📊 EV’s Charts of the Week #105

Can India become the new China?

Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies. Every Wednesday, I do this in Charts of the Week.

🔥 I am encouraging readers to follow me on Mastodon, the decentralised social network. It is unclear the extent to which Twitter will remain a useful network for information sharing and discovery, so as an insurance policy I’m recommending people also build profiles on Mastodon.

---

CHART OF THE WEEK

Shock value
Systemic and structural risks have a renewed meaning following the Covid pandemic. The crisis really brought home the reality of the world as a system, time as shocks and tipping points. Unsurprisingly, this is reflected in the large share of respondents in the WEF’s Global Risk Perception Survey deeming the next two years to be very volatile. The picture is much more mixed for the 10-year horizon. 

This bleak attitude is unfortunately not uncommon. I will be in Davos Jan 16 - 20 discussing the future outlook through the prism which I tend to take in this newsletter, that of pragmatic optimism. I will brief members of Exponential View on my takeaways from Davos on January 26.

*The event is open only to members of Exponential View with an annual subscription*. You can RSVP below:

• Briefing on January 26, 9-10am GMT

• Briefing on January 26, 4-5pm GMT

---

WEDNESDAY SURVEY

Source: Hannah Ritchie

In our last edition, we asked which country or region saw the highest number of patents granted in 2021. 61% of readers selected the correct answer: China, with 39.6% of global patents!

---

The rest of the edition is open to paying members only. Here’s what’s behind the paywall 🔒:

• Analysis: India’s potential - and roadblocks - to becoming an industry and research powerhouse,

• The effect of political affiliation on economic pessimism,

• Evidence on the effect of Russian propaganda during the 2016 US election.