Ambitious Chinese youth are involuting, but it’s not an exclusively Chinese phenomenon. There are lessons on crisis management to be learnt from COVID. Central banks should learn from the past and do something now to curb excessive risk-taking. When it’s an app called Calm, doing very little has proved effective. There are things we can do to help us think more clearly.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Involution is the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless. It is acceleration without a destination, progress without a purpose, Sisyphus spinning the wheels of a perpetual-motion Peloton” (the anthropologist Xiang Biao quoted in the article below).
ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Yi-Ling Liu, China’s “Involuted” Generation
(The New Yorker, 14 May 2021)
This is about China where the involution crisis “is unique in the severity of its myopia and its methods of entrapment”, but surely this cultural phenomenon exists in other countries as well (under a different name, like meritocracy in the US). The increasingly popular concept of involution (when greater input doesn’t yield proportional output) describes a feeling of burnout, ennui, and despair. In China, the meme of involution has now spread from college campuses to what is for many graduates their next destination: China’s hypercompetitive tech industry (reads in 7-9 min).
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Niall Ferguson, How Nations Face Crises
(NOEMA, 18 May 2021)
This is an interview conducted with Niall Ferguson about his latest book: “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.” In essence, he offers three key lessons related to COVID: (1) it is better to be generally paranoid (as the governments of Taiwan, South Korea and Israel are) than meticulously prepared for the wrong disaster (as most Western governments were); (2) speed of response is more important than prophetic powers (disasters are inherently impossible to predict, so governments need to focus on rapidly reacting to a broad range of possible scenarios); (3) when new and useful technology exists (like digital contact tracing as practiced during the early pandemic), governments should make use of them (8-9 min).
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Mohamed El-Erian, The Return of the Finance Threat?
(Project Syndicate, 9 June 2021)
The author of “The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse” warns us that policymakers would be unwise merely to hope for a best-case deus ex machina scenario in which a strong and quick economic recovery redeems the enormous run-up in debt, leverage, and asset valuations. He thinks, instead, that they should act now to moderate the finance sector’s excessive risk-taking (reads in 5-6 min).
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Annie Lowrey, The app that monetized doing nothing
(The Atlantic, 4 June 2021)
This article discusses the meteoric and paradoxical rise of Calm – the most popular mindfulness app that more than 100 million people have on their smartphone. Calm is now valued at $2bn and about to become a fully-fledged wellness empire. How much can a young start-up selling a centuries-old spiritual practice really help? How is it that a smartphone app that purports to undo the anxieties of the smartphone age can monetize sitting and doing nothing? Read on! (7-8 min).
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Tom Chatfield, How to Think Clearly
(Psyche, 9 June 2021)
The author of “How to Think” offers some practical tips on how to question and clarify our thoughts, improve our self-knowledge and become a better communicator. All this entails three stages: (1) reflecting on why we believe something to be true or important; (2) teasing out the assumptions this reasoning relies upon; (3) acknowledging what we do and don’t know, where we’re uncertain, and what it might mean to redress these things. It reads in 7-8 min and contains useful references. You can also jump straight to the “key points” at the end.
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