I’ve been a dedicated daily listener to Economist podcasts for at least 5 years and am starting to understand why other reviewers are saying its quality is degrading.
On today’s show on Inequality there was an embrace of Piketty and interviews stating that free market economics didn’t work as though it was fact and utterances of things like “post-neoliberal”.
I like the coverage but don’t want the Economist to become just another progressive MMT podcast where only writers who are way farther left than modern academic economists are interviewed and taken seriously.
As a monetarist and devout follower of resources like wtfhappenedin1971.com and also student of modern international neoliberal superpowers like Panama, Nigeria, the UAE, South Korea, Singapore etc. where the neoliberal miracle appears to still be working, it’s sad that the Economist still seems to view the world as just Europe and the US and to hold up the US as the only example of free markets worth paying attention to, which feels extraordinarily stale. It also feels like the Economist has forgotten that there’s a diverse set of economic philosophies and has almost comically placed itself ideologically among the devout post-WW2 continental European Keynsians who are so thoroughly pilloried in Daniel Yergin’s Commanding Heights, etc.
The US is a complex, highly government influenced and funded economy and to blindly accept the position that all of its problems lead back Reagan and Clinton is, to use a gen Z word, cringe in its bias at best and willfully one sided at worst. While the Economist’s international news coverage is still great, its actual economic coverage is only slightly less shallow than a CNN or New York Times.
I’ll give it a few more tries. Like I said I prefer a broad range of ideas so the progressive, Piketty influenced and MMT mantras are good too, but I’d also like to know for instance why the quality of life in the UAE and Singapore appears so great despite having no income tax whatsoever, and why the UK seems so stagnant that not only its economy but its population is collapsing, etc. or why Europe relies so heavily on the US for innovation in healthcare and technology despite being 3x larger in population, without Charlotte Howard’s stern motherly remonstration or Idris Calhoun’s upper crust east coast academic tut-tutism which often tends toward advocating for European style policy which as we’ve seen lead to economic stagnation, demilitarism, indebtedness, and population collapse which are all mocked on the world stage and seen more as a symptom of blind privilege and generational experience of wealth than a serious long-term set of rules to govern by