Rajesh Jain

Veronique de Rugy: “The best job-creation policy is a strong economy. The government should be content to create a level playing field with transparent rules and strong protection of property and contract rights. Of course, it should also supply public goods like infrastructure and ensure a stable legal system. Be wary of those who push industrial policy as a means of job creation. It’s a short-sighted approach that distracts us from the more important question, which is whether hindering the market allocation of resources is truly justified for national security or other valid reasons.”

The Verge: “A search engine is both an enormously complex thing and a fairly simple idea. All a search engine is doing, really, is compiling a database of webpages — known as the “search index” — then looking through that database every time you issue a query and serving the best and most relevant set of those pages. That’s the whole job. At every tiny step of that journey, though, there are huge complications that require critical and complex tradeoffs. Most of them boil down to two things: time and money. Even if you could hypothetically build a constantly updating database of all of the untold billions of pages on the internet, the storage and bandwidth costs alone would bankrupt practically any company on the planet. And that’s not even counting the cost of searching that database millions or billions of times a day. Add in the fact that every millisecond matters — Google still advertises how long every query took at the top of your results — and you don’t have time to look over the whole database, anyway.”

FT: “Since it launched the wildly successful Indian Premier League tournament in 2008, India has brought unparalleled riches to the sport. Its teams now attract the world’s best players and have bought up new international franchises. The country’s governing body, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, dominates global decision making and takes a larger share of global revenues than England and Australia combined. India is even influencing how the game is played, with test teams such as England increasingly adopting crowd-pleasing, aggressive playing styles that fans trace back to the IPL’s shorter, fast-paced Twenty20 format. “India’s influence in global cricket cannot be overstated,” said Arun Dhumal, the IPL’s chair and a former BCCI executive. “The IPL has been a game-changer not only for Indian cricket but also for world cricket, in terms of the traction it has generated with fans across the globe, in terms of the financial bandwidth . . . It has been phenomenal.””

Omar Shams on the AI organisation: “Right now we’re hand-designing information flows and team structure. Instead, let’s use LLMs to share information between teams and help route important work to the right people. LLMs can summarize what work everyone does in an organization by parsing over their code, messages, and documents. LLMs in conjunction with other AI techniques can also identify common problems in an organization and rank them by severity. These models can then group the work of each team member by reviewing their code, messages, and documents, providing a comprehensive summary of their roles. We can then route important information to the right people in the organization who have the relevant expertise. This way of organizing information effectively forms dynamic ‘flash’ teams that cut across traditional organizational boundaries. By training LLMs on company code/docs and/or embedding company code/docs in a vector space we can capture institutional knowledge (‘tribal knowledge’) and spread it around the organization and safeguard it against loss due to personnel changes.”

WSJ: “Traditionally, goods come to the warehouse in trucks, then are manually unloaded with pallet jacks and forklifts. Here, Walmart is testing an autonomous forklift. A single worker can unload multiple trucks at once while monitoring cases for accuracy and damage. Walmart plans to automate or partially automate many of its hundred-plus U.S. warehouses in the coming years. The shift means Walmart can use fewer people to process more goods and make stocking shelves at stores more efficient. To keep their jobs, many of the company’s tens of thousands of warehouse workers need to retrain for new roles. Some will leave. Warehouses will also need to hire people with new skills, such as technicians. Large companies such as Walmart and Amazon that rely on massive warehousing networks have worked for years to automate more of their supply chains to increase the volume of packages they can process and reduce labor costs. Because of Walmart’s scale, its plan to make automation standard in more of its supply chain is likely to affect how smaller competitors invest in their own facilities and what a U.S. warehouse job becomes.”

RV Raman: “This is sketch of the nascent crime fiction scene in India. Stories and writers are not in short supply. Nor are publishers. But readers are. We are lamentably short of readers. For the Indian crime fiction scene to flourish, we need more people to read for pleasure. However, we do have a silver lining: there is fresh interest from overseas publishers for Indian mysteries. How much that will help remains to be seen. With luck, the new readers who currently consume romance and mythological fiction will expand their patronage to crime fiction and provide the genre the necessary boost. Just as British mysteries and Scandinavian noir have carved niches of their own, we might see Indian noir carving one for itself in the coming years.”

NYTimes: “If you have had a romantic partner, you’ve most likely had the maddening experience of realizing that while you were blabbering on about something or another, they were focused on their phone. As relationship transgressions go, “phubbing” — a portmanteau of “phone” and “snubbing” — is, on the surface, fairly benign. Yet research increasingly shows it can be insidious. A recent study linked higher levels of phubbing to marital dissatisfaction, and a 2022 study found it can lead to feelings of distrust and ostracism. One study found that those who phub a lot are more likely to be phubbed themselves, creating a kind of ripple effect.”

Renée Mauborgne: “Beyond Disruption is about how companies can innovate and achieve growth without displacing industries, companies, or jobs. It is a positive-sum approach to innovation and growth that allows business and society to thrive together. The book is the result of research that my colleague W. Chan Kim and I completed during a 30-year research journey. We set out to codify processes and tools that allow organizations to be systematic in identifying and unlocking nondisruptive opportunities in a high-value, low-cost way…Disruption occurs when you create a new market within an existing market, leading to a high level of disruptive growth. Blue ocean strategy involves developing a new market across existing industries, creating a measure of disruptive and nondisruptive growth. Nondisruption is at the opposite end of the innovation spectrum. It occurs when you develop a new market outside the bounds of existing industries, which generates largely nondisruptive growth where there is no displacement.”

Arnold Kling: “The presumption that markets are flawed and government intervention is the solution pervades the thinking of much of the economics profession in general and Akerlof and Yellen in particular. As you know, I have a different point of view. Are markets imperfect? Certainly. But solutions that come from the market itself can sometimes work. And solutions that come from government intervention can often fail. In short: markets fail; use markets.”

WSJ: “To reduce your cancer risk, you don’t need to make it all the way to the gym: You could start by bringing in the groceries. People who recorded just under four minutes of vigorous movement every day had a roughly 17% reduced cancer risk compared with people who didn’t log any high-intensity movement, a study published [recently] in the journal JAMA Oncology concluded. The link was stronger for cancers in which exercise has previously been connected to lower risks, including breast, colon, endometrial and bladder cancer. The study followed more than 22,000 people who reported that they didn’t exercise but logged minute-long bursts of activity such as walking uphill or carrying shopping bags. It adds to evidence connecting physical activity to better health, even when the movement is modest.”

Economist: “Companies are increasingly caught up in governments’ competing aims. What to do?…In a fractious world, businesses cannot hide from politics and geopolitics. But the lesson of the wokelash is that outspokenness can backfire. When deciding whether to speak up, bosses of global firms should use long-term shareholder value as their lodestar. The more directly what they say affects their business, the more credibility they have and the less risk of appearing a fraud or a hypocrite. This approach may include reminding politicians of the benefits that efficiency and openness once brought to economies around the world. When governments seem to contain a dearth of champions for either, that would be no bad thing.”

Ninan: “If growth has been slowing down in recent years, it is because no sector comparable in scale has emerged to play the role of lead cyclist. Meanwhile the pharma sector lost momentum prematurely because of poor industry practices and regulatory failures. Now the infotech boom has eased into a slower, mature phase. And in the wake of successive shocks (demonetisation, Covid, etc), domestic consumer demand growth has levelled off. For instance, two-wheeler sales have stagnated. One reason could be that the consumer debt burden is now high for India’s income level. As for aviation, India has just one viable (and one potentially viable) airline company that can invest for growth. Meanwhile, merchandise exports have done poorly in the last decade, following the economy’s failure to develop a competitive manufacturing base vis-a-vis rivals like Vietnam and Bangladesh.”

FT: “The rise of AI forces us to reinterpret our human intelligence…Teachers of all kinds must ensure their students continually question what they think they know — and they are able to use both natural and artificial sources of intelligence. Armed with the tools of curiosity and healthy scepticism, they must master nuance. And, as the emerging career category of “prompt engineers” demonstrates, they must become ever more skilled at asking questions. If the goal of education is to enable our full potential, then we must rethink how we are developing all human capacities, taking advantage of the technological tools that augment our natural abilities. This education needs to be life-long. Top performers in sports, music and, increasingly, business have coaches of many different kinds. These teams increasingly use technology to enhance the feedback they are able to provide their clients in order to constantly improve their performance. As technological advances enhance human capabilities, our need for human guides will only grow.”

WSJ: “In “Look,” Mr. Madsbjerg attempts to impart the wisdom he has acquired from art and philosophy and from the practical experience of running a corporate consultancy and teaching a class on “human observation” at the New School in New York. His book is full of intriguing goodies: anecdotes and precepts originating in a wide array of sources, as well as summaries of the work of gestalt theorists and practitioners of phenomenology, a discipline he defines as “the study of how the human world works and everything that gives our life meaning.” The breadth and vagueness of that definition bespeaks the book’s enthusiastic overreach. There’s a lot here, and a lot of it makes sense, but there are moments when the argument is so diffuse as to feel precarious. At times Mr. Madsbjerg teeters on the edge of banality, even incoherence. Yet he never tips over, for there is unmistakably truth in what he’s getting at. And, to be fair, the distinction between apparent understanding and deep understanding is difficult to draw. It is difficult even to describe. Mr. Madsbjerg does a heroic job of seeking to capture the experience of sudden insight…To pay attention is not solely to concentrate or focus; it can mean entering states of heightened awareness, like a predator on the hunt.”

Walter Russell Mead: “What unites the subcontinent, say Hindu nationalists, is a shared culture in which Hindu religion plays a central role. Even Indians who aren’t Hindu have been shaped by this traditional culture. Cultivating pride in that heritage and freeing it from injuries of both British and Mughal domination is the only way, Hindu nationalists believe, to hold this vast and diverse population together. Nehruvian secularism and liberal abstractions like “constitutional patriotism” can’t do the job, they argue…RSS leaders believe that India can remain united as the shock waves of modernization propagate across the subcontinent only if the changes are seen as grounded in ancient Hindu principles. While conciliating and reassuring more-conservative Hindu thinkers, they are promoting a future-oriented Hinduism in the hope that its ancient religion and culture can bring a united and self-confident India into the 21st century.”

Martin Wolf: “Modi’s India is moving in an illiberal direction. His government has taken huge risks in riding the tiger of politicised religion…As India’s polity has become less liberal, its government has become more effective. World Bank indicators show that “political stability and absence of violence”, “control of corruption”, “regulatory quality” and “government effectiveness” have improved since Narendra Modi became prime minister. But “voice and accountability” and “rule of law” have worsened. His government is more repressive and more effective than its predecessors…This government rides the tiger of politicised religion on what it hopes to be a long journey towards the destination of creating a modern, prosperous and strong India. The question is not just where it will end up, but whether it can avoid being eaten on its journey.”

George Will: “Today, industrial policy’s political purpose is to defuse angry populism that is blamed on “deindustrialization” displacing workers. But declines in the portions of labor forces devoted to manufacturing are normal as nations become richer, regardless of wide variations in nations’ economic policies. And the U.S. government’s would-be industrializers should hope that surly populists, who are eager to cause society’s upper crust to crumble, do not notice how industrial policy makes eager bedfellows of government bureaucrats and corporate elites — for their mutual benefit.”

Jamie Sears: “I wrote How to Love Teaching Again because I am a former teacher and I’ve seen firsthand how teachers are becoming burned out in the classroom. I know that really quality educators are leaving long before they truly wanted to because they have no choice. They need to leave the classroom. I feel like our children really need the best educators possible in the classroom. I’m hoping that the strategies that I share in this book are things that teachers can implement tomorrow to see a better work–life balance.”

From a comment on Tyler Cowen’s blog: “Singapore is often seen as a model for other developing countries for any number of the policies it adopts. But I think one truly underrated high impact policy is this scholarship system. It largely solves the problem governments in many countries face of keeping talent in the public sector, while redressing some degree of inequality (of course, the scale is limited). To a government, the cost of funding the higher education of a couple hundred students a year (Singapore’s birth cohort is small, after all) is relatively insignificant, even at the most expensive American colleges. I’ve always thought of this policy as one of the single lowest-cost, highest-impact things that other developing countries can borrow from Singapore: a marginal revolution, if you like. The second point is on how the civil service is enmeshed with the elected government. The PAP often draws its candidates from the civil service, and because of its electoral dominance, it largely has the power to decide on the career pathways of its MPs and ministers. Unlike the UK, therefore, where ministerial promotions are largely dependent on political opportunity, the PAP does do quite a bit of planning about who its ministerial team a few years down the line is going to consist of, and often draws civil servants to fit into that system.”

Ishan Bakshi: “Considering the lament in the past over the inability to accurately estimate the Indian middle class — households with significant discretionary spending capacity — the sheer range of firms now venturing into the country is indicative not of the potential down the line, but of the market now. So, how big is the market? India’s per capita income is just under Rs 2 lakh or around $2,400. But this statistic conceals more than it illuminates…Though their share in the overall population is minuscule, the absolute number of these households is nothing to scoff at. So even as vast sections of the labour force face near stagnant real wages, millions more seek work under MGNREGA compared to pre-pandemic levels, and, the country’s political and financial capitals, its millennium city and Silicon Valley are submerged during the rainy seasons, for these households, well ensconced in their gated islands, and they are just that, it’s the roaring Twenties. So while India may not be the next China by the end of this decade, even if it only manages to chug along, averaging 6 per cent, it could well eclipse some major markets.”