Arnold Kling: “Probability can be purely mathematical. You can insist that the probability of a coin flip turning up heads is exactly 0.5, because that is the mathematical definition of a fair coin. You do not need to flip any coins to prove it. Probability can be purely empirical. You do need to flip a lot of coins and show that the number of heads approaches 50 percent as you do more coin flips. Probabilities apply to events in the world, not mathematical definitions. Probability can be neither mathematical nor empirical. Instead, probability is subjective. It’s not in the math. It’s not in the data. It is one person’s opinion. If your opinion is that the probability of heads is 0.6, so be it.”
Economist: “A new book by Karthik Muralidharan of the University of California, San Diego, called “Accelerating India’s Development”, argues that the crucial barrier to faster development is a lack of “state capacity”. Mr Muralidharan describes this concept as the “effectiveness” of government. Throwing money at a state lacking capacity is like adding fuel to a car near a breakdown: it won’t get you very far. Currently, the Indian state succeeds when on “mission mode”, achieving clearly defined goals…[India] struggles with mundane, everyday aspects of governance, such as education and health. Three in five rural children in the fifth year of school cannot read at a second-year level—and in the past five years the failure rate has only worsened…The Indian state does a lot, but little well. In his 800-page tome, Mr Muralidharan lays out fixes. The book is crammed with details about how the Indian system works and could be improved. Three ideas stand out. They concern how the state should manage people, use technology and improve its federal system. And they hold lessons for other governments.”
Jonathan Haidt: “What the smartphone user gives up is time. A huge amount of it. Around 40 hours a week for preteens like your daughter. For teens aged 13 to 18, it’s closer to 50 hours per week. Those numbers—six to eight hours per day—are what teens spend on all screen-based leisure activities.” [via Arnold Kling] Haidt in the NYTimes: “The Great Rewiring is a five-year period in which technological changes interacted with social trends to radically transform the daily lives of teenagers in the United States and many other countries. In 2010, few teens had a smartphone, few had high-speed internet, few had unlimited data plans, nobody had Instagram and kids still sometimes went over to each other’s houses and spent some time with other kids. By 2015, everything changed at a faster pace than ever before in human history. For evidence showing how radical this change was, look at the millennial generation, which got most of the way through puberty before this happened, and their mental health is fine. Gen Z, I believe, is defined by the fact that they went through puberty on social media, without spending much time with other kids, and their mental health is the worst ever recorded.”
WSJ: “The world’s most valuable tech companies were founded in dorm rooms, garages and diners by entrepreneurs who were remarkably young. Bill Gates was 19. Steve Jobs was 21. Jeff Bezos and Jensen Huang were 30. Never has anyone so old created a business worth so much as Company, known simply as TSMC, the chip manufacturer that produces essential parts for computers, phones, cars, artificial-intelligence systems and many of the devices that have become part of our daily lives. Chang had such a long career in the chip business that he would have been a legend of his field even if he’d retired in 1985 and played bridge for the rest of his life. Instead he reinvented himself. Then he revolutionized his industry. But he wasn’t successful despite his age. He was successful because of his age. As it turns out, older entrepreneurs are both more common and more productive than younger founders. And nobody personifies the surprising benefits of mid-life entrepreneurship better than Chang, who had worked in the U.S. for three decades when he moved to Taiwan with a singular obsession.”
FT: “Not long ago, societies looked destined to become ever more secular as they grew richer, and religion’s influence on politics would ebb away. That has not happened. In developing countries, the very mixed record of secular models — communism, socialism, nationalism or western-style democracy — in delivering equitable material growth set the stage for a return of religious fundamentalist politics, whether in governments or in violent non-state movements. Resentment against lingering power imbalances and alienation with western-led globalisation has also tempted authoritarian leaders to use traditionalist religion to win support: India is a case in point; so is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In the west, too, the barriers between politics and religion have been disappearing. A traditionalist backlash can be seen in phenomena as superficially different as the nostalgia of Europe’s populist right or the undermining of abortion rights in the US.”
