K.K. Kailash on the north-south divide in Indian politics: “The primary distinction is that in the south, we had movements first and then electoral politics, whereas in the north, it was primarily only electoral politics. In the south, the groups which led the movements have to be courted and accommodated within the mainstream political parties. In contrast, in the north, in the absence of movements, political parties often have taken up issues and concerns. As a result, you have caste groups tied to particular political parties. This makes it difficult for these groups to negotiate with the other political parties.”
Ezra Klein: “You can think of two ways the internet could have sped up productivity growth. The first way was obvious: by allowing us to do what we were already doing and do it more easily and quickly. And that happened. You can see a bump in productivity growth from roughly 1995 to 2005 as companies digitized their operations. But it’s the second way that was always more important: By connecting humanity to itself and to nearly its entire storehouse of information, the internet could have made us smarter and more capable as a collective. I don’t think that promise proved false, exactly. Even in working on this article, it was true for me: The speed with which I could find information, sort through research, contact experts — it’s marvelous. Even so, I doubt I wrote this faster than I would have in 1970. Much of my mind was preoccupied by the constant effort needed just to hold a train of thought in a digital environment designed to distract, agitate and entertain me…Our societywide obsession with speed and efficiency has given us a flawed model of human cognition that I’ve come to think of as the “Matrix” theory of knowledge. Many of us wish we could use the little jack from “The Matrix” to download the knowledge of a book (or, to use the movie’s example, a kung fu master) into our heads, and then we’d have it, instantly. But that misses much of what’s really happening when we spend nine hours reading a biography. It’s the time inside that book spent drawing connections to what we know and having thoughts we would not otherwise have had that matters.”
Wellcome Leap’s Regina Dugan: ““The first one is that the odds are irrelevant. If it matters, if the thing you are trying to do is important, and you see a possibility, take the shot. The second thing I learnt is that nobody is promised tomorrow, so you should live your life big.”
Martin Wolf: “Elections are necessary. But unbridled majoritarianism is a disaster. A successful liberal democracy requires constraining institutions: independent oversight over elections, an independent judiciary and an independent bureaucracy. But are they enough? No. In my book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, I follow the Australian economist Nicholas Gruen in arguing for the addition of citizens’ assemblies or citizens’ juries. These would insert an important element of ancient Greek democracy into the parliamentary tradition. There are two arguments for introducing sortition (lottery) into the political process. First, these assemblies would be more representative than professional politicians can ever be. Second, it would temper the impact of political campaigning, nowadays made more distorting by the arts of advertising and the algorithms of social media. A modest way to do this is to introduce citizens’ juries to advise on contentious issues. These juries would be time-limited, compensated for their time and be advised by experts.”
