WSJ interviews Douglas Murray: “America’s “great resilience,” he believes, keeps decline at bay. “The country can be stress-tested very, very badly and it still keeps going.” He admires the American character, offering an unexpected example of its strength. “There’s a specific thing which Americans may not notice about themselves but which I can assure you an outsider notices. Which is that—unless you have a horrible social circle—if you do well, your friends are pleased for you.” This isn’t true in Britain, or Europe generally. “Strong negative instincts kick in. ‘Don’t get above yourself.’ ‘Who do you think you are?’” America resists decline, also, because it has “very good foundations.” Mr. Murray says he is “forever railing against Americans who do down the founders of this country. Because I don’t think the ones who do that realize how lucky Americans are to have had the founders you had.””
Economist: “The most recent survey, which covers the year to July, shows that only 1% of India’s households fell below the international poverty line in 2024, according to an analysis of the data by Surjit Bhalla, a former executive director of the IMF, and Karan Bhasin of the State University of New York, Albany. Heir to the famous “dollar a day” poverty line, the international poverty line now stands at $2.15 a day at purchasing-power parity. India has, therefore, all but eliminated the most extreme forms of poverty. This is wonderful news in its own right. But India’s success also calls into question a common assumption about development: that the eradication of poverty requires a manufacturing miracle, drawing masses of peasants out of the farms and into the factories. More than 40% of India’s workers are still employed in agriculture. Perhaps people can leave poverty without leaving the land. That is also one conclusion of a new paper by Vincent Armentano, Paul Niehaus and Tom Vogl, all of the University of California, San Diego, which examines some of the paths out of poverty taken by five big emerging economies—China, Indonesia, Mexico and South Africa, as well as India—from 1984 to 2017.”
Ishan Bakshi: “For India to reach a per capita income in excess of $10,000, the current growth structure necessarily requires western and southern states to have higher levels of per capita income, attaining high-income status years before. Put differently, these states will have to avoid the middle-income trap that has bogged down many countries. This is a tall order. Even China, after achieving spectacular growth over several decades, is yet to join the ranks of high-income economies. The ability or inability of these states to do so will perhaps become apparent by the middle of the next decade.”
The Athletic: “There is an easy answer for why [Michael] Phelps, the most decorated and accomplished Olympian of all time, knows these idiosyncrasies about himself: He writes down even the most minuscule details of his day in a journal, then reads over his entries later on, viewing it as a tool to better understand himself. “I have to be the best version of myself and give myself that chance,” he told me.”
