Rajesh Jain

FT: ““The only positive I see from the games getting banned is that Indian studios have started developing battle royale,” Anurag Khurana, a veteran executive and founder of esports company Penta, said. “The biggest negative thing is that the foreign publishers are afraid to make investments in India — they don’t know whether their game might get banned.” Redseer Strategy Consultants estimates that 450mn Indians played at least one game last year and valued the industry at more than $2bn — though much of that comes from games involving real money, such as online rummy or fantasy sports.”

Cato: “Central bankers need a clear guide to monetary policy—and that guide can’t be the price of credit, which should be determined in free capital markets, not by government officials. Most importantly, in a pure fiat money regime, there needs to be a credible, transparent rule for the conduct of monetary policy that ensures stable money—that is, a rule that prevents stop‐​go policy and preserves, as much as possible, monetary equilibrium…In a fiat monetary regime characterized by discretionary government management, the likelihood of monetary disorder increases compared to a rules‐​based regime. The Fed and Congress need to listen to those who propose monetary alternatives based on rules rather than discretion. Attention should turn away from the day‐​to‐​day operation of the Fed and focus on fundamental guiding principles and learning from past mistakes.”

Howard Schultz: “Sometimes you need to look much deeper, even when the company is financially performing well, as to what’s behind the curtain.”

Samuel Gregg: “But those living in a society in which economic security is generally prioritized over liberty, and where the state is considered the primary institution responsible for securing such security, are more likely to trade off various economic liberties in return for economic security via the government – the long-term price being gradual stagnation.” [via CafeHayek] Adds Donald Boudreaux: “A great deal of government intervention is aimed at increasing the public’s satisfaction today with little or no regard for the consequences of these interventions tomorrow. The political impulse is to protect today’s jobs despite the consequent negative impact on creating better jobs tomorrow. It is to keep inflation going for another day despite the accumulating damage that cannot avoid being paid tomorrow. It is to use antitrust to break-up or otherwise obstruct successful firms today despite the resulting negative impact on industrial structures and practices tomorrow. It is to fund spending today with debt that must be repaid tomorrow…If I can drink all I want this evening knowing that the resulting hangover will be suffered, not by me, but by strangers – and, further, by strangers who are unlikely to hold me accountable for their nausea and headaches – then pour me another, and keep ’em coming!”

Michael Munger: “We all say we admire honesty. But whenever we actually have to choose, we pick the person who tells us what we want to hear. In economic policy, especially, that means that we can get hurt, when we pick promises over prudence…We ignore people who (rightly) point out that simple solutions to political and economic problems make things worse, not better. We vote for, and reward, charlatans who pretend to know the answers, and zealots who actually believe their own superficial galimatias. Ultimately, it’s a collective action problem: it would be better for society if our leaders were humble and honest about how little they actually know. But it’s better for the candidates for leadership if they pretend to be committed to a whole dog’s breakfast of truths that just ain’t so.”

Watched: Kantara (Hindi version) and Avatar: The Way of Water. Liked both.

FT: “In her research on how remote teams communicate, Catherine [Cramton] analysed thousands of messages across email and chat logs from geographically dispersed teams. She identified that conflicts arise from one of five reasons: differing contexts; unevenly distributed information; inconsistent interpretations of what’s important; individuals accessing information at different speeds; and understanding the meaning of silence in disparate ways. Shared context is the most important factor, says Catherine, but it’s also the most challenging to achieve for dispersed teams. When you have coworkers in another country, for example, it’s more difficult to gain awareness of your differences. Everything from local holidays and customs to workplace facilities will affect your interactions.”

Nathan Baschez: “You can think of the post-launch phase of a startup as one big optimization problem. You have a bunch of goals—engagement, retention, growth—and a lot of levers you can pull to achieve them. The challenge is figuring out which goals you should focus on, and which levers actually work. The good news is that there are some frameworks you can use to think through this problem.”

Julian Simon (in 1996): “There is one resource that has shown a trend of increasing scarcity rather than increasing abundance – the most important of all resources – human beings. Yes, there are more people on Earth now than ever before. But if we measure the scarcity of people the same way that we measure the scarcity of other economic goods – by how much we must pay to obtain their services – we see that wages and salaries have been going up all over the world, in poor countries as well as in rich countries, throughout the preceding decades and centuries. The amount that you must pay to obtain the services of a driver or a cook has risen in India, just as the price of a driver or cook – or economist – has risen in the United States. This increase in the price of people’s services is a clear indication that people are becoming more scarce even though there are more of us.” [via CafeHayek]

WSJ on science-based strategies to eat better: “Set one or two specific rules, and stick to them. Make a grocery list, and shop online. Good sleeping begets good eating. Don’t eat alone.”

FT: “Writing the Revolution [by Heather Ford, about Wikipedia] evokes two themes that together encompass practically every contemporary anxiety about truth and technology: how humans create knowledge, and how machines manipulate it. We privilege Wikipedia content, writes Ford, because we believe it is a product of mass consensus, what the journalist James Surowiecki first dubbed in 2004 “the wisdom of crowds”. And we trust that its editors adhere to strict policies, the main ones being that articles should present a neutral point of view, and that all contestable claims within them should be reliably sourced. In an age of hyper-awareness around subjectivity and disinformation, these beliefs are reassuring…Wikipedia content is further privileged, she writes, because it is encoded as structured data about objects in the world and their relationships to one another. This transforms it into machine-readable data, meaning it can be digested by the algorithms that power the products of major commercial players, from Google’s Knowledge Graph (the fact boxes that appear next to Google search results), to Apple’s virtual assistant Siri.”

Benedict Evans: “If the narrow definition of ‘metaverse’ is that VR and AR will be the next smartphone, the broad definition is that there’s going to be a whole new internet. Our experience will be 3D, but much of that will be layered onto the real world as we see it through glasses. Games will become a much larger part of daily life – instead of the current split between a few hundred people playing deep and rich AAA PC and console games and several billion playing much lighter-weight smartphone games, Roblox and Fortnite point to a growing middle ground of persistent, open, accessible and expressive environments that are much more about social and identity than games per se, and that can become platforms and ecosystems for developers. Many of these experiences will blur into each other, and digital goods (skins, avatars and other models of self-expression in digital form) will be portable and interchangeable between these worlds, rather like the characters in Wreck-it Raph could pass between games.”

Ezra Klein talk to Pippa Norris: “Over the course of 2022, Italy elected a far-right prime minister from a party with Fascist roots, a party founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads won the second-highest number of seats in Sweden’s Parliament, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hungary won its fourth consecutive election by a landslide, Marine Le Pen won 41 percent of the vote in the final round of France’s presidential elections and — just this past weekend — Jair Bolsonaro came dangerously close to winning re-election in Brazil. Why are these populist uprisings happening simultaneously, in countries with such diverse cultures, economies and political systems?”

Martin Wolf: “Deglobalisation is most unlikely to be the outcome of carefully calibrated and intelligent decoupling. This is not how we humans work. People might pretend deglobalisation has something to do with reducing inequality. That is nonsense, too: the more open economies are frequently relatively equal. It is conflicts over power that most threaten globalisation. By seeking to enhance their security, great powers make their rivals more insecure, creating a vicious downward spiral of distrust. We are already a long way down this spiral. That reality will shape the fate of the world economy. We are not headed towards a benign localism, but towards negative-sum rivalry. Our world may not survive a virulent bout of that disease.”

WSJ talks to Jony Ive on life after Apple: ““Success is the enemy of curiosity,” he says. And for Ive, curiosity has taken on an almost moral or religious quality. “I am terrified and disgusted when people are absolutely without curiosity,” he says. “It’s at the root of so much social dysfunction and conflict…. Part of why I get so furious when people dismiss creativity is that [when] it’s an activity practiced in its most noble and collaborative form, it means a bunch of people who come together in an empathic and selfless way. What I have come to realize is that the process of creating with large groups of people is really hard and is also unbelievably powerful.”

Richard Rumelt: “Strategy is problem-solving. It is how you overcome the obstacles that stand between where you are and what you want to achieve. There are, of course, companies and individuals with brilliant insights into what’s happening in the world and how to adapt to or take advantage of it, but I am often asked to participate in strategy sessions, and a lot of them are awfully banal. In a typical session, the CEO will announce certain performance goals: “We want to grow this fast, and we want to have this rate of profitability.” Maybe they will throw out some things about safety and the environment, and that’s their strategy. But that’s not a strategy—that’s a set of ambitions…The beginning of strategy is, which of these ambitions can we make progress on today or in the near future? Then you formulate an action plan. This gap between action and ambition is where most bad strategies come from. Bad strategy is almost a literary form that uses PowerPoint slides to say, “Here is how we will look as a company in a year or in three years.” That’s interesting, but it’s not a strategy.”

George Will: “The Peter Principle is: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” The Federal Reserve’s behavior illustrates an analogous principle: Institutions that are flummoxed by their primary responsibility will fail upward by embracing more urgent and noble purposes. The Fed’s primary purpose is to preserve the currency as a store of value: to prevent inflation. The Fed’s newest self-proclaimed purpose is to identify — through guesswork dignified as “scenario analysis” — and mitigate the threat that climate change supposedly poses to the “financial system.” Having failed at its first responsibility, the Fed now adopts a function at which it cannot fail: Whatever it says will be unfalsifiable because “systemic” climate risk cannot, as a matter of common sense or science, be identified.”

Ray Dalio: “I believe that reviewing how the typical Big Cycle works, what stage we are in, and what typically comes next is now especially important. That is because the evidence points to us being on the brink of civil and/or international war (in my book Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order, I describe this as late Stage 5, on the brink of Stage 6) and because without understanding how these cycles transpire, we will simply observe events in the news without being adequately prepared for them or able to prevent them.”

Thomas Sowell: “Government is a blunt instrument. Its policies should be limited to what blunt instruments can do. We gain nothing by pretending to know what we cannot know and to be able to do what we cannot do.” [via CafeHayek]

David Perell: “The Spreadsheet-ification of the world shows up [everywhere]. You see it in Spreadsheet Architecture, where efficiency is prized over beauty and ornamentation. You see it at Spreadsheet Hotels, where the people at the front desk are practically asleep, and nearly all the food at the continental breakfast is processed junk. Look at Apple, too. They’ve gone from innovative products to innovative payment plans and pricing strategies. It seems like the MBAs are in charge there now.”

D/D Advisors on the Android-ification of cars: “What is clear is that as much of the world moves towards electric vehicles (EV) the supply chain is changing significantly. The design of EV cars is much simpler than those of cars using internal combustion engines. The skills required for this work very much favor the electronics supply chain and without a doubt this opens up the door to significant disruption of traditional methods. And then we get to the question of software. Buyers today, especially the crucial demographic of young buyers, care much more about electronics and the interior experience of their cars than previous, older groups who prioritized performance and speed. This falls neatly into the realm of User Experience which the electronics industry now does very well. Ultimately, this is a software question.”

Ann Miura-Ko: “We live in a historical inflection point in which two dominant visions of how the world ought to be governed are clashing. With its controlling and repressive regime, China has nevertheless demonstrated an ability to become an economic powerhouse through a very different political order. Simultaneously, the United States is struggling with a disaffected populace that cannot engage in a constructive dialogue about its collective vision for the future…The power dynamic between corporations and governments will be interesting to watch, especially as crypto and web3 offer an alternative vision of the future in which currency and economic movement are controlled by code. This movement is more likely to catch on in developing countries, but as we know with startups, what seems like a niche movement can quickly become a disruptive force.”

Ari Wallach, author of “Longpath”: “On a day-to-day level, the best way to rein in our short-termistic impulses is with a really simple idea, which is to take a moment and pause. When something happens—be it a notification from your child’s school about a missed assignment, or something much bigger like a drop in your stock price—your amygdala basically takes over. You’re no longer able to think clearly, and you’re no longer able to tap into your long-term prefrontal cortex abilities to think about where you want to go. The easiest way to rein in our short-termism is to build a pause into your reaction. In the book, we look at different ideas and different exercises to allow you to able to access this pause much faster—in many ways, almost automatically. At the end of the day, having the ability to step back and ask, “Where do I want to go with this decision?” is going to be the most important way that you’re able to take control of a situation and move it toward an outcome that you want.”

Credit Suisse: “Ten economies in Asia (the A-10: China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, Malaysia, and Taiwan) were 50% of incremental global GDP, 60% of incremental goods exports, and sent US$ 5 tn in capital to the world (2010-19).”

Amy Gallo, author of “Getting Along”: “Our brain perceives conflict as a threat, and our brain doesn’t do a good job of distinguishing between a small threat, like someone rolling their eyes at us, and a big threat, like being chased down by a bear. We often don’t make good choices in those moments because, in fight or flight mode, there’s really two options: I can shut down, or I can be aggressive. The goal, then, is to try to calm the brain down so that it doesn’t feel threatened.”

Nassim Taleb: “If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the comtemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.”