Business Standard: “India’s economy needs to expand at an average growth rate of 7.8 per cent over the coming decades to become a high-income country, according to a World Bank report…The world’s most populous nation is currently on track to become an upper middle-income country by 2032, but it will need two more decades of “very high growth” to reach its target of becoming an advanced economy by 2047 — its 100th anniversary of independence from Britain — the anti-poverty lender said. India’s gross national income per capita stood at $2,540 as of 2023, according to the World Bank. That number would have to grow to $20,000 by 2047 for the country to reach high-income status, it added. Only a handful of countries have managed to make the transition from middle to high income in less than two decades. Many nations, including Brazil, Malaysia, Mexico and South Africa have languished in the middle-income trap for two decades, the lender said.”
Scott Belsky on the future of commerce: “Context-based purchase decisions. Imagine every purchase decision – from food items and vitamins to wardrobe and accessories – being framed in the context of your diet, what you’ve purchased before, or what is recommended based on a deep analysis of your life and preferences. When you want to buy something, your personal AI will make the best recommendation and explain why. Of course, in the process you will begin to care less about the brand (and potentially be less persuaded by marketing) as you begin to trust your personalize AI (given its context and reasoning) more than any other signal. Pricing will become hyper-personalized based on our loyalty, preferences, and willingness to pay. Imagine special offers extended to customers based on, among other ideas, their taste, influence on social platforms, and their viral co-efficient (i.e. their willingness to share information about their purchase in ways that yields other customers, a measure that could certainly be determined from past purchases in the age of AI). AI-driven pricing is a fascinating and somewhat disconcerting phenomenon about to gain new dimensions and go mainstream.”
Eric Schmidt: “The contours of an AGI future are beginning to take shape. AI systems capable of performing at the intellectual level of the world’s top scientists are arriving soon—likely by the end of the decade. A key marker of the shift to AGI will be AI’s ability to produce knowledge based on its own findings, not merely retrieval and recombination of human-generated information. AGI will then move beyond the current limits of knowledge…The advent of AGI could herald a new renaissance in human knowledge and capability. From accelerating drug discovery to running whole companies, from personalizing education to creating new materials for space exploration, AGI could help solve some of humanity’s most pressing challenges. Perhaps most important, it could augment human intelligence in ways that would help us better understand ourselves and our place in the universe.”
Bloomberg on Unilever: “Urbanization is driving consumers in emerging markets like Indonesia from supermarkets and hypermarkets to small, neighborhood mom-and-pop shops and mini marts, and inflation has fostered penny-pinching habits. That has the maker of Persil, Vaseline and other country-specific brands struggling to re- tailor its strategy. Caught on the wrong foot by nimble local players that have eaten into its market with freebies, slashed prices and rapid product upgrades, the London-based company last month reported a 30% plunge in 2024 net income in the country — the sixth consecutive annual decline. Unilever’s local rivals’ “game is simple: just cut the price,” said Willy Goutama, an equity analyst at PT Maybank Sekuritas Indonesia. “They are willing to operate at a loss if that means gaining market share; Unilever, like many multinationals, tends to prioritize profitability…Most of the time, Unilever is too late to react.””
FT: “An easy read is like a nursery pudding — it brings comfort. But literature that is hard to digest should also be on every reader’s menu…One of my favourite reading memoirs of recent years is the American writer, professor and critic Sarah Chihaya’s Bibliophobia, which begins with an account of a wrenching emotional and physical breakdown. She explores books that are “Life Ruiners” — books that “you can’t ever recover from, that you never stop thinking about”, books that leave you fundamentally changed. Reading books that refuse to be easily digested, “the ones that churn up anxieties and fears you never knew you had”, helped Chihaya to feel, as she writes, not “better”, but “simply different”. These “hard but necessary” books illuminated more difficult but perhaps also revealing corners of the self.”
