Deirdre Nansen McCloskey: “A dominant paradigm these days in economics is “neo-institutionalism,” pushed for decades by Douglass North (1920–2015; Nobel 1993) and now the orthodoxy at the World Bank. It says, like a recipe book, “Add institutions and stir.” Institutions such as sharecropping or land reform or modern courts are seen as causal. Much of the evidence is historical. Much of it is mistaken.”
WSJ: [United Airlines CEO Scott] Kirby keeps pressing executives to improve the experience of flying United, repeating one phrase that has become a mantra: “Your job is wow.” “They all looked at me, like, what the hell does that mean?” he said. It means he wants customers to think: “Wow, I’ve never seen an airline do this.””
ET: “Every once in a while, a decade arrives that quietly but decisively resets the trajectory of a city. For New York, it was the 1890s, when bridges, subways and skyscrapers stitched together a modern metropolis. For Singapore, the 1980s marked its transformation from a port city into a global hub. Dubai’s reinvention began in the 1990s; Shanghai’s in the noughties. For Mumbai, that decade may well be the 2020s. Over $60 billion is currently flowing into the city’s infrastructure, an investment scale Mumbai has never seen before. A second international airport, new expressways, a 16-line metro network, redesigned local train rakes, sea links, tunnels and transit-oriented development zones are all coming together, almost simultaneously.”
NYTimes on “what the rise of A.I. and the gutting of books coverage across U.S. media will mean for literature”: “Book reviews may survive if only because, as Elizabeth Hardwick observed, publishers need praise for their new releases “as an Easter basket needs shredded green paper under the eggs.” But the breakup of the monoculture, the rise of algorithms and the flattening of taste mean that critics will never, for better and worse, have the consecrating power they once did.”
