Swaminathan Aiyar on Indian Independence, with a story that’s not usually quoted in textbooks:
World War II converted India from a debtor to a creditor with over one billion pounds in sterling balances. Britain, meanwhile, became the biggest debtor in the world. It’s not worth ruling over people you are afraid to tax. That’s why the British left.
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Worth re-reading: a mid-1998 piece by Paul Krugmann: The Ice Age Cometh.
…suppose that, for whatever reason, the market goes up month after month; your MBA-honed intellect may say “Gosh, those P/Es look pretty unreasonable”, but your prehistoric programming is shrieking “Me want mammoth meat!” - and those instincts are hard to deny.
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Though not exactly ordinary, Ms. Ryan’s story is familiar around here. Campus veterans marvel at all the poolside apartments that have sprung up since Georgia popped the income cap off its merit awards. Professors are testing their hypothesis that instead of increasing college enrollment, the state’s $1.7 billion scholarship program has been a blessing for the automobile industry — since so many families roll the savings into buying new cars.
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Thomas Friedman in the NYT: countries that are globalizing sensibly but steadily are also the ones that are becoming politically more open, with more opportunities for their people, and with a young generation more interested in joining the world system than blowing it up.
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BBC: Life expectancy to soar, centurions to become commonplace. The majority of the world’s work culture and education systems — even corporate hiring procedures — on the other hand, remain mired in the 1900s, when you started a job in your 20s and retired at 60. More flexibility in high school and college programs and an increased awareness of age-ism worldwide (especially in recruiting) would help young and old alike.
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It’s clear that we won’t likely have an economy where productivity doubles every 12-18 months, but are trend productivity growth rates of 10%+ possible? I think they are. In that scenario, we all get very rich, very fast.
Productivity seems to be on the rise, yes. But so’s fiscal over-prudence and a distaste for spending, probably because of the excesses of the late 90s. And without some spending in the marketplace, it’s unclear how the boom (long or not) can really kick off.
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An MP3 digital music player, such as the RioPort, can store 400 hours of compressed music. Within five years, the same $400 player will be capable of storing 12,000 hours of music — enough capacity to take an entire music collection with you in your car, at the gym or to work. “Everybody’s going to have these things. People are going to pay $400 to get thousands of hours of storage,” said [Marc] Andreessen.
And there are execs in the music and video industry who still believe that they can hold on to the model of pay-per-view? {shakes head} Pay-per-view may make sense when content is scarce and difficult to obtain or distribute, but with plentiful content and distribution bandwidth, the all-you-can-eat model is a powerful one and appeals to a lot of people — even those who don’t plan to use the service regularly. This is a lesson that Internet Service Providers learnt quickly, and practically no one asks for per-minute connectivity charges today. AOL learnt its lesson, when will the rest of the AOL-TW conglomerate learn?
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New Scientist: Germany will top the medals table in this year’s Winter Olympics with 31 medals, 11 of them gold. Russia will be runners-up with 21 medals, 10 of them gold. Close behind will be the US and Norway. It isn’t Olympics-fixing, it’s economics. Let’s see how close they get.
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The Economist:
Is there no limit to the crimes for which globalisation must be held to account? Not only does it oppress the consumers of the rich West, undermine the welfare state, emasculate democracy, despoil the environment, and entrench poverty in the third world; we knew all that already. In addition, we now find, it is a utopian scheme for global ideological conquest — like Stalinism, minus the compassion. Truly, the idea that people should be left free to trade with each other in peace must be the most wicked and dangerous doctrine ever devised.
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The Cluetrain Manifesto — “Life is too short,” we say, and it is. Too short for office politics, for busywork and pointless paper chases, for jumping through hoops and covering our asses, for trying to please, to not offend, for constantly struggling to achieve some ever-receding definition of success. Too short as well for worrying whether we bought the right suit, the right breakfast cereal, the right laptop computer, the right brand of underarm deodorant.
This is a great book, a moving book, and one of the best works of non-fiction I have read in a long time. Especially if you have blighted your brain by reading too many Who-moved-my-cheese type books, read this! And if you’re too cheap, um, impoverished, to buy it, then you can read it all for free online.
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