Prithwiraj Choudhury, Ina Ganguli & Patrick Gaul: “We study migration in the right tail of the talent distribution using a novel dataset of Indian high school students taking the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), a college entrance exam used for admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). We find a high incidence of migration after students complete college: among the top 1,000 scorers on the exam, 36% have migrated abroad, rising to 62% for the top 100 scorers. We next document that students who attended the original “Top 5” Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) were 5 percentage points more likely to migrate for graduate school compared to equally talented students who studied in other institutions. We explore two mechanisms for these patterns: signaling, for which we study migration after one university suddenly gained the IIT designation; and alumni networks, using information on the location of IIT alumni in U.S. computer science departments.”
Jennifer Ackerman: “To my mind, the real gift of an owl’s stealth is the example it sets for how to be in the world. Owls invite us to move through life more quietly, to still ourselves, to notice sights and sounds that might otherwise go unnoticed. For owls, quiet invisibility is a defense or disguise. For us, it’s a privilege, one that — if we’re lucky — may yield an owl sighting.”
Jony Ive: “For many people, the creative process can be an unfamiliar one. So people often try to institutionalize the process, as if, like many activities, you can just review it on a spreadsheet. They want to say, if we apply more people and you give us this amount of time, this is where we’ll end up. Now, there is a bunch of engineering activity that’s like that. In software, for instance, when you’re trying to fix bugs, there can be some quite predictable parts of the process. In general, however, I think there has to be acceptance and engagement with the fact that the creative process is fabulously unpredictable. A great idea cannot be predicted. You can increase the probability of having a good idea, which is the reason I pay so much attention to the creative process. It’s also partly for my sanity, to deal with that feeling of, “Oh, I’m here again, and I’m staring at a blank piece of paper.” I take enormous encouragement, and massive solace, in reminding myself how many times I’ve been in this position, where I feel that there are no ideas and I feel horribly stuck, and I keenly feel the burden and responsibility of the people that are waiting.”
Steven Sinofsky: “The simplest definition of a platform is a technology that serves as an ingredient for the success of others but is so important that it achieves recognition and a market position on its own. The market position is such that there are many attempting to offer the same complete product or service, but the platform defines the not-so-secret ingredient upon which most, or even all, of the end-products or services rely…Perhaps the most ubiquitous modern productivity tool is the spreadsheet which at first did not seem to be a platform but was “just an app” or even a “killer app [for a platform]” but definitely not a platform itself. Over time spreadsheets added programmable macros and even very complex add-in architectures requiring professional programming, but compared to just using a spreadsheet these tasks did not dominate. Still, the spreadsheet is a platform. It serves as a foundational ingredient for the whole of finance, consulting, science, and more broadly analysis, not to mention tracking everything in most every job category. Today, people engineer work processes around spreadsheets baking them into final goods and services.”
R Jagannathan: “Political and public mindsets must change if growth is to be sustained without compromising on basic social safety nets, public health and education. First, the state must consciously curtail its growth, and non-state actors, community organisations and charities should be encouraged to fill the gaps in welfare. This implies that while personal taxes must be cut, the resources for welfare must be raised through private agencies — something that a corrupt Left-liberal system will try to scuttle. Second, as mentioned above, the focus must shift from public sector job creation to entrepreneurship and self-employment. Technology or no technology, enhancing livelihoods is as important as creating an environment for jobs. This implies that the informal sector, and a formal middle sector — the equivalent of Germany’s Mittelstand — must become the main engines of jobs and livelihoods. Third, as a corollary to the above, we must thus rethink our approach to taxation. In a low-trust society like India’s, high personal taxes are a strict no-no. People will accept high taxation only as long as they see where their money is going, and especially whether it is going to “people like us”.”
