Rajesh Jain

The Economist: “Mr Xi’s strategy is best understood as a weighty bet that China is on track to become the world’s centre of innovation over the next decade. A shift towards homegrown tech is altering the geographical layout of China’s manufacturing machine. New investment and migration are being rerouted from rich coastal hubs to inland cities such as Zhuzhou. A second feature is an unprecedented rise in the number of new tech companies. The government is nurturing thousands of groups, big and small, in the fields of data science, network security and robotics. Mr Xi and his advisers are also taking firmer control over markets. Their ability to direct capital flows is already evident in how private-equity groups invest in China…Mr Xi is building an incubator state: an economy that relies heavily on government nourishment to create productivity gains with domestic research and technology. In doing so he is also signalling a premature break with the technological convergence that has served China well since the 1980s.”

Matthew Hennessey: “If a society can bear to hear the unmistakable sound of what the mid-20th-century Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called the “perennial gale of creative destruction,” then it can be pretty sure its markets are working as intended.” [via CafeHayek] Donald Boudreaxu: “Markets aren’t set into operation by anyone’s design or intent, so strictly speaking there is no intention – no purpose – that markets can be said to fulfill or to disappoint. But because what most people want from markets is the provision of high and rising standards of living for ordinary people, when and insofar as markets make such a provision, markets are operating as we ‘want’ them to operate.”

Shane Parish: “Today, not tomorrow. What you avoid today is harder to do tomorrow. Today’s choices become tomorrow’s position. If you put off things today, they don’t magically disappear tomorrow. They just get added to the list of things you want to do. Don’t wait till tomorrow. Tomorrow is where dreams go to die.”

Roosevelt Montás: “One can begin by recognizing that the present has a past; that the categories, the institutions, the ethical norms, political procedures, economic structures of society—all of that has a history. And understanding that history is the most empowering kind of education if you want to alter, to intervene in, to adapt the current world. To understand that past means looking at its sources, and its sources are sometimes called “the classics,” sometimes called “great books.” This doesn’t only mean poetry—it also means documents, debates, and philosophical treatises. But there is a whole kind of humanist tradition of debate, expression, and artistic exploration that lies at the foundation of our society. The best way to educate a human being to be a conscious, effective agent in our society, is to acquaint them with that history, and there are no better tools than the tradition that’s associated with classics. Now, it’s a tradition that we’re always revising, we’re always discovering new classics and we’re always finding new ways of reading them. We’re always discovering new questions and new information that contextualize what they mean. All of that is salutary and necessary and part of what the classics, in fact, prompt and give an occasion for.”

Veronique de Rugy: “inflation isn’t caused by corporate greed. Readers of this column know by now that it’s caused by government’s excessive deficit spending, fueled in part by loose monetary policy. Therefore, getting rid of inflation requires an increase of interest rates theoretically higher than the current inflation, along with some overdue fiscal discipline. Reforms like deregulation that promote faster growth in the supply of goods and services would also help. What we don’t need, but what we’ll likely get, is more government spending and more debt accumulation. The result will only fuel the inflation fire.”

WSJ: on the everyday patriotism of diverse democracies: “Civic principles matter, but love of country in the modern West is largely based on affection for ordinary life, from food and holiday customs to sports teams and local geography.”

The Economist on innovation hubs: “Younger innovation hubs, including Bengaluru, São Paulo and Singapore, look a bit more alike in that their focus is regional rather than global. Instead of breaking new ground they often adapt existing business models to local market conditions. As disposable incomes rise in new regions, consumers become willing to pay for similar “technification of services”, says Peng Ong of Monk’s Hill Ventures, a Singaporean VC firm. Anand Daniel of Accel, a Silicon Valley VC firm, calls this the “X of Y” playbook. And so Flipkart (e-commerce) is the Amazon of India; Nubank (fintech) is the Revolut of Brazil; Grab (ride-hailing) is the Uber of South-East Asia. This helps explain why 70% of South-East Asian unicorns and 80% of Latin American ones are either in fintech or consumer internet. Still, hyper-localisation means each hub is distinct.”

FT on Baillie Gifford’s James Anderson: “Anderson runs through some of the big academic influences on Baillie Gifford. There’s Hendrik Bessembinder, a professor at Arizona State University, who found that over many decades the vast majority of stock market returns come from a tiny percentage of business. Another is work by the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, which demonstrated that today’s knowledge-based companies tend to exhibit increasing returns to scale: that is, returns of the winners have become exponential rather than linear. He says that all of this emboldened Baillie Gifford to try to identify as many of the “outlier” companies as possible — very different to most fund managers who have a diversified portfolio of bets.”

Russ Roberts: ” I think most people think–when they hear the word ‘liberal’ education–most people don’t know what liberal arts education is. It’s usually misunderstood. But, what I mean by it is the study of philosophy, literature, and history. But, it’s more than that. It’s grappling with the great ideas that are embodied in those fields in a way that is different than you might learn, again, a preprofessional skill. And, I think it’s easy to misunderstand what those fields are about.”

James Pethokoukis: “What are America’s greatest economic assets? Certainly our democratic capitalist system — democracy, rule of law, property rights, the price system — would be at the top of that list. But then what? Lots of candidates, from our vast natural resources to our world-leading university system to our ability to attract the very best of global talent. And, of course, the existence of some assets affects others. Our largest technology companies are the economy’s crown jewels, but they wouldn’t exist if not for some of the above factors, among others (immigration + universities + property rights + California weather). Here’s another asset: the American venture capital industry.”

Martin Casado: “Ten years ago, if you started a software project, you really didn’t know if you were going to complete it. It was more art than engineering. Certain people could do it and certain people couldn’t, and it was hard to outsource. Now, with all of the tooling built around it, cloud, mobile, containers, all of these things…if you start a software project, it will almost certainly be completed, and it will be done better and faster than before. The question has moved from can you build it to how effective will it be. We never ask founders if they can build software anymore. We know they can. It is more, how does software use data to create features and differentiation? If you assume anyone can build software and build it with success, then the next question is who can extract the most interesting features? It often becomes a data problem, much more math, statistics and science than engineering. It feels to me like the engineering problem is mature and we are now in the realm of math, science, statistics.”

FT reviews “How Religion Evolved”: “The first [urge] is our need to bond. Humans are highly social animals but there are ceilings above which the usual means of primate bonding cannot go. There’s only so much time in a day to groom one another. In the absence of such mechanisms, our ancestors developed certain shared practices — singing, dancing, eating, storytelling — which, when done ritually or in synchrony, have the same bonding effect. Although many evolutionary biologists claim that religion is an unintended consequence of evolution, Dunbar is clear that religious practices improve the individual’s “fitness”. “[A]ctive involvement in religion both makes you feel happier and provides you with a level of support that helps you cope.” In effect, one of the origins (and engines) of religion lies in its capacity to keep us healthy and together.”

Alexander Salter: “By his own admission, Matthew Hennessey is an unlikely author of an economics book. He has no experience in business, accounting, or finance. Until fairly recently, he was quite intimidated by the dismal science. Yet he’s managed to become the Wall Street Journal’s deputy op-ed editor, so he likely knows a thing or two about markets. Over the course of 200 entertaining pages, he proves it. Visible Hand is the elementary economics book we’ve been waiting for. I don’t mean it’s an Econ 101 text of the kind college freshmen wearily slog through. It’s something much more important: an everyman’s introduction to how property rights, prices, and profits and losses make the world go ‘round. I hope we can get copies of this book in the hands of every high school senior in the country.”