Can you have a healthy democracy without a common set of facts? | How to put boosters under India’s economy | Etsy CEO turns to sailing metaphor to rally troops after laying off 225 workers just before the holidays | Iran rethinks its role as a regional troublemaker

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Can you have a healthy democracy without a common set of facts? - The Economist

Journalists should not spend much of their time writing about journalism. The world is more interesting than the inky habits of the people who report on it. But this week we are making an exception, because the discovery and dissemination of information matters a lot to politics. Don’t take our word for it: “A popular government,” wrote James Madison in 1822, “without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.” Were Thomas Jefferson offered a choice between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, he said that he would choose the press (though that is probably going a bit far).

As the turmoil at America’s elite universities over antisemitism shows, creating a political culture in which people can argue constructively, disagree and compromise is not something that happens spontaneously. In media, business models, technology and culture can work together to create those conditions. They can also pull in the opposite direction. Our analysis of over 600,000 pieces of written and television journalism shows that the language of the mainstream American media has drifted away from the political centre, towards the Democratic Party’s preferred terminology and topics. That could lower the media’s credibility among conservatives.

As the country braces for next year’s election, it is worth thinking about the internal forces that deepened this rift. You can take comfort from the fact that the industry has been buffeted time and again during its long history, yet somehow survived. The worry is that today’s lurch may prove worse than any before.

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How to put boosters under India’s economy - The Economist

Land in any Indian city, such as Bangalore or Hyderabad, and you will be struck by its heady optimism. India’s economy may be in the early stage of a historic boom. Recently released figures show that economic growth roared to an annualised pace of 7.6% in the third quarter of 2023. In the past few weeks four international forecasters have raised their growth projections for the year, from an average of 5.9% to one of 6.5%. The National Stock Exchange of India is now neck-and-neck with Hong Kong’s stock exchange for the title of the world’s seventh-largest bourse.

Pause for breath, though, and India’s performance looks a little less impressive. GDP growth has been slightly slower under Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, who was elected in 2014, than in the decade before. Labour-force participation is a paltry 40-50%, and only 10-24% for women. Subsidies are distorting the economy. A semiconductor plant in Gujarat will create 5,000 jobs directly and 15,000 indirectly. But a state handout covered 70% of its $2.7bn cost. Assuming rather generously that the factory would not have been built without government support, each job cost $100,000—nearly 40 times India’s average income per person.

Grappling with the tension between India’s enormous potential and an often messy reality is the task of a new book by Raghuram Rajan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and Rohit Lamba of Pennsylvania State University. The pair sketch out a vision that amounts to an entirely new model of development for India—one that they argue is better suited to its strengths than its current model. Three lessons stand out from their work.

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Etsy CEO turns to sailing metaphor to rally troops after laying off 225 workers just before the holidays - Fortune

Etsy has joined the growing list of companies to lay off workers in the lead-up to Christmas—and its CEO attempted to water down the bad news with a sailing metaphor.

The online marketplace told 225 workers that they will be out of a job in the New Year, via a live stream on Wednesday.

Moments after announcing the 11% headcount reduction, its chief executive Josh Silverman described the day as “one of the hardest we’ve experienced at Etsy” while attempting to rally the staff who were not cut.

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Iran rethinks its role as a regional troublemaker - The Economist

ON THE FACE of it, the war in Gaza has been good for Iran’s clerical regime. First, its ally, Hamas, proved itself horrifyingly more effective than most observers had assumed in its attack on Israel on October 7th. Since then the other members of the “axis of resistance” have demonstrated Iran’s reach, striking Israeli and American targets from Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. The Houthis, Iran’s proxies in Yemen, have attacked oil tankers in the Red Sea and fired missiles with a range of 800km, allowing Iran to threaten trade through the Suez canal, much as it already dominates passage to the Persian Gulf. “They’re showing the world needs Iran if it wants to keep the Middle East stable,” says a former UN diplomat in Tehran. In Washington, DC Republican politicians present the regional menace posed by Iran as proof of President Joe Biden’s geopolitical incompetence.

Iran’s muscle-flexing comes after a year in which the ayatollahs have regained their grip over the country’s citizens. In late 2022 widespread demonstrations, triggered by the death in custody of a woman who wore her hijab improperly, appeared to be close to toppling the regime. In the end it was the protests, not clerical rule, that died out. Iran’s diplomatic and economic isolation is also easing. It has positioned itself as a crucial supplier of weapons to Russia. Oil exports, especially to China, are booming. In March China brokered a deal to restore diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In August Iran was invited to join BRICS, the bloc of big emerging economies. And in September America agreed to unfreeze $6bn of Iranian assets as part of a prisoner exchange.

But Iran is less confident than it appears. It has restrained attacks by its proxies. It signals support for Hamas, but does not go far enough to invite furious retribution from Israel and America, whose navy is now near its shores. That caution, in turn, reflects weakness in Iran’s economy and simmering discontent among ordinary Iranians. Above all, Iran is on the verge of a change in leadership, owing to the age (84) and infirmity of its “supreme leader”, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The regime’s focus is increasingly on securing its hold on power, not fomenting chaos abroad.

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