Business Standard: “India’s textile industry, valued at USD 250 billion, provides jobs to 50 million people. The sector is divided into three broad categories – Textiles (fibre, yarn, and fabrics); Garments and; Made-ups (Bed sheets, curtains etc.). India is present across all parts of the value chain. In 2023, China exported USD 114 billion worth of garments, followed by the EU (USD 94.4 billion), Vietnam (USD 81.6 billion), Bangladesh (USD 43.8 billion), and India with just USD 14.5 billion. From 2013 to 2023, Bangladesh’s garment exports grew by 69.6 per cent, Vietnam’s by 81.6 per cent, and India’s by only 4.6 per cent.”
Pete Wells: “I’m at the end of 12 years as a critic who ate in and reviewed restaurants constantly. Of those years, I probably spent two solid months just waiting for the check. I ought to be in favor of anything that speeds up the end of the meal, but Blackbird’s new checkless exit gives me the creeps. It is just the latest in a series of changes that have gradually and steadily stripped the human touch and the human voice out of restaurants. Each of these changes was small, but together they’ve made going out to eat much less personal. Meals are different now, and our sense of who we are is different, too…If we’re going to stay in a restaurant for more than a few minutes, we want to connect.A server’s little smiles, rehearsed jokes, out-of-nowhere raves for the daily special and so on may be subtle or not-so-subtle efforts to bump up the check and the tip, but they also ground us. Without them, the meal may be faster and cheaper, but it leaves us feeling a little empty. And when it’s time to go, we’re not in the mood to high-five the host, if the host still has a job.”
WSJ: “I ask Mr. [Nate] Silver if people have trouble understanding the difference between probability and certainty. He says no, at least not in everyday life: “If you see a weather forecast, there’s a 30% chance of rain, you carry an umbrella if you’re going a long way. Or if you’re flying some airline and there’s a 30% chance that the flight is late and you have an important business meeting the next morning, you might jump on an earlier flight.” The difference is that “people don’t want to see political outcomes as being governed by things that are outside of their control.”
James Pethokoukis asks why no Industrial Revolution in Ancient Rome, Greece, or China? “What set Europe apart was its eventual continuous advancement. Unlike China, Europe’s fragmentation into numerous competing states increased the cost of restraining technical progress. Backward countries risked being overtaken or conquered by more tech-progressive ones. The external threat of falling behind outweighed the internal threat from resistant guilds. Governments began siding with innovators and disruptors, recognizing that the risk of losing wars to technologically superior enemies outweighed the threat from displaced workers.” Donald Boudreaux adds: “Pethokoukis doesn’t mention Deirdre McCloskey’s work on the bourgeois deal. It’s true, as Pethokoukis (and Mokyr) note, that modern science is far more advanced in both its substantive achievements and institutional structure than was the science of ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and Song-dynasty China. But this reality isn’t as central as is the reality that market-tested innovation was in these places and times frowned upon – and frowned upon not only by state rulers and mandarins, but also by many ordinary people. This cultural hostility to innovations that disrupt familiar patterns of economic production and exchange – innovations that bubble up from below without prior approval of the powers-that-be – innovations that seek and need only the approval of ordinary people spending their own money as they choose – innovations that creatively destroy – is what prevented Rome, Greece, and China from experiencing the world’s first great wealth explosion. (I know that even Deirdre doesn’t like the term “cultural” as I use it here, but I honestly can think of no better term that isn’t excessively long.)”
