What is going on at The Economist?

I was going to comment on The Economist's strangely enthusiastic investigation into prostitution, and endorsement of it as a career for those who chose it (not to mention complaining about it being "illiberal" to make it illegal) which appeared about a month ago, but I never got around to it.

Frankly, when economists start talking about things like the sale of bodies and sex, or illicit drugs, they can  work themselves up into enthusiasm for legalisation simply because of the money involved; but their discussions easily become an embarrassingly moral free zone.  Not that I am one to take a hard line stance on the question of legality for prostitution;  as with so many things, I tend to think that Australia gets the balance more right than many of the American States and without the sleaziness of some other countries, too.  But it's embarrassing to see an economics magazine downplay the exploitation inherent in such a large proportion of an "industry".   You certainly get the feeling that the number of women who were involved in compiling the story was nil.

And now we have even more cringeworthy  material appearing in the magazine:  a review of a book on slavery that sought to paint that enterprise as "not all bad".   This post at Boing Boing summarises the matter, and the Economist did withdraw the (anonymous) review and apologise.

Both of these stories indicate to me that something is amiss in the magazine's editorial decisions at the moment.

Update:  on the matter of the status of economics more generally, I thought that Harry Clarke's complaint about how the enthusiasm is now all for econometrics without tying it to theory was interesting.

It perhaps also explains why Piketty's work has been received with such enthusiasm - from what I can gather, it combined the novel compilation of figures with their analysis in terms of theory in a way not seen for some time.