Joel Mokyr

The Nobel Prize in Economics this year was awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt. I have blogged about his work here (why the Industrial Revolution happened in England), here (how expanded access to “technical literacy” promoted industrial development in Japan), here (useful R&D), and here (the importance of tinkering and microinventions). 

This post will be about Mokyr, whom I have earlier described as arguably the most important and profound social scientist of our times. His work shines light on arguably the most important question of political economy: what drives economic progress?

Mokyr is best known for studying the period from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, investigating the causes of the Industrial Revolution (IR) and its links to the Enlightenment, and showing that the causal link runs from the latter to the former. He argues that the latter fostered a belief in the possibility and desirability of human progress, scientific temper, and the culture of inquiry and problem-solving, all of which paved the path for the Industrial Enlightenment, which in turn, catalysed the conditions for the IR. 

He first explained why the Enlightenment happened in Europe. 

In Europe in 1500-1700, among the educated elite, there developed a culture and a set of institutions suitable for intellectual innovation and the accumulation of useful knowledge. Europe was lucky to stumble on an institutional solution that supported the market for ideas, actively encouraged innovation, and led to an exponential growth in useful knowledge. This institution was a transnational community of scholars, an intellectual commons resource (scientists, mathematicians, physicians, philosophers). It is described as the “commonwealth of learning” or the “Republic of Letters” (respublica literaria). 

It was a virtual pan-European community that shared, distributed, and evaluated knowledge. It was the “community” that resolved the common resource (of new ideas) problem. Its rules included an open community, which excluded none and where knowledge and data should be shared; which was egalitarian and non-hierarchical; all knowledge, both old and new, was contestable (with no sacred cows); and all new propositions were to be reproduced, checked, tested, and evaluated (reliability of new knowledge).

The Republic of Letters created “open science” as a transnational intellectual commons management device. It created norms that new knowledge would be placed in the public realm and accessible to anyone who wanted to build on it and use it for technological purposes. By 1700, the norms of “open science” were fully in place. By creating a pan-European institution linking intellectuals, it also created economies of scale for ideas. Europe enjoyed “intellectual unification amidst political fragmentation”. It allowed new knowledge and discoveries to diffuse quickly into a large market.

The community thrived because it was largely independent of religion and politics. The political fragmentation of Europe, the Protestant Reformation, etc., limited rulers and organised religion from controlling knowledge creation. Those with ideas could shop around across kingdoms. Another contributor was patronage, which was a competitive market where sellers (those with ideas) and buyers (rulers, universities, academies, etc.) competed intensely to attract smart people to their court as a matter of prestige, and a source of getting useful advice, the latest medical care, tutors for their children, etc.

In simple terms, Mokyr showed that the most important institutional change that explains IR is not better property rights, a decline in transaction costs, or the Glorious Revolution in England. Instead, it was the institutions that governed the accumulation and diffusion of “useful knowledge” and the solution to the “knowledge commons” problem that the Republic of Letters in Europe provided.

Why did the IR start in Britain as opposed to continental Europe?

He uses the concept of useful knowledge to answer this question. He defines useful knowledge as that which promotes material progress. It consists of propositional knowledge (“what”) and prescriptive knowledge (“how”). The former describes the “regularities in the natural world that demonstrate why something works”, whereas the latter consists of “practical instructions, drawings or recipes that describe what is necessary for something to work”. It’s a distinction between people who know things (savants) and who make things (fabricants).

He described two aspects of the Age of Enlightenment that led to the deployment of useful knowledge to catalyse the IR and promote economic growth. One, the generation of useful knowledge by creating incentives (patents, awards, prizes, medals, pensions, memberships in Royal Societies, and generally higher social status, etc). 

Second, easier and cheaper access to existing knowledge through written compilations like libraries, book indexes, alphabetisation, compilations based on topic, etc. The Age of Enlightenment expanded access by promoting the codification of knowledge and establishing linkages between philosophers, industrialists, entrepreneurs, inventors and artisans, etc. This meant that savants communicated not only with one another but also with fabricants. 

All this created positive feedback mechanisms between propositional and prescriptive knowledge. He describes this fusion of scientific knowledge, technological know-how, and a culture that valued human progress as the Industrial Enlightenment. 

The Industrial Enlightenment focused on material progress and the growth of prosperity, and it believed that useful knowledge was the key to achieving this. This became the Baconian program. While the English and continental European Enlightenment thinkers shared the belief in the possibility and desirability of progress, there was a crucial difference between them.

The continental enlightenment thinkers focused on morality, government, justice, and what was wrong with society. In contrast, the English intellectuals were less concerned with political and social issues, and more with the kind of progress driven by practical, useful knowledge leading to material advances. The English Enlightenment thinking concerned nuts and bolts, pulleys and belts, cogs and springs. As Roy Porter said, “British pragmatism was more than mere worldliness: it embodied a philosophy of expediency, a dedication to the art, science and duty of living well in the here and now.”

Supplementing this, in his classic work, The Culture of Growth, he points to the different ways in which cultural beliefs create the conditions for the adoption of technology.

The most direct link from culture and beliefs to technology runs through religion. If metaphysical beliefs are such that manipulating and controlling nature invoke a sense of fear or guilt, technological creativity will inevitably be limited in scope and extent. If the culture is heavily infused with respect and worship of ancient wisdom so that any intellectual innovation is considered deviant and blasphemous, technological creativity will be similarly constrained. Irreverence is a key to progress… so, as Lynn White has pointed out, is anthropocentrism. In his classic work, White stressed the importance of a belief in a creator who has designed a universe for the use of humans, who in exploiting nature would illustrate His wisdom and power… social attitudes toward production and work (and leisure) are another major factor in determining the likelihood of innovation.

Technologically progressive societies were often relatively egalitarian ones. In societies dominated by a small, wealthy, but unproductive and exploitative elite, the low social prestige of productive activity meant that creativity and innovation would be directed toward an agenda of interest to the elite. The educated and sophisticated elite focused on efforts supporting its power such as military prowess and administration, or on such topics of leisure as literature, games, the arts, and philosophy, and not so much on the mundane problems of the farmer in his field, the sailor on his ship, or the artisan in his workshop… The agenda of the leisurely elite was of great importance to the lovers of music in the eighteenth-century Habsburg lands, but was not of much interest to their farmers and manufacturers. The Austrian Empire created Haydn and Mozart, but no Industrial Revolution. As McCloskey has stressed, the bourgeois societies of the Netherlands and Britain of the seventeenth century, in contrast, were prime candidates for technological advances.

Finally, Mokyr’s work points to the importance of relentless implementation over just ideas. He describes microinventions, or the incremental improvements needed to turn a new idea into a significant product. Tinkering, embodiment, and scaling are examples of microinventions, and are often more important than the original breakthrough itself. Making technology useful often means building it at scale. Mokyr says,

“Most major inventions initially don’t work very well. They have to be tweaked, the way the steam engine was tinkered with by many engineers over decades. They have to be embodied by infrastructure, the way nuclear fission can’t produce useful electricity until it’s contained inside a working reactor. And they have to be built at scale, the way Ford’s Model T came down in price before it made big difference to the country.”

Interestingly, the Nobel Committee describes all three as “having explained innovation-driven economic growth”. I’m not sure that microinventions are exactly innovations, or what we commonly perceive as innovations. I’m inclined to argue that the popular narrative generated by the innovations and innovators in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector in the US over the last three decades has led to the diminution of persistence and implementation, and elevated ideas and eureka moments as the defining values and skills. 

This narrative will most likely interpret Mokyr’s work as a nod to the importance of such innovation. But that may be misleading. 

It should be noted that Mokyr’s examples of microinventions are tinkering, embodiment, and scaling. This is a process of continuous iteration and adaptation. I’m inclined to describe this as a process of innovation (a structured process of creating new or improved products) driven forward by improvisation (spontaneous, on-the-fly creation of solutions to an immediate problem). As Mokyr writes, for inventions to materialise, the latter may be more important than the former. 

Extending this insight to the field of international development, I had blogged here.

The fundamental insight is that it’s not ideas that lead to development but their implementation, and that implementation is almost always far more daunting than the process of discovery of the idea itself. In fact, only a fraction of the pipeline of ideas ever finds its way into successful implementation… The most valuable individual and collective attributes for progress and development may be the desire and skills to tinker and embody (or institutionalise) to solve problems. In development in particular, they are far more important than the ability to ideate and innovate. Persistence and not mutation is what drives development (and much else in life)… It’s therefore apposite that development embraces and elevates the attributes, skills, and values of problem-solving through the process of tinkering, embodying, iterating, and scaling, instead of the current fetish with new ideas and innovation. 

All in all, the Nobel to Mokyr is a recognition for arguably the pre-eminent social scientist of our times.

Electrification in Africa is a global development failure

I had blogged here arguing that the availability of adequate and good-quality power is the biggest constraint to Africa’s sustained economic growth. 

The graphic below is a powerful illustration of one of the biggest failures of global development efforts.

The number of people in Africa without access to electricity remains at 600 million, unchanged from 15 years ago. Among those without electricity globally, the share of Africans has risen from a third in 2010 to 80% in 2024. 

Africa’s electrification problem seems to be excessively concentrated in its hinterland areas, in the region sandwiched between the North and the South. 

In this context, it’s also useful to see the contrasting fortunes of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa in electrification. 

Africa has had a very low baseline of electrification. For example, SSA reached South Asia’s 1995 level of electrification only by 2020, despite its percapita GDP in 2020 being 2.34 times more than that of South Asia in 1995. East Asia and Latin America had a much higher baseline of electrification than even South Asia. This questions an oft-repeated argument that Africa will be able to afford high electrification rates only if its incomes rise enough to sustain a viable market. 

I’m inclined that a very big reason for the gap is the governance of the electricity supply. Through a series of reforms, South Asia, especially India, managed to restructure the sector, regulate it more effectively, improve operational efficiencies of state utilities, and gradually bring in consumer payment discipline. The industrial, commercial, and other higher consumption subscribers were able to ensure that the discoms could become viable entities even after subsidising the vast majority of residential consumers. All this, in turn, derisked the sector and opened the door for private investments in generation. 

The take-off point for electrification in India was the Electricity Act 2003, one of the least appreciated among India’s economic reforms. Today, almost all incremental generation capacity addition from all sources comes from the private sector, and it owns more than half the total installed capacity, from virtually zero at the turn of the millennium. Domestic promoters and capital, intermediated mostly by regular banks, have been the major financiers. 

Africa too must go through these reforms if it’s to derisk its electricity sector and make it viable enough for private investments into generation. In most African countries today, it appears futile to rely on private financing in any meaningful manner to meet power generation requirements. I had blogged here, highlighting the challenges with attracting private investments into power generation in Africa. Till then, public financing may have to do the heavy lifting on electrification in Africa. 

In the spectrum between public and private goods, electricity is an interesting outlier. While it’s a private good insofar as people pay for access, power itself has several positive externalities in human resource development and economic growth. In fact, reliable three-phase electricity is one of the most essential preconditions for economic growth. Public production and provisioning of electricity may, therefore, be an unavoidable necessity in Africa for the foreseeable future. 

In this context, South Africa’s recent success with reforming its electricity sector and reviving Eskom after numerous scandals and rolling power cuts for several years offers an encouraging sign. 

In the latest global endeavour to electrify Africa, the World Bank and the African Development Bank have launched a $90 billion scheme to bring electricity to 300 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030. About 30 countries have already signed ‘energy compacts’ under the Mission 300 initiative. 

A cursory reading of the Mission 300 plan reveals a mix of objectives thrown in under the broad umbrella of electrification - promotion of renewable energy, decentralised and distributed generation, supply through mini and micro-grids, private participation, complex financial instruments, partnerships between DFIs and philanthropic foundations, microentrepreneurs, etc. In simple terms, the objective of electrification is being pursued through private participation, foreign funding, and renewable energy generation. There are several problems with this approach.

For a start, it’s the classic “everything bagel” development, where multiple laudable objectives are being sought to be achieved in the guise of electrifying Africa. Each of these objectives is challenging by itself, and bundling them only makes the objective of electrification in Africa manifold and daunting. 

The involvement of several partners in the coalition, while laudable, also risks diffusing accountability and responsibilities. Given the scale of the problem, the role of philanthropies and impact investors is marginal. Even meaningful private investments will be difficult to realise in most countries, especially in the early stages. Given the requirements, small renewable energy units and mini grids are marginal compared to thermal generation and grid supply. As the long history of infrastructure financing in low-income countries shows, complex financial instruments will struggle to make any headway. 

Importantly, the opportunity cost of coal (and rivers) rich Africa foregoing thermal (and hydel) power and relying on intermittent solar or wind power is considerable. Besides, given the commercial risks involved, the total cost of renewable power generation by the private sector (including the cost of capital and storage) is likely to far exceed pithead thermal and hydel generation that’s possible in many African countries. In the first stage, it may be useful to prioritise projects with a demand mix that primarily serves industrial and other bulk consumers. The Mission 300 should prioritise all such projects.

The quantum of funds required means that the major share of financing must come from national governments and traditional bilateral and multilateral DFIs through grants and concessional loans. Unless this fundamental constraint is relaxed, the rest are only distractions in the serious endeavour of significantly increasing electrification in Africa.

Thoughts on international development VIII

This is in continuation of the series that has been consolidated here. 

This post will argue that, in addressing complex development challenges, comprehensive design and end-to-end planning (both in the realm of technical expertise) are, while logically appealing, far less important than starting simple, improvising, and expanding gradually. Complexity emerges from simplicity. 

For example, the implementation of any program with a significant non-logistical (or quality or behaviour change-focused) aspect would necessarily require starting with a basic and simple version of the program and then continuously iterating and adapting to address the problems and issues that invariably emerge in the course of implementation. 

Similarly, a monitoring Dashboard of a large program in any sector cannot emerge suddenly from a one-time planning and software development exercise. There are too many emerging scenarios that must be captured as implementation progresses. Accordingly, it must arise from continuous iterative improvement on the basic version over an extended period of use by its stakeholders. 

On the same lines, a high-performance school (or hospital) system in a district or state emerges from one that performs its basic functions well and then builds on them. Alternatively, it’s almost impossible for a bad school (or hospital) system to be transformed into a good one using technology and innovations without first getting its basic functions right. 

Or, a city’s urban planning system must be grounded on a simple set of basic planning rules that can be effectively enforced by it. On this, gradually, elements of complexity can be introduced, like high floor area ratios, land value capture instruments, transit-oriented development, etc. Poor planning rules cannot be offset by innovation and ideas. 

This is the same in the private sector, too. Most famously, Amazon did not emerge into its current complex behemoth form by starting with a comprehensive design and plan. It began as a simple online bookstore and has improvised and evolved to expand its business opportunistically. Much the same can be said about any large company of today.

A common thread in all these cases is that a mature, sophisticated and complex system (which in turn is effective in generating outcomes) in development must necessarily start from that which is basic and simple and must emerge through a process (that is generally long drawn). 

The point about starting with the basic and the simple is a universal truth. 

A sportsman perfects his skills through continuous and long practice. A good writer starts with certain basic skills and then hones them over time. A good design is essential before you start building anything. You cannot make a good curry without getting its ingredients right. You cannot start developing software without an algorithm. 

Similarly, successful development interventions must start with a simple basic design. It’s the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which then undergoes iteration to become more complex. 

The point about progression is also critical.

EL Doctrow famously said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” 

The progression from a basic and simple system to a mature and complex one takes time, follows a messy process, involves constant improvisation, is driven by opportunism and entrepreneurial spirit, and requires certain capabilities and attributes. 

Unfortunately, the mainstream discourse on development glosses over the point about starting simple and the centrality of gradual progress through improvisation and opportunism. 

In fact, one of the most deeply entrenched beliefs in development discourse is that a system can be transformed by supplanting new ideas, innovations, technologies, process reengineering, and so on, and by following a well planned process. The boring process of getting its basic functions right and the struggles of the transformation are mostly overlooked.

The distractions of development and public policy

Interestingly, the discourse of development is often marred by distractions. It may not be entirely incorrect to say that a very significant part of the development discourse is avoidable and distracting noise. I blogged here about the distractions caused by the predominance of programs and schemes. 

Bloomberg has a good op-ed that draws attention to the near-universal problem of deficient student learning outcomes and argues that the debate on school choice in the US may be a big distraction.

Cultivating more school options is not the end-all-be-all. As of 2019, 25 states had voucher programs of some type in place, but only 2% of K-12 students are in private school with public vouchers. Only 7% of public school students are in charter schools. The reality is that most kids end up staying in the public schools they are zoned for a variety of reasons: some private schools don’t take vouchers and some charters are oversubscribed or on the other side of town. School choice is particularly ineffective in rural environments... Worse, school choice can become an excuse for policymakers to skirt hard and immediately needed conversations about an ineffective public-school curriculum, classrooms that have morphed into screen zombies, or unaccountable teacher and student performance...

Indeed, the most meteoric change in student achievement this last decade wasn’t from vouchers. It was from a statewide investment in the basics. Since 2013, Mississippi has gone from one of the worst elementary school literacy rates in the country to above average from investing in third grade reading. That included better training for teachers, using a phonics-based curriculum and hiring reading coaches. These investments have been paired with steep accountability: if kids are not literate, they repeat third grade. Instead of falling behind, those kids were further ahead academically by 6th grade for having gotten the basics right. We need more of this, shoring up the foundation.

This echoes across development sectors and public policy areas, and countries, developed and developing. 

The description of school education in the US could be applied to school education systems in India and elsewhere. Smart classrooms and digital technologies, Edtech in general, may have become big distractions from doing the basics right. 

On the same lines, the neglect of public health and primary care is sought to be made up for by focusing on universal health insurance. Consultants and dashboards are the response to basic governance failures in monitoring and supervision of programs, schemes, and policies. The unwillingness (and inability) of basic energy audits and their enforcement is sought to be made up for by installing smart electricity meters to address the persistence of high electricity distribution losses. Instead of focusing on basic governance and improving their property tax base and collection efficiency, cities chase technology solutions like GIS mapping and municipal bonds. 

There’s a false comfort from believing that infrastructure financing gaps can be leapfrogged by replacing public financewith Public Private Partnerships, private capital, and foreign direct investment. Instead of derisking bank finance for infrastructure, public policy prioritises capital market deepening. Instead of managing the governance of processes and ensuring compliance, tax authorities tend to use targets and coercive practices to boost revenues. Instead of improving governance, the reflex reaction to an adverse news item about abuse of regulation is to double down with more layers of regulation.

All this, more generally, is in line with the pervasive belief that the way to fix struggling public systems is through innovation and doing new things instead of doing the basics right and doing them much better. 

The point here is not to reject these innovative approaches and technologies, but to put them in perspective, as (perhaps even distant) supplementary to the primary activities that get marginalised in the hype. This is especially so in systems entrapped in low baseline of achievement.

Programs and ideas are a distraction in development

Arguably, the biggest distraction in development is the disproportionate importance given to the idea of designing programs or schemes to address specific problems as the primary route to development and economic growth. 

It displaces attention away from the core broad issues of development and economic growth. It encourages a reductionist view of development and detracts from the processes and struggles associated with making choices and decisions in acutely resource-constrained environments. 

Instead, it fixates the public system (politicians and bureaucrats, but in their different ways) on the implementation of narrowly defined inputs and activities of programs. It’s an unfortunate reality of modern development discourse since the end of colonialism that whole systems and countries have become entrapped in the pursuit of programmatic development. 

This distortion has been the combined handiwork of politicians, bureaucrats, donors, and experts. The programmatic approach to the development endeavour suits them all in their different ways. The politician gets to appropriate the credit, the bureaucrat gets the comfort of being able to administer something tangible, donors know what they are funding and whether it’s achieving its objectives, experts can critique and offer new ideas about improving the design of these programs, and academicians can evaluate them. 

These programs are built on a body of assumptions about the problem statements, objectives, diagnoses, and prescriptions. So, for example, in the world of programs, the issue of poor learning outcomes is dealt with primarily by building schools, hiring teachers, providing uniforms and textbooks to students, prescribing a curriculum and syllabus, conducting tests, and monitoring the implementation of all these (and now we also have providing digital devices and content). These components are brought under the umbrella of one or more programs and schemes. There’s a neatness and simplicity to this approach. 

This programmatic focus sidesteps the hard public debates and tough choices and trade-offs around the expectations from education expenditures, prioritisation of scarce resources, creation of implementation capabilities, monitoring of outcomes and impact, and accountability mechanisms at different levels. Such debates tend to be anchored on the local context, its challenges, and practical issues with solutions and their implementation. Most importantly, the absence of such debates prevents ownership of education department initiatives by its primary stakeholders (students, parents, teachers, and communities). 

At a macro-level, it engenders critical distortions. It anchors the agenda around redistribution and expenditures, while also marginalising the focus on economic growth and resource mobilisation. It glosses over the debates about the constraints on and enablers of economic growth, and the capabilities, strategies and choices necessary to address them. 

Another consequence of the program focus in development is that it crowds out the process. It’s appropriate here to point out that we consistently overestimate the importance of ideas in development when, in reality, implementation is what matters. As I have written here, there is hardly any idea in development that is truly new and innovative, and has not already been tried before at multiple places. And where they have been tried earlier, they have succeeded or failed in varying degrees depending purely on the quality of implementation.

Lack of ideas is not a constraint on the resolution of the big problems in development - sanitation and hygiene, nutrition and child health, learning outcomes and skills acquisition, lifestyle diseases, affordable housing and traffic congestion, community ownership and management, etc. Commentators and experts wax eloquent with op-eds and books prescribing ideas on every problem in the world. They are barking up the wrong tree. 

The biggest variance in development is implementation. Essentially, the same things are being done across development sectors everywhere, developed and developing countries, though their success or failure varies widely, almost completely due to the nature of their implementation. 

With this backdrop, a few observations:

1. The foremost requirement for sustainable and focused change is political ownership. While bureaucrats may be able to take the lead with limited infrastructural, logistical, and regulatory initiatives and reforms, systemic transformations rooted in deep behavioural and attitudinal acceptance/change cannot happen without political leadership. Such political leadership can be driven only by public demand. In simple terms, the issue must become an electoral imperative. Unfortunately, none of the problems discussed above are yet an electoral good.

2. There cannot be any meaningful effort to address complex (or wicked) public issues without ownership by the bureaucratic system, especially of the frontline bureaucracy. There must be an account or narrative that is individually and collectively internalised. Accountability must be built and shaped by this account. 

3. Account-based accountability is meaningless and unsustainable without sufficient agency for bureaucrats, especially those at the frontline, given the critical importance of implementation. Besides, agency also creates ownership. 

4. Effective implementation requires sufficient space for problem-solving. This space should be available at all levels of implementation, especially at the cutting-edge level where things get done. The most important requirement to create this space is a culture that allows experimentation and tolerates honest failures.

5. Effective problem-solving requires a few things. Foremost, it requires the application of an analytical framework that enables understanding and defining the problem, diagnosing its reasons, evaluating solutions, finalising and implementing a solution. Given the uncertainties involved, it must use data and evidence to monitor and guide the trajectory of implementation. Problem-solving in development should generally be seen as a never-ending iterative process, where outcomes improve gradually and continuously. 

None of this should be seen as a critique of all programs. In some areas, programs are useful. Further, once the debates are had and choices are made, programs are a useful anchor for execution. 

Insights from development - WB takeaways

Some time back, the World Bank published a compilation of useful insights that have emerged from its development work over the decades.

Berk Ozler on conditional and unconditional cash transfers, 

A systematic review of CCT and UCT programs finds that the effect sizes on school participation increase as the conditions are made more explicit, monitored, and enforced... while CCT programs may be more effective than UCTs in obtaining the desired behavior change, they can also undermine the social protection dimension of cash transfer programs... While there are few long‐term studies of unconditional cash transfers, the available evidence suggests that their short‐term effects are not sustained.

Deon Filmer and Adam Wagstaff draw attention to the importance of service delivery quality,

In both education and health, poor quality of service delivery is the key reason why service coverage does not necessarily translate into better outcomes... One study found that going from having a teacher in the bottom quality decile to one in the top is equivalent to a full additional business‐as‐usual year of learning for students. Another study compared mortality in high‐income countries and mortality in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs), and concluded that of the 8.6 million excess deaths in LMICs that were amenable to medical care, the bulk (5.0 million) were due to receipt of poor‐quality care rather than non‐receipt of care.

They also discuss the pros and cons of the three approaches of paying for public service delivery - fee-for-service, capitation (according to the number of characteristics of people served), and budget-salary. They argue in favour of some combination, depending on the sector and context, with a pay-for-performance element.

In this context, I recently came across a J-PAL meta-study of 17 preventive health products, including mosquito nets, deworming pills, and water-purifying chlorine tablets, which found that "offering them for free makes it far more likely that people actually get and use them, benefiting themselves and others."

Roberto Fattal, Hiau Looi Kee, and Sergio Schmukler points to the constraints faced by small firms and business formation in general.

The overall functioning of financial markets is important, the allocation of credit across firms matters for economy‐wide growth. Small firms as well as young that create novel products and technologies but that lack the financing to scale up tend to be harmed the most by misallocation of credit. In countries where credit is expensive and hard to access, firms typically are small, leading to a misallocation of credit. Large firms that are relatively less productive end up producing a significant share of the output, while smaller more productive firms are unable to grow and to contribute as much as they could.... just developing financial markets might not be enough to generate growth – ensuring that credit flows to the firms that have growth potential is as important... The regulation of entry, for instance, should consider the incentives for low‐scale entrepreneurship to become informal. Similarly tax policy should anticipate distortions to firm growth that happen when firms of different sizes face differential enforcement.

Norman Loayza and Michael Woolcock draw attention to the importance of complementary measures and state capability.

Policy implementation can fail for two broad reasons: (1) the absence of complementary measures needed to make the chosen policy effective; and (2) the inadequate capability of prevailing institutions and administrative systems... without a supporting institutional framework and capable public sector organizations to implement them, even technically sound policies and programs are likely to fail... Children do not learn if they are hungry, so educational and nutritional policies should go hand in hand. Parents do not vaccinate their children if they are struggling to survive, so immunization campaigns should target the poor and provide pecuniary benefits to families that participate. Farmers do not adopt new crops and technologies that are potentially more profitable but also riskier, so introducing new farming practices should be accompanied by improved insurance mechanisms and access to markets... Trade openness cannot promote competitiveness if domestic industries are burdened with excessive regulations, so international openness should be accompanied by streamlining regulations and improving public infrastructure.

Vijayendra Rao and Michael Woolcock write about the role of local accountability.

There is an increasing realization that better development outcomes are delivered within institutional systems where citizens and communities matter... Elections are one mechanism of accountability, but they are not enough because they are held infrequently and can be captured by elites. Elections need to be complemented by citizen bodies – institutions for collective and deliberative decision‐making where the voices of citizens can be heard and where they are able to monitor the performance of governments.

They also dwell on the importance of process legitimacy.

How difficult and contentious social outcomes (such as elections, judicial rulings, or even the extent of inequality) are reached has enormous bearing on their legitimacy and the extent to which they are accepted, especially by those who would have strongly preferred a different outcome. Political parties that lose close elections can accept this outcome if they believe that votes were cast and tallied impartially; citizens tolerate higher levels of inequality to the extent the wealthy are perceived as having gained their riches by diligence, innovation and prudence (not theft, deception or corruption)... Securing and sustaining legitimacy is likely to be deeply context‐specific, varying considerably between and within countries. Even professional ‘best practices’ (fiscal rules, meritocratic hiring) and scientifically verified ‘solutions’ (immunizations, fertilizers) must earn local legitimacy and credibility before they will be embraced, at scale. Creating public spaces within which such practices and solutions can be identified, adapted to the local context, and/or be improved is a key way in which legitimacy is acquired.

Robert Cull and David McKenzie write about the challenge of scaling programs,

Even when pilots and local development interventions have proven very successful, they have often been difficult to scale up in a cost‐effective way to achieve development impact on a large scale. Conversely, several development interventions that have managed to achieve impressive scales at relatively low costs are increasingly under scrutiny for their lack of transformative impacts on the lives of the poor... A recent meta‐analysis of more than 600 research papers covering 20 different types of development interventions found that the larger the study, the smaller the size of the effect, and that programs implemented by governments tend to have smaller effect sizes than academic or NGO‐implemented programs.

They list out a few reasons - small‐scale pilots may concentrate efforts on those who benefit most; implementation and political economy issues can arise as programs grow; general equilibrium effects can further reduce some impacts; cost issues can make scaling prohibitive.

Sergio Schmukler, Michael Toman, and Adam Wagstaff use examples from early childhood education, financial crises, and environmental degradation to highlight the cost-effectiveness of early policy interventions at scale. 

Education and health interventions in early childhood have large returns... The period over which returns accrue is therefore very long. By contrast, the costs of early childhood interventions occur over just a few years. But even after discounting to present values, the benefit‐cost ratio is large... preschool interventions... make these later investments more productive. Empirical work supports this idea that early investments enhance the productivity of (i.e., are complementary to) later investments... Recognizing that financial crises are costly, governments around the world have moved to implement measures to act early in order to prevent them... Preventive measures include financial regulation and supervision, macroprudential policies, and even capital controls. By minimizing currency and maturity mismatches, obtaining high capitalization and liquidity buffers, adopting flexible exchange rate regimes, and introducing sand‐in‐the‐wheel types of measures, the financial system can be less prone to boom‐and‐bust scenarios.

Finally, Bob Rijkers and Erhan Artuc write about international trade.

The negative distributional impacts of international trade are large, localized, and long‐lived... Workers who are adversely affected by trade liberalization face high moving costs and are often not able to leave to find better jobs in other regions. The adverse effects of trade liberalization are consequently concentrated in particular regions, while the benefits are widespread throughout the whole economy. These negative localised effects persist in the long run and the affected regions take a long time to recover, if at all.

The compilation is also a good example of how a body of knowledge can be built through long-drawn and institutionally guided research efforts. It can play an important role in changing narratives and may be a bigger and more important legacy of the World Bank than the various development programs it has financed. 

Idea or implementation - which is more important?

I just completed reading Abundance, the excellent new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. It tries to provide the basis for a narrative to shape a new “political order” based on abundance to counter the current politics of scarcity with all its discontents and turmoil. It proposes a combination of deregulation, improving state capabilities, focusing on implementation, and generally using technology and innovation to produce more sustainably. Its essence boils down to this question: “Can we solve our problems with supply?” 

I’ll blog more on the book itself later, for despite my reservations on its rather reductionist approach, it frames an agenda that deserves a wide readership and discussion. 

This post is on one of the main insights of the book and the narrative it seeks to propagate. In the context of innovation, the authors say, “Implementation, not mere invention, determines the pace of progress.” Klein and Thompson write

“For many, progress appears to be a mere timeline of such eureka moments. Our mythology of invention treats the moment of discovery as a sacred scene. In schools, students memorise the dates of major inventions, along with the names of the people who made them – Edison, lightbulb, 1879; Wright Brothers, airplane, 1903. The great discoverers – Franklin, Bell, Curie, Tesla – get bestselling biographies, and millions of people know their names. It’s the story of progress you might expect to see in Hollywood or read in nonfiction books that hail the lonely hero whose flash of insight changes the world. 

But this approach to history is worse than incomplete; it’s downright wrong. Inventions do matter greatly to progress. But too often, when we isolate these famous scenes, we leave out the most important chapters of the story – the ones that follow the initial lightning bolt of discovery... When a good idea is born, or when the first prototype of an invention is created, we should celebrate its potential to change the world. But progress is more about implementation than it is about invention. An idea going from nonexistence to existence – from zero to one – introduces the possibility of change. But the way individuals, companies, and governments take an idea from one to one billion is the story of how the world actually changes. And it doesn’t always change, even after a truly brilliant discovery. The ten-thousand-year story of human civilisation is mostly the story of things not getting better: diseases not being cured, freedoms not being extended, truths not being transmitted, technology not delivering on its promises… 

The US has thrown tens of billions of dollars annually into scientific discovery. But it hasn’t brought as much progress as we’d expect… we have haphazardly burdened the scientific process with the same flavour of procedural kludge that has slowed down other critical parts of the economy… we have gotten worse at translating our inventions into domestic industries. To borrow some familiar language, it’s not just that ideas are getting harder to find. The problem is also that new ideas are getting harder to use... we have become too enthralled by the eureka myth and, more to the point, too inattentive to all the things that must follow a eureka moment.”

They point to the work of historian Joel Mokyr, one of the most important and profound social scientists of our times, in my opinion, in this regard. Tinkering, embodiment, and scaling are examples of what Mokyr calls microinventions, or the incremental improvements needed to turn a new idea into a significant product. These microinventions are often more important than the original breakthrough. Making technology useful often means building it at scale. Unfortunately, this insight has not been taken seriously. Mokyr says,

“Most major inventions initially don’t work very well. They have to be tweaked, the way the steam engine was tinkered with by many engineers over decades. They have to be embodied by infrastructure, the way nuclear fission can’t produce useful electricity until it’s contained inside a working reactor. And they have to be built at scale, the way Ford’s Model T came down in price before it made big difference to the country.” 

The point that progress depends on implementation and not mere invention is borne out by Wright’s law of manufacturing. Named after Theodore Wright, who served as the vice chairman of NASA’s predecessor organisation, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, it states that some things get cheaper as we learn to build more. 

“It says that innovation is not a two-stage process, where a loner genius conceives of a brilliant idea and then a bunch of thoughtless brutes manufacture it. Innovation is enmeshed in the act of making. Wright’s law is the story of penicillin, whose costs declined as the government learned to cook larger batches of the medicine. It is the story of the Model T automobile, which became more affordable as Ford built larger and larger factories. It is also the story of the computer chip. In the 1960s, Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, wrote that the number of transistors on a chip might double every two years. His prediction became prophecy. Fifty years later, transistor costs declined by a factor of one billion.”

Wright’s law is best captured in China’s spectacular success across sectors in starting small and then continuously iterating and bringing down costs, while also continually moving up the value chain of manufacturing.

The best illustration of this insight comes from the folklore around antibiotics. Alexander Fleming may have discovered the value of penicillin to treat bacteria in 1928 by way of an accidental contamination of some of his staphylococcus bacterium samples with spores of mould that blew into his lab while he was on a holiday. But its commercialisation took several more years till 1942. Two Oxford University professors, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain were responsible for this commercial development by testing it on mice and then human beings. But they could not produce penicillin on a commercial scale. For scaling, they had to rely on a US OSRD-supported group of scientists in Peoria, Illinois, who discovered that adding “corn steep” (water soaked with corn) could increase penicillin production tenfold. Finally, it was the OSRD and War Production Board in the US that spent millions to establish penicillin plants. Pencillin production soared from 10 million units per plant per month in 1942 to 646 million per plant per month by June 1945. The cost of producing antibiotics plummeted by over 95%. This collaborative effort belies the simple story of attributing all credit to Alexander Fleming. Ideas are not what leads to progress, but workmanship on those ideas!

Another example is that of Edison and the incandescent light bulb. In 1800, the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta reportedly built the first battery with an electric current. In 1809, Humphry Davy built the first practical “arc lamp” that sent a span of sparks across two rods. In 1841, the English investor Frederick de Moelyns was granted the first patent for a charcoal-powered incandescent lamp. So what did Edison do? In his Menlo Park lab in 1879, Edison burned hundreds of materials inside a glass vacuum until he settled on a carbonised bamboo to serve as an efficient lightbulb filament. Understanding the need for steady delivery of electricity, he also built a system of generators to make power, wires to carry it, sockets and switches to turn it on and off, and meters to measure usage and allow for the billing of customers. His microinventions were useful to illuminate the scaling path. “Through exhaustive tinkering, embodying, and scaling, he made electric light useful.”

All this has significance in the debates on international development. 

In the context of development interventions, I blogged here highlighting the obsession in international development circles with new ideas and innovations and neglect of implementation of regular development interventions; herequestioning the belief that there are several new ideas and innovations waiting to make a transformative impact; and herethat ideas and policies in most of the development matter very little and it's mostly about implementation. A long paper is here. 

The fundamental insight is that it’s not ideas that lead to development but their implementation, and that implementation is almost always far more daunting than the process of discovery of the idea itself. In fact, only a fraction of the pipeline of ideas ever finds its way into successful implementation. 

It goes back to a deep philosophical point. The most valuable individual and collective attributes for progress and development may be the desire and skills to tinker and embody (or institutionalise) to solve problems. In development in particular, they are far more important than the ability to ideate and innovate. Persistence and not mutation is what drives development (and much else in life). 

This insight is borne out in Mokyr’s work around the idea of useful knowledge. He describes useful knowledge as that which promotes material progress. It consists of propositional knowledge (“what”) and prescriptive knowledge (“how”). It’s a distinction between people who know things (savants) and who make things (fabricants). A feature of the Age of Enlightenment, which led to the Industrial Revolution, especially pronounced in England (as against the contintental Europe), was the generation of useful knowledge by the creation of incentives (patents, awards, prizes, medals, pensions, memberships in Royal Societies, and generally higher social status, etc.). It became easier and cheaper to access existing knowledge through written compilations like libraries, book indexes, alphabetisation, compilations based on topic, etc.

I’m inclined to argue that the narrative generated by the innovations and innovators in information and communication technology (ICT) in the US over the last three decades may have led to the diminution of persistence and implementation, and elevated ideas and eureka moments as the defining values and skills of progress. This narrative has also been fueled by venture capital and ideologues on 

It’s a different matter that this narrative of college drop-outs working in isolation in garages and inventing their eureka moments is itself highly misleading and inaccurate. The story of Amazon is a good example of how success emerged from a confluence of factors - being at the right moment in time at the right place; bringing together and building on technologies that were already available; long duration of tinkering, iteration, failures, persistence, and deferred gratification; the nature of the market with its network effects induced entry barriers that allowed for iteration and growth; regulatory arbitrage that allowed harvesting of first-mover windfalls and rents, etc. Similar stories in varying degrees apply to all the Big Tech firms of today. 

It’s therefore apposite that development embraces and elevates the attributes, skills, and values of problem-solving through the process of tinkering, embodying, iterating, and scaling, instead of the current fetish with new ideas and innovation. This is an important message for international development organisations, philanthropic donors, US-based academic researchers, and Western think tanks, who have been most culpable for development straying from focusing on implementation and instead getting hooked on ideas and innovation.

Update 1 (17.05.2025)

The Economist has a Boss Class podcast, which examines the process of innovation and comes to some conclusions.

One, forget the 1980s earworms. Breakthroughs very rarely come from aha moments. You often have to work towards something for years, and you don’t know when the market will be ready for it. Iterate and innovate. A portfolio approach pays dividends. Whether you do it formally or not, give people space to work on big new ideas, as well as improvements to existing ones. Three, test and learn. Whether it’s a building site or London streets or playing children, get feedback and be ready to change course. There’s a phrase that I found useful. “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”

The Economist’s Bartelby columnist writes

“The biggest bullshit is eureka ideas where you just wake up and have an idea that solves things,” says Mr Alex Kendall, co-founder of Wayve, a self-driving software company… The myths of lone geniuses and moments of inspiration undoubtedly capture the imagination. But the reality—of problems solved by groups of determined people over many years—is an even better story.

Weekend reading links

1.  Ruchir Sharma points to the attractions of investing in China.

China now has more than 250 companies with a market cap of over $1bn and a free cash-flow yield of more than 10 per cent; the US has fewer than 150. Of those 250-odd China stocks, all but about 20 are in sectors other than tech, led by industrial and consumer discretionary businesses, so the opportunities are not just in the internet and AI... But by some measures, capitalism with Chinese characteristics is more competitive than its US rival. Large caps account for a smaller share of listed companies in China, leaving more room for newcomers. Among the 11 leading sectors, seven are less concentrated in China than in the US, meaning the top five businesses constitute a smaller share of each sector’s market cap. China’s tech sector is much less concentrated, which means a private upstart such as DeepSeek could rise in an environment less dominated by giants.

2. Interesting that amidst all talks of green transition in the US under Biden, the country continued to increase oil and gas extraction at an increased pace since 2016.

3. Good description of the bear and bull case for US equity markets with associated numbers.

4. Microsoft announces a breakthrough in quantum computing by unveiling Majorana 1, the world's first quantum chip powered by a topological core architecture. 

Microsoft’s ability to exploit a new kind of matter to create a new type of qubit (or quantum bit) promises to accelerate the development of reliable large-scale quantum computing... It’s kind of a generational technology like moving from vacuum tubes to a semiconductor. The advantages of Microsoft’s topological qubits are that they are fast and digitally controlled. That should enable them to scale more reliably to the 1mn qubit threshold that researchers consider necessary for sophisticated quantum computation. But it will still take years of experimental engineering before the company can deploy its quantum processing units (QPUs) in data centres alongside the classical graphics processing units (GPUs) that are currently powering the AI revolution. Nevertheless, the company still hopes to build a utility-scale quantum computer by the end of the decade configured to tackle a set of problems that no classical computer can address. By exploiting the special properties of a quantum computer, Zander reckons researchers will be able to develop new catalysts to break down microplastics, enhance the fertility of soils or develop new forms of self-healing concrete, for example.

A summary of the latest on quantum computing chip development - Google's Willow, IBM's Heron, Microsoft's Majorana 1, Amazon's Ocelot, and others. It's estimated that we are 15-30 years from any commercial chip deployment. 

5. In a paradigm breaking shift from its more than two decades of fiscal conservatism, Germany looks set to amend its 'debt brake'

Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz late on Tuesday agreed with the rival Social Democrats (SPD) to exempt defence spending above 1 per cent of GDP from Germany’s strict constitutional borrowing limit, set up a €500bn off-balance sheet vehicle for debt-funded infrastructure investment and loosen debt rules for states. Deutsche Bank economists described the deal as “one of the most historic paradigm shifts in German postwar history”, adding that both the “speed at which this is happening and the magnitude of the prospective fiscal expansion is reminiscent of German reunification”.

The plan is expected to open €1tn of additional borrowing over the next decade, more than a fifth of the country's GDP, for defence and infrastructure spending. Given its far lower debt to GDP ratio of 63%, Germany fortunately has enough fiscal space to accommodate such spending which is expected to rise to 84% over the decade. It has precedents in so far as similar spending spike happened in the aftermath of the reunification and boosted economic growth in the nineties. 

At the core of the problem has been a “debt brake”, written into Germany’s constitution in 2009 at the peak of the global financial crisis, that limited the government’s capacity to take on new debt to 0.35 per cent of GDP — one of the most stringent anti-borrowing laws in history. Much of the fiscal space that did exist was spent on the welfare state and social benefits. Merz’s plans bypass the debt brake by enabling the exclusion of everything over 1 per cent of GDP spent on defence. Goldman Sachs anticipates that the plan will drive German defence spending to as much as 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2027 — up from 2.1 per cent in 2024 and a mere 1.5 per cent in earlier years... Even with a debt-to-GDP ratio of around 84 per cent, German public leverage would be “still pretty favourable” compared with most peers, said Cyrus de la Rubia, chief economist at Hamburg Commercial Bank, pointing to ratios of 115 per cent in France and 124 per cent in the US.

The markets reacted in all the positive ways to the announcement.

Markets are applauding. As a Kiel Institute policy brief notes, the increase in German borrowing costs after the announcement was accompanied by rising stock prices, an appreciating euro, a steeper yield curve and stable default insurance — all pointing to improved growth expectations.

6. It's a measure of the unprecedented global power wielded by Donald Trump that his tirade against Chinese ownership of Panama Canal has led to the Hong Kong based CK Hutchison has decided to sell its ownership of two ports at either end of the Panama Canal to BlackRock. The deal involves the takeover of 43 ports, including the two, by a consortium headed by BlackRock and includes Global Infrastructure Partners (the private infrastructure investment company purchased by BlackRock last year), port operator Terminal Investment Ltd (TIL), and the world's biggest container shipping line, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC).

7. Good primer on the effects of tariff increases. Interesting that it confines to short-term costs and does not talk about the gains and the long-term impacts.

8. Efficiency maximisation, Amazon edition.

Amazon’s fulfilment centre in Shreveport, Louisiana — its most technologically advanced warehouse — has demonstrated the type of savings it can achieve with automation. The 3mn sq ft facility, which opened in September, uses robots at every stage of fulfilment and has achieved a 25 per cent cut in costs, according to Amazon, following a tenfold increase in robotics compared with its previous generation of warehouses... Shreveport features a range of mobile drive units, which are used to carry items across the warehouse, and advanced robotic arms that pick and sort items, cutting down on the number of human workers in the warehouse. The tech giant is also investing in robotics talent as part of a wider push to deploy AI large language models in its warehouse robots... 

While its retail business continues to be profitable, Amazon has forecast more modest growth across the group in the first quarter of this year, with a strong dollar knocking revenues. The US ecommerce group is pushing to lower delivery times, particularly for users of its Prime subscription service. This includes separating its logistics network into specific regions to ensure inventory is in place for same day deliveries... The group has deployed more than 750,000 mobile drive units since it acquired robotic start-up Kiva Systems in 2012. In recent years it has introduced Proteus, a fully autonomous lift vehicle that navigates sites independently using a set of sensors having been trained using AI. The company has also partnered with chipmaker Nvidia to develop “digital twins” of its warehouses to enable it to run thousands of simulated situations before deploying an autonomous robot.

9. Bjorn Lomborg interview in FT. He appears to have 12 hanging fruits, drawn from deep research evidence, that would cost $35 bn to add $1.1 trillion to developing world output and save 4.2 million lives a year. 

His favoured educational reform, for example, is to improve outcomes in countries such as Malawi by teaching children according to their level, not their age. Many children, crammed into massive classes, fall hopelessly behind. Lomborg’s solution is to teach for one hour a day using tablets with adaptive software, giving children the benefit of a good curriculum delivered at their own pace. Implementing it, according to his think-tank, would cost $9.8bn and deliver a $604bn boost to income through better-educated children. “This is spinach for the world. I want people to know about it.”

Ahem!

10. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, neo-colonialism, and corruption.

Foreign companies operating in South Africa have to navigate Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) regulations set by the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, and in the case of certain multinationals, such as auto manufacturers, where ownership quotas can’t be applied, “equity-equivalent” programs require investments that drive Black participation in supply chains to meet empowerment targets. This doesn’t apply in the case of communications companies, though, which need to be 30% owned by “previously disadvantaged” people to qualify for a license.

Musk wants to launch his Starlink satellite-communications service in South Africa, but that requires him finding an equity partner for a South African operation to qualify for a license. “Change the laws,” Musk is said to have repeatedly told Ramaphosa during a Feb. 3 meeting. On Feb. 5, Musk’s SpaceX (representing Starlink) withdrew from the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa’s hearings into a proposed licensing framework for satellite services. Trump’s executive order blasting South Africa came two days later... Donald Trump’s Feb. 7 executive order decried the “egregious actions of the Republic of South Africa,” claiming its 2024 Expropriation Act, which allows the state to seize land without compensation in certain scenarios, has been used to dispossess White people of their property.

11. The best illustration that America is now a country of rule by law, where law is that decided by the President and his cronies, comes from the decision to cull USAID programs. 

In Afghanistan, women’s education programmes shut down. Health services were suspended for refugees from Myanmar taking shelter in camps in Thailand. In Colombia, anti-narcotrafficking helicopters were suddenly idle. But African countries were hit particularly hard. In Uganda, medical trials were halted. Life-saving medicines are gathering dust in warehouses in Malawi, where more than half of healthcare spending is dependent on US and foreign aid. Perhaps greatest of all has been the impact on the decades-long battle to end the Aids pandemic... The President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, known as Pepfar, screeched to a halt. Launched by George W Bush in 2003, a year in which Aids killed more than three million people, the multibillion-dollar health initiative is based on a simple premise that everybody deserves access to antiretrovirals that suppress the spread of HIV... The initiative changed the trajectory of the Aids pandemic. To date, Pepfar has saved more than 26 million lives and prevented roughly 1,000 babies a day from being born with the HIV virus. Pregnant women can avoid passing on the virus to their babies by taking medications that either suppress their own viral load to undetectable levels, or pass through the placenta to the baby’s body... 

Mitchell Warren, the executive director of the Aids Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (Avac), a New York-based campaigning group, called Pepfar “inarguably the best investment ever in global health and development”. “We took 20 years to build up what has taken less than four weeks to dismantle,” he said, reflecting on the chaos caused by Trump’s move... Within days, the 340,000 global healthcare workers whose salaries depend on the Pepfar programme — doctors, nurses, lab assistants and community outreach workers — received “stop-work orders”. More than 20 million HIV-positive people like Samkelo no longer knew when their next dose of antiretrovirals would come. Already, since January 24, at least 15,000 premature deaths have occurred because of the funding gap, according to a Pepfar tracker set up to monitor the impact.

The surest sign of the phasing out of Rule of Law and phasing in of Rule by Law comes when one hears news like this.

Congressional Republicans, egged on by Elon Musk and other top allies of President Trump, are escalating calls to remove federal judges who stand in the way of administration efforts to overhaul the government. The outcry is threatening yet another assault on the constitutional guardrails that constrain the executive branch... “The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” Mr. Musk wrote this week on X, his social media platform, in one of multiple posts demanding that uncooperative federal judges be ousted from their lifetime seats on the bench.

12. Two maps that convey the striking reversal of global trade leadership between the US and China.

13. Xiaomi does what Apple could not.

After nearly a decade of trying, Apple finally gave up its effort to produce an electric car last year, canceling a project that soaked up $10 billion. But last year in China, the electronics maker Xiaomi launched its first electric car after just three years of development and delivered 135,000 vehicles. It has vowed to double that number in 2025. Xiaomi’s ability to succeed where Apple could not shows how thoroughly China has come to dominate the supply chain for electric vehicles. Chinese companies have mastered electric vehicle manufacturing. By tapping that infrastructure, Xiaomi was able to get components quickly and cheaply. More Chinese electric vehicle companies — including Leapmotor, Li Auto and Seres Group — are starting to turn a profit after burning cash for years in their intense competition for the world’s largest auto market... The telecommunications giant Huawei, which the U.S. government has targeted with sanctions and legal action for years, is making autonomous driving software. Huawei has teamed up with multiple Chinese automakers, including Seres Group and the state-owned firms SAIC Motor, BAIC and Chery.

14. Two striking graphics about the masculinisation of the US society. First on gender roles.

The second on society becoming too feminine.

15. Javier Blas introduces a dose of realism to the debate on the critical minerals squeeze due to Chinese restrictions.

Beijing has targeted five metals: tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum and indium. China is the biggest producer of all of them...My calculations suggest the US spends about $300 million importing tungsten; roughly $30 million on bismuth; about $90 million on indium; and less than $1 million on tellurium. The total annual cost for all four comes to less than $500 million... it’s the same trend as the one observed in the much-hyped rare earth elements sector. Fears abound, but the cost of importing the 17 metals that form that category is tiny. The US Geological Survey calculated rare earth imports at less than $200 million in 2023... 

The import bill of minor metals could increase by five, 10, 20, even 50 times, and not amount to more than a rounding error for the US economy. Prices, however, are lower today than they were a decade ago. Did you notice when they were high? Nope; for a reason. Indium, for example, traded as high as $800 per kilogram in 2011; it’s now at $345. The cost of the most common compound of tungsten, one of the much-hyped critical minerals, is trading 25% below its 2011 peak. Even if prices rise because of Chinese restrictions, recycling will increase, American engineers will work to reduce their use and alternatives will be found. High prices cure high prices.

This is a good primer on rare earth minerals and their refining (where, in particular, China has a 30 year headstart advantage). 

16. Some facts on employment increase in the Government of India, which rose 4% from 3.17 mn to 3.3 mn from March 2022 to March 2024. 

But what contributed to the rise in the civilian staff strength in the last three years? Note that over 86 per cent of the total civilian staff is accounted for by just four heads — Indian Railways, posts, central police forces, and tax departments... And even as the overall civilian staff strength has risen by over 489,000 in the last three years, the Indian Railways has seen a small increase during the same periods—about 3,000 employees. Of the four heads, the postal department and the police saw the largest increase by over 179,000 and 143,000, respectively, in the last three years. The two tax departments (overseeing direct and indirect taxes) have seen an increase in their staff strength by over 71,000, bringing their total strength to over 172,000.

17. As defence spending rises globally, it may be end of the peace dividend.