Independent Institute: “The title of Christopher Meissner’s book on globalization is brilliantly appropriate: One From the Many. It’s a deliberate reference to the Latin phrase familiar to all users of dollar bills, “E pluribus unum,” traditionally translated as “out of many, one.” Yet the unification that Meissner identifies isn’t political; it’s economic. It’s the unification of the peoples of many different nations—of many different cultures, creeds, conditions, and callings—into one society, a society that transcends political boundaries and language differences. It’s the global economy. Its whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. In this economy today, each person benefits from the creativity and work effort of literally billions of his or her fellow human beings, just as this person promotes—through his or her own creativity and work effort—the well-being of these billions. Today’s globe-spanning market order encourages and directs a division of labor that generates annual global output now worth about $106 trillion, or just over $13,000 for every man, woman, and child. If this output were spread evenly, every person on earth in 2025 would enjoy access to roughly ten times—measured in monetary value—the amount of material goods and services that was available to the typical human being for nearly all of human history until the Industrial Revolution.”
ThePrint: “Even though China is a one-party authoritarian State, it is far more decentralised than India. While India’s city-level governments account for less than three per cent of total government spending, nearly 51 per cent of government spending in China happens at sub-provincial levels. Local governments also have a much broader qualitative mandate. For instance, they are almost exclusively responsible for unemployment insurance and pensions.”
WSJ reviews “The Narrative Brain”: “If humans were fish, our water would be narratives. We never experience reality unmediated. Light and sound filter through our senses and we impose meaning and order, building our familiar perceptual world of trees, people and buildings. At a higher level, we string events together into stories, ranging from brief encounters to autobiographical arcs to historical epochs and beyond. We use narratives to understand the causal influences in our lives; these unseen forces, manufactured by our minds, become what we know of reality. The first question is what defines a narrative. An important aspect is the segmentation of time. Every story has a beginning and end. Exactly how the human brain segments time is murky, and different people do it differently. Some segmentation cues are concrete; walking through a doorway, as researchers have shown, mutes our memory of what happened immediately before.”
Stephan Gans: “In our business, the drivers of competitive advantage used to be related to physical scale. But those advantages have melted away—not entirely, of course, but competitive advantage no longer rests on physical scale the way it once did. Today, competitive advantage is about who has the most data, and who can leverage it the best for increased consumer understanding and better commercial decision-making. Likewise, marketing used to be a very linear, sequential set of processes. And in that world, consumer insights could afford to be both a testing and a measurement function—testing ads and getting feedback, measuring what’s working, and creating reports. Today, of course, marketing is far more digitalized and data-driven—a real-time sport. Therefore, consumer insights must become a real-time sport as well. We need to stop thinking about testing, and we need to start thinking about learning. We can’t afford a culture of going from one test to another; we need a continuous-learning loop—based on behavioral data—that’s part of the commercial decision-making process.”
WSJ: “Advertisers are grappling with trade-offs of AI-powered ad planning and buying tools for automating nearly every step in digital ad campaigns. The tools work by asking buyers for parameters for campaigns, such as budget limits and sales goals, then allow algorithms to decide where ads will run, who they target and, in some cases, how ads appear. Buyers often can’t find out exactly what decisions the artificial intelligence implements, but they can essentially press a button for campaigns to run on their own. “
