Peter Boettke: “Writing [Milton Friedman’s] biography presents a unique challenge owing to the immensity of his professional stature and the duration of his excellence from the 1930s through the early 2000s. Jennifer Burns in Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative is every bit up to the challenge. Deeply researched and beautifully written, her book makes the personal and intellectual life of Friedman jump off the page. Burns not only captures Friedman’s life but conveys in her telling of that story the broader intellectual life of America and the global political and economic order of the 20th century. Her book gives us a history of the Chicago School and monetarism while delineating the methodological, analytical, and ideological battle lines of the economics profession. Along the way, we learn about the broader contours of the intellectual and political movements of the Cold War, among them the tension-filled coalition of free-market classical liberals and conservative anti-communist Republicans, and right-wing extremists from whom Friedman consistently strove to distance himself. And we learn too about the international spread of free-market ideas between 1980 and 2005.”
NYTimes: “Take a smidgen of hydrogen, then blast it with lasers to set off a small thermonuclear explosion. Do it right, and maybe you can solve the world’s energy needs. A small group of start-ups have embarked on this quest, pursuing their own variations on this theme — different lasers, different techniques to set off the fusion reactions, different elements to fuse together. “There has been rapid growth,” said Andrew Holland, chief executive of the Fusion Industry Association, a trade group lobbying for policies to speed the development of fusion.”
Siddharth Pai: “What has let Indian IT majors stick with their ‘paisa vasool’ (value for money) model is that the growth in salaries for Indian engineers has not kept pace with the growth in our economy. This is most evident in the starting salaries being offered by our IT majors to fresh engineering graduates. These packages have remained more or less constant for almost two decades, with insufficient correction for inflation. In my experience, in the early 2000s, fresh graduate engineers in India could expect modest starting salaries in the range of ₹2.5-3 lakh per annum (or $4,500-6,500 at then prevailing exchange rates). Apart from some exceptions, it appears as if the hiring of fresh engineering talent at the same low salaries as two decades ago is an exploitative tactic that is still used by the country’s IT majors. Accounting for inflation, this means that engineers graduating today are only making a fraction of what their seniors did 20 years ago! The only exception was the sudden surge during the pandemic, which pushed global clients to outsource more of their operations in a bid to keep down costs. This surge in offshore demand forced the usually stingy Indian IT majors to pay large premia to poach people from one another.”
Suzanne Heywood: “The biggest thing from my past which shaped me as a leader is being calm and resilient. One of the things that you learn being at sea and you learn when you’re in life-threatening situations, which I was multiple times as a child and as a young adult, is you can’t panic when you’re under threat.”
