Ravi Venkatesan: “India’s economic growth story has been impressive. Gross domestic product (GDP) is expanding, corporate profits are looking up and the country is asserting itself as a global economic powerhouse. But beneath our headline-grabbing figures lies a troubling reality: stagnant wages, biting inflation, insufficient jobs and growing inequality. For millions of Indians, GDP growth has not translated into better livelihoods, creating the paradox of a booming economy that fails to uplift a significant portion of its population…As we stand at this crossroads, India has the opportunity to rewrite its growth story. By embracing an economic model that uplifts all sections of society, the nation can ensure that its progress is not just measured in GDP figures, but also by the quality of people’s lives. An Indian Enlightenment—rooted in dignity, fairness and shared prosperity—is the need of the hour.”
FT: “The China commodities supercycle is over…Back when the last supercycle started, around 2000, the scale of the demand caught everyone by surprise. “China came along and completely changed everything,” recalls Toth, the mining executive, who joined BHP in 1994. Mining giants BHP and Rio Tinto each reported more than $100bn in operating profits from iron ore during the 2000-20 period. Some in the mining industry joke that they were scooping money out of the ground. But now the structural and demographic factors that underpinned that boom — China’s rapid urbanisation and industrialisation — have become much less powerful. On a per capita basis, China has already passed the level of annual steel consumption of the US and other developed countries. The vast migration to cities, in which half a billion people moved from rural to urban settings during the boom years, is starting to slow down.”
WSJ: “There’s a better way to predict a technology’s future: follow the rate of change…“You can predict the direction of technology and what is scalable, with 60% to 70% accuracy,” says [Vinod] Khosla, who is also a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. You just can’t get there by asking up-or-down questions about a moment in time. Khosla said he previously focused on the rate of change in internet protocol technology in the 1990s, which convinced him that traditional telecom networking standards would be overrun and a new generation of networking companies would arise.”
Alex Tabarrok: “Almost all researchers in social choice understand the defects of common voting systems and indeed tend to agree that the most common system, first past the post voting, is probably the most defective! But, as no system is perfect, there has been less consensus on which methods are best. Ranked choice voting, approval voting and the Borda Count all have their proponents. In recent years, however, there has been a swing towards the Borda Count. Don Saari, for example, whose work on voting has been a revelation, has made strong arguments in favor of the Borda Count. The Borda Count has voter rank the n candidates from most to least preferred and assigns (n-1) points to the candidates. For example if there are 3 candidates a voter’s top-ranked candidate gets 2 points, the second ranked candidate gets 1 point and the last ranked candidate 0 points. The candidate with the most points overall wins. The Borda Count satisfies positive responsiveness, the Pareto principle and stability.”
Nabeel S. Qureshi: “Think about what makes you ‘imbalanced’ as a personality, & do things where this gives you an edge…Once you are ok with people telling you ‘no’, you can ask for whatever you want. (Make reality say no to you.)…Do things fast. Things don’t actually take much time (as measured by a stopwatch); resistance/procrastination does. “Slow is fake”. If no urgency exists, impose some…Doing as much as you can every day is a form of life extension…Always be high integrity, even when it costs you. The shortcuts aren’t worth it…Figure out what your primary focus is and make progress on that every day, first thing in the morning, no exceptions. Days with 0 output are the killers. (Tyler Cowen)”
