Rajesh Jain

A paper on Venture Predation: “Predatory pricing is a strategy firms use to suppress competition. The predator prices below its own costs to force its rivals out of the market. After they exit, the predator raises its prices to supracompetitive levels and recoups the cost of predation. The  Supreme Court has described predatory pricing as “rarely tried” and “rarely successful” and has established a liability standard that is nearly impossible for plaintiffs to satisfy. We argue that one kind of company thinks predatory pricing is worth trying and at least potentially successful—venture–backed startups. A venture predator is a startup that uses venture finance to price below its costs, chase its rivals out of the market, and grab market share. Venture capitalists (VCs) are motivated to fund predation—and startup founders are motivated to execute it—because it can fuel rapid, exponential growth. Critically, for VCs and founders, a predator does not need to recoup its losses for the strategy to succeed. The VCs and founders just need to create the impression that recoupment is possible, so they can sell their shares at an attractive price to later investors who anticipate years of monopoly pricing. In this Article, we argue that venture predation can harm consumers, distort market incentives, and misallocate capital away from genuine innovations. We consider reforms to antitrust law and securities regulation to deter.“

Shane Parrish: “Everyone is a perfectionist when they care enough. If you’re not obsessed with it, you’ll never master it. The reason you won’t master it is because you won’t care enough to be a perfectionist.”

Business Standard: “India has jumped six ranks to 38th position among 139 countries on the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index for 2023, the same rank as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Portugal, which are much richer countries than India. This is a very positive development because it helps lower the cost of doing business in India. It will help India’s exports and make the country a more attractive destination for investment — especially, but not only, in the manufacturing sector. China is still way ahead at 19th position, Malaysia ranks 26th, and Thailand is just a little ahead at 34th. But India has beaten key ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) competitors like Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, with whom we have a free trade agreement on this important ingredient of competitiveness…India is clearly on the move and the focus of the government to improve our logistics is bearing fruit, but this is a battle that must be fought continuously and smartly. “Logistics is not an expense, it’s an investment,” said business coach Michael Allosso. This is the kind of reforms that lay the foundations for sustained growth to becoming an advanced economy.”

Spencer Stuart: “Executives who decide to shift styles need to recognize that the transformation will be long and difficult — an odyssey requiring humility, self-awareness, patience and resilience. Broadening your repertoire of people skills is not a single event but an involved process that unfolds over time, often uncomfortably, in three predictable stages: The departure — the first stage, when a leader recognizes the need for a change and deliberately starts to leave behind familiar ways of working. The voyage — a time of transition when the leader encounters obstacles and trials that teach important lessons and open the path to transformation. The return — a period during which leaders arrive at a new understanding of who they are and what kind of leader they want to be and start to transfer what they’ve learned to others.”

Numbers every LLM Developer should know. Among them: “It’s important to remember that you pay by the token for responses. This means that asking an LLM to be concise can save you a lot of money. This can be broadened beyond simply appending “be concise” to your prompt: if you are using GPT-4 to come up with 10 alternatives, maybe ask it for 5 and keep the other half of the money.” Also: “LLMs operate on tokens. Tokens are words or sub-parts of words, so “eating” might be broken into two tokens “eat” and “ing”. A 750 word document in English will be about 1000 tokens. For languages other than English, the tokens per word increases depending on their commonality in the LLM’s embedding corpus. Knowing this ratio is important because most billing is done in tokens, and the LLM’s context window size is also defined in tokens.”

FT’s s Rana Foroohar:  “I ask [Daron] Acemoglu what led him to tackle technology as his latest topic. “Well, in some sense, I’ve been thinking about technology for over 30 years — my graduate research was about the effects of technology on employment and wages. Then, once I realised that I could also study these issues of politics, economy, democracy, conflict and so on, my academic research then progressed along two somewhat separate lanes.” The research shows that major technological disruption — such as the Industrial Revolution — can flatten wages for an entire class of working people. It also points to the distributional conflict and power dynamics inherent in it. “Yes, you got progress,” Acemoglu says, “but you also had costs that were huge and very long-lasting. A hundred years of much harsher conditions for working people, lower real wages, much worse health and living conditions, less autonomy, greater hierarchy. And the reason that we came out of it wasn’t some law of economics, but rather a grassroots social struggle in which unions, more progressive politics and, ultimately, better institutions played a key role — and a redirection of technological change away from pure automation also contributed importantly.””

Simon Johnson (related to the above): “I’ve never been bothered by the top wealth, Tyler. It’s never been a major concern of mine. What bothers me more is lack of good wages, rising wages for people who haven’t completed college, let’s say, or didn’t go to college. I think it’s the stagnation of that since the 1970s, which was quite different, of course, from what happened for the 30 or 40 years before that. I think that’s unnecessary and we can do better, but it’s a very hard process to reverse. It’s not a new process, and it’s a process very rooted in the fact that in early Industrial Revolution, people like Henry Ford — when they brought in automation, they also created a lot of new tasks for workers that didn’t previously exist. Workers even without a lot of skill became much more productive. That productivity was shared with them through higher wages, through unions and other things. That whole mechanism has broken down more recently. I think with AI, there’s a lot of obviously huge discussion about all kinds of dimensions, but the piece that we really focus on and are concerned about is that more workers may be displaced from previously well-paying jobs, and without creating new tasks. Therefore, worker productivity doesn’t go up. You may pay some people — maybe the designers of AI algorithms — more money, but most people may well be paid less in real terms.”

NYTimes on why we listen to sad songs: “We generally don’t enjoy being sad in real life, but we do enjoy art that makes us feel that way. Countless scholars since Aristotle have tried to account for it…Mario Attie-Picker, a philosopher at Loyola University Chicago who helped lead the research, found the results compelling. After considering the data, he proposed a relatively simple idea: Maybe we listen to music not for an emotional reaction — many subjects reported that sad music, albeit artistic, was not particularly enjoyable — but for the sense of connection to others. Applied to the paradox of sad music: Our love of the music is not a direct appreciation of sadness, it’s an appreciation of connection.”

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.”