Where Are the Shudras? Why the Shudras are lost in today’s India
Shudras comprise approximately half the population of India…The Mandal Commission concluded in the 1980s that the OBCs, not including the “upper” Shudra castes, represent 52 percent of all Indians…By comparison, the “forward” castes—Hindu castes outside the OBCs, Scheduled Cates and Scheduled Tribes—all together count for no more than 20 percent of the Indian population. So, […]
Ticketmaster stages fightback against touts
The pop star Taylor Swift’s business acumen is once again in full display as she comes up with a novel way to solve an age old economic problem. The problem is as follows: when the tickets for a rock concert are sold, the fans who buy the tickets tend to span a wide spectrum of […]
Do not believe the hype about artificial intelligence
The author – inspite of running an AI service provider for corporates – says that AI is being overhyped and overpromoted. He believes that: “We have much faster computers, thanks to Moore’s law, but the underlying algorithms are mostly identical to those that powered machines 40 years ago. Instead, we have creatively rebranded those algorithms. […]
Two articles which should be read together: (1) How social democracy lost its way: a report from German; and (2) What the Left misses about Nationalism
In India it is a common refrain that the Congress can’t get its act together whilst the BJP displays its political muscle on a daily basis. However, the challenges of traditional left of centre political parties do not seem to be confined to India alone as these articles in the FT and NYT show. In […]
Quant Investor Cliff Asness Hasn’t Smashed His Screen This Year—Yet
Cliff Asness has built AQR Capital Management into a systematic investing giant by capitalizing on two trends: the growing power of computers and the demand for lower fund fees. Today, AQR runs $226 billion in strategies built on so-called factors—behaviors that securities tend to exhibit over time. The problem is the “over time” qualifier – […]
What Sets Successful CEOs Apart
The authors conducted a 10-year study (dubbed the “CEO Genome Project”) to identify what sets successful CEOs apart. They tapped into a database containing more than 17,000 assessments of C-suite executives, including 2,000 CEOs and “sifted through that information, looking for what distinguished candidates who got hired as CEOs from those who didn’t, and those who […]
How tech employees are pushing Silicon Valley to put ethics before profit
To end on a brighter note, whilst the world is understandably worried about rapid groundbreaking technological advancements potentially working against humanity if abused, here is a piece which gives hope, for a better future. To the extent, leaders of large organisations drive culture around ethics, it is refreshing to see employees effecting shared beliefs even […]
The case for drip-feed investing is plausible, but costs more
In his typical style, the Undercover Economist debunks yet another everyday gospel – cost averaging. He shows that it works neither in theory nor has backing from historical data. Yet, he concludes it might still be the best thing to do simple because the alternatives known to us aren’t any better. However, acknowledging the shortcomings […]
Dodgy data makes it hard to judge Modi’s job promises
Some of us in Marcellus were still in primary school when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister. In that era, our parents would give the news broadcast on Doordarshan a miss and tune into the BBC World Service’s 9pm broadcast to understand what was happening in India. Ironically, the BBC reported both Indira Gandhi’s and […]
In the Himalayas, living the crisis that the IPCC report warns off
One of the challenges of our job is that we tend to lose all sense of proportion and obsess about trivialities such as the RBI’s interest rate announcements or the latest sexual escapades of our politicians. Meanwhile, changes take place in the real world which are quite literally earth-shaking. On 6th October 2018, the Intergovernmental […]
Saudi Princes Quest to Remake the Middle East
In the wake of what looks like the murder of Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Turkey, it is worth spending some time to understand how and why the heir apparent to the Saudi throne, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), is moving at such speed to stamp out all opposition to the […]
The Big Hack – How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate US Companies
This investigative article based on interviews with American government officials and corporates claims that Chinese spies attacked almost 30 US companies, including Amazon and Apple “by compromising America’s technology supply chain”. So how did China pull this off? It appears that China inserted a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, into […]
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