The Economist

• 1. Introduction

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  The Economist was born in 1843 with a single, urgent purpose: to kill a law. James Wilson, a Scottish economist and businessman, launched the newspaper to rally support for abolishing Britain's Corn Laws, a system of import tariffs that Wilson and his allies believed were choking the country's economy. The prospectus he published on the 5th of August 1843 laid out thirteen distinct areas of coverage, from parliamentary reports on free trade to agricultural topics drawing on geology and chemistry. Wilson described the entire enterprise as taking part in "a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress." That phrase still appears on the publication's imprint today.

  What is strange about The Economist is what it refuses to be. Widely considered a magazine, it insists on calling itself a newspaper. Its articles carry no bylines. Its fire engine red masthead, created by Reynolds Stone in 1959, is one of the most recognisable mastheads in print journalism. It claims an influential readership of business leaders and policy-makers, and two out of three of its American readers earn more than $100,000 a year. Yet it once ran the self-deprecating slogan "The Economist - not read by millions of people." The questions that follow are about how a publication launched to fight a tariff became one of the most debated and closely-watched papers in the world.

• 2. The Corn Laws and Karl Marx

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  When James Wilson circulated the first issue in 1843, the Corn Laws had been in place since 1815. They were import tariffs designed to protect British grain producers from foreign competition, and Wilson believed they were an obstacle to the free trade he regarded as the engine of national prosperity. The paper's prospectus called for "original leading articles, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day."

  The paper's advocacy was noticed by adversaries as well as allies. Karl Marx cited The Economist in his formulation of socialist theory, writing that "the London Economist, the European organ of the aristocracy of finance, described most strikingly the attitude of this class." Marx saw the paper not as a neutral observer but as the voice of a particular class interest. In 1915, Vladimir Lenin called it "a journal that speaks for British millionaires" and added that it held a "bourgeois-pacifist" position, supporting peace out of fear of revolution.

  The Economist's own engagement with financial controversy went beyond advocacy. In the currency disputes of the mid-nineteenth century, it sided with the Banking School against the Currency School, opposing the Bank Charter Act of 1844. The paper blamed the financial crisis of 1857 on what it called "a certain class of doctrinaires" who attributed commercial crises solely to excessive bank note issuance. The paper's own diagnosis pointed instead to variations in interest rates and a build-up of excess financial capital leading to unwise investments. That willingness to pick a side in technical economic debates would remain a defining feature.

• 3. The Anonymous Voice

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  Walter Bagehot served as editor from 1861 to 1877, and the paper named its Britain column after him in 1989. He became the embodiment of The Economist's intellectual spirit: precise, opinionated, and deeply engaged with constitutional questions. The tradition he helped establish, that individual articles carry no byline, has shaped the paper's identity ever since.

  The anonymity rule is not casual. Not even the editor's name is printed in the issue. The only signed article an editor writes during their entire tenure is the farewell piece on leaving the position. Author names appear in a handful of exceptions: when notable external figures contribute opinion pieces, when journalists compile special reports, for the Year in Review edition, and to flag potential conflicts of interest over book reviews. Writers refer to themselves in print as "your correspondent" or "this reviewer." The named opinion columns follow their own convention: a writer in the "Lexington" column might write "Lexington was informed" rather than use the first person.

  The rationale the editors give is that "collective voice and personality matter more than the identities of individual journalists." An academic study found that the anonymous ethos has strengthened three things: collective voice, talent and newsroom management, and brand strength. The arrangement is not without practical absurdity. One anonymous writer noted: "We have four staff members with the initials 'J.P.'" American author Michael Lewis criticised the practice in 1991, calling it a means to hide the youth and inexperience of staff writers. Despite this, Lewis included multiple Economist articles in his 2009 anthology about the 2008 financial crisis, Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity.

• 4. Circulation and Ownership

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  In 1844, The Economist's circulation stood at 1,800 copies. By 1850 it had reached 3,800, and by 1854 it was 4,300. The number dipped to 3,700 in 1877, recovered to 6,000 in 1920, and then accelerated sharply after 1945. By 1970 it had crossed 100,000 readers. From around 30,000 in 1960 it climbed to near 1 million by 2000, and to about 1.3 million by 2016. Geoffrey Crowther, the editor from 1938 to 1956, captured the paper's early sense of its own exclusivity: "Never in the history of journalism has so much been read for so long by so few."

  As of September 2025, combined print and digital circulation was reported at 1.255 million, though the paper can reach up to 5.1 million readers on a weekly average basis across its print and digital runs. Approximately 54% of all sales originate in the United States; the United Kingdom accounts for 14%, and continental Europe 19%.

  Ownership has shifted significantly over time. Pearson plc held a 50% shareholding through The Financial Times Limited until August 2015, when it sold that stake to the Italian Agnelli family's investment company, Exor, for £469 million. The paper simultaneously re-acquired a separate block of shares for £182 million. Other shareholders include Cadbury, Rothschild at 21%, Schroder, and various family interests as well as current and former staff. A board of trustees formally appoints the editor and cannot remove that person without trustee permission, a structural safeguard for editorial independence. In March 2026, Canadian businessman Stephen J.R. Smith bought a 26.9% stake formerly held by Lynn Forester de Rothschild.

• 5. Data, Indexes, and Journalism

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  Data journalism at The Economist traces back to the paper's founding year. The publication initially ran basic international trade figures and tables. Its first graphical element appeared in 1847 as a letter featuring an illustration of coin sizes. The first standalone chart, a tree map visualising the size of coal fields in America and England, ran in November 1854. Data Journalism.com estimated this adoption came roughly a hundred years before the field's modern emergence.

  The shift from broadsheet to magazine format in 1971 brought coloured graphs, first in fire engine red during the 1980s and then in a thematic blue from 2001. Starting in the late 2000s, the paper began publishing more articles built entirely around charts, some released online every weekday. These daily charts typically include a short explanation of around 500 words. In September 2009, the paper launched a dedicated Twitter account for its Data Team. By 2015 it had established a formal data journalism department staffed by journalists, visualisers, and interactive developers. That team produced election forecasting models for the French presidential elections of 2017 and 2022 and for US presidential and congressional elections in 2020.

  The paper's best-known data product is the Big Mac Index, a measure of purchasing-power parity across currencies that uses the price of a McDonald's hamburger in different countries. It was first published in 1986 and has appeared twice a year since 2006. Other standing indexes include a Democracy Index produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the Glass Ceiling Index measuring female workplace equality, a Most Dangerous Cities Index based on homicide rates, and a Commodity-Price Index tracking gold, Brent oil, and agricultural goods.

• 6. Editorial Stance and Controversy

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  Geoffrey Crowther, writing in 1955, described the paper's historical position as the "extreme centre." The Economist repeated that self-description in a 2016 editorial. The paper champions free markets, free trade, free immigration, deregulation, and globalisation. Former editor Bill Emmott stated plainly: "The Economist's philosophy has always been liberal, not conservative."

  That position has produced a varied record of endorsements. The paper has backed Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton. In recent British elections it has endorsed the Labour Party in 2005 and 2024, the Conservative Party in 2010 and 2015, and the Liberal Democrats in 2017 and 2019. It supported the US-led invasion of Iraq initially, then called the operation "bungled from the start" and criticised what it termed the "almost criminal negligence" of the Bush Administration's handling of the conflict. It called for Bill Clinton's impeachment and for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse became public.

  Critics have not been quiet. In 1991, James Fallows argued in The Washington Post that the paper's editorial lines contradicted the news stories they accompanied. In 1999, Andrew Sullivan described its approach in The New Republic as "marketing genius" compensating for thin original reporting, resulting in a product he called "a kind of Reader's Digest" for corporate America. The Guardian suggested its writers rarely encounter a political or economic problem they cannot solve with a combination of privatisation, deregulation, and liberalisation. An investigation by The Intercept, The Nation, and DeSmog found the paper among the leading media outlets publishing advertising for the fossil fuel industry, a finding that troubled the paper's own climate journalists. In 2019, the paper received backlash for suggesting that transgender people should be sterilized; it subsequently apologised.

• 7. Censorship and Reach

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  On the 15th of June 2006, Iran banned the sale of The Economist after it published a map labelling the Persian Gulf simply as "Gulf," a choice that carried political significance given the ongoing Persian Gulf naming dispute. On the 29th of May 2025, Reuters reported that Vietnam had banned the May 24th issue featuring President To Lam, which described him as "an ambitious leader who emerged from the security state" and who "must turn himself into a reformer."

  Zimbabwe went further than a ban. The government imprisoned the paper's correspondent there, Andrew Meldrum, charging him with violating a statute on "publishing untruth" for reporting that a woman had been decapitated by supporters of the ruling party. The decapitation claim was later retracted. Meldrum was acquitted but immediately received a deportation order. Inside the United States, the Missouri Department of Corrections censored the paper's issue of the 29th of June 2013, informing the paper by letter that prisoners were barred from receiving it because it constituted "a threat to the security or discipline of the institution" or might "facilitate or encourage criminal activity."

  The paper currently reaches an audience of 35 million across its social media platforms, as of 2016, and is sold by subscription and at newsagents in over 200 countries. Its audio edition, produced by the company Talking Issues, has been available since July 2007. The weekly download runs to 130 megabytes, is free for subscribers, and records the full text of the newspaper in MP3 format. The Economist launched its short-form news app, Espresso, in 2014, offering a daily briefing every day except Sunday.