Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Social media platforms are a mess

Twitter is a case in point - a messy, clumsy, opaque platform - hard to read and even harder to follow. Despite that I often find interesting and intelligent conversations but they soon vanish in the quagmire. Noah Smith's exchange here is a good example.

Greg Ip is a Canadian-American journalist, currently the chief economics commentator for The Wall Street Journal.
His WSJ link opens an exchange.

He posts: As western multinationals pursue a "China plus one" manufacturing strategy, India is aggressively seeking to be the "plus one." One company official said, “We don’t want all our eggs in one basket in China.” @PhilipWen11, @agarwalvibhuti and I report.
(WSJ link here. Subscription wall.)
In Tamil Nadu, companies like Vestas, Salcomp, and Foxconn are ramping up production on wind turbines, iPhones and other accessories. Indian electronics exports are soaring. India is trying to improve its notoriously slow, burdensome and capricious regulatory environment.

“We have now taken… integrating ourselves with other countries far more seriously," says commerce and industry minister @PiyushGoyal.
"In fact, manufacturing's share of Indian GDP has gone down since PM Modi introduced "Make in India" in 2014. Never mind China, India has work to do to convince MNCs it's a better place to manufacture than Vietnam or Mexico."

Noah Smith replies...
"If India can become a new "workshop of the world", it will be one of the greatest victories for human progress in the history of the planet, comparable only to China itself. 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳"

To which someone responds "We already made that mistake once with China, why should we make the same mistake again with India?"

Smith: "It wasn't a mistake; Chinese people deserve not to be poor. Yes, we have to deal with negative side effects of China's rise, but the same was true of Germany, Japan, Britain, etc...and the U.S. itself.
"This is a nuance I wish more people understood. Keeping 1.4 billion Chinese people in poverty would NOT have been worth it just to prevent the rise of the Xi Jinping regime. China's leadership is bad, but the fact that China developed is overwhelmingly good.
"The same is true of India. Cheering and promoting India's economic development does not equal an endorsement of Modi. Trying to keep India poor just to try to weaken Modi and the BJP would be a monstrous crime, so hopefully no one wants to do that.

This is not a big deal, but I come across stuff like this all the time, fresh  ideas - nothing combative or argumentative - just conversational exchanges, which is how civil discussions unfold. Makes me crazy.
Something about the current sound-bite prone social media platforms tends to evoke confrontational challenge instead of thoughtful reflection.

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