Why China got rich and India didn't
The human roots of the Sino-Indian divergence
Economics
David Oks.
David Oks on economic measurement, development statistics, and global affairs.
Recent essays
24 of 24AI is killing the cheap smartphone
The global memory crunch and the great repricing of consumer electronics
Why Japanese companies do so many different things
The internal logic of the world’s strangest corporations
Language models are weird for the same reason human cultures are weird
You can’t have adaptive learning without strange tics
Why airlines are always going bankrupt
How aviation companies (fail to) make a profit
How funerals keep Africa poor
Why the poorest people in the world spend fortunes burying their dead
How citations ruined science
The making and breaking of scientific life
Seeing like a spreadsheet
How the commercial spreadsheet reshaped America
Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
There's a lot more to replacing labor than just automating tasks
Why I’m not worried about AI job loss
We're not in a February 2020 moment, and ordinary people will be fine
Oks notes #2: AI math, the Epstein emails, and why Steve Jobs wanted to buy General Motors
Brief notes from what I've been reading
GDP numbers in poor countries are usually fake
We need to be much more skeptical of official-seeming economic statistics
Oks notes #1: DeepSeek, the WASPs, and the last Mossad station chief in Tehran
Brief notes from what I've been reading
A lot of population numbers are fake
Do we have any idea how many people there are in the world?
Why poor countries stopped catching up
The rise and fall of the Great Convergence
The good luck of Nicolás Maduro
Why dictators need better retirement plans
On getting robbed
(And finding the thief and getting my stuff back)
The era of declining global poverty is over
Global economic development is hitting a wall
Southern Italy is poor because of malaria
A plasmodial theory of divergent development
Social media is a demonic force in the world
Thoughts on recent events
The crisis of central banking is structural
Fiscal dominance is our future
Africa doesn't have large firms because it doesn't have social trust
On the causes of informality in African economies
Were European immigrants to the U.S. always considered white?
No, not really
Notes on Bihar
Seeing Orwell's birthplace and eating mutton in India's poorest state