arctotherium Profile picture
Mar 14, 2024 14 tweets 6 min read Read on X
Book thread on "The Billionaire's Apprentice," by Anita Raghavan, an Indian-American journalist. It chronicles the rise and fall of three-time McKinsey director and Goldman-Sachs board member Rajat Gupta and billionaire hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam. (1/n) Image
Raghavan refers to Rajat's generation as the "twice-blessed," benefitting from both the end of the Raj and the passing of the Hart-Celler act of 1965, which allowed them to escape their newly independent homeland and come to the US instead, where they quickly rose to the top.
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The book spends some time chronicling the ethnic divisions in NY finance and business. There was a WASP ethnic clique and a Jewish one, and the newly arriving Indians quickly set up their own. The usual process was firms beginning to hire Indians to get a leg up on...
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...their American competitors, followed by the Indians leaving or taking over and hiring more Indians, forming their own ethnic network, and shutting Americans out. This process is an example of a prisoner's dilemma; Americans...
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...are harmed by being shut out of large chunks of the market by Indian ethnic networks (note: ethnic networking is a zero-sum game; other groups doing it hurts you), but companies feel the need to hire Indians to compete. The solution to this dilemma is immigration restriction.
Raj Rajaratnam in particular used an ethnic Indian network of insiders at a number of American tech companies as a source of internal secrets to use for insider trading, making billions. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs got over ancestral hatreds to form a common front against whites.
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Despite being a book about Indians committing crimes, the book practically oozes Indian triumphalism, with Gupta's ascension to director of McKinsey representing the company rejecting the 'homogenous [read: white] past' in favor of the 'diverse and multicultural future'. Image
The first Indian at McKinsey, Tino, made it a priority to promote and mentor more Indians. His group then helped lead white collar outsourcing to India in the 90s.
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Raj Rajatnaram was incredibly successful with his insider trading, becoming one of the 400 richest people in America. Image
What brought Gupta down was selling information about Goldman Sachs to Rajatnaram while on the board. Both were jailed. Image
Funnily enough, Gupta's father was arrested during the Raj for impersonating someone else to take an exam for them. The author expects us to sympathize with him because he was doing it for a good cause (raising money for the socialists).
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The author concludes that the fact that two leading lights of the Indian-American community were arrested proves that Indians have made it, as they are powerful and secure enough to commit crimes at the top of American society, and are starting to flex their power. Image
I think the big takeaway from this book is that high-skilled immigration from India is a terrible idea, because they form ethnic networks (zero-sum) to shut out Americans. The small boost a company gets from hiring one is not worth the long term transformation of institutions.
May be interested:
@USTechWorkers
@moldbridge_
@russian_cosmist

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More from @arctotherium42

Jun 22
This is just silly. Between Lend-Lease and the Marshall Plan, Britain got about 300B (net, accounting for "reverse Lend Lease") dollars worth of free aid in WWII. This is almost exactly the same as the total aid Israel has received from the US in its entire history.
This does not count things like the extremely generous terms of the Anglo-American loan (long repayment schedule, below-inflation interest rate, the ability to suspend payments up to six times if it couldn't be afforded) or destroyers-for-bases as "aid."
Britain was far less ruined by WWII than any other major participant except the US, and poor British economic and financial performance is because Attlee was an actual true-believing Fabian socialist, and his continental equivalents were mostly Communists kept out of govt. Image
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Jun 18
Excerpts from "Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire." (1999) Image
Unconditional surrender was publicly adopted as a war goal in Jan 1943, with the idea of preventing WWIII, as many Germans, including Hitler, thought Germany had not been beaten militarily in WWI and as such wanted to fight WWII. This caused trouble later. Image
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(My opinion, not in the book, is that demanding true unconditional surrender was a mistake. Eisenhower wanted to publicly guarantee law, order, and property, because many German units resisted to the end out of fear. Since the US was going to respect those, should have said so.)
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Jun 17
Excerpts from "Shattered Sword" (2005), a history of the Battle of Midway. I assume the rough contours of Midway are broadly familiar. The key thing the book adds is use of untranslated Japanese sources, which debunked many common misconceptions about the battle. Image
The genesis of the simultaneous Japanese attacks on Midway and the Aleutians Islands: the IJN had won so hard so fast (Pearl Harbor, Malaya/Singapore, Indian Ocean raid, Philippines, Dutch East Indies), they didn't have any obvious next thing to do. Image
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On Yamamoto: he rose to the top of the IJN despite making many enemies for his stances on the Washington/London Naval Treaties (pro), carrier aviation (pro), and alliance with Nazi Germany (anti). Effectively took control by threatening to resign when he didn't get his way. Image
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Jun 12
Some excerpts from "India's War: WWII and the Making of Modern South Asia" by Srinath Raghavan, published in 2016. Image
First thing to understand about the Raj is that it was practically an empire of its own within the British one, and with a great of autonomy though not self-government. India was a signatory of the Treaty of Versailles. 30M Indians emigrated to other parts of the Empire. Image
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The Viceroy of India declared war without consulting any Indian body. The INC was generally torn between broad opposition to the Nazis and not wanting to cooperate with the Raj without further political concessions. Image
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Read 51 tweets
Jun 11
The Mexican population of the US Southwest was 83,727 in 1850. This is because we decided against annexing populated areas on the grounds that Mexicans were not fit for self-govt. The modern Mexican pop in the US ~entirely descended from post-1900 immigration, >90% post-WWII. Image
3/4 of this tiny population (outnumbered by more than twice as many Indians, because Mexico did not actually control this territory, hence inviting Anglo settlers) was in New Mexico.
In 1900, Mexicans were 7% of the US Southwest. There was significant Mexican immigration 1900-1930 (followed by mass deportations under Hoover, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower). Even by 1950, it was only 10%. Image
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Jun 8
Thread from the 2015 version of "How Long Will South Africa Survive?" (RW Johnson, the author, wrote a book with the same title in 1977). "Once the great change of 1990-94 took place there was a general loss of interest in South Africa in the world at large." Image
South African GDP grew at 8.3% per year from 1945-65 (admittedly, with extremely high black population growth). Image
British entry to the EEC screwed South Africa by damaging SA's biggest export market and more importantly by forcing Portugal into the EEC, which indirectly destroyed the Portuguese Empire in Africa. Image
Read 67 tweets

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