Economist: “India’s urban centres generate 60% of its gdp. By 2036, according to an official estimate, 73% of Indian population growth will take place in urban areas. Workers in big cities command a wage premium of 122% over those in the countryside. Just 5% of Indian city-dwellers are “multidimensionally poor” (ie, very), compared with 19% of people in rural areas…India’s long-standing neglect of its cities is rooted in Gandhian ideology as well as electoral exigency. Mohandas Gandhi, in some ways India’s founding father, preached that “the soul of India lives in its villages”, a view that gave cities a poor footing in independent India from the start. The constitution sets out powers for the federal government and for states, but hardly mentions cities. Municipal authorities are therefore weak; state governments are mainly responsible for urban policymaking. Only one in eight Indian government employees works at the local level, compared with two in three in China. Where China boosted its urban centres by rewarding local governments for economic development, notes Nirvikar Singh of the University of California in Santa Cruz, no such mechanism exists in India…Letting [India’s cities] look after themselves would help a lot.”
David Brooks: “My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage. Please respect the truism that if you have a great career and a crappy marriage you will be unhappy, but if you have a great marriage and a crappy career you will be happy. Please use your youthful years as a chance to have romantic relationships, so you’ll have some practice when it comes time to wed. Even if you’re years away, please read books on how to decide whom to marry. Read George Eliot and Jane Austen. Start with the masters. This is not just softhearted sentimentality I’m offering. There are mountains of evidence to show that intimate relationships, not career, are at the core of life, and those intimate relationships will have a downstream effect on everything else you do.”
Ben Thompson: “Disney is, from this point forward, not much different than Taylor Swift: sure, there is money to be made (hopefully) in areas like streaming, but the real durable value and outsized profits will come from real life experiences. This is, to be sure, a good business, but it has its limits: it is remarkable that Swift performed six shows in seven nights in Los Angeles, but it was still only six shows; concerts don’t scale like CD sales used to. Disney, similarly, only has so many theme parks, that only accommodate so many people, and operating those theme parks takes significant ongoing resources.”
FT: “Investors typically make three arguments about how to make money out of generative AI. Even with its imperfections, they say, it can still be a valuable productivity tool, accelerating the industrialisation of efficiency. There are also many uses, ranging from copywriting to call centre operations, where a “two 9” level of accuracy is OK. Second, investors are betting on the fact that some companies can deploy generative AI models to solve narrow, real-world problems. The latest advances in AI allow data to be analysed in real time, says Zuzanna Stamirowska, chief executive of the French start-up Pathway, helping to optimise maritime trade or the performance of aero engines, for instance. “We really focus on business use cases,” she says. Third, generative AI models will enable the creation of new services and business models as yet unimagined. During the mass electrification of the economy in the late 19th century, companies profited from generating and distributing electricity. But the serious fortunes were made later by using electricity to transform ways of manufacturing things, such as steel, or inventing wholly new products and services, including domestic appliances.”
