitarianism and discrimination âJonathan Rauchâs âShort guys finish lastâ is excellent (and can still be found online):
You wonât read that kind of stuff in the Economist today.
Eric
Yes, late seventies, eighties. Then came a period when every month Scientific American, seemed obsessed with nuclear missiles and strategy, I stopped reading. I stopped my sub to the Economist in the early 90s but still picked up a copy from time to time. But it must be ten years since I last bother to even flick through a copy on the newstand.
Ah, the Economist.
I remember back in college – 1979 or so – everybody had a subscription. Didn’t matter your political bent. It was new here in America then. It represented the apogee of international economic thought.
Most importantly, a copy of The Economist sitting in your dorm room gave you a certain cachet with the more intelligent women.
(I, of course, bought it for the articles.)
Yes it is the smug arrogance that is annoying.
Even when I agree with the Economist (and I sometimes do) I feel uneasy about agreeing with them on this or that – because of their horrible attitude. They do not care about getting the facts right, and they do not care about making a logical argument – they just decide what is the “correct” line and then deliver it, sneering and sneering and sneering at the “common herd” I might think differently.
It it terrible that they represent a common attitude among the “educated” establishment elite – and, sadly, they do.
Very good post Niall.
On the historical characters. I can not stand Walter Bagehot and J.S. Mill, the former being “concede whatever is safe to concede” in terms of new government spending to (supposedly) please the new voters under the Act of 1867 and also being a bailout-for-bankers supporter (yes under certain conditions blah, blah, blah). As for J.S. Mill, Maurice Cowling cynically summed him up – perhaps too cynically but it is fun giving the account, J.S. Mill was someone who (may) have wanted the ILLUSION of democracy whilst really not wanting ordinary people to decide policy questions at all – Mr Mill (may) really wanted an educated elite of officials and writers (people like himself) to “guide” policy making (much like Rousseau and his “Lawgiver”) – replacing the old landowners who he hated. And what was the standard of Mr Mill’s own opinions? Were they really superior to opinions of other people?
In philosophy he followed Hobbes, Hume and Bentham (although with some tormented doubts) – in short human BEINGS do not (to Mr Mill) exist at all. He goes along with the darkness of Hume (which he calls “the light of Hume”) in holding that a thought does NOT mean a thinker.
In economics John Stuart Mill ignored the refutations of David Ricardo on the theory of rent and on the labour theory of value – and in his “Principles of Political Economy” (1848) Mr Mr thus mislead generations of students – as such people as Sir William “we are all socialists now” Harcourt (later the Chancellor of the Exchequer) got their economics from Mill’s book and thought there was no alternative view.
On land Mr Mill basically accepted a Henry George like view – thus turning some 19th century (and later) liberals into just about the OPPOSITE of Whigs – as the Whig position had been based on the independence of landowners. And, essentially, ignoring the refutations of the view of RENT on land of David Ricardo and his followers.
On industry – Mr Mill was, essentially, hostile to capitalists (industrialists), and he accepted (or half accepted) the worker coop view.
So if we take the J.S. Mill view – all land comes under state control, and industry is a load of worker coops in endless meetings. And, in terms of economic theory, the theory of value and the theory of land and rent is left an utter mess.
As for government spending “everyone agrees” that the state (national or local) should do X,Y,Z (and a lot of other things as well), because Mr Mill ignored everyone who did NOT agree. Indeed most British economists (unlike French ones in the same period – a point Rothbard was fond of making) seem to have been rather weak on opposing taxation and government spending.
I quite like James Wilson (the founder of the Economist) he was generally a free market, limited government man – it is true that he had no real answer for the banking mess, but who does? Like the late Murray Rothbard I would love to see an end to banker credit bubble ism – but unlike him as I grow older (“and more SENILE Paul” – pipe down at the back there) the less confident I become that it would be a simple thing to ban. Perhaps (perhaps) the best that can be done is to get rid of the Bank of England (and the other Central Banks) and enforce Contract Law and Bankruptcy Law – no “suspension of cash payments” and no “bank holidays”, if they do not pay the CASH they have contracted to pay (cash-on-the-nail) then they close then they go into ordinary bankruptcy.
It strikes me as a I sit here that I do not actually know what James Wilson’s position in the disaster in Ireland in the late 1840s was – did he denounce the massive TAX INCREASE (the Poor Law tax increases – and the demented Act of 1847, which dragged down areas of Ireland that had not gone bankrupt by making them pay for Poor Law Unions in other parts of Ireland, PLUs that had already gone under).
I apologise for my ignorance of James Wilson on Ireland – I hope he he denounced the insane policy of Sir Charles Trevelyan of “Irish Property Must Pay For Irish Poverty” via taxation (as if all taxes are not PASSED ON and undermine the economy generally – thus increasing the very poverty they are supposed to be fighting), but I do not know he did. I am ignorant of this – and, again, I apologise for that.
I do know that just before he died James Wilson was sent to India and made a mess of things (more taxes and paper “money”), but then it is normally a nightmare for an armchair critic to be given command. And, contrary to popular delusions, British policy in India was normally light years away from laissez faire – and was normally a bit of a mess.
“Paul GOOD NEWS! You are to be made Chancellor of the Exchequer, you are going to be in charge of sorting the economy out from the mess it is in! Paul why are you running away screaming – COME BACK, is power not what you have always wanted?”
I will make the point I have so often made before – but which needs to be made.
The policy of massive increases in TAXATION all over Ireland in the late 1840s is not “laissez faire”.
For some reason (and I do not know what it is) some writers (then and now) do not see massive taxation as an “intervention” in economic life.
I would point out that France had no “Poor Law” till at least the 1890s, really France did not have a large scale state system till after the First World War.
France had, till the Third Republic, no system of government schools either – although the government of Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) did subsidise private, Church, schools.
The Economist and Private Eye declined dramatically after 2000. I stopped my sub to PE in 2010 and have thrown away all my carefully archived copies. I stopped reading The Econ when it became clear that it thought the Euro a Good Thing, although to its credit it did criticise how it was set up. Otherwise from the mid-80s to 1999 I read it often, especially when living abroad.
And the level of a modern Economist writer is illustrated here.
I wonder if The Economist’s âPretend you are Godâ style was always about selling its readers on the illusion that they were the “more highly gifted and instructed One or Fewâ who had both a duty and an entitlement to “guide” the “Many” – that this was its business model (but unwittingly, as its editors bought into it too) much as Playboy’s business model was to sell its readers the illusion that they were suave international-jet-setting playboys.
This would explain why it has become what it so clearly is at this time of “the death of expertise”: the premier journal of those who are
[Added Later] Of course, it is sometimes even worse when they are not shocked: The Economist Refers To Chinese Businessman Disappearance As âRegulationâ And âBoosting Competition.â.