Rajesh Jain

Andy Kessler: “My free-market instincts make me allergic to government intervention. Instead, as in financial markets, government’s role is to set up rules for the sandbox and then let everyone play in it. Let the best sand castle win. Make sure everyone can get in and out of the sandbox on equal terms. We almost have to let Meta or anyone buy companies early in the development of the Metaverse to tinker with applications and business models and prove to others what works, enticing them to join in. If I were the FTC, I’d let Meta, Microsoft or Google make as many acquisitions as they want for the next decade, but only in exchange for open standards and interfaces so that competing firms can build their own version of this space to connect and be interoperable with what already exists. Governments are involved with standards—the National Institute of Standards and Technology is part of the U.S. Commerce Department. But instead of defining details of these new worlds, the focus should be on sensible interfaces and application programming interfaces so everyone can access the sandbox.”

David Perell: “The history of innovation is filled with endeavors that seemed useless at the time: Newton was as obsessed with alchemy as he was with calculus, Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class in college, which contributed to the typeface renaissance Apple would later pioneer…Many of the best scientists are poets. Many of the best investors are philosophers. Many of the best politicians are historians. Though life is random and spontaneous, something in the human psyche expects a linear, ascending staircase towards the penthouse of success. Fearing judgment, people are scared to explore unproven avenues. Second-time authors, musicians, and entrepreneurs struggle because they’re afraid to go back to the beginning and look like a novice again…Honor the dreamer within you and stop trying to justify everything.”

Peter Coy: “What most of us do most of the time is “satisfice,” to use a word coined by the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon in 1956. To satisfice is to satisfy and suffice — to make a quick, easy decision that, while maybe not perfect, is good enough. One quick-and-dirty way to make decisions is to consider a single criterion at a time, rather than trying to weigh all the criteria at once. Let’s say you’re choosing between job offers. Your first criterion might be salary and your second might be distance from home. In that case, you’ll automatically pick the job that pays the most without even looking at how far it is from home. Only if two or more jobs pay the same amount will you move on to the second criterion, distance from home, as a tiebreaker. This is known as lexicographic ordering because it’s similar to the way we alphabetize words. All the words starting with the letter A go in the front of the dictionary. Moving on to the second letter, “aardvark” comes before “abacus,” and so on.”

FT: “The relentless rise of TSMC is one of the most important and least told chapters in the era of globalisation. Different from peers such as Intel and Samsung, which continue to both design and manufacture chips, TSMC is a contract manufacturer that produces semiconductors designed by other companies. The efficiency and cost savings of this foundry model have convinced so many other chipmakers to outsource fabrication to TSMC that Taiwan now accounts for 20 per cent of global wafer fabrication capacity, the single largest concentration in one country, and a staggering 92 per cent of capacity for the most advanced chips. The US share in global chip manufacturing has dwindled from 37 per cent in 1990 to 10 per cent in 2020.”

FT: “[Steven] Pinker argues that humans have a “mythology mindset” when it comes to things outside their personal experience: we are happy to believe things for which there is no evidence. So it is often rational to pander to each other’s irrationality: Republican politicians must pretend not to believe in the 2020 election result. “That’s why we have institutions: like science, responsible journalism, liberal democracy, a court system.” So the problem of rationality is actually a political problem of defending institutions and decreasing partisanship.”

WSJ: “Across the West, we are led by too many inferior people who shouldn’t be left in charge of a Lego set, let alone the entire edifice of national government. Governing has become a heavily performative exercise played increasingly by a cast of professional political figures who never made a payroll, donned a uniform or created anything other than a sharply worded press release. All this is exacerbated by the unseriousness of a media and political culture in which the demand for constant gratification is met by “owning” your opponent, always on the lookout to exploit some alleged grievance.”

Donald Boudreaux: “Precisely because government intervention into markets is intended to disregard or to override market signals, government officials, if they are to improve the welfare of citizens, must have access to information that is superior to that which is available on markets. But government officials, in fact, not only have no superior source of information, they have no good source of information at all. The best they can do is guess. This absence of information available to government officials is an especially acute problem for those officials who fancy themselves able to improve the economy’s performance by nationalizing industries, by using subsidies and protective tariffs, and by imposing ‘corrective’ taxes here and there. But this absence of information is ubiquitous throughout all government affairs. No matter which projects government undertakes as a government, its officials cannot really know, in the way that market participants know, just what to produce, how much to produce, and how best to produce it.”

Indrajit Gupta: “As digital transformation agendas take centre stage, the newsrooms in large incumbent news brands have succumbed to pressures of building traffic, in a bid to chivvy up digital advertising. The reliance on technology tools like Chartbeat to take “data-driven” editorial decisions are rapidly replacing human curation of the past. Journalists in such integrated newsrooms are now given traffic targets. Yet this reckless obsession with page views can be self-defeating, as a major news publisher recently admitted in a closed door session. He said his biggest challenge was retaining loyalty and driving usage. Despite publishing more than 300 stories a day, nearly 95 per cent of his readers read only two stories—and drifted off to other sites. Going forward, my belief is that this dilution of news agendas could create new niches where digitally-led magazine brands could play a big role. The focus will be on building strong communities. Rather than pedestrian, run-of-the-mill events, more engaging formats for live and asynchronous engagement will emerge. Monthly or quarterly print editions could offer a more immersive experience. And new forms of digital story-telling, adeptly curated by editors, will provide the understanding and clarity that data-driven news agenda can seldom guarantee.”

Janan Ganesh: “Knowing what you want is the ultimate life skill. It is more foundational to happiness than either talent or hard work…With it, you will often fail to get what you want. But you won’t succeed in getting what you didn’t want, which is much worse, and less reversible.”

WSJ: “Apologies have become more of a reflex than a real expression of contrition and overusing them might be holding you back…“Don’t give away your power,” counsels Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business and author of a book about commanding authority at work. Apologizing in business, especially when you’ve actually done something wrong, is just asking for trouble, he says. People are never satisfied with an apology, he adds. Groveling and exhibiting vulnerability only make you look weak and sink team morale. Standing your ground comes with risks, he allows. You’ll piss some people off. You might not be liked. He thinks it’s worth it. “You can either conform to what people want you to be, or you can decide that you are going to risk offending people,” he says. “Life is about trade-offs.””

Francisco Toro: “A prodigious body of literature in political science deals with the role of parties within democracy. A leading hypothesis appeared in Responsible Parties, Saving Democracy from Itself by Yale’s Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro, published in 2018. In exhaustive detail, Rosenbluth and Shapiro chronicle how reforms that weaken parties in the name of grassroots involvement fail. Such reforms, they argue, “feed political dysfunction and produce policies that are self-defeating for most voters, even those who advocate the decentralizing reforms.” They end up leaving voters more dissatisfied with the political system, and less able to hold their leaders to account.”

Michael Mignano: “Creativity has become the focal point of our modern Internet economy. What was once just a means of artistic expression now powers much of how we all interact, work, and play online…What if the promise of the “Creator Economy” failed because we collectively (myself included) defined the opportunity for creativity as far too small? What if we were thinking about one small piece of the market for creativity? Surely there is much more to creativity than the tools that enable the top 1% of creators to make money. What if the opportunity for creativity is much bigger than what we’ve all been calling the Creator Economy? I believe it is. I call this opportunity, The Creativity Supply Chain…The Creativity Supply Chain is the global market for creativity in today’s modern economy. It is made up of the supply, incentives, and demand that drive how and why people create. And it rests on the technology-enabled superpowers which turbocharge all of the above, generating massive market value in the process.”

NYTimes: “It’s been a banner year, in particular, for generative A.I. apps that turn text prompts into images — which, unlike NFTs or virtual reality metaverses, actually have the numbers to justify the hype they’ve received. DALL-E 2, the image generator that OpenAI released this spring, has more than 1.5 million users creating more than two million images every day, according to the company. Midjourney, another popular A.I. image generator released this year, has more than three million users in its official Discord server…But no generative A.I. project has created as much buzz — or as much controversy — as Stable Diffusion.” More: “Only a few months old, apps like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are changing how filmmakers, interior designers and other creative professionals do their jobs.”

McKinsey: “We start the next era—if indeed one is about to unfold—from a fundamentally different point from which we started the prior one. The world at the turn of the 1990s had a much more obvious gap between the developed and the developing worlds: huge populations poor in energy and resources, more people living in rural areas outside of the orbit of global markets and capital, more people uneducated, and disconnected from each other and from the world’s information. In the previous era, the world converged much more into a globalized economy, with rapid catch-up growth for billions of people where we managed peacefully to keep the gains. Without question today’s world is better, but with this growth there is also much more disruption to established constituencies, more pangs of imbalance, and more powerful new players asserting their place at the global table.”

The Titanium Economy authors: “What if a group of companies could consistently outperform the market? What if they could create millions of high-quality American jobs and lead technological innovation while building a more sustainable future? These companies already exist. They are what we call the Titanium Economy: a cohort of industrial technology companies that are redefining the future of US manufacturing. Of the more than 4,000 firms that make up the Titanium Economy, the majority have seen an 11 to 15 percent return on invested capital over the past decade. Most are privately owned, small- to mid-cap companies that don’t have consumer-facing brands. And for many Titanium companies, their performance has rivaled that of Silicon Valley’s tech darlings over the past decade. Like their namesake metal, these companies are resilient and essential to many of the products that we use every day. Winners in the Titanium Economy offer a simple playbook that America’s manufacturers—and many others—can learn from: digitalize your operations, respond to external shifts, execute programmatic M&A, upskill your workforce, and prioritize sustainability.” WSJ review: “Supply-chain issues are about more than keeping shelves stocked. ‘The American spirit,’ the authors remind us, ‘is about controlling one’s destiny.’”

Tyler Cowen: “In the classical liberal view, elites usually fall short of what we would like. They end up captured by some mix of special interest groups and poorly informed voters. There is thus a certain disillusionment with democratic government, while recognizing it is the best of available alternatives and far superior to autocracy for basic civil liberties. That said, classical liberals do not consider the elites to be totally hopeless. After all, someone has to steer the ship and to this day we do indeed have a ship to steer. Most elites are intelligent and also they are as well-meaning as the rest of us, even if the bureaucratic nature of politics hinders their performance. We can entrust them with supplying basic public goods, and indeed we have little choice…The New Right thinkers are far more skeptical of elites. They are more likely to see elites as evil and pernicious, and sometimes they (implicitly) see these evil elites as competent enough to actually wreck society. The classical liberals see checks and balances as strong enough to limit the worst outcomes, whereas the New Right sees ideological conformity and indeed collusion within the Establishment. Checks and balances are a paper tiger…The policy emphasis then becomes learning how to use the government to constrain the Left and its cultural agenda, rather than ensuring basic liberties for everyone. The New Right view is that this obsession with basic liberties leads, in reality, to the hegemony of a statist Left, and a Left that will use its power centers of government, media and academia to crush and cancel the New Right.”

George Hawley on Ranked Choice Voting: “One benefit of RCV is that it resolves the problem of third-party votes seeming “wasted.” Under an RCV system, if you genuinely feel closest to the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Constitution Party, or some as-yet-non-existent populist MAGA party, you could list that party as your first choice. If that party comes in third or fourth place, your vote will go to your second choice, rather than simply becoming irrelevant…Under RCV, voters would no longer have to choose between voting their true preference and strategically voting for the candidate most likely to defeat the person they fear or dislike the most. RCV has an additional purported benefit: it disincentivizes uncivil political campaigns. Under current rules, there is no benefit to being anyone’s second choice. There is no reason not to offend an opponent’s base of voters. Under RCV, candidates still want to reach out to voters they are confident will never list them as their first choice—earning the second slot on their ranking of preferred candidates may mean the difference between defeat and victory. RCV may simultaneously encourage candidates and parties to cast a wider net when campaigning and discourage the kinds of ugly, scorched-earth tactics that we have become accustomed to.”

Economist: “India has immense energy needs. It is forecast to be one of the fastest-growing big economies this decade and will need to add capacity equivalent to the size of the European Union’s power system by 2040. After a flirtation with hydro in the 1950s and 1960s it came to rely heavily on coal, which met 58% of its primary-energy needs in 2021. Like many governments, India’s has committed to reaching net-zero emissions (by 2070). The big surprise is that major changes are happening on the ground. In the past decade India has seen a 50-fold increase in installed solar power. In 2021 its renewables accounted for 5% of its primary-energy consumption, and 5% of global renewable primary-energy consumption. Private firms have plans to invest perhaps $200bn in the coming years in everything from generation facilities to green hydrogen plants (by comparison, global investment in wind and solar last year was about $300bn, and India’s was roughly $15bn). The government wants to triple non-fossil-fuel capacity by 2030.”

Peter Boettke: “Let me start with my summary judgement of “The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World”: Samuel Gregg has written an outstanding contribution to the theory and practice of political economy for our times. Gregg’s book will appeal more to those on the center-right than to the center-left, but he nevertheless has identified the fatal flaws in the rhetoric and practice of those on the populist right (Trump) and the populist left (Sanders), as well as those who consider themselves more sophisticated representatives of economic nationalism on the right (Rubio) and left (Warren). I say the book will appeal to the center-right and pull them away from the pitfalls of economic nationalism because of the intellectual inspiration that Gregg proudly relies on—the Founding Fathers and the desire to create a commercial republic. The center-left, on the other hand, has grown tired of appeals to constitutional principles and the aspirations of the American promise. In fact, that is the problem that Gregg’s book is motivated to address.”

Hayek: “Thus, though the consistent application of liberal principles leads to democracy, democracy will preserve liberalism only if, and so long as, the majority refrains from using its powers to confer on its supporters special advantages which cannot be similarly offered to all citizens.” [via CafeHayek]