Deirdre McCloskey: “What is this “liberalism” enunciated by the forefathers and foremothers—Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, Frédéric Bastiat and Alexis de Tocqueville, Ramon Aron and Rose Wilder Lane? Briefly, it is equality of permission. Parts of such an equality are human dignity, in cosmopolitan fashion ,and equality of standing to speak, in pluralistic fashion. But more generally it is an equality for all responsible adults to endeavor.”
Ezra Klein: “Martin Gurri discusses how social media and the internet have fundamentally changed the public’s relationship to institutions and power.”
Economist: “Since CRISPR’s discovery in 2012, it has begun supplanting old ideas that never reached their full potential. Gene therapy, a different technique that uses viruses to insert genes into patients, can treat many rare genetic diseases but is often too expensive. Genetically modified (GM) crops, which swap genes between species, have faced misguided opposition in Europe and elsewhere. CRISPR offers an alternative to both. But if, unlike them, it is to live up to its world-changing potential, it will need to attract a continuing flow of investment—which, in turn, means chalking up some real-life successes. For that to happen, scientists must show that they can get CRISPR into more types of cells in the body cheaply and easily. The technology would also be boosted if it could serve as a platform to create personalised therapies for people’s individual mutations. That will require new science, but it would also be catalysed by a better system of regulation.”
Azeem Azhar: “The economy is built on the idea that expertise is scarce and expensive. AI is about to make it abundant and practically free…For most of history, hiring a dozen PhDs meant a massive budget and months of lead time. Today, a few keystrokes in a chatbot summon that brainpower in seconds. As intelligence becomes cheaper and faster, the basic assumption underpinning our institutions — that human insight is scarce and expensive — no longer holds. When you can effectively consult a dozen experts anytime you like, it changes how companies organize, how we innovate and how each of us approaches learning and decision-making. The question facing individuals and organizations alike is: What will you do when intelligence itself is suddenly ubiquitous and practically free?”
Manish Sabharwal: “India’s problem of “employed poverty” arises from too many people working on farms, too many self-employed people, too few cities with two to four million people, too few megacities, too few people working in factories, and too few non-farm employers with the productivity to pay higher wages. The best advice for ambitious CMs aiming to deliver the “great transformation” of mass prosperity comes from Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman: “We instinctively step on the accelerator to go faster, but get better results by taking our foot off the brake”.”
