Raghuram Rajan: “To pursue such services-led growth, India requires a different emphasis. The push on physical infrastructure will offer meagre returns if we do not recognise and remedy the damage done to our children’s schooling, which has suffered so much in the pandemic. Similarly, our democracy should not be seen as a constraint to be sidestepped but as something to build on – for instance, by protecting the privacy of data, and limiting the government’s ability to intrude on it. India’s image of being respectful towards its own minorities should be restored so that the world wants to trade with, and invest in, us, without hesitation; and people everywhere want to visit, study, or work, here. Put simply, rather than attempting to mimic the Chinese path, India needs a truly Indian vision.”
Rita McGrath on loonshots: “Rather than looking for a specific return on investment or net present value number, what we are after at the project selection stage is the “shape” of the opportunity to be explored. We can think of this in terms of option value – the commitment of a modest downside investment to identify (and potentially capture) the value of an enormous upside. Specific indicators I look at: Is the champion for the idea truly convinced that it might work? If it does, will it change the contours of what is possible, potentially sparking an inflection point? Are the naysayers reflecting the constraints of the previous paradigm? Is it really new?”
Moisés Naím: “Like populism, polarization has always existed. And I claim that polarization is like cholesterol; you have good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. Good polarization, which is democratic, is when different groups that are polarized in their politics interact and compete and then eventually resolve their competition in the electoral arena. And one of the groups gets to be the winner or create a coalition with others. And so that’s good democratic cholesterol. Bad cholesterol, or polarization, paralyzes decision making and creates rifts that make it very hard to govern, very hard to maintain the social contract, and very hard to make decisions—and most decisions governments need to make are for the long term. The decisions require an agreement for long-term outcomes. Bad polarization is a political illness, in which you get a situation in which you don’t treat a contender that has different ideas as a compatriot. You treat that person as illegitimate.”
