Rajesh Jain

Hayek: “We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which …does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible…Free trade or the freedom of opportunity are ideals which still may arouse the imaginations of large numbers, but a mere “reasonable freedom of trade” or a mere “relaxation of controls” are neither intellectually respectable nor likely to inspire any enthusiasm…Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.” [via Michael Munger]

Fadeke Adegbuyi: “Sudowrite and other AI writing tools see themselves in a long line of technological advancements heralding bold forms of creativity, dating back to the advent of writing itself—tools for thought, changing how we think and, maybe, what we think about. They’re thought partners, rather than creative adversaries. They won’t spit out flawless phrases, but they will help you get closer to your own version of perfection. With a thesaurus, a writer gets to choose the word from a list of synonyms, selecting the one that might most meaningfully roll off a character’s tongue. With Grammarly, an essayist can break a grammar rule for effect, ignoring the tool’s red warnings. Similarly, AI writing tools provide writers with possibilities they can discard or build upon. In all cases, tools are assisting human creativity, not replacing it.”

Samuel Gregg: “The idea that the state can fix these problems through raising tariffs or introducing industrial policy strikes me as fanciful. But nonetheless, these social problems, I think, are what are driving many conservatives in this type of direction…I think free marketers’ responses to many of these questions has been inadequate. What do I mean by that? I mean that the response of free marketers has been to focus heavily on the economic problems associated with the economic arguments being made by people on the right who want protectionism and want industrial policy. Free marketers have gone very hard, and I go very hard at them as well, about they don’t understand trade, they don’t understand basic elements of things like comparative advantage, trade-offs, the damage that protectionism does to an economy. They either don’t know or they ignore the very real systematic and epistemological problems with something like industrial policy. And that’s all fine, and that all needs to be said, but if free marketers are basically saying, “Look, these other things don’t work. They’re inefficient. And what we have to offer you is efficiency and effectiveness,” well, that’s fine, but that’s not a compelling narrative at a time in which politics heavily revolves around questions of identity. Who am I?…What community do I belong to? What is my nation? Who is my tribe? Et cetera. If free marketers don’t understand that they need to move their arguments so that they invest them with a narrative that is cognizant of just how much the center of debate has shifted, then they lose.”

WSJ: “Dall-E 2, DreamStudio and other new text-to-image generators let you type in almost any phrase and get an image. The technology is fun but full of potential unknowns…The AI systems interpret your words and create fully original images. You could insert the same prompt and never get this same image…Programmers train AI using hundreds of millions of captioned photos, which it deconstructs in a mathematically complicated process…Then, through another complex process called diffusion, it turns a meaningless cloud of pixels into an image with a reasonably high probability of resembling what you requested.”

Substack: “The game we’re playing is one that gives power to writers and creators. It’s a game that ensures writers can maintain their independence without most of the drudgery that comes with running their own media operation, and without having to cede control to a gatekeeper. We build tools that give writers and creators the full powers of the internet so their work can have maximum impact, reach, and revenue. We are helping to unlock the potential of existing writers to get greater value for and from their work, and so that new types of writers can enter the media economy and thrive. That’s the movement Substack is helping to drive. We don’t believe it’s going to slow down any time soon. On the contrary, we expect it to accelerate and expand.”

Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah: “[India’s] GST is widely criticised for underwhelming outcomes. Design problems have hindered the gains. The rates of 18 and 28 per cent are very high levels of taxation. Some individuals see the piling of a 28 per cent GST on top of a 42 per cent income tax, adding up to one of the world’s highest levels of taxation. What works best is a single rate of 12 per cent that is applied to all goods and services. This needs to go with a simple administrative system where every producer (even an individual) gets offsets correctly. We believe that a 12 per cent rate will generate adequate tax revenues, and potentially after a few years, these revenues can go up slightly if it is not the case.”

WSJ: “Rule number one [of publoc speaking] is to consider your audience, says Matt Abrahams, who teaches strategic communication at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Everything you say and do should start with this question: What do the people listening to you need? What do you want them to know, feel and do after watching you? Stories are a great way to connect with listeners, he adds, but keep your anecdotes and examples focused, making sure each one has a key takeaway or emotion you want to impart. Stick to tried-and-true structures, such as introducing a problem, outlining the solution and wrapping with the benefit. Or, compare and contrast two things, and then draw a conclusion.”

Washington Post: “Recent years have brought a sharp reaction in many parts of the world, as globalization, political polarization, the rise of social media and a collapse of trust in major institutions have left many people feeling betrayed by their governments, torn apart from their careers and alone in their communities, according to historians, political scientists and sociologists who have studied these shifts in the world’s economies and governments.The result has been a similar quest for nationalist solutions in country after country, and a growing bond among the far-right autocrats in those places…“The trend we are seeing reflects a disillusionment around the world that the democratic process fails to produce effective, charismatic leaders,” said Nikolas Gvosdev, a professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College. “In country after country, the idea spreads that we need strong leaders who get things done.”

Adam Tooze: “If your currency devalues against the dollar, then you tend to get import inflation, because the goods that you buy from abroad, many of which are denominated in dollars, become more expensive. And the other reason you’d be leery about doing this, especially if you’re an emerging market or low-income country, is that many of your businesses, big businesses, will have borrowed in dollars. Why? Because your local capital markets aren’t big, deep, or sophisticated enough. And the U.S. market is there. And hitherto, borrowing on U.S. markets has been cheap, relatively speaking. And so what big corporates in the emerging market will do is issue debt with the help of investment banks in New York and in Europe onto global dollar markets and borrow there. Now, if your currency severely depreciates against the dollar — and this is a big company, which is earning revenue locally — its problem all of a sudden is that it has liabilities in dollars, which are worth more in assets or as stream of income, which is in a depreciated local currency. And that’s a recipe for financial crisis in big corporations.”

Arnold Kling: “Long ago I offered the aphorism “Markets fail. Use markets.” That is, I readily concede that the market economy is not at some theoretical optimum. The question is what will lead to improvement. I believe that government intervention will often make things worse. Meanwhile, entrepreneurial innovation and creative destruction tends to solve economic problems, including market failures…If “market fundamentalism” is the belief that markets are perfect, then I do not know anyone on the libertarian side who is a market fundamentalist. Economics professors do not have to spend a whole semester arguing against this straw man. I wish that they would spend more time discussing “government fundamentalism,” which is what you are guilty of when you assume that government intervention consists of wise, technocratic solutions.”

Russell Napier: “My structural argument is that the power to control the creation of money has moved from central banks to governments. By issuing state guarantees on bank credit during the Covid crisis, governments have effectively taken over the levers to control the creation of money. Of course, the pushback to my prediction was that this was only a temporary emergency measure to combat the effects of the pandemic. But now we have another emergency, with the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that comes with it…[This] means governments won’t retreat from these policies. Just to give you some statistics on bank loans to corporates within the European Union since February 2020: Out of all the new loans in Germany, 40% are guaranteed by the government. In France, it’s 70% of all new loans, and in Italy it’s over 100%, because they migrate old maturing credit to new, government-guaranteed schemes. Just recently, Germany has come up with a huge new guarantee scheme to cover the effects of the energy crisis. This is the new normal. For the government, credit guarantees are like the magic money tree: the closest thing to free money. They don’t have to issue more government debt, they don’t need to raise taxes, they just issue credit guarantees to the commercial banks…We’re in for a long social and political journey. What you have learned in market economics in the past forty years will be useless in the new world. For the next twenty years, you need to get familiar with the concepts of political economy.”

Shane Parish: “Most people read the same new books that everyone else has read, not necessarily for the ideas but for the social reward of being able to talk about them with others. Reading the same thing as everyone else is only going to put the same ideas in your head that everyone else has. If you want new ideas, read old books.”

Ben Hunt: “The business of Wall Street consists of two and only two things: thinking up news ways to create a transferable share of some future economic activity, and thinking up new ways to borrow money today for a promise to repay that money and more in the future. We call the former activity “securitization”. For example, equity promises are securitized into “stocks” and debt promises are securitized into “bonds”, which makes the sale and resale of these promises sooooo much easier. We call the latter activity “leverage”, which is just a ten-dollar word for borrowed money. Every bit of financial innovation over the past ten thousand years or so – all of it! – has been in service to one or both of those two activities: securitization and leverage.”

Shane Parish: “The key to doing anything well is commitment. Not only does commitment help you become better at what you do, but it also makes other people want to help you. If you see your job as punching the clock, not only will you never be great at it, but your employer won’t invest in you. The best relationships are the ones where both partners go all in all the time to make the relationship amazing. If committing sounds like a lot of work, it is. That’s why so many people are half-in. The problem with half-in and half-committed is that it doesn’t get you the results you want. If you’re not committed, get out. The committed person gets both the opportunity and the results.”

Rafal Nadal: “One lesson I’ve learned is that if the job I do were easy, I wouldn’t derive so much satisfaction from it. The thrill of winning is in direct proportion to the effort I put in before. I also know, from long experience, that if you make an effort in training when you don’t especially feel like making it, the payoff is that you will win games when you are not feeling your best. That is how you win championships, that is what separates the great player from the merely good player. The difference lies in how well you’ve prepared.” [via Shane Parish]

WSJ: “What if scientists could engineer the sponge to serve a variety of therapeutic purposes, including storing drugs and enhancing cancer therapies? Such sponges exist, in a class of ultra-porous crystals known as metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. Research into potential uses for MOFs has accelerated over the past five years, chemists said. They predict the crystalline compounds could transform healthcare, energy and other industries. Some said MOFs could become as widespread as polymers, compounds that form the basis of many man-made materials like plastics, in the next decade or two.”

strategy+business: “You need to [first] understand the company’s culture—the identity of the organization. A lot of CEOs think they have this understanding, but that’s often at a high level, based on impressions and anecdotes (and of course, CEOs don’t always get the full and unfiltered view). Even when companies conduct formal research, they tend to focus on employee engagement, asking whether employees are happy coming to work, whether their jobs are fulfilling, or whether they’d recommend the company to a friend. Those methods have value, but they answer a different question: whether employees feel positively or negatively about various aspects of their workplace experience. They don’t identify what the culture actually is. To fully understand a company’s culture, you need to go beyond those sentiments. That requires a comprehensive survey of the organization, one that looks at more than just employee engagement. Questions need to be structured to accurately define the dominant traits of an organization and how they might impact its ability to deliver on its strategic goals, as well as the workplace experience it offers to employees. It’s a challenging task, because culture—the unwritten rules for how a company functions on a day-to-day basis—is often invisible.”

Washington Post: “TikTok starts studying its users from the moment they first open the app. It shows them a single, full-screen, infinitely looping video, then gauges how they react: a second of viewing or hesitation indicates interest; a swipe suggests a desire for something else. With every data point, TikTok’s algorithm narrows from a shapeless mass of content to a refined, irresistible feed. It is the ultimate video channel, and this is its one program. The “For You” algorithm, as TikTok calls it, gradually builds profiles of users’ tastes not from what they choose but how they behave. While Facebook and other social networks rely on their users to define themselves by typing in their interests or following famous people, TikTok watches and learns, tapping into trends and desires their users might not identify. The system runs on a sophisticated machine-learning engine — ByteDance researchers have championed its “sub-linear computational complexity” — but to TikTokers, the process could not be simpler. Launch the app. See the video. Passively consume.”

Kenneth Rogoff: “In chess, when a player makes a mistake, they’re much more likely to make another mistake in their next move. People lose their nerve — this is a very human tendency but I worry that’s what we’re seeing with central banks today. They induced too much stimulus, remained unaware as inflation rose and now, they’re panicked and rushing in the other direction. We can’t follow one mistake with another — we need to overlook the past to focus calmly on the situation now.”

Benjamin Reinhardt: “If we draw the thread of ergophilia out into the future, we can build a world where energy too cheap to meter unlocks technology that is indistinguishable from magic. Chunky, fixable technology unconstrained by the need to make everything as efficient as possible. A return to the belief that our children will have better lives than our own. Airships sailing the sky, hypersonic craft skipping along the atmosphere, and ion-belching behemoths plying the stars. Fusionpunk…The great slowdown began when we started rationing energy. Restarting progress means getting energy that is so abundant that it’s almost free.”