Another kind of criticism comes from intellectually pretentious, slightly envious Yanks rather than class-embittered Brits. James Fallows, who once wrote speeches for President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, complained in a 1991 Washington Post piece that the Economist “unwholesomely purveys smarty-pants English attitudes on our shores.” This is about as valid—or invalid—as accusing the American-owned and -led International Herald Tribune or the European edition of the Wall Street Journal of “unwholesomely” purveying “smarty-pants” American attitudes on the shores of Europe and the United Kingdom.

Admittedly, there are times when the Economist leans a little heavily on plummy English props and mannerisms. Michael Lewis, the popular American financial writer and author of Liar’s Poker, once attributed the magazine’s sometimes laboriously polished prose and tone to the fact that the Economist “is written by young people pretending to be old people,” adding that if American readers “got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions.” This may be the reason almost all of the publication’s articles still lack bylines, much less accompanying photos of the writers. Besides, that hint of pseudo-Dickensian creakiness in its prose is part of the Economist’s charm and its distinctive brand. It also helps to explain its success among educated English speakers around the world who still prize good writing that requires a modicum of sophistication and literary grounding on the part of its readers rather than being written down to the lowest common denominator. As for Fallows, someone should have reminded him that, for the most part, “smarty-pants” tend to be much better writers than sans culottes.

The American journalist who has come closest to pinning down the Economist’s winning formula is Michael Hirschorn, in a perceptive essay in the July/August 2009 issue of the Atlantic. He suggests that the secret of the Economist’s success

is not its brilliance, or its hauteur, or its typeface. The writing in Time and Newsweek may be every bit as smart, as assured, as the writing in The Economist. But neither one feels like the only magazine you need to read. You may like the new Time and Newsweek. But you must—or at least, brilliant marketing has convinced you that you must—subscribe to The Economist.

This may explain how an idiosyncratic publication—produced by an allegedly pimply writing staff of about seventy-five from a cramped space in London’s St. James’s quarter—has proved to be David to rival American Goliaths such as Time and Newsweek.

SO MUCH for the Economist’s success. What about the quality of its content? Is it worthy of the pedestal on which it now perches? One way to find out is to look at how well the Economist’s running coverage and commentary stand up over time and after the fact. To do this I engaged in a twenty-two-week monitoring of the magazine, encompassing weekly issues from February 18 through July 14, 2012.

Although I have followed the Economist for most of my adult life, this meant immersing myself in each issue in a way I never had before. Twenty years ago, Microsoft’s Bill Gates said that one reason he didn’t have a TV set was that watching it wouldn’t leave him enough time to read each issue of the Economist from cover to cover. For the first—and probably the last—time in my life, I found myself emulating Bill Gates. Trudging through the Economist, week after week, I found I was watching less and less television, especially television news and documentaries of the “serious” sort which, even at their best, cannot convey as much information as a really well-written article.

Looking back on it now, in the very first issue I monitored there were several items that held up very well—and that addressed serious subjects ignored or oversimplified by most American media. The lead editorial (or, if you’re English, the leading leader) was entitled “Over-regulated America: The home of laissez-faire is being suffocated by excessive and badly written regulation.” It proved to be a compact, compelling condemnation of the ill-considered Dodd-Frank law Congress passed in 2010, concluding that it is

far too complex, and becoming more so. At 848 pages, it is 23 times longer than Glass-Steagall, the reform that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929. Worse, every other page demands that regulators fill in further detail. Some of these clarifications are hundreds of pages long. Just one bit, the “Volcker rule”, which aims to curb risky proprietary trading banks, includes 383 questions that break down into 1,420 subquestions.

This is likely one reason why “hardly anyone has actually read Dodd-Frank, besides the Chinese government and our correspondent in New York.”

Here, in a single page, the Economist addressed the overarching problem of runaway federal regulation and the legitimate concerns that can lead to bad legislation, providing strong supporting examples and powerful statistical data to back up its position. It wasn’t just interesting or convincing. It was useful; most readers would come away better informed on the subject than they had been before, even if they didn’t buy in to the Economist’s opinion on all points.

The second leader in the same issue, subtitled “The euro may survive brinkmanship over Greece, but the road to recovery will be long and hard,” was a prescient warning of the crisis to come within the euro zone due to stagnating economies and ruinous debt levels in Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain. The Economist definitely saw this one coming.

Less pressing but equally prescient was a third leader dealing with India’s often meddlesome, hectoring attitude toward weaker neighbors such as Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and even Pakistan. At a time when India’s diplomatic charm offensive was winning uncritical praise from Washington and most American media, the Economist took a more informed look at India’s increasingly imperious attitude toward its South Asian neighbors and the problems it could lead to.

Not so clear-sighted was the following week’s “Lexington” column on the Republican race for the presidential nomination. Although Peter David, author of the column, was a gifted journalist and had been based in Washington since 2009, this was his first full-time, on-the-ground experience of an American presidential campaign. Like most foreign journalists dropped into that surreal world for the first time, he seemed to be unduly influenced by the groupthink of the predominantly liberal Washington press corps. In his February 25 column, David unrolled a scenario that dramatically overestimated the influence of fringe elements in the Tea Party and the Christian Right while ignoring the essentially moderate-conservative alignment of rank-and-file Republican voters. So it came as no surprise that he bought into the widely held but mistaken view of liberal inside-the-Beltway pundits, declaring that:

It is now clear . . . that a large share of the party’s conservatives just do not like Mr Romney. This traps the party in a fratricidal exercise that could continue for months, if not all the way to the party convention in Tampa in August. Even if he loses next week in Michigan, Mr Santorum should pick up enough delegates to keep his hope alive. . . . There is new talk of an “open” convention, where no candidate has a majority and the call goes out for a white knight, if one can be found. Mr Obama is a lucky man.

Is that so?

The Economist’s lead editorial the next week demonstrated a clearer, more farsighted understanding of a very different kind of presidential election. Headlined “The beginning of the end of Putin: Vladimir Putin will once again become Russia’s president. Even so, his time is running out,” it foresaw the victory Putin’s brass-knuckle tactics would win at the polls. But it also foresaw its hollowness:

Everybody in Russia knows that Vladimir Putin . . . will be elected president on March 4th. This is not because he is overwhelmingly popular, but because his support will be supplemented by a potent mixture of vote-rigging and the debarring of all plausible alternative candidates. The uncertainty will come after the election, not before.

The March 17 Economist sported a cartoon cover suggesting that the recovery had finally arrived. A featured briefing on the American economy agreed, concluding that “economic recovery doesn’t have to wait for all of America’s imbalances to be corrected. It only needs the process to advance far enough for the normal cyclical forces of employment, income and spending to take hold. . . . it now seems that, at last, they have.”

Call it irrational exuberance, premature miscalculation or whatever. The Economist clearly jumped the gun on this one. In fairness, it was not alone in doing so. The conventional wisdom on Wall Street and among Washington movers and shakers at the time was that happy days were, indeed, here again. It is not very surprising that the conventional wisdom proved wrong yet again; it is, however, a little disappointing to find the Economist joining the errant chorus.

On a more positive note, by March 24 the Economist had finally sobered up about the race for the Republican presidential nomination. No more pipe dreams about a Tea Party rebellion derailing the Romney candidacy and leading to a brokered convention. Instead: “Mr Romney has won over half of the delegates awarded so far. That pace, if sustained, will be more than enough to secure him the nomination outright.” Better late than never.

Pullquote: One of the signature virtues of the Economist is its ability to spot and put into perspective quiet but important developments ignored by most of the mass media.Image: Essay Types: Book Review