Category: Thinks

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.”

16^th-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.”

How People Get Rich Now: by Paul Graham. “How are people making these new fortunes? Roughly 3/4 by starting companies and 1/4 by investing…By 2020 the biggest source of new wealth was what are sometimes called “tech” companies.”

A new era of innovation: Moore’s Law is not dead and AI is ready to explode: from Silicon Angle. “We’re entering a new era of innovation where inexpensive processing capabilities will power an explosion of machine intelligence applications. We’ll also tell you what new bottlenecks will emerge and what this means for system architectures and industry transformations in the coming decade.”

Why Bangladesh is flying high at 50: from Mint. “Once a byword for poverty and disaster, famines and floods, Bangladesh’s per capita GDP now closely rivals India’s after having surpassed Pakistan in the last decade. According to human develoment indicators, Bangladesh outranks its bigger neighbours —a far cry from the “basket case” that then US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had once made it out to be.”

UBS on the Subscription Economy: from subscribed.com. “Millennials are the ones behind the massive shift toward digitization. They—and the Gen Zers right behind them—are true digital natives who prefer “access over ownership”: paying for Uber, not a car note; streaming a new release on Netflix, not buying a DVD. The Subscription Economy model is what makes this shift possible…More and more corporations are now embracing a subscription model because they love how it allows for more predictable and sustainable cash flow. Think going from paying for huge data processing centers to subscribing to storage in the cloud.”

Atanu Dey has quotes from Lee Kuan Yew: “India is an established civilization. Nehru and Gandhi had a chance to do for India what I did for Singapore because of their enormous prestige, but they could not… Policies of self-reliance are no longer relevant in an interdependent world with fast-changing technology…A second relic of India’s historical legacy is its preoccupation with fair distribution…To redistribute all the gains in the early stages of growth will slow down the capital accumulation necessary to generate further growth. Wealth springs from entrepreneurship, which means risk taking…The only way to raise the living conditions of the poor is to increase the size of the pie. Equality of incomes gives no incentive to the resourceful and the industrious to outperform and be competitive.” No much has changed; we continue to lose opportunities to transform India.

Times of India on the making of the new Mumbai-Delhi expressway.

Why Beavers Beat Koalas: A framework for capital allocation in the 2020s: by Rafi Cohen. “It is based on two criteria that will drive business performance in the coming years: sustainability ambition and innovation potential.”

Virginia Postrel: “By dispersing knowledge and control, a dynamic society takes advantage of the human quest to create and discover. Dynamism allows the world to be enriched through the decentralized, trial-and-error experiments in which we all engage when left free to do so. While reactionaries seek rules that will ban change and technocrats want rules that will control outcomes, dynamists look for rules that let people forge new bonds, invent new institutions, and find better ways of doing things. Like the laws of physics and chemistry, which permit the simplest of particles to form complex combinations, dynamist rules allow us to create the bonds of life – to turn the atoms of our individual selves, our ideas, and the stuff of our material world into the complex social, intellectual, and technological molecules that make up our civilization.” [via CafeHayek]

What Did J.D. Salinger, Leo Tolstoy, and Sarah Bernhardt Have in Common?: from WSJ. “The surprising—and continuing—influence of Swami Vivekananda, the pied piper of the global yoga movement.”

How Do You Define A Thought Leader?: by Ryan Phelan.”You can call yourself an evangelist. That can even be the title your company gives you. But your community appoints you a thought leader for your ability and willingness to share and give back.”

Prospectus On Próspera: from Astral Codex Ten. A look at Próspera, the charter city taking shape in Honduras. “this is about startup governments and investment opportunities and blah blah blah, but it’s also about trying to fight global poverty by radically changing the rules of the game that makes it possible.”

Rise of risk capital: from Business Standard. “The flow of PE/VC funding is bridging the crucial risk capital gap in India, which has allowed some of the firms to grow rapidly. It is also the biggest source of foreign direct investment. Savings in India are not sufficient to fund the investment needs of the economy. Besides, the allocation of household financial savings towards equity is negligible. Many of the new businesses would not have grown the way they have without the support of foreign risk capital. Thus, it is important for policymakers to constantly assess the business environment and improve the ease of doing business.

Economist obit on John Williamson, who defined the “Washington Consensus”: “The paper sought to capture what Washington’s intelligentsia agreed were broadly sensible policies. There were ten planks, which Mr Williamson later summarised as encompassing “macroeconomic discipline, a market economy, and openness to the world”. Wild-eyed radicalism it was not; the list was intended after all to reflect only the policies that almost everyone in Washington thought wise. Mr Williamson did not endorse knee-jerk austerity; he emphasised redirecting industrial subsidies towards education and health. Exchange rates should be competitive, but not necessarily freely floating. Openness meant acceptance of imports and direct investment, but not full capital mobility. Deregulation meant liberating sheltered sectors, not gutting environmental and labour standards. It was more a practical guide to avoiding disaster than a manifesto.” More from Bloomberg and NYT.

Feeding Hate With Video: A Former Alt-Right YouTuber Explains His Methods: NYTimes. “Focus on conflict. Feed the algorithm. Make sure whatever you produce reinforces a narrative. Don’t worry if it is true.”

Watched: Mandela (Tamil movie on Netflix), a political satire

Why Don’t Low-Income Countries Adopt More Productive Technologies?: from researchers at UCLA, the Richmond Fed and Washington University in St. Louis. “By integrating theories that separately emphasize the roles of coordination failures and distortions, their unified framework shows that reducing distortions within “big push” regions could unleash massive economic growth.”

Industrial Policy is a Very Old, New Idea: from Discourse. “It has a long history of disappointments and failures, but that’s not stopping many policymakers from proposing it again…Governments are gambling with taxpayer dollars and making a lot of manifestly bad bets on risky ventures. These bets look even worse when we consider the empirically supported alternative: generalized economic freedom.

Warren Buffett: “Look for 3 things in a person. Intelligence, Energy, & Integrity. If they don’t have the last one, don’t even bother with the first two.”