Rajesh Jain

Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot: “Thanks to socialism, nobody works. Nobody gives a damn. Just give it to me. Send me money. I don’t want to work – I’m too lazy, I’m too fat, I’m too stupid.” [via Dailymail UK: “He also listed human resources executives, government bureaucrats, socialists, Harvard graduates, MBAs, Harvard MBAs, lawyers and accountants as the obstacles to entrepreneurial success in 2022.” More: ““I’m worried about capitalism. Capitalism is the basis of Home Depot [and] millions of people have earned this success and had success. I’m talking manufacturers, vendors and distributors and people that work for us [who have been] able to enrich themselves by the journey of Home Depot. That’s the success. That’s why capitalism works.”

Gulzar: “India has the highest income gap between the 90th and 99th percentile, the most closely bunched distribution between 20th and 80th percentile, the poorest first quintile, and the lowest median income. It points to an important insight about the nature of India’s income distribution – the extremes of wealth and poverty, much higher than elsewhere, and a very narrow base of consumers. This squares us with data from elsewhere. The Pew Research Centre, using the updated ProvcalNet household consumption based income database also used by the World Bank, found that at the end of 2020 while only 5% of Indians live on less than $2 per capita (at PPP) per day, 87% live between $2-10, 7% between $10-$20, 2% live between $20-$50, and just 0.2% (or 3 million people) earn more than $50 per day.  All this points to the very narrow base of India’s consumption class and the large base of those requiring welfare support.” See the income distribution graphic in the blog post.

Fareed Zakaria: “The United States’ core character remains one that encourages attacks on power and hierarchy, celebrates the upstarts and cares little for tradition and established practice. Businesspeople often quote Jobs’s famous commencement advice to Stanford students — “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” — but Jobs was actually quoting Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog,” an icon of the 1970s counterculture. You still see that spirit in many parts of American society — especially among the young, who are eager to break sharply with their elders, whether on race relations or climate change. They should take some inspiration from America in the 1970s — when the world’s richest and most powerful country demonstrated that it somehow retained the capacity for dissent, dissatisfaction and radical change. Somewhere in there is the country’s secret sauce for enduring success.”

John Stossel: “Charity and Capitalism are better than government…When I was young, I assumed government would lift people out of poverty. But those policies often do more harm than good…Zuckerberg invented better ways to connect with people. Bezos makes shopping easier and cheaper. Musk stopped socialist idiots from censoring my Twitter account, created better electric cars, and gave satellite internet to poor people. Businesses do better things because competition forces them to spend money well. If they don’t spend well, they disappear. Government never disappears. When politicians fail, they force us to give them more of our money so they can do it again. People hate capitalists, but it’s the capitalists who create the jobs, lift people out of poverty, and feed the world…The world benefits more from people like Musk—and the millions of entrepreneurs who try new things.”

Ninan: “Depressed agricultural wages will not narrow the gap with non-agricultural incomes until more manufacturing and service-sector work is created, so that fewer people depend on agriculture. Until then, some income support for the poor is unavoidable. And third, a self-selecting programme like the employment guarantee scheme has more to say for itself, as does the argument for investing more in public health care, school education, and job-oriented training. Subsidies and freebies frequently divert attention from the real work to be done.”

Andy Mukherjee: “In the longer term, India is seeking to buttress its investment appeal by emerging as an alternative to China. With President Xi Jinping’s policies aggravating a rift with the West, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pitching his country as a destination for multinationals to reduce their overexposure to Chinese supply chains. There’s no guarantee that the gamble, backed by $24 billion in subsidies for manufacturers, will work. As Arvind Subramanian, an economic adviser to the Modi administration until 2018, and Josh Felman, a former International Monetary Fund official in New Delhi, noted in a recent Foreign Affairs article: “India faces three major obstacles in its quest to become ‘the next China;’ investment risks are too big, policy inwardness is too strong, and macroeconomic imbalances are too large.”…As long as India Inc. delivers reasonable earnings growth, foreigners won’t be able to ignore a country where an increasingly muscular domestic investment class has come to worship profit.” More: “Poised to overtake China as the world’s most populous country next year, India is in the midst of a building boom. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking to modernize roads, rail networks and ports in attempt to vie with China as a manufacturing hub. That’s set to translate into a 6.7% jump in steel demand to around 120 million tons in 2023, according to the World Steel Association, the highest growth among major economies. India, which also saw a similar expansion this year, overtook the US to become the world’s No. 2 steel consumer after China a couple of years ago.”

Yejin Choi: ” I’m a big fan of GPT-3, but at the same time I feel that some people make it bigger than it is. Some people say that maybe the has already been passed. I disagree because, yeah, maybe it looks as though it may have been passed based on one best performance of GPT-3. But if you look at the average performance, it’s so far from robust human intelligence. We should look at the average case. Because when you pick one best performance, that’s actually human intelligence doing the hard work of selection. The other thing is, although the advancements are exciting in many ways, there are so many things it cannot do well. But people do make that hasty generalization: Because it can do something sometimes really well, then maybe is around the corner. There’s no reason to believe so.”

FT: “If you want a nuanced worldview, reach for that novel…A novelist is like a magician: although they are writing fiction, they have a certain authenticity about them, because we understand we are reading something that’s not real. And as Aristotle suggests, it is this that allows the characters in a novel to somehow feel more real to us than historical figures; each represents a kind of embodiment of the human condition that we can relate to. Many studies have found that reading works of “literary fiction” — as opposed to non-fiction or pop fiction — increases empathy and emotional intelligence. This is because the reader is exposed to a much broader range of experiences and cultures than they would come across in real life, which helps them understand that other people have beliefs, desires and perspectives that differ, sometimes greatly, from their own.”

The Week lists the 10 biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2022: nuclear fusion, James Webb Telescope, transplant promise, a universal flu vaccine, changing an asteroid’s trajectory, AI for artists, new vaccines to fight malaria, cancer treatments advance, injecting human cells into rats’ brains to study psychiatric disorders, creating life without sperm or eggs.

Hayek: “[T]he competitive price system makes possible the utilization of an amount of concrete knowledge which could never be achieved or approached without it. It is true, of course, that the director of any centrally planned system is likely to know more [about the economy at large] than any single entrepreneur under competition. But the former could not possibly use in his single plan all the combined knowledge of all the individual entrepreneurs that is used under competition. The knowledge which is significant here is not so much knowledge of general laws, but knowledge of particular facts and the ever-changing circumstances of the moment – a knowledge which only the man on the spot can possess. The problem of the maximum utilization of knowledge can therefore be solved only by some system which decentralizes the decisions.” [via CafeHayek]

Bloomberg (via Mint): “Hybrid work is the norm. The idea of a tug-of-war between managers and workers over attending office has been exaggerated. Polls shows that employees do value some degree of face time and want to be in the office roughly two days a week. Managers prefer three. “Overwhelmingly, managers are pretty much aligned with employees,” Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom says. The exceptions are people who have “30-plus years of work experience and have been successful and have done that all in person… but they are real outliers.” Instead, most bosses are becoming comfortable with managing and evaluating employees they don’t see every day—and not with creepy surveillance tools. As evidence, Bloom points to data he said surprised him: that after resisting giving employees Mondays and Fridays at home in 2021, in 2022 managers seemed to become more comfortable with an in-office schedule that allows for remote work on four or more contiguous days.”

WSJ: “When it comes to money and real estate, most of us make careful arrangements for what will happen after we die. Why not take equal care of our stories, which can’t be retrieved once lost? Think of the stories you’ve heard your partner or parents tell a thousand times. They are precious. When someone dies, we need those stories—not in a vague, half-remembered, secondhand form but in the original version, with all the plot twists, nuances and personal storytelling quirks. Your own words and insights are more illuminating than others’ eulogies and tributes. Preserve your stories now, while the memories are vivid. The best stories show not just what you have done but why and how. Starting points include how you got on a career path; what you are trying to do with your life and how it is working out; your biggest triumphs and failures, and what you have learned from them. Also worthwhile: the oddest, funniest, most wonderful and awful things that have happened to you.”

David Perell: “Our kids have neither agency nor autonomy because the system is explicitly designed to strip it away from them. Contemporary schools, like Ford’s factories, dehumanize the people within them. Their individuality is squashed. Their passions are silenced. These were the explicit goals of the Prussian system, which we so readily adopted. Our school system is a failure because it succeeded in its original mission.” ​

Arnold Kling: “Government does not stay limited…The theory of checks and balances is that by standing up multiple government institutions with differing goals and powers, we can turn competitive human nature against the natural tendency to abuse power. Each branch of government will be held accountable by the other branches. Unfortunately, checks and balances run afoul of the human tendency to seek authority without accountability. It is in our nature, or at least in the nature of some of us, to seek power and to evade checks on our power. Just as businessmen love competition in theory but try their best to avoid it in practice, public officials do their best to subvert whatever accountability mechanisms are in place.”

Giorgio Castiglia: “Given the inherent uncertainty of our world, producers will often be mistaken in their evaluation of what consumers’ wants and needs will be. The result of such mistakes is leftover product on which they must take a loss. If the firm does not incorporate such losses into future decision making, it may continue to make losses, eventually reaching an untenable financial situation. In other words, if producers are forced to bear the costs of their own mistaken choices, such losses have a purpose in a market economy. They tell the firm that what it is producing is not of sufficient value to undergo the costs of its production. Thus, “waste” from mistaken production decisions is part of a critical feedback loop in market economies. If producers were protected from bearing the costs of such waste, we would expect more of it to occur.”

Shane Parrish: “Choosing something once is easy. Choosing it repeatedly makes a difference. Ordinary choices compound into extraordinary results.”

Cody Moser: “Contrary to received wisdom, less connected networks are better than more connected ones. Collective decision-making is, at bottom, a process of consensus-building. In a roundtable of 50 people, the loudest, most charismatic voice will dominate and squeeze the conversation to a single fixed point. But in 10 roundtables of five people, 10 very different conversations will develop, with unique ideas and consensuses.” [via Arnold Kling]

Indian Big Business: An essay byJairus Banaji. “In what follows, I present a precis of the evolution of Indian big business over the last two decades, starting with a fact which is hardly ever foregrounded, namely, that the business families who formed the mainstay of industrial capitalism in the country for a whole three or four decades after Independence have either disintegrated or have been disintegrating and will soon cease to exist as coherent entities, let alone cohesive ones. Next, I shall present the results of an exercise that involves looking at the biggest non-banking companies in the country (both listed and unlisted) in terms of who actually owns them and of the different categories of ownership we can divide them into.

Hayek: “Adam Smith’s decisive contribution was the account of a self-regulating order which formed itself spontaneously if the individuals were restrained by appropriate rules of law. His Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations marks perhaps more than any other single work the beginning of the development of modern liberalism. It made people understand that those restrictions on the powers of government which had originated from sheer distrust of all arbitrary power had become the chief cause of Britain’s economic prosperity.” [via CafeHayek]

Kartik Hosanagar: “The goal of the development of AI is to get machines to match human intelligence. Are we close to that? Not really. But we’re only about 60 years into this and in that short time, we’ve gone from computers doing simple things like solving puzzles to beating the best humans at chess and venturing into creative domains. The ultimate question now is whether you can design ‘artificial general intelligence’. Today, we have ‘artificial narrow intelligence’ or AI being good at very specific tasks. But we could be moving to a stage where AI might match standard human thought processes. However, human consciousness is also more than logical thinking. We have intuition and emotion and exceptional creativity comes from a much deeper place, where an individual can discern feelings and express these perfectly. That could be hard for AI to match…While heavy automation works for the US, India’s model should focus on AI that makes people more productive.”

Economist on the city grid: “The oldest form of city planning is falling out of fashion…Should construction one day take off again though, the grid might make a return. The important thing is to get them right. As Jane Jacobs, an influential early critic of the car-centric replanning of cities, argued in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, what matters most is that the blocks are short, and the roads not too wide. Short blocks are easy to walk through, and create plenty of space for different businesses. Long blocks, designed to reduce the number of times cars have to stop at traffic lights, “thwart the potential advantages that cities offer”, and turn streets into sewers for vehicles. Bear that in mind, and the oldest form of city planning remains as valuable as ever.

Chad White imagines an Amazon email client: “While there have been several new email inbox apps since Gmail launched nearly two decades ago in 2004, these apps have generally had very narrow appeal around niche concerns…Prime Mail would be used to provide extra benefits and raise awareness, in addition to being a Prime benefit itself. For example, Prime Mail users who are Prime members could be given early access to Prime Day deals; early access to or discounts on the latest Echo, Fire, and other Amazon products; and other perks that would provide one of the chief financial motivations for consumers to use a Prime Mail account. Amazon’s promotional emails could also feature exclusive deals and featured content using dynamic content modules that only appear for Prime Mail users. In addition to helping them promote their own products and events.”

Naushad Forbes: “Where is the economy headed? In 2019, we set a goal of being a $5-trillion economy by 2024. The lost Covid years (net growth of 1.5 per cent over two years) sets our $5-trillion goal back to 2026. That means growing 9 per cent each of the next four years. We should grow between 6 and 7 per cent this year; projections for next year are lower. The $5-trillion target is for GDP growth by 2026; $5 trillion eventually is meaningless. In 1980, China and India were equally poor. China is now five times richer than we are, a result of growing 9 per cent, compared with our 6 per cent for 40 years. We need to catch up. It is not enough to be “the world’s fastest-growing large economy”. We are too poor a country for growth of 5 or 6 per cent, and must grow at 8-10 per cent annually for the next few decades.”

Michael Munger writes about the distinction between “forklift” and “microphone” technologies: “Traditional manufacturing is highly productive, and machines make it more productive. One person with a forklift can do the work of dozens of people carrying things on their backs. Still, given the current technology, increases in output require more- or-less-linear increases in labor. If a lumberyard wants to double the amount of bundled timber it handles per day, it has to double the number of forklifts, and the number of forklift operators. These “good jobs” seem to be the gold standard of Progressive politicians, who constantly reminisce about the good old days when jobs were about making physical things using big strong tools. A microphone is also productive, in the sense that it records, and either amplifies or transmits the data it captures. A microphone in a theater can reach 100 people; a microphone on a television set, a music studio, or political event can reach 100 million people. The digital recording of the data, whether characters, sound, or video, can be stored and used again as if it were brand new. The problem, and the great benefit, of microphone-type technologies is that doubling the “amount” of the product requires no more than burning a CD, or transmitting digital information over wires or 5G connections. Once the data are produced and recorded, the marginal cost of increasing the audience is very nearly zero. So, forklifts are very nearly linear, and microphones “want” to be giants, with costs so low that forklift technologies cannot compete.”

Rahul Matthan: “Over the course of my career, I have come across entrepreneurs of all hues. Some are bubbling with inspiration, constantly finding solutions to the problems around them. They have an almost inexhaustible supply of ideas and the energy and inclination to worry away at a problem till they’ve figured out how to solve it. They love to mend what’s broken in the world—the problems no one else has been able to solve. And once they’re done, they can’t wait to move on to the next thing that needs fixing. I call these people Idea Factories—individuals who generate a stream of ideas with such predictable regularity that it feels as if there is an assembly line churning away inside their heads. The trouble is that more often than not, that constant stream of ideas comes in their own way…The second category of entrepreneurs is of the opposite disposition. Not only do they not have a fountain of business ideas to choose from, they are lucky if they come up with even one over the course of their career. Their skill lies in taking the germ of an idea and transforming it into a venture, building a product team, sales force and the whole operational machinery needed to transform a concept into a self-sustaining, revenue-generating business. I call this type of entrepreneur a Factory for Ideas—an individual who has what it takes to transform an idea into a revenue stream.”