Category: Thinks

Arnold Kling: “I think of the [US] election as a necessary evil. Elections are necessary because you want people to give up power. But they are evil because politics is like the worst of Twitter. You get followers by stirring up fear and anger. We can have an argument over which candidate’s economic proposals are worse than the other’s. We can have an argument over which candidate’s rhetoric is more demagogic and out of touch with reality. Only a partisan hack could claim that either candidate is good on the economy. I wish we could elect Javier Milei.”

Rohit Krishnan on what has surprised him most this year: “The development of decentralized training for AI models, from DiLoCo and DiPaCo from Google DeepMind to Distro coming up from Nous Research. It completely changes the game in terms of how we ought to think about large models and what we can do to train them. This means pure compute thresholds are not going to be very useful, and that we will have even less of a way to centrally control the means of knowledge production.”

WSJ: “The role of lasers is likely to be narrow for the foreseeable future because of their large energy needs, limited range and problems with bad weather. But militaries say the new weapons could prove an effective way to shoot down drones, a key task as they look for cheaper ways to counter a proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, in combat. Laser weapons shoot highly concentrated beams of light that deliver intense heat to their target. The beams, which travel at the speed of light, cut through metal to destroy engines, fuel tanks, electronics and other key parts of a target or can be used to “dazzle,” or blind, their sensors and cameras. “The old adage that lasers were five years from being amazing and always will be, that is changing,” said Doug Bush, the U.S. Army’s assistant secretary for acquisitions, logistics and technology. “Lasers for counter drone (warfare) may have met their moment,” he said.”

FT: “Corporate messaging on social media is often left to younger, tech-savvy staff in a business, or communications professionals, who understand how it might be received. But chief executives and other C-suite staff are increasingly expected to post regularly on platforms such as LinkedIn to improve their public profile. And, as with all influencers online, authenticity is critical. There has been a 35 per cent increase in C-suite professionals in the US on LinkedIn in the past five years and a 30 per cent rise in the UK. There has also been a 23 per cent increase in posts from chief executives globally year on year, and their content gets four times more engagement than other content from LinkedIn members. CEOs can expect a 39 per cent surge in followers after posting, according to LinkedIn. “It is often easier to build trust with people than corporate brands,” says Dan Shapero, chief operating officer at the platform.”

Jason Lemkin (written in early Oct): “Since December 2021 it’s been rough for SaaS liquidity: There have only been 3 SaaS IPOs since 2021: Klaviyo, Rubrik, and OneStream.  Just 3.  A record low…The Top 10 Software acquirors’ M&A activity is down -90% or more from 2021.”

WSJ: “Private equity…is no foreign player in the skilled trades these days. PE firms across the country have been scooping up home services like HVAC—that is, heating, ventilation and air conditioning—as well as plumbing and electrical companies. They hope to profit by running larger, more profitable operations. Their growth marks a major shift, taking home-services firms away from family operators by offering mom-and-pop shops seven-figure and eight-figure paydays. It is a contrast from previous generations, when more owners handed companies down to their children or employees.”

Mint: “In the 1950s, manufacturing was about 10% of India’s economy. Since 2010, it has averaged about 17.7%. When the ‘Make in India’ campaign was launched in 2014, it was 17.3%. As the economy expanded over the years, the share of agriculture declined while that of services rose. The share of manufacturing has never reached even 20%. The reasons for this are well documented: Difficulties in obtaining a multiplicity of required licences, delays in acquiring key requirements such as land, hundreds of stringent labour regulations that make taking on labour costly and incentivize the formation of small rather than large integrated firms, and deficiencies of physical infrastructure and governance at the level of states.”

Harsh Mariwala: “Entrepreneurs are often treated like mythical creatures—visionary, creative and self-actualized. But this aura leaves no room for their vulnerability. We rarely talk about their unique stressors and challenges. In my journey as an entrepreneur and from conversations with others, I have learned that many of us experience anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, anger, guilt, sadness and isolation at some time or another. There are mental health implications of linking your identity with a business, along with the constant fear of failure or of not fulfilling your role in enterprise and society. With the entrepreneurial ecosystem becoming increasingly competitive, these risks get pronounced.”

Anna Koivuniemi: “If you are a researcher, you typically need to read a lot of material, and figure out which of the thousands of papers published annually are relevant to your work. AI’s ability to enhance productivity will enormously accelerate research and lead to new breakthroughs. I’ve seen the proof of AI’s ability to handle huge amounts of data, understand the patterns, fill in the gaps, and make predictions that are far faster and more precise than humans. I think we have an example of that in weather forecasting, which is a brilliant human science. But weather models based on AI have quickly made huge advances, making complicated predictions in seconds that took hours with powerful computers just a year ago…[Also,] think about the problems humans haven’t yet been able to solve because they are either so complex, too interdependent, or involve too much data. I have a strong hope that in five to ten years, AI models will help researchers be more productive, help them create better and faster simulations, and help to solve new problems.”

Uday Shankar: “Many Western companies haven’t succeeded in India primarily because, even before they board the flight to India, their strategy is very clear in their heads, and that is often a global strategy that has been defined by a team that has never been to India or doesn’t know India. They look at India as the headline value of a population of 1.4 billion people. But if you look under the hood, barely 60 million people or so fall into the “affluent” category [with an income of greater than $10,000]. So which India do Western companies want to address? They come here for the 1.4 billion people but start designing solutions for 60 million people or less—that’s where the big mismatch is. And this insight becomes clear very quickly. However, they don’t want to change that strategy, for whatever reason—sometimes it’s a conviction about their strategy, sometimes because it causes global dissonance in their business model.”

WSJ: “Since trade and investment-income surpluses and deficits across the world must equal zero, [Michael] Pettis argues the U.S. is forced to run trade deficits as long as it absorbs the savings of China and other surplus economies. As those savings flow into U.S. assets, they drive up the value of the dollar. That encourages America to import more, which benefits foreign manufacturers at the expense of jobs and earnings at their U.S. rivals. And to offset the manufacturing sector’s weakness, the U.S. must borrow more to keep up the big spending, resulting in huge fiscal deficits and periodic financial bubbles. It is the surplus countries like China, he says, not the deficit countries like the U.S. that are the real protectionists.”

WSJ: “When they walked into their local food cooperative a decade ago with a Ziploc bag of homemade tortillas, Veronica and Miguel Garza had no clue that they would one day have a billion-dollar business. Veronica had just started making grain-free tortillas from her Texas kitchen, and her wildest dream was selling them at a farmers market. But after that fateful day, she founded a company with Miguel, her youngest brother. They called it Siete Foods—siete as in the seven members of the Garza family. In only 10 years, their products have gone from a single grocery store to just about every supermarket. These days, Siete’s collection of grain-free snacks includes tortillas, chips, taco shells, cookies, churro strips, beans, queso puffs, salsas and sauces. What started as a side hustle has become one of America’s most successful food startups. And it was acquired [recently] by PepsiCo for $1.2 billion.”

Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei. “I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or “doomer” who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don’t think that at all. In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they’re the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future. I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be. In this essay I try to sketch out what that upside might look like—what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right. Of course no one can know the future with any certainty or precision, and the effects of powerful AI are likely to be even more unpredictable than past technological changes, so all of this is unavoidably going to consist of guesses. But I am aiming for at least educated and useful guesses, which capture the flavor of what will happen even if most details end up being wrong. I’m including lots of details mainly because I think a concrete vision does more to advance discussion than a highly hedged and abstract one.” Matt Clancy has some different views.

NYTimes: “The S&P 500 is more than 20 percent higher than the Wall Street consensus for all of 2024. As a consequence, Wall Street has upgraded its outlook radically: Now that stocks have been rallying, why shouldn’t they rise further? It’s not crazy to think this way, even in the midst of wars, catastrophic storms and vituperative political battles. Stock market momentum, in itself, is a powerful thing. When the market is rising, it often keeps going. And important factors are propitious for stocks: The Federal Reserve has made life easier for companies and investors by lowering interest rates, those companies are still churning out handsome earnings and there is no economic recession visible on the horizon. But at some point, the tide always turns. While market meltdowns are what most people worry about, some strategists are nervous that stocks are rising too rapidly. “The risk of a melt-up has increased,” Yardeni Research, an independent financial research firm, warned clients in a note last month. Translation: The market is in danger of getting carried away.”

WSJ: “In his intellectually sparkling and beautifully crafted “The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie,” Richard Dawkins argues that, unlike the unfinished works of human literature—specific, deliberate—the genetic manuscript encoding the informational details of human beings was not crafted by a conscious being or Creator, but by a Darwinian process of evolution by natural selection…The human genome is an unfinished work, its current state representing a snapshot, a moment of transience and transition that lacks the completeness of a destination. Unlike a novel, however, the genome is a project of continuous revision, locked in a Nietzschean state of perpetual becoming. It is a process that may often be whimsical and capricious. As such we have lyre birds that can mimic car alarms, chainsaws and supposedly even the distinct sounds of “Nikon versus Canon camera shutters,” and octopuses that have “perfected the art of dynamic cross-dressing.” It is also possible, Mr. Dawkins intriguingly speculates, that bats may “hear in color.””

The Verge: “Humans have automated tasks for centuries. Now, AI companies see a path to profit in harnessing our love of efficiency, and they’ve got a name for their solution: agents. AI agents are autonomous programs that perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with environments with little human input, and they’re the focus of every major company working on AI today…AI companies argue “agents” — you’d better not call them bots — are different. Instead of following a simple, rote set of instructions, they believe agents will be able to interact with environments, learn from feedback, and make decisions without constant human input. They could dynamically manage tasks like making purchases, booking travel, or scheduling meetings, adapting to unforeseen circumstances and interacting with systems that could include humans and other AI tools. Artificial intelligence companies hope that agents will provide a way to monetize powerful, expensive AI models.”

Kenneth Kletzer: “The middle-income trap is a clear potential for India. Has South Korea gotten into a middle-income trap? I’m not so sure. South Korea continues to grow, but slowing growth rates are what we see. South Korea has a fairly high per capita income now and has naturally started to converge towards the growth rate of others. I would expect by 2047 that India will have a higher per capita GDP. The stumbling point for the whole world, particularly a country like India, is that it might be exposed to climate change, notably in agriculture…Every country has its potential. Even though manufacturing has taken amazing leaps in India, there still needs to be greater integration in the global supply chain. That integration has really just begun. Getting transportation within the country is not all that great yet, for goods. Can that kind of growth be sustained without advancing manufacturers more? And I can’t make a prediction on that. Advancing manufacturers may be a real opportunity for India. “

Arnold Kling on truth in AI: “The larger problem is that machine Intelligence and truth have parted ways on the march towards human-like general intelligence. The AI guru and 2024 Physics Nobel Laureate Geoff Hinton described the conundrum with some humor, equating AI with an alien species that has descended on Earth, but “we’re having a hard time taking it in because they speak such good English.” We are never sure whether they are telling us the truth.”

Kim Scott: “Silicon Valley’s current fascination with a trendy management meme illustrates a broader and more troubling turn in certain powerful pockets of its culture — one that has seized our politics and could even unduly influence our election (again). I’m talking about founder mode. A recently coined management style being celebrated by some venture capitalists, it embraces the notion that a company’s founder must make decisions unilaterally rather than partner with direct reports or frontline employees. All too often the extension of founder mode is to resist not only internal checks and balances but also those from the government. I see founder mode as another expression of a creeping attraction to one-man rule in some corners of tech. (I use “man” intentionally, as only 3 percent of venture capital funding goes to solo female founders.) This neo-authoritarianism is nothing short of a rejection of the historical values that made Silicon Valley what it is today.”

NYTimes: “Sugar is among [Maharashtra’s] most important industries, one that sells to big brand buyers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and is heavily controlled by the political elite. Most of the state’s sugar mills are led by sitting lawmakers or political figures, a new investigation by The New York Times and The Fuller Project found. That includes at least 21 state lawmakers, four members of the national Parliament, five government ministers and nearly 50 former officials. Mill bosses come from every party — both in government leadership and opposition — including the Indian National Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Shiv Sena and the National Congress Party. Countless other mills have business or family ties to politicians and lawmakers. That means, in many cases, that the very people who could protect workers are also profiting from their exploitation.”

FT: “UK universities produce groundbreaking research with the potential to transform industries and society. Since 2014, 1,300 spinouts from 91 UK universities have generated more than £20bn in investments and created nearly 29,000 jobs. Yet, many of these ideas fail to make it to market, trapped in the so-called valley of death. This funding gap occurs between the point where researchers exhaust research grants and the point where technologies are viable enough to attract venture capital. It poses a serious threat to the UK’s economic prospects as a home for innovative companies. Proof-of-concept (POC) funding is the bridge that can help researchers cross this valley of death. It allows academic inventors to test and demonstrate the viability of their ideas as marketable technologies. It provides the insights needed for decisions to be taken on further investment.”

Andy Kessler: “I feel sorry for the youth that do care, do work hard, are productive and help push the boulder of progress up that steep slope, while essentially carrying all the others on their backs. It’s you against the collective, the village, which is always about being supported, pampered, living off someone else’s hard work and then complaining that the handouts aren’t big enough.”

Sanjeev Bikhchandani on the three things he look for in a founder before investing: “We first look at what they are trying to do. Will the customer want it? Evidence that the customer wants it. (Then, the) team. How good are they? Are they likely to win in the space. Will they stay committed? Do they look like they are good on governance? Will they be fair to minority shareholders?”

WSJ: “Over the past two decades, an education revolution swept large parts of the developing world. Colleges popped up, by the thousands, across cities and small towns alike. Farmers, laborers and herders poured their wages into higher education for their children, who nursed dreams of becoming lawyers, engineers and diplomats. The unemployment rate in the developing world for young people with higher-education qualifications is two to three times the rich-world figure, according to an August report by the United Nations International Labor Organization. In low-income and lower-middle-income countries—groupings that include nations across South and Southeast Asia, North Africa and the Middle East—more than a fifth of those under age 30 who have such postsecondary qualifications are unemployed. In these countries, young people who have completed college are more likely to be jobless than those with a basic education.”

Jaspreet Bindra: “How are agents different from apps and why are they creating an AI gold rush? As Bain Capital’s Sarah Hinkfuss elegantly describes it: “We are used to ‘pulling’ information from computers; we need AI to ‘push’ finished work to us instead.” Instead of tapping apps multiple times or asking ChatGPT a series of questions to work out a complex and frustrating travel itinerary, what if, say, a travel-site agent would select a hotel and airline that we usually like, design a daily schedule based on our interests, and go ahead with the requisite bookings, since we have given it the permission and agency to do so. This AI-based system makes decisions and takes actions on its own to achieve our goals on the basis of the travel scenario and what it knows about our holiday history and preferences.”

Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin: “[T]echnological innovation is essential for growth to persist in the long run. But innovation requires detailed knowledge of production processes and what can make production more efficient. Any society that frowns upon hard work will be unlikely to have a robust class of innovators. Any society that disparages finance will be unlikely to have a thriving entrepreneurial class or significant investment in capital.” [via CafeHayek]

FT: “Estimates of India’s potential oil wealth differ hugely. S&P Global Commodity Insights believes there may be as much as 22bn barrels of oil in unexplored basins. Rystad, an energy consultancy, puts the figure at just under 8bn. Meanwhile, analysts at the International Energy Agency are pessimistic about the chances of a significant increase in the country’s 700,000 barrels per day of production. “In part, the absence of international companies may be due to lacklustre discoveries since the turn of the century,” they wrote, in their annual Indian Oil Market outlook. Over the past 23 years, 2bn barrels of oil have been discovered in India, compared with 10bn in each of Angola, Norway and Guyana and 40bn in Brazil.”

Niranjan Rajadhyaksha: “A higher share of wages can actually spur the economy when there is excess capacity in factories. But growing wages can lead to higher inflation in case there is no slack in the economy. A higher share of profits can be helpful when companies need cash to invest in new production capacity. But companies will prefer to use their higher profits to pay off loans or invest in financial assets in case there is no compelling case to build new capacity in a slack economy. In other words, whether an economy—and specifically domestic private-sector demand for either consumer goods or machines—benefits from either a wage-led or a profit-led phase of growth depends on the overall slack in the economy.”

WSJ: “A fault tolerant quantum computer will be able to hammer away at problems indefinitely, giving them wherewithal to break encryption algorithms that companies and governments use to protect their most price-sensitive and important information, Gil said. That moment might reasonably occur by around 2035, he estimated, but regardless of the timing, he is convinced it will happen. “The reality is that the thing that we used for that ultimate line of defense is vulnerable. It will be broken. There’s no ifs or buts about it,” Gil said. Why worry about a scenario that’s looming perhaps a decade or more in the future? Because of a scenario some call “harvest now, decrypt later.” It envisions hackers stealing encrypted data today and sitting on it for years, hoping to realize its value at some point in the future when quantum computers are able to decrypt the information, said Markus Pflitsch, founder and chief executive of quantum-computing company Terra Quantum.”

NYTimes: “The data suggests that after decades of life expectancy marching upward thanks to medical and technological advancements, humans could be closing in on the limits of what’s possible for average life span. “We’re basically suggesting that as long as we live now is about as long as we’re going to live,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago, who led the study. He predicted maximum life expectancy will end up around 87 years — approximately 84 for men, and 90 for women — an average age that several countries are already close to achieving.”

FT reviews “The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform”: “The history of China’s “great transformation”, the authors argue, is key to understanding how China became the authoritarian developmental state that it is today. First, they emphasise that much of China’s dazzling economic growth over the past 40-some years was due to contingency and individual entrepreneurs rather than centralised political planning. Second, although Deng suffered terribly in the crazed dictatorship of the Cultural Revolution, through the 1980s and 1990s he never contemplated political alongside economic reform; his status as a revolutionary elder ensured that his views would trump those of his more liberal junior ministers. The epochal upheaval of the 1970s is thus “also a story of missed opportunities” for breaking with autocracy’s “corruption, mismanagement and widespread abuses”.”

WSJ: “Forget window seats versus aisle seats. The most contentious debate in travel is what type of suitcase you should buy. The popularity of hard-shell luggage has exploded over the past decade. It has been driven by advances in material technology that made hard-sided suitcases more durable, and the rise of direct-to-consumer brands like Away. Hard-sided bags tend to cost more than comparable soft-sided luggage. Fans of each luggage category aren’t quiet about their preferences. Hard-shell die-hards regularly cite the durability and aesthetics of their favorite suitcases. Soft-sided aficionados appreciate the flexibility a fabric-encased bag provides.”

FT: “Apple’s Vision Pro…is a headset worn over the eyes, but ingenious camera and display technology beams your surroundings back at you with exceptional clarity while overlaying it with digital content: icons, menus, apps and as many screens as you want, all easily moveable and resizable. Perhaps its most remarkable quality is the understated realism of that synthesis, with virtual objects casting subtle shadows and reflecting light as if they were really in the room. “We wanted to make sure that you felt like you were where you were,” says Richard Howarth, Apple’s vice-president of industrial design. “So we put an awful lot of effort into the clarity — of the glass, the optics, the whole system — to make sure you didn’t feel separated from it.” This is full digital immersion, but you don’t feel imprisoned by it — indeed, Alan Dye, Apple’s vice-president of human interface design, contrasts the “freedom” of the Vision Pro with the way you’re “locked in” to a standard screen. “Tim [Cook, Apple’s CEO] often talks about how it’s the first [Apple] product you look through, and not at,” he says. “I think that’s a lovely sentiment.””

Financial Review: “Mark Leonard is hardly a household name. He’s not even particularly well known in the world of finance. But the long-bearded reclusive founder of Toronto-listed Constellation Software – known to his admirers as Software Santa – is arguably one of the greatest capital allocators of this generation. A dollar invested in Constellation Software’s initial public offering in 2006 is worth 25 times more today as the firm’s earnings have expanded by gobbling up smaller firms. Constellation has acquired more than 1000 businesses, and now owns software platforms that do everything from weather forecasting to sales and commodity trading.  Roll-ups – in which companies increase profits through serial acquisitions – tend to fail in most industries. But Constellation and others show they can work well in software.”

Semafor: “To avoid fizzling the way competitors like Medium have, Substack is trying to become less a journalism platform and more a payment system for creators. In recent months, the company has been reaching out to influencers, video creators and podcasters to convince them to join the platform. It doesn’t need beauty influencers, say, to all of a sudden become bloggers. But it does want to be the primary vehicle for paying creators regardless of medium. The pitch is simple: YouTube and other platforms do not generate meaningful revenue for the vast majority of creators, and other ways of making money like brand deals can be inconsistent and subject to volatile ad market trends.”

FT: “Although The Genetic Book of the Dead covers familiar ground, [Richard] Dawkins explains — and celebrates — evolution so joyfully that devotees will forgive some repetition of ideas. His clear prose is enhanced further by Jana Lenzová’s gorgeous illustrations which run through the book, supplementing photos of the wonderful animals (and a few plants) chosen to exemplify evolutionary science. As the title implies, Dawkins frames his story this time by looking backward, exploring the way every living creature’s genes can be read as an archive of its ancestral history and the environments that gradually shaped the development of millions of previous generations. He uses the analogy of palimpsests — the way scribes used to erase previous writing so that they could reuse the parchment for their own manuscript. Just as new imaging techniques are beginning to show scholars traces of older scripts beneath the surface of ancient documents, genomic analysis can reveal the evolutionary history of living organisms.”

WSJ reviews “The Extinction of Experience”: “Being human has traditionally involved being a kinetic, tactile mortal who has evolved to read the faces and gestures of other mortals and to perform complex physical actions. In our embrace of streamlining technologies, we have adopted screen-based virtual realities that require little motion and that eliminate points of human contact. To open a letter, set an alarm, take a picture, make a date—any of these minor tasks would once have summoned different movements but can now be accomplished with the touch of a finger to a screen. And increasingly, of course, we needn’t deal with other people in the flesh. To Ms. Rosen, each embodied activity that disappears takes with it some small element of experience that may, when it’s gone, leave us depleted—while habituating us to engineered, homogenized behaviors. Throughout the book, she remarks the ways that, in adjusting to the algorithmic demands of our machines, we are in danger of developing machinelike responses ourselves: “It is the subtle but important difference between putting something you like on Instagram and doing something specifically for Instagram because you want to be liked.””

Mint on Vietnam: “It’s only in the 21st century that it gathered economic steam. In less than 24 years, 99% of its households have electricity. Load shedding is unheard of and potholes don’t break your back on the roads. Fifty percent of the population has access to clean drinking water, and close to 87% of Vietnamese have access to the national health insurance scheme. The World Bank in a 2022 report said just 4.2% of Vietnam’s population was living below the poverty line.”

FT: “Last year was the fourth straight year that Jane Street generated net trading revenues of more than $10bn, according to investor documents seen by the Financial Times. Its gross trading revenues of $21.9bn were equivalent to roughly one-seventh of the combined equity, bond, currency and commodity trading revenues of all the dozen major global investment banks last year, according to Coalition Greenwich data. “The amount of money they make is almost obscene. And that comes from handling instruments that many other people don’t want to touch,” said Larry Tabb, a longtime analyst of the industry who now works at Bloomberg Intelligence. “That’s where the greatest profits are, but also the greatest risks.””

Chandrasekhar Mantha: “Global advertising spend is projected to grow by 4.6% in 2024, reaching $752.8 billion, with digital advertising growing by 6.5% to $442.6 billion, accounting for 58.8% of the total. This surge, driven by investments in retail media, emphasizes the need to measure returns from each medium. The key question for marketers, CFOs and CEOs becomes: what is the return on investment (RoI) from these growing ad expenditures? Beyond CMOs, marketing RoI is now on the agenda for CEOs, CFOs and boards. Assessing RoI is crucial for measuring campaign impacts on sales, brand awareness and conversions, extending to media agencies as well. Traditional media metrics include gross rating points (GRPs) for TV, circulation for print, and listenership for radio, while digital platforms utilize metrics like views and engagement. However, simply focusing on media metrics doesn’t capture the full RoI picture. Accurately attributing ad spend to specific goals is essential for optimizing budgets and ensuring that both brand-building and sales efforts yield measurable results, which enables smarter strategic decisions and resource allocation.”

Narayan Ramachandran: “India has about 25 million government employees, five million government school teachers, over two million police personnel and 25,000 judges at the district, high court and Supreme Court levels. Add to these India’s armed forces of a million-plus and 1.4 million in the railways. It is this large group that is administering state services for India’s citizens…Giving effective voice to local government to negotiate with state governments is an imperative not only from a democratic point of view, but also from a functional effectiveness perspective. No amount of training or technology can substitute for effective decentralization reform based on the principle of subsidiarity.”