WSJ: “China is flooding foreign markets with cheap goods again. This time it isn’t buying much in return…[China’s] factories are churning out more cars, machinery and consumer electronics than its domestic economy can absorb. Propped up by cheap, state-directed loans, Chinese companies are glutting foreign markets with products they can’t sell at home. Some economists see this China shock pushing inflation down even more than the first. China’s economy is now slowing, whereas, in the previous era, it was booming. As a result, the disinflationary effect of cheap Chinese-manufactured goods won’t be offset by Chinese demand for iron ore, coal and other commodities. China is also a much larger economy than it was, accounting for more of the world’s manufacturing. It had 31% of global manufacturing output in 2022, and 14% of all goods exports, according to World Bank data. Two decades earlier China’s share of manufacturing was less than 10% and of exports less than 5%.”
NYTimes: “The key to better math education? Explaining money…I offer to pay you $200 in one year if you give me $190 today. Good deal or bad deal? It’s the kind of math problem you might encounter in real life, as opposed to, say, whether the cosecant of a 30-degree angle is 1 or 2. You can imagine students perking up and paying attention when they realize that they need to know algebra to avoid being cheated on a loan. Math and personal finance make a perfect fit. Students grasp concepts such as exponential growth and regression to the mean much better when they see how those subjects apply to their daily financial lives.”
Arnold Kling: “To be successful, in a Darwinian sense, humans have to compete in three levels of games. At the individual level, we have to find mates, reproduce, and provide for our offspring. At a sub-Dunbar group level (meaning under roughly 150 persons), we have to obtain emotional and material support from the groups to which we belong, and our group has to avoid being outcompeted by other groups. At a larger corporate and society level (I call this super-Dunbar, in which there is considerable interdependence in a society of more than about 150 people), the performance of rulers and institutions has to be conducive to order and prosperity.”
Trae Stephens: “Though AI in its current state is more applicable to some companies than others, every industry needs to ask themselves questions about how they can leverage the state of the art in AI to build efficiencies into their businesses. AI will cut across every industry in a similar way to how the internet did. It took some companies up to thirty years for the internet to eat their world (and maybe it will take that long for AI to do the same), but everyone should be on the lookout for that to happen again, and perhaps more rapidly.”
Economist: “[Tacit knowledge] is the know-how born of experience, which cannot easily be documented in the manuals and is not much thought about by those who have it. Working alongside experienced colleagues is the best way to transfer tacit knowledge but it is not always possible. Sometimes you only want your very best people working on something, especially if the stakes are high. The most valuable employees are usually the ones with the least time to mentor others. When NASA was working on a Mars rover programme in the 2010s, it gave younger engineers a smaller, parallel project: to build a rover for use in educational programmes on Earth. It wasn’t the real thing, but it was a way to give them some hands-on experience. NASA also has an emeritus programme that gets retired veterans to mentor junior staff…managers everywhere should think about how to capture tacit knowledge. That starts by recognising the importance of retaining workers. You can’t share experience if no one has any.”
