Category: Thinks

Atanu Dey: “I desire water when I’m thirsty. But after a few glasses of water, I am done. I have no more desire for water. I may have other needs but water is not one of them. If every need I feel now is met without any struggles, then at least for now I am not bothered by them. I may have other needs that arise later that I cannot conceive of now but that’s something I have to deal with later. But for now, all I want is that I have sufficient amounts of stuff that meet my current needs so that I can be as free of needless unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) as possible. That is where humanity is headed. It’s going toward a world where everyone’s well-being is assured because they all have their consumption needs met regardless of how much wealth and income they have… In about 15 years or so, there will be equality in well-being. There will be inequality of wealth and income, and to some degree inequality in consumption, but there will be equality of well-being.”

Sebastian Park: “Decision-making is even more difficult than people realize. In the academic sphere, we talk about how we’re breaking out the decision: we assume no variance in the system, and then we say, ‘What’s one plus one?’ We say it’s two, and we’re all happy with that. That’s not how the world works! In the real world, everything operates with imperfect information. We don’t know what we don’t know. Additionally, things constantly change…All of this makes decision-making difficult. That’s even before we consider the effects of bias, the impact of noise, the fact that we don’t control our destiny, or the possibility that all our basic assumptions are wrong. The combination of these factors impedes our ability to make the perfect decision. Therefore, our goal is not to make the perfect decision. It’s to make the best decision possible at any given moment, based on what we know at that time, how we know it, and why we know it. It’s not a question of whether we regret a decision in retrospect; it’s a question of whether, knowing what we knew then, it was a good decision or a bad one.”

Mint on dealing with jet lag: “According to the Sleep Foundation, tart cherries or tart cherry juice contain melatonin and tryptophan if you’re not interested in taking a melatonin supplement. Tryptophan can encourage melatonin production. When flying west to east, Dr. Stacy Sims recommends ingesting 4 ounces of tart cherry juice approximately 30 minutes before bed, then waking up one hour earlier than usual. Four days before your trip, drink 4 ounces of tart cherry juice (for natural melatonin) with 400 milligrams of valerian about 30 minutes before bed. Go to bed and wake up 1 hour earlier than usual. When you wake up, start the “wakeful” process by opening your curtains to bright sunlight or going outside.”

Nandan Nilekani: “India is upgrading. It is going from being an offline, cash-based, informal and low-productivity economy to an online, cashless, formal and high-productivity one… Building on the country’s successes with IT services, the nation has been able to harness governmental scale, technocratic zeal and socio-economic aspirations to invent the India Stack—a bouquet of technological goods spanning unique identification, digital documentation and finance with the potential to alter the country’s destiny.“

Anticipating the Unintended asks if India can industrialise: “Despite all the hype around Make in India and the rising ease of doing business rankings, it is still quite difficult to start and run a business in India. The state is deeply entrenched in controlling capital in India, and it enjoys the arbitrary power that it has over them that it is impossible to change this with just better optics of ‘single window’, tax holidays or investment roadshows. In the last two decades, the state has retreated a bit in some areas, but paradoxically, with greater digitisation, it has more information and, therefore, greater power over industry. My general contention is that the state can continue with its welfarism (or whatever else you may call it) on the social and political front, but for India to industrialise, the state has to retreat on the economic control it wields. This looks very difficult today because the state’s first goal is to perpetuate itself. It will require the PM to go back to some of his campaign promises of pre-2014 with real conviction…My view is we will industrialise a bit faster than in the past, but we are going to fall short of the expectations of the kind of industrialisation that’s expected for us to increase our per capita income from $2000 to $10,000 in the next 15 years.”

Andre Plaut writes that Twitter’s killer app is real-time search: “Twitter has a tremendous amount of live, real-time data about what’s happening where. This makes Twitter unique as a service—it encourages its users to create in-and-of-the-moment content. They share what they’re seeing, thinking, feeling, and experiencing now…Something happens, and seconds later, people turn to Twitter.”

Raghu Raman: “Leaders across organizations follow growth journeys through four stages: Tactical, Operational, Strategic and Doctrinal. Leaders (or heroes, since every individual is the protagonist of one’s own life) begin their journey at the tactical stage. This is usually the first 5-10 years of their career where the key success components are basic knowledge of their professional domains, a high degree of positive energy and a can-do attitude. At tactical levels, the idea is to forge ahead under guidance and figure out a path along the way. Once leaders transition to the operational stage, their role requires an ability to create collaborative alliances. They must recognize that ostensibly adversarial attitudes within the same organisation are required for robust growth…At strategic levels, the primary role of leaders is capacity building for the future. A leader must have a view of ‘over the horizon’ events and discern sense from feeble signals heralding changes in the environment…At the doctrinal stage, the leader attains the altitude and influence to be able to shape the environment in terms of guiding policies, mediating intractable short versus long-term choices, navigating contradictory asks and also advocating orbit-shifting ideas.”

Paul Zak (HBR, 2014): “My research has also shown that stories are useful inside organizations. We know that people are substantially more motivated by their organization’s transcendent purpose (how it improves lives) than by its transactional purpose (how it sells goods and services).  Transcendent purpose is effectively communicated through stories – for example, by describing the pitiable situations of actual, named customers and how their problems were solved by your efforts. Make your people empathize with the pain the customer experiened and they will also feel the pleasure of its resolution – all the more if some heroics went in to reducing suffering or struggle, or producing joy. Many of us know from Joseph Campbell’s work that enduring stories tend to share a dramatic arc in which a character struggles and eventually finds heretofore unknown abilities and uses these to triumph over adversity; my work shows that the brain is highly attracted to this story style…When you want to motivate, persuade, or be remembered, start with a story of human struggle and eventual triumph. It will capture people’s hearts – by first attracting their brains.”

Vivek Murthy (US context): “Loneliness and isolation hurt whole communities. Social disconnection is associated with reduced productivity in the workplace, worse performance in school, and diminished civic engagement. When we are less invested in one another, we are more susceptible to polarization and less able to pull together to face the challenges that we cannot solve alone…As it has built for decades, the epidemic of loneliness and isolation has fueled other problems that are killing us and threaten to rip our country apart. Given these extraordinary costs, rebuilding social connection must be a top public health priority for our nation. It will require reorienting ourselves, our communities, and our institutions to prioritize human connection and healthy relationships. The good news is we know how to do this…Evidence shows that connection is linked to better heart health, brain health and immunity. It could be spending 15 minutes each day to reach out to people we care about, introducing ourselves to our neighbors, checking on co-workers who may be having a hard time, sitting down with people with different views to get to know and understand them, and seeking opportunities to serve others recognizing that helping people is one of the most powerful antidotes to loneliness.”

Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman: “According to [Indian] government data, roughly $45 billion in direct cash payments were delivered in the fiscal year that just ended, benefiting about 700 million (not necessarily distinct) people via 265 public schemes. If transfers from state governments were included, these figures would be even larger. Taken together, the cash transfers are tantamount to a universal basic income…Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unique approach to redistribution, which one of us dubbed “New Welfarism,” emphasises funding for items such as toilets that are essential but normally provisioned privately, as opposed to public goods such as primary education and basic health care.”

Laura Williams: “The pineapple trade is now highly industrialized. Chemicals that ripen fruit — the same ones that ripe bananas emit — are added to crops a week before harvest. Refrigerated shipping containers on ships, planes, and trucks allow whole pineapples to be delivered fresh, worldwide, with little loss to bruising or rot. Grocery stores do a healthy trade in whole, fresh pineapples; cored and prepared pineapple; and canned and dried varieties. If you want a taste of pineapple today, almost anywhere in the world, you can get it for under a dollar…Pineapples were once a supreme luxury item, which (through a combination of industrial process improvement, specialization, and relocation to regions with marginal advantages in pineapple growing) have become accessible to almost everyone. When past centuries’ most-iconic luxuries become commonplace and affordable, we always have specialization and market innovations to thank.”

Amjad Masad: “Learning how to code becomes more important in a world with AI. AI means that the return on investment from learning to code just went way up. AI models are great at generating code, but they go off the rails easily. They’re inherently statistical and stochastic, so they make a lot of mistakes. That will get better asymptotically, but for the foreseeable future, they’ll need human input. That means in this new world, you can suddenly build incredible things by leveraging these tools to generate code. And, if you can program, you can understand where they’re getting things wrong and fill in the gaps. You become less of a traditional programmer and more of a guide to bring your ideas to life. These are inherently augmenting technologies, not automating technologies.”

Josh Waitzkin on how people identify their peak energy: “I ask people to rate one through 10 how their energy levels and creative state is in different parts of the day. And then of course, I examine it. But people tend to have a pretty good sense for this. I think it’s really important. One of the things that I have every one do — and that I’ve been doing my whole life — is ending my day thinking about the most important question in what I do. Then waking up in the morning, first thing, pre-input, and brainstorming on it…Ending the day strong, like I mentioned before, and focusing on what matters most and building the musculature of focusing your being on not all this ancillary stuff that just comes at you, but what really matters the most. Releasing it, not stressing out a little about it all night, sleeping well. And then first in the morning pre-input, not after checking the news or checking Bloomberg or checking Twitter or checking stock prices. Pre-input, brainstorming on it. Because what you’re doing that way is you’re systematically opening the channel between the conscious and the unconscious mind. That’s something that is something you can do it systematically, day in and day out rhythmically.”

Bloomberg: “In the very near future, employees working in just about every industry imaginable will need to know how to prompt chatbots such as ChatGPT effectively and efficiently. “Using AI models to generate things is expensive, and the outputs can vary massively,” said Ben Stokes, the creator of PromptBase, a marketplace for good AI prompts. “A good prompt engineer can create prompts that produce consistent, high-quality outputs (e.g. images, text or code) at low costs (either API costs or images credits etc.)…Often, this can involve a little role play: telling ChatGPT to “pretend” it is something else. “You are an interviewer for a job at a multinational bank,” you might say, followed by a detailed description of the role and requesting they give you a grilling. You might ask it to play the role of an app designer writing specifically for Apple’s iOS and have it spit out code to your specifications. Like a good journalist, who might ask a similar question in different ways to elicit a more thoughtful response from a subject, the specific words and structure can provoke the AI to behave in a certain manner. It’s not just what you say, but the way you say it. The more complex the prompt, and the more strict the guardrails of your directions, the better the result. Setting out a scenario in a chatbot’s “mind” works just as it does for us humans, encouraging us to think outside our normal perspectives.”

Charlie Munger on his own imprint on the world: “I would like my legacy to be a more relentless determination to develop and use what I call an uncommon sense.”

Katherine Boyle on her most contrarian, high-conviction opinion: “We are in a full-contact, all-out war with forces competing for control of our minds. Not just attention but control. Avoid any expert, meme, substance, or practice – however safe or mundane it may seem – that claims it can improve your mind in a way that invites these forces in, especially permanently. This may seem like a consensus opinion, but in practice, eradicating these forces from one’s life is a daily battle that requires contrarian actions, not just belief.”

Andy Kessler has Holmesian advice to those who feel bombarded by information. One of the tips: “Ignore the feed. When I met with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon in 2019, I asked if it could see his office. I have a thing about checking out a CEO’s view. His was terrific, and it wasn’t even on the top floor. I asked if he had the bank’s profit-and-loss statement, with minute-by-minute updates, on his computer screen. He looked at me like I had two heads and said, “Of course not.” I admit I was disappointed, but then I realized he shouldn’t. Instead, I suspect, Mr. Dimon has honed the art of delegating fire-hose duty to others so he could think and lead.”

Timothy Lee: “Computers and smartphones have become ubiquitous across the economy. But this has led to only modest changes for established industries like health care, education, housing, and transportation…Most of the American economy is not information-focused: It’s focused on delivering physical goods and services like homes, cars, restaurant meals, and haircuts. It will be hard for AI to have a big impact on these industries for the same reasons that it’s been hard for Internet startups to do so…Software didn’t eat the world and AI won’t either.” [via Arnold Kling]

Mint: “The fundamentals of India’s economy are less dynamic than often assumed. India’s poor are mostly concentrated in rural parts, and especially in the poorest (and most populous) states whose per-capita income growth has continued to lag behind the top five richest states of India. The share of India’s rural population reduced by a mere three percentage points between 2011 and 2020 and at present stands slightly below two-thirds of total population. In nearly every country where poverty has been eradicated by industrialization, we usually observe a sharp and continuous reduction of the share of agriculture in GDP. In India, the share of agriculture declined sharply from the early 1990s through to 2004 but has remained stuck at 16-17% ever since. The decline in share of agriculture in the total labour force has also been modest—it stands at 43% at present, starting with just around 50% in 2011. Among other fast-growing emerging economies in Asia (China, Bangladesh, Vietnam), India’s agricultural share of GDP is the highest.”

Token Dispatch: “Just like Bitcoin and Ethereum are changing the way we think about money, we can use the same principles to revolutionise social media. By decentralising content, we can create a public pool that no one entity controls. Think of it like a big public park: everyone can come and play, but no one person owns it all. That means more innovation, more competition, and more control for us, the users and creators. To shift from a traditional social media platform to a decentralised blockchain platform, significant changes are required. This includes developing and deploying new technology infrastructure based on decentralised technologies like blockchain, changing the business model from selling services to using cryptocurrencies for generating revenue, providing users with more control over their data, and complying with data privacy and blockchain technology regulations.”

Andy Matuschak: “Books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it…Books are static. Prose can frame or stimulate readers’ thoughts, but prose can’t behave or respond to those thoughts as they unfold in each reader’s head. The reader must plan and steer their own feedback loops…Let’s reframe the question. Rather than “how might we make books actually work reliably,” we can ask: How might we design mediums which do the job of a non-fiction book—but which actually work reliably?…How might we design mediums in which “readers” naturally form rich associations between the ideas being presented? How might we design mediums which “readers” naturally engage creatively with the material? How might we design mediums in which “readers” naturally contend with competing interpretations? If we pile together enough of these questions we’re left with: how might we design mediums in which “reading” is the same as “understanding”?”

Rajeev Bhargava: “If a nation is a people in conversation, then anyone stopping this conversation is damaging it…At no point must the state hijack the conversation, dictate its agenda or control it. It is a part of the conversation, not its permanent leader. Indeed, it is the duty of the state to rein in those who disrupt or block the conversation. The nation expects it.” [via HT]

Hugh Hewitt: “My defense of reading fiction in a time of urgent facts boils down to four points. First, fiction can keep anxious minds from chewing themselves to bits…Second, reading can give a sense of proportion, which our distracted age needs most urgently…Third, reading can take us into unfamiliar worlds and better prepare us to live in our own…Fourth, and finally, time spent with a worthwhile novel is not time sucked away and spat out. It is time, and the lessons of time, brought into focus.”

ksred: “The format of the [Emergent Ventures] Unconference is something I have not seen anywhere else. It really puts forward this battle of ideas with the freedom to explore without any judgment. This is how it works: There are several venues and several time slots available to talk. A grid board is put up representing these. Anyone who wants to put a talk forward, writes the talk title on a sticky note. Anyone who wants to attend a talk, finds one or more talks of interest. People are not discouraged from attending multiple talks.”

Richard Nixon: “What makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle. The struggle. Even if you don’t win it.” [via Shane Parrish]

Gillian Tett: “The irony of this dash to live on digital devices is that it has created a dire need for metals, rare earth minerals and other commodities, ranging from sodium to nickel to lithium. Who controls those supply chains, and whether they are in private or public hands, is therefore critical. As is the question of whether entrepreneurs will jump in to create extraction processes that are large-scale, low-cost and green…Although tech entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs have become household names, most people would be stumped if you asked them to name an industrial entrepreneur. So I am curious to watch the progress of Hall’s lithium venture, alongside the dozens of other start-ups quietly moving into this field. [Amanda] Hall is confident, pointing out that since she offers an extraction service, rather than actually owning a mine, she can work with a private group or a government, whatever happens in places such as Chile. The question for western governments is how many other entrepreneurs they have waiting in the wings. “Getting your hands and your boots dirty is so important — we are bringing new technology into that space,” Hall says. Let’s hope others are listening.” Key point: “Forget mining bitcoin: real heavy industry is the challenge.”

EconTalk: “Is the perfect really the enemy of the good? Or is it the other way around? In 2008, Duke University economist Michael Munger ran for governor and proposed increasing school choice through vouchers for the state’s poorest counties. But some lovers of liberty argued that it’s better to fight for eliminating public schools instead of trying to improve them. Munger realized his fellow free-marketers come in two flavors: directionalists–who take our political realities as given and try to move outcomes closer to the ideal–and destinationists–who want no compromises with what they see as the perfect outcome.”

Ninan: “[India’s] demographic dividend can be turned to good account only if human capabilities are built and put to productive use well before birth and death rates converge and mark the tail-end of the demographic transition, a couple of decades hence. By then, going by current trends, India might be an upper-middle-income country approaching early middle-age. For, it will be the work of at least 20 years for India to attain the living standards typical today of parts of Southeast Asia, Latin America, or China, whose current per capita incomes (using purchasing power parity numbers) are about two and a half times India’s.”

WSJ: “Efficiency is about how work is done, and it is closely linked with productivity. If workers are more efficient—reducing the time and resources needed to complete a task—productivity should theoretically improve, too. Productivity, as narrowly defined by macroeconomists, measures the amount of output produced in one hour of labor. How companies measure productivity varies. Some businesses consider the revenue or profit generated per employee. Others focus on projects delivered or new products shipped. Improved processes could also pave the way for companies to employ fewer people. At some point, however, shaving time off workers’ tasks in microdoses reaches a limit in terms of cost savings. Companies ultimately still need innovation and investment to fuel long term growth, said Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and now an author and adviser to executives…Around 43% of workers say they spend more than 10 hours a week trying to look productive rather than on valuable tasks, according to a February survey of 1,000 full-time workers by the workplace analytics company Visier Inc.”

Shane Parrish: “Most people write to sound smart when they should write to be useful. Communicating to sound smart dramatically lowers your potential for impact. The harder people have to work to understand you, the less they want your input. Writing to be useful means your ideas are easily understood. Write what you would want to read. Simple, but not easy. To write usefully, you need to think clearly. And clear thinking doesn’t simply flow from your mind. Writing helps you think better because it forces you to slow down. And the process of slowing down helps you discover new insights.”

Sadanand Dhume: “Before India can dream of emulating their success, or China’s, it must acknowledge the size of the challenges it faces. Only about three-fourths of India’s population is literate, a level that China surpassed about 40 years ago. According to Mr. Eberstadt, this makes India the only country in history to have a vast pool of college graduates living amid hundreds of millions of working-age people who have never been to school. Moreover, over the past three decades regional disparities have widened. Kerala in the south has human-development indicators akin to Brazil. Bihar in the north looks worse than Cambodia. Or take female labor-force participation, another measure of economic development. In China it’s more than 60%—roughly the same as in the U.S. and other wealthy countries. In India it has declined from 28% in 1990 to 23% in 2021. More than two-thirds of Chinese live in cities, which tends to boost productivity. India remains overwhelmingly rural—only about a third of the population lives in cities. Industrialization also matters…As a proportion of employment, India’s industrialization peaked in 2002.”

NYTimes: “The ideal breakfast is the one that makes you feel your best, experts say, though there are some important nutrients to keep in mind…To maintain healthy blood sugar, energy and fullness levels until your next meal, getting the right balance of protein, fiber and unsaturated fats at breakfast is important, said Lauren Harris-Pincus, a registered dietitian in New Jersey. This roughly translates to at least 20 grams of protein, eight to 10 grams of fiber and 10 to 15 grams of unsaturated fats, totaling about 300 to 350 calories, Ms. Harris-Pincus said. But it’s important not to get hung up on the numbers, said Alice H. Lichtenstein, a professor of nutrition science and policy at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Your nutrient needs will depend on your weight, activity level, age and health conditions, Dr. Lichtenstein said…“So what’s the ideal breakfast?” Dr. Lichtenstein said. “It’s whatever makes your body work best.””

Excellent wisdom nuggets from Morgan Housel. “The fastest way to get rich is to go slow. Social media makes more sense when you view it as a place people go to perform rather than a place to communicate. Everything is sales. Every employee is replaceable. The most important communication skill is knowing when to shut up.”

Forbes India has a comment from in a story about Web3: “With India having both a critical mass of consumers and the tech talent, for the first time, there is an opportunity to play on a level-playing field with global companies, says Rajesh Jain, who has been in the tech space from the last three decades, and is the founder and managing director of 25-year-old Netcore Cloud. “Having seen the early days of the internet, I sense a similar excitement with Web3. But uncertainty and excessive regulation are business killers. Given a history of retrospective actions and taxation by Indian governments, it is the rare brave entrepreneur who will create a Web3 company based in India. And when capital moves, so do people—and so does eventual wealth creation.””

Vivek Kaul: “The trouble is that a large population and the ability of that population to buy things, or there being a viable market for what any startup is trying to sell, are two very different things. One of the most important points in the story of startups has been the success of UPI. But just because UPI transactions are growing, it doesn’t automatically imply that the overall number of economic transactions are also growing at the same pace. Before UPI, almost all of these transactions were in cash. Also, when it comes to consumer transactions on which valuations of startups are built, a few people seem to be making a bulk of these. As the Indus Valley Report 2023 published recently pointed out, 1% of Indians take 45% of flights, 2.6% of Indians invest in mutual funds, 6.5% of users are responsible for 44% of UPI transactions, and 5% of users account for a third of the orders placed on Zomato. As Zomato recently reported: “Customers with annual order frequency >50 as a % of annual transacting customers have increased from 1.4% in 2018 to 4.7% in 2022.” Basically, this means around 5% of Zomato’s customers order from it at least once a week. So, as the Indus Valley Report points out: “Much of the consumption is driven by a tiny super-user set… [The] broad user base narrows sharply when it comes to paying users.””

NYTimes: “In just 15 years, the men’s Premier League has become one of the most valuable sports organizations on the planet. Teams bought for $100 million are now estimated to be worth $1 billion. The money flooding in has been used to improve infrastructure at the sport’s lower levels and groom younger players. Now, wealthy investors see an opportunity in the Women’s Premier League, too, and are pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars. That means the kind of opportunities for female athletes that never existed before. Opening up what has long been known as “the gentleman’s game” sends a powerful psychological message to hundreds of millions of women and girls in what will soon be the world’s most populous country. Gender roles remain rigid in India, where only about 20 percent of women are employed in the formal work force, one of the lowest rates globally. If the country is to meet its full economic potential, it must chip away at that gender divide.”

WSJ: “Slack? Phone? Teams? Zoom? There are too many work communications. Workplaces become saturated with ways to talk, often breeding mistakes and misunderstandings…There are so many ways to communicate at work that our communication is breaking down. Bosses say missed messages and crossed signals waste time and trigger mistakes, while research suggests that so much virtual communication makes it easier to snipe at or ignore co-workers. Then there’s the stress of having to stay on top of so many different channels all the time.”

David Oks on the long, slow death of global development: “Despite attempts to find alternative models of economic development, there is no widely replicable strategy to develop a country—simply put, to turn it from poor to rich—that does not involve an economy becoming highly industrialized. But in recent decades, the growth of manufacturing sectors, and thus of economic development more broadly, has been overwhelmingly concen­trated in East Asia, particularly in China. Across the bulk of the poor world—here we have in mind Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa—economies have been experiencing a more disturbing trajectory: simultaneous deagrarianization and deindus­trialization, especially in the years after 1980…Most emerging markets have not found an engine of durable growth comparable to manufacturing—most have indeed grown over the last few decades, but dependence on services and commodities exports has not made them rich. Thus most “developing” countries—we are skepti­cal of that euphemistic label—are in a worse structural position than they were a few decades ago: less economically complex and more socially unstable, with their developmental coalitions, if they ever exist­ed, badly frayed. For all the intermittent hype around “rising India” or “rising Africa,” systemic dynamics—deindustrialization, ecological dis­ruption, demographic headwinds—will pose severe challenges to eco­nomic development over the coming decades.”

NYTimes: “Remote workers may be paying a hidden professional penalty for that flexibility, according to a working paper from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the University of Iowa and Harvard. The research is among the first major studies to demonstrate the professional downside of remote work. The economists — Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington and Amanda Pallais — studied engineers at a large technology company. They found that remote work enhanced the productivity of senior engineers, but it also reduced the amount of feedback that junior engineers received (in the form of comments on their code), and some of the junior engineers were more likely to quit the firm. The effects of remote work, in terms of declining feedback, were especially pronounced for female engineers…“It’s what grandparents have been saying for a long time,” Ms. Emanuel, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in an interview this month. “Face-to-face meetings are very different from FaceTime.””

Wes Bush: “Businesses create a free version of their product and hope that users magically upgrade after they’ve signed up. Problem is, you’re likely following this traditional sales-led process you’ve always known: Acquire, Monetize, Engage, Expand. But in a product-led model, you need to engage your users before you monetize them. Acquire, Engage, Monetize, Expand. It might seem minor at first glance, but this switch is critical to your success as a product-led business. Engaging users before you ask them for money means you’re prioritizing value first. When they’re successful with your product, it’s much easier to get them as paying subscribers.”

WSJ: “If Hoover is today a bastion of democratic capitalism, limited government, robust national security and American exceptionalism, it is because [John] Raisian made it so. In his quarter-century as steward of Hoover, he turned a modestly good institution with a daunting fiscal deficit and prickly relations with the bien-pensant pooh-bahs at Stanford into one that enjoys universal renown, is better than solvent, and boasts a world-class roster of scholars. At one time under Raisian, three Nobel laureates in economics hung their hats at Hoover—Friedman, Gary Becker and Michael Spence. In a country where demonstrativeness is prized, Raisian was an anomaly, toiling behind the scenes to create an ecosystem in which conservative and libertarian ideas could thrive. He had an unerring eye for intellectual talent, recruiting to Hoover some of the finest minds in American scholarship. And he was adamant that the best scholars are those who make an active impact on policy and public life.”