Category: Thinks

Arnold Kling: “Democracy does not mean will of the people. At best, it provides for peaceful transfer of power.” He adds: “Perhaps the idea that democratic governments are accountable to the people is a Noble Lie. If people did not believe it, they would be inclined to be rebellious and disobedient, and this could get out of hand, meaning anarchy and violence. On the other hand, the Noble Lie seems to have gotten out of hand, in that government seems to me to be too powerful. For me, the virtue of democracy is that it allows for peaceful transfers of power. In an ideal country, the stakes in elections would be low, because of constitutional limits on government. Elites would be able to negotiate and settle differences, unperturbed by engaged, polarized masses who use primaries to punish compromisers. The public will have modest demands and expectations for government, but they will vote out of power a party that governs poorly. Their voting will be fluid, based on satisfaction or dissatisfaction with those in power; not fixed, based on strong party allegiance.”

Juergen Schmidhuber: “Perhaps you know that all the recent famous AI applications such as ChatGPT and similar models are largely based on principles of artificial neural networks invented in the previous millennium. The main reason why they works so well now is the incredible acceleration of compute per dollar. ChatGPT is driven by a neural network called “Transformer” described in 2017 by Google. I am happy about that because a quarter century earlier in 1991 I had a particular Transformer variant which is now called the “Transformer with linearized self-attention”. Back then, not much could be done with it, because the compute cost was a million times higher than today. But today, one can train such models on half the internet and achieve much more interesting results…There’s no reason to believe that in the next 30 years, we won’t have another factor of 1 million and that’s going to be really significant. In the near future, for the first time we will have many not-so expensive devices that can compute as much as a human brain. The physical limits of computation, however, are much further out so even if the trend of a factor of 100 every decade continues, the physical limits (of 1051 elementary instructions per second and kilogram of matter) won’t be hit until, say, the mid-next century. Even in our current century, however, we’ll probably have many machines that compute more than all 10 billion human brains collectively and you can imagine, everything will change then!”

FT: ““Now, people generally look at diaries and the first thing they do is look for a 15-minute gap, and it just gets taken,” one consultant tells me. “My biggest challenge is finding time to eat lunch.” I’ve come to think of this as the “suitcase principle” of white-collar work: just as you always fill your up suitcase whether you’re going away for a weekend or a week, white-collar work always seems to expand to fill the time available. What happened after the invention of spreadsheets is an instructive example of how time-saving technology can create more work. The days when accountants could sit back and relax didn’t last long. By the time Levy was writing, the new technology was already reshaping demand. People began to expect work to be done quicker because they knew it could be done quicker. More importantly, spreadsheets vastly expanded what kind of analysis was possible.”

Adam Grant: “We often think about relationships on a spectrum from positive to negative. We gravitate toward loving family members, caring classmates and supportive mentors. We do our best to avoid the cruel uncle, the playground bully and the jerk boss.But the most toxic relationships aren’t the purely negative ones. They’re the ones that are a mix of positive and negative. We often call them frenemies, supposed friends who sometimes help you and sometimes hurt you. But it’s not just friends. It’s the in-laws who volunteer to watch your kids but belittle your parenting. The roommate who gets you through a breakup and then starts dating your ex. The manager who praises your work but denies you a promotion.Everyone knows how relationships like that can tie your stomach into a knot.”

Matthew Guay: “e-books, now with search and AI-powered interactivity, have become more navigable than paper books. This flexibility let the book take over the scroll, and we may have just found the key innovative advantage that makes e-books more valuable than their print counterparts. We can chat with books and keep their authors’ voices alive far beyond the grave. E-books may be a poor version of books, but they’re infinitely better stores of knowledge.”

Rita McGrath: “The share price, and hence market capitalization, of a publicly traded company reflects two sources of value. One is the value of the cash thrown off by company operations. The other is the perceived value of growth. Divide the value of growth by the value of operations and you get a metric we call The Imagination Premium (TIP). A high TIP suggests that investors have confidence in management’s ability to generate organic growth through innovation. Think of a high TIP as a free boost to your market capitalization. Management has both imagined a bright future and effectively conveyed its vision to analysts and investors.”

Jack Goldstone: “India is seeking to jumpstart rapid economic growth with less favorable demographics and economic fundamentals. In 2000, 70 percent of China’s total population was made up of literate, working-age people who participated in the labor force. In India today, its proportion of literate, working-age people in the labor market—nearly 40 percent of its population—is so much smaller that it cannot realistically hope to match China’s economic miracle in the coming two decades….[Even 5-7%] economic growth will depend on India making forward leaps in education and female labor force participation, if the country is to reap the “demographic dividend” of a large, youthful population. For all the international attention given to India’s population, the country’s future rests on three pillars: quality universal education, boosting women’s employment and moving large numbers of its labor force out of agriculture into more productive pursuits. If India is to move out of China’s economic shadow, those pillars must be solidified. Otherwise, the opportunity of a century may be lost.”

WSJ: “A working life, these days, is often nonlinear, with frequent disruptions and changes—an alarming prospect but also an opportunity…Most of Mr. [Bruce] Feiler’s subjects went through what he calls “workquakes”—events that can be positive or negative but trigger a major change. A small-business owner who had to shut his operation during the pandemic sought out new training for a career shift. One ad agency CEO turned green-tech executive restructured his career after seeing Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” The leader of a nonprofit that provides low-cost car repair for the needy started her operation after talking with a homeless man who had to move the broken-down car he was living in to a new spot. Mr. Feiler’s research subjects went through such workquakes every 2.85 years, on average. On one level, this rate is alarming, but it need not be seen in a negative way. In a nonlinear work life, it is true, we will “face existential moments like these more frequently than we’d like,” Mr. Feiler writes, but the choices we make and the answers we come up with will also be less momentous or definitive: “No answer lasts forever. Odds are, you’ll face another defining moment in the not-too-distant future.””

Yamini Aiyar: “As Pratap Bhanu Mehta has argued in Burden of Democracy, once the State becomes a means of social mobility, it shifts norms of accountability from accountability for public goods to accountability for access to State power. And when access to power becomes the goal, competing interest groups manipulate institutions to serve particularistic ends rather than their broader public purpose. This is precisely the challenge that the Indian State and society confronts. The State is, and will, remain for the conceivable future, given the trajectory of our economy, the primary vehicle of empowerment, of dignity and status. In a deeply stratified society that has suffered centuries of discrimination, this is a powerful and critical role that the State can ill-afford to give up. But to avoid trade-offs for State capacity, the democratic discourse has to reclaim the core purpose of public institutions. And this is where political leadership has failed.”

WSJ: “Access to tens of thousands of advanced graphics chips is crucial for companies training large AI models that can generate original text and analysis. Without them, work on the large language models that are behind the AI runs much slower, founders say. Nvidia’s advanced graphic chips excel at doing lots of computations simultaneously, which is crucial for AI work.  UBS analysts estimate an earlier version of ChatGPT required about 10,000 graphic chips. Musk estimates that an updated version requires three to five times as many of Nvidia’s advanced processors. Some investors are combing their networks for spare computing power while others are orchestrating bulk orders of processors and server capacity that can be shared across their AI startups. Startups are shrinking their AI models to make them more efficient, buying their own physical servers with relevant graphics chips or switching to less-popular cloud providers such as Oracle until the shortage is resolved, according to AI investors and startups.”

Scott Galloway: “Work/life balance is a myth. I’ve taught 5,500 students at NYU, and I do a survey. “Where do you expect to be in five years economically?” And something like 90%-plus of them expect to be in the top 1% economically by the age of 30, right? I get it, it’s great. But it means you’re going to have no life other than work, or very little life. I don’t remember my 20s and 30s other than work. It cost me my hair, it cost me my first marriage, and it was worth it. You can have it all. You just can’t have it all at once. If you expect to be in the top 10% economically, much less the top 1%, buck up. Two-decades-plus of nothing but work. That’s my experience.”

Benedict Evans: “Every incumbent tries to make the new thing a feature of the old thing, and every incumbent has read the Clayton Christensen ‘Disruption’ book and wants to make sure they make the jump. Adobe made a very successful shift to subscription SaaS in the last decade, and now it’s trying the same with generative AI, launching a de novo image generation product in Firefly and adding generative features to Photoshop. The more generally important part of this, I think, is the move to add interface, control and product to the prompt: instead of typing 50 words into a box and waiting to see what you get, there are options and switches to give you some control. Stepping up another level again, I think these kinds of features, like most automation and indeed like Photoshop, will produce more employment, not less: making these kinds of workflows easier and faster will lead to more people doing it. However, the other side of a platform shift is that while the incumbents make it a feature, new companies create entirely new tools that are native to the new possibilities, and unbundle the use cases one by one.”

Chakshy Roy: “Our Constitution entrusts Parliament with the power to pass laws. It’s a responsibility that requires careful consideration of every aspect of the law before Parliament puts its stamp of approval on it. And for the institution to be true to that responsibility, it must ensure that it updates its rules and makes every law go through the scrutiny of parliamentary committees without requiring an initiative from the government or the discretion of the presiding officers. The decision to build a new Parliament was based on the inadequacy of the existing building and to create a new structure distinct from our colonial past. This is laudable. We should also extend that metric for overhauling our parliamentary procedure because both infrastructure and rules are required for working towards the common objective of an effective Parliament. Only then can the new home of India’s democracy fulfil the promises made by its founding document, the Constitution, to its only sovereign, the people.”

FT: “Green hydrogen has a seductive appeal. Done right, this zero-emissions energy source has the potential to penetrate many corners of our economies and be instrumental in the fight against climate change. It can be transported over long distances, stored for lengthy periods and some existing fossil fuel infrastructure such as gas pipelines can be adapted to handle it. These attributes help explain the rush of excitement around the gas, also referred to as “clean” or renewable hydrogen. Unlike its most common form of production, known as grey hydrogen, which is extracted from natural gases in a carbon-intensive process, the green version relies on renewable energy, such as solar or wind power, to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. It creates no carbon during a production process called electrolysis and emits only water when it is burnt… Lex calculates that a net zero energy system might require 500mn tonnes of hydrogen annually, which would entail some $20tn of investment by 2050.”

Hayek: “The inherent logic of collectivism makes it impossible to confine it to a limited sphere. Beyond certain limits collective action in the interest of all can only be made possible if all can be coerced into accepting as their common interest what those in power take it to be. At that point, coercion must extend to the individuals’ ultimate aims and ideas and must attempt to bring everyone’s Weltanschauung into line with the ideas of the rulers.” [via CafeHayek]

Molly Worthen: “Colleges should offer a radically low-tech first-year program for students who want to apply: a secular monastery within the modern university, with a curated set of courses that ban glowing rectangles of any kind from the classroom. Students could opt to live in dorms that restrict technology, too. We can work individually with students who have accessibility accommodations to find the best low-tech solutions for them (like turning off Wi-Fi, rationing screen time and deleting attention-guzzling apps). I prophesy that universities that do this will be surprised by how much demand there is. I frequently talk to students who resent the distracting laptops all around them during class. They feel the tug of the “imaginary string attaching me to my phone, where I have to constantly check it,” as Ms. Rodriguez, who took the monk class and Existential Despair, put it. Many, if not most, students want the elusive experience of uninterrupted thought, the kind where a hash of half-baked notions slowly becomes an idea about the world. Even if your goal is effective use of the latest chatbot, it behooves you to read books in hard copies and read enough of them to learn what an elegant paragraph sounds like. How else will students recognize when ChatGPT churns out decent prose instead of bureaucratic drivel? Most important, students need head space to think about their ultimate values.”

Jaspreet Bindra: “As the Generative AI tidal wave sweeps across industries and offices, I believe what it will impact the most is this aspect of corporate life. We often do not consider work as an industry in itself, though it is a several trillion dollar one, and confuse work with jobs. We are rightly worried about how AI will impact jobs, but tend to neglect how it will impact work. Investigating this, I stumbled on another post, this time on LinkedIn, which had a wonderful way to deconstruct work into three kinds. The first is where you must act, which is about your role, be it as an accountant, a programmer, marketer or a journalist. The second is where you show, by means of a format, be it a slide, chart, spreadsheet, code or a summary. And the third is when you need to create, or perform a creative task, like an essay, a recipe, code or a sales pitch…we humans will have to step up and learn how to work with AI and develop an “AI aptitude” as the WorkLab report calls it. We have been good at working with revolutionary technologies. We learnt how to use tools like fire, the personal computer and internet to make our work better and create new jobs for humans. We will have to do the same with this powerful technology and use it to lift ourselves away from the mundane and the monotonous. It will not be AI which takes our jobs, but other human beings using AI could, and we need to choose which of the two we are. We need to recalibrate.”

Emily Chamlee-Wright: “The freedom to read is a remarkable technology for social learning. As we transmit wisdom across space and through time, humanity as a whole becomes smarter. The accumulated wisdom has a compounding effect. Solutions once discovered do not need to be discovered again. Yesterday’s discoveries can be tweaked, combined with new insights, and applied to solve new problems. Because we have the freedom to read, we inherit the treasure trove of knowledge all prior generations of literate forebears accumulated. Just as importantly, the freedom to read connects us to humanity, our own and others’.  As Martha Nussbaum observes in her book Cultivating Humanity, when we read the stories of people from far-off places, times, and circumstances, we develop our moral imagination. We extend our capacity for compassion beyond what our direct experience might allow.”

WSJ: “What Mr. Kissinger sees when he looks at the world today is “disorder.” Almost all “major countries,” he says, “are asking themselves about their basic orientation. Most of them have no internal orientation, and are in the process of changing or adapting to the new circumstances”—by which he means a world riven by competition between the U.S. and China. Big countries such as India, and also a lot of “subordinate” ones, “do not have a dominant view of what they want to achieve in the world.” They wonder if they should “modify” the actions of the superpowers (a word Mr. Kissinger says he hates), or strive for “a degree of autonomy.””

Jason Furman: “The equation economists use holds that inflation is a function of three things. One is sometimes called “expectations.” You should think of that just as the internal dynamics of inflation: wages lead to prices, prices lead to wages, if you think everyone else is going to raise prices, you’re going to raise your prices, et cetera—a sort of a self-fulfilling thing. The second term is how tight the economy is, how much demand there is, often simplified by how low the unemployment rate is. And the third term is what supply shocks are like.”

Thomas Sowell: ““Entitlement” is not only the opposite of achievement, it undermines incentives to do all the hard work that leads to achievement.” [via CafeHayek]

WSJ: “[Po-Shen Loh] says the key to survival is knowing how to solve problems—and knowing which problems to solve. He urges math nerds to focus on creativity, emotion and the stuff that distinguishes man from machine and won’t go obsolete. As artificial intelligence gets smarter, the premium on ingenuity will become greater. This is what he wants to drill into their impressionable young minds: Being human will only be more important as AI becomes more powerful.”

Ramesh Mangaleswaran & Rahul Ahluwalia: “Mobile phone exports from India went from about $5 billion in 2021-22 to around $10 billion last year. This growth was driven primarily by Apple, which accounted for half the mobile phone exports from India in 2022-23. Electronics exports overall rose to about $20 billion from $13 billion. As good as this news is, benchmarking against other countries shows how much further we can go. In 2022, Vietnam, a country about as big as Madhya Pradesh, exported $114 billion in electronics. China exported close to $900 billion. What can take our green shoots in electronics exports and turn them into a flourishing eco-system? The answer is deceptively simple but critically important and highly time sensitive: prioritize building one large export cluster around one big anchor investor… India can be a splendid alternative if we set ourselves the target of reaching $100 billion in exports from just one large electronics cluster, and line up all the ducks needed to deliver on it.”

strategy+business: “In Unbreakable: Building and Leading Resilient Teams, Bradley Kirkman and Adam Stoverink, business professors at North Carolina State and the University of Arkansas, respectively, tackle the problem of how to gird your team against the setbacks that disrupt operations—or worse. Teams have great potential advantages in the face of setbacks. The talent, energy, and resources of a group will always exceed those of an individual, and group members can support one another in a crisis. But the point of a team is to accomplish ends sufficiently challenging and complex that a whole bunch of people must work together. That means coordination, communication, and, potentially, friction. Teams also need some things that tend to be in tension with one another. They need leadership, for example, yet they need personal initiative to make decisions close to the action. Teams also need to strike just the right balance between planning and improvisation.”

Vasant Dhar: “Just like Internet platforms such as Google, Tiktok, Facebook and Netflix can serve up virtually any amount of supply required to meet demand. ChatGPT has similarly created an infinite supply of creative material on-demand at close to zero marginal cost. All you need is to prompt it appropriately. A very likely future is that AI will displace all but the most exceptional humans in many areas of our lives. However, those who survive will be have an amazing tool at their aid, and will combine their inherent talent with the wisdom they are able to extract from ChatGPT’s ever-expanding knowledge base. In effect, while previous technologies freed humans from grunt work, AI is becoming capable of all kinds of creative work.  For humans, this will require constant upskilling. That’s a tall order for a lot of people, for whom Universal Basic Income will be a godsend.”

Puja Mehra: “It is widely agreed that India’s economy isn’t generating the number of jobs required by millions of low-skill youngsters. Governments have been under the impression that ‘welfare’ spending can compensate for these failures. Money—even speedy, leakage-proof digital transfers—cannot substitute for quality livelihoods. Our economic model isn’t delivering for all Indians. Repairing it requires sound policy advice from economists and technocrats, which governments seem allergic to. Good bureaucrats often have reserves of bad ideas for when the political temperature heats up. Political conviction in reforms appears to be on the wane. Both the Congress and BJP seem ready to tear down the progressive economic policies of their earlier PMs. That can’t be good for the economy.”

Jonathan Martinez: “I am lucky enough to have worked for companies that ranged from corporate giants like Uber and Coinbase to smaller startups that were run out of private residences in Silicon Valley. One of the largest differentiators between these companies was their respective emphases on conversion rate optimization (CRO). The initial focus for smaller startups is typically on growth pillars, such as paid acquisition or starting up a lifecycle email program. By contrast, larger companies have dedicated teams in place for managing and implementing their CRO efforts, alongside all their other activities. Bringing paid acquisition costs down when funds are tight makes a great deal of sense. Similarly, starting email marketing campaigns to improve performance through the funnel can be equally important. However, what many startups do not realize is that CRO can help lower paid acquisition costs and push users through the funnel as much as, if not more than, the other pillars.”

Matt Levine: “There are two main ways for companies to finance themselves, debt and equity. Debt financing means that you borrow money and promise to pay it back on some set schedule with some set interest rate. Your creditors are entitled to exactly what you owe them, and if they don’t get it then they can sue you for the money, or put you into bankruptcy if you don’t have it. Equity financing means that you sell stock to investors and you never have to pay it back. Your shareholders are not entitled to anything specific; there is no particular amount of money that they have to get back or any schedule for when they get it. But they are in some loose sense part-owners of the company, they have a residual claim on its cash flows, and they vaguely hope to one day get their money back through dividends or stock buybacks or mergers. They can’t make you share the profits in any direct way, but a share of the profits is what they want. And while there is no guarantee of what they’ll get, there is also no limit to it: If they buy 1% of the stock when the company is worth $10 million, they put in $100,000; if they then sell when the company is worth $100 billion, they get back $1 billion. That’s hard to do with debt.”

Casey Rosengren: “There are five archetypal fears that I often see underlying people’s work: Unworthiness – the fear of not being good enough; Death – the fear of insignificance and disappearance; Uncertainty – the fear of not knowing who one is or where one’s life is going; Insecurity – the fear of not having enough resources; Rejection – the fear of isolation or letting people down. If you can learn to recognize and work with these fears when they arise, you’ll be able to stay connected to your dreams, even in the face of perceived threat.”

NYTimes: “The notion that art can improve mental well-being is something many people intuitively understand but can lose sight of — especially if we have become disconnected from the dancing, creative writing, drawing and singing we used to enjoy as children. But there’s a “really robust body of evidence” that suggests that creating art, as well as activities like attending a concert or visiting a museum, can benefit mental health, said Jill Sonke, research director of the University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine…Start by quickly drawing yourself; don’t overthink it. The second drawing should show you with your biggest problem. The third drawing should show you after your problem has been solved.”

Abraham Thomas: “Early stage founders have to discover almost everything about their business. What is the product? Who is the customer? How do we reach them? What will they pay? How do we hire, and scale, and compete, and disrupt, and defend? It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where you have to craft each piece from scratch and you don’t know what picture you’re assembling…Early stage founders need to hire, build, sell and grow, before they run out of cash. It’s a race against the clock, and most startups are ‘default dead’ — their runway will end before they reach profitability. This is like venturing on the Polar Plateau: you have to reach safety or perish; time is not your friend. (The jigsaw puzzle will explode if you don’t finish it in 6 months). What’s the best way to mitigate this deadly duo?…Speed.”

WSJ: “For two years debate has raged over what caused the highest inflation [in the US] since the 1980s: government stimulus or pandemic-related disruptions. Now two of the country’s top economists have an answer: It’s both. Pandemic-related supply shocks explain why inflation shot up in 2021. An economy overheated by fiscal stimulus and low interest rates explain why it has stayed high ever since. The conclusion: For inflation to fade, the economy has to cool off, which means a weaker labor market.”

Kevin Corcoran: “I found Following Their Leaders to be a solid and important work…A key point Holcombe makes throughout the book is that, to a huge degree, people do not adopt parties based on policy, but instead adopt policy based on parties. Democracy is treated as sacrosanct, and its justness is taken for granted. I suspect that most people don’t come to support democracy because they are persuaded that democratic governments are accountable to the people—instead, they accept uncritically the idea that democratic governments are accountable to the people because it supports their pre-existing belief in the justness of democracy. Refuting the idea that democratic governments are accountable to the people will therefore have little effect. I wish I could end on a less dour note, and I sincerely hope to be proven wrong! But regardless of the impact it will have, Holcombe has written a well-reasoned and important book that deserves to be widely read, and one I can easily recommend.”

WSJ: “Big moments and decisions in our lives can make our stomachs drop. Moving somewhere new, getting married, starting a family—if we’re sizing them up realistically, maybe we should be nervous. (Newborns are exhausting; being a manager is hard.) More than half of workers in a recent poll ranked starting a new job as scarier than skydiving or holding a snake. Just trust your gut, everyone implores when you’re staring down a new opportunity. It takes effort to distinguish between normal jitters and the kind of fear that’s a real warning sign, though. And it’s more work still to convince yourself to just do it, even if you’re doing it scared. First, take a breath, advises Luana Marques, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of a coming book about harnessing anxiety. Calm your nerves by meditating, taking a walk or talking to a friend. Then, with clearer eyes, ask yourself: If I said yes, would taking on the discomfort of a new thing get me closer to where I want to be in my career or relationships? Often, the fear cloaking our big decisions is “an anxiety toward your dream life,” Marques says.”

McKinsey on effective meetings: “Should this even be a meeting at all? Recurring meetings are particularly susceptible to migration from the original purpose toward something more diffuse…What is this meeting for? A meeting’s title and its purpose are not the same. When the latter isn’t clear, meetings can seem frustrating at best and futile at worst…What is everyone’s role? Even if a meeting has a clear purpose, it’s of little use if there is no one present deputized to make a decision.”

Hitendra Wadhwa on leadership: “To activate the core in themselves and others, exemplary leaders tap into five core energies: purpose (commitment to a cause); wisdom (calm, receptive to truth); growth (curious, open to growing); love (connected with their team and those they serve); and self-realisation (centred in a joyful spirit). When executives take stewardship of their inner state and help their team do the same, insecurities, habits and ego fall away and breakthrough performance can arise. They can do so with small actions to activate one of the five core energies — for example, taking people on an inspired hero’s journey; dialling down or redirecting a negative emotion; acknowledging a stumble; or apologising and adjusting. The anatomy of great leadership is not about mastering predetermined behaviours, but building resonance in a team by taking people to their inner core. The right behaviour follows, as members respond to unfolding conditions. This is a big shift for executives schooled in the old ways. But mastery of the inner state allows ordinary people untutored in the formal craft of leadership to become extraordinary.”

FT: “Phra Anil Sakya, one of Thailand’s most senior Buddhist monks, teaches mindfulness to business executives and to criminals…”Being mindful is knowing what is wrong or right for humanity, so when I speak to business executives, I teach them they have to put people before profit. Mindfulness is coming back to who you are, changing yourself first before trying to change others.” The teaching of mindfulness — paying attention to the present moment — and self-awareness is a growing trend in executive education, as schools seek to help business leaders appreciate and adopt more reflective, analytical and collaborative styles of decision-making and management. After all, the rationale goes: how can you lead others if you don’t know how to lead yourself?…Phra Anil suggests his own simple mindful habit. “Just try closing your eyes, shutting yourself down and living in the present. Bring things back to yourself and ignore the impulse to check social media and look at others’ lives. Do not forget to look at your own life.”

Enuma Okoro: “We are all children of someone. And there are ways in which we still carry within us the children we were, the ways in which we were taught to be in the world, and the lessons we learnt, for good and for ill, from parents as human as we find our own adult selves to be. What we do with those teachings and lessons is the parenting we all have to learn to do on ourselves. Sometimes this means revisiting the ways we were raised and recognising which of the lessons we picked up from our parents are keeping us from life-giving patterns and relationships now. Sometimes it means remembering and reclaiming the powerful and positive teachings that remind us of who we can be in the world, despite what the world suggests or demands of us.”

Evan Armstrong: “A media company can drive additional ad revenue by increasing three things: the number of viewers, the number of ads, the price/performance of ads. The most important variable, by far, is the price/performance variable. Being able to target ads based on intent and interest is the holy grail. If you go for mass scale (which is the entire point of keeping your product free), then you’ll need to be able to do additional targeting/enrichment on customers’ data. However, because no media company is where the transaction data and demographic data live, it is unable to do proper attribution/targeting. I’ve written in the past how Twitter and Snapchat are probably screwed for the exact same reason. And if those folks, with hundreds of millions of users and far more demographic data, can’t do it, ye old internet publication will be awful at it. This leaves media companies two very ugly choices. You either go after a niche, high-value audience that big platforms struggle to capture (the Every approach). Or you do mostly brand ads where specific performance isn’t as important (the Axios approach). In both cases, you have to spin up your own salesforce, sell the ad slots, get the copy approved, on and on. It is a miserable process. In both cases, it is a worse ad product for marketers versus the infinitely scalable and easy to use ad platforms like Amazon or Google. The big tech platforms offer better products in basically every way for marketers to use.”

Nitin Pai: “We are now in the Amrit Kaal of Independent India. Few can argue that caste has receded from the public sphere. To its credit, the republic has achieved something unprecedented by declaring all Indians equal and adopting social justice as a goal. Yet in politics, public policy and daily life, caste remains a major factor even if overt discrimination and violence have declined. We unashamedly talk about parties assembling caste-coalitions, picking ministers based on caste identities. Reservations in educational institutions and government jobs are seen as spoils of political power wrapped in the language of social justice. Matrimonial classifieds and online services are flourishing. Even car bumper stickers can speak of caste. It seems as if we have abandoned the vision of a casteless nation of the kind Ambedkar envisioned…We need a fresh public debate on caste, and how the Indian republic should deal with it. Because, as Ambedkar put it so well, castes are anti-national.”

Omkar Goswami about the Indian jobs situation: “What can one do with this huge number of people waiting to get into the workforce? I have seen no real solution worth the name. We haven’t invested sufficiently in education and training since Independence. And technology is rapidly changing the labour-output mix to the detriment of labour. I see more people leaving villages for towns to seek jobs that don’t exist, significantly greater urban underemployment across India, and eventually a groundswell of uncoordinated anger of the poor. This problem predates the present government, and Modi alone cannot solve it. Swathed in our creature comforts, consider this as a massive issue. We are generally pacific people. But faced with this cancer, this is how mass unrest begins.”