Consider the following fascinating table from Angus Maddison’s book Contours of the World Economy 1- 2030 AD (also available here) . For the whole of the capitalist epoch from 1820 onwards, the table presents growth accounts for two successive lead countries, the UK and the USA, back to 1820 and Japan, the most successful catch-up
This post tries to tie a few threads together which eventually evolve into a tentative set of principles for AI usage in modern times. It begins by briefly talking about Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks (the introduction chapter), expands into some work with AI around collecting a range of cross-disciplinary principles, and ends by
Good health & wellbeing is perhaps the first freedom and requisite for a human being. As a society shapes up, and as the world itself shapes up and settles in definite boundaries with clearly defined government roles, healthcare becomes more and more a policy question, a scientific enquiry, a cost to government, and the first
A post to note this popular essay/chapter on ‘Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System’ drawn from Donella H. Meadows’ ‘Thinking in Systems – A Primer’. The advent of systems view of things has updated our understanding of the way many things in this world behave. There is no simple chain
For the following linked resources, please note that the ideas, questions, and the direction were mine — but the work itself was done by Claude, Anthropic’s AI. AI can make mistakes, so please refer accordingly. Also, all numbers are for directional reference only. I’ve been building a set of resources for a while now
“We live in a world of unprecedented opulence, of a kind that would have been hard even to imagine a century or two ago. There have also been remarkable changes beyond the economic sphere. The twentieth century has established democratic and participatory governance as the preeminent model of political organization. Concepts of human
Key sources: A few charts from here, here, here and here. And some notes from A very short introduction – Demography. To set the context, 1.2 million years ago, there were ~55,000 humans in the world. Homo sapiens left Africa some 60,000 years ago. At the end of the last ice age, some 20,000
The following post draws from the book and this report on inequality. We live in an unequal world. One of the arguments in the book is that this inequality could be perhaps more acceptable at levels of say, one is to five, or one is to ten. But at the current levels, at times,
Data, charts and quotes in this post from various sources on the internet. Please regard the following for directional reference only. CONTEXT To understand the world of minerals and metals for say, the last 50 years, one could say that the traditional demand driver has been core economic growth led by a) manufacturing, b)
I recently read Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Great Derangement’. The book is about climate and the way perhaps future generations will call this age of ours the greatly deranged age – these 300 years of industrialisation, consumption, exploitation of earth’s resources, and our persistent blind eye to what is happening to the world. Once read, the
