“India’s institutional footprint in higher education has expanded considerably over the decade.

The number of universities increased from 760 in 2014-15 to 1,289 in 2023-24, registering a growth of 69.6 per cent. The number of colleges rose from 38,498 to 48,246, an increase of 25.3 per cent, while standalone institutions increased from 12,276 to 15,221, registering growth of about 24 per cent…

The Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) also improved steadily, rising from 23.7 per cent in 2014-15 to 29.5 per cent in 2022-23 and 30 per cent in 2023-24. The rise represents increased participation in higher education and progress towards the NEP 2020 target of achieving a 50 per cent GER by 2035…

Female participation has emerged as a major area of progress in India’s higher education system.

Female enrolment increased by 42.2 per cent, from 1.57 crore in 2014-15 to 2.24 crore in 2023-24, outpacing the growth in total enrolment…

The Gender Parity Index (GPI) in higher education also improved from 0.92 in 2014-15 to 1.08 in 2023-24. Among SC students, GPI increased from 0.91 to 1.11, while among ST students it rose from 0.81 to 1.08.

A GPI of one represents parity between male and female participation, while a figure above one indicates higher female participation.”

From DD India.

Summary: Human progress depends not only on discovering knowledge but also on preserving and transmitting it. From stone tablets to printed books and solid-state drives, storage media have become vastly lighter, denser, and faster. Over five thousand years, humanity has increased data density by trillions, making accumulated knowledge cheaper and more accessible than ever.

The astonishing conveniences and prosperity of modern civilization rest on two pillars: our mastery of energy and our relentless discovery of knowledge. Yet, discovering new knowledge alone was not enough for civilizational progress. To accumulate and build on discoveries across generations, humanity needed a way to encode knowledge onto a medium outside of our collective nervous system. From etching hieroglyphs into stone to digitally controlling electrons in modern solid-state drives (SSDs), humanity’s advancement in creating affordable, lightweight, and reliable data storage is astonishing.

Before the invention of written language, people usually transmitted knowledge orally. Fables and other knowledge had to be memorized and accurately recited to pass from one generation to the next. Transmitting knowledge this way, where data is stored only in the human mind, risks significant data loss. When Joe Huntergatherer, the only member of the tribe who had memorized the story of the Great Elder, was killed by an arrow, that story was forever lost. The fragility of oral transmission is why almost all human history, spanning hundreds of thousands of years, is lost to the erosive sands of time.

The invention of writing, the ability to etch, carve, or paint characters onto clay tablets, stone, and cave walls, allowed humans, for the first time, to store information outside the brain. The first clay inscriptions with readable script date from ~3,400 B.C. So long as another person was trained to interpret the inscribed hieroglyphs, characters, or letters, that knowledge was no longer subject to fallible human memory. However, stone inscriptions had relatively low information density.

To create a formula to measure the data density of storage media over time, I convert characters (letters and punctuation) into bits of information, then divide by the number of grams of matter needed to encode that information. A bit is a single binary digit, a zero or one, and roughly eight bits make up a single character. (View these calculations not as precise figures, but as order-of-magnitude approximations, since data density varies considerably from stone to book to drive.)

Let’s begin with stone engravings, using the famous Rosetta Stone as an example. The Rosetta Stone weighs roughly 750kg and contains the same text in three languages: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs on top, Egyptian Demotic script in the middle, and Ancient Greek on the bottom. To estimate the data density, I focused on the Greek portion of the stone, which accounts for roughly 1/3 of the stone’s total weight (about 250kg).

No source I could find provided a reliable count of the surviving Greek characters, so I calculated it twice independently. First, I compared a 19th-century publication’s line-by-line count with a high-resolution photo of the stone, which puts the original, undamaged text at about ~7,290 characters. Adjusting that figure for the approximately 20 percent of the stone that’s damaged or missing gives an estimated ~5,832 surviving characters. Second, I ran an AI optical character count directly off the damaged stone, which returned ~5,800. The two methods are close, so I use ~5,800 characters going forward.

Since a single character of text equates to about 8 bits of information, the surviving 5,800 characters store 46,400 bits of data. Divided by the 250kg weight of the Greek portion, we arrive at a data density for the Rosetta Stone of ~0.19 bits/g.

With the discovery of agriculture and the rise of agrarian civilizations, the demands for knowledge storage and transmission media grew. The human population expanded, and a small but notable fraction began to congregate in small towns. As social and economic complexity grew, so did administration, trade, tax, and legal systems. Humans needed an easy way to perform and store the outputs of mathematical calculations, record taxes, and codify rules and regulations for personal and business conduct. Agrarian civilization, in short, demanded a storage medium with higher information density and faster read/write speeds (throughput). Enter papyrus, parchment, and paper.

Early forms of “paper” included papyrus and animal-skin materials like parchment and vellum. Papyrus was made from the papyrus plant, which grew in the Nile Delta in ancient Egypt. To make papyrus, strips of the plant were cut, laid into overlapping layers, and then pressed and dried into sheets. Papyrus was first used for writing as early as 2,500 B.C. and was one of the primary writing materials for thousands of years. Compared with stone, papyrus was far more data-dense; we could fit more characters on a given surface area, the substrate was lighter, and it could be folded or rolled into a scroll.

Parchment, made from cleaned and stretched animal skin, was developed long after papyrus and, thanks to its superior durability, quickly became the medium of choice for important documents. The Magna Carta, made from parchment, contains about 3,500 words or ~25,000 characters, which equates to about 200,000 bits of information. Medieval parchment weighs about 100–180 g/m², meaning the Magna Carta weighs roughly 50 grams. Using our formula, the Magna Carta’s data density comes out to around 4,000 bits/g.

Even the Magna Carta pales in comparison to modern paper with printed text. “Paper”, the flexible plant-fiber sheets we know of today, was invented in China as far back as the 2nd century B.C.. It took centuries for it to spread outside China. Paper could be made thinner and lighter than parchment or papyrus, and the printing press made it possible to fit more words on a sheet. The King James Bible, for instance, contains around 789,000 words. That’s roughly 4.3 million characters, or 34,400,000 bits of data. A standard hardcover Bible weighs about 1 kg. Even if we conservatively include the weight of the binding, the information density comes to ~34,400 bits/g, about 8.6 times the density of the Magna Carta.

Our eyesight is limited, and text can only be so small before we can no longer resolve it. The next revolution in data storage came in the form of more exotic “machine-readable” media. Examples include magnetic storage such as hard drives and magnetic tape. Here, data is encoded on magnetized material directly as bits of information – ones and zeros – by carefully controlling the polarity of magnetic domains. This technology was a wondrous breakthrough, and it’s still improving. Today, for a few hundred dollars, you can purchase a hard drive that can store tens of terabytes of data! A commercially available 10TB HDD that weighs ~1500 g can store ~80 trillion bits of data, a data density of ~53 billion bits/g, 1.54 million times higher than the King James Bible.

Yet today, hard disk drives already feel antiquated. Instead, most phones, desktops, tablets, and external drives use solid-state storage (SSDs). It’s easy to see why SSDs have become so dominant in recent years; they are ideal for mobile devices. They have no moving parts, are more durable, use less energy, and still have higher data density. Solid-state media store data by trapping electrons in a grid of floating-gate transistors to represent bits of information. A commercially available 4TB (~32 trillion bits) SSD weighs 32 grams; a data density of 1 trillion bits/g, about 19 times higher than a comparable hard drive, or about 5.3 trillion times the data density of the Rosetta Stone!

Commensurate with improvements in data density came higher read/write speeds, or “throughput.” People read about 4 words a second and with an average word length of around 5 characters; that’s about 160 bits per second. A professional stone carver might be able to write up to 20 letters an hour, or about 0.044 bits per second. Paper and paper-like media dramatically increased writing speed. A human writes about 1.1 characters per second, or roughly 8.8 bits per second – 200 times faster than carving into stone, though still slower than reading. Printing machines, of course, could print text far faster than any human could write by hand.

But none of this compares to magnetic storage, such as modern hard drives, where read/write speeds (which are similar) are currently about 4.4 billion bits per second. SSDs are faster still, reaching read/write speeds up to 112 billion bits per second. That’s about 700 million times faster than reading, and nearly 13 billion times faster than writing by hand, roughly 2.5 trillion times faster than carving into stone!

In roughly five thousand years, we’ve pushed the density of our storage media up by a factor of trillions, and the leaps keep coming faster. It took five millennia to get from stone to the printed page, representing a 180,000-fold gain in data density. In the seventy years since the invention of the hard drive, and with SSDs, humanity has multiplied that density by another 29 million times. For perspective, the text of the King James Bible carved in stone would weigh around 185 tons, nearly as much as a Boeing 747 (without fuel). On an SSD, it weighs less than a grain of sand.

Summary: Marcus Aurelius faced temptations that feel surprisingly modern: comfort, excess, distraction, and uncertainty about how to use freedom well. His reflections offer one way to think about the psychological challenges of abundance, including the difficulty of balancing pleasure, purpose, and responsibility. As prosperity makes scarcity less central to everyday life, people must find new sources of meaning in work, relationships, service, and self-directed goals.

“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly,” Marcus Aurelius instructed himself, remember that “I am rising to the work of a human being.”

The most powerful man in the world did not want to get out of bed.

Book Five of Meditations begins with the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher arguing with himself under the covers. Staying warm is more pleasant, he admits. Rest is necessary too. But nature has placed limits on rest, just as it has on eating and drinking. The problem, Marcus observes, is that he exceeds those limits when pleasure is involved and “stoppest short” when there is work to do.

Strip away the second-century diction, and this could be a transcript of someone bargaining with an alarm clock before a morning workout. Marcus tells himself to get up, stop overeating, do his job, and quit pretending that comfort is the purpose of life. Two thousand years later, we buy books and download podcasts that tell us the same things.

That helps explain Stoicism’s extraordinary revival. Annual sales of Meditations reportedly rose from around 12,000 copies in 2012 to 100,000 in 2019. Modern Stoic writer Ryan Holiday has sold millions of books to an audience spanning professional athletes, politicians, technology executives, and ordinary people trying to exercise before work. An ancient philosophy of self-command has found a mass market because the problems of self-command have found a mass market.

Marcus did not live an easy life. He ruled during frontier wars and the Antonine Plague. Several of his children died young. Much of Meditations was written to and for himself, apparently while on military campaign. But he also experienced a class of surprisingly recognizable “first-world problems” back when they were much rarer: too much food, too little movement, diffuse anxiety, irritation with other people, uncertain purpose, and the temptation to let comfort consume a life.

First-world problems were once emperor-world problems.

Marcus practiced a form of what psychologists today call cognitive reappraisal: changing an emotional response by changing how one thinks about something. When confronted with an elaborate meal, he reminded himself it is just a dead animal. Falernian wine, among the most prized luxuries in Rome, is “only a little grape juice.” Imperial purple, Rome’s finest clothing material, is just sheep’s wool stained with shellfish blood. The exercise, he explained in Book Six, was to strip away the prestige surrounding an object and see it clearly.

Marcus needed the Stoic operation because he inhabited an unusual ecology of evolutionary mismatch, much like that found in the developed world today.

For nearly all human history, calories were costly, physical exertion was unavoidable, and rest conserved energy that might be needed later. Today, the time prices of food are so low that many can afford a day’s worth of calories in under an hour of labor, all while working sitting down in an indoor climate-controlled environment. Many of us pay for gyms and manufacture strenuous movements that resemble pointless labor because ordinary survival no longer supplies enough activity.

The same principle extends beyond food and exercise. Humans evolved to monitor threats in a local environment. For most of history, only emperors and a small governing elite received a steady stream of dispatches from distant lands. Couriers and envoys brought Marcus news of wars, revolts, epidemics, and political intrigue from across the known world. Now a phone or TV news channel supplies every catastrophe on Earth in real time. And in economic life, we apply evolved intuitions built for small-group scarcity and zero-sum rivalry that fail to scale to modern global markets.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes foresaw these problems of prosperity. Writing during the Great Depression, he predicted that technological improvement and compound growth could raise living standards to such a degree that we would be free from material scarcity. Once the absolute needs were met, humanity would confront what he called its “real, permanent problem”: how to use freedom from pressing economic cares “to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

Brink Lindsey borrows Keynes’s phrase for his recent book, The Permanent Problem. Lindsey argues that wealthy liberal democracies now occupy an awkward territory between mass plenty and mass flourishing. Food, shelter, safety, education, and medicine are more available than ever, but people still need status, purpose, belonging, and the sense that their efforts matter.

Imperial wealth solved the economic problem for one man nearly eighteen centuries before markets and technology began solving it for whole populations. Once freed from many ordinary constraints, Marcus encountered the permanent problem early. What should he do with comfort? How much pleasure was enough? Why work when others could work for him? How could he remain useful when status had removed the need to prove himself useful?

Critics sometimes find it amusing that a philosophy of indifference to wealth attracts wealthy executives. But Stoicism’s new popularity is less paradoxical than it seems. Stoicism developed among people living close to power and abundance because power and abundance exposed problems that scarcity had concealed. The philosophy of an emperor becomes more relevant when ordinary people begin living, in important respects, like emperors.

Poverty has not disappeared. But the characteristic problems of affluent societies increasingly concern regulating access rather than enduring absence: eating less of the food surrounding us, moving more despite labor-saving technology, limiting entertainment, directing attention, choosing among options, and finding commitments strong enough to organize freedom.

Stoicism offers a useful set of psychological tools for the task of finding meaning and navigating abundance. Its distinction between what is and is not under our control redirects threat monitoring toward action. Its practice of stripping luxuries down to their physical components weakens the stories that amplify craving. Voluntary discomfort teaches the nervous system that cold, hunger, exertion, and inconvenience are tolerable. Gratitude resets the comparison point against which abundance otherwise becomes invisible. Remembering death makes us appreciate life’s finitude.

But Stoicism was never only a collection of tricks for feeling calmer or becoming more productive. Marcus did not drag himself from bed merely to clear his imperial inbox. He was rising to fulfill a human purpose, which for a Stoic meant acting rationally, socially, and for the common good. Meaning came from duty voluntarily embraced and service to something beyond appetite.

That fits the evolutionary account. Humans are not built only to consume calories and conserve energy. We also evolved to cooperate, master difficult skills, earn esteem, care for kin, reciprocate favors, contribute to groups, and navigate moral concerns that sometimes pull in different directions. The pragmatic response is to choose ecologies that activate the better angels of our nature: difficult work with visible progress, physical exertion, face-to-face relationships, responsibility for others, and problems whose solutions improve a community. Realistic progress works with evolved psychology instead of pretending human beings are blank slates.

Historically, only a tiny elite had enough food to struggle with gluttony, enough leisure to struggle with lethargy, and enough freedom to struggle with what freedom was for. Marcus repeatedly reminded himself that pleasure, technology, wealth, or leisure were not vices themselves. The problem was surrendering judgment to them. He could enjoy the palace without becoming its slave. Likewise, we can enjoy the supermarket, smartphone, washing machine, and weekend, while recognizing the new, preferable challenges that abundance creates.

Emperor-world problems are still problems, but it is a triumph that they are increasingly part of ordinary life.

Summary: Wealth creation is not inherently zero-sum: fortunes can grow through innovation, investment, and expanding prosperity rather than by taking from others. Yet human psychology remains highly sensitive to relative status, often valuing rank over absolute gains and even accepting personal losses to reduce perceived inequality. This tendency can misclassify productive success as exploitation, turning economic comparisons into moral and political conflict.

This summer Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in history. Supporters celebrated the trillions in market value and the thousands of jobs he helped create pioneering electric cars and reusable rockets. Critics treated the milestone as a referendum on inequality. Bernie Sanders invoked the “greed and power of a ruling class.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren renewed demands to tax extreme wealth. Then SpaceX shares fell back below their IPO price and Musk’s fortune dropped to a humble $850 billion, down from its brief peak of $1.4 trillion.

The decline provoked almost no commentary. When Musk “gained” hundreds of billions in unrealized wealth, politicians spoke as if the money had been taken from everyone else. When more than half a trillion dollars disappeared, no one proposed that wealth had been restored to the public. If anything, millions of shareholders, including blue-collar employees holding equity and the retirement accounts of ordinary Americans, lost money.

Economists can explain the difference between income and equity, paper wealth and spendable cash. But the real dispute is psychological. Humans dislike inequality even when a rising tide lifts all boats. If every centibillionaire donated over 99 percent of their net worth to charity and kept a single billion, people would still lament that billionaires exist.

Wealth can be created. That is why the economy grows every year and why most people can afford basic goods like refrigerators that were once luxuries. But status is zero-sum. If one person moves up in rank, everyone below moves down by definition.

Social psychology experiments consistently show that people care more about rank than wealth. Many will take a smaller income if it places them above their neighbors over a larger one that places them below, and their health and happiness track relative standing more than absolute income.

People will even pay to close a gap. When one person proposes how to split $100, and the other can only accept it or kill the deal for both, a lopsided offer is routinely rejected, the responder giving up a real $20 to stop a stranger from pocketing $80. The asymmetry appears early in development. Five-year-old children will even sacrifice some of their own reward to preserve an advantage over a peer.

Envy is not a free-floating vice. It is a system for detecting consequential differences in rank and resources. Humans evolved in groups that were both cooperative and competitive. Food sharing and reciprocal exchange produced mutual gains, but access to land, allies, and mates was limited, and a rival’s rise could shrink one’s own share. Monitoring who had more was adaptive.

The trouble begins when the system cannot distinguish extraction from creation. A fortune won by inventing something useful should be celebrated, not interpreted as a threat.

Musk does not hold a trillion dollars in food, houses, or currency. He owns stakes in companies whose prices reflect what investors expect them to produce. Comparisons between one man’s fortune and the combined wealth of whole populations translate an opaque balance sheet into a familiar problem: one member of the band appears to have claimed the communal kill.

Zero-sum belief also converts personal comparison into coalitional morality. A man who resents a richer neighbor feels small. A man who resents a class of exploiters feels righteous. The English writer George Orwell noticed the pattern: socialism is often motivated more by hatred of the rich than by love of the poor.

Musk may regain his fourth comma or shed another few hundred billion. His rank can swing violently without any matching change in everyone else’s circumstances. That is why the gains produce outrage and the losses silence. The number is being read as a status score.