Douglas Irwin: “Protection had insulated less productive firms from foreign competition and allowed them to drag down overall productivity within an industry, whereas open trade weeded out inefficient firms and allow more efficient firms to expand. Thus, trade brings about certain firm-level adjustments that increase average industry productivity in both export-oriented and import-competing industries.” [via CafeHayek]
Jason Lemkin: “In the early days of SaaS, we looked mostly at ARR growth. Then, we realized NRR was just about as important. NRR is the mathematical key to keeping growth going and going. But now fast forward to today, and we have a large swath of public SaaS and Cloud leaders. And one thing that’s become clear is that not only does high NRR keep scaling well past $1B in ARR … so can net new customers. Yes, you will exhaust your core ICP and buyer at some point. But you have to keep growing that circle, that sweet spot of customers. So you can keep growing new customers ideally at least +20% a year, even at $100m+ ARR. And yes even at $1B+ ARR…Your net new customers are your future. This probably is your most important metric at all.”
NYTimes: ““We have to move away from the idea of classic development stages, that you go from the farm to the factory and then from the factory to offices,” said Richard Baldwin, an economist at the IMD in Lausanne. “That whole development model is wrong.” Two-thirds of the world’s output now comes from the service sector — a mishmash that includes dog walkers, manicurists, food preparers, cleaners and drivers, as well as highly trained chip designers, graphic artists, nurses, engineers and accountants. It is possible to leapfrog to the service sector and grow by selling to businesses around the world, Mr. Baldwin argued. That is what helped India become the world’s fifth-largest economy…In the new model, countries can focus growth around cities rather than a particular industry. “That creates economic activities which are fairly diverse,” Mr. Baldwin said. “Think Bangalore, not South China,” he said.”
Ethan Mollick: “Generative AI, and the LLMs that power it, are different. Every previous method of organizing was intensely human, built on human capabilities and limitations. That is why traditional organizational models have persisted for so long. Human attention remains finite, so we needed to delegate our tasks to others. The number of people who can work in a team is limited, so we needed to break organizations into smaller parts. Decision-making is complicated, so we embraced layers of management and authority. The technology changes, but workers and managers are just people, and the only way to add more intelligence to a project was to add people or make them work more efficiently through tools that helped them communicate or speed up their work. But this is no longer true. Anyone can add intelligence, of a sort, to a project by including an AI.”
Martin Wolf: “For all its faults, democracy is still better than autocracy. All the evidence shows that despotism cannot consistently deliver the economic goods for developing countries…Democracy is a recent innovation. But he was also wrong: that democracy is recent, does not mean it is not valuable. This is true even if democracies are imperfect and autocracies sometimes work for a while. Democracy delivers accountability for governments and voice for citizens. That is far better for us than serving the whims of despots.”
