Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin: “[T]echnological innovation is essential for growth to persist in the long run. But innovation requires detailed knowledge of production processes and what can make production more efficient. Any society that frowns upon hard work will be unlikely to have a robust class of innovators. Any society that disparages finance will be unlikely to have a thriving entrepreneurial class or significant investment in capital.” [via CafeHayek]
FT: “Estimates of India’s potential oil wealth differ hugely. S&P Global Commodity Insights believes there may be as much as 22bn barrels of oil in unexplored basins. Rystad, an energy consultancy, puts the figure at just under 8bn. Meanwhile, analysts at the International Energy Agency are pessimistic about the chances of a significant increase in the country’s 700,000 barrels per day of production. “In part, the absence of international companies may be due to lacklustre discoveries since the turn of the century,” they wrote, in their annual Indian Oil Market outlook. Over the past 23 years, 2bn barrels of oil have been discovered in India, compared with 10bn in each of Angola, Norway and Guyana and 40bn in Brazil.”
Niranjan Rajadhyaksha: “A higher share of wages can actually spur the economy when there is excess capacity in factories. But growing wages can lead to higher inflation in case there is no slack in the economy. A higher share of profits can be helpful when companies need cash to invest in new production capacity. But companies will prefer to use their higher profits to pay off loans or invest in financial assets in case there is no compelling case to build new capacity in a slack economy. In other words, whether an economy—and specifically domestic private-sector demand for either consumer goods or machines—benefits from either a wage-led or a profit-led phase of growth depends on the overall slack in the economy.”
WSJ: “A fault tolerant quantum computer will be able to hammer away at problems indefinitely, giving them wherewithal to break encryption algorithms that companies and governments use to protect their most price-sensitive and important information, Gil said. That moment might reasonably occur by around 2035, he estimated, but regardless of the timing, he is convinced it will happen. “The reality is that the thing that we used for that ultimate line of defense is vulnerable. It will be broken. There’s no ifs or buts about it,” Gil said. Why worry about a scenario that’s looming perhaps a decade or more in the future? Because of a scenario some call “harvest now, decrypt later.” It envisions hackers stealing encrypted data today and sitting on it for years, hoping to realize its value at some point in the future when quantum computers are able to decrypt the information, said Markus Pflitsch, founder and chief executive of quantum-computing company Terra Quantum.”
