WSJ: “India put about $120 billion toward spending on infrastructure such as roads and railways in its budget for its fiscal year that started in April. That was a more than 30% increase from the previous year. India’s finance minister said at the time the investments would help fuel productivity and job growth. Government departments are focusing on spending a large share of those funds this year, ahead of national elections due in 2024. Exports were down from April to June because of slowing global demand. But strong demand for services at home also fueled the world’s fifth-largest economy.”
Peggy Noonan: “My great memory of this summer is reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” In all these years I never had. In college I majored in British and American literature, so didn’t have to. I expected I’d catch up with it along the way, but I didn’t. For one thing it was huge, more than 1,000 pages, a real commitment, and one that involved patronyms, lineages and Russian existential gloom. Also, at some point in my 40s I pretty much stopped reading fiction and was drawn almost exclusively to nonfiction—histories and biographies. From youth I had read novels hoping to find out what life is, what grown-ups do, how others experience life. Now I wanted only what happened, what did we learn, how did it all turn out. But something got in my brain the past few months, that there were great books I hadn’t read and ought to. My mind went back to something George Will wrote about William F. Buckley, that later in life he’d finally read “Moby-Dick” and told friends: To think I might have died without having read it.”
Economist: “The book business…depends on those despised bestsellers. September is when publishers release the titles that they hope will be their money-spinners. Yet most books will be loss-making. To produce, print and publicise a book costs about £12,000-15,000 ($15,000-19,000), says Mark Richards of Swift Press, an independent publisher. He reckons that it takes around 5,000 copies to break even. Most books never come close: only 0.4% of titles in Britain last year sold more than that, according to Nielsen BookData…And yet publishers seem to have an almost total inability to predict which books will sell.”
Mint: “If half of India were to be urban by 2047, the country’s urban population would be close to 800 million. This would mean adding roughly 323 million people to the current urban population of about 497 million, assuming an urbanization level of 35% and a total population of 1.42 billion. Given this projection, India would require an additional urban space of more than 15,000 sq km to accommodate such growth, rivaling the United States in terms of population density. In the existing towns of the country, the price of every additional lot of dwelling tends to be higher than that of the previous lot, for the simple reason that it is a struggle to find fresh space on which to build. Very expensive housing tends to discourage fresh investment in productive enterprises in the area. In San Francisco, whose permitting policies prevent very many additions to the existing stock of housing, rents are sky-high, pushing up wages without really raising living standards of those who receive the wages, who merely pass a high proportion of their wages to their landlords. This makes it difficult for anything but the highest productivity industries to survive in the city.”
Economist: “Subtraction is not just about removing day-to-day distractions. It’s also about taking decisions to kill off projects and products that are going nowhere, and to focus efforts on the most important bits of the business. Peter Drucker, the doyen of management theorists, was an advocate of “planned abandonment”, so that resources that are tied up in marginal activities are freed for more profitable use. Executives should, he advised, routinely ask the same question of every aspect of the business: “If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?” In “The Case for Good Jobs”, a new book, Zeynep Ton of MIT Sloan School of Management argues that doing less can often make commercial sense.”
