Akash Prakash: “Independent of its cyclical challenges, China is entering a period of much slower growth, simply based on demographics. As Bloomberg has pointed out, the global growth baton is being passed on to India and somewhere between 2035 and 2040, India should become, on a sustained basis, the largest contributor to global growth. For India the chart makes the point our demographic window remains open. We have an unbelievable opportunity. We need to invest in education, skilling, and health care. These are the areas in which the maximum focus of public policy must be placed. In addition to high technology we must accelerate labour-intensive manufacture. Labour-intensive production will have to migrate out of China because it simply does not have the people. We must get our fair share. This is based on ease of doing business, which has to improve.”
FT: “Even the most candid writer tends to neaten themselves in their fiction. But letters, even though they’re written for friends, lovers, family or the odd enemy, are intimate snapshots. Taken together, they reveal the dishevelled hair, the unwise or joyous decisions, all of life’s concerns as well as the soaring highs.”
Elysian: “The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).”
Rama Bijapurkar: “Overstimulated with information, social media, and a whirring hyperactive world, overwhelmed by the constant change around them, and anxious trying to cope, [18-21 year old Indians] are short on attention span and constantly in a state of mental movement. Perhaps the lack of large institutions and predictable lives they can lean on is the cause of it — this generation in India has a lot less of it than any generation before. Social scientists think in terms of agency and structure — respectively defined as the “ability to affect their environment or make truly free choices” and “conditions in the environment that limit choices and opportunities or define the range of actions available”. Young India is hearteningly strong on agency, constantly buzzing with plans of what to do now and next, but sadly coming up against the harshness of structure. Some survive and are resilient, others give up and are dispirited, and a few decide to work at making the structure better.”
Daron Acemoglu: “Today’s generative AI has huge potential and has already chalked up some impressive achievements, including in scientific research. It could well be used to help workers become more informed, more productive, more independent, and more versatile. Unfortunately, the tech industry seems to have other uses in mind. As we explain in Power and Progress, the big companies developing and deploying AI overwhelmingly favor automation (replacing people) over augmentation (making people more productive). That means we face the risk of excessive automation: many workers will be displaced, and those who remain employed will be subjected to increasingly demeaning forms of surveillance and control. The principle of “automate first and ask questions later” requires – and thus further encourages – the collection of massive amounts of information in the workplace and across all parts of society, calling into question how much privacy will remain.”
