NYTimes: “Virtual reality is now advancing so quickly that it seems quite reasonable to guess that the world inside V.R. could one day be indistinguishable from the world outside it. [David] Chalmers says this could happen within a century; I wouldn’t be surprised if we passed that mark within a few decades. Whenever it happens, the development of realistic V.R. will be earthshaking, for reasons both practical and profound. The practical ones are obvious: If people can easily flit between the physical world and virtual ones that feel exactly like the physical world, which one should we regard as real?”
Vidya Mahambare: “At an all-India level, from 2004-05 to 2018-19, while young adults in farm work as a proportion of their population fell from 34% to 14%, those in non-farm employment remained largely constant at around 29%…Why did the share of young adult employment in industry and services not rise during a largely good period of growth for the economy? A combination of three factors may explain it. First, more young adults are staying in education longer; second, unemployment has risen; and third, more women are either leaving or not taking up paid work.”
Tyler Cowen: “For all the talk about how political and media bias distort people’s perceptions of current events, another kind of bias may have an even greater impact: recency bias. Put simply, recency bias is the practice of giving disproportionate weight to the events of the recent past when formulating expectations and plans. For instance, starting in 2008 the U.S. Federal Reserve increased the money supply sharply, and the rate of price inflation did not rise correspondingly. One result of this recent episode of expansionary monetary policy is that America became less vigilant about inflation — and it is now living with the consequences.”
