Rajesh Jain

Vasant Dhar: “Clearly, the global economy has been a wreck, with declining ad revenues, which is shining a spotlight on the cost side of social media platforms. But the real war is over long-term attention, which is essentially a zero-sum game. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter cornered most of our attention over the last decade because they were early, and “network effects” did the rest, meaning that they became more valuable to people as more people joined the platform. Most of the ad dollars flowed into them, away from conventional media. But Meta/Facebook and Twitter have had a murky mission, and have gradually lost their way. In good times, mission didn’t matter much, as long as their “objective functions” did a decent job of creating engagement, typically measured by time spent or value added on the platform.  In my conversation with Stuart Russell, we considered to what extent the pursuit of such singular objectives – such as time spent, might have led to the unintended side effects we’ve seen, such as political polarization and teen depression. In tough times, murky missions can lead to the wrong objective functions that harm long-term value.”

WSJ on managing superstar employees: “Organizations spend considerable resources recruiting and deploying stars—high performers with greater visibility—in the hopes that they will not only create value through their own contributions, but also elevate the game of those around them. And, yes, working with stars can sometimes inspire colleagues to dream bigger, learn faster, and work harder. But it often doesn’t work out that way, our research shows. In fact, hiring a star can bring just as many negative results as positives…In our research, we’ve examined when star employees inspire their colleagues and when they deflate them, and discovered a number of factors that can make all the difference. Among them: the personality of the stars, the goals and mind-sets of the people they work with, and aspects of the team or workplace culture.”

Dan Shipper: “People think AI is going to replace individuals and create gigantic trillion dollar megacorporations that will upend Google. But I think there’s a strong case to be made that rather than replacing individuals, recent advances in AI will empower them to make an impact on a scale matching some of the biggest businesses, research labs, and creative organizations of today…AI pushes the cost of intelligence toward zero. And as this happens, domains of achievement that were previously unavailable to individuals and small teams—because they required the marshaling and coordination of a large amount of intelligence—suddenly open up.”

WSJ: “The rate of change of the first derivative is called the second derivative. We can keep on calculating further rates of change, but they don’t have names, since we don’t usually think about them. However, they are critical to engineers designing roller coasters. Acceleration can be exciting, but if it changes too abruptly it can cause injury. The rate of change of acceleration is the third derivative, and its technical name is jerk, because it makes rides feel jerky. The next three derivatives are sometimes known as snap, crackle and pop, showing that humor can be involved in mathematical terminology.”

Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz: “Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after. In Experiment 1, while seated and then when walking on a treadmill, adults completed Guilford’s alternate uses (GAU) test of creative divergent thinking and the compound remote associates (CRA) test of convergent thinking. Walking increased 81% of participants’ creativity on the GAU, but only increased 23% of participants’ scores for the CRA. In Experiment 2, participants completed the GAU when seated and then walking, when walking and then seated, or when seated twice. Again, walking led to higher GAU scores. Moreover, when seated after walking, participants exhibited a residual creative boost. Experiment 3 generalized the prior effects to outdoor walking. Experiment 4 tested the effect of walking on creative analogy generation. Participants sat inside, walked on a treadmill inside, walked outside, or were rolled outside in a wheelchair. Walking outside produced the most novel and highest quality analogies. The effects of outdoor stimulation and walking were separable. Walking opens up the free flow of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity.”

Larry Summers: “My broad view has been that the 20th century was the century of physics, and that the 21st century is going to be a century of the life sciences. I think we’re going to see more change around healthcare and the implications of biology for doing other things in the years ahead. Here’s a fundamental thing to understand about the economy: All the consumer price indices are normalized to be 100 in 1983. The price index for a television set is now below 5. The price index for a year in college is now measured at 600. What that’s telling you is that a much larger fraction of our economy is going to be away from manufacturing and producing stuff, and is going to be around services, experiences and taking care. That stuff is in many, many ways very ripe for transformation.”

Thomas Sowell: “It is not the source or the ruthlessness of power alone which defines totalitarianism, but the unprecedented scope of the activities subjected to political control.” [via CafeHayek] Donald Boudreaux adds: “Progressivism is an even graver threat to liberty than is populism, for progressives are far more intent than are populists at subjecting to political control as many activities as possible…Populism is deeply illiberal and much to be feared. It must be fought against and subdued if liberal civilization is to survive. But the enemy of my enemy is not thereby my friend. Progressivism – if only because, compared to populism, the mask it wears is friendlier and the tones in which it speaks are more dulcet – is an even greater threat to liberal civilization than is populism. Embracing, or even tolerating, progressivism as a means of subduing populism – or simply because progressivism is currently the most practical political option to populism – is a foolish move for anyone wishing for a revival of true liberalism.”

Mint: “[India’s] PM GatiShakti National Master Plan launched a year ago and is frequently touted as India’s biggest administrative reform tool. It is like the Google Maps of infrastructure planning and offers a dashboard with a bird’s eye view of bridges, roads, tunnels, pipelines, power transmission cables, forests, water bodies, and airports in any region of the country…As of now, GatiShakti has over 2,000 layers of data, and it is growing every day as more and more state and central government agencies feed the platform with even more data. The tool, in short, aims to solve a complex problem—delay in important projects that often leads to cost overruns. An oil refiner, for instance, can potentially cut the time required to get a mega project off the ground if the company knows for sure the land it needs to acquire between place A and B, the number of railway tracks and highways to be crossed, and other hurdles such as water bodies and habitation.”

Vinod Khosla: “Rushing to meet carbon-reduction targets by 2030 may hinder what can be achieved by 2050…For any technology to scale globally requires risk-adjusted competitive returns for investors. Companies must produce technologies that can succeed without subsidies. They must be profitable at what I call the “Chindia price”. I define this as the price at which clean technology will be adopted in China, India and globally as it outcompetes fossil alternatives. We should not rush to meet targets unthinkingly, but instead invest in superior technologies that may take longer to mature. The reality is that China was the world’s largest investor in clean technologies last year while also increasing its coal consumption by a whopping 10%. India will burn coal in ever-greater quantities for years to come. Let’s plan pragmatically to maximise carbon-cutting by 2050.”

Read: Desert Star by Michael Connelly

James Broughel: “The real division is not between classical liberals and the New Right, but between those who trust individuals to run their own lives and those who think technocrats know better.”

WSJ: “Now that millennials control the purse strings at many businesses, sales professionals are carving out new ways of closing deals on everything from business software to chemicals and office equipment. Those tactics, some say, involve fewer trips to the golf course and more time corralling large buying teams that include senior managers, finance officials and end users at target companies. Cold calls are ceding ground to millennials’ preference to communicate via text or direct message. And just as they do as consumers, many millennial corporate buyers like to research business products online and on their own before ever talking to a salesperson. For veteran sales leaders like Dale Taormino, the generational shift means much less time working the phones and wooing a few executives at a prospective company—as she did in her early selling days. Instead, she operates like “more of a quarterback,” she says, coordinating large teams of players on both the seller’s and buyer’s sides.”

Tim Martinez on some of the attributes of a “perfect business”: “A defensible niche in the marketplace, voted best place to work… – outcompetes for top talent in the industry, the perfect blend of automation and human touch, evergreen product/service, recurring revenue business model, YoY profitability – requiring the least amount of capital to generate the most amount of profit, YoY increased market share, profitable for everyone involved – shareholders, employees, partners, … over delivers in the Value to Price equation.”

WSJ: “In that triplet [government of the people, by the people, for the people], Lincoln lays out the three fundamental elements of democracy. The first is consent—government of the people. “According to our ancient faith,” Lincoln said in his 1854 speech objecting to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which compromised on slavery, “the just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the governed.”…A second distinctive feature of democracy is the people’s voice in the affairs of governing—government by the people. It matters little whether that active voice is the direct participation of individuals, as in ancient Athens, or through their representatives, as in the American Constitution…The third basic element of democracy is a government that serves the interests of the people—government for the people—not those of a monarch, an aristocracy or an angry and contemptuous elite. For that reason, Lincoln wrote, government served to do only those things that need “to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves,” such as roads and bridges, schools and asylums, the enforcement of the laws and the defense of the nation.”

Law & Liberty: “When it comes to the biggest debate of economic policy—whether governments should exercise more or less control over economic life—[James] Otteson’s major assumption is simple: as human beings, we all have an equal worth and an equal moral agency. Thus, interventions into the market economy, whether they be large or small, are presumptively illegitimate because they supersede the judgment of peacefully contracting parties. This is true even when the goal is economic equality itself. Market participants have different talents, training, and goals, so implementing government policy that would force them into an identical status would mean disrespecting their freely chosen life paths.”

FT reviews “Power Failure” about GE’s fall: “Welch loved GE Capital. He told Cohan, who worked briefly there before becoming an investment banker, that fooling with money was easier than bending metal — a home run, as he put it. Part of what made moneymaking easy was that GE Capital could facilitate earnings manipulation for its parent. Welch could, for example, sell some of the assets in the GE Capital portfolio to make up for any earnings deficiencies in the industrial businesses. He thus acquired a reputation among Wall Street analysts for always hitting his quarterly earnings targets, so the market put a higher value on GE’s earnings. The trouble with such earnings management is that it can lead to self deception. And the underlying reality was that the financial business, which accounted for more than 40 per cent of GE’s earnings on Welch’s retirement, posed a serious threat to the group’s financial viability because it was overleveraged with borrowings and badly funded.”

Chetan Ahya in FT: “We forecast that India will be the third-largest economy by 2027, with its GDP more than doubling from the current $3.4tn to $8.5tn over the next 10 years. Incrementally, India will add more than $400bn to its GDP every year, a scale that is only surpassed by the US and China. My colleague Ridham Desai projects that India’s market capitalisation will rise from $3.4tn to $11tn by 2032, the third largest globally. These projections are underpinned by a confluence of favourable domestic and global forces. The most important change domestically is the shift in policy approach away from redistribution and towards boosting investment and job creation. This was evident in the introduction of the goods and services tax which creates a unified domestic market; corporate tax cuts; and production-linked schemes to incentivise investment from both within and outside India’s borders. Overlaying this is the emergence of a multipolar world where companies are diversifying their supply chains, with India emerging as a destination of choice.”

Economist: “Walking, talking machines will soon act as guides, companions and deliverers…Different companies are coming from different directions in their approaches to making humanoid robots. Mr [Will] Jackson, [boss of Engineered Arts], born into a family of artists involved in automatons, gravitated naturally towards producing modern versions of them for the likes of theme parks, museums and the film industry. These have steadily evolved in sophistication. Some work as interactive guides. Others are used as research platforms by universities. During the covid lockdown, when business dried up, the firm threw all of its resources at developing Ameca, its most advanced model yet.”

Ishaan Tharoor: ““In competitive authoritarian regimes, formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority,” Levitsky and Way wrote, gesturing to governments like that of Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia or Alberto Fujimori in Peru, which stacked the field in their favor through a pliant or cowed media as well as other abuses of state power. “Incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent, however, that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy.””

Adrian Wooldridge: “Anyone who wants to think a bit more deeply about [the] mighty organizations could do no better than to turn to William Magnuson’s new book, “For Profit: A History of Corporations.” (Full disclosure: I have also written a history of the company, together with John Micklethwait, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News). A professor of corporate law at Texas A&M University School of Law, Magnuson tells the story of the corporation through individual companies that are chosen to exemplify various themes: the Medici Bank (trust), the East India Company (shares), Ford Motor Company (the assembly line), Exxon Mobil Corporation (globalization), KKR & Company Inc. (private equity) and Facebook (start-ups). Magnuson sees the upside as well as the downside of companies, which is in itself a remarkable thing in today’s academic world, where the only two attitudes you normally come across are sanctimony and dislike. He even praises Exxon Mobil for performing engineering miracles by erecting oil platforms in the North Sea, where gale-force winds roared, and waves rose to a hundred feet.”

Shane Parish: “Everyone looks for the miracle moment – the moment when success happens…The problem is … there is no miracle moment. If you want to understand success, you can’t focus on what’s visible. Results are simply one more step in a long chain of steps that led to that moment. Nature offers a great example with bamboo, which takes ups up to 5 years to develop its roots. For years, to the outside observer, no visible progress has been made. Meanwhile, the bamboo grows below the surface, developing its roots and storing energy. Then, all at once, it starts to grow. Years of stored energy result in exponential growth, sometimes reaching over 50 feet in a matter of weeks. That’s how results happen. Slowly and then all at once.”

Bharat Bhushan: “Two parallel narratives will play out in India for young people eager to join the labour force. The ground reality of tangible unemployment will vie with the perception created by events like “rozgar melas”. This duality between the real and the imagined is likely to continue till the next general election, with the Indian people free to believe one or the other.”

A Cato review of “Visible Hand” by Mark Hennessey: “The “invisible hand,” for instance, is frequently attacked by those who demand interventionist policies. Hennessey points out that the phrase appears only once in Smith’s great work, but it contains a profound insight into human nature. In a market economy, the way for a person to get ahead is by producing goods and services that other people are willing to pay for. The pursuit of self‐​interest thus leads to harmony and cooperation. To those who might credit Smith for inventing capitalism (or blame him for that), Hennessey replies that Smith’s work was one of revelation: his insights into human interaction simply revealed how people go about their business. Because of that natural harmony of interests, no government economic planning is needed. Here’s how Hennessey explains the point: “All of our selfish buzzing and scurrying adds up to something bigger. It moves the world forward in a way we could never achieve if we woke up every day trying to figure out a way to move the world forward. That’s the invisible hand, not some big foam finger pushing you into the mall. Greed isn’t good, ambition is—ambition to improve your circumstances, ambition to feed yourself and your family, ambition to make a better life for the next generation.””

Sangeet Paul Choudary: “As the number of APIs increase and API provisioning gets increasingly fragmented, Integrators act as API switchboards enabling one-stop standardized connectivity and interoperability across an increasingly fragmented API landscape. On the supply/production side, an integrator aggregates product provisioning APIs across the production ecosystem, and on the demand/consumption side, it integrates across distribution environments (websites, apps, and other digital services) in the consumption ecosystem. Integrators emerge in any API-based distribution landscape and create value by organizing access across the ecosystem. Financial services, logistics, automotive, and travel are prominent examples involving mediation of APIs through integrator switchboards.”

Anu Atluru: “Ritual social apps aim to create regular, purposeful moments, even if small ones; they’re at their best as a mindful microdose of meaning and feel-good. In consumer social, rituals have been likened to just a feature, a mechanic, or a new entry strategy. They haven’t been celebrated as the main thing. But I see huge potential for rituals to be a core element of social products. In fact, I believe the next era of social will be defined by products that create rituals rather than habits…Rituals have meaning beyond the action itself; they celebrate the purpose, the “why” of a repeated action. A daily meditation practice or even a few moments of quiet while solving the New York Times crossword can be rituals that give us comfort and joy.”