Category: Current Affairs
Daniel Litt on AI and Math
Daniel Litt is a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto. He has been active in evaluating AI models for many years and is generally seen as a skeptic pushing back at hype. He has a very interesting statement updating his thoughts:
In March 2025 I made a bet with Tamay Besiroglu, cofounder of RL environment company Mechanize, that AI tools would not be able to autonomously produce papers I judge to be at a level comparable to that of the best few papers published in 2025, at comparable cost to human experts, by 2030. I gave him 3:1 odds at the time; I now expect to lose this bet.
Much of what I’ll say here is not factually very different from what I’ve written before. I’ve slowly updated my timelines over the past year, but if one wants to speculate about the long-term future of math research, a difference of a few years is not so important. My trigger for writing this post is that, despite all of the above, I think I was not correctly calibrated as to the capabilities of existing models, let alone near-future models. This was more apparent in the mood of my comments than their content, which was largely cautious.
To be sure, the models are not yet as original or creative as the very best human mathematicians (who is?) but:
Can an LLM invent the notion of a scheme, or of a perfectoid space, or whatever your favorite mathematical object is? (Could I? Could you? Obviously this is a high bar, and not necessary for usefulness.) Can it come up with a new technique? Execute an argument that isn’t “routine for the right expert”? Make an interesting new definition? Ask the right question?
…I am skeptical that there is any mystical aspect of mathematics research intrinsically inaccessible to models, but it is true that human mathematics research relies on discovering analogies and philosophies, and performing other non-rigorous tasks where model performance is as yet unclear.
Podcast with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer
Mostly about geopolitics, plenty of fresh content. And here is the transcript. Excerpt:
Jon Finer:
Should the United States be willing to take military action to defend Taiwan? It’s a thorny question for politicians to answer, but we’d be interested in your view.
Tyler Cowen:
Well, this is what economists would call a mixed strategy. Ex-ante, we should have strategic ambiguity, and not just say, we’re not going to defend Taiwan. And when Joe Biden said, “Well, we are going to defend Taiwan,” I was quite happy.
Jon Finer:
Four times. Four times.
Tyler Cowen:
Four times, yes. I know there’s different versions of how it was talked back and the like, but it should be unclear. That said, when push comes to shove, if China has made its move, you have to look at what are the terms of the deal? What are they going to do with TSMC to our best knowledge? What’s the domestic quality chip production in the United States? How do we feel about Japan and maybe South Korea getting nuclear weapons? Can South Korea remain an autonomous nation? Those are a lot of balls to juggle and they’re all hard to judge at this moment. But I think ex-ante, we should definitely create some risk that we will go to war over Taiwan, but then make the best decision ex-post. But China knows that too, right? They’re not fools. They’ve studied game theory.
Jake Sullivan:
Tyler, I’m going to put you down as that being Tyler Cowen’s version of strategic ambiguity.
Tyler Cowen:
It may not be that different from your version.
Jake Sullivan:
Exactly.
Recommended, and I also talk about my secret, unpublished China book, still pending at Tsinghua, almost certainly forever. And we cover UAPs and curling as well.
I guess Mexico is solving for the equilibrium?
For some while I have wondered what would happen if the U.S. military sought to assist Mexico in taking out one of the top drug lords. I suppose now we are finding out. A few points:
1. There is a good chance a few more drug lords will be hit. It makes no sense to get involved just to take out one guy (supply is elastic!). Sheinbaum is doing this, so it is not just the oddities of Trumpland at work here. Presumaby the goal is to shift the entire equilibrium.
2. The cartels would do better to lay low for a while, rather than making this a big public issue. The virulence of their response indicates they are probably pretty scared. Of course the actual decisions here are being taken by (threatened) individuals, not by the (persisting) “cartels.”
3. “Cartels” is an overused word here. They are more like loose syndicates, and by no means are they always colluding with each other.
4. Perhaps there is a new “Trump doctrine,” namely to focus on going after lead individuals, rather than governments or institutional structures. We already did that in Venezuela, and there is talk of that being the approach in Iran. If so, that is a change in the nature of warfare, and of course others may copy it too, including against us. Is there a chance they have tried already?
5. With this action, which seems to have U.S: involvement at least on the intelligence side (possibly more), we are also sending a message to Iran.
6. I believe my post from this morning is holding up pretty well. What the U.S. is supplying here is “more decisive action,” rather than some new, detailed understanding of the Mexican dilemma. See also my Free Press Latin America column from October.
7. In its most extreme instantiation, today’s action represents a willingness of the U.S. to get involved in a Mexican civil war of sorts. I do not expect matters to take that path, as the last time U.S. troops had direct involvement in Mexico was 1916-1919. “Convergence to some warning shots” is a more likely equilibrium outcome here. Nonetheless such an escalatory scenario is not off the table, do note that American foreign policy has been returning to much earlier eras in a number of regards.
8. This story is not over.
How to make sense of the U.S. Iran strategy
I am not saying it is a good strategy, I genuinely do not know. But the people behind the scenes, what are they thinking? Did we not just, not too long ago, take out or at least disable some big chunk of the Iranian nuclear assets? So what are we going after this time? Can we really affect regime change without large numbers of troops on the ground? Is there a “Venezuela version” of an Iranian intervention?
My simple model is as follows. The Trump people believe that previous administration, along many dimensions, simply never tried hard enough. They were too bound by previous conventions, too captive to polite society, and also they did not exercise executive power enough. When it comes to foreign policy, they did not threaten other nations enough to achieve American ends. When it comes to military action, they did not summon enough forces backed by enough executive will.
This time around, the goal is to make big threats backed by big, serious forces. Which indeed America is doing. The rest of the details will be filled in later.
If you think the binding constraint in the past was “not enough threats backed by serious enough executive will,” that constraint (it seems?) is being relaxed now.
Of course if the binding constraints lie along other dimensions, or along other dimensions as well, the current strategy could fail badly. The plan is simply not complete enough.
I suppose we are likely to find out.
Why the “Lesser Included Action” Argument for IEEPA Tariffs Fails
The Supreme Court yesterday struck down Trump’s IEEPA tariffs, holding that the statute’s authorization to “regulate… importation” doesn’t include the power to impose tariffs. The majority’s strongest argument is simple: every time Congress actually delegates tariff authority, it uses the word “duty,” caps the rate, sets a time limit, and requires procedural prerequisites. IEEPA has none of these.
The dissent pushes back with an intuitively appealing argument: IEEPA authorizes the President to prohibit imports entirely, so surely it authorizes the lesser action of merely taxing them. If Congress handed over the nuclear option, why would it withhold the conventional weapon? Indeed in his press conference Trump, in his rambling manner, made exactly this argument:
“I am allowed to cut off any and all trade…I can destroy the trade, I can destroy the country, I’m even allowed to impose a foreign country destroying embargo…I can do anything I want to do to them…I’m allowed to destroy the country, but I can’t charge a little fee.”
The argument is superficially appealing but it fails due to a standard result in principal-agent theory.
Congress wants the President to move fast in a real emergency, but it doesn’t want to hand over routine control of trade policy. The right delegation design is therefore a screening device: give the President authority he will exercise only when the situation is truly an emergency.
An import ban works as a screening device precisely because it is very disruptive. A ban creates immediate and substantial harm. It is a “costly signal.” A President who invokes it is credibly saying: this is serious enough that I am willing to absorb a large cost. Tariffs, in contrast, are cheaper–especially to the President. Tariffs raise revenue, which offsets political pain. Tariff incidence is diffuse and easy to misattribute—prices creep, intermediaries take blame, consumers don’t observe the policy lever directly. Most importantly tariffs are adjustable, which makes them a weapon useful for bargaining, exemptions, and targeted favors. Tariffs under executive authority implicitly carry the message–I am the king; give me a gold bar and I will reduce your tariffs. Tariff flexibility is more politically appealing than a ban and thus a less credible signal of an emergency. The “lesser-included” argument gets the logic backwards. The asymmetry is the point.
Not surprisingly, the same structure appears in real emergency services. A fire chief may have the authority to close roads during an emergency but that doesn’t imply that the fire chief has the authority to impose road tolls. Road closure is costly and self-limiting — it disrupts traffic, generates immediate complaints, and the chief has every incentive to lift it as soon as possible. Tolls are cheap, adjustable, and once in place tend to persist; they generate revenue that can fund the agency and create constituencies for their continuation. Nobody thinks granting a fire chief emergency closure authority implicitly grants them taxing authority, even if the latter is a lesser authority. The closure and toll instruments have completely different political economy properties despite operating on the same roads.
The majority reaches the right conclusion by noting that tariffs are a tax over which Congress, not the President, has authority. That is constitutionally correct but the deeper question is why the Framers lodged the taxing power in Congress — and the answer is political economy. Revenue instruments are especially easy for an executive to exploit because they can be targeted. The constitutional rule exists to solve that incentive problem.
Once you see that, the dissent’s “greater includes the lesser” inference collapses on its own terms. A principal can rationally authorize an agent to take a dramatic emergency action while withholding the cheaper, revenue-lever not despite the fact that it seems milder, but because of it. The blunt instrument is self-limiting. The revenue instrument is not. That asymmetry is what the Constitution’s categorical division of powers preserves — and what an open-ended emergency delegation would destroy.
A Republic, if you can keep it
The conclusion of Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence in the tariff case:
For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason. Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem
arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers
disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day. In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation’s future. For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious. But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.
South Africa facts of the day
With the lights back on and freight beginning to move again, in November South Africa won its first credit upgrade in two decades after S&P Global Ratings lifted the sovereign rating by one notch to double B.
Investor confidence is also up. According to Nedbank, private sector investment announcements tripled last year to more than R382bn ($23.6bn). Since the end of 2023, the South African rand has been the world’s best performing major currency on a spot basis reflecting immediate exchange rates, up nearly 15 per cent against the dollar. Over the past 12 months, the JSE all-share index is up 37 per cent in rand terms.
Growth reached 1.2 per cent in 2025, hardly transformative, but double the rate of the previous year. For the first time in a long time, economists are talking enthusiastically about “green shoots” and forecasting year-on-year expansion.
Here is more from David Pilling, Joseph Cotterill, and Monica Mark at the FT.
I podcast on Spain and Latin America
With Rasheed Griffith and Diego Sanchez de la Cruz. Here is one excerpt:
Rasheed: Tyler, if El Salvador were to become a success story, what would it likely be a success at first? Manufacturing, migratory investment, investment tourism, or something more unusual? Because those typical answers feel like maybe they have missed the boat.
Tyler: I think El Salvador has turned itself into a very safe country which is great news. I think you and I both saw that when we were there. I think under all scenarios they have a very hard time becoming much richer. So I don’t think it’s manufacturing through no fault of their own. But most of the world is de-industrializing. So manufacturing is not a source of growing employment due to automation. But there’s other issues for Central America such as scale and the cost of electricity. El Salvador is not the best in Latin America for either of those compared say to Northern Mexico. So I don’t see what its relative advantage is. And it’s just a small place.
I checked with ChatGPT. one estimate places about third of the population, living in the United States on average. That’s probably the more ambitious one third. So there’s considerable brain drain. I do think in terms of levels they can do much more with tourism. They have an entire Pacific Coast which is quite underdeveloped, and could be developed very fruitfully. Sell condominiums, have people do more surfing. Try to have something a bit more like the next Acapulco, but even there you’re competing against Cancun among other locations and it will boost their level but it won’t be a permanently higher rate of growth.
And that’s the case with many touristic developments. They don’t self compound forever and give you many other productivity improvements. So I expect El Salvador to do much better but I know a lot of people who read Bukele on social media and they think it’s about to be the next Singapore or something and I just don’t know how they’re gonna do that under really any scenario. I do think it will improve and they’ll get more foreign investment and more tourism.
Rasheed: How much is “much better”? That’s doing a lot of work there.
Tyler: When you look at the Pacific Coast and you and I sat right next to the water [it could develop much more]. So that could create quite a few jobs. But in the longer term steady state I think they’ll have a hard time averaging more than 2% growth. So they can attach themselves more closely to the US economy. They use the dollar and let’s just assume their governance does not go crazy. That’s another risk right? So Bukele or whoever succeeds them could overreach. The checks and balances the constitutional protections there seem quite weak. Another possible risk there that even despite his best efforts the country becomes dangerous again. You look at Costa Rica which had been quite safe and did all the right things, and is larger and has many more resources and that’s now becoming a more dangerous place because it was targeted by external, in some cases Mexican drug traffickers. And that could happen to El Salvador as well. So even if think the current campaign is gonna work forever it doesn’t mean the country stays safe forever. It’s not really in a very safe region. So that’s a side risk which will also keep down foreign investment. I don’t know, I’m I am definitely seeing the upside but not super duper optimistic there.
Plenty of fresh material, with transcript, recommended.
Brazil facts of the day
Pensions cost the government 10% of GDP. If no reforms are made by 2050, Brazil will spend more on pensions as a share of GDP than many richer and greyer countries… Though Brazil’s share of young people is similar to that in Chile or Mexico, its pension spending is already at Japan’s level. That is despite a modest reform in 2019 that introduced a minimum retirement age. The population is ageing rapidly. Without reform, its social-security deficit, or the shortfall between contributions and payments, is set to rise from 2% of GDP today to over 16% by 2060.
Brazil’s courts cost 1.3% of GDP —the second-most expensive in the world—mostly because of generous pensions. The typical soldier retires before turning 55 on a pension equivalent to their full salary.
Here is more from The Economist. By the way, Brazil cannot change its pension system without amending the constitution.
My excellent Conversation with Joe Studwell
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. The conversation is based around Joe’s new and very good book How Africa Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Last Developmental Frontier. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Joe explore whether population density actually solves development, which African countries are likely to achieve stable growth, whether Africa has a manufacturing future, why state infrastructure projects decay while farmer-led irrigation thrives, what progress looks like in education and public health, whether charter cities or special economic zones can work, and how permanent Africa’s colonial borders really are. After testing Joe’s optimism about Africa, Tyler shifts back to Asia: what Japan and South Korea will do about depopulation, why industrial policy worked in East Asia but failed in India and Brazil, what went wrong in Thailand, and what Joe will tackle next.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Does Africa have a manufacturing future? Is robotics coming, AI, possibly some reshoring?
STUDWELL: Yes. I believe that Africa does have a manufacturing future.
COWEN: But making what? And at what cost of energy?
STUDWELL: They will start, as everybody does, producing garments, producing textiles, which in certain enclaves is already going on in Madagascar, in Lasutu, in Morocco, and they’ll move on to other things. They’ll start with those things because they are the most labor cost-sensitive products.
Africa is now in a position where — depending on which state you’re looking at, and taking China as a reference point — the cost of labor is now between a half and one-tenth of what it is in China. Factory labor is now around $600 a month at its cheapest. In a country like Ethiopia or Madagascar, it’s $60 or $65 a month. So, it’s a 10th of the cost, and that’s already beginning to have a bit of effect, often with Chinese firms moving production to Africa.
So, I think there is a future for manufacturing. It will depend on the extent to which African governments understand that you don’t really move forward fast for very long without manufacturing, that every developed country — apart from a few petro states and financial centers — has gone through a manufacturing phase of development. It depends on the extent to which African governments engage with that, but some, without doubt, will.
The Ethiopians, for instance, have already attempted to do that. What they’re trying to do has been somewhat derailed by the two-year civil war that took place from 2020, but they’re back on it now, and they’re trying to move forward.
The idea that robotics and AI are going to change the story I personally do not buy, principally for two reasons. One is the cost reason, because whenever people talk about what’s happening with robotics, no one ever talks about the cost of robots. In garmenting, for instance, even a basic robot will cost you in excess of $100,000, and you pay the cost upfront, and you’ve then paid that, whether there’s demand for your products or not. Also, in garmenting and in textiles, robots don’t work very well because they can’t work with material very well. They’re much better at working with solid things.
So, you’ve spent $100,000 for a robot when you can go out in somewhere like Tana in Madagascar and get another skilled — because they’ve been doing it now for 20 years — garmenting employee for $60 or $65 to make the new order that you just got. And if the order doesn’t come through, you can sack them. You see what I’m saying? There’s a point about the cost of robotics.
COWEN: But think of automation more generally — it’s not that expensive. Most countries are de-industrializing. Even South Africa has been de-industrializing for a while, and China maybe has peaked out at industrialization, measured in terms of employment. It’s hard to trust their numbers. But maybe just everywhere is going to deindustrialize, and that will be very bad for Africa.
STUDWELL: I don’t think so. I think South Africa is deindustrializing because the ANC has followed a hyper-liberal approach to economic policy. I don’t think the ANC has ever really understood economic policy, frankly, so South Africa is an outlier in that respect. There are many other states in Africa, whether Nigeria or Ethiopia, which understand they’ve got to have a manufacturing future and intend to pursue one.
Then, as I was saying, the other point is, what people miss is the flexibility with robotics and AI. There’s very limited flexibility with robotic and automated production. When demand goes up, you can’t just stick in more robots, but when demand goes up in a people-operated factory, where the cost of labor is low, you can stick in more people and produce more.
Just one example: during COVID, when everybody was having home deliveries of supermarket goods, the price of a UK firm called Ocado, which runs a supermarket, but was also developing the software and consulting around building blind warehouses went up through the roof, but now it’s down through the floor.
And only last week, Kroger supermarket in the US said, “We’re closing five of these super-modern blind warehouses.” And the reason, fundamentally, is because they lack the flexibility that human labor brings to the job. So, I’m not saying that robots, automation, and AI are not important. They are important. What I am saying is that they are not going to derail a manufacturing future for a number of African countries that aggressively pursue it.
COWEN: But there’re a lot of developing nations around the world — you could look at India, you could look at Pakistan, even Thailand — where manufacturing has not taken off the way one might have wanted. There’re just major forces operating against it. And in the US, manufacturing employment was once 37 percent of the workforce; now it’s 7 percent to 8 percent.
It just seems like it’s swimming upstream for Africa — which again, has quite expensive energy — to think it will do that well. And again, South Africa had very good technology, pretty high state capacity. I don’t see the alternate world state where a wiser ANC would have made that work.
STUDWELL: Well, oddly enough, before the end of Apartheid, the manufacturing performance of South Africa was really not bad at all, with classic industrial policy, quite high levels of protection, and so forth. I think that demand for manufactured goods will continue to be high around the world, and the labor cost will continue to be a prime determinant of where producers go for low value-added goods. So, I think that the opportunity is there for African countries.
COWEN: But say there’re transportation costs internally, energy costs, political order uncertainty. Where’s the place where people really want to put all these manufacturing firms?
Interesting throughout, recommended.
Germany projection of the day
Germany’s population is projected to shrink by nearly 5 per cent within 25 years — a significantly steeper decline than previously forecast, according to an Ifo study.
The German economic think-tank on Tuesday revised its forecast for a 1 per cent population decline by 2050 to nearly 5 per cent — a drop that would leave Germany with its smallest population since 1990. The revision is based on updated figures from the country’s statistical office.
“Demographic change will have significant effects on all areas of the economy and society,” Ifo economist Joachim Ragnitz warned in the study.
Here is more from the FT.
The mainstream view
Multiple studies have either shown that smartphone and social media use among teens has minimal effects on their mental health or none at all. As a 2024 review published by an American Psychological Association journal put it: “There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems.”
And this:
Advocates of bans compare social media to alcohol or tobacco, where the harms are indisputable and the benefits are minimal. But the internet, including social media, is more analogous to books, magazines or television. I may not want my sons watching “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” or reading “Fifty Shades of Grey,” but it would be crazy to ban books and films for kids altogether.
But that is the nature of these social media bans. Australia’s law not only restricted access to platforms such as Instagram and TikTok but also banned kids under 16 from having YouTube, X and Reddit accounts. Even Substack had to modify its practices.
Here is more from the excellent Sam Bowman. And many teens make money through “digital side hustles,” in this day and age that is what a teenage job often means.
“You see tech and AI everywhere but in the productivity statistics”
How many times have I heard versions of that claim? Erik Brynjolfsson picks up the telephone in the FT:
While initial reports suggested a year of steady labour expansion in the US, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 403,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7 per cent growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth.
My own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of roughly 2.7 per cent for 2025. This is a near doubling from the sluggish 1.4 per cent annual average that characterised the past decade.
It is fine to suggest caution in interpreting such statistics, but they hardly push the other way.
Minimum Wages for Gig Workers Can’t Work
In 2017, I analyzed the Uber Tipping Equilibrium:
What is the effect of tipping on the take-home pay of Uber drivers? Economic theory offers a clear answer. Tipping has no effect on take home pay. The supply of Uber driver-hours is very elastic. Drivers can easily work more hours when the payment per ride increases and since every person with a decent car is a potential Uber driver it’s also easy for the number of drivers to expand when payments increase. As a good approximation, we can think of the supply of driver-hours as being perfectly elastic at a fixed market wage. What this means is that take home pay must stay constant even when tipping increases.
…If Uber holds fares constant, the higher net wage (tips plus fares) will attract more drivers but as the number of drivers increases their probability of finding a rider will fall. The drivers will earn more when driving but spend less time driving and more time idling. In other words, tipping will increase the “driving wage,” but reduce paid driving-time until the net hourly wage is pushed back down to the market wage.
A paper by Hall, Horton and Knoepfle showed that’s exactly what happened.
More recently, in 2024, Seattle implemented “PayUp”, a pay package for gig workers like DoorDash workers that required a minimum wage based on the time worked and miles travelled for each offer. Note that this is not a minimum wage for all workers but for one type of worker in a large market. For this reason, we can use the same analysis as with Uber tipping. The supply of workers is very elastic and essentially fixed at the market wage for workers of similar skill. Thus, we would expect a zero effect on net pay.
Here is a recent NBER paper by An, Garin and Kovak looking at the effects of the Seattle law:
We find that the minimum pay law raised delivery pay per task….At the same time, the policy led to a reduction in the number of tasks completed by highly attached incumbent drivers (but not an increase in exit from delivery work), completely offsetting increased pay per task and leading to zero effect on monthly earnings. We find evidence that drivers experienced more unpaid idle time and longer distances driven between tasks…Using a simple model of the labor market for platform delivery drivers, we show that our evidence is consistent with free entry of drivers into the delivery market driving down the task-finding rate until expected earnings return to their pre-reform level.
All of this is a general result of the Happy Meal Fallacy.
India’s AI wedding buffet
Shruti Rajagopalan surveys much of the AI policy debate in India. Excerpt:
If there is a single domain where India’s AI ambitions will succeed or fail, it is energy. And energy in India is not a technology problem. It is a political economy problem, arguably the most intractable one the country faces.
India’s peak electricity demand hit 250 GW in May 2024, up from 143 GW a decade earlier. The IEA forecasts 6.3 percent annual growth through 2027, faster than any major economy. Cooling demand alone could reach 140 GW of peak load by 2030. One number captures the trajectory. For each incremental degree in daily average temperature, peak demand now rises by more than 7 GW. In 2019 the figure was half that. India is getting hotter, richer, and more electricity-hungry simultaneously.
State-controlled distribution companies have accumulated $83.7 billion in debt because energy prices have been politically distorted for decades. Over 50 GW of renewable capacity sits underutilized. About 60 GW is stranded behind inadequate transmission. The shortage is financial and infrastructural, not resource-based. Without reforming distribution pricing, governance, and grid investment ($50 billion estimated by 2035), new renewable capacity will not become reliable electricity. It will become another line item on a DISCOM balance sheet no one wants to read.
India’s electricity reaches consumers through 72 distribution companies, 44 of them state-owned, collectively the most financially distressed utilities in the world. Accumulated losses stood at ₹6.92 trillion ($76.89 billion) as of March 2024, rising every year despite five government bailouts since 2002.
Substantive throughout.