Category: Thinks

Thinks 139

India must make the most of its demographic dividend: by Ejaz Ghani. “First, investments in human and physical infrastructure will need to be scaled up dramatically to promote entrepreneurship and create jobs. Second, promote entrepreneurship and job creation. Third, it is now time to implement the next generation of economic reforms to deliver efficient public services. What will happen if India fails to capture its demographic dividend? The most likely effect will be that a large number of young working-age people will be left unemployed or underemployed.”

Compounding Incumbent Advantage: by Adam Inoue. “Getting your foot in the door” is permanent permission to enter the fast lane…Knowledge-worker incumbency advantage compounds on itself. Over time, my basic signals get stronger—I have more years on the resume and slowly gain a reputation in my areas of expertise—but also my actual skills tend to get stronger at a pace that would be unsustainable for someone who isn’t already in the industry and has to spend 40+ hours a week doing something else.”

A Few Short Stories: by Morgan Housel.

Thinks 138

Investing advice from Andy Kessler: “My advice is always to invest in the fog. When everyone else is incredulous, look for scale. Usually, no one else can see it. Squint hard, but don’t make stuff up. If you can see something that everyone dismisses, and that will get cheaper over a long period of time, maybe decades, buy in cheap and go along for the long ride. Others will eventually overpay. On the flip side, when the fog clears and we’ve moved from the acceptance to hype, it’s time to unload your shares to those late to the party.”

Agriculture policy should target India’s actual farming population: by Harish Damodaran. “Most government welfare schemes are aimed at poverty alleviation and uplifting those at the bottom of the pyramid. But there’s no policy for those in the “middle” and in danger of slipping to the bottom…Whether it is crop, livestock or poultry, agriculture policy has to focus on “serious full-time farmers”, most of them are neither rich nor poor. This rural middle class that was once very confident of its future in agriculture today risks going out of business. That shouldn’t be allowed to happen.”

Robert Mundell: Obit by Vivek Dehijia. “Widely considered the greatest macro economist of the second half of the last century, in the generation after John Maynard Keynes, Mundell was in rarefied terrain. Indeed, the only other credible contender for this title would be the late Milton Friedman, who was his colleague at the University of Chicago when Mundell taught there during the late 1960s. Mundell was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1999.” More from Madan Sabnavis and TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan.

Thinks 137

HBR on new research about customer loyalty programs. “Customer loyalty programs are ubiquitous, accounting for more than 3.3 billion memberships in the United States alone…New research, conducted by professors at the Wharton School along with the customer experience consultancy the Verde Group, reveals an important downside of loyalty programs. When loyal members encounter service failures—shipping issues, problems with returns, stockouts, and the like—they get more upset than customers who are not members of the program…The researchers call this the boomerang effect, because the very loyalty a brand engenders comes back to hurt it.”

Covid and India’s Middle Class: by Udit Misra. “In 2020, Covid disruption resulted in reducing India’s vibrant middle class by one-third. “Prior to the pandemic, it was anticipated that 99 million people in India would belong in the global middle class in 2020. A year into the pandemic, this number is estimated to be 66 million, cut by a third. Meanwhile, the number of poor in India is projected to have reached 134 million, more than double the 59 million expected prior to the recession,” stated the Pew report.”

Make Time for “Me Time”: from HBR. “you can take steps to make sure that you put focus and attention on taking care of yourself each day. “Always on” doesn’t have to mean you must sacrifice your needs. It just means sometimes finding the time to make sure that your focus is on yourself.”

Thinks 136

How mRNA vaccines like Moderna’s and Pfizer’s are propelling us into the ‘new golden age’ of vaccinology: from Fortune. “Unlike other vaccine types, producing RNA and DNA vaccines is a matter of assembling nucleic acids and packaging the fragile genetic material in such a way as to protect it until it can make it into a cell. In the case of current vaccines, that package is a tiny particle of fat. This process means the vaccines are quick to make, compared to other kinds of vaccines that use components that have to be grown, and they can be modified with relative ease.”

The CEO of Pfizer on Developing a Vaccine in Record Time: in HBR. ” It took a moon-shot challenge, out-of-the-box thinking, intercompany cooperation, liberation from bureaucracy, and, most of all, hard work from everyone at Pfizer and BioNTech to accomplish what we did in 2020. Organizations of any size or in any industry can use these strategies both to solve their own problems and to produce important work that benefits society.”

Atanu Dey: “The cost of any economic good is the cost of the energy that went into its production. We can go into why this is so later. If this is true, then it follows that the cost would fall if the cost of energy falls. And if the cost of energy tends to go close to zero, then the cost of everything would tend toward zero. In other words, super abundance…Super abundance is just round the corner, just over the horizon.”

Thinks 135

Ninan on what is likely in India — tax and spend. “With economic disruption, growing inequality, & lack of government resources, economic practice is coming full circle…Higher tax rates, central banks pumping out cash, protection for home industry, suppressing interest rates, increased social welfare pay-outs — it all harks back to pre-Thatcher-Reagan. Sure, taxes will not go back to the 70-90 per cent range that existed once in Britain and the US (as in India), and governments still believe in market orientation when it comes to products and services. But they are re-assuming the primary role in building physical infrastructure and funding research.”

Sunil Jain in Financial Express: “The government should use this opportunity to raise corporation tax rates; companies are doing exceptionally well and can afford to pay a higher tax rate for a couple of years. A 30% tax rate won’t kill them. These are extraordinary times and call for special measures. The rates can be reversed after two years. Meanwhile, the additional revenue can be used to bring some succour to MSMEs and also the less privileged; MGNREGA allocations can be increased and more cash transfers can be made.”

According to me, India needs exactly the opposite: this is the time to implement the ideas in the Mission 10-20-30 blog series I wrote a year ago.

Thinks 134

Resources Are More Abundant Than Ever, and People Are the Reason: from Cato Unbound. Quoting Julian Simon: “There is no physical or economic reason why human resourcefulness and enterprise cannot forever continue to respond to impending shortages and existing problems with new expedients that, after an adjustment period, leave us better off than before the problem arose.… Adding more people will cause [short‐​run] problems, but at the same time there will be more people to solve these problems and leave us with the bonus of lower costs and less scarcity in the long run.… The ultimate resource is people—skilled, spirited, and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so, inevitably, for the benefit of us all.”

Ideas of India: The History of Textiles: Shruti Rajagopalan and Virginia Postrel discuss the development of textiles and their economic relevance in India and throughout the world. “The sari is interesting in several different ways because the other thing about a sari is, it’s a rectangle. And of course, a sari can be, as you say, very expensive. It can be made of silk. It can be brocaded, which requires very complex weaving patterns. If you go back in history, almost everybody wears clothes that are basically rectangles. Think about a sari. Think about a sarong, a toga, and the toga-like cloth in West Africa. Think about a kimono, which is basically some stitches, and even European peasant clothing is basically rectangles. You can make a skirt; you can make a shirt. It’s just rectangles.”

Reading: Murder at the Mushaira. A mystery set in 1857 Delhi with Ghalib as detective.

Thinks 133

Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think: by Arthur Brooks. “The secret to bearing my decline—to enjoying it—is to become more conscious of the roots linking me to others. If I have properly developed the bonds of love among my family and friends, my own withering will be more than offset by blooming in others.”

Bloomberg on Asmodee Holding: “You might have noticed something about Catan, Pandemic, Game of Thrones, Ticket to Ride, Specter Ops, Agricola, 7 Wonders, and Lord of the Rings. If you’d bought them a decade ago, they would have come from a half-dozen producers. Today, those titles are made by a single company: Asmodee Holding…Like the Monopoly player who never rolls doubles or lands on Free Parking but suddenly has hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place, the company has quietly bought up game studios and distribution licenses.”

Theodore Roosevelt: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Thinks 132

Geoffrey Hinton has a hunch about what’s next for AI: from Technology Review. “A decade ago, the artificial-intelligence pioneer transformed the field with a major breakthrough. Now he’s working on a new imaginary system named GLOM…Hinton thinks of GLOM as a way to model human perception in a machine—it offers a new way to process and represent visual information in a neural network. On a technical level, the guts of it involve a glomming together of similar vectors.”

Messing with the web of social conventions: by Arnold Kling. “We live in a web of social conventions. Each social convention by itself is a sort of Chesterton Fence. You may wonder why it’s there, but take it away and you may not anticipate what will happen elsewhere in the web. You ignore potential interdependencies at your peril…Once social conventions have been adopted for awhile, they become very sticky.”

Watched: Mr. Holmes

Thinks 131

Technology will save emerging markets from sluggish growth: by Ruchir Sharma in FT. “As economist Carlota Perez has shown, tech revolutions last a long time. Innovations like the car and the steam engine were still transforming economies half a century later. Now, the fading era of globalisation will limit the number of emerging economies that can prosper on exports alone, but the era of rapid digitisation has only just begun. This offers many developing economies a revolutionary new path to catching up with the living standards of the developed world.”

The Importance of Epistemic Humility: by Atanu Dey. ” Epistemic — of, relating to, or involving knowledge and cognition. Humility — the attitude that acknowledges weakness or incompleteness in one’s capacities. Epistemic humility is when you know that you don’t know, and resist the pretense of knowledge…People who hold absolutely rigid views on matters that are intrinsically unknowable or incompletely known cause a lot of misery. They lack the wisdom to realize that as imperfect beings we are subject to all sorts of illusions and have at best an incomplete understanding of the world. We have to be especially wary of our beliefs.”

What Walt Whitman Knew About Democracy: from WSJ. “For the great American poet, the peculiar qualities of grass suggested a way to resolve the tension between the individual and the group…Whitman’s image of the grass suggests that the one and the many can merge, and that discovery allows him to imagine a world without significant hierarchy. Can any one blade of grass be all that much more important than any other? When you make the grass the national flag, as it were, you get to love and appreciate all the people who surround you. You become part of a community of equals. You can feel at home.”

Thinks 130

Future of Money: from CitiGPS. “The race towards Digital Money 2.0 is on. Some have framed it as a new Space Race or Digital Currency Cold War. In our view, it doesn’t have to be a zero sum game — there’s a lot of room for the overall digital pie to grow.”

Rajiv Bajaj: “My interpretation is that it is the strategy of the company, which you can call as its vision or its direction or its purpose, that actually leads the company. My 30 years at Bajaj since December 19, 1990 has really been invested in trying to define as robust a strategy as possible — which also means simple, and as I like to say, one that should be self-evident and eminently clear to everyone from the chairman to the watchman. Only then, can such a strategy align a company, have us all working as one in the same direction and if you’re able to do that reasonably well, then maybe that’s not all what leadership is about but that is what is most important when it comes to leadership.”

16th-century French political philosopher Étienne de La Boétie: “It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such a complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.” [via CafeHayek]. See his “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.”