Am I the only economist who does not read The Economist??Well, maybe the first one to confess to it.?No, it is not because I am too busy and don?t have the time.?It is a deliberate decision.?Call it a one-man boycott of ideology that masquerades too often as journalism.??
It wasn?t always like that. In fact, I used to love the magazine and its opinionated style.?It was such a refreshing read after American media!?I loved it so much that I preferred buying it at the news-stand at a higher price to subscribing, because I could get my hands on it faster that way.?When I spent a year out on the West Coast, my most important complaint was that The Economist arrived later there (on Mondays instead of Saturdays).?
But then I realised that the more I knew about a subject, the less The Economist was making sense.? Its one thing to be opinionated, another to be misinformed and arrogant at the same time.?After one too many articles in this mould, I simply stopped picking up the magazine.?I had a conversation recently with the new economics editor of the magazine (a KSG alum), who said I should take another look, but aside from an occasional thumbing through on a plane ride, I haven?t done so.????
[The other day], a friend told me in the hallway that The Economist had quoted me in its current issue. I went online, and there it was, a quote from this blog that opens a longish piece [hypertext] on the ?rule of law? and development.?But what struck me about the piece is how well it was done. Or how much I agreed with what was in there.?I thought the article got many of the nuances right, most importantly the distinction between the role of institutions in the short- versus long-run. While institutions ?rule? in the long run, in the short run there is a very weak relationship between economic growth and institutional reform.?
Dani Rodrik?s weblog rodrik.typepad.com/