5 Amazing Ideas In 5 Minutes (#19)
Hyperinflation, Free Will, And More
Hello there,
Welcome to all new subscribers who’ve joined the hood in search of novel ideas & insights.
Every month, I do an article with 5 mind-opening ideas that’ll make you wonder why you haven’t sent me a bitcoin out of gratitude already.
Enough with the build up. Let’s get down to work:
Triple-Selected Indians: Kamala, Tulsi, Vivek. Sundar, Satya, Parag. These aren’t 6 random names taken from the Aadhaar database. If you’ve are on enough family Whatsapp groups, you’d immediately know that these are Indian-Americans who’ve made it to the highest rungs of the US establishment. How is that Indians are so good at reaching the top? One of the reasons is that they’ve gone through a triple selection process. First, Indian immigrants predominantly belong to higher castes who had better access to education. Then, many cracked the most competitive exams in the country which gave them access to the West. And finally, the competitive US job market and visa process ensures that the very best of our lot end up in the US. When you run 3 layers of selection on a HUGE group, the fact that some of them make it to the top isn’t very surprising.
On Free Will: Humans have a history of believing that toothless grandmas caused natural disasters, that kids got schizophrenia because of their mothers, and that epileptic patients caused bad events. As a result, these people suffered insults, ostracisation, and even torture & death, as in the case of witch hunts in medieval Europe. Fortunately, advances in science have made it clear that these unfortunate people didn’t cause any bad events and has helped us end this sickening trend. Similarly, Robert Sapolsky argues that when we finally get clarity about the fact that all our actions are caused by factors beyond our control (I covered this in detail here), we’ll be able to build a much better society that doesn’t brutally punish people for committing crimes or engaging in (illegal) stuff that they just couldn’t have avoided. Definitely a point worth pondering.
Hyperinflation: What’s it like to live through hyperinflation? It’s basically a fire sale of all assets because people have completely lost faith in the government. At that point, people don’t care about booking a loss while selling their stocks or house or bonds- they just want to get their hands on whatever money they can before asset prices move towards zero. A hard hitting statement that got me thinking was “Every person in Argentina has 2 jobs- one is their main job and the other is that of a Finance Director”. That’s what happens when you live in an economy facing high or hyperinflation- managing money, switching currencies quickly before it loses most of its value, etc itself become a full time job, not something we can take for granted (as you and I do).
When money loses its meaning Luggage trends: Even the luggage industry isn’t prone to disruption. Enough opportunists have been salivating at the $174B global opportunity, which has led to the rise of cool new D2C brands like Away and Monos (and Mokobara in India). Finding a white space between cheap-ass bags and the expensive ones sold by legacy brands like LVMH, these companies are offering sleek products with minimalist design to capture the emerging class of younger travellers. This seems to be a trend across categories- package your product in a cool way, entice the next generation and take advantage of the brand fatigue. Old wine, new bottle, lots of funding.
Explanatory Inversions: We often ask questions like “Why do people believe false things?” or “Why are people poor?”, but those aren’t the right questions. Looking at the long arc of human history, one will quickly realise that our default state has been to believe in falsehoods, myths & superstitions, and that we have remained poor for most of our existence. The fact that we sometimes believe things that are true, and that we suddenly got rich starting in the 1700s are the anomaly- the exceptions that really need to be explained! This is called an explanatory inversion, where you flip the question and tackle the thing that contradicts all trends and is the one that actually deserves deeper analysis and explanations.
That’s it for the day folks. If you loved this and want more brain food, read these:
The Story Of Our Sexuality (Quite sexy)
How To Build Your Learning Machine (Important)