The Economist

You're smart enough to understand the concept of a statistical relationship, and also smart enough to know that single anecdotes ("my uncle smoked all his life and didn't get lung cancer") don't really prove anything about a statistical relationship.

But look again at what you're claiming here: "price doesn't depend on quality of content".

Here's the evidence you start from:

- Time: lower quality content, ~$5 / issue

- Economist: higher quality content, ~$7 / issue

Which to an outside observer certainly doesn't look like a case of price not depending on quality of content.

To turn the above facts into evidence for your claim you introduce a "price per page" metric, which lets you salvage your point at the expense of introducing a dubious metric.

Leaving aside the dubiousness of the metric, your chosen datapoints don't hold up once you leave the newsstand:

- 1 year of time: ~$20. http://www.amazon.com/TIME-1-year/dp/B00007BK3L/ref=sr_1_1?i...

- 1 year of the economist: ~$127. http://www.amazon.com/The-Economist/dp/B00077B7M6/ref=sr_1_1...

Difference in quality of content may not be a complete explanation for the above differential, but I'd wager a guess it has something to do with it.

And even at the newsstand you can find a wide range of price-per-sheet values (eg: 4c to 20c by my estimates), enough so that you could just as easily, say, have picked "Foreign Affairs" and "Time" and have it come out that higher quality content yields higher per-page prices.

Which is why this looks like a sloppy generalization: you're trying to argue against a statistical relationship (generally "higher-quality content => generally higher prices") by means of anecdote, and not really a carefully-vetted anecdote at that (as evidenced in the subscription pricing).