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- Arvind’s Newsletter
Gideon Rachman, formerly a journalist with both the Financial Times and The Economist has written a very relevant book to understand our times- “ The Age of the Strongman”, and we are seeing today both right leaning and left leaning strongment leading countries today. This week headlines covers three of them -Narendra Modi in India, Netanyahu in Israel and AMLO in Mexico. We will cover all three in this newsletter.
1.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to freeze a controversial overhaul to the judicial system following a night of huge protests after he fired his defense minister for opposing the reforms.
The new laws would let parliament override the Supreme Court and make it harder to remove political leaders from office — including Netanyahu, who faces an ongoing trial for corruption. Months of protests against the move have brought Israel to a standstill: A general strike was announced today, with all flights grounded at Israel’s main airport. Israel’s president told Netanyahu: “For the sake of the unity of the people of Israel, for the sake of responsibility, I am calling on you to stop legislation immediately.”
2.ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.
Whether it’s based on hallucinatory beliefs or not, a gold rush has started over the last several months to make money from generative AI models like ChatGPT.
You can practically hear the shrieks from corner offices around the world: “What is our ChatGPT play? How do we make money off this?”
But while companies and executives want to cash in, the likely impact of generative AI on workers and the economy on the whole is far less obvious.
Will ChatGPT make the already troubling income and wealth inequality in the US and many other countries even worse, or could it in fact provide a much-needed boost to productivity? Read the full story
3.Mexico’s Supreme Court temporarily halted President Andres Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO’s) controversial changes to the country’s electoral authority. In response to the decision, López Obrador said the Supreme Court is “part of a mafia” that is intent on protecting an oligarchy, Reforma reported. “Money is their only god,” Lopez Obrador said. The president has used fiery rhetoric — an effigy of the Supreme Court’s president was burned during a recent government rally — to weaken independent institutions in what critics view as a series of attacks on Mexico’s fledgling democracy. The country holds presidential elections next year, and the court is expected to decide on the issue by the summer.
(4) Shruti Rajgopalan, economist and blogger, asks the question, “Did Modi kill India's democracy by expelling its opposition leader from Parliament?”
(5) In the latest edition of his podcast, Play to Potential, Deepak Jayaraman has interviewed Christopher Clarey, the author of The Master — The Long and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer. In this podcast Clarey discusses what distinguishes Federer as Sportsman and as a person. Listen to this interview on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, even if you are not a Roger fan.
