Author: Rajesh Jain

Shankkar Aiyar: “India’s job market is a study of paradoxes. There are 3 million vacant government posts and the joblessness debate. There is also another market reality—the gap between what employers want and what aspirants are equipped for. Accelerated adoption of technology will widen the gap. Primary education is broken; higher education is located in the past. India needs to map the skills of its workforce and what the market needs. The realignment of curriculum with market needs a public-private partnership between academia, industry and government. India needs an active labour policy which enables skilling, up-skilling and re-skilling.” Rohit Lamba and Raghuram Rajan: “India’s economic growth, although seemingly high compared with other countries, has not been large enough, or taken place in the right sectors, to create enough good jobs. India is still a young country, and over ten million youth start looking for work every year. When China and Korea were similarly young and poor, they employed their growing labor force and consequently grew faster than India is today. India, by contrast, risks squandering its population dividend. The joblessness, especially among the middle class and lower-middle class, contributes to another problem: a growing gulf between the prosperity of the rich and the rest.” More: “To drive growth, India could focus on the export of services provided by its well-educated and skilled population. Though this cohort represents a small fraction of the total population, it still numbers in the tens of millions. Such a strategy would build on India’s strengths. The country is already well known for its role in the global software industry, and now it exports many other services, too, accounting for over 5% of the world’s services exports while its goods exports account for less than 2%.”

WSJ: “While an entire generation of coaches went one way, Ancelotti moved in the opposite direction. Once upon a time, he’d been a tactical purist—schooled since his playing days in the philosophy of Arrigo Sacchi’s all-conquering AC Milan teams of the 1980s. Ancelotti was so disinclined to stray from it that during his time coaching Parma in the mid-1990s, he refused to sign a ponytailed Italian forward because he didn’t fit his 4-4-2 system. That forward turned out to be Italy legend Roberto Baggio. Years later, Ancelotti would admit that whiffing on Baggio had been one of the great mistakes of his career. Still, the lesson stuck. In the years that followed, Ancelotti would divorce himself from any kind of set approach, developing a reputation as a specialist in man-management rather than as a master tactician. And nothing has made that clearer than his latest run to a trophy.”

NYTimes on how Keila Shaheen sold a million copies of her self-published book: “One day, while searching online for therapeutic journaling prompts, she came across references to the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s idea of the shadow self, which holds that parts of our unconscious can mask hidden fears and desires. She learned about a practice called shadow work, a somewhat fringe field that draws on Jung’s ideas to guide people as they interrogate their shadow selves, with the goal of accepting parts of themselves that make them feel guilty, ashamed or afraid. Shaheen started posting videos on Instagram and TikTok about shadow work exercises she was trying, and began getting messages from viewers asking for a printed guide. So in the fall of 2021, she self-published the journal, and began selling copies for $19.99.”

FT: “Only ever leave voice notes for someone you are confident likes you. A voice note is a demand on someone else’s time. It is also, as the detractors say, somewhat self-indulgent. While it is the case that a spot of self-indulgence can actually be quite healthy, it is unreasonable to expect someone who dislikes you to indulge you. Never argue via voice note either. To not allow someone to respond in real time to an accusation you are levelling at them is to emotionally torture them. And don’t leave a voice note when you are in a grumpy mood either — nobody wants to hear you whining.”

M Govinda Rao: “It is clear that persuading the [Indian] states to fiscally empower the local bodies does not succeed. Effective decentralisation requires directly empowering the local bodies. This requires having clarity in the assignment of functions and revenue sources by amending the Constitution to add a Local List in the Seventh Schedule and penalising the state (not local bodies) for not appointing SFCs. It is also important to build capacity and handhold the local bodies in this task. In the end, decentralisation becomes healthy and sustainable in a system where there is a strong demand for decentralisation from the grassroots level.”

Thomas Sowell: “In politics – whether electoral politics or ideological politics – the word “crisis” often means whatever situation someone wants to change. Far from automatically indicating some dire condition threatening the public, it often means simply a golden opportunity for surrogates to use the taxpayers’ money and the government’s power to advance the surrogates’ interests, whether these interests are political, ideological, or financial.”

Economist: “[India] has long been easier to offshore white-collar work to India than the blue-collar variety. Spreadsheets and emails do not need to travel across the country’s congested roads or otherwise rely on its shoddy infrastructure. (GCCs generally have dependable internet connections, a luxury not always enjoyed in India.) Labour laws covering matters such as redundancies and—crucially for global firms—working hours are less restrictive for the country’s white-collar workers, too. More recently, technologies such as cloud computing and video conferencing have made it less cumbersome to tap India’s vast pool of brainy workers. Having learned how to supervise employees remotely through the covid-19 pandemic, plenty of bosses will have now pondered whether some roles could be done from farther afield. All that helps explain why the number of GCCs operating in India has ballooned from 700 in 200 to 1,580 last year, according to NASSCOM, an industry body. A new centre now opens roughly every week, two-fifths of them in and around Bangalore. India’s GCCs generated a combined $46bn in revenues last year, estimates NASSCOM.”

Arnold Kling: “I remain…optimistic about LLMs. I just think that the timeline for getting widely-used applications is years, not months. Here are some ways I think that LLMs are already capable of changing our lives, but the actual implementations are going to take time. I think that we will see a revolutionary increase in the deployment of robots within five years. I would bet more on specific-purpose robots than general humanoid robots, but I think we will see both. I think that we will see LLM tutors/coaches within three years. But the Null Hypothesis warns that their impact on learning could be modest. I think that over the next ten years, the PC form factor will fade out. Instead, LLMs will be embedded in wearables and in things that surround us.”

Tyler Cowen: “Read books about specific businesses or industries that you already know a lot about. That way, you will have enough contextual knowledge for the book to be meaningful. Of course many people don’t work at a company or industry big or famous enough that there are books about it, so I have a corollary proposition: You will learn the most about management by reading books about sports and musical groups.”

Thomas Cech: “Unlike DNA, RNA plays numerous active roles in living cells. It acts as an enzyme, splicing and dicing other RNA molecules or assembling proteins — the stuff of which all life is built — from amino acid building blocks. It keeps stem cells active and forestalls aging by building out the DNA at the ends of our chromosomes. RNA discoveries have led to new therapies, such as the use of antisense RNA to help treat children afflicted with the devastating disease spinal muscular atrophy. The mRNA vaccines, which saved millions of lives during the Covid pandemic, are being reformulated to attack other diseases, including some cancers. RNA research may also be helping us rewrite the future; the genetic scissors that give CRISPR its breathtaking power to edit genes are guided to their sites of action by RNAs. Although most scientists now agree on RNA’s bright promise, we are still only beginning to unlock its potential.”

Donald Boudreaux: “The classical liberal is neither a bloodless promoter of efficiency for efficiency’s sake nor a citizen who’s morally indifferent or apathetic. Quite the contrary. The classical liberal recognizes that morality is utterly indispensable. But he or she believes that beyond preventing coercion and fraud, the government has no business imposing any concrete moral code. The government can be trusted to possess neither the knowledge nor the consistently excellent motivation that would be required for it to successfully impose ‘the’ appropriate moral code. The business of choosing and enforcing moral codes belongs to the people, to free individuals who talk to and reason with each other, who set and follow examples, who learn from their mistakes, and who compromise with one other.”

NYTimes: “High-intensity workouts are designed to be hard. The whole point of repeatedly going all out for 30 seconds or a minute at a time is to get the maximum cardiovascular exercise in the least amount of time. But that doesn’t mean these workouts need to be punishing for your joints. The most well-known of these workouts, high intensity interval training, or HIIT, involves high-impact moves and has been adopted by serious athletes to become stronger, faster and more powerful, said Susane Pata, a Miami-based trainer with the National Academy of Sports Medicine…These workouts substitute high-impact activities such as sprinting, burpees or jump lunges with joint-friendly alternatives. The goal is still the same: to keep your heart rate above 80 percent of your absolute maximum before letting it barely recover and then repeating the effort.”

O’Reilly: What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs (Part I)

Ben Thompson: “Google is certainly building products for the consumer market, but those products are not devices; they are Internet services. And, as you might have noticed, the historical discussion didn’t really mention the Internet. Both Google and Meta, the two biggest winners of the Internet epoch, built their services on commodity hardware. Granted, those services scaled thanks to the deep infrastructure work undertaken by both companies, but even there Google’s more customized approach has been at least rivaled by Meta’s more open approach. What is notable is that both companies are integrating their models and their apps, as is OpenAI with ChatGPT…I think that models will certainly differ, but not in a large enough way to not be treated as commodities; the most value will be derived from building platforms that treat models like processors, delivering performance improvements to developers who never need to know what is going on under the hood. This will mean the biggest benefits will accrue to horizontal reach — on the API layer, the model layer, and the GPU layer — as opposed to vertical integration; it is up to Google to prove me wrong.”

The Generalist: ” We are taught to take our rejections with dignity, to view them as permanent and inflexible. But how often do we stop trying just before our luck is about to turn? What if one final, ferocious push is all that’s needed to convince that venture investor, land that promotion, recruit that game-changing hire, or seal that sales deal?…A founder’s job is really a dozen jobs, stacked head to foot under a trenchcoat. One that can be easy to neglect is selling. As a founder, you must sell your business non-stop: to VCs, customers, employees, potential hires, and the media. Doing so can elevate your standing and accelerate your progress.”

The Hill: “Political liberalism ensures our freedom to participate in self-governance. Economic liberalism promotes the freedom to innovate, produce and exchange goods and services for our mutual benefit. Epistemic liberalism encourages freedom of thought and expression, as well as respectful exchange of conflicting ideas. And cultural liberalism encourages us to respect the choices of others so long as they don’t violate anyone else’s rights. It’s a messy process, but this system moved the U.S. from a predominantly agrarian economy to a technologically advanced economy. It transformed a society where self-governance was only available to the privileged to one where all adults are frequently encouraged to participate in our democratic republic. We can practice different faiths and religions, and expressive freedom is not only a right but part of the cultural ethos. Clearly, ideas do have consequences. To defend these corners of liberalism is to defend progress.”

Bloomberg has a comparison between the business models of Nvidia and solar panel makers: “Nvidia’s competitive edge is in designing chips, and it outsources the capital-intensive business of actually making them to foundries such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The solar companies are all physical producers, and as a result they’re exposed to a never-ending rollercoaster ride of depreciation and obsolescence. That shows up in Nvidia’s 56% return on assets, compared to less than 10% at the panel-makers. There’s also the issue of monopolistic power. While photovoltaic manufacturers are fairly interchangeable and competition is cutthroat, Nvidia’s lead in making AI-appropriate processors means it has about 90% of the relevant market — a license to print money, or at least extract it from cash-rich Silicon Valley tech companies.”

strategy+business: “In a perfect world, your company would be a well-oiled machine. In reality, most companies have sludge in the engine that’s keeping them from moving as quickly as they want. Call it sludge, friction, or transaction costs, getting things done at work—whether that’s small tasks, such as sending emails, or bigger initiatives, such as developing a generative AI approach—often takes longer than anyone would like. What if that could change? In PwC’s 27th Annual Global CEO Survey, CEOs said 40% of time spent on activities including emails, meetings, and administrative processes is inefficient in their organizations. That’s a significant drain on money, morale, and time that could be better spent on transformation, business model reinvention, or just about anything else.”

FT: “Falling fertility rates are one of the biggest challenges facing our world…[The] global shift towards very low fertility, with the exception (so far) of sub-Saharan Africa, is among the most important events in our world. One implication is that the population of Africa is forecast to be larger than that of all today’s high-income countries, plus China by 2060. Another is that familiar population pyramids, with the largest numbers at the youngest ages, are inverting. In South Korea, for example, males aged 50-54 are 4.3 per cent of the population, while those aged 0-4 are a mere 1.5 per cent of it. Similar inversions are occurring elsewhere, notably including China and even, albeit more slowly, in India.”

Tyler Cowen on “Best Things First”: “The author is Bjorn Lomborg, and the subtitle is “The 12 most efficient solutions for the world’s poorest and our global SDG promises”.  Here is what Lomborg presents as the twelve best global investments, in no particular order: Tuberculosis, Maternal and newborn health, Malaria, Nutrition, Chronic diseases, Childhood immunization, Education, Agricultural R&D, e-procurement, Land tenure security, Trade, Skilled migration.”

David Friedman: “One of the things you learn in economics, and life, is the principle of revealed preference: Believe what people do, not what they say.” More: “One effect of being brought up as I have described is to make you less willing to be persuaded by bad arguments, even when offered by high status people. Another is to make you more willing to be persuaded by good arguments, even ones nobody else is making.”

Indrajit Gupta: “The physical store has a new role: Not just showcase what is available, perhaps help the customer to try it out — but also offer the added benefit of closing the sale, in case the customer is open to having it delivered from their nearest store or warehouse. It isn’t without reason that blended commerce is emerging as the holy grail of retail. Especially since covering a country as large and diverse as India has its challenges. The opportunity in Tier-II towns and beyond is starting to open up. Major retailers are scrambling to open physical stores, but that invariably takes time. Instead, a thoughtfully crafted combination of e-commerce and physical stores could help bridge the gap.”

Mint: “One of the most critical yet often overlooked parts of the reform process is determining what should be the ideal ‘unit of change’ of the proposed transformation. What do we mean by this? A ‘unit of change’ is a component of a system that’s the focal point for transformation efforts. It could be a geography, a function, a process, an institution, a policy or any other distinctly identifiable element that, when modified, is capable of catalysing broad systemic improvements. By way of example, consider reform efforts in education. One approach could be to target the ‘school’ as the ‘unit of change.’ When this is the case, the reform agenda could include developing new curricula, different pedagogy or making changes in the administrative processes of the school. On the other hand, if the ‘unit of change’ is the child, reform efforts would focus on improving learning and development outcomes. Identifying the correct unit of change is crucial for the success of a given reform, as it sets the stage for the depth, scale and scope of transformation.”

Economist: “Might it be better to design specialist AI chips from scratch? That is what many companies, small and large, are now doing in a bid to topple Nvidia. Dedicated AI chips promise to make building and running AI models faster, cheaper or both. Any firm that can mount a credible threat to the reigning champion will have no shortage of customers, who dislike its lofty prices and limited supplies.”