McKinsey on food delivery: “Even as the food-delivery ecosystem continues to expand, its economic structure is still evolving. Considerations such as brand, real estate, operating efficiency, breadth of offerings, and changing consumer habits will determine which stakeholders win or lose as the industry develops. Potential regulatory constraints, including possible changes to how drivers are compensated, will figure into the reshuffling. And while the industry has experienced explosive growth during the global pandemic, delivery platforms, with few exceptions, have remained unprofitable. As DoorDash chief operating officer Christopher Payne told the Wall Street Journal recently, “This is a cost-intensive business that is low-margin and scale driven.”
Ruchir Sharma: “Merkel has defied the normal evolution of power, which is that leaders grow stale with years in office and leave on a low. Those who endure tend to grow arrogant or complacent over time, and get caught in scandal or are overtaken by events. Most lose momentum and support, usually well before their first decade is up…The consistent knock against Merkel is that she was a bore from the start, a timid reformer who left a long to-do list, from energy supply to digital competitiveness. But sins of policy omission should not overshadow the human tendencies she rose above: pride, greed, sloth. Power corrupts and time erodes but neither had much effect on Merkel. Go back more than a century and it’s rare to find any major leader who ruled so long but went out on such a high.”
Paul Milgrom (2020 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics): “We think water rights are going to be important. I don’t have a design in mind for that yet, because the legal rights are a big part of the problem, determining exactly what rights farmers have to their water, to the groundwater, to the surface water, how surface water recharges the ground. If you extract too much groundwater and cause the structure to collapse, then you can destroy it permanently, and then it’ll never recharge. How do you create markets that are viable, and so that we have sustainable water use? Just like we had to change rights in radio spectrum to make it work, we’ll probably have to make some adaptation of rights in the water markets, too. Just like in radio spectrum, when we come up with the design, it’s going to need to have good bones because it will be changed, because there’ll be political interests that will force us to make changes.”
