Escalating US-China competition is a given, military conflict need not be. What has COVID changed for good? Almost definitely our working habits – flexible hours and teleworking are here to stay. Israel is top of the class when it comes to tech and startups. Attention overload is today’s most pressing cognitive problem – the Monthly Barometer is here to help!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Officials in Washington and Beijing don’t agree on much these days, but there is one thing on which they see eye to eye: the contest between their two countries will enter a decisive phase in the 2020s. This will be the decade of living dangerously.” – Kevin Rudd

Kevin Rudd, Short of War
(Foreign Affairs, March / April 2021)
The former Australian PM, one of China’s most astute and insightful observers, explains how to prevent US-Chinese confrontation from ending in war. No matter what strategies the two sides pursue or what events unfold, the tension between the two giants will grow, and competition will intensify. This is inevitable but war is not. The US and China can put in place guardrails that would stave off catastrophe through a framework conceived to reduce the risk of competition escalating into open conflict. Rudd calls it “managed strategic competition”. Read on (about 10 min).
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Jim O’Neill, Reflections on a Plague Year
(Project Syndicate, 11 February 2021)
It is still early to draw conclusions about which pandemic-induced changes are likely to prove long-lasting, but in the opinion of the former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and former UK treasury minister, some of the most significant could include: (1) enhanced vaccine development, (2) increased government spending (with a critical distinction made between investment and consumption), (3) work habits becoming more flexible, (4) accelerated digitalization, and (5) the continued rise of China (reads in 6-7 min).
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Nick Start, Salesforce declares the 9-to-5 workday dead, will let some employees work remotely from now on
(The Verge, 9 February 2021)
Salesforce may be prescient when stating: ‘“9-to-5 workday is dead”. We believe this is a powerful emerging trend that will take many investors and business leaders by surprise. Companies across the tech industry (but in others as well) foresee a more flexible approach to work, where many workers come into the office only on certain days while others work entirely remotely (reads in 4-5 min).
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Cristina Lago, How Israel became a tech powerhouse
(New Statesman, 4 February 2021)
Israel, a country of 9m people, is now a tech powerhouse whose start-up sector has an outsized global influence. Israel has the second-highest concentration of high-tech companies in the world after Silicon Valley and the largest number of start-ups per capita in the world. This remarkable achievement boils down to two things: (1) the priority given to higher education and (2) state-backed research – with a strong emphasis on military R&D (reads in 5-6 min).
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Charlie Warzel, I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age
(The New York Times, 4 February 2021)
This is based on an interview with Michael Goldhaber, a former theoretical physicist now 78 who had the following ‘revelation’ in the mid-1980s: we wouldn’t be able to cope with the information glut because the internet would give us access to more news, opinion, and forms of entertainment than we could possibly handle. He was prescient of course, and his epiphany was this: one of the most finite resources in the world is human attention, and to describe its scarcity, he latched onto the expression coined by the psychologist Herbert Simon: “the attention economy.” The Monthly Barometer is based upon the premise that if you want to attract and retain attention, you must distill the overabundance of analysis and information in a succinct manner (reads in 8-9 min).
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