Rajesh Jain

Rita McGrath: “You have power when you have control over a scarce and valuable resource. That could be formal power, as in control over raises, promotions or budget approvals. That could be informal power as in access to a respected inner circle of decision-makers or the possession of a great brand or stellar reputation. Power can also come from expertise and skill. The more invaluable you are to the organization, the more likely people are to tread carefully around you.”

FT on ARK’s Cathie Wood: ““Boom. That’s when it hit me. Why don’t you apply the technologies that have been disrupting other industries to your own? Think about it: your industry finances all of these disruptions that have changed other industries, and it hasn’t embraced them itself.” Within five minutes, the key foundations of what would become Ark’s approach came to her: adopting open source research, embracing online media, investing in innovation…An important element of Wood’s vision — and one of the drivers of her seemingly boundless optimism — is that the deflationary trend of recent decades and generally low interest rates will continue: technological innovation suppresses costs, while companies whose products are being rendered obsolete will have to cut prices.”

Atanu Dey: “In reality what we call the government is just a bunch of people, and people have various goals and motivations. The people who constitute the government can be broadly classified as politicians (who are periodically elected) and bureaucrats (who are unelected and enjoy lengthy tenures.) The politicians…do what they have to do to get re-elected. They may care about the general welfare of the country but that concern comes a distant second to their self-interest. Expecting them to be self-sacrificing for some greater good of the nation is delusional idiocy. The same goes for the bureaucrats; their first concern is how to expand their budgets and their power over the fiefdoms they ruthlessly rule. Practically nothing they do is ever beneficial and most of the time they inflict immense harm…The government is ultimately a reflection of the soul of the people. If the people are morally and ethically weak, they will suffer morally and ethically bad governments.”

Forerunner looks at the future: “We see the seamless blending of two worlds bearing out in multiple capacities. Digital is merging social and professional life together, too. Today’s consumers are no longer just consumers; they are businesses–creating, curating, and coaching their way to financial independence online. In this shift lies an economic empowerment opportunity: Users are willing to pay for access, service, and expertise, and the emergence of Web3 is set to enable more value exchange and efficient payment, only increasing the potential for consumers to monetize…We’re also seeing new paradigms in purchasing. We’re just starting to see the rise of digital goods, with ownership and economic interests aligned with the creator–look for more of this in the years ahead. The consumer has been activated, both socially and economically, and is embracing their power; there is information about all kinds of products at scale, and people will be increasingly willing to “vote their conscience” through their spending decisions. The 2032 consumer will spend an increased share on services, and though they still want to buy, they’ll do so with a stronger interest in recycling, upcycling, and limiting waste.”

Arjun Subramaniam: “An icon who is studied in detail at war colleges across the world is Thucydides, a Greek general and historian from the 5th century BC, who superbly chronicled the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta. This set of wars threw up several lessons for posterity in laying out a template for the geopolitical and behavioural drivers of conflict between an established power and a rising power. On another plane, the fine print of Thucydides’s narrative rests on the trinity of fear, honour and interest — a framework that fits most of the ongoing conflicts and less-than-war scenarios that seem to be playing out in contemporary times even if they do not conform to his classical rising power vs established power paradigm.”

Francis Fukuyama: “Liberalism is a doctrine, first enunciated in the 17th century, that seeks to control violence by lowering the sights of politics. It recognises that people will not agree on the most important things — such as which religion to follow — but that they need to tolerate fellow citizens with views different from their own. It does this by respecting the equal rights and dignity of individuals, through a rule of law and constitutional government that checks and balances the powers of modern states. Among those rights are the rights to own property and to transact freely, which is why classical liberalism was strongly associated with high levels of economic growth and prosperity in the modern world. In addition, classical liberalism was typically associated with modern natural science, and the view that science could help us to understand and manipulate the external world to our own benefit. Many of those foundations are now under attack.”

Abhisek Mukherjee: “[India] will soon have the largest pool of management consultants in the world. Their training is highly valued, and their talents are sought-after. These are the professionals who will drive India’s growth as corporate leaders, startup founders and fund managers. Many of them will leverage their training and relationships to start their consulting firms, which will drive a wave of offshoring of consulting services to India. The influence of this soft power will be massive, perhaps even more than the influence of Indian IT globally. This will also drive down the rates of consulting services, which will make it accessible to a larger pool of clients, not just in the traditional markets but also in emerging economies in Asia and Africa. The resulting virtuous cycle for India-bred global management consulting firms will help attract both clients and capital. Like IT, management consulting in India is commoditizing. This is great for India and the world.”

David Brooks about the US: “Liberalism is a way of life built on respect for the dignity of each individual. A liberal order, John Stuart Mill suggested, is one in which people are free to conduct “experiments in living” so you wind up with “a large variety in types of character.” There’s no one best way to live, so liberals celebrate freedom, personal growth and diversity. Many of America’s founders were fervent believers in liberal democracy — up to a point. They had a profound respect for individual virtue, but also individual frailty. Samuel Adams said, “Ambitions and lust for power … are predominant passions in the breasts of most men.” Patrick Henry admitted to feelings of dread when he contemplated the “depravity of human nature.” One delegate to the constitutional convention said that the people “lack information and are constantly liable to be misled.” Our founders were aware that majorities are easily led by ambitious demagogues. So our founders built a system that respected popular opinion and majority rule while trying to build guardrails to check popular passion and prejudice.”

David Reisman on the key ideas of James Buchanan: “In summary, it is like this. The good society must be built up from the revealed preferences of unique individuals who feel a need to register their choices. God has been dead for a century. Truth is tested by agreement. Efficiency is tested by agreement. Justice is consensus. Fairness is the rational calculus of the loss-averting one-off when situated behind a thick veil of fog. Entrepreneurial imagination weaves unanticipated skeins out of uncertain unknowables. The market is a disequilibrium process of exploration and discovery. Procedures alone and never endstates may be said to be economic. Social interaction is collective choice. Unanimity is the sole test of optimality. Utility like opportunity cost is all in the mind. Human nature is nasty and brutish. Anarchy is the jungle. Leviathan is the Gulag. In between there are the rules. Formal and informal constitutions ensure that the rational and the self-seeking will strike bargains and not one another. Politicians and bureaucrats, neither omniscient nor beneficent, are as short-horizoned as any other merchants. Choices in the public sector are made not by the State qua State but by individuals qua individuals. Politics must be constrained by multi-period rules lest the nasty and the brutish bribe their voters with quantitative easing and deficit finance.” [via Atanu Dey]

Donald Boudreaux: “Until the 1930s, the classical economic understanding was that the burden of government debt is passed on to future generations and that the need to pay off this debt was a genuine burden to the economy as a whole. But in the 1930s, along came John Maynard Keynes’ “revolution” in economic thought. And Keynesians’ “revolutionary” mode of economic thinking (which is largely a gussied-up rehash of economic fallacies that were popular prior to the writings of Adam Smith) led economists, step by unsuspecting step, to reach mistaken conclusions. Keynesian economics’ single biggest flaw on this front is its practice of lumping all people in a country into a single category and focusing exclusively on how much “it” — this collective — spends in the aggregate. If Jones’ taxes rise by $100 and if Smith receives this $100, then as long as we can assume that Smith’s “propensity” to spend is the same as that of Jones, any such tax-and-transfer scheme presents no problem to the economy. Such a conclusion is silly.”

Mises: “An entrepreneur earns profit by serving the consumers, the people, as they are and not as they should be according to the fancies of some grumbler or potential dictator.” [via CafeHayek]

Alex Tabarrok: “Public choice theory is economists doing political science. And it basically says, what if we think about politics the same way we think about markets, which is that people are generally self-interested. When people move from the marketplace to work in government, they don’t suddenly become angels. Like Madison said, we wouldn’t need a government if everyone were angels. Instead, they come with all of the same types of self-interested motivations. Some of them want power. Some of them want to do good. Some of them just want wealth perhaps, all kinds of things. So we ask, well, what if people in government are self-interested? And what Buchanan called politics without romance, that’s not a big leap, but when you think about politics without romance, I think you do become less enamored with what is possible because you begin to see that it’s not good enough to say, here’s something good that we want. Let’s just pass a law. You actually have to say, will the people who are responsible for not just passing the law, but implementing the law, will they have the incentives which are necessary to actually make the law effective? And quite often, the answer to that is no.”

WSJ: “[John Cochrane] traces the present inflation to the pandemic and the government’s response. Starting in March 2020, “the Treasury issued $3 trillion of new debt, which the Fed quickly bought in return for $3 trillion of new reserves.” The Treasury then sent checks to people and businesses, later borrowing another $2 trillion and sending more checks. Overall federal debt rose nearly 30%. “Is it at all a surprise,” Mr. Cochrane asks, “that a year later inflation breaks out?” He likens this $5 trillion in checks to a “classic parable” of Milton Friedman (1912-2006), the great monetarist at the University of Chicago, where Mr. Cochrane was a professor for 30 years before moving to Stanford in 2015. “Let us suppose now that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1,000 in bills from the sky, which is, of course, hastily collected by members of the community,” Friedman wrote in “The Optimum Quantity of Money” (1969). If they spent the money, inflation would result.”

Yazad Jal: “Markets, language, the law, all emerged spontaneously. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, when a hunter exchanged some of his meat for berries collected by a gatherer, barter was born. Markets evolved from this humble beginning. Language grew out of the grunts of early humans. When two tribesmen had a dispute and went to the wise woman of the village to settle it, her words became the first laws. None of these required a mastermind, a planner or a designer…Human knowledge is so fantastically dispersed that no one person can claim to know even a fraction of it. Even making a pencil is a complex endeavor, as Leonard E. Read’s story I, Pencil shows us. The important lesson is not the complexity, it is that this complexity is managed not by a mastermind but by many people, each with her own goal to achieve. They come together, as if led by Adam Smith’s invisible hand to create something that benefits all of society.”

Thomas Jefferson in 1807: “I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.” [via Atanu Dey]