Ashu Garg: “[Box CEO] Aaron’s advice for founders is unequivocal: look toward the technological horizon and align your products with these macro trends…He stresses that riding these tailwinds isn’t just about growth—it’s existential: “I can’t point to a single B2B company in the past two decades that achieved significant scale without benefiting from some underlying architectural or market shift. If you’re going against these tailwinds, you’re dead.””
WSJ: “Americans are hearing very different narratives about current events from very different places. Many factors might have contributed to the election’s outcome, but the media world’s fracturing is hard to ignore. “Our information landscape has splintered into more and more pieces. Large, institutional news organizations are a smaller part of the geography,” said Nancy Gibbs, a former editor in chief of Time who is director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “So voters were all watching different campaigns play out, with different messages and meaning and momentum.” Freewheeling online talk shows hosted by comedians, YouTubers and other celebrities are designed to entertain as much as to inform. They are competing for attention with mainstream media organizations that have a different mission and who are bound by editorial standards.”
Nitin Kumar Bharti and Li Yang paper on Human Capital Accumulation in China and India in 20th Century: “The education system of a country is instrumental in its long-run development. This paper compares the historical evolution of the education systems in the two largest emerging economies- China and India, between 1900 and 2018. We create a novel time-series data of educational statistics related to enrolment, graduates, teachers and expenditure based on historical statistical reports. China adopted a bottom-up approach in expanding its education system, compared to India’s top-down approach in terms of enrolment. While India had a head-start in modern education, it has gradually been overtaken by China – at Primary education in the 1930’s Middle/Secondary level in the 1970s and Higher/Tertiary level in the 2010s. It resulted in the lower cohort-wise average education and higher education inequality in India since 1907. Vocational education is a central component of the Chinese education system, absorbing half of
the students in higher education. In India, the majority of the students pursue traditional degree courses (Bachelors, Masters etc.), with 60% in Humanities courses. Though India is known as the “land of engineers”, China produces a higher share of engineers. We conjecture that the type of human capital in China through engineering and vocational education helped develop its manufacturing sector. Utilizing micro-survey data since the 1980s, we show that education expansion has been an inequality enhancer in India. This is due to both the unequal distribution of educational attainment and higher individual returns to education in India.”
WSJ: “Since ChatGPT’s launch, Chegg has lost more than half a million subscribers who pay up to $19.95 a month for prewritten answers to textbook questions and on-demand help from experts. Its stock is down 99% from early 2021, erasing some $14.5 billion of market value. Bond traders have doubts the company will continue bringing in enough cash to pay its debts.”
FT: “Adults don’t read for pleasure, either, or at least, significantly less than they used to. Half don’t read regularly or at all. And yet the majority of adults surveyed do want to read. There are books, specific books, that they would actively like to read. They simply do not have time. The book would have to take the place of something else in their day. If it can’t replace the hard realities, it had better replace the small comforts. And who would swap a known and easy comfort — telly, say, or endless doomscrolling — for the gamble of a book? Only someone who already loved reading would do that; only someone who didn’t feel already daunted by the whole thing. And listen: if the adults are overworked and overtired, might not the same be true of their offspring? How much time is set aside for the average child to sit and read? How much space is created in the school day? If a carer is working late, who is reading to the child? There is a correlation between children who need free school meals, and children who don’t read for pleasure: when money is scarce, then time is almost always scarce as well.”
