FT: “Moderna’s pivot to tackle Covid paid off. Within 11 months it had developed and manufactured a vaccine called Spikevax, which saved millions of lives, helped the world emerge from lockdown and transformed the US company into a $60bn biopharma group. This success, and similar efforts by German rival BioNTech and Pfizer, proved the potential of messenger RNA — a genetic material that transports messages from our DNA to protein-making cells within the body — to deliver vaccines. Moderna is now developing dozens of others, targeting illnesses from HIV to cancer.” Moderna’s chair Noubar Afeyan on his first leadership lesson: “Hiring the best people is important, but getting the best out of people is the difference maker at great companies. When I first started, I was very focused on intelligence, education and experience, as opposed to innate qualities like creativity, bravery, curiosity, team spirit. You need both, obviously, but inspiring people to lead and perform in ways they didn’t know they were capable of leads to great teams, and big breakthroughs.”
Ajay Shah: “Why did private investment growth subside in the post-2011 period? We need to identify and address the binding constraints. Vijay Kelkar and I wrote a book on this. Our sense is that the private sector has been deterred by an interventionist state, policy risk, faults of public systems, such as the tax system, and the lack of rule of law followed by coercive state agencies, such as regulators. The cost of moving raw materials to a remote location in India and then taking a sub-assembly out is no longer the bottleneck. The problems lie in the tax system, the capital controls, the legal risk, the sudden policy changes, and the fears associated with the agencies and regulators. Alongside this, we must wonder why employment is low, but the wage remains high in many pockets of the population. Perhaps the welfare programmes are distorting labour supply. An array of non-economic factors hamper women’s labour supply. If women’s labour supply could surge, it would help reduce wages and foster more investment and jobs.”
George Will on how millennials became aggressively illiberal, censorious young adults: “Immersed in social media that have “contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them,” unable to “think beyond the clique and the schoolyard,” they pay the severe “opportunity costs of digital diversions” — “mind-maturing activities” forgone, such as learning a language, mastering a musical instrument, following the real politics of governance. Books are the best “reprieve from the bombardment” of the digital age, but the bombardment makes young people “bibliophobes,” drawing them into “the maelstrom of youth amusements.”” George Will is quoting Mark Bauerlein, who wrote “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30)” in 2008.
