Rajesh Jain

WSJ: “China is flooding foreign markets with cheap goods again. This time it isn’t buying much in return…[China’s] factories are churning out more cars, machinery and consumer electronics than its domestic economy can absorb. Propped up by cheap, state-directed loans, Chinese companies are glutting foreign markets with products they can’t sell at home. Some economists see this China shock pushing inflation down even more than the first. China’s economy is now slowing, whereas, in the previous era, it was booming. As a result, the disinflationary effect of cheap Chinese-manufactured goods won’t be offset by Chinese demand for iron ore, coal and other commodities. China is also a much larger economy than it was, accounting for more of the world’s manufacturing. It had 31% of global manufacturing output in 2022, and 14% of all goods exports, according to World Bank data. Two decades earlier China’s share of manufacturing was less than 10% and of exports less than 5%.”

NYTimes: “The key to better math education? Explaining money…I offer to pay you $200 in one year if you give me $190 today. Good deal or bad deal? It’s the kind of math problem you might encounter in real life, as opposed to, say, whether the cosecant of a 30-degree angle is 1 or 2. You can imagine students perking up and paying attention when they realize that they need to know algebra to avoid being cheated on a loan. Math and personal finance make a perfect fit. Students grasp concepts such as exponential growth and regression to the mean much better when they see how those subjects apply to their daily financial lives.”

Arnold Kling: “To be successful, in a Darwinian sense, humans have to compete in three levels of games. At the individual level, we have to find mates, reproduce, and provide for our offspring. At a sub-Dunbar group level (meaning under roughly 150 persons), we have to obtain emotional and material support from the groups to which we belong, and our group has to avoid being outcompeted by other groups. At a larger corporate and society level (I call this super-Dunbar, in which there is considerable interdependence in a society of more than about 150 people), the performance of rulers and institutions has to be conducive to order and prosperity.”

Trae Stephens: “Though AI in its current state is more applicable to some companies than others, every industry needs to ask themselves questions about how they can leverage the state of the art in AI to build efficiencies into their businesses. AI will cut across every industry in a similar way to how the internet did. It took some companies up to thirty years for the internet to eat their world (and maybe it will take that long for AI to do the same), but everyone should be on the lookout for that to happen again, and perhaps more rapidly.”

Economist: “[Tacit knowledge] is the know-how born of experience, which cannot easily be documented in the manuals and is not much thought about by those who have it. Working alongside experienced colleagues is the best way to transfer tacit knowledge but it is not always possible. Sometimes you only want your very best people working on something, especially if the stakes are high. The most valuable employees are usually the ones with the least time to mentor others. When NASA was working on a Mars rover programme in the 2010s, it gave younger engineers a smaller, parallel project: to build a rover for use in educational programmes on Earth. It wasn’t the real thing, but it was a way to give them some hands-on experience. NASA also has an emeritus programme that gets retired veterans to mentor junior staff…managers everywhere should think about how to capture tacit knowledge. That starts by recognising the importance of retaining workers. You can’t share experience if no one has any.”

WSJ reviews The Cure for Burnout: “In addition to exhaustion and stress, burnout, we are told, entails a sense of “misalignment” with the “direction your life is heading in,” even—or particularly—when all signs seem to point to success. Ms. Ballesteros avoids the common pitfall of enshrining burnout as endemic to the modern workplace, and encourages us to see it, instead, as an impetus to change our lives. She points out that burnout can arise from the high volume of our responsibilities, the burden of social demands or the feeling of “chronic disengagement and disinterest.” Mitigating burnout calls for changes to our mindset, personal care, time management, boundaries and stress management. Many of the techniques she recommends—time blocking, establishing accountability mechanisms, using the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize tasks, doing a morning check-in with yourself—will be familiar to regular readers of the self-help genre.”

Scott Alexander: “AI is like one of these detached blobs of brain tissue. This is why I was arguing as early as 2019 that the GPTs were a big step towards general intelligence. We call them “language models”, but as we’ve seen, with slight tweaks they can learn to generate images / video / music, play games, and possibly (I’m not really up to date on this research) handle movement for embodied robots. The exact structure of LLMs is optimized for language but the same general class of things is going to be able to do whatever human brain tissue does, because it’s overall a similar type of thing. You just need to find a way to plug the right input in and reinforce success (I say “just”, but obviously this will take billions of dollars, and work by thousands of people who are much smarter than I am). This is why I expect AI to become human-level or beyond pretty fast. Making a cerebral cortex at all is the hard part. After that, you just need to scale up, and hack together equivalents for other useful brain structures.” More: “The closest thing I’ve seen to agentic AI so far is AutoGPT, which is just GPT plus a wrapper that prompts it with things like “Make a list of ways to create a successful business”, “Okay, how would you do Step 1 on your list”, “Okay, now try doing that thing”, and so on. Connect this to some sort of output channel (like a GMail client that sends an email whenever GPT says the word [SEND]) and you can sort of imagine a hacked-together super-dumb agent.”

Dr. Rainer Zitelmann (Sep 2023): “At the end of the ’80s and into the ’90s, capitalism was on the rise around the world. Prominent examples include China, under Deng Xiaoping, Vietnam because of the Doi Moi reforms, Poland under Balcerowicz, and Reagan in the USA and Thatcher in the UK. Today, capitalism is on the defensive everywhere. Almost all the countries of South America have socialist governments. The EU is increasingly coming to resemble a planned economy. China is reversing course and tightening the state’s grip on more and more areas of life and the economy. And the United States just received its worst ever rating in the Index of Economic Freedom since the Heritage Foundation published the first index way back in 1995…The real problem is massive over-regulation. Under capitalism, companies decide what to produce and it is ultimately consumers who vote with their wallets. In a planned economy, politicians and civil servants make the decisions.”

Ajay Shah: “Every evening, solar users turn back to the grid. This is hard for managers of the grid. The bulk of the Indian energy system is coal thermal, so what is filling in the breach each evening is coal thermal. But in the day when the sun is shining, there aren’t enough buyers for this electricity. It takes hours for coal plants to increase or lower their generation: They cannot respond to surges and declines that play out over short periods of time. The global financial system will no longer fund new carbon-intensive generation plants. Indian energy firms have therefore pivoted in favour of renewables, and the addition of capacity in electricity generation based on fossil fuel has stalled…At present, too much is being asked of grid engineers. The electricity system of the future is a combination of solar, wind, and storage, orchestrated by the price. Decentralised adjustments by private persons will solve the bulk of the problem. This gives grid engineers a modest problem to fight each evening.”

WSJ: “Companies are juggling more software vendors than ever. It isn’t easy…CIOs are yielding control of some vendor management to business unit partners because there’s simply too much to keep track of—but the transition isn’t always smooth…Typically organizations have a handful of major key vendors, followed by a long tail that are used for smaller services. There have been cycles of trying to rationalize, consolidate and reduce the number of vendors used, but there’s also an acceptance that having more vendors makes companies less dependent on bigger ones, White said. He added that today’s AI hype is also fueling the fire as organizations look for new vendors to take advantage of cutting edge technology. Adding to the deluge, software companies have also wised up to the idea of business counterparts’ involvement and have shifted their sales strategies to target end users, Agusti said. She said she asks existing vendors not to target business people when they have a new solution they’re trying to sell and instead go through IT. “

Maitreesh Ghatak: “The rise of the affluent is the real India growth story…If one thinks that India’s rise in terms of GDP is purely a statistical construct, which does not reflect the standard of living of the common man, or that the average per capita income has not increased, he or she is missing the real story. That is, the increasing affluence of a certain segment of the population whose purchasing power has exceeded a threshold. The problem is that if the supply and demand game is confined to a small segment of the population, growth is bound to stagnate unless it spreads and brings a larger fraction of the population into its orbit. The signs of deceleration in growth that became visible before the pandemic could well be a reflection of that.”

WSJ: “[Macy CEO Tony Spring] learned one of his first business lessons in high school, while working at a local Burger King. His initial responsibilities included picking up garbage in the parking lot. It was a humbling experience, but he said it taught him the importance of first impressions. The manager wanted him to understand that customers would make judgments about the restaurant before they even walked in the door.”…“Our job is to get people compliments,” Spring said. “If I can get [you] a compliment for the sweater [you’re] wearing, then I’ve done my job.””

Arnold Kling on what makes a successful marriage: “As individuals, it helps if you can make and keep commitments. In personality psychology, this corresponds to the trait known as conscientiousness—call it C. But my understanding is that C is not purely innate. I think that if we wanted to raise someone’s C, we could do it. Rob Henderson says that you can raise someone’s C using rewards and punishments. I think that going to school and getting deadlines for assignments can help instill C. If I were asked to “treat” someone with low C, I would probably try to give that person exercises that involve making a small commitment, keeping it, and getting praise. Beyond C, I think that it helps to appreciate tradition, including religious tradition. Getting married and having children is not just about you, and it’s not just about now. Traditional rituals mark the major milestones of life: birth, puberty, marriage, and death. Appreciating these rituals helps you to view your marriage as having a significance and life of its own.”

NYTimes: “When you walk into a cozy room, it should feel as if it’s giving you a hug. “Coziness starts from feeling sort of surrounded, and like the walls are closing in a little bit instead of pushing out,” said Jenna Chused, of Chused & Co., a Brooklyn interior design firm. “Painting a room a rich, dark color or using wallpaper helps to create that sense.” For a sitting room in her own townhouse, Ms. Chused wrapped walls with a scenic paper depicting trees and clouds in various tones of gray. Wood paneling is another option. “We’re big fans of paneling,” said Shana Sherwood, who runs Sherwood Kypreos, a Los Angeles interior design studio, with her husband, George Kypreos. “It gives you a lot of visual interest compared to thoughtless expanses of drywall.””

Economist: “By the end of March 2020 the number of individuals registered to trade with India’s National Stock Exchange (NSE) totalled just 31m (of a population of 1.4bn). In the months that followed, even as a new virus upended global society, another bug was quietly spreading among the Indian middle classes: an infectious enthusiasm for investing. Within 12 months the number of investors had expanded by a third to 40m. Today there are more than 90m unique accounts registered with the exchange. An alternative measure, that tries to gauge nationwide stock trading accounts, has nearly tripled between 2019 and 2023, from 41m to 140m…The deluge of retail investors in equities represents a sea-change in middle-class India’s culture of saving. Indians have long parked their money in low-risk, low-return assets, chiefly gold, which at nearly 16% accounted for the biggest share of household wealth in 2023 after property, at 51%. Bank deposits and insurance funds together made up another 20%. Equities (directly held or through funds) still represent a small share of the pie, but one that is growing rapidly: from 2.2% in 2013 to 4.7% a decade later. Americans, in comparison, have 40% of their household assets in equities.”

Tom Tunguz: “Data sales invert the business model of the Internet. Instead of Reddit building product experiences that create good advertising data to earn more on ads, Reddit will launch product experiences that produce more valuable data to feed to LLMs. The LLM vendors should pay more for better data. User data remains the currency of the realm, but it’s packaged & sold in a very different way. Cookies, the moribund technology that created the ad world, will be replaced by data-purchasing contracts. One day, we may visit websites that have fewer ads or none at all. The revenue model of the Internet will have changed. Publishers’ sell the data directly to the search companies. Should we evolve this way, there are any number of questions around user privacy, data controls, regulation, not to mention how product experiences themselves may change. The days of the ad network may be numbered & with it, an era of a new business model for the Internet.”

FT reviews How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History: “Tracing 4,000 years of predominantly European history, [Josephine] Quinn unpicks this paradigm to emphasise the west’s permeability. Her purpose is to dethrone the “privileged connection” between ancient Greeks and Romans and the modern west, and focus instead on the millennia of interaction with other cultures. So-called western values — freedom, rationality, justice and tolerance — are not only or originally western, she suggests, but “the West itself is in large part a product of long-standing links with a much larger network of societies.”

Jonathan Haidt: “Let me be clear: there is no way to make social media safe for children by just making the content less toxic. It’s the phone-based childhood that is harming them, regardless of what they watch. Kids need to be freed from the grip of smartphones and social media, especially through early puberty. This is why two of the four norms I propose for solving our collective action problems are about delaying children’s complete immersion in the virtual world. Here are those four norms: 1) No Smartphone Before High School (give only flip phones in middle school), 2) No Social Media Before 16, 3) Phone Free Schools (all phones go into phone lockers or Yondr pouches), 4) More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world, at an earlier age.” [via Arnold Kling]

WSJ: “Kanbrick evaluates about 150 to 200 companies a year, focusing on consumer businesses and those in industrial or business services with about $5 million to $50 million in earnings before interest and taxes. It rules out companies in financial services, healthcare, real estate and many other industries where the firm doesn’t feel it has expertise. “We’re looking for businesses we can understand that have a moat or competitive advantage—something that we can get our arms around,” [Tracy Britt Cool] said…Many families and founders are fatigued: exhausted from managing their companies through the pandemic, labor challenges, inflation and change. For those who don’t want to sell to private equity, she is positioning Kanbrick as another option.”

NYTimes: “The U.S. economic recovery from the pandemic has been stronger and more durable than many experts had expected, and a rebound in immigration is a big reason. A resumption in visa processing in 2021 and 2022 jump-started employment, allowing foreign-born workers to fill some holes in the labor force that persisted across industries and locations after the pandemic shutdowns. Immigrants also address a longer-term need: replenishing the work force, a key to meeting labor demands as birthrates decline and older people retire. Net migration in the year that ended July 1, 2023, reached the highest level since 2017. The foreign-born now make up 18.6 percent of the labor force, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that over the next 10 years, immigration will keep the number of working Americans from sinking. Balancing job seekers and opportunities is also critical to moderating wage inflation and keeping prices in check.”

Kate DiCamillo: “I just wrote at the top of a draft of a story that I’m working on, “Details, details, everything is in the details.” And everything is. I tell kids who want to write: Pay attention to everything. I think that paying attention is a way to love the world.”

Arnold Kling: “I want to claim that intelligence is not a thing at all. It is an ongoing process. It is like science. You should not think of science as a body of absolute truth. Instead, think of the scientific method as a way of pursuing truth. One should resist the temptation to think of intelligence as a huge lump of knowledge that an entity possesses. Memorizing the encyclopedia does not constitute intelligence. Human intelligence is collective. Pretty much everything I know I learned from other people, either directly or indirectly.”

Priya Parker: “All organizations basically have vibes and cultures. And a huge part of remote and hybrid work is that we’ve killed the vibes, and so our perceptions of each other, our understanding of what our work is, our understanding of what the workplace is, is now primarily through mediocre meetings. On Zoom, when everything is muted, the signals that you get as to whether or not a group is with you are deleted. It becomes a sterile environment. You can’t hear people’s sighs, groans or laughs. It destroys one of the core elements of group conversation, which is a feedback loop: call and response. There are legitimate concerns from senior leaders that much of what allows for new people to succeed in an organization is based on apprenticeship and informal interactions—which in-person work provided. The mode of conversation that happens when you’re not being watched by 20 people [on a video meeting] is fundamentally different. You can absolutely design meaningful connection through remote work, but it’s a skill.”

Economist: “As sales of EVs slow in some markets, carmakers are hoping to rev up sales with both cheaper and more-powerful batteries. Cheaper materials, however, can provide a reduced level of performance, so these are likely to be used in shorter-range city cars. The more costly high-performance versions are aimed at luxury and sports cars. And somewhere in the middle are versions of both. What all this means is that EVs will be using many different types of battery, and each version will need a different concoction of cathode active material (CAM).”

WSJ: “It’s known as “technical debt.” Underneath the shiny and the new, lurking in IT systems where it creates security vulnerabilities and barriers to innovation, is an accumulation of quick fixes and outdated systems never intended for their current use, all of which are badly in need of updating…This technical debt would require $1.52 trillion to fix, and costs the U.S. $2.41 trillion a year in cybersecurity and operational failures, failed development projects, and maintenance of outdated systems, according to a 2022 report by a software industry-funded nonprofit. That’s more than 2.5 times what the U.S. government pays in annual interest on the national debt. The author of that report, retired University of Texas at Austin software engineering professor Herb Krasner, says he believes that debt has now climbed to nearly $2 trillion.”