Jonathan Woetzel & Mahima Chugh: “New McKinsey Global Institute research finds that one of every two upper-middle-income and above households is expected to be in Asia, and one of every two dollars of global consumption growth is likely to occur in the region. In short, miss Asia and you could miss half the world’s consumption growth story over the next decade, worth $10 trillion, with India accounting for $1.8 trillion. In a decade, India may boast half a billion more middle-income consumers than it does today; by 2030, 55% of India’s population could belong to what we call the ‘consuming class’—spending more than $11 a day in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms and therefore able to spend on not only basics like food and housing, but also discretionary items. This would be more than double today’s population share at 24%, and six times the share of 9% in 2000, a remarkable upward shift. The story does not stop there. The top of India’s income pyramid is expanding. The proportion of consumers in the two highest income tiers of the consuming class (spending $30-70, and more than $70 a day) could double to 20% by 2030.”
WSJ: “For most of the 40 years after Deng Xiaoping first unleashed economic reforms in China, Communist Party leaders gave market forces wider room to flourish. That opening helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and created trillions of dollars in wealth, but also led to rampant corruption and eroded the ideological basis for continued Communist rule. In Mr. Xi’s opinion, private capital now has been allowed to run amok, menacing the party’s legitimacy, officials familiar with his priorities say…Mr. Xi isn’t planning to eradicate market forces, the Journal examination indicates. But he appears to want a state in which the party does more to steer flows of money, sets tighter parameters for entrepreneurs and investors and their ability to make profits, and exercises even more control over the economy than now.”
How to Make Smart Decisions Without Getting Lucky by Shane Parish: “Few things will change your trajectory in life or business as much as learning to make effective decisions. Yet no one really teaches us what it means to make consistently high-quality decisions.The decision-making principles in this article are both practical and time-tested. They work in the real world.”
