Cover Story

How we chose this week’s image

Insert a clear and simple description of the image

Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-in-chief

This week we published a good-news, myth-busting cover on income inequality and a bad-news, call-to-action one about the growing chances that Vladimir Putin will win the war in Ukraine.

It is hard to challenge a belief as ingrained as the notion that working people in rich countries are falling ever further behind the moneyed few. Armed with some new statistics and the trends that explain them, that is what we set out to do.

We started with a lineman climbing towards prosperity. For the past seven years real weekly earnings for workers at the bottom of America’s pay distribution have been growing faster than those for people at the top. Since the covid-19 pandemic this wage compression has reversed 40% of the pre-tax wage inequality that emerged during the previous 40 years.

In Britain the inequality-reduction agenda often comes under the label “levelling-up”. Here the muddy-booted lineman is standing on wads of cash. A decade ago Thomas Piketty, a French economist, became a household name by arguing that inequality had surged. Now increasing attention is being given to research that finds that, after taxes and government transfers, American income inequality has barely increased since the 1960s.

The blue-collar bonanza is not just an artefact of the statistics; it makes intuitive sense, too. Demand, demography and digitisation are all benefiting workers in rich countries: their economies are running hot, which keeps labour markets tight; the supply of working-age people is falling; and early research suggests that AI provides a bigger productivity boost for lower performers, helping the laggards catch up with the vanguard.

We felt that the lineman’s jewel-encrusted hard hat said all this best. Although The Economist is dedicated to free-market liberalism, we ended up choosing the cover that does the most to heighten the contradictions.

We wrangled over the subtitle, though. Income inequality is much more than an argument among wonkish economists. The unshakeable conviction that it is growing has been a spur to political projects on both left and right, from the interventionism of Joe Biden to the populism of Donald Trump. We wanted something pithy that put across this wider context, but we struggled. In the end we sacrificed pith for punch.

For the first time since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24th 2022 he looks as if he could win. He has put Russia on a war footing and strengthened his grip on power. He has procured military supplies abroad and is helping turn the global south against America. Crucially, he is undermining the conviction in the West that Ukraine can—and must—emerge from the war as a thriving European democracy.

Our editorial draws on reporting about how Mr Putin has transformed his country. The president now tells his people that they are in a struggle for survival against the West. Ordinary Russians may not like the war, but they have become used to it. The elite have tightened their grip on the economy and are making plenty of money. Mr Putin can afford to pay a lifetime’s wages to the families of those who fight and die.

That transformation is behind these two ideas, featuring St Basil’s Cathedral bristling with bullets and a grenade-carrying matryoshka doll. These covers risk confusing Mr Putin’s advantage with Russia’s. In fact, we should be in no doubt that, whatever happens next, Russia’s president blighted his country on the day he invaded its neighbour. We used St Basil’s and the doll to illustrate the Briefing instead.

That left us with two ideas that focused squarely on Mr Putin.

Here he is, with his dark suit restitched as camouflage. This image says that his presidency is defined by conflict. Having strengthened his control, he could remain in power for years. If he does, he will continue to threaten war because that is his excuse for domestic repression and his own people’s suffering. Without war, the hollowness of his rule would be on full display.

This was stronger. Partly thanks to its colours, partly because it is a collage, it has a Constructivist feel. We enhanced that effect, and enlarged the image, by rearranging the headline and subtitle.

The West could do a lot more to frustrate Mr Putin. If it chose, it could deploy industrial and financial resources that dwarf Russia’s. However, fatalism, complacency and a shocking lack of strategic vision are hampering that effort, especially in Europe. For its own sake as well as Ukraine’s, the West urgently needs to shake off its lethargy.