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Good morning,
Yesterday was the 4th of July. Americans celebrate it as Independence Day with much pomp and fanfare. And rightfully so. Having said that, what big questions are on the minds of American thought leaders? That is why we took some time out to relook the pages of One Billion Americans by Matthew Yglesias. The rise of China and how to decode it, he writes, is a big theme on their minds.
“Wei Chen, Xilu Chen, Chang-Tai Hsieh, and Zheng Song—researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Chicago—concluded in a blockbuster paper presented at a Brookings Institution conference in 2019 that, in particular, the reason Chinese economic data suggests such a freakishly high level of investment relative to consumption spending is that a lot of the investment is made up. Consequently, they think the Chinese government’s official statistics were overstating the country’s growth rate by about 1.7 percentage points per year during the 2008 - 16 period. This aggregates up to the idea that the Chinese economy is about 16 percent smaller in reality on paper.
“On the other hand, if you use market exchange rates instead of PPP-adjusted numbers, then the United States is clearly number one. The Bloomberg columnist David Fickling argued for complacency in a column he led with the question ‘Remember when Japan was going to become the world’s biggest economy?’
“And it’s true that in the past, predictions that the United States would lose its economic preeminence have fallen flat. The obvious difference between Japan and China, however, is that the United States has more than double Japan’s population while less than a third of China’s. The forecast that Japan would overtake the United States was, in effect, a forecast that Japan would become a much richer country than America, which didn’t pan out.
“And, indeed, it’s extremely foolish to look at the fact that a poorer country is growing faster than the United States and then just draw a line projecting that into the indefinite future. China has been growing faster than the United States for a long time now, but Chinese growth has been slowing and it will almost certainly slow further still long before the average Chinese person is as rich as the average American.
“But China doesn’t need to catch the United States in per person terms to beat us in the aggregates. Indeed, it doesn’t even need to come particularly close. If China is able to replicate the success of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, or the better off post-communist states of central Europe, that would be good enough.”
An interesting set of questions indeed! Stay safe and have a good day.
Astrologers and lawyers
If someone were to tell us that there is much in common between astrologers and lawyers, we’d snigger behind their backs. But on reading a lovely essay on the theme by Anna Dorn, a lawyer, who is also an author and dabbles with astrology as a hobby, we could see the parallels.
“I was first drawn to astrology as a conversation piece. I often find small talk tedious. I really don’t care to hear about someone’s intermittent fasting journey or how orange wine changed their life. I like that astrology skips the bullshit, or is perhaps just a more interesting type of bullshit. I want to know whether someone has control issues or is prone to hysteria.
“I like too that it transcends class, gender, sexuality. We all have a birthday and a birth chart, and while some signs are more demonized (Scorpio, Gemini) than others (Taurus, Pisces), all traits have good and bad qualities, and they have nothing to do with where we grew up, the hue of our skin, our gender presentation or the prestige of our jobs. This was how I justified my mounting obsession. We use the sun to tell time and we know the moon controls the tides, so it’s not outrageous to think the placement of the planets at the time we were born impacts our personality. Or maybe it is outrageous! I’m not a scientist. I’m a novelist. I make things up for a living.
“There is an art to doing readings that I appreciate. Frankly, it reminds me of my brief stint as a lawyer. I suspect that lawyer to astrologer is an unusual career trajectory, but hear me out: the two vocations draw on similar skills. In both, I was given a set of rules (in law, statutes and case law; in astrology, signs and planets), and was tasked with making a coherent argument. When a friend asked me to do the astrological compatibility for every member of her bachelorette party, I felt like I was taking the LSAT…
“As Virgos prefer control to spontaneity, I’ve always had an easier time expressing myself in writing than in contemporaneous speech. As a lawyer, I practiced appeals rather than trials because appeals are slower paced and mostly in writing. I chose to do my chart readings in writing too—as opposed to in person or on Zoom. I loved doing readings for people I knew because then I could fill them with inside jokes. If they had an Aries Moon, I could write: this explains why you treat all conversations as a cross-examination. If they had a bunch of planets in Capricorn, I could say: this is why you spend all your time at Soho House ‘networking’.”
Clearly, Dorn knows what she’s talking about.
Dig deeper
Peter Brook’s way
Peter Brook, the British theatre and film director, best known in India for his adaptation of The Mahabharata, passed away on Saturday.
An obituary in The New York Times captures his many achievements: “Mr. Brook was called many other things: a maverick, a romantic, a classicist. But he was never easily pigeonholed. British by nationality but based in Paris since 1970, he spent years in commercial theatre, winning Tony Awards in 1966 and 1971 for the Broadway transfers of highly original productions of Peter Weiss’s ‘Marat/Sade’ and Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ He staged crowd-pleasers like the musical ‘Irma la Douce’ and Arthur Miller’s ‘A View From the Bridge.’
“He was equally at home directing Shakespeare, Shaw, Beckett, Cocteau, Sartre and Chekhov. And he coaxed brilliance out of actors like Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, John Gielgud, Paul Scofield, Alec Guinness, Glenda Jackson, and Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.
“But he was also an experimenter and a risk-taker. He brought a stunning nine-hour adaptation of the Sanskrit epic ‘The Mahabharata’ from France to New York in 1987. In 1995, he followed the same route with ‘The Man Who,’ a stark staging of Oliver Sacks’s neurological case studies. In 2011, when he was 86, he brought an almost equally pared-down production of Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ (he called it ‘A Magic Flute’) to the Lincoln Center Festival.
“Restless and unpredictable, Mr. Brook was also indefatigable, staging almost 100 productions over his long and acclaimed career.”
In The Indian Express, Mallika Sarabhai who played Draupadi in Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata shares her experience working with him. She writes: “Peter, who had studied George Gurdjieff, a Russian philosopher, was of the opinion a teacher should destroy the ‘self’ in a student and, then, transform the person. Peter tried to destroy each one of us and recreate us. I was not willing to be destroyed. But, he taught me how to act. He managed to create a lot of what I am and I will always be grateful…
“The five years I spent with him as Draupadi made me see the effect one single character could have on women across the world, from the smartest French women from the Sorbonne to those in the aboriginal areas of Australia. All the work I have done after the Mahabharata, post-1990, would not have been possible if those five years had not been lived, listening to Peter.”
Dig deeper
Peter Brook, celebrated stage director of scale and humanity, dies at 97
‘Peter Brook tried to destroy, recreate us. I wasn’t willing to be destroyed’
Ancient wisdom
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Warm regards,
Team Founding Fuel
