Cato: “Immigrating to the United States is the main way to escape poverty in many countries. For about 3 dozen countries, most of their not‐in‐poverty population lives in the United States. Indeed, under the developed world poverty standard of $30 per day, immigration is just about the only way to escape poverty for several nationalities. Since poverty is practically assured in their home countries, it should not surprise lawmakers that millions of people would risk everything to immigrate to the United States. In 2019, only about 16 percent of people in the United States lived below the $30‐per‐day poverty line. This is somewhat higher than the 13‐percent rate under the U.S. national standard (which is calculated somewhat differently). But for most countries, the poverty rates under the $30‐per‐day standard are well above 90 percent.”
HBR: “Compared with start-ups, established corporations have many resources and capabilities that ought to give them a substantial lead: products, customers, operations, licenses, distribution, marketing, and capital. But too often a couple of misfits with a laptop manage to steal a corporation’s lunch. Why? Because corporations lack one critical ability: the entrepreneurial muscle to take an idea from small to big, from zero to one. If its idea is radical enough and sound enough, a start-up can disrupt an incumbent’s value chain. Leaders try to respond by creating their own corporate ventures, but those typically lack entrepreneurial qualities because they are staffed by people trapped inside the regime. Or they create an arm’s-length spinout to make space for innovativeness, but then the spinout struggles to access the very resources that would give it an advantage. Enter the hybrid start-up, which combines the assets of a corporation and the entrepreneurial capability of a start-up”.
Jonny Miller: “How is your breath right now? Take a moment to tune in. There’s a reasonable chance (especially if you are reading this on your phone) that your breath is shallow, in the upper chest and possibly through the mouth. Our breath is perhaps the only activity in our body that happens on its own that can also be consciously controlled. Yet it is rare for most of us to inquire how our breath is or consciously control it. Why does this matter? Because how we breathe impacts how we feel, how we show up in the world, and even the types of thoughts that arise.”
Anticipating the Unintended: “Today, the biggest expenditure item in [India’s] union budget is neither defence nor home affairs, but the interest paid by the union government to borrowers on past loans. We are paying for the profligacy of past and current governments…The union government still runs a sizable revenue deficit, meaning that a portion of the borrowing is being used merely to keep the government running today. In other words, we snatch money from future generations to meet the demands of the current generation’s citizens.”
Feldman and Lithwick: “The [American] founders certainly had their intellectual and moral failings. They accepted and engaged in some horribly unjust and inhumane practices. But whatever else they were, the founders were not lacking in imagination or the power of analogous reasoning, nor did they seek to forever lash their descendants to the most cramped reading of democracy they could conjure. They thought creatively and capaciously, particularly about how history and tradition should be used to reason about justice, well-being, law and government. They were looking out through a telescope to a broader and more complex future.” [via Jamelle Bouie]
