Posts Tagged ‘economist’
Economist Magazine Adverts Look Like Parodies After It’s American Slavery Disaster
FREE Speech looks to the Economist, a magazine read by business suits and people keen to appear smart and knowing. But the Economist is no leader, no thought provoker. It’s a publication as uncertain as a worm in flip-flops.
The Economist published a review of Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism”. The review ends with the line:
Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.
An odd view, for sure. Not all whites supported slavery; but blacks were the enslaved victims.
So. Cue the Twitter mob. Outraged they wrote in.
Baptist told TalkingPointsMemo: “Maybe this is crass, but I did realize as soon as I read it that this is not actually going to hurt. It has definitely enhanced my Amazon ranking.”
So. What did the Economist do? It became a non review. It was given its own page, so as not to pollute the rest of the ‘newspaper’s’ website. And it is now topped by an apology:
Apology: In our review of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward Baptist, we said: “Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so. Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil. We regret having published this and apologise for having done so. We have therefore withdrawn the review, but in the interests of transparency the text remains available only on this special page and appears below.
A special page. Blimey. Can this be the same Economnist that has for years advertised it surefootedness and certainty of thought? (Ads via, via, via and).
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: 14th, September 2014 | In: Books, Key Posts | Comments (2)
Video Games are now hiring economists
I KNOW, I know, it’s not quite what you would think is a sensible idea four years after the Great Financial Crash. But video games companies are starting to hire economists to help them design the games.
Here’s one such job ad. They really are looking for an academic economist to help them work out how to write the rules for the games.
This isn’t though to do with Angry Birds and the like. This is about the big online games where there are thousands, perhaps millions, of players. Certain of the games companies have got seriously out of their depth here. Once you start introducing money into the games, the ability to find gold, use that gold to buy powers or attributes, even feed real money in to buy gold, then you’re facing all of the same problems that central banks do in the real economy.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: 27th, June 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
