Retirement Planning: Tackling the Hardest Problem in Finance
Summary: Across the world, retirement planning is viewed as one of the most complex problems in Finance due to the multitude of unpredictable variables at play. In India, this problem is made more complex by the high and variable inflation in the cost of living. The problem is made even more challenging for the Indian middle […]
AI is Birthing a New Middle-Class Elite: Evidence from the West
Nearly four years since the launch of ChatGPT, what has AI done to middle class jobs and incomes in the West? Our literature survey (using AI) suggests: 1) Middle class white collar jobs – especially entry level jobs – have collapsed in the West; 2) Most middle class white collar jobs in the West are […]
Short read: Rs 25 lakh for coaching, 99 percentile in JEE Mains, yet no IIT
It is that time of the year when lakhs of Indian 18 yr olds who have sacrificed four precious years of their childhood and spent a fortune of their parents’ savings on coaching classes preparing for JEE – the entrance exam for India’s prestigious engineering colleges – IITs, await their fate. Deebashree Mohanty who has […]
Short read: The Effect of Deactivating Facebook and Instagram on Users’ Emotional State
This is the “largest-ever experimental study on the effect of social media deactivation on users’ emotional state”. Here is the summary of this remarkable experiment: “Stanford paid 35,000 people to quit Facebook and Instagram for 6 weeks Depression dropped. Anxiety dropped. Happiness went up. Women under 25 on Instagram saw the biggest gains.” Now here […]
Short read: The Big Squeeze
One of the hardest things to understand in a vast, developing country is the true level of inflation. An accurate estimate of inflation is necessary for many economic agents including households who are trying to plan their finances. Noted economist, Ajit Ranade, who was for many years the Chief Economist of the Aditya Birla empire […]
Long read: Middle-Power Multilateralism In A Hard Power World
This January’s World Economic Forum at Davos stood out for two remarkable speeches by two of the world leaders – the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Finnish President Alex Stubb, both recognising the changing world order and what should be done about it. This was even before the Iranian war began. Since then, […]
Long read: How ‘Zombie Flow’ Took Over Culture
In the past, we have featured pieces on one of the most pressing issues in society today – doomscrolling, people across age groups mindlessly scrolling Instagram reels or Youtube shorts, much of the time across places ranging from public transport to social gatherings. Here’s Derek Thompson trying to explain why that might be happening and […]
Long read: Mythos and National Power
Anthropic’s Claude Mythos is said to be the most powerful AI model created so far. It is so powerful that: (a) Anthropic says that it cannot fully control it; and (b) the “model found decades-old vulnerabilities in foundational open-source code that millions of automated tests and countless human experts had missed, presaging a potentially revolutionary […]
Drug Discovery is Being Revolutionized & What It Could Mean for Investors
Google DeepMind’s success in using AI to crack protein folding (one of the hardest problems in science) has revolutionized medical research. Research that used to take decades now takes a few years. This makes it likely that the speed of new drug discovery will increase. To gain exposure to this combination of AI & medicine, […]
Short read: Asha Bhosle: The voice of Nehruvian transition
As tributes continue to pour in, following the passing away of Asha Bhosle, the legendary singer, we found this piece in Frontline quite unique. For a more fun journey through Mrs Bhosle’s most iconic songs as experienced by a 90s kid’s whose admiration grew with age, we would point you to this piece in the Indian Express. […]
Short read: The labor economics of ‘Alien’ — and its lessons for inequality on Earth
This is an interesting read not just for the topicality of it given the recent cases of labour unrest in some parts of India but also a nostalgia driving analogy with the context of the iconic 80s movie – Aliens. The article refers to a new book The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market […]
Short read: The AI Jobs Scare Meets 250 Years of Data
In our latest bestseller, “Breakpoint: The Crisis of the Middle Class & The Future of Work” we explain that tech disruption usually impact the labour market in two waves. In the first wave, labour is displaced by new tech eg. the light bulb displacing candle makers in late 19th century America. In the second wave, tech […]
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