Rajesh Jain

FT: “As a political economist and policy adviser, [Milton] Friedman resides among the great social thinkers of the postwar era. In the pantheon of 20th-century economists, only John Maynard Keynes surpasses him. As a free-market ideologue, Friedman, who died in 2006 aged 94, occupies a more contentious spot, somewhere between prophet and crank depending on one’s disposition. But that he was singularly influential is unquestionable: Friedman, Jennifer Burns writes in her splendid new biography, “was a prime mover in the central economic transitions of the century”. He witnessed the destruction of the laissez-faire order during the Great Depression, became an economist during the construction of the New Deal order, and then contributed to its replacement by the neoliberal order.”

Pratap Bhanu Mehta: “It’s a cliché that you always experience India as a paradox. And I think the paradox of this moment is clearly India’s political significance, economic significance, cultural creativity is as vibrant as ever. On the other hand, the signs for Indian democracy are looking very ominous. I coedited a big “Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution.” Now when I go to class, I say, “I cannot tell you what the Constitution of India is. I cannot tell you, if you go with a habeas corpus case to the Supreme Court, whether it will be heard.” So there is a sense of dread about where this democracy is heading.”

FT: “Something profound is happening in the world — a kind of metaphysical detachment of the west from the rest. Where many people in the rest of the world once saw the west as the answer to their problems, they now realise that they will have to find their own way. But does this mean a total decoupling of the west and the rest is inevitable? Absolutely not. We still live in an interdependent world which faces many pressing common global challenges. We have to talk to each other. But we must do so as equals. The condescension must end. The time has come for a dialogue based on mutual respect between the west and the rest.”

WaPo: “Everyone knows that exercise is good for them, but just how much a small amount of physical activity matters might be surprising. A recent review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that people who followed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation for 150 minutes a week of moderate- or high-intensity activity reduced their risk of heart disease and stroke by 27 percent. It also reduced their risk of cancer by 12 percent and premature death by 31 percent. Importantly, those who achieved half the recommended amount also saw substantial benefits. Just seventy-five minutes a week — or about 11 minutes a day — brought about a 17 percent reduction in cardiovascular disease, a 7 percent decrease in cancer risk and 23 percent lower chance of early death. Many other studies on exercise have found a plethora of other health benefits, such as decreased dementia risk and improved mental well-being. There is a dose-response relationship, meaning that increased exercise results in better health outcomes. But the most significant increase is going from zero activity to some. This is key for those who do not exercise; incorporating just 11 minutes of brisk walking into their day can make a marked difference for their health.”

The Generalist: “We’ve found that while most investors aren’t helpful, a few have been company-trajectory-changing for us. When I think about why these specific investors have been so helpful, I think it comes down to a few reasons: the investor has the requisite experience, the investor is aware of her limitations and position, [and] the investor and the founder have a relationship that works (for them).”

Andy Kessler: “With tariffs, you get false price signals and less innovation. They misallocate capital and human resources by having entrepreneurs chase fake opportunities. Domestic manufacturers love tariffs, which allow them to raise prices, but the rest of us have to overpay for goods while manufacturers become lazy. The largest and lowest-cost electric-vehicle manufacturer in the world, China’s BYD, is effectively kept out of the U.S. by Trump and Biden tariffs, and we now have a glut of unprofitable and expensive domestic EVs. If all the chips in an iPhone were made in the U.S., I calculate we would be paying close to $2,000 for one and unit sales would decline 50%. Would you upgrade at that price? Margins matter. Capital flows to its highest returns. Trade-deficit figures don’t tell you how profitable manufacturing is.”

Ginny Choi and Virgil Storr: “The apparent captains of industry are not captains at all. They are in fact helmsmen who must either follow the orders of the consumers, the true captains, or they will be relieved of duty.Consumers convey their commands through their purchasing decisions. They instruct entrepreneurs what to produce and what not to produce through their decisions to buy a good or service.” [via CafeHayek]

FT: “India’s appeal to the likes of Apple as a “China plus one” manufacturing hub may depend on how the country and foreign investors resolve one glaring issue: how and where to get enough workers in the right place. In China, hundreds of millions of migrant workers played a crucial role in the country’s rise as the “workshop of the world”. Executives hoping India will emerge as a parallel manufacturing centre as geopolitical tensions rise are waiting to see whether its workers will prove equally willing to leave their homes and families for a job that includes spending long periods with a dormitory bed as their only private space. “When we started manufacturing in [the Chinese city of] Shenzhen all workers came from far away, so there was the necessity to build accommodation for them from the very start,” said a person close to Foxconn, the biggest manufacturer of Apple’s iPhone, which has said its manufacturing ambitions for India extend to new products such as electric cars. “In India, the main model so far was bringing workers from their hometowns with shuttle buses, but as things get scaled up that is just not sustainable.””

Economist: “Increasingly, those consumers with deep enough pockets are getting the chance to escape the online admen. Last month Facebook’s owner, Meta, began offering customers in Europe ad-free subscriptions to Facebook and its sister network, Instagram, for €9.99 ($10.85) a month. In October X (formerly Twitter) launched an ad-free option. In the same month TikTok, a fast-growing Chinese-owned video app, announced that it was testing an ad-free subscription. The following month Snapchat, another social-media rival, said it was doing the same. Social networks are not the only medium allowing the group that advertisers most covet—the better-off with money to splurge—to wriggle beyond their reach. From video and audio to news and gaming, a combination of regulation and technological change is encouraging media companies to offer alternatives. “We are in a world where it will be increasingly possible to avoid ads,” says Brian Wieser of Madison and Wall, an advertising consultancy. As the rich opt out of commercials on some platforms, advertisers are therefore looking for new places to catch them.”

WSJ: “Rather than filling sprawling department stores with an array of merchandise, many retailers have started using data from online orders, social-media and foot-traffic analytics to customize smaller inventories to the local population. They have also bolstered store infrastructure to make it easier for customers to pick up and return items bought online. This allows them to keep fewer items in stores and shrink their footprints to fit into the open-air shopping centers where customers are increasingly shopping. “The old days of stack ’em high and watch ’em fly are gone,” said retail analyst Dana Telsey, who founded and runs Telsey Advisory Group.”

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.”