What? They bought up another company in 2015. Not the other way around. Why would that even be a bad thing?

Please read carefully.

The Agnelli family owns 43.4%, members of the Rothschild family own 21%, other big corporate/rich families interests own the rest. Lots of "Sirs", "Ladies" and "Baronesses" on the board of directors, as you can see below.

From the Wikipedia page:

Pearson PLC held a 50% shareholding via The Financial Times Limited until August 2015; at that time Pearson sold their share in the Economist. The Agnelli family's Exor paid £287m to raise their stake from 4.7% to 43.4%, while the Economist paid £182m for the balance of 5.04m shares which will be distributed to current shareholders.[2] Aside from the Agnelli family, smaller shareholders in the company include Cadbury, Rothschild (21%), Schroder, Layton and other family interests as well as a number of staff and former staff shareholders.[2][3]

The current members of the board of directors of The Economist Group are: Rupert Pennant-Rea (Chairman), Zanny Minton Beddoes (editor-in-chief of The Economist), Lady Suzanne Heywood, Brent Hoberman, Sir David Bell, John Elkann, Alex Karp, Sir Simon Robertson, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Chris Stibbs and Baroness Jowell.[12]

Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild publicly supports many politicians including Hillary Clinton.

Isn't your thesis that this situation changed in 2015? I don't know for sure, but I always assumed the Economist has always been run by a bunch of Sirs and Ladies... I have read and quite liked the magazine for a couple decades and they have seemed consistently elitist, pro-market, and globalist during that time. It is something I like, that they have a strong identifiable editorial perspective, unlike newspapers that have some claim to neutrality, which mostly makes their biases harder to delineate and more arguable.

Whether it is the Sirs/Ladies, or the Elkanns or the Rothschilds, they are interested in continuing the current status quo, enriching the 1% that they belong to, at the cost of everyone else.

The Economist used to be pro-small-business free market. At some point they started justifying outsourcing as "free trade", which benefited big companies like Apple, etc. and stagnated or starved small businesses (and the productivity/innovation that comes from it), not to mention labor providers (even highly educated ones, such as software engineers :-))

This has proven to be quite bad for the US and Europe (except the 1%, whose interests The Economist represents through ownership) - and it may get even worse when money-printing will stop working at some point.

You are missing my point: this has always been their editorial stance. It may have always been a reason not to read them if you're not into it, but it's not a new reason.

As I mentioned I had been a subscriber for 30 years.

And no, I am not missing your point. There was a clear change in direction a few years ago - as I mentioned, I sensed it, but was not aware of the ownership change at the time.

You either did not notice or you just started reading them - good for you. Enjoy.

You may be right, but I don't see it. I have been reading since about 2005 and I don't recall seeing a strong stance against outsourcing at any point in that time. It would have struck me as surprising if I had, since they are broadly in favor of free trade, and outsourcing clearly fits the bill (even if you put it in scare quotes).

I don't really disagree with you about any of the points you're making, which means I often or usually don't agree with the Economist on these points, I just think it's a weird critique of the Economist to accuse them of being globalist, free trade, neoliberals; to me it's like, yeah, they are the Economist... It seems like accusing Jacobin of being socialist.

Maybe this change happened before 2005? I'd be interested in seeing some receipts. Are there some anti-outsourcing articles from way back that I've missed?

I noticed the change as well, but didn't think to investigate. Thanks for surfacing this information.

so where do we go now?

I'm confused by this thread: I've been reading the Economist since quite awhile before 2015 and I don't think its editorial stance has changed significantly; it has always been pro-globalism, pro-trade, pro-market, generally what I'd describe as neoliberal. If anything, the shift I detected in their views was toward more government intervention and regulation, coming out of the great recession. I'm very skeptical of the idea that there was an inflection point toward globalism in 2015.

So to answer your question: if you want what the Economist gives, you don't need to go anywhere else.