Noah Smith: “If you went back to 1973 and made a cheesy low-budget sci-fi film about a future where humans sit around looking at little glowing hand-held screens, it might have become a cult classic among hippie Baby Boomers. Fast forward half a century, and this is the reality I live in. When I go out to dinner with friends or hang out at their houses, they are often looking at their phones instead of interacting with anything in the physical world around them. Nor is this just the people I hang out with. Just between 2008 and 2018, American adults’ daily time spent on social media more than doubled, to over 6 hours a day..About a third of the populace is online “almost constantly”.”
Lokiniti-CSDS post-poll survey on Karnataka (in The Hindu): “Survey data show that unemployment was the biggest voting issue for voters in the State. Asked an open-ended question, close to three in 10 voters (30%) stated unemployment to be the biggest issue while voting in this election. Poverty stood at a distant second, with 21% saying that it was the biggest issue. Price rise was mentioned by 6% of voters as the main issue, thus bringing economic issues to the fore, with nearly 60% voters drawing attention to economic issues more generally…In the 2018 Assembly election, a mere 3% voters reported unemployment to be an issue. For the majority (27%) of voters, development was the biggest issue. Back then, no issue, other than development crossed double digits. This corroborates the fact that unemployment was one of the major pressing issues for voters in this election.” ET: “The exit poll conducted by Axis My India shows that the top three factors influencing those who voted for Congress were change (10%), inflation and poll sops (9% each).”
Raghu Raman: “Happiness comes from many sources like material acquisitions, social validation, satisfaction of achievements, etc. but probably the most effective of them all is a sense of gratitude for the blessings we were given and curses we were spared. There is an old parable about Emperor Akbar and his courtier Birbal in which Akbar draws a line on the wall and challenges his court to shorten the line without touching it in any manner. Eventually after everyone fails, the wise Birbal walks to the wall and draws a line much longer than Akbar’s next to it and says, ‘There… your line is shorter now’. Most of us belong to a minuscule Indian minority who have already won a big lottery of life, and at an intuitive level, we know it. However, like any value system or culture, this source of happiness and joy also needs structured rituals that constantly remind us of why we should be happy and radiate that happiness within our spheres of influence. And spending physical time in a sustained cadence with those less fortunate and if possible helping them out is perhaps the most effective ritual of finding joy.”
WSJ: “A once-in-a-generation convergence of technology and pressure to operate more efficiently has corporations saying many lost jobs may never return…Companies are rethinking the value of many white-collar roles, in what some experts anticipate will be a permanent shift in labor demand that will disrupt the work life of millions of Americans whose jobs will be lost, diminished or revamped partly through the use of artificial intelligence. “We may be at the peak of the need for knowledge workers,” said Atif Rafiq, a former chief digital officer at McDonald’s and Volvo. “We just need fewer people to do the same thing.””
