Daniel Susskind explaining the pitfalls of relentless pursuit of growth and how we can sustainably grow without causing an ecological disaster.

Growth does not come from using more and more finite resources, but from discovering more and more productive ways of using those finite resources. In other words, it comes not from the tangible world of objects, but from the intangible world of ideas. And the universe of those intangible ideas is unimaginably vast: as good as infinite. In other words, our finite planet is not the constraint that matters when thinking about the future of economic growth.

— WE MUST CHANGE THE NATURE OF GROWTH

Pallava Bagla describing how ISRO manages to keep the costs low.

At the moment, he says, India uses small rocket launchers because they don’t have anything stronger. But that means India’s spacecraft take much longer to reach their destination.

So, when Chandrayaan-3 was launched, it orbited the Earth several times before it was sling-shot into the lunar orbit, where it went around the Moon a few times before landing. On the other hand, Russia’s Luna-25 escaped the Earth’s gravity quickly riding a powerful Soyuz rocket.

“We used Mother Earth’s gravity to nudge us to the Moon. It took us weeks and a lot of resourceful planning. Isro has mastered this and done it successfully so many times.”

— Why it costs India so little to reach the Moon and Mars

Let’s say you’re a student and you use ChatGPT to write your essays for you. Give it the right prompts and it will produce pieces that are good enough to get the grade you need. That seems like a win: it saves you time and effort, presuming your tutors don’t notice or don’t care. Maybe you get through the whole of university this way. But be wary of this equilibrium. Over the longer term, you will be stunting the growth of your own mind. The struggle of turning inchoate thought into readable sentences and paragraphs is a powerful exercise for the brain. It’s how you get better at thinking. It is thinking.

— The Good Enough Trap

So if I want higher returns, now this is where it flips away from being me and it’s no longer my characteristic, but I do want higher returns for higher risk, then you choose which instrument has actually given you those higher risk. And I think by and large, this has become a function of size and manager affluence. So the size question would be that as you grow bigger and bigger in size, the number of companies that you can buy into in India becomes smaller and smaller.

So now the biggest Indian mutual fund is nearly 80,000 crores.

Oh, they hit 80,000 crores?

70 plus thousand crores. So at that rate, at the 80,000 crore rate, even if I have 100 companies, I don’t think he has 100 companies, he has 50 or 60 companies. But you’re still buying more, nearly a thousand crores per company.

Now the number of companies that you can afford to buy a thousand crores for is now countable in the total number of companies you actually have. The 100th company in India today has a 1 lakh crore market cap. That means if you bought 100 companies with a thousand crores each then the 100th company you would own 1% off.

So effectively, you’re owning more and more percentage of… So what this happens is you just have to spread yourself too thin. You can’t meaningfully take large bets.

And until Indian market cap of Indian companies reaches a much higher degree, you’re limited by the growth of… The size of the mutual fund is greater than the growth of market cap of all the companies. So in the sense that that becomes your limiting factor.

— Capitalmind Podcast: Mutual Funds, PMS, or AIF: Choosing the Right Investment Vehicle for Your Needs