Their approach has been anything but subtle.

“Once upon a time, there was an ambitious young man who didn’t read The Economist. The End,” read one particularly audacious ad from 2004. Another, from 1988 said, “I never read The Economist  Management Trainee. Age 42.” One from 2001 said, “Look forward to class reunions.”

The magazine’s latest advertising campaign in the United States, being introduced in 11 cities with well-off, well-educated populations, includes two slides that riff on the theme of social advancement. In one, an ostrich has his head buried in the ground. In the second, the bird’s head pops up through the ground right under the words “Get a world view. Read The Economist.”

“They’ve always implied that if you read The Economist, you’ll be just a little bit wiser and smarter than the average guy,” said Joseph Plummer, an adjunct professor of marketing at Columbia Business School and a former executive at McCann Worldgroup. “People want to get better most of the time. And I think in the case of The Economist, what they’re doing is adding a little bit of a wrinkle by appealing to a second emotion: competitiveness.”

Americans seem to be responding. Since the magazine first began printing a North American edition in early 1981, its circulation has increased more than tenfold. (It has published in Britain, where it has its headquarters, since 1843.)

When The Economist began reporting figures to the Audit Bureau of Circulations in 1982, it printed about 80,000 copies and sold fewer than 8,300 on the newsstand each week. As of its last accounting, for the first half of 2010, the magazine sold an average of about 52,000 on the newsstand each week and had a total weekly circulation of just under 823,000. Newsstand sales, however, are off 9 percent from more than 57,200 in the last six months of 2009, and the number of short-term subscribers is high.