Best of BS Opinion: The night, the noise, and the need for balance

Today's pieces look at public debt and economic stability, trade as strategic leverage, the continuing unemployment crisis in Bihar, and how pollution has turned the Milky Way's light into an irritant

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Welcome to Best of BS Opinion, Business Standard’s daily wrap of the Opinion page.

 

Kenneth Rogoff, the centrist economist who has spent years defending nuance in an increasingly black-and-white world, revisits the firestorm that followed his research on debt and growth — a saga of Excel errors, misread thresholds, and misplaced austerity accusations. His takeaway? That economic sanity lies not in extremes but in acknowledging trade-offs, that moderation itself is revolutionary in polarised times.

 

Then there’s Devangshu Datta’s piece on Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky, whose brilliance on the chessboard was overshadowed by online torment. Accused without evidence, the 29-year-old champion’s tragic death has shaken the chess world and exposed how digital witch-hunts blur the line between vigilance and cruelty. The board, once a space of intellect and respect, now mirrors the chaos of comment threads.

 

Bihar, alongside Uttar Pradesh, has long been a never-ending source of cheap labour for other Indian states, especially those that have industrial jobs to offer. Its politicians, on the other hand, have only been a source of empty promises of jobs that have rarely come to fruition, a chimera that has re-manifested itself ahead of the Assembly elections next week, writes Mihir S Sharma. But with other states increasingly saying they would rather hire their own, out-migration from Bihar might slow down despite the government's failures in creating an employment-friendly ecosystem. The fantastical promises about job creation from all parties, however, proves one thing: the incumbent government has failed to do so in the past. 

 

US President Donald Trump earlier this week dropped a shockingly dangerous post, saying his country would resume nuclear testing. But it was likely a red herring, says Shekhar Gupta, a show of braggadocio before he capitulated to China on trade. The larger message, though, was that for all his leveraging America's buying power (read consumerism), China is the one with a hand on both sides of the trade scale - as buyer and seller. And this is where India has fallen woefully short with its miniscule trade numbers, thanks to a protectionist mindset, barely qualifying as a strategic weapon. Indeed, protectionism itself has become a strategic liability. This, he writes, could be India's second 1991 moment: reform by compulsion. 

 

And finally, Kumar Abishek looks up, or rather, mourns that we no longer can. Once, the Milky Way stretched over small-town rooftops like a promise. Today, it’s been erased by a sleepless orange haze. Light, once a symbol of hope, has turned into a pollutant, confusing birds, disorienting turtles, draining human health, and devouring $800 million a year in wasted energy. Abishek calls it “planetary insomnia,” cities too wired to rest, too proud of their glow to notice what they’ve lost. 

 

Stay tuned!