Michael Huemer: “a. If you’re on the left, you’re biased toward stories about oppression and prejudice. b. If you’re on the right, you’re biased toward stories about dangerous foreigners. c. If you’re libertarian, you’re biased toward stories about evil or incompetent governments.” [via Arnold Kling]
NYTimes: “People have been keeping diaries for centuries, though I suspect that less of us do now. A survey of more than a dozen friends turned up only one who sporadically made an attempt. The rest rely on their phone’s photo roll or social media. However, with so many of us taking thousands of photos, I wonder if each picture is still really worth a thousand words? Given how much those images are curated and filtered, do they provide a faithful record of our lives? Looking back, I found that the events I recalled as uniformly terrible had moments of beauty sewn in, like those nights in the hospital when my mother and I talked for hours in the dark as the machines beeped and nurses came in to check on her.”
Dan Williams: “Unless you understand that the real puzzle—the deep question—of economics concerns wealth, not poverty, you will be fundamentally confused about the world around you. You will think poverty is an aberration that demands a special explanation—most commonly, someone or some group of people to blame—rather than treating it as the default state humanity will revert to in the absence of improbable and precarious institutional arrangements.”
FT: “In 1810, 81 per cent of the US labour force worked in agriculture, 3 per cent worked in manufacturing and 16 per cent worked in services. By 1950, the share of agriculture had fallen to 12 per cent, the share of manufacturing had peaked, at 24 per cent, and the share of services had reached 64 per cent. By 2020, the employment shares of these three sectors reached under 2 per cent, 8 per cent and 91 per cent, respectively. The evolution of these shares describes the employment pattern of modern economic growth. It is broadly what happens as countries become richer, whether they are big or small or run trade surpluses or deficits. It is an iron economic law.”
Business Standard reviews India Before the Ambanis: A History of Indian Business, Money and Economy: “India has had a long tradition of recorded business — covering the bazaars, foreign trade, transformation of merchants to entrepreneurs, building of a fairly substantial modern industrial sector in the late colonial period, the role of entrepreneurial groups such as the Parsis, Gujaratis, Marwaris, Chettiars and Tamil Brahmins, creation of new business organisations and hierarchies, expansion into new industries after Independence, and mastering the licence-control raj to create major business groups such as Reliance. There have been many separate works that focus on one or more aspects of this rich business history. Unfortunately, there was no individual book that covered the entire span; a book that was historically accurate yet readable that one could refer to someone who wanted an overall view of the subject. Lakshmi Subramanian has changed that. Through six chapters, Dr Subramanian has created a clear and comprehensive book that I would recommend to anyone who wants a bird’s eye view of the subject. So, many kudos for that.”
