NYTimes: “India’s working-age population, already the world’s largest at nearly one billion, grows by about 12 million people a year. For families with money to spare, education is one of the few apparent routes out of low-paid farming and wage labor. The best option is a place at one of the country’s highly competitive public universities. For those who cannot get in, private colleges offer another route. That industry has exploded. The number of private colleges tripled in the decade after Mr. Modi became prime minister in 2014. By 2024, India had 45 million students in higher education, up 41 percent from a decade earlier, according to a government survey. More than two-thirds of all students attend private institutions. But the expansion of higher education has far outpaced the creation of good jobs.”
WSJ: “People who switch employers a lot are often seen as red flags. New evidence suggests they get up to speed much faster than others.”
Manu Joseph: “When a system is rotten, a diligent person endures by digging deep into the quirks of his own personality. Some good things happen in India because some people are eccentric.”
FT: “China is beginning to construct its own self-sustaining, internally reinforcing AI ecosystem — and is increasingly offering it abroad. Beijing’s geopolitical foothold in critical infrastructure is increasing and countries adopting Chinese AI will, over time, absorb Chinese approaches to technical standards and governance principles…The original China shock came with the manufacturing revolution that followed the country’s entry into the World Trade Organization. China shock 2.0 was the cleantech wave of solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. China shock 3.0 has been the diffusion of Chinese digital technology, from ecommerce to recent AI models. China shock 4.0, now on the horizon, will be quite different. It will be based not only on the export of Chinese technology but on China’s approach to innovation as a national project.”
