time acknowledged that larger elec-
torates saw “inequality and insecurity”
as a serious problem. The Economist
disagreed with the socialists “not on
their objective, but only on the meth-
ods they proposed for attaining it.”
Such a stance mirrored a widespread
acceptance on both sides of the At-
lantic that governments should do
more to protect citizens from an in-
herently volatile economic system.
Since the nineteen-sixties, however,
The Economist has steadily reinstated
its foundational ideals.
In the process, it missed an oppor-
tunity to reconfigure for the postcolo-
nial age a liberalism forged during the
high noon of imperialism. The emer-
gence of new, independent nation-states
across Asia and Africa from the late
forties onward was arguably the most
important development of the twen-
tieth century. Liberalism faced a new
test among a great majority of the
world’s population: Could newly sov-
ereign peoples, largely poor and illit-
erate, embrace free markets and min-
imize government right away? Would
such a policy succeed without prior
government-led investment in public
health, education, and local manufac-
turing? Even a Cold War liberal like
Raymond Aron questioned the effi-
cacy of Western-style liberalism in
Asia and Africa. But The Economist
seemed content to see postcolonial na-
tions and their complex challenges
through the Cold War’s simple dichot-
omy of the “free” and the “unfree” world.
In any case, by the seventies, the mag-
azine’s editors were increasingly tak-
ing their inspiration from economics
departments and think tanks, where
the pure neoliberal principles of Mil-
ton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek
were dominant, rather than from such
liberal theorists of justice as John Rawls,
Ronald Dworkin, and Amartya Sen.
In the nineteen-eighties, The Econo
mist’s cheerleading for Margaret Thatcher
and Ronald Reagan’s embrace of neo-
liberalism led to a dramatic rise in its
American circulation. (Reagan person-
ally thanked the magazine’s editor for
his support over dinner.) Dean Acheson
famously remarked that “Great Britain
has lost an empire and has not yet found
a role.” No such status anxiety inhib-
ited The Economist as it crossed the At-
lantic to make new friends and influence
more people. After the Second World
War, when the U.S. emerged as the new
global hegemon, the magazine—despite
some initial resentment, commonplace
among British élites at the time—
quickly adjusted itself to the Pax Amer-
icana. It came to revere the U.S. as, in
the words of one editor, “a giant elder
brother, a source of reassurance, trust
and stability for weaker members of the
family, and nervousness and uncertainty
for any budding bullies.”
This meant stalwart support for
American interventions abroad, start-ing with Vietnam, where, as the his-
torian and former staff writer Hugh
Brogan tells Zevin, the magazine’s cov-
erage was “pure CIA propaganda.” It
euphemized the war’s horrors, charac-
terizing the My Lai massacre as “minor
variations on the general theme of the
fallibility of men at war.” By 1972, fol-
lowing the saturation bombing of
North Vietnam, the magazine was com-
plaining that Henry Kissinger was too
soft on the North Vietnamese. A pol-
icy of fealty to the giant elder brother
also made some campaigners for lib-
eralism a bit too prone to skulduggery.
Zevin relates colorful stories about the
magazine’s overzealous Cold Warriors,
such as Robert Moss, who diligently
prepared international opinion for the
military coup in Chile in 1973, which
brought down its democratically elected
leader, Salvador Allende. In Moss’s
view, “Chile’s generals reached the con-
clusion that democracy does not have
the right to commit suicide.” (The gen-
erals expressed their gratitude by buy-
ing and distributing nearly ten thou-
sand copies of the magazine.) Zevin
relates that, when news of Allende’s
death reached Moss in London, he
danced down the corridors of The Econ
omist’s office, chanting, “My enemy is
dead!” Moss went on to edit a maga-
zine owned by Anastasio Somoza, Nic-
aragua’s U.S.-backed dictator.
After the fall of Communist regimes
in 1989, The Economist embraced a fer-
vently activist role in Russia and East-
ern Europe, armed with the mantras
of privatization and deregulation. In
its pages, the economist Jeffrey Sachs,
who was then working to reshape “tran-
sition economies” in the region, coined
the term “shock therapy” for these pol-
icies. The socioeconomic reëngineer-
ing was brutal—salaries and public ser-
vices collapsed—and, in 1998, Russia’s
financial system imploded. Only a few
months before this disaster, The Econ
omist was still hailing the “dynamism,
guile and vision” of Anatoly Chubais,
the politician whose sale of Russia’s as-
sets to oligarchs had by then made him
the most despised public figure in the
country. In 2009, a study in The Lan
cet estimated that “shock therapy” had
led to the premature deaths of millions
of Russians, mostly men of employ-
“Uhoh—we can’t both be dreaming.” ment age. The Economist was unrepen-