to ‘professional boxing’, his host tells him to shut up: ‘Farebrother, you are talking through your hat.’8 Buyers usually do more than walk around with their copies, in other words: whether he or she is the leader of the free world, a business magnate, college freshman or, apparently, Sarah Palin and Steve Bannon – they also read it.
Investigative journalism is not a strength of the paper. What readers expect from the Economist are sharp didactic summaries and surprising numbers, which it provides on a grand scale. In a single issue, one may flit past e-commerce in China, mortgage fallout in Las Vegas, peace negotiations in the Middle East, the search for life on Mars, a new art museum in Qatar, and an obituary for an obscure South African explorer eaten by a crocodile. The first paper ever to compile and publish wholesale prices, it still devotes its back pages to data sets that change like shifting prisms onto the world economy: greenhouse gas emissions, growth forecasts, global remittances, the cost of a Big Mac. Treatment of any single issue is limited, outside of special reports, and articles can descend into parody – ‘as if the writer started out knowing that three steps must be taken immediately – then tried to think what those steps should be’.9 Range is accompanied by relentlessness: sucked under the foaming waves, the unfortunate explorer was served up as a fine specimen of the entrepreneurial spirit.10
Yet this strong institutional character, which sees an act of creative destruction in death, is also what makes it unique, preserved as it is by an equally unusual ownership structure designed to ‘let the editor run the paper as though it belonged to him’. In place since 1928, this structure gives the editor power over policy, salaries and employment; and puts between him or her and the board of directors four trustees, who sign off on share transfers and the appointment of chairmen and editors. In 2016, when Pearson sold its half of the Economist Group for £469 million to existing shareholders, this charter came into play, with voting rights capped at 20 per cent for the largest of them. Insulated from business pressure, editors have swelled the business. In 176 years, just seventeen have filled the position: all but one a man, and for the last hundred years almost exclusively graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. At least one staffer has called the striking lack of diversity in this ‘common room’ an asset, making it easier to maintain a stable, collective voice. The need for that will be obvious to any reader, as the most distinctive feature of the Economist by far is that articles in it are unsigned. With few exceptions, the hundred or so staff in London and abroad toil anonymously – common enough at nineteenth-century newspapers, but almost unheard of today. Individualism may be the editorial line, but as a result of this Victorian holdover, the editorial leaders are written in an unusually cooperative and collegial manner, as if guided by invisible hands.11
Anonymity was always designed to amplify the voice of the Economist. Today, so do the covers, with Photoshop acting as a slingshot for pop-cultural lèse-majesté: Kim Jong Il blasts into space as ‘Rocket Man’; Angela Merkel appears as Kurtz, groaning in horror at Greeks in ‘Acropolis Now’; Hu Jintao and Barack Obama are the cowboy lovers from Brokeback Mountain. The more hated the figure, the more lurid the caricature: Vladimir Putin has been a prohibition-era mobster with a gas pump for a gun, a chess piece, a spider, an ice cube, a shirtless tank driver. Faced with this sort of barrage, Silvio Berlusconi sued. Hero worship is less common, if not unknown. ‘Freedom Fighter’, above a halo of hair, was its memorial to a monochrome Margaret Thatcher.
Both covers and articles are belligerent but conversant with politicians and governments; whole countries are blamed or praised with breezy self-assurance. But this is not mere posturing. When a new leader appears on the global stage, especially one unknown to capital markets, or from a developing country that needs to tap them, he or she will make a pilgrimage to the offices of the Economist. Even Hugo Chávez paid homage in 2001, trying to ‘chat up the receptionists, two young black women, as if they were Venezuelan voters’. Luiz Inácio da Silva got a warmer welcome in 2006 for his plans to promote market reforms in Brazil, as well as asides about his diet. Michelle Bachelet had her tête-à-tête in 2014 ‘over herb tea in the Moneda palace’ in Santiago, assuring the Economist she would never put equality before growth.12 Latin American leftists are one thing. The paper is naturally still more solicited at home, where each year Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer briefs it on the budget over lunch at Downing Street.13 In the US, Barack Obama was the first president to write a signed editorial for it in 2016, before departing the White House.
‘How do you write like the Economist?’, a nervous new recruit, trying to compose his first leader for it, once asked. Simple, a senior editor replied. ‘Pretend you are God.’14
A Power unto the Powerful
This quality of omniscient narration was not dreamt up by sales managers, and even if they could account for the success of the paper in circulation terms, this would be a misleading measure of its importance. What truly sets the Economist apart is the way it has shaped the very world its readers inhabit, by virtue of three close relationships: to liberalism, to finance, and to state power. Launched at a watershed in the historical development of each, the Economist opened a new front in the mid-nineteenth century battle against the Corn Laws in Britain, aimed less at partisans of the free trade in grain than at those wariest of it, above them: ‘the higher circles of the landed and monied interests’, in particular the commercial and financial hub of the City of London.15
That perspective paid. The Economist not only made money – turning a regular profit after just two years – it also made a name for its founder, James Wilson, a Scottish hat manufacturer who used the paper to catapult himself into politics. Elected to parliament in 1847, Wilson became a powerful financial secretary to the Treasury, and the first ‘Chancellor of the Indian Exchequer’, tasked with putting the British Raj on a sound fiscal footing in 1859. As Wilson stepped onto the steamer that would take him to India, the Chartered Bank he had co-founded – in part from Economist profits – was opening branches in Calcutta, Bombay, Shanghai and Hong Kong, with an eye to the opium traffic into China; this would become today’s Standard Chartered Bank, with over $660 billion of assets.16 By that time his paper had become indispensable as a conduit between a nascent Liberal Party in Whitehall and Westminster and the parts of the City of London most concerned with imperial and foreign affairs. This caught the attention of Karl Marx, who read the Economist not just for its indexes on global trade, but for its political worldview – the most striking depiction in Europe of the concerns of the ‘aristocracy of finance’, whose stake in ‘public credit’ required it to keep close track of ‘state power’.17
Over time, the Economist became even more deeply embedded in these circuits of money, power and ideas: editors advised chancellors on the currency, devised ground rules for running central banks and responding to financial panics, scanned the horizon for threats to British rule and British capital everywhere from Ireland to Egypt and Argentina – offering up the sort of political advice that markets themselves might, if only they could speak. Up to 1943, the paper had 10,000 subscribers, no more. But, as one editor pointed out at the time, in the past decade these had included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Benito Mussolini, Manuel Azaña, Heinrich Brüning and Adolf Hitler’s finance minister. Its centenary celebration in wartime London was stuffed to bursting with bankers, politicians, economists, diplomats and foreign dignitaries, eating smoked salmon, puffing cigars. ‘Never has so much been read for so long by so few,’ quipped another editor, riffing on Winston Churchill.18
In the second half of the twentieth century, the Economist reached across the Atlantic: the role it once played in the British Empire, it now undertook in the American. A literal bridge between them, star reporters now passed apprenticeships on Wall Street and in Washington, where they enjoyed special access from the start – collared by John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson in the marble corridors of Congress, enjoying personal lines to Ronald Reagan’s White House via George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and other pillars of the foreign-policy establishment. The intimacy of its advocacy of US hegemony,
