Norman Macrae, who has died aged 86, was a former deputy editor of The Economist and columnist for The Sunday Times. He had a reputation as a fiercely intelligent journalist and as a remarkably prescient soothsayer. In 1984, he predicted: “Eventually books, files, television programmes, computer information and telecommunications will merge. We’ll have this portable object which is a television screen with first a typewriter, later a voice activator attached. Afterwards it will be miniaturised ... will be used to access databases anywhere in the globe, and will become the brainworker’s mobile place of work.”

There was hardly an aspect of life that was off-limits for him; through his writing he changed many minds and opened even more; most of his ideas were ahead of their time. The ability to foresee the internet and the smartphone did not automatically make him a household name, however. This was easily explained. In 1949 he joined The Economist, then as now a publication without bylines, and he did not leave it until he retired in 1988.

Despite its anonymity, The Economist was the perfect pulpit for Macrae. It allowed him to roam, geographically as well as intellectually. Several influences had helped to form him. As a boy, he had witnessed Stalin’s purges first-hand in Moscow, where his father was the British consul from 1936 to 1938. In the second world war, he had been in the RAF, which he described as a “public-sector job, with public-sector productivity”. And, having read economics at post-war Cambridge, he derided the university’s intellectual atmosphere as “sub-polytechnic Marxism”.

Although easy to pigeon-hole as a prophet of the new right — one former colleague described him as “a Thatcherite before she was” — in truth his politics were more complicated. He was an advocate of market capitalism only in so far as it advanced individual freedom. He objected to big business as much as big government; and he was as harsh a critic of religious conservatism under Reaganism as he was of the flabby post-war consensus in Britain.

He wasn’t always entirely right. In retirement in 1989 he was hired by Andrew Neil, to whom he had been a mentor at The Economist, to write a column for The Sunday Times.

In the first, 10 months before the Berlin Wall fell, he thought communist eastern Europe would “take the Latin American road to horrid inflations, and through them back to worse military dictatorships, with the added nuisance that any Soviet Galtieri would still have intercontinental missiles and several thousand hydrogen bombs”.

And in his last, in 1996, he hoped, as he had throughout his career, for a united Ireland that would become a magnet for investment by making politics irrelevant.

The Economist's Obit 
Few journalists have had as great an influence—or been proved right so often—as the man who, for 23 years, was the deputy editor of The Economist Jun 17th 2010 WHEN Norman Macrae died on June 11th, aged 89, no major British newspaper published an obituary of him. You could blame The Economist’s tradition of anonymity; you could blame the extraordinary modesty of the man himself who, if you tried to take his photo, would duck down and giggle, convinced that no one could possibly be interested in him...Norman was the first journalist to “discover” Japan. In 1962 he wrote a survey predicting that a country most Westerners regarded as synonymous with knick-knacks and knock-offs would become an industrial power-house. He was also the first journalist to “discover” the internet. In 1984 he wrote another survey arguing that life was about to be transformed by “terminals” which would give users access to giant databases