Dr. Barbara Sturm: “Don’t start a business just to start a business. The biggest motivation should be that you’re totally in love and obsessed with a product you’ve created.”
Rajesh Shukla: “As millions of [Indian] households ascend the income ladder, they will not merely spend more, but spend differently. The key to anticipating India’s next consumption wave lies not in the slope of income growth, but in the thresholds it crosses.”
Vasant Dhar: “It is undeniable that modern-day AI machines have achieved remarkable fluency with language. They seem to understand what we tell them, regardless of the words we choose to express ourselves. This enables the same conversational fluidity that we have with humans. However, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that LLMs are not designed to be truthful, but to ensure that the narrative “makes sense” in any context.”
Bloomberg: “I’ve long thought that calling Adam Smith the father of economics seriously understates his significance. In some ways he was indeed the first economist, and The Wealth of Nations, published 250 years ago…, was indeed the discipline’s seminal text. But his ambitions and insights extended so much further than the dismal science as now conceived. In many ways, his modern followers, intent on narrowing and thereby desiccating the field, have let him down. The breadth of his thinking is hard for modern readers to grasp because his prose was ornately opaque even by the standards of his time. Scholars argue about what he really meant and didn’t mean – a literature that doesn’t rival the one dedicated to Karl Marx (who was much influenced by Smith) because nothing could, but which trundles on and shows no sign of exhausting the source material. Meantime, for non- specialists, Smith is simply an avatar of laissez-faire capitalism. What a pity his legacy has come to this. The right way to mark the anniversary is to celebrate not only the works but also the remarkable intellectual temperament that produced them.”
