Most people would rather spend a dollar to get rid of one hour advertising on TV, but not many would spend more than five dollars to get rid of the relative unobstrusive ads in the Economist.
How many issues do the magazines for $20 a year have in a year? Too bad, you can't get a magazine that cheaply here in Germany.
By the way: There is a website to the 'Why not?'-book (http://www.whynot.net/). It tries to be a web-2.0 idea exchange. But browsing it did not gratify me as much as reading their book.
Especially I like 'What would Croesus do?' (How would you solve your problem if resources were unconstrained?) and 'Find new problems for your solutions.'.
I read that in a book (http://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Ingenuity-Solve-Problems-Smal...) that the usual TV station makes less than a dollar for an hours advertisement per viewer. The Economist makes more than five dollars in advertisements per issue.
Most people would rather spend a dollar to get rid of one hour advertising on TV, but not many would spend more than five dollars to get rid of the relative unobstrusive ads in the Economist.