The Erosion of Deep Literacy. Adam Garfinkle: “Deep literacy has wondrous effects, nurturing our capacity for abstract thought, enabling us to pose and answer difficult questions, empowering our creativity and imagination, and refining our capacity for empathy. It is also generative of successive new insight, as the brain’s circuitry for reading recursively builds itself forward…We ask our stone-age brains to sort, categorize, parse, and prioritize torrential data streams it never evolved to juggle, while in the background we have to stay ever vigilant to change in every sensory channel….Screens of all sorts serve up rapidly changing images, jump cuts between scenes, erratic motion, and non-linear narratives that spill out in fragments….Is it any wonder people today complain of mental fatigue? Fatigue makes it even harder to sort the trivial from the salient and navigate the glut of decisions modern life throws at us.”
Six ‘freedom’ reforms to bolster job creation and employability: by Manish Sabharwal. “India is fifth in the world in total GDP, but 138th in per capita GDP. Our problem is wages, not jobs (unemployment has hovered between 5-9% since 1947). We don’t have a shortage of land (we can give every Indian household half an acre and they would fit into Rajasthan and half of Maharashtra), labour (about 100 million people could shift off farms without impacting food security), or capital (domestic savings and foreign investors can supply the money required), but our challenge is how these three inputs combine.”
