Nieman Journalism Lab: “Per capita newspaper circulation has been declining in the United States since World War II, so it’s hardly shocking that it’s still dropping. If you’re The New York Times, you’ve been able to more than make up for the loss in print subscribers with digital ones. But for most local newspapers, digital gains are nowhere big enough to stop the print bleeding…When the local paper stops reporting, there’s often no one else to take its place. Everyone gets a little less informed about the world around them.”
Dan Shipper writes about AI as a copilot for the mind: “Every time you touch the keyboard, the AI downloads and sorts through everything you’ve ever read and uses the sum total of that knowledge to help you complete your sentences. It’ll work in every app that you use, and it will be on your computer and on your phone. And it’ll be incredibly easy to save anything that you want to remember for later. Just take a screenshot, or paste a URL, or upload a file, or send a text, and whatever you’re looking at will be saved and available for your copilot to bring back to you at the right time. A copilot for the mind might be able to find the perfect quote from a book you highlighted 10 years ago to help you make the point you’re trying to make. Or it might suggest relevant counterarguments to help you sharpen your prose—or maybe even change your mind on a topic you’re thinking about.”
WSJ: “The Chinese family is about to undergo a radical and historically unprecedented transition. Extended kinship networks will atrophy nationwide, and the widespread experience of close blood relatives will disappear altogether for many. This is a delayed but inescapable consequence of China’s birth trends from the era of the notorious one-child policy (1980-2015). The withering of the Chinese family will make for new and unfamiliar problems, both for China’s people and its state. Policy makers in China and abroad have scarcely begun to think about the ramifications.”
Himanshu: “Labour data points to significant distress in the Indian economy…A strong piece of evidence of distress is a statistically observed workforce shift back to agriculture, thereby reversing the gains of a structural transformation in the economy between 2004-05 and 2017-18. The absolute number of workers in agriculture declined by 33 million between 2004-05 and 2011-12. Almost a matching decline was observed between 2011-12 and 2017-18. However, the slowdown and pandemic reversed this process. The agricultural sector witnessed a return of 36 million workers between 2017-18 and 2021-22. So pronounced was it that the absolute count of workers in agriculture stood higher in 2021-22 than in 2011-12, a decade ago. Besides a reversal of the structural transformation, the numbers also imply a declining per worker income in agriculture, thereby worsening the rural distress…For the Indian economy to revive, employment in non-agricultural sectors needs to increase along with a rise in income from such employment. This is also necessary for us to make the country’s economic growth more employment-intensive, which would be the best antidote to poverty and distress in the economy.”
Michael Munger: “Destinationism insists that any new policy must be the ideal, or oppose it; directionalism is willing to support any move toward the ideal, if the ideal is not on the table as an alternative.”
