Be Afraid of Economic ‘Bigness.’ Be Very Afraid.
This New York Times piece by Tim Wu, a law professor and the author of the recently published “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age”, highlights the link between two major emerging phenomena of rising populism, nationalism or neofascism and increasing economic concentration or Big Corporate. He highlights that throughout history the […]
The Friendship That Made Google Huge
No, this is not about Sergei Brin and Larry Page. James Somers, in this lovely piece in The New Yorker, talks about how Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, two Google engineers who “changed the course of the company – and the Internet”. Part of the piece talks about how Larry Page’s idea to index the […]
Three lessons in decision making from a poker champion
In this crisp video, poker champion Liv Boeree, tells us that there are three mistakes which poker players make which are also made by many of us in day-to-day life: a) Misunderstanding the role of luck: if due to a slice of good fortune, you win big but then misinterpret that victory as being underpinned by your […]
Why my generation is the last of the hedonists
Janan Ganesh notes the millenials’ growing abstinence from use of alcohol and drugs and even physical intimacy and wonders if these typical hedonistic pleasures of the previous generation are being replaced by hits from digital tools. “Consider the well-documented abstention of the young: America’s millennial homebodies, the near-third of British 16- to 24-year-olds who refuse […]
Why Central Bank Digital Currencies Will Destroy Cryptocurrencies
In this insightful piece, Roubini explains why it is easy and almost inevitable that Central Banks use their unique place in the financial system to displace cryptocurrencies with their own Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). If we extrapolate Roubini’s thinking, a broader point emerges: wherever blockchain challenges the authority or the role of the sovereign, […]
Will UK House Prices Ever Rise Again?
Across the English speaking world – including India – a delusion that grips affluent people is that there is some sort of law in Finance which says that house prices have to rise, if not tomorrow, if not next year, then at least in the next decade. This delusion is fuelled by a belief that […]
Extreme Athleticism Is the New Midlife Crisis
Canadian psychologist Elliot Jacques’s 1957 paper on “Death and the Mid-Life crisis” brought out the aspect of realisation of mortality as we approach mid-life. In this piece, Paul Flannery links the rise in middle aged people taking up extreme endurance activities as a response to such realisation and suggests that it is perhaps a more […]
Adm. McRaven Urges Graduates to Find Courage to Change the World
As a start-up, we run into people every now and then who try to use their muscle to put us in our place. In the narrow context of our lives and in the broader context of the world we live in, we loved this commencement speech given by US Navy veteran, Admiral McRaven (ninth commander […]
System level thinkers
Published on: 2 Dec, 2018 The intellectual legacies of four titans show that the smartest thinkers of every epoch are able to understand how the economic system works in its entirety whilst most of the rest of us only understand the world at an episodic and literal level. “Truly radical “Machiavellianism”, in the popular sense […]
Weak EPS growth and strong GDP growth can coexist
Published on: 28 Nov, 2018 There is needless angst in India about EPS growth staying weak even as the economy grows at 7%. Such a phenomenon is actually a good thing for the Indian economy – it highlights a shift to a more competitive, pro-consumer paradigm which sets the stage for efficiency improvements in the […]
Momentum Investing: It Works, But Why?
From the time we entered the stockmarket, all of us have been taught that “if everyone knows that the stock is a BUY then that info is fully factored in the stock price and you can’t make money”. But if that is the case then how is that “momentum investing – which is betting that the […]
Proxy resignation service helps Japan’s dutiful workers to quit dead end jobs
Have you been in a situation where you desperately want to quit a job but you don’t quite have it in you to tell your employer? Well, the Japanese have figured out a solution to this problem. In Japan, all you have to do is call a proxy resignation service, tell them you want to […]
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