ECONOMIST AFFLUENCE
From time to time, my wife and I fantasize about what we would do if we had enough money. What would we consider affluence?
Foreign adventures, pricey vehicles, stylish clothing, and such have no appeal for us. Number one on our list is being able to buy whatever we wanted at the food co-op. Being able to eat what is nutritious and support what is sustainable—now THAT would be supremely pleasurable.
For my own part, because I’ve been there and done that as a Rutland Herald reviewer, I’d put being able to go to the Weston Playhouse’s productions on the affluence list. It’s a place and a troupe that aims for the heights of the dramatic arts and more often that not reaches them. Probably I’d want to take the train down to New York City for a few theatrical productions, particularly at the off-Broadway theater where my brother does a lot of work, but I wouldn’t expect them to be in a different league than Weston.
But to get to the point of this blog: recently my wife and I have agreed on another way that we’d be sure to spend our money if it were abundant enough: subscribing to The Economist.
This is a British publication most Americans don’t get to see. We wouldn’t get to see it except that in the summer, the Middlebury College mailroom accumulates a lot of issues from subscriptions paid for by people who are not on campus to collect them. These are left for anyone to reuse, rather than just chucking them into the recycling, and this summer the faculty member my wife happened to be assisting kindly picked up copies of The Economist and brought them to their office, from which she brought them home.
We subscribe to Time and Newsweek, so comparisons came easily.
First and most obviously, The Economist was bigger—about 80 pages versus about 60. In those pages were sections on all parts of the world—first the United States then The Americas, Asia, Middle East and Africa, Europe, Britain, and “International,” which in a recent issue discussed “NATO after Libya” and “UN Climate Talks.” Sections on Business and on Finance and Economics followed, and at the end of the magazine, for easy reference, was a set of Economic and Financial Indicators that included statistics on 42 economies, plus “closer looks” at office rents and venture capital. There is indeed a hard economics core to The Economist that makes it a worthwhile read for people with investments.
But also, there are serious sections on Science and Technology and on Books and the Arts. The science pieces are intense, unsparing, and deeply informative. For example, there was a report on research in mice that suggests mental attitude can be influenced by bacterial colonies in the intestines. Mice fed a bacterium found in yogurt and other dairy products excelled in tests of positive attitude, as measured by such things as venturesomeness in navigating mazes and endurance in swimming in containers from which there was no escape (exhausted mice were rescued, not allowed to drown).
This blog has commented before on how high fructose corn syrup may be giving us the wrong gut reactions, a matter of some concern because there are ten times as many bacterial cells in a typical human body than human cells. I remarked that farmers pay very close attention to nurturing the unpaid immigrant bacteria in cows’ stomachs that do the work on turning otherwise indigestible materials into food products, to the point where it seems we care more for our cows’ stomachs than our own.
Here’s the way the Economist piece ends: “An editorial in this week’s Nature raises the possibility that the widespread prescription of antibiotics—which kill useful bacteria as effectively as hostile ones—might be one factor behind rising rates of asthma, diabetes and irritable bowel syndrome. If Dr. Bravo’s results apply to people, too, then mood disorders may end up being added to the list.”
Thought-provoking information of this sort comes up again and again in The Economist, for those willing to do the reading. Pictures don’t take over the pages as they so often do in Time and Newsweek. The Brit editors still harbour, as they would spell it, literacy of the old-fashioned kind, refusing to dumb things down but rather insisting that rewards await those willing to make the effort to strengthen their language skills.
The magazine offers a chance to develop one’s links with a country that at one point was parental to our own. For example, a book review takes on “Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World, written by the Cambridge-trained son of a Ghanian émigré who had become a noted scholar. But the focus shifts regularly across The Pond to the country that no other country can long afford to ignore, and examines its issues informatively as well. The next book review in that issue was of “A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America.” We may take for granted, but the Brits do not, that by 2009 the prison population in this country was five times greater than in 1980. The reviewer remarks, “None of Mr. (Ernest) Drucker’s statistics or stories is new, but they bear repeating because they are unjust, unintended and easily remedied.”
The gift to see ourselves as others see us—that is certainly part of the appeal of The Economist.
Unfortunately, a year’s 51-issue subscription costs $138, which is better than Canada’s $189 (in Canadian dollars) or Latin America’s $270 (in U.S. dollars), but still prohibitive for us old folks. You get what you pay for, an old saying insists. The corollary, for a country that relies only on Time and Newsweek, should be painfully obvious.
Comments