Economist on Tour

Once, as a "reverse Rhodes Scholar at Yale," chubby Geoffrey Crowther toured Georgia with three other collegians in a ramshackle flivver. He enjoyed every muddy mile of it. Since then, as editor of the Economist, he has covered the U.S.-- and the world--like a politico-economic bird dog working a new, field. And he has made the weekly Economist Britain's most influential periodical.

Fortnight ago, his nose for news began to twitch again. He presided over a house-warming at his paper's new London home. Then he cleared his billiard-table-sized desk, and caught a boat train. In Manhattan last week, four hours after stepping off the Queen Elizabeth, he gave the Council on Foreign Relations a lucid lecture on Britain's "concealed inflation" (the Crowther view: an oversupply of demand) and its inevitable end ("we are disconcerted now by the boominess of the boom, as we shall be equally disconcerted by the slumpiness of the slump"). In the next seven weeks he will talk, look and listen his way across the U.S. "to see when the 'crack' is coming, to see who the next President will be, to find out how firm the Marshall Plan is."

Phrasemaker for M.P.s. For most of its 104 years, the Economist had been a financial paper for London "City men." It was Crowther who pushed the financial tables into the back pages and brilliantly widened the Economist's horizon. Its best long leaders on world problems and news, written in his own longhand, are a clear synthesis of political and economic reasoning that often echoes in Parliament. Many an M.P. would be tongue-tied if he could not say, as Anthony Eden said last week, "I saw . . . by the Economist. . . ." ("Soft underbelly of Europe" was Crowther's phrase before it was Churchill's.)

Brendan Bracken's Financial News Ltd. owns half the Economist's shares. But Crowther, editor since 1938, answers only to a four-man board of trustees that has met only once in 20 years. In four and a half years, he has increased his small but potent readership from 10,000 to 38,000 (45% of the circulation is outside the United Kingdom). A thousand Americans (out of 4,500 U.S. subscribers) pay $24 a year to get the Economist by air.

Editor Crowther, a green-eyed little man who is cheerful as a cherub, perky as a piggy bank, is a prototype but not a proponent of Union Now: besides his American schooling and travels he has an American wife (and five little Anglo-Americans). During the war, to open another, pocket-sized window on the U.S. to Britons, he also edited a monthly mag--azine, Transatlantic. He is a nonsmoker, heavy eater, and a Chablis drinker.

Five days a week, he goes to his office from his Wimbledon half-acre; weekends he stays home to read, think and write. "But the leaders that get talked about," he says ruefully, "are the ones I write at deadline." Bombed out during the war, his Economist now lives in handsomely remodeled, fluorescent-lighted quarters off St. James's. The apartment building is 70 years old and has, says Crowther, a dubious past: "I find that the older generation of taxi drivers know the address [22 Ryder Street] very well." It now houses a brilliant crew, and a tradition of passionate anonymity: only a departing editor's valedictory may bear a byline. Although it has a reputation for omniscience, the Economist takes pains to tell its readers every so often that it doesn't know it all.

Byproducts. The Economist has a much larger staff (about 25) than its circulation alone could afford. To support it, Crowther has built up an "intelligence unit" of economists to do research jobs at handsome fees for British industries. The combined staffs produce much more than the Economist has room to print; some of the overflow goes into a confidential foreign newsletter ($84 a year).

These days, with the Economist sharply critical of government bungling, it gets little but dirty digs from leftist Laborites (last week the Socialist Tribune called it the "young Tories' weekly bible"). But the Economist, generally conservative in its economics and liberal in its politics, does not oppose efficient state planning. It just thinks that freedom is more efficient than the order imposed by Labor's unimaginative, often inefficient state.

"I have been bitterly attacked by my friends on the left for veering sharply to the right," says Crowther. "Of course, I say it isn't true. My heart, like all the best of hearts, is slightly on the left."

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