This Pioneering Economist Says Our Obsession With Growth Must End
Central banks globally are battling inflation with tighter monetary policy willing to sacrifice growth in the process. Whereas the ongoing heatwaves across the world, which many attribute to climate change, beg the question as to why don’t we sometimes sacrifice growth to battle environmental damage for a more sustainable future. Here’s an interview with Herman […]
Why Isn’t New Technology Making Us More Productive
For all the euphoria over the past 20 years about the rise of new types of tech, there is scant evidence that even in the country which has most aggressively invested in tech – the USA – labour productivity is actually enhanced by the application of technology. As this piece in the NYT says, “Innovations like […]
Farmers That Finance the World
Marc Rubenstein’s Net Interest is fast becoming one of the most widely read blogs focussing on the global financial services industry. Rubenstein, a former hedge fund manager himself, in his blogs, dives deep into topical subjects concerning the industry or in-depth analyses of a sub-sector or a company in each of these blogs. This one […]
A new ‘miracle’ weight-loss drug really works — raising huge questions
Increasingly obesity is being viewed by scientists as a disease rather than as a lifestyle problem. It follows therefore that scientists now view obesity as a problem that can be remedied by drugs rather by dieting & exercise. Enter, the wonder drug that can cure obesity: “Wegovy, made by Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk, is the first […]
ONDC and the Next Digital Commerce Evolution
In the 12th June edition of Three Longs & Shorts we highlighted Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani and Chief Economic Advisor V.Anantha Nageswaran’s piece in Mint on Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) – see https://marcellus.in/story/open-network-for-e-commerce-its-an-idea-whose-time-has-come/ To quote Nilekani & Nageswaran: “The idea of ONDC was conceived and has been widely discussed since April 2020, soon after the first […]
The Never Ending Generosity of the Public Sector
In this newsletter, we discuss the consolidation which is taking place across the Financial Services sector in India. Indian public sector banks (PSBs) are plagued by conflict of interest wherein the largest shareholder wants to run the banks for benefit of the public at large, mostly at the expense of minority shareholder. Historically this has […]
Covid learning loss has been a global disaster
Many of us agonised about how long authorities took to reopen schools and get our kids back on the path to learning. Whilst we knew that prolonged closures would have a lasting damaging effect on our kids’ futures, this article in The Economist cites new studies by World Bank and Mckinsey that attempt to show […]
Crispr for the Masses Gets a Little Closer to Reality
Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020 for her contribution to the path breaking gene-editing technology CRISPR. The development of the technology has been beautifully captured in Walter Isaacson’s book – The Code Breaker. While gene-editing has raised prospects of curing rare diseases, a new development bodes well for potentially curing diseases which […]
The race to reclaim the dark
One of the great joys of travelling to far flung islands like, say, Havelock Island in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands is that with minimal light pollution in such places, you can see the midnight sky studded with thousands of stars. In several parts of the world, people are taking active measures that they too […]
Twitter Still Wants Musk’s Money
It is never a boring day in a world where the wealthiest man is Elon Musk. In early May, we featured a piece from Steven Pearlstein, where he reckoned that he wouldn’t be surprised if Musk eventually walks away from his somewhat hostile Twitter bid. Indeed, earlier this month, Musk withdrew his bid citing Twitter’s disclosure failures […]
Jagadish Chandra Bose: The first complete biography investigates his life as well as his science
Jagadish Chandra Bose was the first Indian scientist to make pathbreaking discoveries in a variety of fields. The American Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers regards him as one of the fathers of radio science. Bose did most of his research more than a century ago and “Bose’s Galena detector was the first semiconductor device and […]
The surprising revival of eastern Germany
As Xi Jinping draws the Bamboo Curtain to gradually isolate China from the world at large, it is but natural that foreign investment which would have once gone to China now migrates elsewhere. Whilst some of these investments will go to the other Emerging Markets, so singular was China’s rise in high tech manufacturing that […]
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