It would be neat to be able to say that it was thanks to all this financial success and these illusions of happiness that the magazine and its editor-in-chief achieved financial success and renown. However, the matter is complicated by the fact that the magazine was part of the aforementioned media conglomerate which, it so happens, sold approximately half of all the issues of magazines sold in the United States and took in approximately half of all the magazine advertising revenues. Thus it was able to achieve what business people like to call “economies of scale”. For one example, in this case these “economies of scale” meant that the corporation could force magazine distributors to pay better rates for its financial-advice magazine and to display it more prominently than competing products.

          Thanks to wealthy patrons a few non-academic magazines have been able to survive despite a lack of economies of scale and of the advertising revenues that are earned almost exclusively by magazines that publish articles that imply or state that the consumption of goods and services brings happiness. But Americans such as myself who might be interested, for instance, in reading less relentlessly sunny analyses of the effects of stock-market profits on human beings may search many a magazine stand without coming across one of these publications.

       “Our readers must be made to understand that life is a complicated thing of negatives and positives.” Perhaps this is the real reason the Soviet Union collapsed. In the United States we have no space for negative thinking. Most of us who engage in it are the sort of hapless, talent-less, weak-willed losers who are never able to save a cent to invest in the stock market.

          Talk to any expert or journalist you want, all of the best — or all of the best-paid, anyway (and isn’t that more or less the same thing?) — they’ll all tell you how, in order to be productive, successful and happy you have to maintain a positive attitude, no matter how low your stocks may go or how advanced your cancer may be. This is what government and business leaders tell graduating college classes. This is what we were taught in kindergarten. Never mind complicated things and negatives. “Smile and the whole world smiles with you; cry and you cry alone.”

       “Our readers must be made to understand that life is a complicated thing of negatives and positives.” It is also possible that in 1982 the prospects for the Russian economy were not looking good, and the editor in question was encouraged by his superiors — or he personally felt it appropriate — to urge readers to adopt a more philosophical attitude.