Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We hear stories all the time of how products of Western companies are copied brazenly by the Chinese. Of how copyright, patent laws and intellectual property are violated with impunity by Chinese companies.   As I was reading Chinese venture capitalist and ex-Googler, ex-Microsoft, Kai-Fu Lee’s book on AI, I realized this is how Chinese companies operate against everybody – including each other. It’s not something restricted only to their dealings with the West.   Here are two examples of how brutal, vicious and underhanded the fights between Chinese companies are. Before the smartphone, TenCent had a popular messenger/chat application for the desktop called QQ. Another company, Qihoo , came up with a popular antivirus software. Unrelated areas, right? Until TenCent decided to enter the antivirus market. Sneakily, TenCent changed the installation program – if a user tired to install QQ, it would also install TenCent’s antivirus software . Given how popular QQ was, this effec

Why does capitalism produce such economic wonders while communism flops miserably on the same front? Note I just asked about the economic aspects, not the political side of things. I’ll pre-empt the wrongly cited counter-example: China. Sorry, but China is not a communist country in economic terms. Rory Sutherland dismisses efficiency as the critical difference between the two systems. Rather, he says: “Truly free markets trade efficiency for a costly process of market-tested innovation heavily reliant on dumb luck. The reason this inefficient process is necessary is that, though we pretend otherwise, no one knows anything about anything: most of the achievements of consumer capitalism were never planned; they are explicable only in retrospect, if at all.” And in contrast, he says: “The reason to avoid communism is not because it is inefficient, but because it tries to be too intelligent.” Too intelligent? Sutherland elaborates that communism thinks it knows what is ne

Most of continental Europe, and Germany in particular, is highly critical of the disruption that the Internet wreaks on traditional companies. One such article by Shoshana Zuboff was a criticism that a new form of capitalism is taking over the world. She calls it “surveillance capitalism”: “(It is) a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior.” And who’s doing this surveillance? The big bad wolf, aka the Internet companies. She elaborates what she means: “The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life –your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit.” Why is it so easy for companies to collect data about us? “(Because it combines) the clandestine coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism (of people).” It’s hard to argue with any of that. But typical of such criticisms, she then

A while back, I’d written about Yuval Noah Harari’s comment from his first book, Sapiens , that capitalism and consumerism are intertwined , that the combo is like the “shark that must swim or suffocate”. The instinctive reaction of many to that is one of revulsion: why is everyone so greedy? Can’t we just be satisfied with our current comforts and possessions? In his follow-up book, Homo Deus , Harari answers those questions by using India as the example: -          India’s population is growing at the rate of 1.2% p.a. -          Simple maths then tells us that unless India’s economy grows by at least the same amount each year, “unemployment will rise, salaries will fall and the average standard of living will decline”. -          Next comes the kicker: even if India’s population stabilizes, and the middle class is satisfied with its current standard of living, “what should India do about its hundreds of millions of poverty stricken citizens?” -          If the pie rema

Naomi Klein says that capitalism cannot be the solution to the problem of climate change: “If we really believed that climate change is an existential crisis, if we believed climate change is a weapon of mass destruction, as John Kerry said, why on Earth would you leave it to the vagaries of the market?” Klein clarifies that she is not saying that “the market has no role”. While agreeing that there will be “solar and wind millionaires”, she says that a solution to climate change requires major changes that can only be achieved via “a strong role for the public sector, a strong role for regulations and, yes, incentives”. Klein’s approach sounds like a (much) stronger version of the approach Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein described in their book, Nudge . Jeremy Waldron describes the book thus:  “Some (choices) make themselves clamorously known; others have to be unearthed…There is no getting away from this: choices are always going to be structured in some manner, wheth

Pope Francis is ruffling feathers within the church. For instance, can you believe he said this in an interview? “Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense.” Or that politics: “ has its own field of action, which is not that of religion. Political institutions are secular by definition and operate in independent spheres.” Imagine the implication on laws on homosexuality or abortions in the West! And then the Pope criticized capitalism: “The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose…(the absolute autonomy of the marketplace) reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. ” That criticism reminded me of this 1999 article by Harvey Cox , a professor of divinity at Harvard University, who compared religion (Christianity in particular) with capitalism. This line sums up his

Facebook was in the news because Goldman Sachs’ investment in it valued the company at $50 billion. That’s $50 billion for a company that makes $2 billion a year in revenues ( not profit). So why pay so much for it? One of my friends said people are willing to pay so much because they expect (hope?) Facebook will figure out a way to generate money via advertising. Or they’ll find a completely new way of making money directly or indirectly from their 500 million members. After all, who can predict the ways of the “brave new world”, my friend asked. And that’s capitalism: creating new ways to make money. Capitalism, of course, can also destroy existing ways of making money. Like when Google started offering free navigation services on its Android OS for cell phones in late 2009, Nokia had to follow suit and stop charging for its Ovi Maps (Who’d pay for Nokia’s navigation service if they could get it free from Google?). And with both Google and Nokia making navigation directions free