About 11 years ago, I cold-emailed Om for his guidance. I was an absolute nobody, living thousands of miles away. Not only did Om patiently explain how I should think about my career, he kept in touch over the past decade checking in on how I was doing. I left journalism last year to do something else -- coincidentally, again, following Om's footsteps -- and had been meaning to write a long email, sharing so much. I deeply regret missing the chance to have another conversation with him.
Om has been deeply impactful to my journalism career and beyond. He was way too kind and leaves a big vacuum.
"Say more" sounds like a terse but daft order / directive. Discussion boards lack non-verbal cues, so you have to be sometimes extra mindful with words.
For example, India based companies have had the ability to create and market enterprise class software for decades … at scale. And there is certainly enough talent that has been exposed to business logic and domain expertise while working at India-based subdivisions of the biggest legacy players. Yet over the decades, even with this insight and a massive low-cost skilled workforce, no regional vendors have successfully emerged to challenge the legacy US vendors, in our view. Factors such as having enterprise class sales teams, technology cross-licensing agreements, proprietary and patented IP, industry specific domain expertise, aligned workflows with industry practice, being first-to- market, having brand awareness, scale, or effective go-to-market strategies are just the tip of the iceberg when looking into the key attributes needed to compete effectively in the software sector and … just making code is not enough.
(The note isn't in public domain, hence sharing here the text and screenshot.)
The paper interestingly finds that fertility rates have fallen to historically low levels in virtually all high-income countries due to a fundamental reordering of adult priorities rather than economic factors.
That implies adult priorities are independent of economic factors. Which is rather weird - many lives would be so different if they involved less future worries and fight for survival.
So far I've only skimmed the paper, but here's an interesting quote:
> Among respondents of a 2018 survey conducted for the New York Times, the desire to “have more leisure time” is offered as the leading reason for not having children among adults who...
If your assumption is that economic reasons cause the decline in fertility rates, it's tempting (and natural!) to view every alternative explanation in the context of economics. In other words: all alternative explanations are symptoms of economic problems, so the root cause remains money.
But quotes like this can also be interpreted as people changing their priorities regardless of income and worries about housing. Maybe, freed of traditional role models, people would rather watch Netflix all day long in their single person household.
Fact is, people in the past had far more worries and were fighting for survival much harder than the average person in rich countries today - and still had far more children.
Absolutely, yes. There's lots of factors, and any answer that just says "Because this one reason obviously", without giving arguments and statistics showing why it's that and not something else, is worthless.
It's pretty clearly not simply household income vs. cost of living, though, the data just doesn't support it.
It’s called sour grapes or more charitably: people adjust their expectations according to their opportunities. It’s entirely rational to cease wanting what you cannot have.
Om has been deeply impactful to my journalism career and beyond. He was way too kind and leaves a big vacuum.