Weekend reading links

1. Fascinating article on aging,

As the years pass, our chromosomes contract and fracture, genes turn on and off haphazardly, mitochondria break down, proteins unravel or clump together, reserves of regenerative stem cells dwindle, bodily cells stop dividing, bones thin, muscles shrivel, neurons wither, organs become sluggish and dysfunctional, the immune system weakens and self-repair mechanisms fail. There is no programmed death clock ticking away inside us — no precise expiration date hard-wired into our species — but, eventually, the human body just can’t keep going.

Social advances and improving public health may further increase life expectancy and lift some supercentenarians well beyond Calment’s record. Even the most optimistic longevity scientists admit, however, that at some point these environmentally induced gains will run up against human biology’s limits — unless, that is, we fundamentally alter our biology.

Or this on the case against extending the age, 

Perhaps the most common concern is the potential for overpopulation, especially considering humanity’s long history of hoarding and squandering resources and the tremendous socioeconomic inequalities that already divide a world of nearly eight billion. There are still dozens of countries where life expectancy is below 65, primarily because of problems like poverty, famine, limited education, disempowerment of women, poor public health and diseases like malaria and H.I.V./AIDS, which novel and expensive life-extending treatments will do nothing to solve.

Lingering multitudes of superseniors, some experts add, would stifle new generations and impede social progress. “There is a wisdom to the evolutionary process of letting the older generation disappear,” said Paul Root Wolpe, the director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University, during one public debate on life extension. “If the World War I generation and World War II generation and perhaps, you know, the Civil War generation were still alive, do you really think that we would have civil rights in this country? Gay marriage?”

2.  Fascinating story on the origins of venture capital, from the whaling industry,

To understand what was a risky venture in 19th-century America, visit the Whaling Museum in Nantucket. The industry thrived on this Massachusetts island, now transformed from an outpost for coarse sailors into a swanky beach spot. Two centuries ago, whales were valuable because of the lucrative oil in their head-cases. Captains amassed fleets of sloops and dozens of men armed with harpoons to hunt them. For lucky crews that found their “white whales” the rewards were enormous, but so were the risks of losing ships and souls in the hunt... The risk of losing all was too great for bankers, who refused to lend money to whalers. So a new breed, the whaling agent, stepped in to provide captains with capital in return for a share of profits. Although stakes in many voyages might be lost they spread the capital so that one successful voyage made up for it. This model was an oddity in the 1800s, but the trade-off will sound familiar to venture capitalists today.

3. Scott Galloway on the reality distortion antics of Elon Musk in what he calls the "spectacle economy". This nicely captures Tesla's profitability

4. Tyler Cowen makes the point that patent restrictions are not the binding constraint to expanding vaccine supply. Instead he points to investments in factories, supply of intermediates etc, and also argues that transferring technology like than on the mRNA is very difficult. 

These are not mutually exclusive. As is only too well known with Pharma industry in general, patents are a problem. But the other issues raised by Tyler too are as much a problem and need to be addressed. Mere emergency licensing is not going to get us anywhere. 

Licenses are widely available. AstraZeneca have licensed their vaccine for production with manufactures around the world, including in India, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, China and South Africa. J&J’s vaccine has been licensed for production by multiple firms in the United States as well as with firms in Spain, South Africa and France. Sputnik has been licensed for production by firms in India, China, South Korea, Brazil and pending EMA approval with firms in Germany and France. Sinopharm has been licensed in the UAE, Egypt and Bangladesh. Novavax has licensed its vaccine for production in South Korea, India, and Japan and it is desperate to find other licensees but technology transfer isn’t easy and there are limited supplies of raw materials.

5. New paper by Dev Patel, Justin Sandefur, and Arvind Subramanian, that adds to the literature on convergence among developed and developing countries. They write,

At the country-level at least, we should update, perhaps even shed, three of the deeply entrenched ideas about cross-country growth: unconditional divergence, middle income traps, and volatile and unstable growth within poor countries over time. Since the mid-1990s, it's not just China, India, or a select group of Asian countries that have done well; developing countries on average outpaced the developed world. And in this era of unconditional convergence, middle-income countries far from being stuck in a trap experienced reduced volatility and more persistent growth. In other words, the facts have changed considerably. That convergence happened over the last 25 years is, of course, no guarantee that it will continue. Until we know what caused it (exogenous factors related to cheap nance, Chinese growth, and/or country-specific attributes), and until we know the impact of future developments (such as deglobalization, climate change, and rise of labor-saving technology), unconditional convergence cannot be taken for granted. That said, we must finally acknowledge that what has happened since the mid-1990s is historically remarkable. Developing countries as a group have broken from a pattern of development going back nearly 500 years. Between the 1400s and the industrial revolution, there was a reversal of fortune (Acemoglu et al., 2002) and subsequent divergence, involving today's poor countries that were once rich falling behind industrial nations. Since the industrial revolution, reversal gave way to divergence in growth rates between rich and poor nations (Pritchett, 1997). Both those historical trends have been arrested since the mid-1990s, making the unconditional convergence finding truly noteworthy.

6. Business Standard examines the Rs 4500 Cr production linked incentive scheme for encouraging solar manufacturing in India.  

PLI will be disbursed for five years, post the commissioning of manufacturing plants, on sales of high efficiency solar PV modules... The Centre will impose 40 per cent basic customs duty, BCD, on imported solar cells and modules from April 2022 in order to support dom­estic solar manufacturing. Close to 85 per cent of India’s solar capacity is built on imp­orted cells and modules, majority of which come from China. “BCD offers much better incentive to a foreign player to come and manufacture in India, rather than PLI. Under the PLI, the incentive is very less compared to their capex. For large scale manufacturers, neither the PLI scheme nor BCD is beneficial. Established solar component makers are based in special economic zones (SEZs) and the Centre has not offered any BCD exemption to them,” said a senior industry executive.