Noah Smith reviews Brad deLong’s forthcoming book (Slouching Toward Utopia): “Why did the world become rich? DeLong argues that only after 1870 did technological progress accelerate to the point where it managed to outstrip human population growth, thus freeing humanity from Malthusian constraints. He attributes this acceleration to three key innovations: the industrial research lab, the modern corporation, and steamship-driven globalization. I would have liked a bit more definitive proof that these were the key causal factors, but DeLong’s arguments in favor of them are fairly persuasive. With these pieces in place, DeLong shows that total factor productivity — which he calls the “value of knowledge index” — accelerated dramatically right around the time that these things appeared. That acceleration, according to DeLong, continued up until the mid-2000s; thus, he conceives of 1870-2010 as a “long 20th century” characterized by rapid productivity growth and the social and political upheavals it caused.”
Lenny Rachitsky on how to kickstart and scale a consumer business: “Step 1: INSIGHT: Come up with your idea. Step 2: AUDIENCE: Identify your super-specific who. Step 3: HOOK: Craft your pitch. Step 4: REACH: Find your early adopters by doing things that don’t scale. Step 5: RETAIN: Iterate until enough people stick around. Step 6: SCALE: Build your growth engine.”
Nitin Pai: “I think parliaments do perform an important function: they allocate political power and confer it with legitimacy. Digital democracy will continue to need parliaments to make high-level political choices, allocate public funds and hold the executive accountable. MPs should have the power to depart from public opinion or expert determination. After all, they are not merely agents of their constituents, but consolidators of constituents’ interests with that of the larger collective. However, digital democracy will set baselines. Ultimately, the aim of such a digital upgrade is to assign the right job to the right entity: enable every citizen with an effective voice, aggregate society’s expertise in making laws and leverage the political legitimacy that derives from elections. Think of it as separation of competencies. The executive also needs to be re- imagined for the information age and that is a topic for a future column. But I think an overhaul of the parliamentary structure is overdue, and getting urgent by the day. Political polarization in the US, UK, France and India is perhaps masking an underlying dissatisfaction with the ‘system’ itself, even as China’s authoritarian model advertises its competent superiority. Unless it embraces the open and the digital, democracy itself is in danger.”
