Learning by Proxy with Vivek Srinivasan

The cause and effect that economics predicts does not seem to be playing out in the real world. Something fundamental has changed in the nature of work and the structure of societies. Banks are not the main source of debt for the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor, hence tweaking bank interests makes no difference!

Under these circumstances, the old theories of economics do not work. We need to go back and take another look at all of them.

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I used to think dust was mud breaking down but it seems to be originating from sources that are even more human than I had earlier assumed. One of the biggest sources of dust is vehicles, not the exhaust but the tyres that they run on which disintegrate at increasing speed. The health repercussions are incredible!

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Driverless taxis have been in the offing for a very long time and we have stopped taking them seriously. When you least expect something to become a force in the industry, it most likely does become one. Driverless cars seem to be at that tipping point.

The problem no longer seems to be technology but people’s behaviour.

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Our body has an insanely powerful immune system. Most of the time when it is fighting against possible invaders, you do not even come to know that it has fought off invaders.

Our homes, environment and even our bodies are being sterilised more and more often as we have developed this fear of germs. This leaves our immune system with nothing to do but to turn on the body itself.

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Insulin grew into a big business as the number of cases of diabetes ballooned across the globe. Diabetes was the first disease that was termed a lifestyle disease. Obesity is the reverse. It is often a problem amongst the poor who cannot afford high-quality foods and end up eating a lot of ultra-processed foods.

A drug is offering hope and billing itself as a solution to the problem. Its popularity has soared and caused the company that manufactures it to be valued more than the country in which it resides. This is the story of Wegovy and Novo Nordisk.

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In this episode, I summarise two books that I recently read on the causes of Obesity. The Obesity Code written by Dr Jason Fung and Ultraprocessed People written by Chris van Tulleken. The two books play into each other with the obesity theme being central to both of them. This made it all the more interesting for me.

Obesity is not a result of a person’s inability to control oneself, it is a result of food being engineered in such a fashion that it promotes higher consumption. People who fall prey to this are the victims and not the villains.

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Media organisations across the globe want Google and Meta to compensate them each time a user clicks on links to these organisations. People across the Internet have named it the Link Tax. Lawmakers who have been lobbied are beginning to pursue this idea as well. Australia enacted the law in 2021 and Canada enacted on this year. Both companies played ball in 2021 but no longer seem to be willing to do that.

You can access my blog to see the images that I used as a part of the article here.

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The pandemic delivered a body blow to commercial real estate in many large cities. The white-collar workers who used to work in many of these cities have transitioned to hybrid work and are probably never going to go back to working 5 days a week in the office. This is resulting in many of these cities dying a slow death as a vast amount of commercial real estate lies empty.

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There was a time when it was normal for a city to catch on fire. This would often be a result of human stupidity. Poor and unplanned construction and lack of proper safety features were responsible for many of the fires. These were identified and fixed in the 20th century.

In the 21st century, we ushered in an era of wildfire. And now these are turning into urban fires as we all saw in Hawaii. Could many more cities be on the line? What will we do to protect ourselves?

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The Incandescent bulb was 100 years in the making and it lit up the world. So much so that we cannot even see the stars these days thanks to the lights in the city. That bulb had a 100-year run which is now coming to an end thanks to greater energy efficiency.

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