Rajesh Jain

Economist: Five of America’s biggest firms, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft—call them MAAMA — have invested $280bn in the past year, equivalent to 9% of American business investment, up from 4% five years ago. Big tech wants to find the next big opportunity, and our analysis of deals, patents, recruitment and other yardsticks shows that cash is flowing into everything from driverless cars to quantum computing. The shift reflects a fear that the lucrative fiefs of the 2010s are losing relevance, and the fact that tech’s titans are increasingly moving onto each other’s patches (the share of sales that overlap has doubled since 2015 to 40%). So they are all looking to swoop into new territory.” More: “Their focus is on the metaverse, cars and health care.”

Shankkar Aiyar on the need to redesign the Indian Constitution: “The fundamental issue India must debate as it rises to be the sixth-largest economy hosting over 1.4 billion people, is how to redesign the constitutional framework to address the deficits in governance. The basic design of the current structure was inherited from the colonial regime. The construct of the division of responsibilities in Schedule 7 stems from the Government of India Act 1919 artifacts from the Government of India Act 1935. The confusion about who does what is responsible was worsened by the amendments during the Emergency.”

Brunello Cucinelli: “There are three things you cannot buy. Fitness: You have to keep fit, whether you’re rich or not. Diet: You cannot pay someone to be on a diet for you. I think that diet is the biggest sacrifice in my life. Then, looking after your soul. No one can possibly treat your soul but you yourself. This is something you can do through culture and philosophy.” [via Shane Parish]

Leonid Bershidsky: “The real breakthrough for crypto will only come if and when the world is unimaginable without it, as it was unimaginable without the internet back in 2004. Even 13 years after it all started, that sense of an irreversible technological revolution — one that would deserve the Web 3.0 label — still requires some technological leaps, even in areas where the blockchain has its obvious uses, such as payments or the creation of contracts. But the turning point will not come in the form of overwhelming statistical evidence, or as a single event, such as a major traditional investor’s conversion to the crypto creed or a major nation’s adoption of a blockchain-based currency. It’ll come as a feeling, a sense that Web 3.0 has changed the world so much that losing it would leave a scar. That sense is the biggest prize when it comes to technological revolutions.”

Anticipating the Unintended on India’s PLI programs: “Through the Phased Manufacturing Program (PMP), the government increases import duties on final consumer products such as mobiles, chargers etc. This leads to import substitution because products assembled in India (even with imported parts) start to become cost-comparable to the duty-levied imports. Every year, the government keeps adding new products to this PMP list, with the objective of increasing the number of final goods that are assembled in India. The final aim and hope is that these assembly units will become the nuclei for a complete manufacturing ecosystem over time…The costs of this strategy are being borne by two sets of Indians. The first losers are all consumers. Higher import duties mean that mobile phone prices have been increasing…Second, the Indian manufacturers themselves have been under the pump because of rising tariffs for mobile phone parts…Before copying the mobile phone policy success playbook in other sectors, we must remember that the burden of protectionist policies is borne by the consumers and eventually the manufacturers, both. Protectionism can play spoilsport in India’s hopes of exporting its electric vehicles and mobile phones to the world.”

Tripurdaman Singh: “Even while embracing Westminster-style democracy in form, India’s Constitution bent, twisted, and adapted its norms and techniques, creating something very different in substance: both unusual and hard to categorise. While many of these distinctions were indeed down to the impress of Nehru, it is important to note that these ideas were widely shared in the Constituent Assembly, including by Ambedkar and Patel. Even when expressed in the language and paradigm of a British constitutional legacy, India’s Constitution created an institutional structure and political culture that constitutes a typology of its own, distinct from Westminster. It was, to quote the constitutional historian Harshan Kumarasingham, an ‘Eastminster’ — the first of its kind.”

Andy Kessler on Sturgeon’s Law which says ninety percent of everything is crap: “…I spent some time sitting on Mr. Andreessen’s back porch pondering the magic of 90% and how it created Silicon Valley and continues to rule it. “In venture capital, you think a lot about so-called adverse selection,” Mr. Andreessen says. “ ‘Why am I so lucky as to be the person you’re trying to raise money from?’ You want to get to positive selection, the best people coming to you.””

Nilesh Shah: “[India] missed the manufacturing/export bus in the 1980s. We did excel in services like software to become back office to the world. With China+1 becoming a geopolitical imperative, it is an opportune time for us to expand the manufacturing sector and improve our export market share. Many of our peers are ahead of us in ease of doing business, but none of them has a large domestic market like us. The automobile and generic pharma sector in the past and the mobile phone/RAC sectors recently have shown that we know the formulae. It will still be a long and arduous journey to attain a stature close to Vietnam or China in exports. To achieve our true potential we need close coordination and seamless working between central, state, and local governments, the rule of law, improvements in infrastructure, especially logistics and flexible labour laws.”

Mint: “Indians are adopting digital payments at a scorching pace. This digital stride has left China and a few developed country markets trailing digital transaction numbers. Government data shows that digital transactions grew close to 90%, from 232,000 to over 430,000 in the three years from FY19 to FY21. The growth was led by the United Payment Interface or UPI, the payment system the government-owned National Payments Corp. of India developed to enable immediate money transfers through mobile devices. According to an ACI Worldwide report for 2020, India was at pole position with 25.5 billion real-time online transactions, ahead of China at 15.7 billion, South Korea-6 billion, the UK-2.8 billion, Japan-1.7 billion, and the US-1.2 billion…The credit goes to the Indian central bank and banks and lenders that jointly leveraged the indigenous strengths in technology and innovation of non-banks to build the infrastructure for offering a wide range of payment services. The emergence of over half a dozen unicorns (with a valuation of over $1 billion) in the Indian fintech sector, offering services ranging from payments to cards and multiple payment options, both rides on the secure and reliable digital financial infrastructure and contributes to the pace of adoption.”

James Pethokoukis: “Why didn’t the Industrial Revolution start 2000 years ago? One important reason: Those pre-industrial societies intentionally extinguished the sparks of progress. For millennia, stasis had powerful defenders. The Roman Emperor Tiberius executed rather than rewarded a man who had invented unbreakable glass. Queen Elizabeth I declined to grant a patent to the inventor of the stocking-frame knitting machine, worrying that the invention would deprive textile workers of their employment. The guilds of preindustrial Europe played a key role in making sure Europe stayed preindustrial by blocking new technologies.”

Naushad Forbes: “Most countries developed by putting millions to work in labour-intensive manufacturing. Millions of the unskilled and less-educated can be employed in good manufacturing jobs where average productivity is 15 times the national average. We do not have the huge firms in export-oriented labour-intensive sectors that employ millions in China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. Foxconn’s largest factory in China, making iPhones among other products, reportedly employs 4,00,000 people. It employs over 1 million in the country overall. Compare that 1 million with 15 million employed in all larger manufacturing companies in India. Samsung employs 1,00,000 people in its largest phone assembly plant in Vietnam. These giant factories are missing in India. Take another example of labour-intensive manufacturing. A company we visited in Vietnam manufactures agarbattis. They learnt by sending 10 workers to a factory near Chennai for training. Today they employ 10,000 people making agarbattis, which they mainly export to India. Even when the technology is Indian and the market is India, mass manufacturing seems to be more efficient 4,000 km away from the country. The economics must be fixed — we need labour reform, so employing people is less expensive and improved logistics to move goods around more cheaply.”

David Perell: “The average quality of information is getting worse and worse, while the best gets better and better. That’s why markets of abundance are simultaneously bad for the median consumer but good for conscious consumers.”

Sangeet Paul Choudary on the real shift from Web1 to Web2 to Web3: “While it’s now undisputed that there was a significant shift from pipelines to platforms, I believe we are now in the early innings of a similar shift from platforms to protocols. Much like the arrival of platforms didn’t signal the end of pipelines, the emergence of protocols will not end the era of platforms. Instead, pipelines, platforms, and protocols, will co-exist as different mechanisms to organize and configure value in the economy. Some parts of the economy will be best managed through platforms, while other use cases will lend themselves to decentralized protocol-based management.”

Donald Boudreaux on the ill-effects on minimum wage legislation: “In the absence of a minimum wage, workers whose skills are so low that they cannot produce hourly value as high as, say, $10.00 per hour would cloak their low skills by offering to work at wages low enough to make them profitable to employ. Given that no employer will knowingly fail to employ any worker willing to work at a wage that’s not in excess of the hourly value produced by that worker, workers with very low skills – when they have unimpeded access to money’s cloaking property – will have no trouble finding employment. But because the minimum wage prevents such cloaking, many low-skilled workers remain unemployed and unemployable.”

Randall Holcombe: “Citizens and voters anchor on political identity. It might be a party, a candidate, or an ideology. Most of their political preferences are then derivative of that identity. People don’t think: I support a woman’s right to have an abortion, I support more gun control, I believe the government should be more involved in health care, and I think impediments to voting should be relaxed. Therefore, I am a Democrat. The reasoning goes the other way. People identify as Democrats; therefore, they support a woman’s right to have an abortion, more gun control, and so forth. Citizens and voters adapt their public policy preferences from the political elite–the people who actually determine public policy. One implication is that citizens and voters have less influence over public policy than a romantic notion of democracy would suggest. The political elite tells voters what to think, and they fall in line behind their leaders.”