Economist: “Not so long ago, Latin America was on a roll. A commodity boom brought healthy economic growth and provided politicians with the money to experiment with innovative social policies, such as conditional cash-transfer programmes. That, in turn, helped bring about big falls in poverty, reducing the extreme income inequality long associated with the region. The middle classes grew. That helped underpin political stability. Democratic governments generally respected human rights, even if the rule of law was weak. Growing prosperity and more responsive and effective politicians appeared to be reinforcing one another. The future was bright. Now that virtuous circle has been replaced by a vicious one. Latin America is stuck in a worrying development trap…Its economies have suffered a decade of stagnation or slow growth. Its people, especially the young, who are more educated than their parents, have become frustrated by their lack of opportunity. They have turned this anger against their politicians, who are widely seen as corrupt and self-serving. The politicians, for their part, have been unable to agree on the reforms needed to make Latin America’s economies more efficient. The region’s productivity gap with developed countries has widened since the 1980s. With too many monopolies and not enough innovation, Latin America is falling short in the 21st-century economy.”
FT: “Novels can cast a spell in a way that no other form of entertainment quite matches…Nigel Newton, Bloomsbury chief executive, calls such titles “a marvellous escape in brutish times”…Readers are familiar with the feeling of their imagination being pulled into a story and consciousness of the real world slipping away, although they are just words on a page. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi used the term “flow” for “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter”. He was referring to forms of work and artistic endeavour, rather than simply reading a book, but there are similarities. Long-form reading does require a bit of effort, especially in a world with many distractions, from watching television to scrolling mindlessly through social media…Books also offer something rare and precious: a break from economic worries and media fragmentation. The experience of following a narrative so closely that nothing else intrudes is so valuable that every generation craves it.”
Atanu Dey: “Economics does not tell us what we should or must do: it does not have the power to compel. But it has explanatory power. It can explain why we do what we do, and could reveal the possible consequences of our proposed courses of action. Most significantly, if powerful people who have control over and influence others — politicians, bureaucrats, public intellectuals, popular entertainers — are ignorant of the fundamental lessons of economics, it usually spells disaster for the people. Worse than that, if the people are themselves unfamiliar with the basic economic truths, they are guaranteed to not be able to judge whether their elites are doing what is best for the collective. The fact is that the fundamental truths of economics are all counter-intuitive, and they seem to defy common-sense. It takes a bit of training, though not a lot of it, for us to understand the basics, and when we do, it becomes part of our common-sense…The good news is that now anyone can, if he wishes, learn the basics of economics because there are immense resources on the web for that. Will it improve his financial situation? No. But it will help him better understand the world he lives in. And if enough people understand the world as it is, then the ignorant elites will not be able to push policies that make the world worse than it has to be.”
