NYTimes: “China’s aggressive embrace of clean energy technologies, at a faster pace than even its own government expected or planned, has left it with an unquenchable thirst for electricity. Half the country’s new cars are battery-powered, and the 30,000 miles of high-speed rail lines run on electricity. Wind and solar energy provided over a quarter of China’s power in April, a milestone that few other countries can brag about. But much of that clean energy is produced in the country’s sunny, windy western and northern regions, far from most of its people and factories. More than 90 percent of China’s 1.4 billion people live in the east, where cloudy days, windless nights and sluggish rivers limit the potential for clean energy. So to move the electricity to where it is needed most, China is urgently upgrading its power grid.”
Arnold Kling: “In the case of social media, we cannot pinpoint how it causes harm. We have plenty of hypotheses, but they are difficult to test. If someone misbehaves, we cannot determine the extent to which social media helped cause the misbehavior or the mechanism by which it did so. We cannot know whether in the absence of social media the individual would have come across a different adverse stimulus.”
Bloomberg: “Youth-led protests across Asia in recent months have centered on corruption, elitism and censorship. But behind Gen-Z’s anger lies something even more troubling: A staggering jobs crisis. The generation born around the turn of the century is facing a bleak economic future. A shrinking pool of jobs and the advance of artificial intelligence are weighing on their prospects. Left unaddressed, the demographic dividend (which refers to having more people in the workforce than dependents) that leaders like to tout as a guarantee of prosperity can just as easily become a trigger for unrest.”BCG newsletter: “With the turbulence over tariffs in recent months, most of the discussion has been about physical goods—automotive, agricultural products, high-tech components, consumer goods—and their sprawling supply chains. But the new dividing lines of the trade landscape are frequently drawn around another piece of the story. Trade in services—which includes business services; IT and digital; financial services; IP licensing; travel, tourism, and logistics; and sectors such as media, health, construction, and cultural services—is often overlooked in the headlines. In most economies, services account for anywhere from 40% to 70% of GDP, and they represent about half of global employment—even higher in developed markets. On the international trade side, the US leads, with close to $3 trillion in annual services exports, while countries such as India, Ireland, and the UK have become global hubs. What was once seen as “soft” or secondary to goods has quietly become a central pillar of the global economy.”
FT: “As recent FT analysis highlights, corporate America may be waxing lyrical about the promise of artificial intelligence but few boardrooms appear able to describe how the technology is actually changing their businesses for the better. There is, however, one sector where the gains are clear, even if it is less eye-catching to profit-chasing investors: public health. For an industry with intensely high demands on accuracy and efficiency, generative AI could transform healthcare delivery and patient outcomes. In turn, the potential benefits for society, the economy and stretched public budgets are immense. The greatest payback from AI may well come from the earlier and more accurate detection of life-threatening illnesses. In June, Microsoft claimed it had built a diagnostic medical tool that was four times more successful than doctors at determining complex ailments. Some models may even be powerful enough to ascertain distant health risks. Last month, scientists using the gen-AI system Delphi-2M, which was built at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge and trained on large-scale health records, reported that it could predict susceptibility to more than 1,000 diseases decades into the future. But AI’s impact extends well beyond preventive support.”
