Rajesh Jain

FT: “[IEA’s report] shows the world is on the cusp of a historic turning point. Based only on today’s policy settings by governments worldwide — even without any new climate policies — demand for each of the three fossil fuels is set to hit a peak in the coming years. This is the first time that a peak in demand is visible for each fuel this decade — earlier than many people anticipated. These remarkable shifts will bring forward the peak in global greenhouse gas emissions. They are primarily driven by the spectacular growth of clean energy technologies such as solar panels and electric vehicles, the structural shifts in China’s economy and the ramifications of the global energy crisis.”

NYTimes: “Your body has two forms of fascia: dense and loose. Each type is key to facilitating movement. Dense fascia, made of sturdy collagen fibers, helps give your body its shape. It holds muscles, organs, blood vessels and nerve fibers in place. It helps your muscles contract and stretch, and stabilizes your joints. The more slippery loose fascia allows your muscles, joints and organs to slide and glide against one anther like a well-oiled machine…Until the early 2000s, doctors believed fascia was just packaging for more important body parts. Since then, researchers have discovered that the connective tissue plays a vital role in how we function and is key to flexibility and range of motion. Emerging research suggests that caring for your fascia may help treat chronic pain and improve exercise performance and overall well-being.”

Hunter Walk: “My bold statement is that there has never been a better time for Creators by that objective function. I absolutely concur that if you want to maximize around other objectives, or examine particular types of creative industries, you might disagree with me. For sure there were periods where smaller groups of participants had better lifestyles, more stable employment, increased societal influence, or a less demanding fandom. But all of these moments were based on artificial scarcity and cultural gatekeeping. It might be harder than ever to earn $1 million/year as a creative but it’s never been easier to make $50,000. Software and technology in general has driven down the cost of most creativity and powerful tools are in the hands of more than 1 billion human beings. Creativity is happening within communities and platforms which bring together distribution and collaboration. And you can directly and indirectly monetize your creativity in a myriad of ways.”

Walter Isaacson: “There have been three people who have deeply affected our age that I’ve written about. One is Steve Jobs, who brings us into the digital age with human-friendly computers and a thousand songs in our pocket and smartphones. Another is Jennifer Doudna, who helped discover the tool called CRISPR that allows us to edit our own genes. And now Musk. I think he will have a lasting impact by, having more than anybody else, moved us into an era of electric vehicles, when the major car companies had given up on that, and into space.”

NYTimes: “Apple has expanded its smartphone empire as the broader industry has faltered. Over the past two years, sales of Android smartphones have plummeted, but the iPhone has suffered only modest declines because it’s been winning new customers. It has done so despite being the industry’s priciest device. Apple has overcome price sensitivity by creating a business that is reminiscent of U.S. car sales. Like a car, iPhones last for years and can be resold to offset the purchase of a new one. Wireless providers, much like auto dealers, offer discounts and monthly payment plans that make it more affordable to buy the latest model. And customers, like brand-loyal car buyers, are more likely to buy another iPhone than switch to Google’s Android operating system.”

FT in a review of “Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How it Created the Modern Middle East”: “It is also always poignant to be reminded how, in closely fought conflicts, so much can depend on moments when a battle could go either way but one side sees through the fog of war with greater clarity, and how comradeship and patriotism shape the responses of those doing the fighting. Kaufman cites a moment on the Syrian front when Avigdor Ben-Gal, commanding the 7th Israeli armoured brigade, asked an old friend, Meshualem Retes, in charge of an already battered unit, to reinforce a crucial position. Both knew this was a suicide mission. Having acknowledged that he would have refused the order from anyone else, Retes said, “I’ll do it for you”, closed his tank hatch, went into battle, and was killed by a direct hit.”

Akash Prakash: “I had the privilege of attending a presentation by my good friend Raamdeo Agrawal at his conference recently. He shared some interesting statistics and thoughts on the retail equity revolution in India. It was a fascinating presentation, leading me to ponder the implications of the impending tidal wave of savings. Raamdeo highlighted that over the past 25 years, India had built up gross domestic savings of approximately $12 trillion. Over the coming 25 years, this number is expected to surge to over $100 trillion. While still relatively modest, an increasing portion of these savings will find its way into financial assets, particularly equities. The presentation highlighted the surge in retail equity flows. It took 10 years for demat accounts to grow from 20 million to 40 million (2010-20), and they have now tripled in three years to 120 million. We have more than 2 million accounts being added per month. The average retail daily turnover of the equity markets has soared nine-fold in the last three years, from Rs 7 trillion to more than Rs 60 trillion. Systematic investment plan inflows are also rising consistently, moving from Rs 3,000 crore per month in 2016 to over Rs 15,000 crore per month today.”

Paul Mueller: “As Hayek notes, the oldest and fullest sense of liberty means freedom from coercion – that is, freedom to act according to your own plans and goals rather than according to someone else’s. That’s it. Liberty does not equal happiness. Nor does it guarantee it. Liberty, defined as freedom from the arbitrary wills of others, also does not mean unconstrained choice.”

Cato: “The key to understanding comparative advantage is opportunity costs: Determining whether to produce something yourself or to purchase it from another producer requires comparing the cost of producing that good yourself to the cost that you’d incur to purchase it. Because of comparative advantage, another producer who is less technically proficient at producing the good might nevertheless be able to profitably sell you that good at a price lower than your cost of making the good yourself. That other producer can do so if it has a comparative advantage at producing that good. When one person or productive unit, such as a firm, improves its comparative advantage at some task, it thereby improves its trading partners’ comparative advantages at other tasks. While government export subsidies harm citizens of the countries that use them, they benefit citizens of countries that purchase the subsidized exports. The use by foreign governments of export subsidies does not justify the home government doing the same or otherwise interfering with trade.”

Howard Marks: “One way to better understand [risk] is by looking at tennis, which offers many apt comparisons to investing. As seen in this summer’s Grand Slam tournaments, tennis players have to take some risk if they hope to succeed. If none of your serves fall outside the service box, you’re probably playing too cautiously to win. But if you try for shots you can’t make consistently, you can beat yourself. The key is to have a favourable relationship between winners and losers. Neither maximising winners nor minimising losers is necessarily enough. It’s all in the balance. The same is true of investing. When you aspire to returns well above those available on investment-grade bonds, it’s not enough to avoid losers; you actually have to find (or create) winners from time to time. But as you take more risk, not only will your expected return increase, but the range of possible outcomes will become wider and the bad possibilities will become worse. The widening of probability distributions as you move up the risk curve means that even the most successful investors are bound to have some losers along the way. The question is how many and how bad relative to their winners.”

Ajay Chhibber on the 4 course corrections India needs to make: “First, India’s illiteracy at 25 per cent today remains much too high and must be addressed. Most other countries in our comparator table have almost wiped-out illiteracy…Second, if we can succeed in sending a rocket to the moon, we must also ask why we are unable to make greater progress in industry where we have fallen behind many competitors. India is now trying to reverse this “pre-mature deindustrialisation” through the production-linked incentive scheme, import tariffs, and bans. Smart industrial policy to make India more competitive is needed but shutting ourselves off from the world is hardly the way forward to success. Third, the welcome sight of so many women scientists in our space programme again stands in sharp contrast to our incredibly low and, until recently, declining female labour force participation rates. It shows that if the discrimination against women is removed and more women enter the paid workforce, India will be a winner. Finally, despite considerable liberalisation since 1991, the heavy hand of the bureaucracy, and conflicting rules and regulations leading to corruption still stifle growth, investment and innovation.”

Cato: “When we consider the progress that has been made in the past 50 years—in living standards, equality in household consumption, worker safety, and opportunities for women—the nostalgia for a less globalized past is difficult to understand. As Gramm, Ekelund, and Early, summarized in their book, “In short, by virtually any physical definition of economic well‐​being, working Americans across all income levels, racial classifications, education levels, and other commonly used statistical classifications are substantially better off today than they were in 1972” (Gramm, Ekelund, and Early, p. 85). If Americans want to extend and revitalize the kind of progress we have enjoyed since the 1970s, the answer is not to turn back to a more protected and regulated U.S. economy but to promote policies that open the U.S. economy to more domestic and international competition and more choice in the marketplace for U.S. workers and families.”

FT: “Silicon photonics is a technology that integrates optical components, such as lasers with silicon-based integrated circuits to enable high-speed data transmission, longer transmission distance and low power consumption by using light rather than electrical signals. It may also offer lower latency. Silicon photonics has become an intense area of investment for the semiconductor industry as a wide range of tech players eye its potential use in everything from data centres, supercomputers and networking gear to driverless cars and defence radar systems.”

Business Standard: “Unlike the earlier version, which saw qualified engineers and management students, many educated at government cost at top-notch institutions, head out to the West for job opportunities that would absorb their skills and offer dynamic career advancement, Brain Drain 2.0 is taking place right here in India. A blue-blooded US company such as IBM is, in effect, extracting value from India’s intellectual capabilities in India. But the commercial applications accruing from those innovations will benefit the bottom-line of a company headquartered and listed in New York. The migration of domestically developed intellectual property to foreign corporations within India reflects a standard anomaly in the demand pattern of the country’s executive job market. In order of preference, foreign companies, preferably in tech, engineering or consumer goods, top the totem pole.”

WSJ: “Picture Fridays where the office is closed, phones are off, texting is on hold and emails can wait until Monday. But it’s different from a four-day workweek because it isn’t a day off by default. Instead, Fridays become the day when employees tackle focused work, since they won’t be interrupted by emails, texts and phone calls, and if someone is so efficient that they’ve completed most of their tasks by the end of Thursday, they might even take some of Friday as personal time. We get the benefit of clarity—we know we won’t be expected to take meetings or calls, and we know we won’t be able to reach our colleagues—while offering employees a nice perk, and an incentive to be extra efficient the rest of the week to have a little flexibility on Friday.”

NYTimes: “In recent years, only in America has a defeated leader attempted a coup. And only in America is the coup leader likely to once again be the nominee of a major party. “Why did America, alone among rich established democracies, come to the brink?” they ask.A disturbing part of the answer, Levitsky and Ziblatt conclude [in their book ““Tyranny of the Minority””] , lies in our Constitution, the very document Americans rely on to defend us from autocracy. “Designed in a predemocratic era, the U.S. Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them,” they write. The Constitution’s countermajoritarian provisions, combined with profound geographic polarization, have locked us into a crisis of minority rule.”

McKinsey: “Corporate leaders first have to grasp that their workforces are not monolithic when it comes to employee experience and that the tactics to increase performance require a more segmented approach. Leaders can then apply differentiated strategies to groups of employees that boost levels of satisfaction and commitment, performance, well-being, and, ultimately, retention and engagement. Our latest research identifies six distinct employee groups, or archetypes, across a spectrum of satisfaction, engagement, performance, and well-being. These workers range from the highly dissatisfied and actively disengaged—who comprise more than 10 percent of an average organization and who we believe are destroying value—to a group at the other end of the spectrum that we call “thriving stars.” At about 4 percent of an average organization, these super-engaged workers not only perform at high levels themselves but also appear to spread their positive engagement and commitment to others. In between these two poles is a vast middle of workers who experience varying levels of engagement and satisfaction that affect their performance and sense of well-being.”

FT on surge pricing: “Powered by algorithms and artificial intelligence, it is being introduced at a rapid pace by a growing number of consumer industries…“It will eventually be everywhere,” says Robert Cross, who created a computerised dynamic pricing model for Delta Air Lines in the early 1980s before doing the same for hotel giants Marriott, Hyatt and InterContinental Hotels Group. As high inflation erodes margins and improvements in technology make dynamic pricing cheaper and more practical for businesses to implement, the temptation to deploy the pricing strategy is growing in industries that have so far remained largely untouched by the method. Bars, restaurants and bricks-and-mortar retailers have historically only adopted dynamic pricing for basic discount offers, but that could change. “If you’re a business, it’s irresistible because it will improve your margins and it’s in the consumer’s best interests too,” argues Cross, who chairs a revenue management company. “Anywhere there is a mismatch between what a customer is willing to pay and the actual price is ripe for dynamic pricing.””

WSJ: “Employers around the country have good news for workers who dread chats about their performance: Feedback is on the way out. Many companies, executive coaches and HR professionals are looking to erase the anxiety-inducing word from the corporate lexicon, and some are urging it be replaced by what they see as a gentler, more constructive word: “feedforward.” Feedback too often leaves workers feeling defeated, weighed down by past actions instead of considering the next steps ahead, but “feedforward” encourages improvement and development, its proponents say.  “The old assumptions of feedback, and all that word conjures up, I think puts a chill on performance,” says Joe Hirsch, a corporate speaker and author of a book on how to fix feedback. “Feedforward is about this forward-looking view of people, performance and potential.””

Sadanand Dhume: “Ten years ago, India’s $1.86 trillion economy was the 10th largest in the world at market exchange rates, according to World Bank figures. By last year, India’s gross domestic product nearly doubled to $3.39 trillion, making it the world’s fifth-largest economy, ahead of the U.K. The International Monetar y Fund estimates that India will become the world’s third-largest economy as early as 2027…As it has risen, India has become more active in shaping global events. “Ten years ago, nobody in India cared about foreign policy,” says Constantino Xavier, a fellow at New Delhi’s Centre for Social and Economic Progress. “Now India’s international aspirations have become part of Modi’s domestic political ambitions across the country.””

FT: “The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman focuses more narrowly on the twin revolutions of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. But the author would surely be delighted if his book were to prove as influential as Toffler’s in prompting politicians to action. As one of the three co-founders of DeepMind, the London-based AI research company founded in 2010, and now chief executive of the AI start-up Inflection, Suleyman has been at the forefront of the industry for more than a decade. The Coming Wave bristles with breathtaking excitement about the extraordinary possibilities that the revolutions in AI and synthetic biology could bring about. AI, we are told, could unlock the secrets of the universe, cure diseases and stretch the bounds of imagination. Biotechnology can enable us to engineer life and transform agriculture. “Together they will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen,” he writes.”

Rebecaa Caden: “A decade ago, I was only a couple of years into my venture career. I believed that growth and progress were synonymous – in an industry where scale was the ultimate target, platforms that achieved it were glorified. A decade later, I have learned that success is more nuanced, and we have to take accountability for the outcomes we encourage. New dominant platforms can transform how we live but also present challenges: loss of control of our privacy, loneliness, a free-for-all of data control, and increased inequality. These are often unforeseen at the outset. But I’ve also come to believe that predicting the issues is both in our control and our responsibility. Platforms grow toward incentives built in. As we look toward new platform shifts and opportunities for market dominance, I’m thinking a lot more about technology not just creating scale but, with it, creating the world we want to live in. Who owns our digital lives? Where do data control and privacy fit in? How can we fuel belonging and not only connectivity?”

Economist: “A line of research shows the benefits of an “innovation” that predates computers: handwriting. Studies have found that writing on paper can improve everything from recalling a random series of words to imparting a better conceptual grasp of complicated ideas. For learning material by rote, from the shapes of letters to the quirks of English spelling, the benefits of using a pen or pencil lie in how the motor and sensory memory of putting words on paper reinforces that material. The arrangement of squiggles on a page feeds into visual memory: people might remember a word they wrote down in French class as being at the bottom-left on a page, par exemple. One of the best-demonstrated advantages of writing by hand seems to be in superior note-taking. In a study from 2014 by Pam Mueller and Danny Oppenheimer, students typing wrote down almost twice as many words and more passages verbatim from lectures, suggesting they were not understanding so much as rapidly copying the material.”