Rajesh Jain

Marc Andreessen: “You’re dealing with human behavior on the part of all the people in the industry and all the things that we’re doing and our own behavior and our own biases and our own ability to think clearly and all the people we coach and work with. But then, look, these products launch, and they have to take in the market. And to take in the market, they have to get a large number of people — who are busy already in their daily lives out in the world — to basically take something new seriously, and to want to use it and want to buy it and pay for it and have it really affect how they live. What I’m figuring out over time is the psychology-sociology elements are as important or more important than the business finance elements or the technology elements.”

Anticipating the Unintended: “India needs to create between 15-20 million non-farm jobs every year to keep pace with those entering the labour force. The labour participation rate has remained in the 40-45 per cent range for a long time. New job creation data can be contentious but it is difficult to argue that India is creating anything more than 3-4 million jobs every year. The quality of many of these new jobs isn’t great. The merry-go-round of employees switching jobs and getting big hikes in the IT/ITES sector shouldn’t blind us to the reality in the broader economy. There aren’t enough jobs. The two prerequisites for job creation, an 8-9 per cent GDP growth and skew towards sectors like construction, infrastructure or labour-intensive exports aren’t being met. The reason the job crisis hasn’t snowballed into a larger political and social issue is the immense faith in the PM among the youth. There’s a strong belief among them that India is on its way to becoming a superpower. The regular dose of nationalism and jingoism that’s amplified by the media helps continue this narrative.”

Shane Parish: “The most practical decision-making is not making better choices, it’s learning to deal with uncertainty. The most common thing holding people back from the right answer is holding on to your previous beliefs. Instead of instinctively rejecting new information, take in what comes your way through a system of evaluating probabilities.” More.

Economist: “Not so long ago, Latin America was on a roll. A commodity boom brought healthy economic growth and provided politicians with the money to experiment with innovative social policies, such as conditional cash-transfer programmes. That, in turn, helped bring about big falls in poverty, reducing the extreme income inequality long associated with the region. The middle classes grew. That helped underpin political stability. Democratic governments generally respected human rights, even if the rule of law was weak. Growing prosperity and more responsive and effective politicians appeared to be reinforcing one another. The future was bright. Now that virtuous circle has been replaced by a vicious one. Latin America is stuck in a worrying development trap…Its economies have suffered a decade of stagnation or slow growth. Its people, especially the young, who are more educated than their parents, have become frustrated by their lack of opportunity. They have turned this anger against their politicians, who are widely seen as corrupt and self-serving. The politicians, for their part, have been unable to agree on the reforms needed to make Latin America’s economies more efficient. The region’s productivity gap with developed countries has widened since the 1980s. With too many monopolies and not enough innovation, Latin America is falling short in the 21st-century economy.”

FT: “Novels can cast a spell in a way that no other form of entertainment quite matches…Nigel Newton, Bloomsbury chief executive, calls such titles “a marvellous escape in brutish times”…Readers are familiar with the feeling of their imagination being pulled into a story and consciousness of the real world slipping away, although they are just words on a page. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi used the term “flow” for “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter”. He was referring to forms of work and artistic endeavour, rather than simply reading a book, but there are similarities. Long-form reading does require a bit of effort, especially in a world with many distractions, from watching television to scrolling mindlessly through social media…Books also offer something rare and precious: a break from economic worries and media fragmentation. The experience of following a narrative so closely that nothing else intrudes is so valuable that every generation craves it.”

Atanu Dey: “Economics does not tell us what we should or must do: it does not have the power to compel. But it has explanatory power. It can explain why we do what we do, and could reveal the possible consequences of our proposed courses of action. Most significantly, if powerful people who have control over and influence others — politicians, bureaucrats, public intellectuals, popular entertainers — are ignorant of the fundamental lessons of economics, it usually spells disaster for the people. Worse than that, if the people are themselves unfamiliar with the basic economic truths, they are guaranteed to not be able to judge whether their elites are doing what is best for the collective. The fact is that the fundamental truths of economics are all counter-intuitive, and they seem to defy common-sense. It takes a bit of training, though not a lot of it, for us to understand the basics, and when we do, it becomes part of our common-sense…The good news is that now anyone can, if he wishes, learn the basics of economics because there are immense resources on the web for that. Will it improve his financial situation? No. But it will help him better understand the world he lives in. And if enough people understand the world as it is, then the ignorant elites will not be able to push policies that make the world worse than it has to be.”

FT: “We long to believe that we can be creatures of the day and night, that we can defy the dark to enjoy 24/7 lives defined by long working hours, minimal sleep and, if technology adverts are to be believed, going jogging in the middle of the night. In fact, insists University of Oxford neuroscientist Russell Foster in Life Time, we are “not able to do what we want at whatever time we choose. Our biology is governed by a 24-hour biological clock that advises us when it is the best time to eat, sleep, think and undertake a myriad of other essential tasks.” Pitched somewhere between science book and lifestyle manual, this is a comprehensive manifesto for living in harmony with our body clocks, penned by someone who has devoted his career to studying them. Chasing perfect synchronicity not only increases happiness and mental sharpness, he argues, but potentially reduces the risk of diseases such as obesity and diabetes.”

Frank Knight: “The first commandment, with respect to any intelligent action is self-evident: “compare the alternatives,” beginning with understanding  what they are. But that is what people dislike doing. And the second and third are, appraise the alternatives, and then act on the basis of the best knowledge or judgment that is to be had. The basic axiom is that it is better not to act unless it can be done intelligently; as people are and as the world is, the odds are strong that bad results on balance, rather than good, will follow from acting ignorantly, at random – and acting on false knowledge is of course worse; but unhappily it is more common.” [via CafeHayek]

Decrypt: “Soulbound Tokens (SBTs)…are a primitive, or foundational building block, in an emerging Web3 trend known as the Decentralized Society.  DeSoc sits at the intersection of politics and markets and, much like the wider Web3 context into which it fits, is based around principles of composability, bottom-up community, cooperation, and emergent networks that are owned and governed by network users. It aims to augment Web3’s trajectory toward hyper-financialization to something more inclusive, democratic, and decentralized. SBTs are an essential feature of DeSoc. Similar to a resume or medical records in the non-Web3 world, SBTs are non-transferable tokens that represent “commitments, credentials, and affiliations” that make up the social relations on Web3 networks. In other words, they are tokenized representations of the myriad traits, features and achievements that make up a person or entity. Crucially, Souls can issue and attest SBTs to other Souls; so for example a college (represented by one Soul) could issue a SBT certifying that a course has been completed to a student’s Soul…In their purest and fullest expression and manifestation, however, Soulbound Tokens stand to become a foundational element of the Decentralized Society movement, in which communities emerge around shared networks and goods that are owned and managed by the Souls that use them.”

Eric Ashman: “A VC’s job is not to help founders build great companies. Instead, a venture capitalist’s job is to raise money from Limited Partners (‘LPs’) to invest in a portfolio of startups that will produce returns that can outperform the stock market. LPs are primarily institutional investors, such as foundations, pension funds, family offices, university endowments, and sovereign wealth funds. Those LPs view venture capital as an asset class. A part of a diversified portfolio that also invests in bonds, stocks, real estate, and commodities. That’s your startup right there, in a portfolio with 90 other startups, in your VC’s 7th fund, as a part of a diversified mix of investments in Standford’s endowment fund.”

Economist: “The corporate world has changed since the mba first became a rite of passage for high-powered executives. Management teams answer to a growing number of “stakeholders”, from employees to social activists, and face public scrutiny on their companies’ environmental, social and governance (esg) record. Simply creating shareholder value no longer cuts the mustard. One consequence of this trend is that running a modern business requires an ever-expanding list of credentials and competences. In addition to financial and digital literacy, strategic acumen and communication skills, executives are expected to be clued in on supply chains, climate science and much else besides. They must ensure that their workforces are diverse and inclusive. And as work life goes hybrid, mixing time in the office with home working, they are also asked to spend more time checking in on subordinates.”

WSJ: “President Reagan understood something neither party grasps today: that the value of the dollar isn’t a function of how many dollars government supplies but of how many dollars people demand. Money is supplied insofar as it is demanded by people who can put it to good use. Inflation arises when people have less use for money, which is why stagnation comes with it. Reagan beat inflation not by reducing the official money supply—M2 nearly doubled during his time in office—but by boosting demand for money. The great lesson of the Reagan era is that money supply is determined by investment opportunity. Absent such opportunities, no matter how much money the government gives people, they will reject it and turn it into stuff. Here is the radicalism of Reagan: Orthodox economics attempts to use both monetary and fiscal policy to manipulate the availability of dollars. Reagan used both to increase the utility of dollars.”

Sridhar Ramaswami: “Now we are in this environment that everything is about grabbing our attention. And, this is where things like the free model that you, like, give that really nice vignette about sort of come into play. We are now in a world where we think we’re getting a bunch of free products; but in effect we have given away all of our attention–and attention equals dollars. And, I think economists sometimes have trouble understanding that. All of us are eminently manipulatable. The brands you’re going to remember are the ones that showed you ads, whether you cared for them or not. We have run studies, for example, where we ask people about remarketing ads. Every single person, if you talk to them, individually is 100% convinced that they can never be, like, persuaded to buy anything. But, if you ask in anonymous surveys whether they bought stuff that they didn’t really need because of remarketing ads, 50% of people will say, ‘Absolutely. I ended up spending money on junk.’ So, this stuff works, and free isn’t really free.”

Dev Lewis: “In my view the Modi government’s reactions— the app bans, military strategy, rejection of Chinese investment exemplified head in the sand behaviour that did very little to benefit Indian citizens (let alone India’s physical sovereignty for that matter). The PRC’s military actions and rhetoric reflected the CCP’s own sense of power in the world and disregard for Chinese business or citizen’s interests. People on both sides of the border lose while the States play their own game of nationalist narratives of victimhood, morality, and superiority, drawing power and legitimacy domestically from bilateral hostility. I see very few incentives for this status-quo to change.”

The Milk Road summarises Stanley Druckenmiller’s advice to young investors: “He encourages them to learn all the asset categories and how they integrate. Not easy… but fundamentals are fundamental…His number one advice to young people? Do not invest in the present. The present is not what moves stock prices. Change over time is what moves them. He says to try and envision a different world a year and a half from now.”