Rajesh Jain

Economist: “Long known for its interminable, rattling train journeys, snarled roads and grotty airports, the country is experiencing an infrastructural makeover unseen outside China. It will transform Indians’ ability to travel, by rail, road and air; and so intermingle and do business. Mr Modi’s government hopes it will remove one of the biggest constraints on the rapid economic growth that India needs to meet the aspirations of its young, fast-growing population…Mr Modi’s faith in the transformative power of new infrastructure is well-judged. It is a precondition for the high growth that India—including above all millions of poor and emerging middle-class citizens—desperately needs. But without additional reforms, even the prime minister’s shiny new railways, roads and bridges will not be enough.”

Nathan Baschez: “Today we are seeing the emergence of a new kind of “central processor” that defines performance for a wide variety of applications. But instead of performing simple, deterministic operations on 1’s and 0’s, these new processors take natural language (and now images) as their input and perform intelligent probabilistic reasoning, returning text as an output. Like CPUs, they serve as the central “brain” for a growing variety of tasks. Crucially, their performance is good enough to attract millions of users, but their current flaws are so pronounced that improvements are desperately demanded. Every time a new model comes out, developers take advantage of new capabilities and push the system to the limits again, fueling demand for the next generation of improvements. Of course, the new central processors I’m talking about are LLMs (large language models). Today’s dominant LLM supplier is OpenAI.”

Shane Burly: “I define fascism along two primary temples, the first being a belief in human inequality. The second being essentialized identity. Identities that choose you not identities you choose. Ones that are eternal and transcendent, that create “essences” that are beyond just their quantifications or abilities to quantify them. Then you mix in a few other characters, and some of which are secondary, some of which are just temporarily necessary. For example, fascism is a modern movement. It’s one that claims to reclaim the standard bearers of the pre-Enlightenment era.”

Evan Armstrong: “A startup is a permissionless way to improve society. Startups make things cheaper, which is a moral good.”

Mediapost: “Research from cybersecurity company CHEQ shows that more than 40% of all traffic online is invalid. For marketers, where fake traffic is present, audiences, customer data platform (CDP) segments and CRMs become “polluted” and campaigns become optimized toward fake users and revenue opportunities are missed.  In 2022, global spend on digital advertising surpassed $600 billion. By applying the average invalid rate for paid traffic against this number, CHEQ estimates $35.7 billion of ad spend was wasted on fake traffic in 2022 by analyzing more than a billion site visits from the 15,000 companies it works with to weed out bots and other fake web activity.”

Akash Prakash: “A related issue is that public investors are now starting to realise that they are dealing with a slightly different animal when it comes to new listings. Most of them have no promoters and the shareholding of the founding group tends to be sub 15 per cent. This means 80-90 per cent of the equity is owned by investment groups who will sell, driven by their own liquidity needs, with no coordination. We have to be prepared for a constant drip of stock from this capital base. It almost reminds one of the public sector undertaking (PSU) stocks and the government’s initial attempts to monetise its holdings many years ago. Every six months, there would be a 5 per cent block deal. The selling pressure seemed interminable. It ultimately drove all the PSU companies to a steep valuation discount. Given this liquidity/market dynamic, should public investors demand a liquidity discount also on the new VC/PE-backed listings? Should they list at such high multiples if 80 per cent of the float will come to the secondary market in the next 12-24 months. Either that or there has to be much better coordination and visibility on the selling side. Have no doubt, float and technicals do impact valuation multiples, at least till such time as the float stabilises and the shareholding pattern matures.”

Donald Boudreaux: “An issue on which economists’ thinking differs most distinctly from that of non-economists is jobs. The economist understands that jobs are always available. In fact, each of us has so many potential jobs that we can’t possibly do all of them. Paint the house, clean the garage, bathe the dog, mow the lawn, mow the neighbor’s lawn. The list is endless. Trouble is, few of these jobs pay very much. The economist also understands that jobs are not a benefit, but a cost. That is, what each of us wants is not the job itself. We don’t work because doing so affords us the obligation to toil, sweat, and agonize. Rather, we’re willing to toil, sweat, and agonize only because we value sufficiently highly the income we get paid to do so. In short, what we want are not jobs per se but opportunities to earn income.”

Andy Kessler: “Equitable outcomes are collectivist, with capital diverted unproductively to buy votes. Without individual empowerment, meritocracy vanishes and capitalism stops working. With unaesthetic kickback capitalism maybe that’s the intent.”

CNBC: “India’s dream of becoming the new factory of the world will have to overcome longstanding hurdles. A formidable bureaucracy, lagging infrastructure and labyrinthine red rape have forced many foreign businesses to either shun India or shutter their local operations. A lack of skilled labor and innovation, poor production quality, and a reluctance to adopt rapidly evolving technology are also seen as hindrances.”

WSJ writes on how Loego beat Barbie and Monopoly: “The widening gap between Lego and its rivals has been driven by success in tapping new markets such as China, engaging new generations of fans with the help of movie and videogame tie-ups and piggybacking on the appeal of other popular brands, notably Star Wars, with themed sets. The company has also benefited from rolling out more of its own stores and having its own dedicated factories, close to end markets, which have allowed it to largely avoid supply-chain snags.”

Raghu Raman: “While visionary leaders foresee the future, legendary leaders have the ability to simplify and institutionalize their vision. This is the story of one such iconic corporate leader I had the privilege to work with. During a complex review meeting, he simplified four critical chasms that all organizations must leap across, regardless of their size or industry….The first of these journeys is from confusion to clarity…The second chasm is from competence to capability…The third chasm is from concern to confidence…The last and perhaps most important chasm to be crossed is from criticism to celebration.”

Atanu Dey offers some quotes from David Hume: “Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few…It is seldom, that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom, that it must steal upon them by degrees, and must disguise itself in a thousand shapes, in order to be received…Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude…No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion…The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness.”

Benedict Evans: “Retail, search and Amazon’s $40bn ‘advertising’ business Amazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year – bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable than AWS…The broader story of Amazon Ads, of course, is the ‘retail media’ gold rush: the realisation that a high-traffic website or app could be ad inventory even if you’re not a media company, that you have very relevant ‘consented’ first party data (at the very least intent if not broader profiles) and probably purchase attribution too, that all of this now has more relative value given the push against cookies and third party data everywhere else – and that advertising margins are a lot higher than retail margins. Hence, Walmart had $2.7b of ad revenue last year (New York Times ad revenue was $523m) and Uber is at $500m run rate. GroupM thinks the whole segment was 10% of US ad revenue last year.”

Conversations with Tyler: “Yasheng Huang has written two of Tyler’s favorite books on China: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, which contrasts an entrepreneurial rural China and a state-controlled urban China, and The Rise and Fall of the EAST, which argues that Keju — China’s civil service exam system — played a key role in the growth and expanding power of the Chinese state. Yasheng joined Tyler to discuss China’s lackluster technological innovation, why declining foreign investment is more of a concern than a declining population, why Chinese literacy stagnated in the 19th century, how he believes the imperial exam system deprived China of a thriving civil society, why Chinese succession has been so stable, why the Six Dynasties is his favorite period in Chinese history, why there were so few female emperors, why Chinese and Chinese Americans have done less well becoming top CEOs of American companies compared to Indians and Indian Americans, where he’d send someone on a two week trip to China, what he learned from János Kornai, and more.”

Economist: “[TikTok] has changed social media for good—and in a way that will make life harder for incumbent social apps. In less than six years TikTok has weaned the world off old-fashioned social-networking and got it hooked on algorithmically selected short videos. Users love it. The trouble for the platforms is that the new model makes less money than the old one, and may always do so.”

FT: “[Cal] Newport is not the first person to make a name for himself in the time-management space. As he likes to point out, the economic concepts of productivity and value-added labour date back to Adam Smith. While much of the focus in the late 20th century was on trying to get as much done in as short amount of time as possible, most of the more recent popular books on the subject have essentially argued the opposite: that the way to get more done is to do less, exemplified by bestsellers such as Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Newport’s books are part of this oeuvre, tapping into a sense of exhaustion that has surged in the wake of social media and smartphones and the evaporation of work-life boundaries. Being in a massive open-plan room with all of your co-workers makes it hard to focus. But so does being alone, tending to constant Slack notifications and email. It’s for precisely this crisis that Newport offers answers.”

WSJ: “Some people are more sensitive than others. Psychologists, neuroscientists, educators and others refer to them as highly sensitive persons, or HSPs. If you’re not one yourself, I bet you know someone who is. HSPs process information more deeply than other people. They’re very responsive to emotions, both their own and those of others. And they’re often more attuned to sensations, such as taste, touch, sound or smell.  Scientists have been examining HSPs for decades. Researchers believe that sensitivity occurs on a spectrum: About 20% to 30% of people are HSPs, including both men and women. A similar amount have low sensitivity, while the majority are in the middle.  High sensitivity—another term is environmental sensitivity—is an innate, stable trait, requiring some HSPs to employ next-level coping skills. They use strategies such as setting boundaries, scheduling downtime and planning positive experiences. These tactics often enable them to thrive in their personal lives and careers. They are also a great blueprint for everyone.”

Nieman Journalism Lab: “Per capita newspaper circulation has been declining in the United States since World War II, so it’s hardly shocking that it’s still dropping. If you’re The New York Times, you’ve been able to more than make up for the loss in print subscribers with digital ones. But for most local newspapers, digital gains are nowhere big enough to stop the print bleeding…When the local paper stops reporting, there’s often no one else to take its place. Everyone gets a little less informed about the world around them.”

Dan Shipper writes about AI as a copilot for the mind: “Every time you touch the keyboard, the AI downloads and sorts through everything you’ve ever read and uses the sum total of that knowledge to help you complete your sentences. It’ll work in every app that you use, and it will be on your computer and on your phone. And it’ll be incredibly easy to save anything that you want to remember for later. Just take a screenshot, or paste a URL, or upload a file, or send a text, and whatever you’re looking at will be saved and available for your copilot to bring back to you at the right time. A copilot for the mind might be able to find the perfect quote from a book you highlighted 10 years ago to help you make the point you’re trying to make. Or it might suggest relevant counterarguments to help you sharpen your prose—or maybe even change your mind on a topic you’re thinking about.”

WSJ: “The Chinese family is about to undergo a radical and historically unprecedented transition. Extended kinship networks will atrophy nationwide, and the widespread experience of close blood relatives will disappear altogether for many. This is a delayed but inescapable consequence of China’s birth trends from the era of the notorious one-child policy (1980-2015). The withering of the Chinese family will make for new and unfamiliar problems, both for China’s people and its state. Policy makers in China and abroad have scarcely begun to think about the ramifications.”

Himanshu: “Labour data points to significant distress in the Indian economy…A strong piece of evidence of distress is a statistically observed workforce shift back to agriculture, thereby reversing the gains of a structural transformation in the economy between 2004-05 and 2017-18. The absolute number of workers in agriculture declined by 33 million between 2004-05 and 2011-12. Almost a matching decline was observed between 2011-12 and 2017-18. However, the slowdown and pandemic reversed this process. The agricultural sector witnessed a return of 36 million workers between 2017-18 and 2021-22. So pronounced was it that the absolute count of workers in agriculture stood higher in 2021-22 than in 2011-12, a decade ago. Besides a reversal of the structural transformation, the numbers also imply a declining per worker income in agriculture, thereby worsening the rural distress…For the Indian economy to revive, employment in non-agricultural sectors needs to increase along with a rise in income from such employment. This is also necessary for us to make the country’s economic growth more employment-intensive, which would be the best antidote to poverty and distress in the economy.”

Michael Munger: “Destinationism insists that any new policy must be the ideal, or oppose it; directionalism is willing to support any move toward the ideal, if the ideal is not on the table as an alternative.”