How well is our country doing? This is a complicated question for many reasons, not least of which is the sheer size and diversity of India. Aggregate measures like GDP feel unsatisfyingly broad and don’t capture the improvements (or degradations) in our human capital, environment, and social relations. Pakistan and China always act as looming spectres in any comparative analysis - will our choices take us down the path of our struggling neighbor to the West or will we need to compromise on our democratic ideals to reach the lofty economic heights of our once-again triumphant neighbor to the North? Will we finally take off on a period of sustained high growth or will we get mired in low single digits of growth and squander our ‘demographic dividend’ as we have all learned to call it?
I have been thinking long and hard about some of these questions. To begin to answer these questions has been a humbling exercise. There are so many lenses to take, so much data and opinions to sift through. It’s been tough. What began as an idea to write a macro-focused essay on India’s economic trajectory has morphed into a series of articles that each take an enquiring eye on one aspect of India’s position in the world. Over the next few months, we will look at the following deep dives: livelihoods and employment, health, education, infrastructure, and macroeconomic outlook. There might be more or might be less. We will discover the path together.
While the tone of some of these is likely to be sobering (livelihoods, especially for women, is a particularly tough read), I find myself broadly optimistic. I think something is brewing in India - it will not be a sudden resurgence but it will happen over the next 20-25 years. It is always useful to remember that our national experiment is one of the most challenging ever attempted in the history of mankind. Close to a billion people, mired in poverty, coming out of a century of colonial plunder, beset on all sides by hostile and/or struggling states, chose to commit to the lofty ideals of democracy. And in the grand scheme of things, 75 years on from independence, we are still getting started.
I have decided to call this series ‘Assessing India’. Issues of Assessing India will continue to be interspersed by NIVs that will keep recommending my favorite articles. So until AI #1 drops, here are 7 of my favorite articles:
Links of the Week
Finance - Nassim Nicholas Taleb is back, this time criticizing the world of cryptocurrencies (so you know this is going to be good). Taleb has been a vocal critic of excessive confidence and risk-taking, and now he's turned his attention to Bitcoin and FTX, a popular cryptocurrency exchange. In his trademark contrarian style, Taleb questions the long-term viability and stability of these digital assets, arguing that they are built on a foundation of speculative mania rather than sound financial principles. (Link)
He had decided that the crypto world “combined a cult with a financial instrument” and attracted a cluster of computer people who didn’t understand finance. The blockchain? “Explain to me why you’d ever do business with somebody you don’t trust.”
Cinema - Great article on why movies these days look so dark on the screen. (Link)
A key concept to understand in the “Why are modern movies so dark?” debate is “motivated” light. Motivated light sources are those that have a rational, tactile logic within the world of a particular scene: sunlight pouring through a window, or the warm glow of a desk lamp. Unmotivated lights are the exact opposite: lighting designed to create a particular stylistic impression that might not have any “real” basis in the context of a scene.
Medicine - On the miraculous anti-obesity drugs semaglutide and tirzepatide that have taken the medical world by storm. The world of drug discovery is one to keep an eye out on in my opinion. We might be on the verge of a golden age.
Both semaglutide and tirzepatide underwent randomized, placebo-controlled trials for obesity, with marked reduction of weight as shown below. Tirzepatide at dose of 10 to 15 mg per week achieved >20% body weight reduction. Semaglutide at a dose of 2.4 mg achieved ~17% reduction. These per cent changes in body weight are 7-9 fold more than seen with placebo (2-3% reduction).
AI - One of the best articles I have read on understanding the scaling laws behind large language models. (Link)
There is no apparent barrier to LLMs continuing to improve substantially from where they are now. More data and compute should make them better, and it looks feasible to make datasets ~10x bigger and to buy ~100x more compute. While these would help, they would not come close to saturating the performance of modern language model architectures.
China - Dan Wang’s annual letters are always a delight to read. Moreover, they are invaluable for understanding what goes on inside the black box that is China. (Link)
Yunnan resists any underlying unity in its cuisine. It’s a land of jungle food and mountain food, in which cooking methods that make sense for the northern snowlands don’t bear any resemblance to those in the southern rainforests. It’s not just that culinary trends tend to splinter when they enter the mountains. Border cities take inspiration from nearby regions: Tibetan, Burmese, Laotian, and Thai traditions in the west, and Sichuan, Guizhou, Guangxi and Vietnamese traditions in the east.
Writing - A lovely call for more long-form writing on the internet. One of my favorite articles of the past few months. (Link)
Why write long content? No binding reason: just if you want to do something big; if your ego or your morals demand it; if you want to seed more than a one-time flurry of agreement, disagreement, indifference, impressions.
Philosophy - An engaging New Yorker profile of the philosopher Agnes Callard that becomes a fascinating meditation into the philosophy of marriage. (Link)
Agnes views romantic relationships as the place where some of the most pressing philosophical problems surface in life, and she tries to “navigate the moral-opprobrium reflexes in the right way,” she said, so that people won’t dismiss the topic as unworthy of public discussion. “If you’re a real philosopher,” she once tweeted, “you don’t need privacy, because you’re a living embodiment of your theory at every moment, even in your sleep, even in your dreams.”
Happy reading!