Thread: 1/8 Our book "A Primer on Electric Vehicles in India: A Machine-Generated Literature Overview" is out. (with Deb Mukherji) This book tries to answer everything you want to know about electric vehicles in the Indian context. link.springer.com/book/10.10…

Viewing the world economy as a system of chokepoints has its own deadly blind spot, Yeling Tan & coauthors write in @ForeignAffairs. It is leading policymakers to focus on capabilities rather than strategy—to fixate on what leverage they have, & what leverage others have over them, rather than considering what happens when many countries build up their chokepoint power all at once. foreignaffairs.com/united-st…

If you have time, and even if you don't, watch this interview with India's Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. Minister explains what India is doing, domestically and internationally, to sustain economic growth. Key takeaways + my analysis: (1/n) piped.video/watch?v=Fv0ylkeT…

A new IEEFA report on Odisha's power sector highlights large gaps in its renewable sector. There's little to none in terms of grid connected solar or wind power. 0.82 GW of solar against 139 GW potential and no grid connected wind power against 12 GW potential. It'll need at least 1.1 lakh crores in investment over the next 10 years for renewables and grid upgrades. This would get Odisha about 10-11 GW of grid-connected renewable power. This is going to be especially critical as more heavy industries set up plants in Odisha. ieefa.org/resources/sustaina…

Industrialization shifting on the African continent. Industries anchored in South Africa once. Now? Morocco “sustained modernisation of its productive system,diversification of its exports & the effective implementation of its industrial policy”Our essay phenomenalworld.org/analysis…

A very informative chart based on the excellent new report by Prosperiti, on why India’s factories struggle to keep up with their peers in other parts of the world. Authors: Bhuvana Anand, Pranjal Chandra, Naveena Pradeep livemint.com/industry/india-…

Developing countries pay more than double to borrow. Average interest rate on public debt in 2025: 5.2%, against 2.2% in developed countries. ➡️ ow.ly/Xg1v50ZV578 #WorldOfDebt

The @WorldBankSAsia takes a deep dive on the Indian economy. With a special section on "India's AI Opportunity." Not competing at the frontier, but in adoption and adaptation. documents1.worldbank.org/cur…

Why India’s Manufacturing Future Isn’t the China Model The nation has proven it can scale up, but it will likely follow a different path. I wrote this for the Bloomberg New Economy newsletter. Thoughts welcome. Big thanks to @RahulBajoria_, @pranjulb, Jefferies and Morgan Stanley for their insightful reports bloomberg.com/news/newslette…

The actual rate of the 2025 tariffs was less than half of the statutory rate that was announced, yet what was collected was almost fully passed through to US import prices, say researchers at @Harvard and @ChicagoBooth. #Chart aeaweb.org/research/chart/ta…

New at JIE: "Tapping into excess capacity: Chinese machinery exports and African industrialization" by Pak Hung Lam (@PakHungLAM), Yatang Lin, Fangyuan Peng, Jin Wang doi.org/10.1016/j.jinteco.20…

NEW: The big story is not Chinese EVs everywhere —but Chinese EV factories everywhere. And its not just Chinese firms going out. Our CM-FDI database tracks every foreign Solar, Wind, EV and battery manufacturing plant built in 21st century. cmfdi.netzeropolicylab.com

Who owns the benefits of AI? In this essay I co-authored with @IasonGabriel for the DeepMind Institute, we offer four moral arguments — grounded in rights, reciprocity, fairness, and beneficence — that together make the philosophical case that the benefits of AI should reach everyone. Read the piece here and let us know what you think: institute.deepmind.com/essay…

Many people worried about the possible #AI bubble crash compare it with the Nasdaq collapse of 2000. But the relevant cases are 2008 and 1929. I only just discovered @B_Eichengreen 's 2015 book Hall of Mirrors, comparing those two. Super important!

Can India manufacturing move from assembly to value add? How competitive will it be when trillions of rupees of government production-linked incentives come to an end? When will mobile phone sales in India recover? What's Dixon Tech's long-term growth strategy beyond phones? Can Dixon Tech become the Foxconn of India? Don't miss my long-ish conversation with chairperson @SunilVachani this week. bloomberg.com/news/videos/20…

New from @damienics & Binyi Yang: 411 of the top AI researchers in the world did their undergraduate studies in India. But just 36 did their graduate work in the country, while 44 did postgraduate study. carnegieendowment.org/china/… via @CarnegieChina

Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for proving your brain has two ways of thinking. Fast and slow. Wharton just found a third. Its "Artificial." Two Wharton researchers, Steven Shaw and Gideon Nave, gave 1,372 people a set of logic puzzles. The sneaky kind, where the first answer that pops into your head is wrong. A classic one goes like this. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 together. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much is the ball? Your gut says 10 cents. The real answer is 5 cents. Kahneman built his whole career on puzzles like this. System 1 is the fast gut that blurts out 10 cents. System 2 is the slow voice that stops and does the math. Most of us like to believe System 2 is the one in charge. So the researchers added one thing. A ChatGPT window people could use if they wanted. Then they rigged it. On some questions the chatbot gave the right answer. On others it gave a wrong one, just as confidently. People reached for the chatbot on more than half the questions. When it was right, they took its answer 93% of the time. Fine. That's what it's for. When it was wrong, they took its answer 80% of the time. Sit with that. Eight out of ten people read a wrong answer, skipped the math, and wrote it down as their own. And the chatbot didn't just fail to help. When it was wrong, people scored 15 points worse than the group with no AI at all. They would have done better alone with a pencil. Then came the number that made me put my phone down. The AI users rated their confidence 11.7% higher than the people working alone. Right answer or wrong answer, the chatbot made them feel smarter. Shaw and Nave call this cognitive surrender. Handing your long division to a calculator is normal. Cognitive surrender is handing over the judgment itself. The little voice that says "wait, that doesn't add up" never gets a chance to speak. That's why they call the chatbot System 3. A way of thinking that lives outside your head, and when it answers first, the other two go silent. Now the fine print, because I'm not here to tell you AI rots your brain. These were logic puzzles in a controlled study, not doctors reading scans or lawyers writing contracts. The wrong answers were planted on purpose, so the 80% tells you how people react when AI is wrong, not how often AI is wrong. And when the chatbot was right, people scored 25 points better than the no-AI group. When it's correct, it's a massive upgrade. That's exactly the trap. It's right often enough that you stop checking. Everyone I know says they double-check ChatGPT. I've said it too. This is the first time someone actually watched us do it. Most of us don't. Kahneman spent 50 years warning that the fast answer feels like the careful one. We just built a machine that makes the fast answer feel even more careful.

India has committed over 4.5 trillion rupees ($47 billion) to building a manufacturing economy. And that’s just what the federal government has allocated to its production-linked incentive scheme across 14 sectors (1.91 trillion rupees), semiconductor missions (1.93 trillion rupees) and the new mobile-phone manufacturing scheme (625 billion rupees). States offer incentives of their own, making that a considerably larger number. Sure, this has boosted investment and jobs. Also, smartphones, led by iPhones, are now a top export item from India. But the share of manufacturing in GDP has stagnated for a decade and the country is still viewed more as an assembler of products than a deeply integrated manufacturer. How long will that transition take, and when will Indian manufacturers stop needing taxpayer support? In an interview, Sunil Vachani, chairman of Dixon Technologies India Limited, a leading electronics manufacturing services company, talks to me about Smartphone sales slowdown Scope for diversification Reliance on subsidies and incentives From assembly to value-added manufacturing Investments from China Becoming innovators Boosting profit margins Sunil offered a detailed view of India's manufacturing economy. Read a quick take here 👇 bloomberg.com/news/newslette… Watch the full interview here 👇 bloomberg.com/news/videos/20…

New at JIE: "The impact of AI and cross-border data regulation on international trade in digital services" by Ruiqi Sun, Daniel Trefler doi.org/10.1016/j.jinteco.20…

New paper with @BKleinTeeselink! Measuring AI adoption and employment changes across 41 countries. This is some of the first evidence on global changes in labor markets from AI. Paper and Substack explainer + lit review at bottom of 🧵