Vivek Murthy (US context): “Loneliness and isolation hurt whole communities. Social disconnection is associated with reduced productivity in the workplace, worse performance in school, and diminished civic engagement. When we are less invested in one another, we are more susceptible to polarization and less able to pull together to face the challenges that we cannot solve alone…As it has built for decades, the epidemic of loneliness and isolation has fueled other problems that are killing us and threaten to rip our country apart. Given these extraordinary costs, rebuilding social connection must be a top public health priority for our nation. It will require reorienting ourselves, our communities, and our institutions to prioritize human connection and healthy relationships. The good news is we know how to do this…Evidence shows that connection is linked to better heart health, brain health and immunity. It could be spending 15 minutes each day to reach out to people we care about, introducing ourselves to our neighbors, checking on co-workers who may be having a hard time, sitting down with people with different views to get to know and understand them, and seeking opportunities to serve others recognizing that helping people is one of the most powerful antidotes to loneliness.”
Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman: “According to [Indian] government data, roughly $45 billion in direct cash payments were delivered in the fiscal year that just ended, benefiting about 700 million (not necessarily distinct) people via 265 public schemes. If transfers from state governments were included, these figures would be even larger. Taken together, the cash transfers are tantamount to a universal basic income…Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unique approach to redistribution, which one of us dubbed “New Welfarism,” emphasises funding for items such as toilets that are essential but normally provisioned privately, as opposed to public goods such as primary education and basic health care.”
Laura Williams: “The pineapple trade is now highly industrialized. Chemicals that ripen fruit — the same ones that ripe bananas emit — are added to crops a week before harvest. Refrigerated shipping containers on ships, planes, and trucks allow whole pineapples to be delivered fresh, worldwide, with little loss to bruising or rot. Grocery stores do a healthy trade in whole, fresh pineapples; cored and prepared pineapple; and canned and dried varieties. If you want a taste of pineapple today, almost anywhere in the world, you can get it for under a dollar…Pineapples were once a supreme luxury item, which (through a combination of industrial process improvement, specialization, and relocation to regions with marginal advantages in pineapple growing) have become accessible to almost everyone. When past centuries’ most-iconic luxuries become commonplace and affordable, we always have specialization and market innovations to thank.”
Amjad Masad: “Learning how to code becomes more important in a world with AI. AI means that the return on investment from learning to code just went way up. AI models are great at generating code, but they go off the rails easily. They’re inherently statistical and stochastic, so they make a lot of mistakes. That will get better asymptotically, but for the foreseeable future, they’ll need human input. That means in this new world, you can suddenly build incredible things by leveraging these tools to generate code. And, if you can program, you can understand where they’re getting things wrong and fill in the gaps. You become less of a traditional programmer and more of a guide to bring your ideas to life. These are inherently augmenting technologies, not automating technologies.”