Rajesh Jain

Ishan Bakshi quoting from the World Inequality Report: “The top 10 per cent [in India] earns 57 per cent of the national income. Within the top 10 per cent, the very elite top 1 per cent earns 22 per cent. In comparison, the share of the bottom 50 per cent in national income has declined to 13 per cent.”

Elon Musk is TIME’s 2021 Person of the Year. “This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars. His startup rocket company, SpaceX, has leapfrogged Boeing and others to own America’s spacefaring future. His car company, Tesla, controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered and is valued at a cool $1 trillion. That has made Musk, with a net worth of more than $250 billion, the richest private citizen in history, at least on paper. He’s a player in robots and solar, cryptocurrency and climate, brain-computer implants to stave off the menace of artificial intelligence and underground tunnels to move people and freight at super speeds.”

Watching: The Expanse (Amazone Prime Video)

Saurabh Mukherjea: “We basically invest in a company which goes on to consolidate a large market. If you ask me this is a massive opportunity. There are so many more sectors where the consolidation is yet to happen in our country. That it is quite mouth-watering if you look at the Indian economy and see how much wealth will be created in the next 10 years as you consolidate the sector. In the last ten years, the Indian stock market created a trillion dollars of wealth. I reckon that in the next 10 years, Indian stock market could create two trillion dollars of wealth. So from 2000 to 2010, the market created around 0.5 trillion dollars of wealth, from 2010 to 2020 you had a trillion dollars of wealth and the next 10 years could be potentially two trillion dollars. Plays like the formalisation of consumption and shift from physical assets to financial assets are epic themes as so much wealth is waiting to be created there.”

Jagannathan on the Constitutional changes India needs: “One, the concurrent list must go, and most powers should be devolved downwards to states and very few upwards to the Centre. There must be a third list — a local bodies list — that is not subservient to state power. Local bodies are the best places to exercise democratic rights, but right now this is the most disempowered part of the governance structure. The power allocation between the judiciary and state also needs to be rejigged, with the former being barred from making laws. The higher judiciary needs bifurcation between a final court of appeals and a constitutional court. The power to adjudicate on public interest litigation must be exercised only by the constitutional court, and that too sparingly when real questions of law are involved. They cannot be used to impose a tax on SUVs entering the National Capital because of pollution, or to examine the efficacy of the Centre’s vaccination policies. Real power in the three-tier state structure must be maximised at the local body level, so that people have a greater say in the everyday things that matter to them.”

Atanu Dey on “Eliminate Poverty, not the Rich“: “Nobody reasonably questions the goal of eliminating poverty; our quarrel is about the appropriate means. If you think slowly about that, you realize that people who have the freedom to create and keep wealth, create the most wealth, and that ends up helping everyone, and reducing poverty.”

WSJ on tech trends: “There’s a new type of consumer out there—who I call “Generation Novel”—born out of the disruption of the novel coronavirus. Due to many months of lockdown, consumers had to learn how to become digital-first in basically all aspects their lives—including the way they work, learn, buy, relax, and connect with friends and loved ones. In doing so, customers forever changed how they shop and make decisions, what they value, and which brands earn their attention and loyalty. Businesses of all sizes and in all industries will now need to quickly re-evaluate the customer experiences they offer, and pivot to meeting the changing demands of this new generation.”

Anticipating the Unintended: “It is not the differences between the BJP and the opposition, in the shape of TMC and others, that’s important. Those differences on secularism or the definition of nationalism will be used for narrative wars that will continue to deepen the schism in the society. But I don’t see them changing how India will be governed. It is the similarity, where the ‘enemies’ emulate each other that has me worried.  And what’s the similarity? To put it simply, it is their belief in running a ‘party state’ model of governance. What the Left built in West Bengal and the TMC inherited has now been finessed and taken at the national level by the BJP. The party or its affiliates have their imprint everywhere. The law of the party trumps rule of law.”

David Perell: “The smartest kid in my middle school class used to take computers apart and put them back together again in order to understand how they work.
That’s what writing is too. Whenever you write, you’re tinkering with ideas and playing with all their component parts.”

FT: “In recent years, many businesses have come to view the cloud as an important technology platform. There are obvious attractions to replacing in-house data centres with IT that is delivered as a service, on-demand, with payment tied to actual usage rather than a fixed cost. But what happens when the cloud moves from being the platform on which a business runs, to becoming the product itself? How should companies outside the tech industry adjust when much of the value inherent in their own operations can be delivered in the form of a cloud service, rather than packaged into the kind of products and services they have traditionally sold?…The wider adoption of cloud services such as this should prompt more companies to examine the nature of their existing business, and where their competitive advantages lie. When software changed the way businesses operated, it became fashionable to say that every company was now a tech company. In future, that could be replaced by a new refrain: every company is a cloud company.”

The Economist on India’s reducing fertility rate: “While a declining fertility rate is broadly a sign that India is richer and better educated than before, it will also bring worries. Economists have long heralded the “demographic dividend”, when productivity rises because a bigger slice of the population pyramid is of working age. This window will now be narrower, and India will have to contend sooner with a fast-growing proportion of elderly people to care for. Stark discrepancies in fertility rates between states also carry dangers. In future more Indians from the crowded north will seek jobs in the richer and less fecund south. Politicians will also face the hot issue of how to allot parliamentary constituencies. Back in 1971 Mrs Gandhi froze the distribution of seats among states. The result is that whereas an MP from Kerala now represents some 1.8m constituents, one from Uttar Pradesh represents nearly 3m. When the freeze on redistricting lifts some time in the next decade, these disparities will spawn a big fight.”

Christopher Hitchens: “Distrust any speaker who talks confidently about “we,” or speaks in the name of “us.” Distrust yourself if you hear these tones creeping into your own style. The search for security and majority is not always the same as solidarity; it can be another name for consensus and tyranny and tribalism. Never forget that, even if there are “masses” to be invoked, or “the people” to be praised, they and it must by definition be composed of individuals.” [via CafeHayek]

Adrian Wooldridge on meritocracy: “Look at the history of the West and you don’t have to go back very far to find a world where jobs were handed from father to son or sold to the highest bidder. Look at the rest of the world and you can see governments riddled with corruption and favoritism. The meritocratic idea is necessarily fragile: humans are biologically programmed to favor their kith and kin over strangers. We are right to think that the modern world, with its vibrant economy and favor-free public sector, would be impossible without the meritocratic idea. But we are wrong to think that meritocracy will be with us forever if we proceed to douse its roots in poison.”

WSJ on dealing with stress: “You need to be able to hear yourself think. Ms. Myrick recommends a three-pronged approach: “Turn down the volume of the external stuff you can’t control in the news, from the people in your life, and in your own head,” she says.  The news part is easy. Delete everything on your phone that isn’t essential. Turn off the notifications on what you keep. Pick a few trusted news sources. If you feel you must check social media, set a strict limit on how much time you can spend on it. You’ll also need to set boundaries with loved ones. Turn off text alerts and create periods of time when no one can reach you, unless it’s an emergency. Explain to friends and family that you’re busy or don’t have the capacity to engage at the moment and will get back to them later.”

Lawrence Summers: “I do think there is the possibility of a real take-off in India. It is not a small thing that, over all the years since 1979 until quite recently, there had not been a single year when India grew as rapidly as China but in the last several, there were years when India grew more rapidly than China. That is a hopeful harbinger of things that might come. I think if there is a country that pioneers convergence to modern, cutting edge standards of living in the information age after the industrial age, India has greater potential than any other country of size to do that in the period ahead.”