NYTimes: “When we talk about optimism, it’s often easy to oversimplify it as having a relentlessly upbeat outlook. Optimists, we imagine, spend their time gazing at the bright side of life through rose-colored glasses, sipping glasses half-full of good cheer. But the science suggests that optimism is best understood not as an unchanging attitude but as a pattern of responses — which taken together dictate how we view our prospects. Being optimistic is more complicated than blithely thinking, “Everything will turn out fine.” Optimism and pessimism, it turns out, are all about the stories we tell ourselves after both our successes and our failures.”
Art Carden: “Public choice theory—the economic theory of politics, or a body of work that analyzes political decision-making with the same tools we use to study market decision-making—has been derided as cynical if not outright immoral. Such criticism sells it short, though, and it fails to recognize the subtlety of public choice assumptions and analysis. Anyone can tell a story about how things would be better if people were not fools or knaves. What makes public choice interesting, however, is that it does not rely on assumptions of foolishness or knavery to arrive at its conclusions. It only needs to posit that people respond to incentives. The rest, as the Talmudic scholar Hillel might say, is commentary.”
FT: “We should think of honour as a way of making sure we are behaving in a way that is worthy of respect, rather than as a value system in itself. “The psychology of honour attaches itself to all sorts of values, and sometimes those values are good, and sometimes they’re not,” [Kwame Anthony] Appiah says. But on the whole, “when you have a culture where people want to do the right thing because it’s worthy of respect, people will behave better”…Behaving honourably means doing the right thing even — or especially — when we will not personally gain from it. A society with this approach would surely be a better one. We need to learn to honour honour again.”
Gulzar [1 2]: “I believe that the biggest challenge for India in the years ahead is to manage the quality of its economic growth and create jobs to absorb its youthful population…It’s on jobs that the structural transformation pathway is important. Specifically the nature and quality of the structural transformation….[India] needs to spread industrialisation and productive economic activity beyond the current few urban cores to cover the hinterland areas. At least some of its currently numerous sub-optimally productive urban centres (largely parasitic economies dependent on government activities, like many state capital cities are) should embrace productive industrial activities, especially of the labour intensive kind…The country needs to geographically spread out its industrial base to ensure broad-based economic growth. This requires industrial policies that promotes large anchor industries which can provide the basis for knowledge spill-overs and eco-system development; labour intensive manufacturing sectors like textiles, footwear, toys etc; agriculture secondary and tertiary processing etc. Equally, if not more importantly, it needs to address the poor quality of its public services especially in health and education.”
FT: “There are basically two investment models in venture capital. The first is the Greater Value Theory model, where a VC invests in a start-up that is able to create value through sustainable high-growth, and hence can IPO or exit through acquisition during good times or bad. The second is the Greater Fool Theory model, where a VC invests in a loss-hungry company that is able to, through a certain amount of hand-waving, convince retail investors, bigger investment firms or large corporations to facilitate an exit through IPO or acquisition. The problem with the Greater Value Theory model is that it’s actually really hard to find and invest in high-growth start-ups that generate durable and outsized returns. The problem with the Greater Fool Theory model is that the off-ramps (retail investors and large companies) are closing.”
