Zanny Minton Beddoes Discusses Her Work at The Economist

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, at a time when experts are being ignored and alternative facts are being touted as reality, publications like The Economist only becoming more vital. With the readership of more than $1.5 million, it’s at the forefront of the global conversation. Zanny Minton Beddoes is an award-winning financial journalist who became the magazine’s first female editor in 2015. Currently on speaking towards the United States, she started by talking to Walter Isaacson about the Brexit vote and what it really represents.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Welcome to America, and your tour here. Let’s start with Brexit. Why is all this happening? Why did Brexit pass?

ZANNY MINTON BEDDOES, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, THE ECONOMIST: Why did the referendum passed? Well, it was a combination of things. I think there were a group of people within the Conservative Party who for decades had been unhappy with Britain being part of the European Union and it had being sort of festering within the Conservative Party. And David Cameron, the prime minister at the time decided that putting this issue to a referendum would blunts that boil, if you will, and deal with the problem in his party. And he and everybody around him was fully expecting to win the referendum. It was not something that was high on the agenda of most people in the U.K. In fact, if you look at polls before the referendum, it was nowhere near the top, people are worried about the National Health Service, they’re worried about all manner of things, but not Brexit. But that — the referendum itself, it came a vehicle through which many people voice profound frustration. It was a protest vote. It was a vote of anger, not dissimilar to many of the people who voted for President Trump in 2016. It was a vote not necessarily for anything in particular. It was just a kind of, I’m fed up with the status quo. And there’s an interesting English adage that the sort of constellation of people who voted for Brexit were these generally affluent conservative voters and then and a lot of blue collar workers who are angry and felt left behind. And so it’s often that it was a collection — it was a coordination of blue workers and red trousers, because there was a conservative types of them wear red trousers. But so is this protest vote. But since then, what’s really striking is that it’s become the fault line in British politics. I mean, it’s now — people identify much more about whether they are a remainer or a Brexiteer, then they do about whether they are Conservative or Labour.

ISAACSON: In Britain, do you think there might be a real alignment somehow since the party’s don’t represent the political fault line?

BEDDOES: Well, it’s certainly possible. I mean, there has already been somewhat of a realignment in the sense that Conservative Party has become much more of a populist nationalist party than the kind of —

ISAACSON: Which is a little bit like what happened here —

BEDDOES: Which is what like what happened here. The Labour Party has been essentially hijacked by a far left group of people. And, you know, Jeremy Corbyn, who is the leader of the British Labour Party, is by far, the most left wing leader we’ve had in the Labour Party, at least since the 1930s. And he really is a Marxist or close to be. And he’s surrounded by (INAUDIBLE). So this is a far left cabal that have taken over, you know, what was traditionally as sort of center left party under Tony Blair. And the irony is if you haven’t had that takeover at the Labour Party, we probably would have seen the whole referendum debate play out very different. So it’s because these two earthquakes have taken place in the two parties at the same time, that we have British politics where it is. And I think you’re right that it is possible that we will see a factoring. Because centrist remain voters. People who are not in favor of leaving European Union, and a centrist really don’t have anyone to go right now.

ISAACSON: Well, they do with the Social Democratic Party —

BEDDOES: They did with the — they do with the liberal Democrats.

ISAACSON: Liberal Democrats. Why doesn’t that rise up?

BEDDOES: And it is — we may see it the next selection a very big rise in the number of seats for the liberal Democrats. But the problem with the British the political system, which is you know has first passed the post system, it’s actually very, very hard to break through, for smaller parties to breakthrough. So you can get a lot of votes but still not get very many seats. But when you have all the parties where they are now, which is broadly the mid-30s, the Conservative Party polling, and then the 20s for Labour and he Lib Dems slightly below that, we could see a very big reshuffling of British politics. It’s going to be one — the next selection is going to be one of the most exciting elections in modern British history, because you’re right, we could throw the whole deck of cards to get something very different.

ISAACSON: The center isn’t holding, as you say, the center is not holding in the United States. Center is not holding across Europe and much of the western world. What happened to this sort of force that used to keep us gravitating towards the center?

BEDDOES: So really good question. And I think political scientist for the next decades are going to be grappling with this. The sort of simple lines that we keep hearing is the rise of populism which is true, but I think it’s more of a description than it is an explanation. The fact that this is happening in this country, in Britain, as you say, across Europe, in each case, there is some individual (INAUDIBLE) reasons. But I think the fact that we have this anger and frustration in so many countries at the same time suggests to me that there are deeper courses. And I’ve been thinking about this a bit. And it strikes me that there are four big shocks that we’re going through right now in the world economy. And each of them is enough to make people anxious and worry about the future. So one is the whole computer revolution, the technological revolution. As you know much better than many, I mean, we are at the beginning middle of this, probably, huge change in the nature of our economy, of our society from that change. People are feeling anxious. Majorities of people now across the advance world think that their kids are going to be worse off than they are. People are worried about the future of works. So that’s one big shot. The second is, I think, we’re in the midst of this very big geopolitical shift. The late — latter half of the 20th century, the U.S. was the undisputed global leader. Now, we have in the form of China, you know, arising power. It’s going to have the world’s biggest economy in not too distant future. And it’s in authoritarian dictatorship. The authoritarian regime is becoming more authoritarian, the more it rises. That’s a big power shift, a big challenge to the U.S. that I think is also a second big shot. Third one is the demographic shock. Populations are aging. We’re all living longer. The combination of rising life expectancy and declining fertility means that the kind of the nature of society is changing as populations aged. The median age is rising pretty dramatically across much of the world. And then the fourth one, and this, I think, is — you know, this country is being a little slower than others, but I think climate change is going to be the other defining shock of the next few decades, because we’re seeing the impact in the form of more extreme weather patterns. We’re also seeing in the younger generation a kind of credo current, for goodness sake, address this. And you put all of those together, they’re all profound shocks to the established political system. Those sort of post-war system.

ISAACSON: And the people who tend to read The Economists, tend to at least know about Davos and stuff, they believe it, I think, I did it, and you did. Although I’m having second thought, that free trade, immigration, and technology are all going to be good for the economy. And yet, I’m looking at your new cover, you know, Elizabeth Warren’s plan to remake capitalism. We’re looking at Trump, we’re looking at Brexit, it seems that people have lost faith in capitalism being able to distribute the goods of a growing economy fairly.

BEDDOES: You’re right. And I think a lot of people are losing faith and there is a — there are really big problems that haven’t been addressed and that need to be addressed. And I welcome both thinking to do that, and we — as you see this, and that is — The Economist, we have a long hard look at Elizabeth warren’s plan, which is breathtaking in its scope. And in an area where, you know, there’s a lot of policy by tweet. It’s incredibly impressive to have a sort of planned program of that scale. On balance, I think she probably gets more things wrong than she gets right. She identifies a lot of the right challenges. But overall, her particular proposals, you know, some of them will be good, but some of them would have quite dramatic negative consequences. But I applaud the kind of — I think the bold thinking is exactly what we need to do. I rather have sort of both incrementalism than reckless radicalism. But hey, it’s — you’re right. There is — there are important things that need to change and that need to be looked at, and that’s the silver lining in this period of political turmoil. At the moment, we see a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, a lot of scapegoating. And a lot of, you know, snake oil salesman pretending that there are easy answers. I don’t think tariffs is the answer. I don’t think protectionism is the answer. I don’t think a draw bridge up kind of mentality is the answer. But we do need to think about is a positive agenda forward and, what is the kind of positive vision for a 21st Century U.S.? And over the next few years, I think that’s what this country is going to be grappling towards.

ISAACSON: How old is The Economist more than —

BEDDOES: Hundred and seventy-six years. And we find in 1843.

ISAACSON: And in that period, it is always good for sort of the free minds, free markets, free trade, not that ideological but believing in what are the fundamentals of what I’ll call classic liberal, democratic capitalism, free markets. What would you do now to fix that system?

BEDDOES: Well, that’s exactly right. We’ve been — we stand for the classic English liberalism. And when I — whenever I use the word liberal in the U.S., I have to kind of presses it by saying classic English liberalism, because it has a different meaning here. Individual freedom, economic and political. I think that we need to have a very hard rethink about what a liberalism in the 21st Century looks like. Actually, last year was our 175th anniversary. And we marked our anniversary with a cover story and an essay on we making liberalism, which — and I took — I actually wrote that essay and sort of spent some weeks in the summer writing it last year. And so I went through in some detail, the areas that, you know, were required. And I think the — part of it is unleashing genuine competition. And that’s actually something that Elizabeth Warren talks about. I’m not sure that her specifics reach it. But we’ve got an economy increasingly concentrated in this country. Big business increasingly building motes around. We need to have a renewed focus on competition.

ISAACSON: So that the anti-trust.

BEDDOES: Yes, a 21st century, antitrust policy. A kind of pragmatic approach to immigration which is not complete open borders. But not draw bridge up. There needs to be — I think as we look forward, the under lying demographics of many countries, means that they will need more immigration. But we need to find ways to make that immigration politically sustainable. It means, I think, in a geopolitical sense, the U.S. and China reaching a strategic mutually — strategic understanding that they can work together. Because one of their great strengths at the post-war order was that the U.S. built up a system which the U.S. led that was the multilateral open out for looking system that needs to be modified in an area of a rising China. But we need to find what the new equilibrium there is. So there’s a whole load of areas where we need reform voter forms. The welfare state needs to be rethought. When we’re all leaving longer, pension systems need rethinking, tax systems need rethinking. The rich do need to pay more taxes. There are different ways of doing it, better or worse, but bold rethinking. And I think part of the problem for the economist reader, if you will, is that many people who have done very well out of this system — out of a system they considered to be meritocratic, the highly skilled, the highly educated, are actually probably less inclined for bold reforms and they like to admit that they —

ISAACSON: You talk about the sort of competition between classic, liberal, free market democracy on one hand, and China’s rise and its authoritarian state. We’ve seen a lot of pushback recently. Even with the NBA basketball league, pushing back on China’s authoritarianism. Do you think that’s part of the future of what the west needs to do?

BEDDOES: Yes. I think that the west needs to stand up for what it believes in. And I think therefore, it’s important to call out human rights abuses. It’s important to stand up for, you know, western ideas, even if China is an enormous market. And so I think that there is, you know, clearly one area of increasing tension, is that China now — you know, increasingly doesn’t — not only won’t continents criticism of what it does internally. It wants no criticism in the rest of the world than what it does internally. And I think that is a fault line and it’s one way the west needs to stand up for what it believes in.

ISAACSON: How does The Economist deal with China and have to work through its censorship problems?

BEDDOES: Well, our website is bad in China. Our app is often banned. You know, we write what we think is right. And it’s, you know, quite often, they don’t like it very much.

ISAACSON: One of the core things about The Economist over the years, is the covers. And there are always clever, maybe even as the British will take two clever by half and takes your moment to figure them out. One of the covers that was most striking this year was your special issue on climate change. Describe that cover and that special issue what was driving it.

BEDDOES: So we decided — it was the first time we’ve ever done a special issue where we had in every section of the newspaper, we call it a newspaper. In every section of the newspaper, we had a piece of our climate change. And we had a big — we had an editorial, we had a big explanatory briefing, and it was — we had a special logo. The reason we did that was to show that every aspect of our world, so every aspect of what we cover will be influenced by climate change. And it was not the only thing that we wrote about it. There were other things, but it was infused throughout The Economist that week. And the cover which was a colleague of mine who suggested the idea was a very bold graphic that showed in through colored stripes how that world’s temperature had risen, so it was the temperature of the world relative to an average, showing that it had kind of warmth quite substantially over the past 150 years. And it showed because it was basically blue, blue, blue, blue, red, red, red on the right hand side. It showed very powerfully what had gone on with global temperature. And it was sort of an unusual cover for us. We don’t usually —

ISAACSON: And it was somewhat of an advocacy cover more than The Economist has done in sourcing climate.

BEDDOES: I think it was — it was pushing the subject. What was — what was very important to me and if you head the editorial, and you would have seen is that it was very clearly saying that this is you, the fact that the climate is changing is going to affect every aspect of life on this planet over the coming decades. But the dealing with is which requires a profound shift from energy carbon — energy that comes from carbon to energy that doesn’t, that has to, in my view, the only way we will do that is by harnessing the innovative power of capitalism to do it. And part of the — my frustration with the current climate debate is that many climate activists, those people who are more focused on what’s happening with the climate, are also then saying that the evils of capitalism and the evils of economic growth have led to this. And I think that that is, at some point, are kind of dead end of a conversation. The only way we’re going to, as a planet, address climate change and if we don’t, to be clear, it’s not necessarily, it’s not going to be existential for the whole planet. But it is going to affect hundreds of millions of people as the earth warms, as we see the ever more, you know, frequent extreme weather events. But to counter that, you have to harness the innovative power of capitalism. You have to — you have to have all of the elements that The Economist stands for of free markets harnessed to help do that, and we can do that. So it was not an advocacy. It was an explanatory — and the whole tone of it and if it wasn’t this, then we failed. Our goal was very much to kind of lay out the comprehensive nature of what was happening, but do so in that kind of fact-based, rational, analytical way.

ISAACSON: Thank you for being with us, Zanny.

BEDDOES: Thank you.

ISAACSON: Appreciate it.