Rajesh Jain

Business India: “Quotas are the new freebies…Moving beyond castes and ethnic groups, the demand for quotas is knocking at the doors of the private sector as well. As India strives towards the position of the world’s third largest economy (from its current fifth largest economy status), the emerging fault-lines pose a danger to our economic trajectory. India Inc, which has been facing flak for not generating enough jobs for our youth, has now to deal with private sector job quota laws being enacted by some state governments…The demand for caste-based quotas has also found salience in the last few years because of farmer distress in the countryside due to agrarian crisis. The forward castes want the benefits given to other backward classes (OBC) category, so that they can shift away from agriculture. With opportunities shrinking in towns and cities, they feel that the only option left for them is government jobs. But, as acquiring normal government jobs entails stiff competition, they are asking for reservation.”

Jenny Odell: “For me, there’s the question of why you do anything. That can lead into difficult territory like, What do you want your life to be? Ideally your answers to that question are what guide your decisions about how to spend your time. You would hope that you are spending less time on things that you don’t want to be doing so you can do things that you’ve decided are meaningful to you, and I think that there’s something about that culture of making everything more efficient that risks avoiding that question of why. A life of total efficiency and convenience? Well, why? What is left if you were to make everything superconvenient? It is helpful to make certain things more efficient, but that can tip over into becoming its own end, which moves the focus away from that larger question of why.”

NYTimes: “The [Chinese] government reported [recently] that 20.4 percent of people ages 16 to 24 looking for a job were out of work in April. That is the highest level since China started announcing the statistic in 2018. High youth unemployment has been a dark stain on China’s economy for several years, exacerbated by strict pandemic health restrictions limited travel, decimated small businesses and damaged consumer confidence. The government, facing rare public discontent as young professionals in major cities across China protested the “zero Covid” rules, abruptly announced in December that it would start easing the policies. But the youth jobless rate has remained high, even as the overall rate has ticked down two months in a row…One problem, analysts said, is a mismatch between the jobs that college graduates want and the jobs that are available.”

FT: “1979 was the year of the individual. Thatcherism began. Deng Xiaoping let market forces into China through his “special economic zones”. Meanwhile, in Japan, one of the most liberating consumer goods of the last century went on sale. It allowed people to control their aural environment — and to that extent their mood — at all times. Even the trade name (too gendered to be viable now) suggested a new kind of human being. Neolithic Man. Renaissance Man. Walkman. Portable private sound: I want to hail the spread of this invention, from luxury product to commonplace. But what strikes me more is how far from universal it still is. On the street and the Tube, in airport lounges and bank queues, most people, even if unaccompanied, have naked ears. No AirPods adorn them…If you are among the refuseniks, permit me a question. How can you stand it?”

WSJ: “[The] brainstorming exercise is, in fact, a terrible idea—not only because I can’t hear you. The value of gathering to swap loosely formed thoughts is highly suspect, despite being a major reason many companies want workers back in offices. “You do not get your best ideas out of these freewheeling brainstorming sessions,” says Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School. “You will do your best creative work by yourself.”…Business teams ought to collaborate, of course, but she interprets the evidence to mean that colleagues should compare notes after extensive, independent thinking.”

Dan Shipper: “Education is expensive because you’re paying for more than learning. You’re paying for the status of the degree, the ability to participate in the community, a planned course list and curriculum, the quality control that the university provides, and on and on. You’re paying for a turn-key, minimum effort experience. But if, for some reason, you don’t care about those things and you’re optimizing primarily for learning—you can learn anything 98% better than you would in a class, for significantly less money. The way to do this is through 1-1 tutoring.”

Economist: “The advances of generative-AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, have left just about every investor discussing what to make of the incipient industry, and which firms it might upturn. Mr Son sees parallels with the early period of the internet. Generative ai could provide a new pipeline of initial public offerings—and the foundation for the next generation of mega-cap tech firms. Investors face two questions. The first is which frontier technologies will make market leaders a fortune. That is difficult enough. The second, establishing whether the value will accrue to upstarts backed by venture capital or existing technology giants, is at least as tricky. Nobody knows if it is better to have the best chatbot or plenty of customers—having a head start in a whizzy new tech is not the same as being able to make money from it. Indeed, lots of the value of revolutionary innovation is often captured by existing giants…As things stand, it looks more likely that the market value of the technology will end up as a new string to the bow of already giant tech firms.”

WSJ: “Inflation has been running at its highest rate in decades. American society is restive and divided. There’s a public perception that the country’s glory days are over, that democratic capitalism is a spent force. U.S. standing and influence abroad are in decline. America not long ago withdrew in disgrace from one of the longest wars in its history. A communist superpower appears ascendant and is building up military force at a ferocious pace. William Inboden could be talking about today, but he’s describing the world in 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president. “If you were to do an overall scoreboard in the Cold War at the time,” he says, “it would have looked to most objective observers like the Soviets were winning and the United States was losing. At best it’s a tie, but the previous decade had been by most standards a good one for the Soviet bloc and a bad one for the free world.”…A decade later, the Soviet Union collapsed.”

Thomas Sowell: “What is called “capitalism” might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance with it.” [via CafeHayek]

WaPo: “Beneath 1,350 square miles of dense jungle in northern Guatemala, scientists have discovered 417 cities that date back to circa 1,000 B.C. and that are connected by nearly 110 miles of “superhighways” — a network of what researchers called “the first freeway system in the world.” Scientist say this extensive road-and-city network, along with sophisticated ceremonial complexes, hydraulic systems and agricultural infrastructure, suggests that the ancient Maya civilization, which stretched through what is now Central America, was far more advanced than previously thought. Mapping the area since 2015 using lidar technology — an advanced type of radar that reveals things hidden by dense vegetation and the tree canopy — researchers have found what they say is evidence of a well-organized economic, political and social system operating some two millennia ago.”

Anticipating the Unintended: “[Recently], the [Indian] government announced another PLI scheme for “laptops, tablets, all-in-one PCs, servers etc.”, with a budgetary outlay of ₹17000 crores over six years. If the government appreciated technological learning, it would accompany this PLI with a reduction in customs duties. Competitive exports need competitive imports of intermediate components and equipment.”

Dan Wang: “China is achingly aware of its deficiencies in two strategic sectors in particular: semiconductors and aviation. So it has showered these sectors with bountiful money and stern policy attention. Where has that gotten them? Not far. On chips, China has built the basics of the industry, but is at best 10 years behind the leading edge of manufacturing logic chips, and even more on the tools needed to produce chips: lithography equipment and EDA software. On aviation, China’s answer to Airbus and Boeing has been years behind schedule, and is anyway substantially dependent on western engines and avionics systems…I would say that China has caught up with the west on nearly all manufactured products outside of chips and aviation. It is making sophisticated electronics components. It is making boring industrial equipment that rarely grace headlines. And it is making most of the technologies we need for decarbonization. The folks at Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimate that China owns 90% of the solar supply chain: everything from polysilicon production to the tools needed to make photovoltaics to the panels themselves. It’s also doing very well in batteries and has a shot at dominating the hydrogen supply chain as well.”

Rita McGrath on questions a Board should be asking before an acquisition: “What assumptions are we making about future demand? What is the evidence that these are warranted? How will the two companies truly integrate? What are the customer touchpoints that will be valuable for both? How do we make the customer jobs-to-be-done better? And of course, what evidence do we have that there really is synergy between the two operations, so that owning both adds up to more than the cost of making the deal?”

Suzy Welch: “My equanimity was recently tested for the first time in a while, with graduation looming and summer almost upon us, when my students started throwing around the term “funemployment.” As in, “I’ll work when I work, until then, I’ll just do some funemployment…The idea that not having a job, or even the prospect of one, could be pleasant, delightful and, yes, even desirable? This seems a level step up from wanting work-life balance. It makes even quiet quitting—which is really another way of saying, “I want to work 9-to-5 in an 8-to-8 industry”—seem tame.”

FT: “Based on its own research, [Price’s Rajesh] Shukla’s group estimates that there are about 432mn middle-class Indians — about one in every three people. The range of what Price ranks as middle class is large: household income of between 500,000 and 3,000,000 rupees (about $6,700 to $40,000) a year. This is enough, says Shukla to “have achieved economic security and be able to indulge in discretionary consumption”. Shiv Shivakumar, operating partner at private equity firm Advent International, extrapolates the size of the middle class starting from the number of income tax returns and an average household size of 4.4 people. He then adds another 100mn to 200mn non-taxpaying people in agriculture (what he calls the top income layer of the nearly 1bn Indians who live on the land) and reaches an estimate of 356mn to 456mn people.”

Economist: “Mr Kissinger has some opening advice to aspiring leaders: “Identify where you are. Pitilessly.” In that spirit, the starting-point for avoiding war is to analyse China’s growing restlessness. Despite a reputation for being conciliatory towards the government in Beijing, he acknowledges that many Chinese thinkers believe America is on a downward slope and that, “therefore, as a result of an historic evolution, they will eventually supplant us.” He believes that China’s leadership resents Western policymakers’ talk of a global rules-based order, when what they really mean is America’s rules and America’s order. China’s rulers are insulted by what they see as the condescending bargain offered by the West, of granting China privileges if it behaves (they surely think the privileges should be theirs by right, as a rising power). Indeed, some in China suspect that America will never treat it as an equal and that it’s foolish to imagine it might.”

Eliot Peper: “Notes are short. You’ve got to be able to fold them into a paper airplane you can throw to a friend when the teacher isn’t looking, or, you know, fit them into a tweet, adapt them into a TikTok, or post them as an Instagram story. Notes are about one thing, although they can be about anything: gossip, advice, ideas, doodles, quotes, lists, questions, insults, insights, etc. Notes are written for specific people, not for everyone. You write notes to friends, crushes, enemies, and frenemies, but never to some abstract “audience.” Often, the more specific your note, the farther it travels, because there are other people like your friend, crush, enemy, and frenemy on the internet, and they will feel like it was written just for them. Whether you’re on Reddit, iMessage, Discord, Gmail, YouTube, Notion, or Mastodon, the internet is a place for passing notes—a giant note router.”

FT: “Higher interest rates have so fundamentally shifted the financial environment that investors must focus on a company’s ability to maintain margins rather than just its growth prospects, veteran private equity executive Chip Kaye said. “This moment is different than anything we have had in the 40 years before . . . with inflation proving stickier and interest rates higher than currently expected — and more complicated great-power politics adding to that dynamic,” said Kaye, who started at Warburg Pincus in 1986 and has been its chief executive for two decades. “If you could pick one characteristic of a business and that’s how you decide whether to invest, it would be pricing,” he told the Financial Times. “Lean into businesses that feel like they have the ability to adapt to a higher-inflation environment.””

Bloomberg: “[Robert] Lucas’s primary contribution was to insist that all assumptions about expectations be spelled out and tested to see if they were consistent with all other parts of the argument. For instance, if you wanted to assert that people would respond to one set of government actions but not another, you had to outline why that might be the case. In retrospect it seems simple, but Lucas (with co-authors, notably Nancy Stokey) was the person who showed how to do it. The end result was a reworking of virtually everyone’s macroeconomic arguments — monetarist, Keynesian or otherwise. The “Lucas critique” showed that policy changes alter how people behave, and thus affect the operation of the economy. Policy, in other words, should not be thought of as manipulating a fixed target: There is always an economic response to any policy, and so doing good macroeconomics is harder than previously thought.”

Economist: “The Lucas critique can be explained with the help of an analogy—one he offered to students graduating from the University of Chicago, where he spent many years as both a student and professor. Imagine a fairground that sells tokens at the entrance for the rides inside, all of which are independently run. Suppose the cashier abruptly doubles the number of tokens per dollar. Fairgoers, flush with tokens, will flock to the rollercoaster, fun house and other attractions. Some ride operators will assume their rides are more popular than they thought. They might even extend workers’ hours in order to handle the additional custom. A statistically minded economist looking at the park’s data might conclude that an increase in the token supply leads to heightened activity and employment. They might even advise other fairgrounds to try the same trick. But of course this “policy” only works because ride-operators do not anticipate it. As they realise what is going on, they will raise the number of tokens they require per ride. Prices will rise and activity will return to normal.”