aeon essays on economics

Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, profound essays from aeon magazine.

Over the last year, I have found many good articles at Aeon —a digital magazine of ideas, philosophy, and culture. I had intended to write posts about these many pieces but alas I have not found the time. So instead I will link to some of the thought-provoking pieces they’ve published that I’ve read followed by a single sentence description of their content.

“What Animals Think of Death” (Animals wrestle with the concept of death and mortality.)

“Do We Send The Goo?” (If we’re alone in the universe should we do anything about it?)

“The Mind Does Not Exist” (Why there’s no such thing as the mind and nothing is mental.)

“You Are A Network” (The self is not singular but a fluid network of identities.)

“After Neurodiversity” (Neurodiversity is not enough, we should embrace psydiversity.)

“Lies And Honest Mistakes” (Our epistemic crisis is essentially ethical and so are its solutions.)

“Ideas That Work” (Our most abstract concepts emerged as solutions to our needs.)

“We Are Nature” (Even the Anthropocene is nature at work transforming itself.)

“The Seed Of Suffering” (What the p-factor says about the root of all mental illness.)

“Authenticity Is A Sham” (A history of authenticity from Jesus to self-help and beyond.)

“Who Counts As A Victim?” (The pantomime drama of victims and villains conceals the real horrors of war.)

“Nihilism” (If you believe in nihilism do you believe in anything?)

“The Science Of Wisdom” (How psychologists have found the empirical path to wisdom.)

“The Semi-Satisfied Life” (For Schopenhauer happiness is a state of semi-satisfaction.)

“Bonfire Of The Humanities” (The role of history in a society afflicted by short-termism.)

“How Cosmic Is The Cosmos?” (Can Buddhism explain what came before the big bang?)

“Is The Universe A Conscious Mind?” (Cosmopsychism explains why the universe is fine-tuned for life.)

“Dreadful Dads” (What the childless fathers of existentialism teach real dads.)

“End of Story” (How does an atheist tell his son about death?)

“Buddhism And Self-Deception” (How Buddhism resolves the paradox of self-deception.)

“The happiness ruse” (How did feeling good become a matter of relentless, competitive work?”)

“ How to be an Epicurean” (Forget Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics; try being an Epicurean.)

“The Greatest Use of Life” (William James on whether life is worth living.)

“Anger is temporary madness: the Stoics knew how to curb it” (How to Avoid the triggers.)

“Faith: Why Is the Language of Transhumanism and Religion So Similar?” (AI and religion.)

“Endless Fun” (What will we do for all eternity after uploading?)

“There Is No Death, Only A Series of Eternal ‘Nows'” (You don’t actually die.)

“Save The Universe” (It’s only a matter of time until it dies.)

“ When Hope is a Hindrance ” (Hope in dark times is no match for action.)

Oh, to have more time to read and learn.

Economics →

11 Apr 2024
In Practice

Why Progress on Immigration Might Soften Labor Pains

Long-term labor shortages continue to stoke debates about immigration policy in the United States. We asked Harvard Business School faculty members to discuss what's at stake for companies facing talent needs, and the potential scenarios on the horizon.

01 Apr 2024

Navigating the Mood of Customers Weary of Price Hikes

Price increases might be tempering after historic surges, but companies continue to wrestle with pinched consumers. Alexander MacKay, Chiara Farronato, and Emily Williams make sense of the economic whiplash of inflation and offer insights for business leaders trying to find equilibrium.

29 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

Do Disasters Rally Support for Climate Action? It's Complicated.

Reactions to devastating wildfires in the Amazon show the contrasting realities for people living in areas vulnerable to climate change. Research by Paula Rettl illustrates the political ramifications that arise as people weigh the economic tradeoffs of natural disasters.

10 Jan 2024

Technology and COVID Upended Tipping Norms. Will Consumers Keep Paying?

When COVID pushed service-based businesses to the brink, tipping became a way for customers to show their appreciation. Now that the pandemic is over, new technologies have enabled companies to maintain and expand the use of digital payment nudges, says Jill Avery.

17 Aug 2023

‘Not a Bunch of Weirdos’: Why Mainstream Investors Buy Crypto

Bitcoin might seem like the preferred tender of conspiracy theorists and criminals, but everyday investors are increasingly embracing crypto. A study of 59 million consumers by Marco Di Maggio and colleagues paints a shockingly ordinary picture of today's cryptocurrency buyer. What do they stand to gain?

15 Aug 2023

Why Giving to Others Makes Us Happy

Giving to others is also good for the giver. A research paper by Ashley Whillans and colleagues identifies three circumstances in which spending money on other people can boost happiness.

13 Mar 2023

What Would It Take to Unlock Microfinance's Full Potential?

Microfinance has been seen as a vehicle for economic mobility in developing countries, but the results have been mixed. Research by Natalia Rigol and Ben Roth probes how different lending approaches might serve entrepreneurs better.

23 Jan 2023

After High-Profile Failures, Can Investors Still Trust Credit Ratings?

Rating agencies, such as Standard & Poor’s and Moody's, have been criticized for not warning investors of risks that led to major financial catastrophes. But an analysis of thousands of ratings by Anywhere Sikochi and colleagues suggests that agencies have learned from past mistakes.

29 Nov 2022

How Much More Would Holiday Shoppers Pay to Wear Something Rare?

Economic worries will make pricing strategy even more critical this holiday season. Research by Chiara Farronato reveals the value that hip consumers see in hard-to-find products. Are companies simply making too many goods?

21 Nov 2022

Buy Now, Pay Later: How Retail's Hot Feature Hurts Low-Income Shoppers

More consumers may opt to "buy now, pay later" this holiday season, but what happens if they can't make that last payment? Research by Marco Di Maggio and Emily Williams highlights the risks of these financing services, especially for lower-income shoppers.

01 Sep 2022
What Do You Think?

Is It Time to Consider Lifting Tariffs on Chinese Imports?

Many of the tariffs levied by the Trump administration on Chinese goods remain in place. James Heskett weighs whether the US should prioritize renegotiating trade agreements with China, and what it would take to move on from the trade war. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

05 Jul 2022

Have We Seen the Peak of Just-in-Time Inventory Management?

Toyota and other companies have harnessed just-in-time inventory management to cut logistics costs and boost service. That is, until COVID-19 roiled global supply chains. Will we ever get back to the days of tighter inventory control? asks James Heskett. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

09 Mar 2022

War in Ukraine: Soaring Gas Prices and the Return of Stagflation?

With nothing left to lose, Russia's invasion of Ukraine will likely intensify, roiling energy markets further and raising questions about the future of globalization, says Rawi Abdelal. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

10 Feb 2022

Why Are Prices So High Right Now—and Will They Ever Return to Normal?

And when will sold-out products return to store shelves? The answers aren't so straightforward. Research by Alberto Cavallo probes the complex interplay of product shortages, prices, and inflation. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

11 Jan 2022
Cold Call Podcast

Can Entrepreneurs and Governments Team Up to Solve Big Problems?

In 2017, Shield AI’s quadcopter, with no pilot and no flight plan, could clear a building and outpace human warfighters by almost five minutes. It was evidence that autonomous robots could help protect civilian and service member lives. But was it also evidence that Shield AI—a startup barely two years past founding—could ask their newest potential customer, the US government, for a large contract for a system of coordinated, exploring robots? Or would it scare them away? Harvard Business School professor Mitch Weiss and Brandon Tseng, Shield AI’s CGO and co-founder, discuss these and other challenges entrepreneurs face when working with the public sector, and how investing in new ideas can enable entrepreneurs and governments to join forces and solve big problems in the case, “Shield AI.” Open for comment; 0 Comments.

06 May 2021

How Four Women Made Miami More Equitable for Startups

A case study by Rosabeth Moss Kanter examines what it takes to break gender barriers and build thriving businesses in an emerging startup hub. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

20 Apr 2021
Working Paper Summaries

The Emergence of Mafia-like Business Systems in China

This study sheds light on the political pathology of fraudulent, illegal, and corrupt business practices. Features of the Chinese system—including regulatory gaps, a lack of formal means of property protection, and pervasive uncertainty—seem to facilitate the rise of mafia systems.

02 Feb 2021

Nonprofits in Good Times and Bad Times

Tax returns from millions of US nonprofits reveal that charities do not expand during bad times, when need is the greatest. Although they are able to smooth the swings of their activities more than for-profit organizations, nonprofits exhibit substantial sensitivity to economic cycles.

01 Feb 2021

Has the New Economy Finally Arrived?

Economists have long tied low unemployment to inflation. James Heskett considers whether the US economic policy of the past four years has shaken those assumptions. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

06 Jan 2021

Aggregate Advertising Expenditure in the US Economy: What's Up? Is It Real?

We analyze total United States advertising spending from 1960 to 2018. In nominal terms, the elasticity of annual advertising outlays with respect to gross domestic product appears to have increased substantially beginning in the late 1990s, roughly coinciding with the dramatic growth of internet-based advertising.

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Ideas that Work (in: Aeon)

Truth, knowledge, justice – to understand how our loftiest abstractions earn their keep, trace them to their practical origins

Related Papers

Journal of the Philosophy of History

Bennett Gilbert

The history of ideas is most prominently understood as a highly specialized group of methods for the study of abstract ideas, with both diachronic and synchronic aspects. While theorizing the field has focused on the methods of study, defining the object of study – ideas – has been neglected. But the development of the theories behind material culture studies poses a sharp challenge to this narrow approaches. It both challenges the integrity of the notion of abstract ideas and also offers possibilities for enlarging the scope of the ways in which we can study ideas historically. It is proposed here to regard ideas as mental relations deeply connected to human communication by both thinking and doing. This connection of ideational thought to human production and behavior is a deep foundation for the history of ideas as an interdisciplinary historiographic means of understanding moral life. http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/18722636/advance https://doi.org/10.1163/18722636-12341371

Jonathan Floyd

Bevir’s view that theories are prior to theorists, just insofar as they are prior to any observations which one might make and, by extension, any facts one might invoke in support of any particular interpretative conclusions, is problematic when applied to intellectual history. This is because, although it is in one sense true that all facts are ineluctably constituted by some or other underlying theory, it is also true that, in a vast number of important situations, all human beings share the same basic theory. The most important implication of this shared stock of concepts, observations and facts, is that we shall often be able to see numerous aspects of a long‐dead author’s world in much the same way as he or she saw it.

Teun Tieleman

Arthur O. Lovejoy Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 1940), pp. 3-23

Brett Bowden

As a graduate student, I undertook my doctoral training in a Political Science Program [...]

Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method (ed. Stefan Berger)

Arthur Alfaix Assis

Ideas will always resist single-statement definitions, but in a rough attempt at generalization one can say that they either play or are attributed a very special role in thinking and expressive processes, in perhaps all domains of human culture. People who specialize in creating, receiving, transforming, and disseminating them are usually called “intellectuals”—even if they do not monopolize those social practices. The constitution and circulation of ideas as structures of thinking and expression, the settings in which they originate and to which they respond, the material supports in which they are conveyed as well as the intellectual agents specialized in dealing with them are studied by the history of ideas and its neighboring fields. These include intellectual history, history of concepts, histoire des mentalités, Geistesgeschichte, history of books, and even cultural history, sociology of knowledge, and the histories of science, philosophy, literature, and the humanities. As it is obvious, such labels do not support a clear-cut division of labor, nor can they be lined up in an organogram that would fix constant hierarchical relations between them. They show up with incommensurable frequency, displaying different connotations within different academic cultures. This explains why in some cases—as in Geistesgeschichte, Begriffsgeschichte, or histoire des mentalités—equivalent English terms are considered problematic or unnecessary. Having flourished, spread, and sometimes also decayed within different national, disciplinary, and generational contexts, the fields designated by them can only have intricate and overlapping limits. A good way to understand the traditions connected to the history of ideas is hence to look closely to their messy border zones. The closest and most intricate connections are those between “history of ideas” and “intellectual history,” which is reflected in the fact that these terms are often employed interchangeably—a use that will be noted also in the remainder of the present text. Even so, “intellectual history” clearly emerged as preferential designation in the English-speaking world in the final decades of the twentieth century. A reason for this is the spread of the suspicion that “ideas” are burdened by essentialist traits that would render us insensitive to historical discontinuity. The notion of ideas is also sometimes regarded as much too oblivious of the way language conditions thought, and accordingly some analysts suggest that it would be out of line with the best theoretical intelligence established since the so-called linguistic turn. However, others claim that ideas should not be equaled to expressed words, as they refer to occurrences that are best described with psychological terms such as beliefs and attitudes, and, further, that there would be non-essentialist ways of addressing them. What seems more uncontroversial is that, in comparison to “history of ideas,” “intellectual history” opens up an enlarged space of ambivalence as regards the analytical focus, which can then toggle from intellectual products to intellectual producers, consumers, and the cultural frameworks in which they interact. There are also important crossroads between the history of ideas and conceptual history (or Begriffsgeschichte), as both terms signal to the historical study of basic structures of thought. Conceptual history, however, at least in its most well-known variety, which was very much inspired by social-historical approaches, tends to be less centered on biographical and psychological issues and to introduce concepts as more depersonalized linguistic entities. Such and other connections and disconnections between the various ways of attending to “the reflective communal life of human beings in the past” will be further discussed in the following from the perspective of a geographically multicentered historical synopsis. Hopefully, its many limitations will be compensated by the possibility of bringing to the fore relations that otherwise would not become so salient.

journal of Philosophical Investigations at university of Tabriz

Muhammad Asghari , Sahar Joakim , vahid nejadmohammad , Shirzad Peik Herfeh , M. Zamanlu

full text of journal of Philosophical Investigations 2017/ No.21. Year 11 at university of Tabriz-Iran.pdf http://philosophy.tabrizu.ac.ir/

G. G. Bolich

This 500+ page volume traces 2500 years of Western philosophical thought on the nature and acquisition of knowledge. The 18 chapters cover important thinkers from Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Protagoras, through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics, to Christian thinkers on revelation, Descartes, the British empiricists, Kant, Hegel, Existentialism and Phenomenology, Pragmatism, Analytic Philosophy, Bergson, and Polyani, ending with surveys of current trends in epistemology.

published in: Religion 43:2 (2013), 252-273.

Wouter J. Hanegraaff

Sydney Studies in Religion

Garry Trompf

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What would Thucydides say?

In constantly reaching for past parallels to explain our peculiar times we miss the real lessons of the master historian.

by Mark Fisher + BIO

In the weeks after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte seized power and declared himself Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, Karl Marx sat down to write a history of the present. The purpose of this work was straightforward. Marx wanted to understand how the class struggle in France had ‘made it possible for a grotesque and mediocre personality to play a hero’s part.’ Much of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852/69), as the work would be known, accordingly consisted of fine-grained political and economic analysis. But Marx opened in a more philosophical vein. After quipping that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, he reflected upon the role that historical parallelism played in shaping revolutionary action:

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.

This tendency had pervaded European history, Marx thought, and occasionally served the ends of progress. The cloak of Roman republicanism, for instance, had helped French society lurch blindly forward during the revolution of 1789. In the present case, however, the appropriated symbolism of that earlier revolution served no higher purpose than to veil a grifter’s power grab in a more compelling guise.

Marx points toward one of the more paradoxical tendencies of modern political life: the more times feel unprecedented, the more we reach for past parallels. We do so, however, not only to legitimate new regimes. Just as often, historical analogies are invoked to explain, predict and condemn. The past decade alone offers a trove of examples. Among them, the use of ‘fascism’ to characterise Right-wing populist movements has generated the most heat, giving rise to a multifaceted debate about the legitimacy of historical analogy as a mode of political analysis. But there are others that have occasioned less self-reflection. In reckoning with the possibility of open conflict between the United States and China, for instance, foreign policy experts have routinely likened the escalating tension to the Cold War, the First World War, and even the Peloponnesian War. Similarly, in the early days of COVID-19, many dealt with the uncertainty of the pandemic by turning to the Spanish Flu, the Black Death, and the Great Plague of Athens for guidance. Something of the sort is also happening in real time with generative AI. How we interpret the risk that it poses hinges in large part on which analogy we favour: will it be most akin to the Industrial Revolution, the nuclear bomb, or – perhaps most horrifying of all – the consulting firm McKinsey?

If many of these parallels seem self-evident, one recurring point of reference does not: Thucydides, the ancient Athenian general and author of History of the Peloponnesian War . Though hardly a household name, he has been a favourite of those intent on doom-scrolling the historical record for relevant exempla . In the first month of the COVID-19 shutdown, for instance, so much was written about his account of the Athenian plague that one prominent scholar deemed Thucydides himself to be a virus. Something comparable could be said of Thucydides’ role in the viral discourse surrounding Sino-American relations. Ever since the early 2010s, when Graham Allison began referring to the stress on global order produced by hegemonic rivalry as ‘Thucydides’ Trap’, foreign policy discussions have themselves often appeared trapped by the need to balance geopolitical analysis with exegesis of an ancient text.

However strange Thucydides’ prominence may seem, the tradition of looking his way in moments of existential crisis is well established. During the American Civil War, for example, his ‘Funeral Oration of Pericles’ served as a model for Abraham Lincoln’s famed Gettysburg Address, while his account of Athenian defeat helped inspire an overhaul of the US Naval War College curriculum during the war in Vietnam. In Europe, both English and German propagandists excerpted History of the Peloponnesian War during the First World War in support of their causes, and soldiers reported reading Thucydides in the trenches. In subsequent decades, prominent writers in both England and Italy used Thucydides to reflect their concerns over the rise of European fascism.

This cultish appeal has nevertheless come at a cost. While many have tried in earnest to wring wisdom from Thucydides’ text, others have sought little more than an ancient authority for their shower thoughts. Careless glosses and misattributed quotes abound, both in the anarchic spaces of social media and in others that should be held to a higher standard: the website for Harvard’s Belfer Center, for instance, which features an apocryphal quote lifted from the first Wonder Woman movie, or on the desk of the late Colin Powell when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

If this should seem a sad fate for any writer, it is a particularly ironic one for Thucydides. He was both a vocal proponent of accurately accounting for the past and a careful analyst of the textured nature of historical repetition. Resistant to simplification and rich in ‘unuttered thoughts’ (to quote Friedrich Nietzsche), Thucydides recognised that an effective understanding of the relationship between past, present and future would be both highly complex and absolutely critical for prudent political judgment. This combination did not bode well for the ancient Athenians, who ended up suffering dearly for their mishandling of historical analogies, and it is not clear that we have the resources to do much better. But we stand to learn more by thinking with Thucydides about the role of historical analogy in political life than by simply pilfering his text in search of such analogies. If nothing else, taking such a tack helps to remind us of the risks involved in abusing specious parallels in the way that we are prone to do.

T hucydides was unusual among classical writers in stating directly what he hoped his readers would gain from his work. He would be content, he says, if History of the Peloponnesian War was deemed ‘useful’ by those who wanted ‘to scrutinise what actually happened and would happen again, given the human condition, in the same or similar fashion’ (my translation). The description nevertheless leaves readers wanting. How exactly such knowledge should prove useful is underspecified, and scholars have long disagreed over what Thucydides expected the utility of his text to be.

Most assume that Thucydides tried to offer his reader a type of foreknowledge that could potentially translate into active control over the politico-historical process. Taken to its extreme, this ‘optimistic’ interpretation reads History of the Peloponnesian War as a sort of ‘political systems users’ manual’, as Josiah Ober put it , capable of creating expert political technicians. Recognising regularities in the historical process, it is thought, should lead to predictive capacity, which in turn allows for political mastery. Proceeding in this fashion, Thucydides takes himself to be training master statesmen capable of solving the fundamental problems of political life.

Others detect a more pessimistic outlook in Thucydides’ stated ambition. They suggest that the lessons on offer are insufficient to produce control over events even if they can help the reader detect regularities in the political process. Unexpected events will often upset our expectations, as the plague did in Athens, and the ignorance of non-experts will often disrupt the translation of technical insight into effective policy. This problem will be particularly acute within a democratic context, where a popular eagerness to apply bastardised versions of such insights may even make matters worse. In this interpretation, Thucydides is ‘useful’ to the extent that he can temper the ambitions of those wishing to impose rational order onto political life. The best we can hope for, it seems, is to minimise our self-harm.

We must learn how to choose the right parallels if we are to judge well in politics

At issue between these two interpretive poles is the basic presumption of applied social science: to what extent can the recognition of recurring patterns translate into effective political policy? Yet, Thucydides was not writing social science as we know it. To the extent that his text articulated anything like fundamental laws of political behaviour, it did so through exemplary instances and carefully curated parallelisms. The Peloponnesian War served as a paradigmatic event for Thucydides: a particular instance that revealed general truths. It served this representative role, however, not because it was typical. Rather, it was exemplary because it was uniquely ‘great’. The war would prove useful, in other words, not because of history’s strict repetition, but by the pregnancy of similarity and the reader’s ability to parse analogies effectively.

Thucydides schools his readers in just how difficult such acts of analogical interpretation can be. A series of carefully considered verbal parallels, or what Jacqueline de Romilly has called fils conducteurs (‘guiding threads’), extend through Thucydides’ narrative like a web, ensnaring the reader in a constant and, at times, overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Sometimes, repetitions point towards important explanatory insights. But they also suggest likenesses that can lead the reader astray. Time and again, Thucydides confounds the expectations he has created. Even upon rereading, one can feel an internal tension between what one knows to be the case and what one is nonetheless led to expect will happen. Whether it is your first or your 15th read, you can still catch yourself thinking: this time surely Athens will win.

The evident lesson behind all of this is that we must learn how to choose the right parallels if we are to judge well in politics. But Thucydides also knew that we did not have full control of the analogies that shape our deliberations, especially in public life. Our analogical vocabulary is woven directly into the cultural fabric, a product of the contingencies that shape collective memory. We choose them no more than we choose the language we speak. (Once again, Marx: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’) Some events, such as the Persian Wars in Thucydides’ day or the Second World War in our own, simply loom too large to avoid, and we are easily held captive by the emotional weight of their cultural significance. Thucydides measured this gravitational pull also in terms of ‘greatness’, a concept that he identified closely with the production of collective trauma.

The danger inherent in this, of course, is that emotional resonance is often a poor guide to explanatory power. The most immediately compelling analogies can prove deeply misleading. The most haunting Thucydidean parallelism to highlight this point occurs through the phrase ‘few out of many returned home again’. Thucydides repeats this line three times, each to memorialise a harrowing military defeat: two massive Athenian expeditions, first to Egypt and then to Sicily, and a surprise attack that caught an entire army of Ambraciots asleep in their beds. Thucydides’ verbal repetition tempts the reader into seeing these events as an analogous set. Yet the last of these to occur, the Sicilian disaster, could not have been prevented by learning the lessons of the previous two. Quite the opposite. Rather than suffer from neglect by the metropole, as the Egyptian Expedition had, the Sicilian Expedition failed in large part due to the city’s miscalculated interventions. Rather than profit from the creative generalship of Demosthenes, which had proven decisive in the victory over the Ambraciots, his arrival in Sicily only further exacerbated the carnage.

T he seductive pull of ‘great’ events is not an incidental danger to the use of historical analogies. If historians tend to debate the appeal of these parallels primarily in terms of their explanatory value, the motive behind their day-to-day use is arguably more visceral. Analogies serve more as vehicles for generating awe and outrage than for unearthing more nuanced understandings. Yet, even when used merely as rhetorical tools, they can carry serious diagnostic implications.

These implications aren’t always detrimental. Figurative rhetoric can use the resources of collective memory to move people toward better policy when explanatory traction aligns with affective resonance. Thucydides’ Pericles appears exemplary of this. Early in the war, the celebrated Athenian leader faces a crowd wearied by plague and the general miseries of war. In an attempt to steel their resolve, he draws on two coordinated analogies. In the first, he describes the Athenian struggle in terms of a Greek hero overcoming labours in the pursuit of glory. In the second, he likens the democracy’s empire to a tyranny that, in defeat, must confront the widespread hatred it has incurred.

In paralleling the Athenians to two of the most provocative figures in the Greek imagination, Pericles goads the people back to their original resolve with the alternating spikes of pride and fear. And he does so perceptively. Thucydides draws on the same analogical models when characterising Athenian power and political culture in the opening pages of History of the Peloponnesian War . It’s to Pericles’ further credit that he doesn’t simply discard the analogies after they’ve served his immediate purposes. Rather, the need to balance the ‘heroic’ and ‘tyrannical’ elements of the imperial democracy serves as a framing priority for his entire war strategy – a strategy that Thucydides himself explicitly praises.

This is not to say that Periclean policy does not prove costly for the Athenians. It serves to enhance the devastation of the plague by demanding that the Athenians crowd together behind their city walls, thereby exacerbating Athenian deaths. But the costs of this policy do not arise from Pericles’ misuse of analogical rhetoric. The experience of the plague only proves a point that should already be obvious, namely, that using analogies well cannot save us from forces beyond our control. Elsewhere, however, Thucydides makes it clear that the misuse of analogies can actually invite catastrophes on par with those suffered by chance.

A false version of the story weighed heavily on the minds of the Athenians as they made a series of bad decisions

Nowhere is this message more clearly drawn than in Athens’ climactic defeat in Sicily. The toll of this disaster is hard to overstate: not only did Athenian casualties approach those of the plague, the mishap so shook the city’s faith in popular rule that an oligarchy temporarily displaced the democracy in its aftermath. Many events contributed to this grim result. Yet Thucydides’ own explanation of why the expedition failed began with a story about an event that had occurred nearly a century before the Athenian fleet set sail.

Harmodius and Aristogeiton were towering figures in Athenian civic legend. As ‘the Tyrannicides’, they were credited with putting an end to Athenian despotism and instigating the transition towards democracy. For this, they were heroised and memorialised with unparalleled reverence. And yet, Thucydides tells his reader, their reputation was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what they’d actually done. Far from being civic benefactors or even tyrannicides, Thucydides reveals, they’d murdered the tyrant’s younger brother in a romantic rivalry gone wrong. The consequences of this murder were devastating: the previously beneficent ruler spiralled into paranoia, resulting in increasingly harsh treatment of the Athenian people.

Athenian lore had gotten everything backward: the so-called Tyrannicides, far from saving the city from despotism in an act of self-sacrifice, had caused this despotic turn for eminently personal reasons. Nevertheless, it was this false version of the story that weighed heavily on the minds of the Athenians as they made a series of bad decisions in the early days of the Sicilian Expedition. It did not do so unprompted. Rather, this misunderstanding proved a useful tool among aspiring elite leaders within Athens, each of whom was eager to clear a path for their own ascent. Standing in the way of most, however, was the Sicilian Expedition’s most talented general, a brash and charismatic leader named Alcibiades. When a series of sacrilegious acts occurred on the eve of the expedition, Alcibiades’ rivals pushed the (false) Tyrannicide parallel, suggested a tyrannical coup was afoot, and implicated Alcibiades. There was no evidence for this, but in the resultant hysteria it did not matter. Faced with certain prosecution, Alcibiades defected to Sparta, turning the tide of war against Athens.

This elite manipulation of popular misunderstanding effectively inverts Pericles’ constructive use of heroic and tyrannical parallels. By painting Alcibiades as a potential tyrant, his opponents easily conjured up an exaggerated state of fear that allowed them to achieve their private ends at the expense of the city. In the end, Thucydides shows that the analogy between past and present was indeed illuminating: personal rivalries once again led to civic casualties that resulted in brutal and self-undermining politics. But the cost of this collective delusion would become clear only later. Hindered by increasingly poor generalship and an opponent emboldened by Spartan help, ‘few out of many’ would make it home from Sicily, and Athens would soon devolve into civil war.

I n May 1861, Marx found himself increasingly depressed about the American Civil War. The best he could do to mitigate his low mood, he told a friend, was to read Thucydides. ‘These ancients,’ he explained, ‘always remain new.’ They do so, we might add, by forever remaining old, thereby creating the space we need to find ourselves in the contrast.

It is tempting to see Thucydides’ digression about the tyrannicide analogy as the key to understanding his historical method. Had the Athenians only understood the truth of their own history, we might think, they wouldn’t have made such easy prey for self-serving politicians. In this vein, Thucydides’ project may seem to be that of saving future generations from comparable mistakes. As the ‘greatest’ conflict to ever beset the Greeks, unique in both its glory and its trauma, the Peloponnesian War would soon usurp the Tyrannicides and the Trojan War as the privileged source of political analogy. As such, it promised unparalleled resources for anyone trying to persuade others to their cause. It is reasonable to think that Thucydides expected his work to hinder the ability of bad actors to abuse this power. At the same time, it is unclear just how far it was in his ability to do so. The Athenians, after all, had everything they needed to realise the truth about the Tyrannicides. What they lacked was the will to scrutinise something that they felt to be intuitively correct. Thucydides could give posterity an account of the Peloponnesian War that might stop it from becoming fodder for false parallels if considered carefully. But he could not thereby prevent opportunists from constructing misleading analogies on its back.

Approaching Thucydides’ text from the angle of historical analogy does not resolve the age-old disagreement between his optimistic and pessimistic readers. It may nevertheless encourage us to recognise that a more realistic approach to political agency must exist somewhere between these two poles. Thucydides intimates that the careful art of drawing fitting analogies, honed as it may be through the diligent study of political history, will assist some to think more clearly about the present. But mastering this art should not be confused with political mastery. The power of ‘great’ events will remain too easily harnessed, and too hard to control, to serve only those who are clear-headed and well-intentioned. Specious analogies will remain a danger for as long as people stand to benefit from them, and their emotional pull will continue to knock even the most astute off balance. And yet, if there’s little chance that political life will ever be freed from distortive thinking, it may still prove less hazardous for those who look toward history as something more than a sourcebook of convenient parallels.

The environment

We need to find a way for human societies to prosper while the planet heals. So far we can’t even think clearly about it

Ville Lähde

Archaeology

Why make art in the dark?

New research transports us back to the shadowy firelight of ancient caves, imagining the minds and feelings of the artist

Izzy Wisher

Stories and literature

Do liberal arts liberate?

In Jack London’s novel, Martin Eden personifies debates still raging over the role and purpose of education in American life

a crowd of women dressed in black face the camera

Politics and government

India and indigeneity

In a country of such extraordinary diversity, the UN definition of ‘indigenous’ does little more than fuel ethnic violence

Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati

History of ideas

Reimagining balance

In the Middle Ages, a new sense of balance fundamentally altered our understanding of nature and society

A man and a woman in formal evening dress but with giant fish heads covering their faces are pictured beneath a bridge on the foreshore of a river

Emergency action

Could civil disobedience be morally obligatory in a society on a collision course with climate catastrophe?

Rupert Read

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Curated reading list for cat – economy & business | 1.

January 24, 2020 By Rajesh [wtr-time]

This post contains fabulous longform articles categorised under Economy and Business. These are handpicked articles over the course of years for CAT Aspirants. This post contains articles I had shared in 2018 and 2019.

Every Article will have a blurb, either written by me or an extract from the original post (mostly the latter) followed by the link to reach the article.

Article 101

Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market

http://bit.ly/41MthlN

Article 100

Why is China’s inflation rate low compared to the US, Europe and Britain?

https://bit.ly/3QMimTM

The head of Instagram has a vision for using Web3 to shift power from tech platforms to content creators—which he says will ultimately benefit both.

https://bit.ly/37YBCf8

A tempor‘The casino beckons’: my journey inside the cryptosphere

https://bit.ly/3MjdyTc

“DAOs Are Coming For The Movies Web3 collectives want to disrupt filmmaking. Can they?”

https://bit.ly/3xGyMpQ

“America’s culture wars distract from what’s happening beneath them When it comes to economic questions, there’s more agreement between culture war opponents than you might think”

https://bit.ly/3MfSgFR

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“The Real Potential of NFTs Amidst the scams and bubbles, credible scarcity and authenticity will unlock real value in digital markets”

https://bit.ly/3jcZYDS

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is pizza-1-1024x576.png

“Is the pizza tax absurd?”

https://bit.ly/3JIR6Sp

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Jio-Mart-1.jpg

“‘The shops are gone’: How Reliance stunned Amazon in battle for India’s Future Retail”

https://reut.rs/3JuAkGa

“Could mining gold from waste reduce its great cost?”

https://bit.ly/3pPpbYV

Has India Tech’s Golden Decade Arrived?

https://bit.ly/3I5jqgW

“How economists have botched the promise of widely distributed prosperity—and why they have no intention of stopping now”

https://bit.ly/3uBRiOo

“Setting aside the decade or so lead that Netflix has on its rivals for everything from viewing data to its catalog, pretty much every move Netflix makes is driven by making its streaming service as addictive as possible, which, again, costs money.”

https://bit.ly/3rV4ISv

“In today’s Finshots we see why Tesla is yet to make its debut in India”

https://bit.ly/3KE6yQB

“Oakland, California is piloting a program to provide all residents with basic access to mobility”

https://bit.ly/3FQJzOv

“This unequal society is a staple of “Cinderella” stories in which protagonists are displaced into poverty and abused by those with wealth and power until they regain their place.” https://bit.ly/3D7H5ea

“When I first met him he was in his early forties: tall, confident, handsome. The son of a Jamaican immigrant father and a schoolteacher mother, he had been educated at Harvard and Stanford Law School. He had hosted on MSNBC, and worked at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. Ozy’s backers were some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, including the reclusive billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs. If you met Watson you understood why: he was intoxicating.” https://bit.ly/3o0keuC

“A precarious job market and student debt has recent grads feeling hopeless” https://bit.ly/3bA7IMy

“Modeled after the cricket league, the program is engineered to boost productivity during the Diwali season.” https://bit.ly/2Y0jpZQ

“Overworked and underpaid developers are helping fuel Istanbul’s mobile gaming bonanza.” https://bit.ly/3G3TWzF

“The CBC interviewed myself and other Canadian Shoppers about the unilateral decision to slash batch earnings, the lack of communication, the “defective” ratings system and tip theft just to name a few.” https://bit.ly/3oYorB6

“The expected expansion of cities in the developing world poses a number of challenges, including the necessity of generating decent jobs for their growing populations and providing them with adequate urban services in terms of housing, water and sanitation, transportation, electrification, nutrition, education, and health care.” https://bit.ly/3lpx8Ce

“I Asked Experts Why Carmakers Can’t Just Transition To Newer Chips In Stock. Here’s What They Told Me – It’s a classic case of two industries that have conflicting needs but still have to work together.” https://bit.ly/3FjYbHg

“What’s striking is how much riskier bitcoin is to all of the other currencies with the exception of the Venezuelan bolivar. Bitcoin is about four times riskier than the Brazilian real, and a similar order of magnitude as the bolivar.” https://bit.ly/3kqa85D

“International students are also the product of a system that has blurred the lines between immigration and education in an unofficial, ad hoc arrangement meant to appeal to potential immigrants while avoiding any responsibility for their settlement. It’s a system that is quietly transforming postsecondary institutions, which have grown dependent on fees from foreign students and therefore on the shadowy world of education agents who deliver them. And it’s a system built on attracting teenagers like Kushandeep from small villages across the world, taking their money, and bringing them to campuses from small-town Nova Scotia to suburban BC with lofty promises for the future but little regard for what actually happens to them once they arrive.” https://bit.ly/2XsmXmL

“Delivery Workers, Trapped in the System Around the world, previously invisible delivery personnel have achieved a new prominence in popular consciousness as “frontline workers” throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. As the emergency has highlighted both the importance and the dangers of delivery work, strikes over working conditions have occurred alongside public displays of appreciation.” http://bit.ly/3BVRj00

“The disastrous voyage of Satoshi, the world’s first cryptocurrency cruise ship Last year, three cryptocurrency enthusiasts bought a cruise ship. They named it the Satoshi, and dreamed of starting a floating libertarian utopia. It didn’t work out” http://bit.ly/3nw8q4P

“Cryptoassets as National Currency? A Step Too Far” http://bit.ly/3zMqniD

“”This Is Going to Change the World” As the new millennium dawned, a mysterious invention from a charismatic millionaire became a viral sensation—then went down in flames. Ever since, I’ve wondered: Was it all my fault?” http://bit.ly/3kMOwiI

“Why has the gig economy been a disappointment? Maybe because traditional companies still have a good reason to exist.” http://bit.ly/3ygSLYw

“The Most Fascinating Profile You’ll Ever Read About a Guy and His Boring Startup On first blush, it sounds boring. Worse, it’s a bit hard to explain because you haven’t used anything like it before. It’s a communications application, based on the system they created while building Glitch. It’s called Slack.” http://bit.ly/3z2eRzh

“The ‘customer is king’ motto has invisibilised the food delivery rider The ‘customer is king’ motto has resulted in the invisibilisation of an entire community of people who form the backbone of the food delivery enterprise: delivery riders.” https://bit.ly/3s4X4F2

“The man who stole a hotel: How Timothy Durkin took control of Sooke Harbour House A fugitive from the US started fresh on Vancouver Island—then bilked new victims out of millions of dollars while law enforcement refused to act” https://bit.ly/3AituP3

“Karen Russell: A Brutally Honest Accounting of Writing, Money, and Motherhood” http://bit.ly/3xgS3Kq

“First It Was An Assassin’s Creed Expansion, Now It’s Ubisoft’s 8 Year Nightmare It’s a classic case of mismanagement for eight years,” said one former developer. “Instead of adding layers of value we kept running around in a loop.” http://bit.ly/3hURAt1

“The Headache of ‘Crypto Colonialism’ Blockchains can’t rebuild roads or end sectarian violence, famine or natural disasters.” http://bit.ly/36DrJ27

“Fired by Bot at Amazon: ‘It’s You Against the Machine’Contract drivers say algorithms terminate them by email—even when they have done nothing wrong.” https://bloom.bg/2U5kaip

“Riches in space Asteroids could pay for so much space exploration. We just need to mine those valuable resources – and duck a direct hit” https://bit.ly/3hb5PJD

“The Future of the Economy is Even More Dystopian Than You Think The Economy Barely Survived Covid. It’s Not Going to Survive What’s Next. You don’t get to be a billionaire by having a functioning soul or mind — you have to kind of be a sociopath in the first place.” http://bit.ly/3jqMO7J

“Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me An American family’s struggle for student loan redemption” http://bit.ly/3qp3s9c

“The creator economy is running into the Apple Tax — this startup is fighting back Fanhouse wants to keep sending 90 percent of payments to creators” http://bit.ly/3cwuKF5

“Can we make the future worth the fight? “Our greatest glory is not in ever falling but in rising every time we fall!” – Batman. As the pandemic rages on and the whole world tries to dig deep and exhibit resolve in surviving and overcoming this deadly virus, I have been taking solace in comics.” https://bit.ly/3vT9sJv

“India’s Super Rich Want Ordinary Citizens to Donate to Their COVID Fundraisers While some appreciate wealthy celebrities’ efforts to raise money for COVID-19 relief, some others are calling them out for contributing a tiny fraction of their vast bank accounts.” https://bit.ly/3fc48tx

“What a Gambling App Knows About You Sky Bet, the most popular one in Britain, compiled extensive records about a user, tracking him in ways he never imagined.” https://nyti.ms/3vSNMfN

“Modi’s Grand Insurance Scheme Prioritises Profit Over Farm Losses Over 3 years to 2020, as India’s farm crisis deepened, 18 insurance companies running Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s crop-insurance scheme rejected nearly a million claims. As pandemic and pestilence devastated farms, we reveal how the scheme’s complex fine print frustrates farmers and disregards individual loss” https://bit.ly/2R2o8Gk

“The Mystery Monk Making Billions With 5-Hour Energy” https://bit.ly/3sIruvC

“High score, low pay: why the gig economy loves gamification Using ratings, competitions and bonuses to incentivise workers isn’t new – but as I found when I became a Lyft driver, the gig economy is taking it to another level.” https://bit.ly/2Pu87ZD

“These Mothers Wanted to Care for Their Kids and Keep Their Jobs. Now They’re Suing After Being Fired” http://bit.ly/3eky4Vy

A wonderful take on reading fiction by Christine Seifert. A must read for all MBA Aspirants. “The Case for Reading Fiction The quality of our reading stands as “an index to the quality of our thought.” If we want better thinkers in the business world, we have to build better readers.” https://bit.ly/3aybt5B

“How a real-life monopoly made Monopoly the world’s biggest board game On New Year’s Eve, Monopoly celebrates the 85th anniversary of its patent. Its publisher, Hasbro, can toast the occasion knowing that its prized board game is more popular than ever. In 2013, Euromonitor pegged Monopoly’s annual revenues at ~$400m.” http://bit.ly/2Z78RVq

“YouTube’s Spammy Sex Bots Make a Ton of Money Here’s how scammers turn those ubiquitous, meaningless comments into profits” http://bit.ly/2MKcUo2

“The Government Has $3 Trillion of Economic Grift on Its Hands While a quarter of America is behind on rent, the shareholder class has experienced an explosion in net worth” http://bit.ly/2YBV2y0

2 articles today on one important, recent phenomenon where David beat Goliath in the stock market (at least for a very short span of time). How social media moves markets: Analyzing GameStop (GME) using social listening data. GameStop: how Redditors played hedge funds for billions (and what might come next) http://bit.ly/3iWSELP http://bit.ly/3cskoa5

“What’s Next for Parler? Ask the Porn Industry. The ‘free speech’ site isn’t the first to lose its web hosting. Here’s how the adult industry works around similar sanctions.” https://bit.ly/3qHdelY

“A person with a chain saw can cut 10 times as many trees in the same time as a person using older methods. Logging companies did not use this invention, however, to shorten the workweek by 90 percent. They used it to cut 10 times more trees than they otherwise would have. “Lashed by the growth imperative, technology is used not to do the same amount of stuff in less time, but rather to do more stuff in the same amount of time,” Hickel writes. “In a system where technological innovation is leveraged to expand extraction and production, it makes little sense to hope that yet more technological innovation will somehow magically do the opposite.”” http://bit.ly/2Y5TTi9

“Xbox: The Oral History of an American Video Game Empire The original product was ungainly, over-budget and nearly canceled. Here’s how it became a hit and reshaped an industry.” http://bloom.bg/3oihDep

“Inside India’s booming dark data economy Thanks to lax privacy laws and high consumer demand, details on everything from how you shop to who you date are all for sale.” http://bit.ly/2Lq9Z30

“Private gain must no longer be allowed to elbow out the public good The privately controlled corporate market has, in the precise words of the late economics writer Jonathan Rowe, ‘a fatal character flaw – namely, an incapacity to stop growing. No matter how much it grew yesterday it must continue to do so tomorrow, and then some; or else the machinery will collapse.’” https://bit.ly/3m3k5mW

“The Big Lessons From History There are two kinds of history to learn from: One is the specific events. What did this person do right? What did that country do wrong? What ideas worked? What strategies failed? It’s most of what we pay attention to, because specific stories are easy to find. But their usefulness is limited.” https://bit.ly/2JwuPNs

“The Ad-Based Internet Is About to Collapse. What Comes Next? The web as we know it relies on advertising, but that model is headed for a crash. Fortunately, we can build something better from the wreckage.” https://bit.ly/32IozZA

“Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet In a landmark antitrust complaint, the Justice Department is targeting a secretive partnership that is worth billions of dollars to both companies.” https://nyti.ms/2HCfdXH

“What’s Really Holding Women Back? Ask people why women remain so dramatically underrepresented, and you will hear from the vast majority a lament—an unfortunate but inevitable “truth”—that goes something like this: High-level jobs require extremely long hours, women’s devotion to family makes it impossible for them to put in those hours, and their careers suffer as a result. We call this explanation the work/family narrative.” https://bit.ly/2TkZkHy

“Why we should bulldoze the business schoolThere are 13,000 business schools on Earth. That’s 13,000 too many. And I should know – I’ve taught in them for 20 years. By Martin Parker” https://bit.ly/3kmQ95w

“The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code Bill Benter did the impossible: He wrote an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. Close to a billion dollars later, he tells his story for the first time.” https://bloom.bg/3hqH6hC

“The notion of ethics in business can be traced back to the earliest forms of bartering, based on the principle of equal exchange. Countless philosophers and economists have examined the topic, from Aristotle and his concept of justice to Karl Marx’s attack on capitalism. But the modern concept of business ethics dates back to the rise of anti-big business protest groups in the United States in the 1970s. ” https://bit.ly/3a0mfiW

“A rocker’s guide to management Bands are known for drink, drugs and dust-ups. But beyond the debauchery lie four models for how to run a business. Ian Leslie explains” https://bit.ly/3hWJuOk

“Cryptocurrency Will Not Die. You thought you successfully avoided ever having to learn how crypto was going to take over your life? Well, too bad: It’s back and maybe stronger than ever.” https://bit.ly/2NwXZL7

“Mukesh Ambani Won the World’s Most Expensive Sibling Rivalry Being the brother of Asia’s richest man is harder than you think.” https://bloom.bg/2YAcDGw

“‘If one of us gets sick, we all get sick’: the food workers on the coronavirus front line. Low-paid women in US poultry factories are leading the struggle for fair conditions and basic safety. As Covid-19 rips through plants across the country, they have a fight on their hands” https://bit.ly/2Mxkz5C

“The untold story of Stripe, the secretive $20bn startup driving Apple, Amazon and Facebook Patrick and John Collison have democratised online payments – and reshaped the digital economy in the process” https://bit.ly/3dlYLpm

“For a generation, Americans have been outsourcing work to India, where companies like Infosys grew bigger than Facebook and Google combined and created a new middle class. It seemed as though the boom would last forever.” https://bit.ly/2LMlDSK

“My zits didn’t show up with much esprit de corps until I was in my twenties, but in an effort to get ahead of embarrassment, my mom ordered Proactiv—the “easy three-step system that works for all ages and all skin types”—for my brother and me one lazy afternoon when we had the TV tuned to the infomercial channel. It was a whole ordeal. Someone over eighteen had to call a 1-800 number, and the phrase “check or money order” was involved. When the bottles arrived, I used the system once and got a rash in the shape of a beard around my jawline, an early but indelible lesson that anything describing itself as a “system” will come with some measure of pain.” https://bit.ly/2W8VFPw

“Since Uber launched in Argentina in 2016, taxi drivers have come out in force, torching ride-share cars, beating drivers, and shaming passengers. And they’re still angry.” https://bit.ly/2wXTfta

“The 1918 calendar reform was an abrupt, one-off change, designed to signal the irreversibility of the leap from the ancien régime to the new. Undoing the revolution would now mean literally turning back time—which is what some upper-crust characters attempt to do in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s 1929 novella Memories of the Future when they ask the inventor of a time machine to take them back to the days of serfdom.” https://bit.ly/2XbLI4J

“It is said India reforms only in crisis. Hopefully, this otherwise unmitigated tragedy will help us see how weakened we have become as a society and will focus our politics on the critical economic and healthcare reforms we sorely need” https://bit.ly/ 3dXIUhv

“Even before the latest shock, gas operators were reeling from self-inflicted wounds. They had taken on too much debt and drilled so many wells that they had flooded the market with gas, sending its price into a tailspin.” https://nyti.ms/2x2sDXZ

“None of us ever expected to be emergency workers; the idea of an ‘essential worker’ is a totally new concept that no grocery store bag boy considers when they drop off an application,” a current Whole Foods worker who prefers to stay anonymous told me. “There’s all of this rhetoric around how we’re just as important as the doctors, and yes, that’s true, but we’re getting paid way less, and medical workers have a little bit more of an idea of the risks that they are setting themselves up for. . . . We’re not used to this shit.” https://bit.ly/2JGVZxX

“Throughout all this, Neumann was being Neumann. His private jet trips may have involved some incidental transportation of marijuana across international borders, his wife may have fired employees for their bad vibes, and the company may have ended a meeting announcing layoffs with a performance by a member of Run-DMC.” http://bit.ly/2QiQbhv

“Today, China uses almost half the world’s concrete. The property sector – roads, bridges, railways, urban development and other cement-and-steel projects – accounted for a third of its economy’s expansion in 2017. Every major city has a floor-sized scale model of urban development plans that has to be constantly updated as small white plastic models are turned into mega-malls, housing complexes and concrete towers.” http://bit.ly/2VvFBYa

“Javier’s father jokes that once his son leaves home, he’ll be stuck with only women. “And, God willing, my last remaining son will pass the border safely,” the elder Hernandez says. “I’ll be left with pura mujeres (only women at home).”

In the decade since I met the Hernandez family, their modest hacienda-style home — several tin-roofed rooms scattered around an inner courtyard — has improved thanks to the buying power accrued through remittances sent from the U.S. Erika, one of the three Hernandez sisters still living in the area (the fourth immigrated), gives me a tour, saying that a new room will be added there, where now the ox and sheep are tied to a post.” http://bit.ly/3afx5QU

“In technology and software, the employees are the company. They are the intellectual property. There’s no machinery. The people are both the labor and the capital. And so, if the employees want to go a certain direction and they are united, well then, I don’t think there’s a CEO in the world that could defy their entire employee base.” http://bit.ly/2v9buem

“Prices of voice calls had started drifting lower from 1999 itself. From 16 rupees a minute to 6 rupee a minute to 2 rupees a minute to virtually zero by 2016-17 after the new big player Jio entered the market, voice, which was the bedrock of profitability of telecom companies, started contributing almost nothing towards revenues from 2017. Data became the principal contributor of revenue. Yet, the Average Revenue Per Unit (ARPU), which was about Rs. 1600 in 1998 got down to only Rs. 72 per month in March 2018. Profitability of the telecom companies tanked.” http://bit.ly/2upYOPP

“Hurrying across the marble floor of Hospital Angeles, I approached a receptionist and explained that my husband needed ankle surgery. She gave me the names and office numbers of two different orthopedic specialists who happened to be in that day. I could just drop in, she said; a hospital staffer would get a wheelchair and bring my husband up once I made my selection. At that moment, I felt like we were part of the 1%, getting the best health care available in a country where we weren’t even citizens.” http://bit.ly/2V4TMTL

“It is a case of capitalism at its most hyperactive and brazenly inventive: take a freely available substance, dress it up in countless different costumes and then sell it as something new and capable of transforming body, mind, soul. Water is no longer simply water – it has become a commercial blank slate, a word on to which any possible ingredient or fantastical, life-enhancing promise can be attached.” http://bit.ly/37TkHp9

“To understand what has gone wrong, we need to start first with the centralised nature of the current government. Not just decision-making but also ideas and plans emanate from a small set of personalities around the Prime Minister and in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). That works well for the party’s political and social agenda, which is well laid out, and where all these individuals have domain expertise. It works less well for economic reforms, where there is less of a coherent articulated agenda at the top, and less domain knowledge of how the economy works at the national rather than state level.” http://bit.ly/36hg1rP

“While China is the biggest consumer of both products, the United States follows close behind as the world’s second-largest consumer of oil and the third-largest user of sand. Depending on its market price, crude oil is often the first or second most exported good in the world by value. Today’s relatively low prices put crude oil exports in second place, after automobiles. At the end of 2015, the U.S. government rescinded a forty-year ban on the export of crude oil from the States, and since then the country has aggressively reentered the global oil market, becoming the world’s third-largest exporter of petroleum and its refined products, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia.” http://bit.ly/35bvUiU

“The bank was searching for a way to escape this bind, and found it in Janklow. “We were in the poorhouse when Citibank called us,” the governor recalled in a later interview. “They were in bigger problems than we were. We could make it last. They couldn’t make it last. I was slowly bleeding to death; they were gushing to death.”” http://bit.ly/37hMTlF

“Today’s global economy has an insatiable need for raw materials. That’s as true for China’s rise as it is true for the maintenance of America’s economy. With China exporting some 40% of its GDP, Americans need to understand that behind that Made in China tag at Wal-Mart is a mutually reinforcing death spiral. We are beginning to overwhelm our host.” http://bit.ly/31nnym5

Short but brilliant read on student debt. “For Walsh, ballooning tuition didn’t leave much time to consider such questions. The average cost of attendance at public, four-year universities has increased more than threefold since 1987, with much of that increase occurring after the year 2000. This has spawned a vast, all-consuming student finance industrial complex, replete with numerous financial products that emerged like rats from a trash heap to help families pay for their children’s education. In addition to 529s, there are direct private and federal parent PLUS loans.” http://bit.ly/2Orrkbk

“Boris Johnson will kiss hands the next day, not elected by us, not with our consent, no “one nation” unifier but leader of a dysfunctional, disunited kingdom. He will get the usual goodwill poll bounce: May and Gordon Brown had theirs. Skipping spring-heeled across the Downing Street threshold, full of vacuous optimism and “let the sun shine in” self-intoxication, he may bring smiles to the faces of admirers.” http://bit.ly/2LWn5Dp

““My input costs shot up from 4,000 to 15,000 rupees [$62 to $235],” remembers Manam’s brother Veeranjaneyu, who still works as a farmer. “The yield increased a little, but not nearly enough to cover the increase in input costs. And my crops sold for less money than before. I was forced to take out six lakhs [$9,412] in loans from private moneylenders. The loan has been a horrible burden on my life.” “The system now pits human against human,” says Manam, arguing that capitalism reduces the world to competition and cruelty. “People should always be kind and loving to others. People should help one another, whether that person is family, a neighbor, friend, or complete stranger.”” http://bit.ly/2XKlALI

Much detailed version of Anil Ambani’s Journey. Worth reading. http://bit.ly/2HzF9lc

“Anil Ambani – whose surname is so powerful in India that when Ambani sneezes, the who’s who in India catches cold – was asked by the top court of the land to clear his dues or risk going to jail. In a country, where the rich and powerful rarely follow the rule book especially when things go wrong, the Supreme court’s decision is both ground-breaking (for the masses) and earth-shattering (for the classes).” http://bit.ly/2EONDCz

” Even with training, some said, it is exceedingly easy to revert to the original biases. “In the moment of stress, we tend to forget our training,” said Mark Atkinson, the chief executive of Mursion, which provides a simulation platform for training workers in skills like interpersonal interactions.” https://nyti.ms/30L95BT

“Brands like Glossier and Milk have garnered impressive cult followings, thanks to their social media-friendly packaging and refreshing approach to beauty. But, by and large, most brands seem to be all about finding the next trendy ingredient, featuring it in their products and convincing us that their formula is better than the others on the market. The fact is, certain products don’t work for certain people. We’re all unique, with different skin types or hair types, and have different goals for what we want to achieve. Most beauty brands aren’t selling products tailored to individual consumers. Instead, they’re selling a brand, a luxury, a lifestyle or some product that will magically work on every skin type and solve every skin problem.” http://bit.ly/2RnCTBz

“The following is from an old article from 2015. The article is not just factual, but also opinionated. One can expect to see similar articles in the CAT. Right to buy is a zombie policy – an idea that’s intellectually dead and widely accepted as harmful, but one that politicians keep trying to revive. Keen for an easy vote winner that essentially amounts to bribing voters in social housing with eye-watering discounts of up to £103,000, the Conservatives have proposed extending right to buy to Britain’s 1.2m housing association homes.” http://bit.ly/2GelN2n

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. http://bit.ly/2Gh0xt0

“The United States cannot win its tariff war with China, regardless of what President Donald Trump says or does in the coming months. Trump believes that he has the upper hand in this conflict because the US economy is so strong, and also because politicians of both parties support the strategic objective of thwarting China’s rise and preserving US global dominance. But, ironically, this apparent strength is Trump’s fatal weakness. By applying the martial arts principle of turning an opponent’s strength against him, China should easily win the tariff contest, or at least fight Trump to a draw.” http://bit.ly/3aBbnYU

The world of work is undergoing a massive shift. Not since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries and the Information Age that followed in the last century has the scale of disruption taking place in the workforce been so evident. An oft-cited 2013 study from the University of Oxford predicted that nearly half of American jobs—including real-estate brokers, insurance underwriters, and loan officers—were at risk of being taken over by computers within the next two decades. Just last fall, the McKinsey Global Institute released a report that estimated a third of American workers may have to change jobs by 2030 because of artificial intelligence. http://bit.ly/3aAJn7E

Neat article that pokes around with questions that are supposedly Common sense. Talks about how spending culture has lead to the America being where it is now, and why it is important for the old to retire and let the young take on the reigns. ““Look out for China.” “Look out for robots.” Robots? The robots have yet to appear, as Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute has pointed out. (If they were here, productivity would be accelerating, he has said, but that isn’t happening.) Toe-to-toe, it’s the elderly and not the robots who are taking jobs from the young. Too many workers are showing up. In a sense, millions of new elderly workers are gushing into the workforce—simply by staying put.” http://bit.ly/2RDs1yg

Why is it difficult to invest in China? Does the government mechanism strong-arm western investors just with their policies in-to “Forced” technology transfer? Read on to know. Informative read. “China’s main official argument is that, as a developing country, domestic firms are at a disadvantage vis-à-vis foreign investors, which possess advanced technologies that the local companies do not understand. But while this argument may hold water in some of the less developed countries that use it to justify restrictive FDI regimes, China’s technological capabilities have exploded over the last couple of decades.” http://bit.ly/2GfqY2b

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Policy has tightened a lot. how tight is it (an update).

May 7, 2024

Over the past few years, I have published a series of essays assessing where we are in our inflation fight and highlighting some important questions policymakers are facing. My most recent essay was in February of this year, where I questioned how much monetary policy was actually restraining demand. This essay is an update to that commentary, and I now examine the current stance of monetary policy in more detail. 1

I will argue that the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has tightened policy significantly, compared with prior cycles, both in absolute terms and relative to the market’s understanding of neutral. But I will also observe that the housing market is proving more resilient to that tight policy than it generally has in the past. Given that housing is a key channel through which monetary policy affects the economy, its resilience raises questions about whether policymakers and the market are misperceiving neutral, at least in the near term. It is possible that once the reopening dynamics of the post-COVID economy have concluded, the macro forces that drove the low-rate environment that existed before the pandemic will reemerge, pulling neutral back down. But the FOMC must set policy based on where neutral is in the short run to achieve our dual mandate goals in a reasonable period of time. The uncertainty about where neutral is today creates a challenge for policymakers.

Economic Update

Since my last update in February, two significant economic developments have occurred simultaneously: Inflation appears to have stopped falling and economic activity has proven resilient, continuing the robust activity we saw in the latter half of 2023.

The FOMC targets 12-month headline inflation of 2 percent. While we saw rapid disinflation in the second half of 2023, that progress appears to have stalled in the most recent quarter (see Figure 1). The question we now face is whether the disinflationary process is in fact still underway, merely taking longer than expected, or if inflation is instead settling to around a 3 percent level, suggesting that the FOMC has more work to do to achieve our dual mandate goals.

During this time, economic activity has continued to show remarkable strength, as shown in Figure 2. While the most recent headline GDP appears somewhat weaker than prior quarters, that slowdown was driven largely by inventories and net exports. Underlying domestic demand remained strong.

The labor market, the other half of our dual mandate, has also remained strong with the unemployment rate at a historically low 3.9 percent.

Policy Is Much Tighter than the Pre-pandemic Period

In prior essays I wrote that the single best proxy for the overall stance of monetary policy is the long-term real rate, specifically the 10-year Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS) yield. Focusing on a long-term rate incorporates the expected path of both the federal funds rate and balance sheet, not just the current level of the federal funds rate. Moreover, it adjusts the expected path of policy by expected future inflation—the relevant comparison—rather than by recently realized inflation.

As I noted in earlier essays, prior to the pandemic the 10-year real yield was about zero, which I estimate was roughly a neutral policy stance at that time. In response to the pandemic, the FOMC acted aggressively to support the economy by driving the federal funds rate to the effective lower bound and massively expanding our balance sheet. Those combined effects drove the 10-year real yield to roughly -1 percent, as shown in Figure 3. Since we began our tightening cycle two years ago, 10-year real yields have more than fully retraced their pandemic decline and are now around 2.2 percent. Thus, we are clearly in a tighter stance now than immediately before the pandemic.

This Tightening Cycle Appears to Be as Aggressive as the 1994 Cycle

Data from the TIPS market only go back 20 years or so; thus, to evaluate earlier tightening cycles one must make a number of assumptions about the neutral rate and about inflation expectations.

I do not think comparisons to the 1970s and early 1980s are particularly relevant to us today because in those decades, the FOMC had to establish its inflation-fighting credibility, so the required monetary tightening was very large.

The tightening cycle in 1994 might be a better benchmark because at that time, as is true now, the FOMC had a lot of credibility with the public. Inflation was not as high in 1994, however, as it was in this episode. So it is not a perfect comparison either.

Minneapolis Fed staff’s best estimate is that when the FOMC raised the policy rate by 300 basis points in the 1994 tightening cycle, this translated into an increase of about 200 basis points in the 10-year real rate (Figure 4), which was coincidentally also about 200 basis points above the then-neutral 10-year real rate. So that is the key: It seems as though policy drove the 10-year real rate about 200 basis points above neutral.

How does that compare to our current tightening cycle? (See Figure 3.) If my estimate of neutral being zero before the pandemic still holds, then we have accomplished similar or a bit more tightening in this cycle than was achieved in the 1994 tightening cycle.

Yield Curve Suggests Policy Is Tight

As I stated earlier, the underlying inflationary dynamics are quite different today than in 1994, so simply repeating the 1994 tightening might not be enough. And perhaps the unique dynamics of the post-COVID reopening economy have caused neutral to increase.

Another indicator I look at to assess the stance of monetary policy is the shape of the yield curve. Specifically, if the yield curve is inverted, it might indicate that monetary policy is in a contractionary stance. A lot of public attention is given to the yield curve, and there is a robust debate about whether an inverted yield curve is a reliable recession indicator. I wrote about this in 2018. Setting aside its usefulness as a predictor of recessions, the yield curve does seem to give some indication of the stance of monetary policy. The long end of the yield curve should offer some signal of where market participants believe interest rates will settle once current economic and policy shocks have run their course; if markets understand that neutral has moved, it should be reflected in the long end of the curve. If current short rates are higher than long rates, then that might signal an overall tight stance of policy today. Figure 5 shows the history of the (nominal) yield curve with a number of inversions over the past 50 years, including the current inversion. 2

Depending on the specific measures chosen, the yield curve has now been inverted for more than 20 months, which is a relatively long and somewhat deeper inversion than most prior cycles, the Volcker disinflation period being the exception. The current inverted yield curve suggests that policy is in fact tight relative to the market’s understanding of neutral.

The Resilience in the Housing Market Nonetheless Raises Questions

Housing is traditionally the most interest-rate-sensitive sector of the economy. Prior yield curve inversions also coincided with a marked slowdown or even contraction in residential investment, as shown in Figure 6. Curiously, while residential investment fell in the first part of our tightening cycle, it has since reversed and has grown 5 percent over the past year.

What could explain this apparent resilience in residential real estate given monetary policy that has led to an inverted yield curve? We know that following the Global Financial Crisis, the country built far fewer housing units than were needed to keep up with population growth and household formation. Thus, there appears to be a significant shortage of housing that will take a long time to close. In addition, responses to COVID have led to an increase in people working from home, and that has led to increased demand for housing. In recent years there has also been a significant increase in immigration. While the long-run effect of increased immigration on inflation is unclear, immigrants nonetheless need a place to live, and their arrival in the U.S. has likely also increased demand for housing. Policy actions by the FOMC have driven 30-year mortgage rates from around 4.0 percent prior to the pandemic to around 7.5 percent today. Perhaps that level of mortgage rates is not as contractionary for residential investment as it would have been absent these unique factors which are driving housing demand higher. In other words, perhaps a neutral rate for the housing market is higher than before the pandemic.

Other Signals from the Real Economy Are Mixed

Monetary policy is a blunt instrument that eventually affects virtually the entire economy, not only housing. While high interest rates may not be slowing housing as much as in prior tightening cycles, it is nonetheless having an impact on other sectors of the economy. For example, auto loan and credit card delinquencies have increased from very low levels and are now at rates higher than existed before the pandemic, indicating that some consumers are feeling stress from increased borrowing costs. Overall, however, economic activity, consumer spending and the labor market have proven surprisingly resilient.

The FOMC has undeniably tightened policy meaningfully, both relative to the pre-pandemic period and to some prior tightening cycles. Nonetheless, it is hard for me to explain the robust economic activity that has persisted during this cycle. My colleagues and I are of course very happy that the labor market has proven resilient, but, with inflation in the most recent quarter moving sideways, it raises questions about how restrictive policy really is. If policymakers and market participants are misperceiving the neutral policy rate, that could explain the constellation of data we are observing. This is also a communication challenge for policymakers. In my own Summary of Economic Projections (SEP) submission, I have only modestly increased my longer-run nominal neutral funds rate level from 2 percent to 2.5 percent. The SEP does not provide a simple way to communicate the possibility that the neutral rate might be at least temporarily elevated.

1 These comments reflect my own views and may not necessarily represent the views of others in the Federal Reserve System or of the Federal Open Market Committee.

2 Conceptually, the real yield curve is a better measure of the stance of monetary policy than the nominal yield curve. That said, because nominal and real spreads have been quite similar over the past 18 months, the nominal spread in Figure 5 currently provides an equivalent measure of the stance of monetary policy. I plot nominal yields in Figure 5 simply because they are available for a longer time period than TIPS yields.

Policy Has Tightened a Lot. How Tight Is It?

Percent sign transposed over a sheet of 100 dollar bills

Policy Has Tightened a Lot. Is It Enough? (A Second Update)

The Interaction between Inflation and Financial Stability

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Read and understand the headline of the essay then understand the briefing given under the headline.
Now read about the author to get an overview of what are you going to encounter in the entire essay.
As you come across each different word or new word in any passage of the essay, then immediately stop and read about its meaning carefully. Our main motive is to learn as many new words as possible and remember their usage too.
Once done hunting for new words you need to understand their meaning too so you know how to use those words. So relate those words as per your own understanding, and re-iterate the meaning of the passage to know if you are going along with what the author is saying.
Write each vocab word with its meanings in your notebook to remember those words.

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3 issues that could make or break the US economy over the next year, according to top economist Mohamed El-Erian

Mohamed El-Erian named three key risks that will determine where US growth is headed in 2024 through 2025.
That includes changes to the Fed's inflation target and low-income consumer spending.
Investors will also watch for a balance between technological innovation and geopolitical tension.

If Wall Street was wrong about recession odds in 2023 and 2024, forecasting for next year won't be any easier, Cambridge economist Mohamed El-Erian wrote in Project Syndicate .

In his view, chances of a US soft-landing scenario still remain strong for the near-term, but there are three key risks that will determine how likely this really is.

First, all eyes are on the Federal Reserve as to whether it will double down in its 2% inflation chase, or if it can live with a slightly higher rate.

Watch: What is crypto, and is it making a comeback?

Main content

Inflation "settling" high could pose new risks for the Fed, economy

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Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari speaks during an interview with Reuters in New York

Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Andrea Ricci

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Covers the U.S. Federal Reserve, monetary policy and the economy, a graduate of the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University with previous experience as a foreign correspondent, economics reporter and on the local staff of the Washington Post.

Fed rate announcement at the NYSE in New York

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China outbound investment rule to be completed by end of year -- US official

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Wednesday she expects rules to implement U.S. outbound investment restrictions on China will be completed by the end of the year.

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Guest Essay

This Isn’t the China I Remember

An illustration shows a mother with her arm around her young son while she looks out a window at magnolia flower petals falling from a tree.

By Gish Jen

Ms. Jen, an American novelist whose family hails from Shanghai, wrote from Shanghai.

In 1979 my mother pulled out a Band-Aid in a Nanjing hospital. The nurses clustered around it, amazed. “The West has everything!” they said.

We were on a family visit to China, where my Shanghai relatives were similarly wowed by our excellent teeth and ample body fat, not to mention our descriptions of American dishwashers, refrigerators and air-conditioning. And with the general awe came V.I.P. treatment. Hosts broke out bottles of expensive orange soda that they freely mixed with expensive warm beer. We could not escape drinking this any more than we could escape our government-assigned “guide,” whose job was to strictly monitor visitors like us. Relatives or not, we were foreigners.

I returned to teach English at the Shandong Mining Institute in 1981. My students were coal mining engineers preparing to study abroad, so that they might bring back safer mining techniques. I was their “foreign expert.” As such, I had not only a sit-down toilet in the apartment provided to me, but also running hot water, an unheard-of luxury. My ayi, or housekeeper, would make a fire under a vat of water on the roof and, when it was ready, turn the faucet handle in my bathtub.

After class, my students would bring stools out to the basketball court where, each facing a different direction, they would sit and study for hours on end. Loving their country and wanting to make it strong, they were grateful for Westerners like me. Foreign as we were, we were a help.

Fast forward a few decades to a booming China. In my many visits over the years — as a teacher, as a visiting artist and as a tourist — Shanghai hotel staffers had always returned my credit card to me with two hands, a bow of the head, and a smile. But with a quarter of the world’s construction cranes said to be in the city during China’s boom years, raising skyscrapers from what had been rice paddies, attitudes had changed. My credit card was returned with one hand; the receptionist barely looked up. My relatives no longer asked that I bring American goods for them, either. “China has everything,” they said then. As many proudly proclaimed, the 20th century was America’s; the 21st was China’s.

One seldom hears that triumphalist tone today. Instead, the talk is of a loss of confidence and trust in the Chinese government. People remain proud of their city, which now boasts excellent, cosmopolitan food and spotless streets. There are huge new sports centers featuring tennis and paddle-boarding, there is an artificial beach with pink sand. The city is far greener than in years past, too. Magnolia and cherry trees bloom everywhere and even the strips under the freeways have been landscaped. And thanks to the ubiquitous security cameras, Shanghai is spectacularly safe.

Yet below the surface lurks a sense of malaise. In this famously cosmopolitan city, there are weirdly few foreigners compared with before, many having left because of the stifling policies during the pandemic or because international companies have pulled out employees, or other reasons. Clothing shops are empty and many other stores have closed. The Nanjing West Road shopping district, previously a sea of humans, is strangely underpopulated.

Shanghainese are still outraged at having been locked down for two months in the spring of 2022 to stem a surge in Covid-19 cases with little time to prepare. Such were the shortages of essentials that Tylenol was for sale by the pill. And so heavy-handed were even the post-lockdown policies that residents took to the streets in protest .

But for many, the pandemic debacle only capped a series of governmental blunders starting with Premier Li Keqiang urging young people to open their own businesses in 2014. This and other missteps cost wave after wave of people their life savings, and many Chinese now blame government ineptitude and erraticism for bringing the economy to a standstill. As a Shanghainese friend put it, the government has turned China around and around until, like spinning cars, people’s engines have stalled and their wheels have locked up.

The result has been so steep and unrelenting a fall in real estate prices that elderly people, like my friend’s parents, can’t sell their apartments to pay for nursing or assisted living. And they are hardly the only ones affected by the downturn. Doctors find themselves squeezed — many patients don’t have money for operations — while businesspeople sit on their hands, unwilling to make investments in so unpredictable an environment. Many college graduates, faced with a grim job market, are essentially dropping out, or “lying flat,” as it’s called in China. Not even schoolchildren, it seems, have been spared the general despondency. As one teacher I spoke to observed, when the society is sick, the children pay the price. Too many parents know a child who has had to leave school because of depression.

Of course, for all of this the West is scapegoated — having opposed, people say, China’s rise — as is China’s other favorite enemy, Japan, whose brutal 1930s invasion and ensuing occupation of China still rankles. (One sequence of a CGI video shown in my recent Shanghai spin class featured giant images of the coronavirus studded with Japanese temples.)

Whoever is to blame, emigration is on the rise . According to U.N. figures, more than 310,000 Chinese left the country in each of the past two years, a 62 percent increase from the earlier average of around 191,000 per year over the decade through 2019. Those in Shanghai with the means to do so talk endlessly about “running away,” even to officially reviled countries like the United States .

This is not always an answer. One friend of mine has come back to China to stay, having spent six years attending graduate school in Boston, saying she missed the warmth of Chinese family life. And no one has illusions about the difficulty of getting established in another country. People in China speak of a whole new class of emigrants, women who have left high-powered careers to accompany their children to the United States early enough for them to assimilate — ideally, in middle or high school. As for the fruits of their sacrifice, it’s too early to say. Can the children really become Westerners? Will they — like me decades earlier — become the foreigners?

Things in China could change. Those “lying flat” are not asleep. They are watching and could someday rise up. But in the meantime, people in Shanghai are simply, as they put it, “xin lei ” : Their hearts are tired.

Gish Jen is an American novelist and the author of “Thank You, Mr. Nixon.” She is currently teaching at N.Y.U. Shanghai.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Using AI to predict grade point average from college application essays

J onah Berger and Olivier Toubia used natural language processing to understand what drives academic success. The authors analyzed over 20,000 college application essays from a large public university that attracts students from a range of racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds and found that the semantic volume of the writing, or how much ground an application essay covered predicted college performance, as measured by grade point average.

They published their findings in PNAS Nexus .

Essays that covered more semantic ground predicted higher grades. Similarly, essays with smaller conceptual jumps between successive parts of its discourse predicted higher grades.

These trends held even when researchers controlled for factors including SAT score, parents' education, gender, ethnicity, college major, essay topics, and essay length. Some of these factors, such as parents' education and the student's SAT scores, encode information about family background, suggesting that the linguistic features of semantic volume and speed are not determined solely by socioeconomic status.

According to the authors, the results demonstrate that the topography of thought, or the way people express and organize their ideas, can provide insight into their likely future success.

More information: Jonah Berger et al, The topography of thought, PNAS Nexus (2024). DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae163 . academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/art … /3/5/pgae163/7665783

Provided by PNAS Nexus

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Inflation lodged above the U.S. Federal Reserve's 2% target could leave policymakers saddled with the difficult choice in coming months of how much risk to take with economic growth and the job ...
Why China's Most Can-Do City Is Tired
Ms. Jen, an American novelist whose family hails from Shanghai, wrote from Shanghai. In 1979 my mother pulled out a Band-Aid in a Nanjing hospital. The nurses clustered around it, amazed. "The ...
Using AI to predict grade point average from college application essays
The authors analyzed over 20,000 college application essays from a large public university that attracts students from a range of racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds and found that the ...
Guidelines for Aeon application essay? : r/teachinginjapan
If you're planning on rehashing your JET application essay, it might be useful to remember that Aeon are first and foremost a business. So it could help to include any work-related motivations (i.e. you enjoy customer service, learning new skills, etc), rather than purely cultural factors (that might have gone down better with JET). Good luck ...