Anu Bradford: “We have the American market-driven model, the Chinese state-driven model, and the European rights-driven model. So the horizontal battle, then, encapsulates this set of three different models that are competing for influence in the global digital economy. The American market-driven model is premised on this idea that we really want to maximize incentives for innovation. It relies on the idea of free market and free internet and reserves a very minimal role for the government. Instead, governance of the digital economy is in practice handed over to the tech companies. The Chinese state-driven model is rather different. It focuses on the Chinese government’s desire to make China a technological superpower. But China also harnesses technology as a tool for censorship, surveillance, and propaganda in order to preserve social stability and entrench the political power of the communist party. The European rights-driven model is again different in that it is premised on a human-centric vision of the digital economy. It prioritizes the protection of fundamental rights of individuals, the preservation of democratic structures of a society, and also a notion of a fairer distribution of the benefits from digital transformation. This is the idea that we must transfer some of the data power and the gains from the digital economy from these large platforms to smaller tech companies, to the users, and to the public at large.”
Ganesh Sitaraman: “What’s happened is that airlines are doing two things. One is they are reducing service to cities. If you look at the big airlines, since the pandemic, 74 cities have lost service from one of the airlines. That’s a huge number of airlines, a huge number of places that have less competition, and have really lost access to a whole bunch of places they would have had access to already….The other thing is that airlines have moved — and this is a multi-decade trend — from point-to-point service with nonstop flights from one city to another to a hub and spokes model. That has really gotten more and more hub-oriented with what people call “fortress hubs,” these huge airports like Dallas or Atlanta, that are dominated by one airline, which routes a lot of traffic through that hub.”
James Somers: “Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it…Bodies of knowledge and skills that have traditionally taken lifetimes to master are being swallowed at a gulp. Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it. I keep thinking of Lee Sedol. Sedol was one of the world’s best Go players, and a national hero in South Korea, but is now best known for losing, in 2016, to a computer program called AlphaGo. Sedol had walked into the competition believing that he would easily defeat the A.I. By the end of the days-long match, he was proud of having eked out a single game. As it became clear that he was going to lose, Sedol said, in a press conference, “I want to apologize for being so powerless.” He retired three years later. Sedol seemed weighed down by a question that has started to feel familiar, and urgent: What will become of this thing I’ve given so much of my life to?”
Noah Smith: “The first thing that really strikes you about Singapore is how incredibly rich it is. Measured by GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, Singapore is the third-richest country in the world, behind only Ireland and Luxembourg (whose numbers are distorted by their tax haven status), and about 65% richer than the United States. Singapore’s numbers may also be inflated to some degree, because some non-permanent foreign workers are apparently not counted in the denominator — interestingly, neither government workers nor businesspeople I talked to seemed to know exactly which categories of people were included in the calculation. The Singaporean government counts “non-residents” at about 30% of the population; if none of those are counted in the denominator of per capita statistics, it would mean Singapore’s true per capita GDP (PPP) is more like $93,000. That would still make it slightly richer than the U.S., and among the very highest-income countries on the planet.”
