FT on South Korea: “Economists worry that the government’s determination to double down on South Korea’s traditional growth drivers of manufacturing and large conglomerates betrays an unwillingness or inability to reform a model that is showing signs of running out of steam. Having grown at an average of 6.4 per cent between 1970 and 2022, the Bank of Korea warned last year that annual growth is on course to slow to an average of 2.1 per cent in the 2020s, 0.6 per cent in the 2030s, and to start to shrink by 0.1 per cent a year by the 2040s. Pillars of the old model, such as cheap energy and labour, are creaking.”
NYTimes: “New A.I. technology is generating blueprints for microscopic biological mechanisms that can edit your DNA, pointing to a future when scientists can battle illness and diseases with even greater precision and speed than they can today. Described in a [recent] research paper…by a Berkeley, Calif., startup called Profluent, the technology is based on the same methods that drive ChatGPT, the online chatbot that launched the A.I. boom after its release in 2022…Much as ChatGPT learns to generate language by analyzing Wikipedia articles, books and chat logs, Profluent’s technology creates new gene editors after analyzing enormous amounts of biological data, including microscopic mechanisms that scientists already use to edit human DNA.”
Bloomberg: “Finance in the 21st century is still too costly, and clubby. Besides, when compared with the instantaneous gratification in other aspects of our digital lives, money appears to move too slowly online. Sure, there have been efficiency gains from better communication technology: Catching a flight from JFK to Heathrow used to be the fastest way for same-day cash delivery across the Atlantic as recently as 2010. No longer. But for all the strides in mobile banking, remittance costs globally still average a steep 6.2%. It takes $15 to send $200 to sub-Saharan Africa. The bottleneck lies in the very architecture of how value is transferred from one customer to another — as messages flowing between trusted intermediaries. Supplanting it with a superior design will be less like replacing carrier pigeons with telegrams, and more like substituting the existing 700-year-old record-keeping system with something analogous to an internet protocol, built for finance. Agustín Carstens, the general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, and Nandan Nilekani, the Indian tech billionaire behind the world’s largest digital identity program, have proposed just such a financial system of the future. They’re calling it the “Finternet.” At the heart of idea is the so-called unified ledger.”
Economist: “[India’s] basic political structure is still democratic, so consensus-building will be needed. Thirty years of reform have laid a foundation for India to reach scale. To achieve its potential, a new agenda just as ambitious as that of 1991 is needed…With the right changes, it can become an engine of global growth.”
Dani Rodrik: “Boosting manufacturing employment is like chasing a fast-receding target. The world has moved on, and the nature of manufacturing technologies has changed irrevocably. Automation and skill-biased technology have made it extremely unlikely that manufacturing can become the labour-absorbing activity that it once was. Whether we like it or not, services such as retail, care work, and other personal services will remain the primary engine of job creation. That means we need different types of good-jobs policies, with a greater focus on fostering productivity and labour-friendly innovation for services. This is not to suggest that policies to boost manufacturing are necessarily misplaced. They may well strengthen a country’s manufacturing base and promote innovation. However, rebuilding the middle class, generating enough good jobs, and reinvigorating declining regions call for an entirely different set of policies.”
