Rajesh Jain

Economist on delegation: “One way to navigate such problems is to use an explicit decision-making framework that tries to make it clear who is on the hook for what. These frameworks are not perfect. Project managers often use something called the RACI model. Its first two letters sort those who are “responsible” from those who are “accountable”, a distinction which normal people may find “confusing” and “incomprehensible”. Other, clearer frameworks are available. They have punchy names like DACI, DARE and DICE: you might be choosing a cloud-computing vendor but you get to feel a little like you are in the special forces. As well as working out who does what, it helps to have a way to parse what kinds of decision can be delegated and what not. Before Jeff Bezos started hanging out in spacesuits and doing laughable photoshoots in Vogue, he liked to articulate his management philosophy in annual letters to Amazon’s shareholders. In 2015 he made a useful distinction between type-1 decisions (“one-way doors”) that are important and irreversible, and type-2 decisions (“two-way doors”) that can be reversed if they do not pan out. Type-1 decisions warrant slow, deliberative processes; type-2 decisions should be taken quickly by smaller groups. Having a theory of decisions improves choices on what to delegate and reduces the chance of regrets.”

Allison Schrager: “The humanities and social sciences are failing. Their popularity in the US has been waning in recent years, as many students enter science, technology, engineering and math fields to seek skills directly applicable to their careers, but the last few months have exposed a deeper weakness: The humanities and social sciences are no longer training students to be critical thinkers. This failure creates serious challenges for our culture and democracy, leaving students less capable of managing a changing economy.” Agnes Callard: “I teach the humanities, and I still don’t know what their value is…We humanists keep on trying to teach people what the value of the humanities is, and people keep failing to learn our lessons. This suggests to me that humanists do not know the value of the thing they are trying to defend. We can spout pieties that sound inspiring to those already convinced of our cause, but so too can an ignorant math teacher “teach” math to those who already know it. As a humanist — someone who reads, teaches and researches primarily philosophy but also, on the side, novels and poems and plays and movies — I am prepared to come out and admit that I do not know what the value of the humanities is. I do not know whether the study of the humanities promotes democracy or improves your moral character or enriches your leisure time or improves your critical thinking skills or increases your empathy.”

Aaron Saunders: “There is a lot of enthusiasm around AI and its potential to change all industries, including robotics. Although it has a clear role and may unlock domains that have been relatively static for decades, there is a lot more to a good robotic product than 1’s and 0’s. For AI to achieve the physical embodiment we need to interact with the world around us, we need to track progress in key technologies like computers, perception sensors, power sources and all the other bits that make up a full robotic system. The recent pivot in automotive towards electrification and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) is quickly transforming a massive supply chain. Progress in graphics cards, computers and increasingly sophisticated AI-enabled consumer electronics continues to drive value into adjacent supply chains. This massive snowball of technology, rarely in the spotlight, is one of the most exciting trends in robotics because it enables small innovative companies to stand on the backs of giants to create new and exciting products.”

From a Pew survey of US teens: “YouTube continues to dominate. Roughly nine-in-ten teens say they use YouTube, making it the most widely used platform measured in our survey. TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram remain popular among teens: Majorities of teens ages 13 to 17 say they use TikTok (63%), Snapchat (60%) and Instagram (59%). For older teens ages 15 to 17, these shares are about seven-in-ten. Teens are less likely to be using Facebook and Twitter (recently renamed X) than they were a decade ago: Facebook once dominated the social media landscape among America’s youth, but the share of teens who use the site has dropped from 71% in 2014-2015 to 33% today. Twitter, which was renamed X in July 2023, has also seen its teen user base shrink during the past decade – albeit at a less steep decline than Facebook. Teens’ site and app usage has changed little in the past year. The share of teens using these platforms has remained relatively stable since spring 2022, when the Center last surveyed on these topics. For example, the percentage of teens who use TikTok is statistically unchanged since last year.”

NYTimes: “In the rocky soil of Lorraine, a former coal mining region near the French-German border, scientists guided a small probe one recent day down a borehole half a mile into the earth’s crust. Frothing in the water table below was an exciting find: champagne-size bubbles that signaled a potentially mammoth cache of so-called white hydrogen, one of the cleanest-burning fuels in nature. “Hydrogen is magical — when you burn it you release water, so there are no carbon emissions to warm the planet,” said one of the scientists, Jacques Pironon, a senior researcher and professor at the University of Lorraine. “We think we’ve uncovered one of the largest deposits of natural hydrogen anywhere in the world.”…There are still many questions about the find, including exactly how big it is and how best to extract the gas. But it has added to a trail of clues elsewhere in the world that a holy grail of clean energy may be lying in the earth for the taking.”

Mint: “India’s DPI network has laid the groundwork for economic growth where no one is left behind. Our mantra of innovating for scale at the grassroots level and then moving up, as opposed to the Western norm of top-heavy innovation that trickles down, positions India as one of the few countries realizing the vision of a truly inclusive and human-centric digital economy. Moreover, India stands alone in achieving this at the unprecedented scale we’ve demonstrated. The driving force behind this success? A potent blend of talent, technological prowess and a can-do mindset within the dynamic Indian startup ecosystem that seized the opportunity to translate that vision into reality. None of this would have been possible without the unwavering support and visionary leadership of the government. India’s digital transformation stands not only as the largest and most intricate case study of change that has had substantial impact, but also serves as a shining example of a win-win public-private partnership in action. It exemplifies how collaborative efforts between the government and private sector can yield transformative results, setting a global benchmark for effective cooperation and shared success.”

Brad Lightcap on Gen AI: “We’re in this really early period, and I think it’s really important that we maintain the ability for the world to sustain a very high rate of experimentation and a very high rate of trial and error. If you look at historical trends of past phase shifts in technology, there’s always this really important experimentation phase. It’s very hard to get the technology right from day zero. We get there eventually – the end state of the technology, we eventually converge to that point – but it’s only after really trying a lot of things and seeing what works and then seeing what doesn’t, and for people to build on top of the things that work, to create the next best things. My spicy take on this is I think the most important things that get built on top of this technology are actually things that haven’t been created yet. Because it takes some cycles of building with the tools to really understand what they’re capable of, and then how to combine the tools with other aspects of technology to create something that’s really greater than the sum of its parts. And so that’s to be expected, I think it’s very healthy.”

WSJ: “Brands including and Zara have closed hundreds of stores in recent years to cut costs as more shoppers turn to e-commerce. Now they are investing in those that remain to woo customers in ways they can’t online. The new-look stores are typically larger and more spacious, offer services such as beauty salons, repair stations and coffee shops, and enable new digital features such as apps that allow shoppers to rummage virtually through the storeroom. “Now it’s about engaging with consumers and giving them an experience,” said Henrik Nordvall, manager of H&M’s U.K. business.”

Donald Boudreaux: “Consider the taxation of capital gains. This tax discourages some investment. Which new businesses would have been, but because of this tax weren’t, created? Which new goods or services might we enjoy today had this tax been lower? We’ll never know because all of the enterprise and production discouraged in the past by this tax is forever non-existent. Most of the resources that, because of this tax, were not used as they would have been used absent the tax did, of course, find alternative, lower-taxed uses. But these alternative uses are likely to be less productive and valuable than the tax-discouraged uses would have been. We are thus poorer, but cannot know by how much or, exactly, in what manner…Although entrepreneurship and commerce and the production of material goods and services don’t stir the soul as music and literature, seemingly humdrum economic activities are what make our modern lives – including our art, literature, leisure, and learning – possible. Institutions and interventions that diminish market-tested economic activities make us poorer in body and spirit. Sadly, such institutions and interventions are many.”

Arvind Krishna: “I…think that many people when they hear this – I actually disagree with the way many economists and many people characterize it, that if you make somebody more productive, then you need less of them. That’s actually been false in history. If you are more productive, that means you have a natural economic advantage against your competition, which means you’re going to get more work, which means you’re going to need more people. And I think people forget that – they come from a zero-sum mentality to say it’s a zero-sum game… The world I live in, you’re more competitive, so that means you’re going to get more work, which means you need more people to do that work. So yes, certain roles will shrink because you don’t need so many people doing, maybe, email responses or phone calls, but then it will shift to maybe more applications will get done, or maybe you’ll be advertising to different markets that you previously could access. So there will be a shift – yes, the first bucket decreases, and everybody fixates on that. By the way, at our scale, that’s 3% of our entire employee population…I fundamentally believe we’ll get more jobs. There wasn’t an internet job in 1995. How many are there today, 30 million…? There was no CNBC.com in 1995. There was a television channel.”

Peter Coy: “[Charlie] Munger talked about “combinatorial effects” in which a variety of psychological forces, each mild enough in its own right, come together and reinforce one another to create good or bad lollapaloozas. The original success of Coca-Cola came from positive combinatorial effects, with the qualities of the product and the relentlessness of the advertising working together to habituate customers, he wrote. Conversely, he added, the ill-fated introduction of New Coke in 1985 suffered from a combination of several mistakes. To get the good lollapaloozas and not the bad ones requires two things, from what I can glean from Munger’s book and Berkshire Hathaway’s famous annual shareholder letters. One is patience to wait for good opportunities, and the other is plentiful available cash when those opportunities finally present themselves.”

NYTimes: “From 2012 to 2022, investment in private U.S. start-ups ballooned eightfold to $344 billion. The flood of money was driven by low interest rates and successes in social media and mobile apps, propelling venture capital from a cottage financial industry that operated largely on one road in a Silicon Valley town to a formidable global asset class akin to hedge funds or private equity. During that period, venture capital investing became trendy — even 7-Eleven and “Sesame Street” launched venture funds — and the number of private “unicorn” companies worth $1 billion or more exploded from a few dozen to more than 1,000. But the advertising profits gushing from the likes of Facebook and Google proved elusive for the next wave of start-ups, which have tried untested business models like gig work, the metaverse, micromobility and cryptocurrencies. Now some companies are choosing to shut down before they run out of cash, returning what remains to investors. Others are stuck in “zombie” mode — surviving but unable to grow. They can muddle along like that for years, investors said, but will most likely struggle to raise more money.”

NYTimes: “Effective Accelerationism (often shortened to “e/acc,” pronounced “e-ack”) is a loosely organized movement devoted to the no-holds-barred pursuit of technological progress. The group believes that artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies should be allowed to move as fast as possible, with no guardrails or gatekeepers standing in the way of innovation. The group formed on social media last year, and bonded in Twitter Spaces and group chats over memes, late-night conversations and shared scorn for the people they call “decels” and “doomers” — the people who worry about the safety of A.I., or the regulators who want to slow it down. It has moved offline, too, with parties and hackathons in the Bay Area and beyond. Effective Accelerationism began as a cheeky response to an older, more established movement — Effective Altruism — that has become a major force in the A.I. world. E.A., as the older group is known, got its start promoting a data-driven approach to philanthropic giving, but in recent years has been worrying about A.I. safety, and promoting the idea that powerful A.I. could destroy humanity if left unrestrained.”

Erik Hoel: “A more interesting “bear case” for AI is that, if you look at the list of industries that leading AIs like GPT-4 are capable of disrupting—and therefore making money off of—the list is lackluster from a return-on-investment perspective, because the industries themselves are not very lucrative…Call it the supply paradox of AI: the easier it is to train an AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is. After all, the huge supply of the thing is how the AI got so good in the first place. While I don’t think the supply paradox of AI is some sort of economic iron law (if there even is such a thing), it might hold truer than many of those investing in the space would like. Like all things that initially appear as an infinite gold mine, it may turn out not to be for complicated downstream reasons. So I urge investors throwing money at anything that moves: be wary! AI might end up incredibly smart, but mostly at things that aren’t economically valuable.”

Carlo Rovelli: “The common explanations of why there is suffering are not convincing. I feel there is something yet to be understood from the question of why living beings suffer. Why has nature endowed us with such an unwelcome gift? She could have engineered the same behaviour without the pain. She has no reason to treat us well, but no obvious reason to treat us so badly either…Why should I have done anything differently? We go through life with good and bad, joy and grief, regrets and remorse. It is maddening and marvellous. But it is all OK. It is life.”

Ninan: “Businessmen look to prosper; what they seek to minimise is uncertainty, which denotes risk. Beyond that they are politically agnostic. They were unhappy with the Congress right up to the 1980s because of its policies, and changed their stance only after the 1991 reforms. Now the BJP is the preferred choice because it offers what the Mughals and later British offered in their time: A stable polity and an environment in which business could function. As Mark Twain said, history may not repeat itself but it often rhymes.”

Peter Rawlinson: “I see a future five, six years from now where EVs don’t need more than 150 miles range. You leave home with a full 150 because you’ve got overnight charging. You go to the office—you can plug in there. That leads to the car of the future. If it [vehicles] can do 6 miles per kilowatt-hour, do the math, 150 divided by 6. It would only require a 25 kilowatt-hour battery pack. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Because that’s a quarter of the size of some of the battery packs today. If you look at our packs in the Lucid Air today, they are about 660 kilos. If we can get to a quarter of that, that is a profound reduction in weight. We’re talking about a little thing that could be about 150 kilograms, 350 pounds, that would fit underneath the front seats. That in itself would mean the vehicle’s more efficient. That will lead to a truly affordable electric car.”

Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy: “To effect change we need a moonshot mentality. In 2024, we need the government to galvanize a broad investment in AI that reflects America’s bold innovative spirit, backed by strong public-sector infrastructure. AI isn’t just a bag of clever products. It has tremendous potential to extend our lives, improve our societies and save our planet. Policy makers need to empower the public sector to play a vital leadership role in developing responsible AI that reflects the American values that our Constitution and Bill of Rights have etched into our nation’s DNA.”

Tavleen Singh: ” It is time for all reservations to go. In government jobs, universities, schools, in the army and in our paramilitary forces, all reservations must be scrapped. Enough has been enough for a while now, but because our political leaders find it hard to say this, it does not get said. And when columnists and political commentators say reservations should be scrapped, they end up tarred and feathered, so we do not speak up either…If there is one section of Indians who has benefited most from reservations, it is our politicians. They have perfected the art of creating vote banks based on caste, creed and tribe, and perfected the art of promising them the moon and the stars when elections come around. They have also learned the skill of using reservations in government schools and colleges to their own benefit by controlling who gets a reserved seat and who does not. Education is such a useful tool for political power that there is almost not a major political leader who is not running a school or college personally.”

Economic Times: “India’s consumption story is a baffling tale of contrasts. Luxury apartments, fancy cars and top-end consumer goods are flying off the shelves. Malls and restaurants are full while hotel rooms are pricier than ever amid surging demand. Meanwhile, FMCG companies are looking on enviously, unable to sell as much of biscuits, soaps, shampoos and perfumes as they would like. Economists trace the dichotomy to the pandemic, exacerbated by the subsequent developments that sharpened the contrast. “For some at the top of the income pyramid—both individuals and companies—the incomes did not get impacted,” says Sachidanand Shukla, group chief economist, L&T.”

David Henderson: “There has been a lot of discussion of newly elected Argentine president Javier Milei’s proposals for economic reform. Much of that discussion has been on how successfully he will implement his ambitious proposals for freeing Argentina’s highly statist economy. He has proposed getting rid of the central bank and putting Argentina on the US dollar standard that, if successful, would bring Argentina’s inflation rate down from triple digits to single digits. He has proposed slashing government spending by as much as 15 percent of GDP. To put that in perspective, if the US federal government did that, it would cut spending from about 24 percent of GDP to about 9 percent of GDP. He has proposed eliminating eleven government ministries and agencies and privatizing many of Argentina’s government-owned enterprises. What he will achieve is difficult to know. As Danish physicist Niels Bohr said, in a famous line often also attributed to baseball legend Yogi Berra, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” But what we can say is that Milei has a highly developed understanding of the most important ideas in economics. He will almost certainly make better decisions and more-thoughtful trade-offs than if he had the low-level, or even zero, understanding that is typical of politicians. A look at some of his pronouncements in interviews shows a sophisticated analytic mind at work.” FT: “At the root of Argentina’s problems is the government’s chronic overspending. The size of the state has almost doubled over the past two decades, with the government expanding the public sector payroll, handing out hefty fuel and electricity subsidies and boosting welfare programmes.”