Probably my favorite read ...

Summary of where they come from

and one reason I like it: "...a paper whose scepticism about government drips from every issue..." (reference to position on Iraq)

Valedictory | A long goodbye | Economist.com:

Bill Emmott, who stands down as editor on March 31st, offers his parting thoughts

"It seems fitting to begin with the ancestors. One of the exceptional characteristics of this newspaper is the degree to which it still follows the principles and methods begun 163 years ago by its founder, James Wilson, and perfected by his son-in-law, Walter Bagehot. The Economist was launched to campaign for free trade and all forms of liberty, what proponents and detractors alike today call globalisation, blended with what George Bush likes to call “the freedom agenda”. It did so with a formula that was three parts factual description and one part strongly held opinion or argumentative analysis. That is what we continue to attempt today."


and...


The unstupid economy

To a degree, it is hard even now, in 2006, to recognise the world of 1993: a time when the Soviet Union was fresh in the memory, when China's development remained in the shadow of Tiananmen, when America was thought militarily powerful but economically passé, when few had mobile phones, e-mail was in its infancy and the internet was strictly for nerds. Yet the potential was there for the spread of economic development to what were newly known as “emerging markets”, emerging from communism, autarky, war or hyperinflation, and also for the spread of democracy to those same benighted lands. It was there too for a wave of technological innovation analogous to that brought by the railway boom, the electric telegraph and the steamship in the early decades of Wilson's Economist. The phrase “irrational exuberance” may not have been familiar to him, but the word “bubble” assuredly was. Just as early editors devoted thousands of words to a 19th-century version of Arthur C. Clarke's famous observation that the effects of technological innovations are typically overrated in the short run but underestimated in the long run, so did we.

read on...Valedictory ...Economist.com