Marcellus Insights
Later Marriage & Lower Fertility Signals the End of India’s Demographic Dividend
At a very early stage in its development, India is tracing the same path that the richer economies did i.e., Indians are marrying later in life & having fewer children. Specifically, these shifts are taking place far more rapidly in the better educated, more employable parts of the Indian economy. As a result, the data […]
Short read: Not all FDI is the same: The country must rejig what statistics capture to focus on the right kind
The sharp depreciation of the Indian rupee in recent times is attributed to an expanding current account deficit thanks to rise in oil and gold prices, two of India’s biggest imports. But it has historically been balanced by a capital account surplus – FPI and FDI inflows, which have worryingly disappeared. Whilst the former is […]
Short read: LinkedIn is where everyone succeeds and nobody ever fails
Have you noticed how everyone on social media seems to be having exotic holidays that you somehow never manage yourself? Or that your spouse has never declared their love, or surprised you with a gift, quite the way the lucky ones on Instagram are by theirs? LinkedIn has become the corporate edition of the same […]
Short read: Maharashtra’s Ladki Bahin — India’s biggest cash handout to women meets the auditor
Over the past few years, the surest way to win an Indian state election has been to deposit money straight into women’s bank accounts. Madhya Pradesh’s Ladli Behna scheme lit the fuse in 2023, and one state after another — cutting neatly across party lines — has followed with a localised version. Women now make […]
Long read: The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshit
Billionaire population growth globally is at an all-time high. Whilst growing wealth inequality isn’t particularly great for society, many of the newly minted billionaires earned their stripes. Indeed, The Economist published an interesting piece on how for the first time, majority of billionaires have neither inherited their riches nor earned them primarily due to cronyism. […]
Long read: Winners & Losers of the AI Era
Ben Thompson writes a very popular blog on the business of technology called Stratechery. It is a go to blog for tech investors and tech entrepreneurs alike. Given tech is increasingly a part of all life around us, we would recommend the blog even if you don’t belong to either of those categories. Here, Patrick […]
Long read: The Future, Made in China
For a generation, “Made in China” was a story about scale. The country became the factory of the world by making ordinary goods in volumes, and at a cost, that no rival could come close to matching. Then it ran the same playbook on a piece of genuinely advanced technology — the electric car — […]
The Art of Enduring: How Great Companies Turn Crisis into Opportunity
Exactly a decade ago, we published the #1 Business Bestseller, ‘The Unusual Billionaires’. Out of the 7 companies profiled in the book, 6 have beaten the broader stockmarket in the intervening decade. Now, in our new book, ‘The Art of Enduring: How Great Companies Turn Crisis into Opportunity’, we decode the success of 5 more […]
University Education is Losing Value and That Has Profound Consequences
In Breakpoint we showed that in India, finishing school and going to work beats finishing college and looking for work. Graduate unemployment is near 30% while unemployment among Indians who cannot read or write is 3%. That was true before generative AI arrived at scale, however it is truer now. Stanford’s payroll study finds employment […]
Three forces that are making retirement harder
Saving for retirement used to be simple. Save through your working years, stop at 60, and live off the corpus. Three forces are now breaking that maths: People are living much longer, so the same corpus has to stretch across more years. The cost of living is rising much faster than the official number suggests […]
Short read: ‘Anti-Hindu’ crimes remain low in US, but MAGA hostility against Indians is growing
Over the past year we have heard from our friends, relatives and clients in America a narrative which is decades old (namely, anti-Indian racism in USA) but now interwoven with a new layer (namely, a splintering in the Indian community’s response to this racism with some Hindus claiming that their battle against racism does not […]
Short read: How South Koreans donated their family gold to rescue their country from the IMF bailout in 1998
The rapid rise of the South Korean economy to rich world status is a case study in universities across the world. But not too long ago, the country had to be bailed out by IMF after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, thanks to excessive foreign debt by its corporates amidst a plunging currency. This article […]
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