The author speaks

But that analysis underestimates how deeply neoliberal ideas took root across both the left and the right, at least in the Anglosphere.

In Mr DeLong’s version of history, key events are often the product of chance rather than structural forces.

a duel between the insights of Friedrich von Hayek, an Austrian economist who extolled the power of the free market, and Karl Polanyi, a Hungarian thinker who warned that the market was there to serve man, not man the market.

Yet building harmonious societies out of material abundance has proved maddeningly difficult.

a land of plenty that prior generations could scarcely have imagined.

the modern corporation, the research laboratory and globalisation

Mr DeLong, by contrast, argues that the period from 1870 to 2010 is best seen as a coherent whole: the first era, he argues, in which historical developments were overwhelmingly driven by economic ones.

It turns out that gpus, which were first designed in the 1990s to improve video games, are also excellent at running artificial-intelligence (AI) models. Intel recently launched its first set of stand-alone gpus to compete with Nvidia as well as amd, which also makes them.

But there was a twist: the number of tweets about protests and rallies increased. Like death, taxes are certain. Their effects are not.

This kind of messy bargaining could eventually strengthen the contract between citizens and states.

In Uganda the total value of mobile-money transactions dropped by a quarter when the state imposed a 1% tax on them in 2018, taking 18 months to recover

Ghana’s e-levy, in force since May, imposes a 1.5% tax on most electronic money transfers, such as those that citizens zap through their phones. Cameroon brought in a similar charge in January. Nigeria is considering a 5% levy on calls, messages and mobile internet.

African countries have proposed that a tax convention be developed at the un, where they hope to have more of a say.

But many African countries worry it is too complex and would be difficult to implement in countries with low administrative capacity, says Thulani Shongwe of the African Tax Administration Forum, a network of tax officials.

A global tax deal was agreed to by 130 countries last year with the aim of forcing multinational companies to pay more tax in the places where they make their sales, irrespective of where they register their assets.

Now they see untapped potential in new sectors which barely existed 20 years ago, including social media, e-commerce, mobile internet and mobile money.

Levies on mobile and internet services have sparked street protests in Uganda, cabinet squabbles in Nigeria and a parliamentary brawl in Ghana.

And China imports $400bn-worth of chips a year, more than any other country. Though private companies and allied countries might be happy to go along with the Americans now, the amount of money being left on the table by not selling to Chinese customers may start to rankle.

The list includes chips used for artificial intelligence (ai), software to design advanced chips and the machine tools to manufacture them. Selling such things to China is now barred without explicit permission from America’s government. Rulebreakers risk being cut off from American tech themselves.

China’s growing isolation—both self-imposed and enforced by restrictions like America’s new rules on tech exports—is far more severe.

American politicians do not seem to understand the advantage conferred by their country’s openness, however.

Less than half as many Chinese received visas to study abroad in the first half of 2022 as in the first half of 2019. This pulling apart is bad for the world, but China may suffer more. It does not have as diverse a pool of researchers as the West. According to data from MacroPolo, a think-tank, although 60% of the world’s best AI researchers work in America, over two-thirds of them are foreign (and over a quarter of them Chinese). In contrast, China draws overwhelmingly on domestic talent: almost all its best ai researchers are Chinese, and 70% of them have studied only in China.

he West is ahead on biotech, cloud computing and AI

China is dominant in some industries, such as 5G telecoms. It makes some 80% of the world’s lithium batteries.

what is called juguo tizhi or the “whole-of-the-nation system”.

China’s investments are also more co-ordinated.

This calculation confirms that America maintains a slight edge (see chart 1), spending about $800bn or 3.8% of GDP in 2020. That compares to about $660bn in China after adjusting for differences in the cost of living, or 2.7% of gDP.

Peter Thiel, a fabled investor, has argued that there has been too much investment in “bits” (software and analytics) and not enough in “atoms” (hardware and manufacturing).

Private investment, meanwhile, doubled from 1% of GDP in 1979 to 2% in 2017. Giant tech firms such as Google, Facebook (now Meta), Amazon and Apple sprouted in America. China spawned similar titans, such as Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com and Tencent.

Its spending peaked at 1.86% of GDP in 1964. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall federal spending on R&D fell well below 1% of gDP.

“Technological innovation has become the main battlefield of the international strategic game,” said China’s president, Xi Jinping, in a speech last year to Chinese scientists. “We’re in a multi-generation era-defining competition against the ccp [Chinese Communist Party],” rhymes Mr Young, one of the sponsors of the Chips Act.

The month before it passed the Chips and Science Act, which provides $52bn over five years for the semiconductor industry, some of which will incentivise private R&D.

“It’s a total clamp down, trying to cut off every head of the hydra of China’s chip industry.”

The anxiety is easy to understand. In 2008 China spent a third as much as America did on research and development (R&D) and about half as much as Europe, after adjusting for differences in the cost of living. By 2014 it had surpassed Europe. By 2020 its spending was 85% of America’s.

China fears rule-making as a plot to stop it catching up.

“When you are the weaker party, you cannot get a fair deal.”

A truly desperate Russia might stop selling advanced arms to India and Vietnam, both rivals of China’s, and forget its previous disquiet about China playing a larger role in the Arctic.

The Americans were too late: the prime minister, Manasseh Sogavare, signed the Chinese pact before they arrived. In August the islands announced a $66m Chinese loan to pay for Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, to build mobile-phone towers. In September Mr Sogavare defied public appeals from Australia, previously its closest partner, and delayed elections for a year, saying they clashed with a sports tournament.

China has begun working with the IMF, the G20 and the Paris Club of creditors to help some low-income countries restructure crippling debts, among them Zambia. It has also recently struck a restructuring deal with Ecuador.

China prefers to extend the terms of loans rather than write them off, often securing promises to give Chinese lenders a priority claim to revenues (as well as clauses to keep loan terms secret)

In June a first cohort of 120 young cadres from six ruling parties in southern Africa attended a “leadership school” in Tanzania, opened with $40m in Chinese funding.

A European diplomat asserts that Mr Xi is guided by a tianxia guan: an ancient world view with China at the centre, and the influence of Chinese civilisation radiating out to all compass points

Confirmation bias was only part of the problem.

Without team-specific coaching and development, the work is indeed harder than it needs to be, and collaboration is less effective—so workloads become even heavier, making people feel even more overwhelmed and less able to pursue development and growth.

I believe that Yoda’s type of wisdom exists on every team, but only when everyone’s input is openly shared.

A replay may also be requested if it appears that a violation of the social contract—such as a back-channel conversation or an aggressive encounter—has occurred.

Circulate the results in a shared document and then orally after reconvening the full team. Candor breaks can serve as a coaching mechanism: In time team members will begin spontaneously sharing their feedback.

“Most important, they must be able to put their egos aside and assess themselves candidly.”

No matter how sensitive the issue or how serious the criticism, members must feel free to voice their thoughts openly—though always constructively—and respond to critical input with curiosity, recognizing that it is a crucial step toward a better solution.

Conflict avoidance can be corrosive, even deadly, causing teams to miss opportunities and needlessly exposing them to risk

This ensures that the person responsible for the project has clear, well-documented input encompassing a variety of perspectives along with concrete offers of support and that by the time the project comes to fruition, it has been subject to rigorous examination and benefits from the full wisdom of the team.

we have discovered that this courage and candor are sustained when the larger group reconvenes.

People have more courage in small groups; they are less inhibited about critiquing ideas and weeding out weak ones.

who will make the final decision.

The aim is robust dialogue, not consensus

Is this the highest performance we’re capable of?

deeply committed to one anothe

seekers, aware of and open about the areas in which we need to grow

meet their goals and commitments

not encumbered by hierarchy or control.

does not have silos

does not avoid conflict

an unspoken agreement to avoid conflict

have traditionally emphasized leadership competencies, not team competencies.

the rising star of social media could find itself similarly thwacked.

Spotify forks over a 15% commission on subscriptions purchased on iPhones—a tax so annoying that it has filed a complaint against Apple over it.

reliance on distribution platforms that are not their own.

low barriers to entry

try to capitalise on network effects, as data on the listening and viewing habits of similar users promised to deliver an unbeatable product.

Many developing countries see nothing magic about the year 1945, and have limited nostalgia for a time when the West dominated rulemaking

about foreigners who employ double standards to criticise other countries.

even stronger memories of suffering at the hands of colonial powers

explained why Europe’s dark past, notably the Holocaust, obliged its leaders to call out rights abuses, from China to Ukraine

This was “power politics”, Mr Wang retorted: a bid to “replace commonly accepted international laws and norms with the house rules of a few countries”.

a straw-man argument

China hates to be isolated, deploying diplomats to lobby and twist arms to build support.

A “shared future” is another way of saying “development first”, ie, rejecting any order guided by shared, universal values.

a “Global Security Initiative” or “A Community of Shared Future for Mankind”

Chinese leaders want to preserve elements of the current order that helped their country rise, such as world trade rules that fostered their export champions and encouraged inflows of foreign capital and technology

Its officials liken Western powers to missionaries, bossily imposing their own values, a trait they call particularly alien to Asia, a continent that respects diversity.

When its efforts meet resistance, it pushes for vaguer rules whose enforcement becomes a question of political bargaining. All too often, it seeks to revive old, discredited ways of running the world that put states first, at the expense of individual freedoms.

Recipient governments are pushed into higher environmental standards or to protect the rights of vulnerable minorities.

For decades tensions between national sovereignty and the protection of individuals lurked in the founding documents of this new order, from the UN Charter to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Recalling the economic disasters and human miseries that paved the way to world war, the framers of this order built the UN and other international institutions to promote co-operation and development.

Most of all, China wants outsiders to admire its development and the political system that has overseen it. If China is “a bit allergic to universal values”, he says, the problem is not the notion of all countries agreeing to basic principles. It is that some Western countries apply a “special connotation” to universal values and such terms as democracy, so as to criticise China and other developing countries. This makes China “very uncomfortable”, he says.

He mentions relatively low education levels in Asia, and the risks of delaying good projects if local non-governmental groups—which have a right to speak out, he adds—are “hijacked by a very small group of people who put their very narrow interests above the community’s interests.”

faraway lenders were slow to grasp how soon infrastructure projects would pay off in booming Asia, for instance.

the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)

Scenario planning, which became popular in the 1970s, encouraged executives to consider multiple future states in assessing strategic investments, rather than rely on a single, deterministic forecast. Monte Carlo simulation went even further, specifying a probability distribution for each critical variable and then running thousands of simulations so that executives would focus on the distribution of potential outcomes as much as on any prediction of the most likely one. Real options analysis emerged as a further refinement in the 1980s, explicitly incorporating flexibility in the consideration of strategic investments.

scenario planning, Monte Carlo simulation, and real options analysis

This is probably an example of kin selection, which favours the evolution of behaviour that assists the collateral passage of an individual’s genes alongside the more normal route of direct descent.

This list is familiar to zoologists as comprising groups of species known to have developed, independently of one another, high levels of intelligence, both individual and social.

Sometimes this bystander acted as a peacemaker, engaging with the aggressor and reducing the number of subsequent attacks compared with what might otherwise have been expected.

Most conflicts ended in seconds, but some lasted a minute or two.

“I like pigs,” Winston Churchill supposedly once said. “Dogs look up at us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equals.”

Mr Xi may paint that as delivering yet more power to the people. His real aim is control.

The law of shijia lianzuo dates back to the Qin dynasty, which ruled from 221BC to around 207BC. It called for a ten-family unit to be punished for offences committed by any member of the group. The baojia system, created in the 11th century during the Song dynasty, organised Chinese families in groups of ten for mutual monitoring and defence.

It is a low-tech arm of a high-tech police state. Rwanda, a small African autocracy, has something similar.

Mr Xi praises the Fengqiao model, which he has redefined as a way of empowering people. He talks of qunfang qunzhi, or “mass prevention and mass governance”. In reality he is using people to supplement the Communist Party’s other tools of control.

Around 900 of its 65,000 residents were called out by their neighbours in public “denunciation rallies”.

Indonesia is relying on resources, surgical protectionism, big-tent politics and neutrality. Both are giant bets.

India is opting for tech- and manufacturing-led development, fuelled by subsidies, chauvinistic politics and decoupling from China.

a convener and peacemaker.

it wants to be neutral.

has developed that emphasises compromise and social harmony

With a fifth of global reserves of nickel, used in batteries, the country is a vital link in electric-vehicle (ev) supply chains

A source of dynamism is digital services, which are helping create a more integrated consumer market, with over 100m people collectively spending $80bn a year on everything from e-payments to apps for on-demand trucking.

It is the world’s largest Muslim-majority state, its third-biggest democracy and its fourth-most-populous country.

Isaac Asimov

Advertisers are becoming more cautious, despite the pausing of a service introduced by Mr Musk that allowed anyone to buy a verified account, which led to problems with impersonation.

Truth Social,

Cohost

Many are flocking to Mastodon, a decentralised social network founded in 2016 by Eugen Rochko, a German developer and its only employee.

There’s a man who could stop Twitter’s decline if he wanted to. And if we wanted to, we could consider what of Twitter we need to mourn, and what we might want to save or re-create.

We’ve learned that everything is shocking, unbelievable, unprecedented—and, simultaneously, that nothing really matters.

the way to be heard and make a difference is to amplify other ideas instead of coming up with our own, especially ideas that stoke lulz or predict a civilization-ending crisis

Twitter taught us things

But it’s most likely that Twitter will shamble on for a long time, like the Colosseum did, and we’ll never quite know if we’re participating in its glorious and hilarious finale. I actually think the prospect of Twitter’s rapid demise—in weeks or months—is functioning, right now, as fantasy.

bid not to lose followers inevitably comes off as shamefully status-seeking, their pleas are often ignored.

as pleas for the sake of some greater good or community.

the way to be heard and make a difference is to amplify other ideas instead of coming up with our own.

Hundreds of thousands of people's careers are now driven principally on Twitter. Many academics have built popular audiences entirely on Twitter, as well as enriched their professional networks.

But if Twitter died, that devastation would be everywhere.

But people like Jong-Fast—who hosts regular A-list parties at her multimillion-dollar Upper East Side apartment—have some prior networks of wealth and status to fall back on.

In recent years, Twitter worked notably hard to ban menacing bots bought by regimes like Rwanda’s and Zimbabwe’s. And so it has made Moyo sad—and frightened—to notice a certain kind of hateful, pro-regime account reemerging after “the advent of Elon Musk.” Worse, he has noticed that some have come back with a blue check.

Moyo credits his release to the global Twitter outcry his lawyer ignited. He also credits Twitter with preserving his sanity, which might surprise you. When Moyo’s lawyer visited him in prison, he’d always give Moyo a rundown of what people were saying on Twitter about his arrest.

So they become “very prolific on Twitter. The only thing they have is Twitter. It’s a space for fantasy and for articulating despair.

Zimbabwe

It doesn’t silo people into friend circles like Facebook or promote groupthink quite like Reddit.

Twitter has enabled phenomenal reporting, including by people who never would have been heard in the old publishing system

It would be like the 2008 recession, but for status.

But I’ve realized that Twitter’s death could be, to reputation, to the concept of “expertise,” the equivalent of Goldman, Barclays, and Citigroup all failing at once, with no bailout option

“clout chasing.

@AutismCapital has gathered some of the best news and analysis about the collapse of FTX, a crytocurrency exchange.

Take Substack: According to a WIRED analysis, the authors of the top 50 paid news and politics Substacks who listed their Twitter profiles had 387,046 followers on average when they launched their newsletters

his blue check

Jon Katz, a freelance writer, estimates that “most” of his income is now generated with Twitter’s help.

Twitter’s death could be, to reputation, to the concept of “expertise,” the equivalent of Goldman, Barclays, and Citigroup all failing at once, with no bailout option.

his own praise of and DMs to blue-check writers.

a function of momentum that ultimately built on itself rather than of courage or genius.

super-users became the unacknowledged class that determined which events and ideas were considered important

would be judged by “impact points,” which would be determined in part by how much “huge” Twitter commentators interacted with them

Twitter’s evil

Twitter currently functions as perhaps the world's biggest status bank, and the investments stored in it are terrifyingly unsecured.

That encompasses the cash people make out of connections or prestige they develop on Twitter, but also the intangible wealth now vested in its communities and in the sense it offers to people of having a place in the world.

But if we judge Twitter’s influence by its active users, we underestimate it massively. It has no peer as a forge of public opinion. In political analysis, publishing, public health, foreign policy, economics, history, the study of race, even in business and finance, Twitter has come to drive who gets quoted in the press. Who opines on TV. Who gets a podcast. In foreign affairs and political analysis, especially, it often determines whom we consider an authority. Almost every academic and journalist I know has come to read Twitter, even if they don’t have accounts.

Data Scientist:

“Sanction”, for example, can mean both “to approve of” and “to lay a penalty upon”. “Fast” can mean speedy or stuck in place. “Cleave” can mean to split, or to cling tightly. “Fulsome” praise can be full-throated and genuine, or cloyingly insincere. One class of Janus words is particularly troublesome: those that mean different things on opposite sides of the Atlantic. “Moot”, for instance, means “that which can be argued; debatable” in Britain; it means “not worthy of discussion” in America.

contronyms, auto-antonyms or, most poetically, “Janus words”, named for the two-faced Roman god who looks in opposite directions (and so gave his name to January, which faces back into the old year and forward to the new).

“the whole comprises the parts, and the parts compose the whole”

A messy, fragmented trade order might be brutal for small, open economies. But if rulers in Beijing thought it would give them leverage and security, they might take it.

Soon afterwards the People’s Bank of China began developing the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), a network that could one day replace SWIFT for Chinese financial institutions. China is working on a digital yuan that could further reduce its vulnerability to sanctions.

Western governments and business lobbies accuse China of using standards as sneaky barriers to trade.

In the West, standards are a form of private-sector self-regulation. In China, the state is the guide.

China’s government wants to be better represented in international bodies that set industrial and technical standards, determining everything from how the internet works to the steel used in railway tracks.

Perhaps a self-assured China might loosen controls on cross-border data flows and grant more access to foreign internet firms, he suggests—as long as WTO digital standards ensure that companies like Huawei cannot be excluded from Western markets just for being Chinese.

Rich economies advocated free trade in industries where they enjoyed a competitive advantage, at least before the rise of China and other Asian tigers, he says.

That is industrial policy, he concedes, but so is the basic research that underpins much rich-world innovation.

Western leaders predicted that growing Chinese prosperity would lead to ideological convergence with the rich world, as a rising middle class demanded accountable government and individual rights

China says it is now the largest trade partner of more than 120 of the world’s countries.

Today's game-theory software is not yet sufficiently advanced to mediate between warring countries.

The “principle of convergence”, as it is known, holds that armed conflict is, in essence, an information-gathering exercise.

Dr Ponsatí, now head of the Institute of Economic Analysis at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, says such “mediation machines” could lubricate negotiations by unlocking information that would otherwise be withheld from an opponent or human mediator.

But game-theory software can also work well outside the sphere of economics.

Sorting out people's motivations is much easier, however, when making money is the main object.

go astray when people unexpectedly give in to “non-rational emotions”, such as hatred, rather than pursuing what is apparently in their best interests.

Numerical values are placed on the goals, motivations and influence of “players”—negotiators, business leaders, political parties and organisations of all stripes, and, in some cases, their officials and supporters

ceos who play moralists with respect to Vladimir Putin are hard-pressed to justify—in ethical terms, if not financial ones—why they embrace realpolitik when it comes to Xi Jinping.

global expansion would not just be good for business; it would be good for peace and democracy, too. But reality has turned out differently

While bosses are busy encroaching on foreign affairs, foreign affairs are gradually encroaching on them

Yet the belief that the pursuit of profit will always benefit society as a whole is also sadly erroneous,

Ford’s cult of efficiency morphed into creepy control over his workers—parodied in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, in which dates are measured from the “Year of Our Ford”

The Ford Motor Company was organised “to do as much good as we can, everywhere, for everybody concerned”

For much of corporate history, serving society was part of their charter.

Making deals palatable to 27 national governments with their own electorates is a messy business. While it attempts to do this, th

This is thankless but necessary work, best done out of the public gaze.

Coreper, short for Comité des représentants permanents, sounds to outsiders like a car body shop, but is in fact the powerful forum where national governments thrash out deals behind closed doors

They “assist” meetings instead of attending them. They “externalise” a task rather than merely outsourcing it. If they talk of an “actual” situation, they mean the current one.

National governments write in a way that a typical high-school pupil can understand. Eurocrats befuddle anyone who lacks a university education.

Most organisations, from the most gargantuan government to the tiniest start-up, develop their own jargon

how can we act sensibly when we cannot know what the consequences will be in the distant future?

Derek Parfit, a British philosopher who died in 2017, raised the question of whether future generations can hold the current one responsible for their suffering: if our generation had acted differently those people would not have been born.

For long-termists like Will MacAskill, a philosopher at Oxford University who provided EA with many of its founding ideas and helped turn it into a movement, “distance in time is like distance in space”.

Effective altruists claim to use evidence and reason to maximise the good they do for others, no matter where the beneficiaries live or when they are born

Stani Kulechov, the creator of Aave, a decentralised-lending protocol, is building a social-media platform that would allow people to port their followers from application to application, thus allowing them to quit a platform without losing clout.

fficient, scalable blockchains are beginning to emerge

It is an indictment that, almost 14 years after bitcoin was created, there are only a handful of use cases for crypto, such as firms paying workers in countries suffering from hyperinflation, like Argentina, or efficient decentralised exchanges and lending tools. Even the

Stablecoins, which are meant to hold their value in real-world currency, should be regulated as if they were payment instruments at banks.

regulating the institutions that act as gatekeepers for the cryptosphere