Abhishek Choudhary on Vajpayee: “The decade he spent in Gwalior (1935-45) shaped his politics profoundly and, in many ways, lasted a lifetime. It was there that the adolescent Atal obsessively consumed the Arya Samaji version of history — of a glorious ancient India of Hindus being undone by Islamic and British conquests — through newspapers, plays, novels. It was there that he wrote ‘Hindu Tann Mann’, his most popular poem; it was there that he first attended the RSS shakha and discovered his gift for public speaking; and it was there that he won his first student union elections. By the time he left for Kanpur in 1945 for his master’s (and never quite returned home), his political character was more or less formed: essentially conservative yet curious and conciliatory, detached yet quietly ambitious.”
Arnold Kling: “Narrow banking means banking without liability transformation. A narrow bank has liabilities that match the characteristics of its assets. If it has long-term assets, it issues long-term liabilities. If it has risky assets, then it issues liabilities that are also risky. It does not hold risky, long-term assets and issue purportedly riskless, short-term liabilities. Liability transformation is performed with debt. A bank makes risky, long-term loans (or buys corporate bonds), funded with deposits that can be redeemed at par any time. If we only had narrow banking, then the financial sector would consist almost entirely of two types of claims: money, backed by 100 percent reserves; and equity. There would be much less debt issued…It is not such a healthy development.”
Economist: “Botswana has long offered secure property rights and a stable, clear tax regime. Today De Beers reckons that Botswana keeps four-fifths of the revenues from Debswana, their joint mining venture, through taxes, royalties and dividends. Elsewhere in Africa firms are reluctant to invest huge sums when mines can be seized or tax rates are volatile. Neighbouring South Africa is among the world’s ten least attractive countries for investors in mines, according to the Fraser Institute, a think-tank. Between 2009 and 2018 Africa attracted just 14% of the industry’s total spending on exploration, despite containing perhaps 30% of the planet’s mineral wealth. Botswana has minimised “Dutch disease”, whereby resource exports cause the local currency to rise, making other exports less competitive. It has managed the value of the pula and set up a sovereign-wealth fund. Too many African countries have spent the proceeds of resource booms before they arrive. In Botswana a stabilisation fund helps smooth boom-and-bust cycles.”
Ethan Zuckerman: “Twitter is by default public, whereas Facebook is not. There are many, many private spaces that are probably connecting more people. WhatsApp connects an ungodly number of people, but those are extremely small conversations. You can’t listen in on them. Even if you could, it would be unethical, but they’re not a public square in that same way. There are lots and lots of public squares. Many of them are much smaller. Twitter is both public and very, very large, and the journalists continue to swoop around the outsides of it, which has made it fairly hard for the other ones that have sort of tried to get into the mix. ”
Economist: “Narendra Modi aspires to turn India—and by extension himself—into a vishwaguru, or “teacher to the world”. But what pedagogical gift, beyond its prime minister’s charisma and sage-like appearance, does a rapidly growing and ambitious India have for other countries? Technological prowess, is the Modi government’s clear answer. In a little over a decade India has built a collection of public-facing digital platforms that have transformed life for its citizens. Once collectively known as the “India Stack”, they have been rebranded “digital public infrastructure” (DPI) as the number and ambition of the platforms have grown. It is this DPI that India hopes to export—and in the process build its economy and global influence. Think of it as India’s low-cost, software-based version of China’s infrastructure-led Belt and Road Initiative. “The benefits of digital transformation should not be confined to a small part of the human race,” Mr Modi declared at the G20 summit held in Indonesia last year… India’s reputation, if imperfect, is much better in the global south than America’s or China’s. And its digital public offering, if sometimes glitchy, looks like a huge improvement on the largely analogue state systems operating in most African and other developing countries. India’s own digital progress is proof of that. It seems likely that many poor countries will want to emulate it, to their advantage—and India’s too.”
