5 posts tagged with "history"

It's day 3 of Coronavirus lockdown and things are not getting any better. Yet.

The US has become the country with largest number of Coronavirus cases (~85K) surpassing China and Italy. Given the enormous impact US has on the world economy, I shudder to think what impact this will have on it.

India has slowed down its exponential growth in cases a bit, but it is still growing pretty fast. Or may be its just because of the extremely low number of tests we are doing. Who knows?

Today I was checking the corona cases in different countries and was wondering why doesn't Russia figure somewhere in the top. That's when I stumbled upon this piece. The headline read:

Coronavirus deals blow to Putin's plans to stay in power until 2036​

When I read the article, I found that Putin was planning to make some fundamental changes in the constitution which would give him power till 2036. Yes you read it right!

16 years of unchallenged rule.

Can politicians really do such things? Pass a law which keeps you president for 16 more years, when you have already served 4 terms as president?

Turns out they can. His proposal was already passed by the parliament and the constitutional court, and was pending a vote by people, which is now postponed due to coronavirus.

Apparently Putin runs a "managed democracy". It means that:

power flows from one man: The president has no serious political competition, his friends and allies control the commanding heights of the economy and Putin is the ultimate arbiter of disputes between elites

I was wondering how the Russian people must be feeling. And why are they not fighting back?

But then I recalled that our situation in India is not much different. Before this virus hit us, there were protests in street opposing the absurd CAA-NRC acts.

Are we going down the same path as Russia? Would a time come when our politicians will seek a 16 yr term extension - and "we the people" will not have the vigor to oppose it?

Day 2 of lock down in India, and thankfully things haven't become a lot worse here. We have still not hit the 1000 mark in number of COVID-19 cases. Though situation in the US and Spain has become a lot worse, which is terrifying.

Today I was reading this post by hedge fund manager Ray Dalio. He talks about how he reads history to understand what the world is going through. Since his job is based on having a more accurate model of the world, of course it makes sense for him to do so.

But doesn't it more or less apply to all of us? Especially those who are running their own ventures. We are always trying to predict what the world is gonna be 1-2 years down the line and build product for that future. Ray Dalio says that the best way to learn what is going to happen in future is to try to find similar patterns in the past. History never repeats, but it rhymes. The details are different but the broader patterns are similar.

So, if you are struggling with a challenging business problem or struggling to understand how to position your product in a competitive space - study history. How has this been done in the past. Surely it will give you some guidelines or frameworks to think about it.

As Dalio says, there are many things which we may be experiencing first time in our lives. But they are not happening for the first time in the world. Don't be an ant and react to what is happening. Take a seat back, try to study if something similar happened in the past - and try to form a model on how the future may pan out.

But this is not a one time thing. Don't assume that the first model you build will be perfect. You need to keep updating the model if there are any surprises. But having a model is a good point to start with.

PS: Dalio has some amazing resources at his two sites: https://www.principles.com/ and https://economicprinciples.org/. He also publishes detailed reports about his studies. Like this. If you are trying to better understand the world and predict the future - I am sure you will like these.

Today was the first day of the 21 day COVID-19 lock down.

I spent my morning struggling to get groceries. Fortunately the nearby super market was open and most of the important items were present.  Items like milk and floor cleaner were over - but most vegetables, rice and yes, Maggi was available. If you see somebody else buying something, you also keep a couple of packets of it. It took 40 minutes to clear the payment queue - but well, that's a small inconvenience given the situation we are in.

Today, I read a few pages from Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power. Noam Chomsky is a acclaimed scholar with lot's of controversial opinion - so it's a fun read. One essay which caught my eye was his discussion on free markets.

He argues that

there is not a single case on record in history of any country that has developed successfully through adherence to "free market" principles : none

He gives example that most successful pockets of economies have grown with state intervention. United States had excessive state intervention from early days - right from defence funding which gave birth to the Silicon Valley tech companies to the earlier textile industry which survived because of high tariff on imported goods.

We see even this playing out today with China's protectionist govt. policy giving birth to multibillion companies like Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu. While back home in India, the poster child of startups, Flipkart was acquired by Walmart.

This made me think. Is the narrative of free markets just a hogwash?

Chomsky says

the "free market" ideology is very useful - it's a weapon against the general population here, because it's an argument against social spending, and it's a weapon against poor people abroad , because we can hold it up to them and say "You guys have to follow these rules," then just go ahead and robs them.

China never worried about being protectionist. Still its tech industry is doing pretty well and even challenging the US.

Is India's policy of keeping markets open, just falling into the narrative of "free markets are good" which other countries want us to believe in? Should India be more interventionist?

Today, Prime Minister Modi announced lock down of the whole nation for 21 days. Apparently the threat of corona virus is much higher than it was envisaged to be.

More crucially, the US is having  hard time coping with it. India, with a much poorer healthcare infra is at a much higher risk.

What this means for us is:

• More time spent locked down in front of computer
• No outside running & exercises

Since, there will be lot more time at hand, and looking into screens gets boring & stressful after sometime. I have decided 2 things

• Spend the extra time after work on reading books. I went through my personal library and dug out some older books which I always wanted to read. Hopefully, will post notes from them here in coming days.
• Write a blog daily at night till the lock down is in effect. This would help me clear my head and hopefully share some notes here

Today I picked upon Glimpses of World History by Nehru. Its amazing how long term he plans. He is in a jail near Allahabad circa 1931 but is writing letters to his daughter Indira - to educate her.

I am still in the early history of ancient world. Two points which stuck with me:

• India & China are the only civilizations which have continued in some form or other throughout the last 5000 years. Other ancient civilizations like Egypt only have some remains from the past, but there's no thread of culture/traditions running from the ancient Egyptian civilization to modern day Egypt.
• Greece, though a very advanced civilization, always preferred to have City states. They never had a large kingdom like Persia or later day India. Is it because of any geographical factors or is it just that they are fiercely independent? Also, the Ancient Greeks are from a branch of Aryan race - Greek Aryans. Similar to the branch which came to India and was called Indo-Aryans.

I picked up this book on recommendation by Bill Gates for it somewhere in social media. And I must say, I am not disappointed.

Some of the key ideas of the book:

• Eurasia became the cradle of civilization (Fertile Crescent) because it has a long stretch of land lying at the same latitude level - allowing high range of crops and animals to chose from to domesticate. Americas or Africa or Australia didn't have that long stretch - which was connected ecologically and geographically. Being at same latitude implied similar climate and hence ease of distribution.

If I parallel it with startup terminology, distribution was much more important than where the invention was actually made. Because of huge scale available for any innovation in Eurasia, it soon picked up - and reached other lands.

• Another major cause may be the wiping off of large mammals in Americas during the Pleistocene period, which led to unavailability of animals available for domestication in America, leading to slow growth in agriculture (as there was no muscle power of domesticated big mammals) and lack of germs which Native Americans were immune to it. Lack of immunity of Native Americans led to their susceptibility to Eurasian germs which were largely occupied through domesticated animals.

• Food production and settled villages led to development of better technologies, as people can now specialize in particular activities, rather than worrying about food all day long. Thus the major growth in technologies came from better co-operation and financing, rather than individual genius.

This points very starkly the need for teams and leaders who can lead teams to produce results. Though as a society we tend to indulge in hero worship, but the main contribution of leaders/heroes may be to lead teams of great people to achieve extra-ordinary results.

So, EQ is more important than IQ, not only today - but even in historic times. Something similar was pointed out by Alan Kay in his lecture in YC startup school, that point of view contributes to 80 IQ points.

• Human societies have been built on war and struggle. That is what leads to progress. Peace may be periods of stagnation and lack of technological development. Even in recent history, World Wars were times of great technological breakthroughs. Humans innovate best when they are under do - or - die situation. Peaceful innovation may be just a mirage.