Two days in a row...that's pretty good.

Great piece about the making of the movie All the President’s Men, on the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in.  Such a great movie; just showed it to my thirteen year old, who agrees, it’s terrific.

Actually this has a lot of really great advice.

Have we actually reached “peak agricultural land”??  Maybe . . . it would be an interesting moment.

This is a hugely important change happening in the world in this decade:

Asia’s post-COVID recovery is part of a tectonic shift that started at the turn of the century. We can define three distinct periods of the rise of the consumer class:

• Until 2000, the global consumer class was predominantly Western (with allied off-shoots) with a population of 1.7 billion in total. In 1980, over 70 percent of the consumer class was in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
• Until 2020, a crucial shift occurred. East Asia, especially China, entered the global middle class in full force. As a result, the global consumer class grew to almost 4 billion while the share of Asia in the global consumer class reached 50 percent, and the share of the OECD halved from 80 percent to 40 percent.
• This decade, it will be South Asia’s turn, and we will see a strong rise in the middle class of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. By 2030, the sub-region will add 40 percent of the newly minted middle-class consumers. There will be 1 billion new entrants to the consumer class by 2030 (out of 5 billion globally).

Asia has been the driver of middle-class growth since 2000, and this trend will continue throughout this decade. The continent is now home to the world’s largest consumer market, both in terms of people and spending.

Interesting article about Linear A , the script that has so far stymied attempts to interpret it, much as scholars cracked the code of Linear B in the 1950s.

Smil’s book is about the huge concrete political struggles ahead of us, very good for that.

A good collection of worries about Twitter.

Interesting: are we entering a new phase of a fight on the left between those who John Harris calls “lumpers” and those who he calls “splitters”?

This is a piece that is disturbing about the narrowing of cultural opportunities. We say we want a “long tail” economy, but it seems that effectively we support a “short tail” economy. Read the piece to understand what that means.  I would like him to be wrong, but I don’t know that he is. 

Take care!