One would expect that the HN users who care about such things would already be aware of the paywall on economist.com

As someone who cares about such a thing and had no awareness of that, I would tend to disagree. Nytimes gets posted enough that I have encountered the pay wall, but the economist, I’d have had to guess. I also tried to look at the article and didn’t see the year when trying to open the truncated article, and do like to know that I have started reading something old. I just don’t really agree with your comment at all from almost any angle, but I don’t think either one of us has numbers to back up anything