One of the best things about living in India is watching families move from lower or lower-middle class to middle-class status. Usually, all it takes is someone from the family landing a white-collar job.
While the tech bodyshops (TCS, Infosys, etc.) might have a poor reputation in the US, these companies have been absolutely critical in helping move tens of millions into middle-class respectability.
My first job was in Infosys back in 2001. Coming from a lower-middle class farming family, it was a huge deal. My monthly gross was something my dad (farmer) + mom (school teacher) would earn in an entire year. I remember my dad proudly putting a portrait of NR Narayana Murthy (founder of Infosys) on our wall - it is usually reserved for gods/ancestors or revered sages.
My FIL funded their maid’s kids education. The son got into a decent engineering school and landed a job at TCS. The daughter studied nursing and got a job at a large chain hospital. The kids bought their mom an apartment and a car.
Its just amazing to watch - this woman’s mom, grandmom, aunts, uncles were all peasants or did odd trades. Now because of a single generation, the entire family could dream of middle class dignity.
its amazing. and unfortunately they will be the last generation that will be able to do it. just like for western countries everything will become unaffordable and the middle class wont be able to buy houses
Unlikely because there's basically no NIMBY-ism in India. Any developer can just acquire land, some air rights and plop up apartment complexes. And unlike in the US, apartments in India are designed for family life and aren't just for young / unmarried folks.
However, land is the most politically charged investment in India which is controlled by vested and powerful interests once over a certain threshold. It is not that straightforward. Compared to income , houses are very expensive. FSI is very low in India even with Transit oriented development finally becoming popular now. We may not have US style suburbia , however the GINI coefficient or anything similar calculated for per person area availability to live, is going to be significantly skewed.
For example, in Mumbai average people barely find more than few sq ft to live in whereas families like Godrej control land worth approx 10 b $ in the city itself. Moreover the Godrej family do not want the entire land to be used for development per se and are unwilling to part with some of it for developmental infrastructure projects. The moral of the story is that it is the same (if not worse) as any other country.
The rental yield on houses in India can be as low as 2% (source: Personal) which should in theory lead to crash in housing prices, but that is not happening as population in city will constantly increase with rural to urban migration.
Maybe not NIMBYism, but loads and loads of red tape for land acquisition. Especially since all of the land that is not explicitly for non agricultural use is agricultural, and converting it to non agricultural is a whole process usually involving bribes to 20 different officials. See this blog[1] that was posted to HN a while ago[2]
This is not true. Large Indian cities have some of the worst planing/zoning/building codes in Asia. Mumbai's FSI (Floor Space Index) is so bad it's almost a meme.
Maybe. Even so, AFAICT USA and India are vastly different countries though. I wouldn’t take it for granted that India will develop in exactly the same way that USA did.
I'm not sure of your point, but I think I disagree. The previous comment was about going from poverty to middle class. Why won't this be possible in the future?
Right now India is in a transition period and wages for these kinds of jobs are keeping pace with gains in productivity and that's how you're seeing so many lifting themselves are their families out of poverty.
However, if history is anything to go by that will stop pretty soon as the hyper upper class solidifies their hold on wealth, appreciating assets, and means of production, and will start to keep larger and larger shares of profit while workers' wages stagnate, and then inflation will start to decrease the purchasing power of those stagnating wages, and the middle class will start to shrink and disappear as it is in America and other "free market" capitalist countries.
A large majority of the US owns their homes and has been greatly enriched by the distorted housing market. It's a moral hazard resulting from democracy if anything, as people vote themselves into housing monopolies and other advantage over newcomers.
I'm not sure what the "free market" has to do with it. Capitalism, communism, feudalism, socialism, etc.. always end with the majority of money and power concentrated with the few.
I've read that there is a certain number of people that we're basically optimized to coexist within a societal structure, and modern civilization passed that a long time ago, and human beings in general just aren't capable of empathy on the scale of modern civilization. And I mean, it makes sense when you think about it. On some abstract level you have to know that even meagre standards of living in western society requires someone, somewhere to be suffering to provide it. $1 for a pound of bananas shipped from across the world before they even have a hint of yellow on them? That shit don't come without a cost, and our $1 sure as hell aint paying it. But we all just kind of don't think those people just to get through the day, because dwelling on the extent of suffering and horror we've wrought upon our fellow man in pursuit of whatever fresh hell the guys over at Oreo have managed to shape into the general form of a cookie would leave us a broken shell of a person and unable to show up for our next shift at the Big Mac factory.
> Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.
> this in particular is an emergent phenomena that only happens with large-scale civilizations
Is it? If you have N participants in a market and a bunch of investment opportunities that are on average net negative, the person with the most money will take the most opportunities resulting in their relative worth increasing the most. The endgame for this is one person with all the money. Works for N=2 and N≃infinity.
It doesn't happen in (some? most?) small communities because of specific things that aren't present in big communities.
Oh absolutely agree, everything up until now has eventually descended into the age old pattern of power and money finding it's way concentrated into the hands of the few elite, however capitalism with it's private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit, and rewarding accumulation of capital, seems like it's designed from the ground up to funnel money and power into the hands of the few, where at at least in theory communism/socialism/other -isms are designed to try to share the wealth.
Of course, said -isms require either an unbroken chain of morally righteous people with absolute power being in charge of said means of production fairly for the equal enrichment of everyone, or some kind of system of checks and balances to keep those in power from abusing it and preventing corruption from outside the political power structures, the exact formula of which we've yet to figure out.
Personally I'm of the opinion we should just throw the baby out with the bathwater and chalk this whole civilization experiment up as a mistake and go back to tribal societies of yestermillennia. Of course, the vast majority of the current human population disagrees with me in that regard and I will admit there are some good things about it, so until that changes I'll be here plugging along like the rest and hoping for better days.
America is not a "free market" capitalist country. I would say it's of the lack of a free market that enabled the wealthiest to capture that wealth that would otherwise have been more evenly distributed. There is an enormous amount of regulation in the US (and other countries) designed to make it nearly impossible to compete with the established actors in the market.
- fungible goods (i.e. stuff like toilet paper where you have 100s of vendors most people can't really differentiate much in terms of end result): good luck with that for any kind of complex good
- perfect information symmetry (i.e. the vendor and the buyer and seller know exactly the same about the product): can't happen when most buyers are individuals and most sellers are companies with full time people employed to work on their products
- low barriers to entry for vendor: good luck, in the real world you need time, capital, experience, etc to enter a market, and even when you're there, there's stuff like brands, marketing, reputation, etc
Etc.
Plus, even if this absurdly perfect model would be achieved, you still have to put stuff like social welfare somewhere in there. Why? Because some people are just plain bad at basic economics (president Truman was close to dying in poverty during his old age), and you can't just let them starve to death.
Nobody thinks a perfect market, or perfect anything is possible. It's just a theoretical concept. None of the imperfections you mentioned can be solved by a state or any other form of coercion.
If India follows the west then it won't be possible for 2 people with education to lift a family out of poverty to middle class. In my country you basically require 2 full-time wages to be able to support a 3 person family. You wouldn't be able to buy an apartment and car for your family.
I don't know what western country you live in, but I'm guessing you have a very different definition of poverty than the article is using. The UN has a list of criteria such as:
- Lacking access to electricity
- Lacking access to drinking water within a 30 minute round-trip walk
- Lacking access to sanitation facilities
- No household members have completed at least 6 years of schooling
- Any child in the household has stunted growth due to malnutrition
You need at least a third of the criteria to be true in order for a household to be considered in poverty.
It's likely that practically no one in your country meets this definition.
During my childhood I fulfilled the first three for about four years or so and knew many others in similar situations. This was in the US, any country with significant undeveloped land is going to have areas that have people who fulfill the first three pretty easily.
Just out of curiosity, how far did you have to walk to fetch water, what was the source, how much did you carry back at a time, and how often did you do this? Sorry for so many questions, but I always think of the U.S. as such a developed country that it's interesting to hear counterexamples.
Every year I lived in a different location but the shortest was a bit more than half an hour trip by bike and I could only safely manage a single gallon. Usually though we'd get water when we hitchhiked into town as we could get more at once. Both of these sources came from water resupply points for trucks but no on cared if you filled a few gallon containers. Rain water was also usable in many cases but we avoided drinking it. We went out maybe once a week or so?
I never said continental, this was on the Big Island in Hawaii. Though I would be shocked if there weren't similar places in the large patches of undeveloped land in the west side of the US.
There are two types of poverty being talked about here.
In the United States (where it is not only possible, but common for two people with education to lift a family out of poverty into the middle class), most people below the poverty have a drastically superior standard of living to anyone below the poverty line in India. The type of "poor" where two people are working full time jobs in the US would not be considered poor in India.
That's because of idiotic zoning laws that make it nearly impossible to build multi family properties, high density residential, limit the height of skyscrapers and basically forced the entire nation to be a damn suburban hell hole, not because of a land shortage. India hopefully won't make the same idiotic mistakes the NIMBY soccer mom boomers did.
That's not really true for India because unlike developed countries, the housing has a wide price range for any given area. Also it is actually preferable to rent in India because rent doesn't even cover half the emi. Overall, through a lot of measures like tax breaks and cheaper loans for housing developers building affordable housing, reduction in interest for low cost housing, free housing for poorer sections of the populace, government has made housing a non issue apart from a select set of cities like Mumbai where geographical constrains ensure higher prices and low availability.
Very interesting. A very basic house in Austria is over 500k and not in a hot location, while to my knowledge wages here are not higher than in Finland. How is a house so cheap in Finland? 200k is basically Eastern/Southern European house prices, where wages are lower.
I feel like the insane housing prices here are not just related to nimbyism that restricts supply, but mostly to speculation driven by banking, political greed, realtors, investors, basically any and all large piles of money that have housing constantly going up fast so that their piles of money get even bigger.
In a rural but well maintained area in France, my parents bought recently an old family house for 80k (to which you have to add some renovation costs). In this area a brand new house with a good amount of land is 200-300k. In my own area, a new house is more along the lines of 500k. In any case those things are highly localized here, I imagine it's true in Austria as well (though the country is much smaller than either Finland or France).
When I see Indian developers, I have in my mind that they're similar to Chinese: the whole village bands together and gather resources to give that one kid a university education and a good job, so that that one kid returns to the village many years later to help people out of poverty.
I have an uncle who came from Malaysia to the US in the 70's to do his studies. He was "given the task by his village elders.." as he would say and they did exactly that pooled resources and made sure he finished school. When I heard his story I was so moved. He's built everyone in his village a house, invested in many businesses now, literally changed lives of countless families and friends.
What a beautiful story. Both how the village came together to help him and how he remembered those elders and their contribution. Both are such rare gifts in a jaded world.
I lived in Indian villages for several decades. I have never seen a single instance of this "village bands together and gather resources to give that one kid a university education".
Of course, people do help each other etc.,
It is different for different cultures but also depends on mobility.
In western world it is currently family but that's because family ties are much more likely to be preserved over time than ties to your village.
In other places in the world people are so immobile that they are expected to be born, grow up, work and die in the same village. And so ties to your local community are much more likely to be preserved over time just like ties to your family. It is not that the village replaces your family, it is just another group of people where it makes sense to invest to get something back in the future. Imagine you had tight knit group of friends where you left school but somehow are still able to stick together. If you trusted that this will continue for a long time it would be much easier to invest within the group knowing somebody might help you out later.
In the 2000s landing a job in Infosys in India was really the equivalent of landing a job in FAANG's. May be even more than that because the era preceding it has such scarcity in terms of opportunity, that it was literally the equivalent of landing a job in some promised land.
If you didn't go into government jobs, where there was lots of bribe income potential. The next best paying jobs were in IT services namely three big IT giants Infosys, Wipro and TCS. It was also a huge social status symbol to get a job in these companies.
Of course many made it big, many didn't. Many realised the same corruption and Indian social practices applied to these companies too. While there was definitely a base upgrade in terms of a salary. The big opportunities, promotions, travel were subject to discrimination, bigotry and corrupt practices plaguing Indian society. And by early 2010's there was total disillusionment with these companies. Many MNCs set up their own shops in Bangalore, where the systems were relatively fair and HR practices, though not perfect did work to some extent. 2010s were all about working in MNCs directly.
Then came the start up era. While some made it really big, start ups in India like everywhere are subject to same lottery set up and also some Indian founders can be stingy with equity, and many turn up to be straight up frauds.
Software jobs did move the needle by a big margin in moving Indians from lower-middle/poor class to middle class.
For anyone that doesn’t know (although admittedly not particularly relevant, but topical) Narayana Murthy is the FIL of the now-current UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.
Imagine marrying into a self-made billionaire Asian family, and feeling overshadowed by your father-in-law. Literally the only way you're getting out from under that is becoming leader of a major country.
Apropos, I've always wondered where the terms gf and bf, for girlfriend and boyfriend, came from, i.e. the West, or India. Wonder, because many such short forms come from or are unique to Indian English.
Your second paragraph raises an interesting and seemingly valid point, but your first paragraph gets me wrong: I did mean the acronym, i.e. gf or bf (and some other such ones; not all, by a long chalk).
Anyway, thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt. :)
Sure they are common in modern English. (I only speak that version, being modern myself ;) [1]
>Is what you're talking about a bit different? Can you dive in a bit?
Sure I can. Thanks for asking.
Yes, I was talking about something different. But I seem to have been misunderstood by a few people in this subthread.
No worries, it happens. Human languages are not perfect, nor are they always unambiguous. Nor are humans perfect, in writing or interpretation. :)
I wrote the comment casually, so did not think to check how it might be understood differently by others.
When I said
>many such short forms come from or are unique to Indian English.
, I meant, first of all, just "some", because "many" does not necessarily mean "most", let alone "all". It just means "many", for some value of "many". It does not necessarily imply a comparison or relative valuation, such as, "many" relative to the total number of acronyms.
(5000 is a big number on its own, but not compared to 5 million.)
And secondly, I had first come across usage such as gf and bf in emails between Westerners and Indians known to me, some 15-odd years ago, and Indian (techie) English has many :) possibly unique acronyms such as o/p for output, i/p for input, so I thought at the time, that gf and bf might be Indian English acronyms, having not come across them in general Western English usage, at least before that.
[1] An arcane reference to an Asterix comic issue, maybe Asterix in Rome (or Italy), where they talk about learning modern languages such as Latin :)
That's awesome to hear! Our family does something similar - we have a line of portraits above our family photos of the various CEOs that have hired us throughout the years - namely coal and oil company owners.
Those millions who moved to middle class are also helping the layer below them. These lifted households are spending their wealth on house helps, local grocery stores, taxis/autos and a whole lot of other local businesses. This trickle down effect then boosts development in cities where these IT hubs are located. Even more students then want to join these IT companies and enjoy the lifestyle of their seniors thus continuing the cycle.
P.s. We spend money in local shops because the stores like Walmart have still not penetrated the Indian market as they have outside India.
I think in a few years India will find focusing on middle class is not enough. There's finite demand for domestic+outsourceable white collar jobs for 1.4B internal market + ~400M English speakers around the world. PRC has 10s of millions of white collar jobs + 100s of millions of manufacturing that pays better than trickle down housesitting, but there's still 100s of millions more stuck in informal economy while both countries are stuck with another few 100s of millions of subsistent farmers because keeping agriculture low tech is an essential jobs program. Even by PRC standards, India is hyper Deng's "let some get rich first" scheme that's going to cause long term uneven development issues.
Agree completely. We’ve tapped out our services potential. We now need large scale manufacturing. Income inequality and unemployment are very real problems, and its only getting worse. Only manufacturing can create those kind of jobs at scale.
> We’ve tapped out our services potential. We now need large scale manufacturing.
Most "first world" economies are dominated by services, so I would be surprised if India has topped out in services. Do more of the high-level stuff, like design and independent, research and development. "Grunt" work, like churning out code generates, a certain level of wealth. The high-level stuff generates even more. As a crude measure, until India is winning 1.4/7.8 = 18% of Nobel prizes it has untapped potential. (This is not intended as disparagement of India's track record but to highlight the potential for India.)
In my mind the real value of a strong manufacturing industry is that it drives the development of high-level services associated with manufacturing (robotics, materials, science, ...). I'd rather have small highly developed manufacturing sector than a large "low-tech" manufacturing sector.
Most first world economies don't have 1.4B people.
By the government's own admission, 800M people are still being given free food because they can't afford it on their own. That's more than the population of western Europe and USA combined.
Services simply don't employ people in large enough numbers. It's not rocket science - basic maths.
Shrinking globalism has a lot of causes so I don't want to overstate the case here, but one big part of the drive to pull back from it is the PRC's own currency manipulation and leveraging of its manufacturing bottleneck for geostrategic aims. They have themselves to blame partly.
But really, their demographic precipice is what's going to stall them out. I hope their political system is functional enough to let it transition into something that can continue functioning after the end of a turbo-growth economy without collapsing into a Putin-esque kleptocracy or go the way of 20th century Argentina with constant coups and general political chaos.
I would say one of the reason for globalism to retreat is the west (especially US) find itself in a awkward situation: developing world and developed world has to meet somewhere in the middle, which means, the living standard in developed world has to drop.
For developing world to develop, you will have to go the extra miles, you are competing with big guys, trying to make a space for yourself in a crowded room. Every country does currency manipulation, imaging you make your good cheaper to get some papers, only because the paper can be used to buy energy.
> the living standard in developed world has to drop.
That depends on how you define "living standards." For example, the USA can probably afford to lose a LOT of consumer products spending while still raising HDI metrics by simply reallocating how resources are committed. We prioritize spending in a lot of places that don't really return much in the way of physical or spiritual well-being. Think car-dependent infrastructure which mostly just serves to raise need for spending on vehicles and infrastructure. Think fast fashion which mostly serves to accelerate trend cycles so people buy clothes more often than they did otherwise. There's a lot of consumer needs that are socially-pressured here.
What you are saying is absolutely true. The problem is that not everyone is going to think this way. Not having something is easy, but not having something after you had it is hard. The only way to keep the living standard high is actually technology, especially robotics. I am both pessimistic and optimistic on this. I can see a bright future for mankind slaving robotics, but I can also see technology will be guarded as weapons. The same reason in this world we have abundant stuffs and we also have people lacking of basic electricity.
I think a major reason might be that a precondition for globalism has been the US Navy patrolling the high seas and making shipping safe and reliable. As the US retreats from that, the reality will be that many countries cannot guarantee their supply lines. Peter Zeihan talks about this (and many other factors).
The US has been doing this for a long time, but it's gotten to the point where it isn't clear that it is in our interests, e.g., to enable China to be a major trading power.
It makes sense. If the west is worrying about things, it would make sense to build more capacity at home, and then everyone will just follow.
IMO, US's colonization of the world has been through finance, which has been ok for the world. Globalization is a good business for the US, de-globalization will actually accelerate the empires' declining.
India has also hit replacement or below replacement level population in most of the country and it was done without invasively draconian policy setting. Just female literacy and access to healthcare.
Your ideas about population control are antiquated. It is well known that demographic change follows women's rights and economic development, particularly in access to healthcare and education. Draconian laws just lead to wide-scale oppression. India's population (and Africa's) are only growing in the regions that schooling and healthcare infrastructure haven't penetrated yet. The only controls a government can institute under conditions where it can't even run a school are genocidal.
You are not commenting on what I wrote and are using the usual emotional and defeatist rhetoric to oppose any population controls.
Yes, the Chinese approach has been draconian and even cruel. But it has also been effective and the point remains that we should thank them for having succeeded in controlling their population.
I also do think that too little is being done to stop population growth globally because that growth is actually the root cause to most of our environmental issues. Note that between "too little" and your over-the-top claim of "genocide" there a gigantic chasm.
This also applies to Western countries. Many of them have incentives to boost natality. We need to 'free ourselves' from the idea that population growth as a positive and necessary thing because it simply cannot continue and a decrease would even be a net positive for the environment and quality of life.
What part of "The desired outcome already happens in India and Africa through other, more constructive and humanistic methods without any of the ethical downsides" is defeatist? I don't understand the fetish for imposing draconian restrictions on would-be parents in light of those facts.
PRC more insulated against deglobalization than most. Despite trope, PRC is relatively less trade dependant vs OECD/G20 tier countries. It's close to US and JP where internal market is enough to generate growth and development. Meanwhile PRC exports is increasing, especially up value chain in intermediate goods, and among emerging markets. Actual risk of trade disruption with wealthy LIO block is also overstated IMO, first it's ~10% of PRC's GDP. Impact from countries who are serious (so far surprisingly little) about subtantially reducing trade, friendshoring or PRC+1 models are a fraction of that. The really rough patch are US tech blockades that inhibits PRC's ability to upgrade internally, but if overcome, huge boost to development. All of which is to say, PRC exposure to deglobalization is smaller than most think. While reality is PRC so far is inserting herself more and more into global trade despite some efforts to balkanize.
To stay on topic of India (but applies to many countries), PRC / Asian Tiger model of export driven growth model via light industries to generate surplus to upgrade capital is going to be increasingly difficult and expensive. Era of high western consumption (low interest, debt driven etc) and cheap commodities is being tapped out for short/medium term. The TLDR is PRC extracted as much benefit as it can from globalism under relatively ideal conditions while those that did not are going to have a much harder time trying to replicate similar feat. Especially India, because let's be real, west is not going to repeat the PRC "mistake" with India again, especially when India is difficult to geographically contain.
Some cities have “Big Bazaar” which is similar to a Walmart (smaller though, the Indian market doesn’t have the variety of brands and products other countries do). There certainly are a lot of other similar stores. A more American thing that isn't readily available is like a Costco, bulk shopping would be pretty tough there, and people are fine to go out on a more regular basis to pick up fresh milk/veggies.
No American big box retailer will ever be built. Indian government doesn’t allow foreign companies to come in and set up shop very easily (at best they can get in with 49% ownership like Starbucks/Tata). Additionally the logistics situation is very different. Less ports, roads between cities built differently than USA, traffic across states is not a right like USA and various restrictions/inspections/fees can occur. It’s worth keeping an eye on IKEA’s expansion specifically in India. They really want to grow the marketshare, they have the right price points, and people seem to genuinely like and want them around. But lots of artificial hurdles which i suspect are caused by local traders/shops knowing how much business IKEA will take from them.
Indian Amazon is approaching the utility of American Amazon and are pretty good about taking advantage of the existing couriers and air cargo which takes care of some of the interstate logistics I mentioned. The funniest part to me is that every individual item you order comes with it’s own delivery person, there isn’t yet much work to consolidate packages. The current generation is growing up with Amazon though and I anticipate many future improvements.
I also see a dead comment in this thread saying India doesn't have malls... I've never seen more malls in an area than I have in big Indian cities. A lot of them are pretty good!
> The funniest part to me is that every individual item you order comes with it’s own delivery person, there isn’t yet much work to consolidate packages.
I'm impressed how much Aliexpress currently does this: consolidates purchases from different sellers, ship 3rd party to Canada, and then use local postal service for last mile delivery.
We actually have D-Mart and they are quite huge but not comparable to Walmart. These are present at multiple locations in tier-1 cities but are hardly present in tier-2 cities. The thing is even though these are very popular they are not shutting down local shops in the region that they are located. The sheer demand is so high that people get things from local shops instead of standing in long queues at D-mart.
To answer your question, yes Walmart can happen but it has to be ready for some serious competition because other than D-mart other big player JioMart backed by Reliance has entered this space recently.
Yes, there is a company called Dmart and they are doing really well.
Recently one opened in my area and local shop owner mentioned that it is killing their business. People are flocking to Dmart for discounts.
This is how Walmart and other companies spread into things like India - you might even see a few Walmarts open as a "higher class American-like" store, but the vast majority will be in things like Flipkart that are directly aimed at the market.
One of the challenges is real estate and parking. Most major Indian cities are extremely crowded with little in the way of parking space or affordable commercial land. Most large stores in major population areas invariably have to pivot to the higher-end to justify the real estate costs.
Driving out 45 minutes just to buy groceries seems futile since every neighbourhood will have dozens of grocery stores that will deliver right at your doorstep (and now, half a dozen quick delivery apps too).
Not only tech jobs (which certainly have been the biggest factor in lifting tons of lower income to middle/higher income status) but overall due to globalization, lot of jobs have opened up in the past 25 or so years.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s in India and moved to US in 2000. Now I am a US Citizen but when I do go back to visit, I literally know people who were poor/lower middle class and they all are now living upper middle class lifestyles (have a nice car, eat outside a lot , have their own home etc).
Some factors:
- Globalization of economy opening up in the 90s
- Tech and other jobs (manufacturing etc) but more importantly, lot of global companies opening shop after the economy opened up in 90s. It is still not as friendly to outside companies as say China but things are changing even though slowly in a complex country like India
- Rise of Internet especially since the introduction of Jio Data by Reliance. It has changed the game significantly. An average Indian may not have a Computer necessarily BUT they all have data and internet on their phones and almost everyone can order almost anything on their phone including paying for bills (UPI is amazing)
- Mindset of young people is changing especially as more people are now exposed to other countries/culture through TV, youtube/internet, Movies, Travel. Capitalism is becoming more favorable compared to old school thinking of socialism and the whole "Raj" mentality that was left over by British and continued for decades by previous Govts.
There is still a lot of extreme poverty in pure numbers (population size) but I have no doubts that overall, millions have moved from extreme poverty to lower or middle income status in last 2 decades.
Not everything is rosy though. In cities like Bangalore, real estate is super expensive, thanks to software salaries. The same is happening in second, third tier cities now.
But generally speaking, yes, all it takes is one person from a family landing a white collar job. And life becomes (relatively) much better
India’s physical infrastructure has honestly fallen way, way behind our digital infrastructure.
Absurd that I can go a month in India without ever using cash or cards, order everything I want from anywhere and have it delivered within a day (or even minutes), yet it can sometimes take me 45 minutes to travel 3k and that my car’s suspension breaks down at 50k kilometers because there is no public transport and the roads are filled with sinkhole sized potholes.
India's going on a massive metro rail spree and also massively improving intercity rail. Things are significantly improving, though there will always be traffic in a city the size of Delhi or Mumbai.
Eh, that has been ongoing forever. Most projects are grossly delayed and over budget. Not a single metro outside of Delhi has any appreciably large metro rail system. Many have been in development for a decade. Projects get routinely stuck in political gridlock or because the builder went bankrupt.
The Bangalore metro project started in 2011. In over a decade, they've managed a paltry 56km of active rail lines - an average of 5km/year. Meanwhile, the city hasn't even had a master plan since 2016 and every government department works on its own without any collaboration whatsoever (resulting in disasters such as railway stations without any proper bus connectivity).
India's bureaucracy and polity will keep holding our infrastructure hostage.
What car are u using that its suspension broke at 50k, our old family car of 15 years never had once broken, an believe me it was used a lot on Indian village roads.
Real estate will get more expensive due to political greed than any other kind of development. The supply of real estate is artificially constrained by the political class, so any kind of development (say hypothetically manufacturing instead of software) will make it expensive. There used to be a time when new land for building houses was frequently sold by the government in the form of new "colonies", but that has completely stopped. The local political greed (municipal corporators, mayors, MLAs) has destroyed most Indian cities due to lack of planning, and this small fish only cares about short term money they can make.
What you are describing is one part of the problem.
I have friends who earn in dollars. They can easily afford to buy a couple of apartments every year. They do this and let those apartments sit vacant for a few years, waiting for them to appreciate. When many people start doing this, it artificially inflates the prices.
It doesn't work that well in practice. While real estate is overinflated for buying, rental yields reflect the market. They are under 2-4% of the property value in most places.
India is also expanding vertically in cities so new housing is often built in different area and older infrastructure is not maintained in the long run.
A significant portion of real estate is built on under the table money. You often pay 30-50% of the value in black money.
So, real estate is a very illiquid investment unless commercial in India.
There are also cultural reasons for artificially inflating real estate and Indian property developers are under huge loans similar to China. It won't be sustainable.
That can be solved with tax/other laws. Guess who will be most impacted by those laws? Not people with one or two apartments as much, but those who do in large scale - that is again politicians and their helpers who help launder illegal money this way. If there are loopholes in the law, people will abuse it but we have to realize the loopholes are not meant for the layperson but the powerful few who abuse it at much higher scale.
A big reason why Gurgaon real estate is more expensive than Bangalore despite having way more land and poorer jobs is government corruption. All those bribes and backroom deals get siphoned off to buy apartments and land. These buyers can hold forever because their cost basis is practically 0.
I’m actively hunting for an apartment in NCR and get painfully reminded of how poor I actually am.
There was a time when we were living in Delhi and we used to drive down to Jaipur, where our extended family was. We kids looked forward to the drive, as it meant nice stopovers, snacks, etc.
After leaving Delhi we would , after an hour or so, make our first stopover in a little village called .... Gurgaon! There we would have chai, samosas, etc. In those days Gurgaon was separated from Delhi and a sleepy little village.
When the capital expanded, those villagers became instant millionaires.
A lot of comments in this thread are crediting TCS, Infosys, etc for lifting people out of poverty, but another factor was the skyrocketing realestate prices. Small-time farmers who could barely make ends meet suddenly were sitting on million-dollar land holdings.
I visited NCR for first time recently and found that although the metro is amazing, NCR still remains a large urban sprawl whose land potential has not been utilized properly. With continually developing infrastructure on more metro, RRTS etc. hopefully the land utilization also improves.
Not everything is rosy anywhere in the world. One can find issues with any positive story. I would rather have expensive real estate problem due to high paying jobs than poverty.
During my dad's time, it was much easier to buy a house on a modest salary. And the houses were well built too. These days, it is near impossible to buy a house unless you are a very high earner, as all available real estate is being gobbled up by "investors", aka, who have high paying jobs (mostly software).
It is good that we are elevating people from poverty. All I am saying is it creates a different set of problems. But yeah, overall it is good that we are able to pull more people up from poverty.
Just live on rent. It will be far cheaper and flexible in India. The rent won't even pay the EMI for home loans for vast majority of these land lords in metros.
I think the difference is India is a major startup hub that mostly caters to the local market so the effort to shift to more resilient income streams not completely dependent on the global market are underway, something Brazil did not do.
Entirely possible India hits a lean phase and stays stuck where it is. Truth be told, everything from infrastructure to basic law and order are far behind even a “middle income trap” country like Thailand. Too early to pat ourselves on the back.
And recent focus on manufacturing. New govt is heavily pushing local manufacturing(atmanirbhar bharat) for last 8 years. Progress is already being felt in some areas, for example in smartphone manufacturing India went from nothing to #2 in world in those years. They are now targeting more phone phone supply chains like pcb, modems etc. and other consumer electronics too.
To be fair, despite all these efforts, the manufacturing sector has consistently underperformed the rest of the economy. The share of manufacturing as a % of GDP has been trending down for quite a while. Outside of the headline grabbing numbers (such as the iPhone factory), the reality is different.
But Brazil is a really rich country when you consider resources, India is not so, especially when you look at the population size. Only hope for India to maintain momentum is replicating at least 25 % of the Chinese manufacturing success.
I have personally seen this transition. Some folks who started from tier 2 cities got access to white collar jobs because of MNCs like TCS, Infosys.
Now they have improved skillset through Internet courses and are now working on much higher pay at product companies.
MNCs are essentially doing what colleges fail to do in India. Teaching people how to code, talk to clients and bring them into formal employment.
Is TCS/Infosys/etc taking a risk on hiring untrained/undertrained employees and putting in the effort to train them? Or did they get training through a college/university?
If the latter, I’d say education is helping pull these people out of poverty.
IME (I led offshore teams of Indian devs for years), the quality of the in-house training TCS/Infosys/Cognizant/Capgemini etc provide for employees is... poor. They seem to focus on quantity over quality, presumably so devs have lots of "relevant" training to pad CVs with.
I work for one of these services companies in the UK. They put huge investment in having their own training centres and universities and most of the recruits have already attended at least on university. You have to realise that the business is about selling time, not producing working or quality software. The more people you can bill, and the more skills on your CV the better. Once a large enterprise has pushed all their business into outsourcing, they can only go with it and try to make the best of it. Most businesses seem to have done this now, justifying some massive bonuses for their board staff and shareholder gains, due to the perceived "cost savings" going through a professional services business.
Those companies have also aided in increasing the participation of Women in the IT industry and thereby increasing their enrollment into STEM education; India probably has the largest population of women in STEM.
> While the tech bodyshops (TCS, Infosys, etc.) might have a poor reputation in the US, these companies have been absolutely critical in helping move tens of millions into middle-class respectability.
couldn't agree more. In my previous comments, I've criticized bodyshops for their business model but this is so true. While I never worked for any of the WITCH company but I worked with few product based and service based companies, In my case, we do not had our own house, in my 10 years of Software Engineer career, I was able to bought house and also paid my whole housing loan. Own a second hand car. I could also buy a new car but I decided to go ahead with used car instead. For those who don't know, car is necessity in US but in India it is considered a semi-luxury.
Agreed, I would say, I am relatively good at what I do so it also translated in to comparatively higher salary (and still way less than what I could have made if I would have moved to Bengaluru - "Silicon Valley of India")
>While the tech bodyshops (TCS, Infosys, etc.) might have a poor reputation in the US, these companies have been absolutely critical in helping move tens of millions into middle-class respectability
That is more or less, middle classes from developing countries exploded in number. While for the developed countries, their middle class doesnt share the same fortune. The upper class however, reap heavy fortune.
Unfortunately it seems the developed countries' middle class appetite to sustain this is waning.
> While the tech bodyshops (TCS, Infosys, etc.) might have a poor reputation in the US, these companies have been absolutely critical in helping move tens of millions into middle-class respectability.
The same goes for most "slavery" jobs. A lot of people's fortunes has turned all over the world by working under "inhumane" condition for American or European companies.
These are actually good jobs in respect to state of play in these countries. The harm comes from degrading the employment standard in the rich countries where it's impossible to compete with places like China when they work under these conditions and as a result the jobs with "humane" conditions disappear in the wealthy countries or get worse.
Overall though, the world becomes a better places as the people in the developed countries get their stuff for cheap and people in the developing world catch up.
Have to agree. Anyone who has lived in a third world country knows that a formal job is better than a no job, and that many would absolutely love to work for, say, Foxconn for a steady paycheck.
Some of those stories about workers at Foxconn committing suicide also neglect to mention that the factory town has 1M workers who all live and work there, and that the suicide rate is actually lower than that for a city of equivalent size, or that 1M people living together might hurt themselves for any number of reasons (debts, unrequited love, adultery, etc), not just work.
Anti-capitalists and anti-globalists fail to understand that it's impossible to transition from very shitty conditions to good conditions hitting a midpoint of moderately shitty conditions. They just cherrypick examples of bad situations out of context and declare it to be proof of the failings of globalist capitalism without listening to the actual opinions of those they perceive to be victims.
>While the tech bodyshops (TCS, Infosys, etc.) might have a poor reputation in the US, these companies have been absolutely critical in helping move tens of millions into middle-class respectability.
At the cost of Americans dealing with poorer tech support, buggier software (sometimes critical software that leads to million dollar losses), and employment fraud (like lip syncing in interviews where someone else answers the questions connected to the mic).
You make it sound like every employee TCS/Infosys hires are like that. Yes there is fraud and issues with the bodyshops and I am not a shill for these companies but these companies hire tons of Americans as well and create 1000s of jobs in America for Americans. So a blanket statement doesn't add much value.
Thing is it hasn't moved as much as you think. People have moved from poverty to lower middle class not actually middle class. If consider middle class as between 20k to 40k a month and lower middle class at 10k to 20k a month and below 10k as poor then most poor people have only moved to lower middle class only.
A roommate in college was from a small rural village in Vietnam and a first gen college student. It took his entire extended family to pay the cost of tuition (international student rates). At the age of 18 he was putting in 60 -70 hours a week to his studies, as the responsibility he felt to his family to earn that sacrifice was overwhelming and less than an a perfect score visibly upset him. Not knowing any better I once said 'but you got a 3.9...', his reply was 'My father skips meals for me!'.
I really love India, have been visiting for tech business for over 20 years. I've found it to be one of the toughest countries to do business. I'd be more physically and mentally drained at the end of each day. And I'd fly out with a huge to do list. Yet there has been many heartening observations along the way.
I saw a poor woman go up to the window of the frequent flyer lounge kitchen, she placed with her hands out, and the staff returned and gave her a bundle of eggs. She was so grateful.
While stuck in a jam traveling between meetings, slums lined the side of the road, three kids under 5, no clothes, covered in filth, hitting a stone around with a stick with huge smiles... happiness.
And last night on the way home in Mumbai I see a father and son on a dark street intersection with almost nobody around. The father laid out a tarp and the under 5 year old son was hopping and dancing around taking shoes out of the sack and placing them neatly in pairs.
And then the little jobs to help people. The chaiwala and the lift attendant.
Its a fantastic place to 'grow up' from whining western spoiled kid into mature adult, to get some grip on how real world is, unfair, cruel, harsh, but also amazingly beautiful.
The quickest and by far best way to do this is backpacking all around, taking slow public transport, sleeping cheap, eating cheap where locals eat etc. I've spent like 500$ per month there in 2010. Yes there may be unpleasant bowel issues but after weeks you will come back a slightly better human being, and memories and experiences will be part of your personality. Best parts are usually random interactions with anybody out there, asking for directions and ending up eating dinner with their family, haggling with rickshaws, seeing how untouchable caste lives, feeling the intense heat of burning bodies in front of me on Manikarnika ghat in Varanasi... I could go on and on for very long time.
I've done in my previous life 2x 3 months backpacking like that, just big fat lonely planet book and deciding what to do and where to go next on the spot. Everybody from west we met was doing exactly this, just time varied between few weeks to few years. Felt like being in completely different universe, friends and family back home just distant dream of a dream. Both times it also felt as spending few decades there. And oh boy did it change me for the better, even I could see it.
This is one of the messages that need to be pushed hard - globalization - with it's implications on the "first world" global middle class - has helped make this possible.
It's like talking to people opposed to GMO rice. They are fine with an ideological position that GMO foods should be eliminated until you point out the alternative is hundreds of millions dead of starvation.
It's quite easy to see, the early growth is hard carried by export of manufacturing from China and services from India. Yes, you can say, this wouldn't be possible without Chinese government infrastructure and incentives push and Indian government early push for premiere education, but that would have been useless without customers that are global markets.
or probably the first world was stealing their assets (natural resources) while exporting disgrace (weapons, drugs)?
You should read a bit more so you'd know for example what the opium wars have done to China and what the colonialism has done to India (both perpetrated by the same first world country)
Historically India and China were always the wealthiest (up to the second industrial revolution) regions out there (as in the concept of India and China as we know now are post world war II)
What we are actually seeing today is a rebalancing of wealth that is pretty much needed so that in the US a person would need to have just 1 vacation instead of 3, while in India someone can put some food in their table and allow their kids to go to college.
Sure, let's justify a modern disaster by a past one.
First world's wealth of the 20th century had nothing to do with India's or China's misfortunes of yesteryear, European/US de-industrialization and poverty is 100% globalization-inflicted.
So was the right thing to engage in wars in Asia and colonize 2/3 of the world?
You've no idea of what these actions have done long term for the countries. Those things are pretty relevant since India form example gained his independence around 70 years ago, not 4 century
You are wrong in both your posts, colonialism literally raped every country and stole any wealth that was there to be stolen. Humans, animals, crops, minerals etc.
You should travel around a world a bit especially in affected countries/continents, clearly this enlightening activity evaded you.
these countries were always agrarian economies that had enourmous GDP numbers due to their sheer population numbers which supported a minuscule wealthy landed elite, nothing comparable to industrialised and service based economies.
Explotation was always limited, first due to tecnological limits, so it cant be used to describe systemic failure in decades spans. The culpript for stagnation is easily found in Centralization, mindless bureaucratization, socialism and commando economy idiocy both in Cina and India, and how things improved when approaches changed after decades of stagnation at best.
>in the US a person would need to have just 1 vacation instead of 3, while in India someone can put some food in their table and allow their kids to go to college
this is a view of economics which put the center of economic productivity in raw workhours and not organizations and capital. Not true in most cases, the competitivity of poor countries outside of manpower intensive Industries (es: garments, which moved out of china in 2018 due to labour cost) is low to no regulation on (bad) business practicies which increase
shareholder values
edit: economics are not for the most part zero sum games
> these countries were always agrarian economies that had enourmous GDP numbers due to their sheer population numbers which supported a minuscule wealthy landed elite, nothing comparable to industrialised and service based economies.
Nothing different than a service based economy where a huge percentage of people live paycheck to paycheck and supports wealthy billionaires.
What are you trying to prove? Because what you say has not meaning and point whatsoever. We could even argue that certain technologies advantage were reached by China before the west and people like Marco Polo have made their fortune trading them (without going there and start wars for example). Does that make them a "agrarian economy"? They were doing trades with Europe and Asia before America was even discovered (and to that extent before Jesus was born). Unless you've any evidence of what you just said, you just made an empty argument.
> this is a view of economics which put the center of economic productivity in raw workhours
I never talked about this, you're playing a movie in your head and that is the output of your own imagination.
The point I was making is in contradiction to the previous post that mentions how globalism made the west poorer while enriching other countries.
The reason is that with the previous era (colonialist) the west lived above their mean because of the exploitation that was perpetrated elsewhere (Africa and Asia). Now that these countries have added values in their economy which resulted in uplifting their own citizen to a better living standard is creating some trouble in the west.
Some 3 million Australians and 10+ million in the US went hungry at least once over last year. You sure can be worse than that, but that's pretty bad already.
So far GMOs are practically irrelevant for feeding humans, assuming a vegan diet there is enough land to feed everyone to avoid starvation. If we assume a reasonable amount of meat consumption there is also enough land for that.
I don't know why GMO advocates throw the "but everyone will starve if you don't buy my proprietary products" slogan around as if that makes them look less manipulative. It is supposed to delude people and prevent them from thinking for themselves.
People eat chicken... People wouldn't just become vegan without GMOs, they'd eat the same food and its price would go up. The US would stop exporting all its soy and asian pork farms would collapse. Without imported food asian countries would not be able to feed their populace.
I don't comment but also hate reading popular threads like this but I will do it anyway because someone was interested in hearing from someone living in India.
There's so much emphasis (from comments) on information technology services contributing to this. This is a recent phenomenon. Growth due to IT services was extremely concentrated in a few cities and most took their family there.
India was never a nation state before becoming a federal republic. Poverty was not widespread uniformly over the subcontinent. Over-reliance on agriculture and lack of trade meant factors like climate patterns disproportionately affected people in the lower social order.
Government definitely played a role in establishing energy infrastructure, educational institutions, introducing healthcare schemes and before that, smart people played an even bigger role with the constitution.
India's growth can be traced to a small list of landmark decisions which caused chain reactions.
- 1950 Constitution and enforcement by institutions
- 1954 Midday Meal Scheme
- 1956 Non-Aligned Movement
- 1961 Green Revolution
- 1970 Operation Flood
- 1991 Economic liberalisation
Looking back, just liberty guaranteed by Constitution wouldn't have worked because of the caste system.
I would argue that India's present success is in spite of the government, not because of it. The sectors that have seen the most success in India, namely the telecom, IT and services industries, were also those that were the least regulated (because our politicians weren't smart enough to even begin to comprehend technology to regulate it before it really took off in a big way).
As for the being a nation state part, sometimes I think we would have been better off in an EU type situation rather than being one large entity.
> As for the being a nation state part, sometimes I think we would have been better off in an EU type situation rather than being one large entity.
I have the same idea. But I'm not very sure about it, specially because our divide has been the main cause of Britishers colonizing us. An united single state gives us much more resources to function properly and defend our interest against neighbors like Pakistan & China.
I could be wrong though, as EU seems to be a good example of governance
> specially because our divide has been the main cause of Britishers colonizing us
This is just plainly false. Ask any serious student of history, and he will tell you that most of India has very little in common with each other. There are at least 4 major groups of languages (groups, not counting the myriad dialects), differing opinions on laws, clothing and even food. India was never a nation before the Britishers consolidated power over present day India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan, and made it one.
Hong Kong became much, much richer under Colonial rule, without a 'Constitution'.
No other nation needed 'school meals' in order to generate wealth, it's a nice program but hard to fathom as a 'root cause' of something.
The Non-Aligned movement? India would have been much richer, much more quickly, if they were to have aligned themselves with the West.
The Green Revolution / Op. Flood - well obviously that's huge, but does having more food equate to prosperity? I mean, wherever populations are exploding, usually it's pretty poor. Though I'm inclined to agree with you.
Trade Liberalization was unequivocally a big deal and FYI Green Revolution was arguably part of that, or at least tech transfer was.
If you throw in the last item, with the vast surpluses available from technology and productivity from richer nations, it amplifies quite a bit.
Your comment makes me feel like you don't understand India at all. At the time of independence, we were robbed of our resources by the west. Our country was divided with individual identity. Poverty, economy and quality of life were pretty bad thanks to England.
"school meals" allowed families to be able to send kids to school for education instead of getting their help at work to feed families. That means, more people were inclined towards getting education and literacy. Which was a huge deal for our country at that time.
>The Non-Aligned movement? India would have been much richer, much more quickly, if they were to have aligned themselves with the West.
India "might" have been richer without NAM but did you not notice what our close relationship with west did to us? Also, that richness would have made us into a failed state like USA (yes, I know about US' homelessness, lack of social security, and the greedy capitalism). We needed to stand on our own feet before we could make alliances. Heck, the west is still opposed to India till now. As much as I dislike Russian politics, our partnership with Russia has actually helped us develop much quicker (and yes, it was a partnership in every sense)
Indian constitution was needed, specifically because our country is so much more diverse. Are you seriously comparing a tiny piece of land (HK) to a huge landmass like India, which has hundreds of different cultures, identities, religions, languages. We absolutely needed a code to unify our country. We are still very diverse, but our unified under a single identity of Indian.
And since you folks actually acknowledge the atrocities of Nazi Germany, you should definitely look into India's colonial history. You'll understand the storm we had to endure, and what we were left with once we kicked those colonizers out of our land.
While my country has made tremendous progress, I wonder how precise these numbers are.
India's poverty line doesn't gets redrawn every year to account for the inflation and increased cost of living.
The current definition of the poverty line is daily earnings 27 rs for rural areas and 33 for urban, which is a ludicrously low number.
Even beggars earn more than that. Of course we will have very low poverty if we use stupid ways to measure it.
The report does not use any numbers your provided. They use Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). From the report:
The global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) is a key international resource that measures acute multidimensional poverty across more than 100 developing countries. First launched in 2010 by the oxford Poverty and Human development Initiative at the university of oxford and the Human development report office of the united nations development Programme, the global MPI advances Sustainable development Goal 1, holding the world accountable to its resolution to end poverty in all its forms everywhere.
I appreciate the humility, but would suggest updating your original comment to reflect this, since it is one of the top comments on the page. If the edit button is not there, you can reach out to dang via email.
It is hilariously unique indian mentality. Jumping on any positive news about the country to correct why it cant be. It always starts with "believe me im indian". A glance over the report could have prevented it.
It uses Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) not something you are referring to.
Nothing unique about it. Lots of countries have this stereotype about themselves that "we're a people that likes to complain about our government even when things are going well", but it's a natural thing to do.
To put things in perspective, I have 40 Rs in my wallet now, and I can't buy anything with it. It's less than a dollar, and it feels like less than a dollar.
Bro . what are you talking about . I live in BTM, Bangalore and I can get a nice masala dosa for 30rs where I live . or I can get 8 idlies . enough to last me the whole day if I really needed it to . 40rs can get you a lot if you know where to look .
Bruh, you can visit any temple and get free food/water and you can still save 40Rs. ( To put things in perspective, I'm a resident who often visit temple for free food. No offence)
I don't understand poverty statistics. With this news, the UK now has more people living in poverty than India (16% vs 22%?). If it is valuable to judge poverty on relative income, you would think the rational course of action would be mass immigration from the UK to India but that is clearly not the case.
This is based on multidimensional poverty index(MPI), developed pretty recently. It is a mix of both absolute and relative poverty. Though MPI is used mainly in developing nations.
> This figure considers both the proportion of the population that is deemed poor, and the 'breadth' of poverty experienced by these 'poor' households, following the Alkire & Foster 'counting method'.[1] The method was developed following increased criticism of monetary and consumption based poverty measures, seeking to capture the deprivations in non-monetary factors that contribute towards well-being. While there is a standard set of indicators, dimensions, cutoffs and thresholds used for a 'Global MPI',[2] the method is flexible and there are many examples of poverty studies that modify it to best suit their environment. The methodology has been mainly, but not exclusively,[3] applied to developing countries.
This is an incorrect definition of relative poverty as on that basis then number of people in poverty will never change - no one interested in serious analysis would use such a definition as it is not useful.
Via more equal outcomes. An egalitarian society might have the same net wealth as a stratified society, but with less relative poverty.
Of course, the bottom x% is what it is - but if you create margins or classes then it works different - ie, the % of people who are making x% less than the median or average or whatever.
Having fewer middle class people and wealthy people flattens the income curve. Not great for society, but your relative poverty statistics would improve. Otherwise, yes, every ladder has a bottom rung.
Relative measures are important because it's an indicator of how fairly domestic resources are being allocated. You can be a poor country but have resources fairly allocated among the population, and you can be a rich country and have resources unfairly allocated among the population. It's a good indicator of how well people at the bottom are being taken care of, and the ideal scenario is a rich country with low income inequality, which the Nordic countries are probably the best examples of.
You can use measures that are less country-specific like the Gini coefficient and UN R/P to measure domestic inequality between countries:
The UK has a Gini coefficient of 35.1, a UN R/P 10% of 13.8
India has a Gini coefficient of 35.7, a UN R/P 10% of 8.6
For reference, Norway has a Gini coefficient of 27.7, and a UN R/P 10% of 6.1
That is very interesting. But I think the answer to the parents question about why people are not boarding rubber dinghies from the UK to India is that in absolute terms poverty is not the same in the two countries.
Have you been through the process of emigration before, especially as a person in poverty? You make it out to be like just packing up a suitcase and setting up in a cushy new place, the reality is so far away from that.
I think that's just a measure that is meant to vary over time for a single state rather than vary over states for a single time. India struggles with problems of feeding, sheltering, and hygiene for its population.
Ultimately, the purpose of that statistic for the state to be able to tell whether its policies are working. The state, therefore, must construct measures that show progress when it makes progress and show regress when it makes errors. A measure that ultimately shows 0 progress even when real progress is made, is not that useful to the state.
A data nerd may want to normalize definitions (I certainly do and the MMR and IMR measurements are ones I find particularly annoying) but ultimately a state measures for its own purposes and not mine.
> With this news, the UK now has more people living in poverty than India (16% vs 22%?)
The severity of poverty in rich western nations is easy to underestimate. There are people in the UK who are underfed, can't afford heat, have to work multiple jobs etc. This kind of poverty does look different than poverty in India - better in some ways, but worse in others - but it is still poverty.
The data on relative poverty is hard to trust, but we also can't trust gut feelings about which countries "must" have more poverty. Perhaps it is true that UK does have a higher fraction of people in some kind of poverty.
Poverty in the west is often of a different kind than in India. Deep poverty in India can look living in self build house in a slum, with no or low and irregular income most of which goes straight into food and necessities.
Deep poverty in the west often looks like having a stable income and roof, but being completely overwhelmed by high unavoidable static costs such as rent, health insurance, loan paybacks, etc. Of course this style of poverty is also present in India
They're different kinds of experience. I suspect the former is more dangerous, scary and unpleasant, but the latter is more depressing and suffocating.
It's more depressing and suffocating than extremely high rates of malnutrition, less educational and institutional access, a stricter class system , having to cook with fuels like dung, poor sanitation, awful maternal health? Color me skeptical.
Malnutrition is common in the west too, though it more often takes the form of unhealthy overeating. Lack of physical exercise and lives lived inside also contribute to poor every day health. You're right that sanitation and maternal health are better in the west, but those are things that tend to outright kill you if they get to you. The western style health issues are more constant and boring, leading to a different type of suffering.
Likewise with the institutional access and class system, the west has a more sort of guaranteed based level of societal support. But in India, chances are larger that you'll have a more local social support group of family and friends. In comparison the west is often much more isolated and lonely
Obviously I'd still prefer being poor in the west, but I think it's reasonable to say we also have forms of suffering here that are different in kind and sometimes worse than in India
I understand those in poverty in India are typically still part of a religious, family or social community. In the UK those in poverty are often completely isolated.
Sometimes community can provide a safety net, but even a community so poor that it can't help materially is better for, e.g. mental health.
Apparently the Multidimensional Poverty Measure is defined as;
An index that captures the percentage of households in a country deprived along three dimensions of well-being – monetary poverty, education, and basic infrastructure services – to provide a more complete picture of poverty.
There's also the Multidimensional Poverty Index which has an alternate definition
It must be relative to that nation. From my experience the UK IS becoming an incredibly segregated nation along economic lines. I don't find it hard to believe that 22% of the populace are in relative poverty. This is very different from absolute poverty, of which I'm sure India has a higher percentage.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. UK has been under Tory rule for most of the last few decades. Its hard to see why they shouldn't be held responsible for UK's fortunes
Uk has 4.1 million children in poverty, or 30%.
It now more food banks than macdonalds.
Poorer counties often have large families, government programs for food distribution and many people growing their own food.
You might have empty bank account but you will have something to eat and some roof over your head, even if you are crashing at family place or it's illegal construction on a land thats not technically yours.
If you are poor in London you will just starve and freese to death
This is sad, but basically every supermarket and corner shop has something like a foodbank by the door and I guess it would be included in these stats so not surprising. Also people with housing can survive in way colder conditions than they might think. It's a shame that all the wealth has been hoovered up from them by the upper classes and big businesses. Every time I see something about cost of living in the UK I think about whenever I want to do anything: theme park, attractions, hotels, restaurants everything is packed with people spending obscene amounts of money, loads of new cars around etc. It's truly a 2 tier system now and I guess in the US also?
I don’t know the answer but I’m sure they’re defined differently. Poverty in India means making less than $1.90 dollars a day. By those standards the UK would have zero poverty so their numbers are clearly self defined at a much higher standard than the UNDP global standard.
All incomes are in PPP (purchasing power parity) dollars, so you can see that living at the US poverty line of $11k/year places one at about 85th percentile (having more income than 85% of the world's population).
One of the best comments I came across do describe India (doesn't matter if it isn't original): "India is a place that disappoints both an optimist and a pessimist at the same time.
I grew up in India in the 90s, saw first hand the transition from the disastrous socialism of the Nehru era to open markets, capitalism and deregulation. (The end of "license raj".)
It started with PV Narasimha Rao as PM and Manmohan Singh as his finance minister in the early 90s. Thankfully Singh himself had a fruitful tenure as PM later. All it took for India to take off was the shackles of govt control to come off.
Sad to see that the lesson hasn't been learned and even today there is a strong strain of socialist reasoning calling for more govt control on markets.
Concrete example: before deregulation one had to pull strings (e.g. have family or friends in the civil service) to get a phone to your house, then wait a few months after approval to actually get the wire to your house. That was also the era that there were two channels on TV, both state controlled (Doordarshan) that broadcast maybe 5-6 hrs per day.
The license raj is still there for business, except maybe some sectors like tech startups. Yes there has been improvements in citizens life like mobile phones etc. But official harassment and bribery is as prevalent as before. Want to get a passport issued or renewed have to pay Rs 500 to the police. Just last week a mother and her kids died as they were turned away from a govt hospital as they could not show the Aadhar id card. Read the Indian news and this kind of cases as their every week.
Aadhar card actually lessens corruption. Before aadhar government aid could go to whoever. With aadhar the points where corruption can happen is drastically reduced (to 1).
I wonder which city this would be where you still need to bribe the police for getting a passport. I got mine in 2015 and the process was hassle-free. But this was in a tier-1 city, so my experience might be an exception.
> I got mine in 2015 and the process was hassle-free.
Funny story - I had my police verification the week of demonetization in 2016. After the cop was done, we both silently knew that even if he asked for something, there just wasn't cash available to give him. He looked heartbroken.
I am really baffled by this claim, since I've been observing the Global Hunger Index for a while, where India has consistently fared worse than even DPRK (North Korea), and is almost the same level as Afghanistan, a country that has been at war for 20 years. https://www.globalhungerindex.org/
I am not sure if these 2 reports are contradictory, or whether they are in agreement with each other (since the GHI score for India has been trending downwards). Does anyone who is more knowledgeable on this please explain?
(Any government will try to say the same thing, to save its face)
But right now, the welfare state is still working (free/discounted food for lower income class).
Anecdotally speaking, there is no such 'hunger' observed even in beggar communities. All are pretty much well fed.
Due to opening of the economy in 1991, people have become 'rich' and the welfare state has subsequently reduced.
If we are talking about nourishment or nutrient intake, it is also not observed to be lower to the scale the index paints.
Even during lockdown and covid pandemic, 200 million or more people were given free/discounted food everyday. There might be more hunger during the lockdowns, covid deaths; but not to high extent the index says compared to other countries.
The index paints the 'hunger' levels on the scale of DPRK or Afghanistan which is just not possible (laughable), if anyone sees it from first hand perspective. I have always been suspicious of the index from the very beginning. Even the past decade reports are suspicious.
worse than NK?
lmao any index claiming that is absolutely wrong
you get 1 kilo of rice or more for 2 rupees from the government and other stuff too. Sure not everyone is well fed but we aint as bad as NK
The reason for this is the population is so large that absolute numbers will be still very high. There are still millions of people that need to be lifted.
The reason for this is (assuming no malice from the index creators) Indians always have had low protein diet (I have evidence from all state cuisines which are very carb heavy for field work). Relatively lower meat consumption also skews it. However, eggs consumption has increased a lot in recent decades which should help.
In states such as Andhra and Telangana, there is a public distribution scheme, which supplies subsidized rice and cooking oil for a long time, at least since 1985. Even in 1985, they supplied 1 kilo rice for 2 rupees--this price is kept that way even today. Families get like 25 kilos per month. For many, that is a savior, even though this rice is not of quality (like sona masuri, basmati). However, it is tasty when the rice is freshly cooked and hot.
After PV Narsimrao's reforms, thanks to IT and service sectors, many people are able to get out of this dependency. In South India, every small village has many people working in Chennai, Hyd, Bangalore, Pune for many IT companies, etc.
In Late 90's and early 2000's, even if you were a M.Tech graduate from IITs in chemical engg/civil engg/mech engg, Companies like Infosys/TCS did not hire such people. Today, same companies go to a third rate private engineering colleges, hire a lot of people for jobs.
Now, you see a lot of migration from the North to the south--to work as carpenters, electricians, etc. Also, population growth is kind of slowed in the south--at most two kids per couple.
The public distribution scheme is riddled with inefficiency and corruption.
My family is one beneficiary being below poverty line, You had to entertain the worst of lot, the local corporator, the PDS contractor so you get your PDS every month. There was also no fixed date by when it would be present, Most of the times the contractors are cheaters who replace that rice for a worse quality of rice(Almost always the grain in small)
I can promise you, That the 2 rupees rice is not tasty. It's horrible, It was not 25 kilo per month, If I remember correctly it was around 4 kilo per person per month till bjp came to power.
BTW, It was started by late CM of AP, N.T.R.
Direct money transfer is a better option every single time.
Interested in comments from anyone who lives in India or has experience/familiarity with it as to whether reality on the ground matches the rosy picture painted in the article.
I can give me 2 cents (or paisa hah), apologies if it gets a little sentimental, I am drunk. Looks like I've ascended on the Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Grew up in a poor family with my dad as the sole earner taking care of my mother and 3 kids. Mum used to do minor clothes repair work for neighbours for some extra money, but it wasn't much. One of my first memories is waddling along to the ration shop (cheap subsidized government shops) with my mother to buy rice and kerosene for cooking.
Things were hard for quite a while (I was about 12 or 13), it didn't really change until my oldest sibling got a job at Infosys after finishing university. Now that I look back on it, what they were paying him wasn't much, but for us it was a life changer. We could afford daily essentials without any hassle. No longer we needed to buy things on credit from the grocery stores, no longer we were worried about not being able to pay the electricity bills at the end of the month.
It did change the trajectory of our life dramatically, as it allowed me and my other sibling to afford university. I did a bachelors in Computer Science and eventually managed to move to Europe for work after a few years. We are in a much better position than we were 15 years ago.
I know people here tend to look down on these cheap curry-consultancies for their dogshit services but at the other end of the line there are real humans too. Same dreams and ambitions as you do. It's true that these companies pay their actual employees peanuts and treat them like shit, but sometimes that's good enough when the baseline of what life gave you to begin with was wayyyy less.
This is just anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt, but this was a similar story for many of my friends from childhood.
It's a little funny that people here assume that everyone on this forum is some FAANG engineer earning $400k in SF, there's also a small section of us little people hanging out in the corners :)
As a fellow Indian who has had a similar trajectory as yours, thank you for sharing your story.
The point you said about Infosys paying salary that is good enough to escape poverty trap can’t be emphasized enough. Infosys, TCS, and similar companies gave lifted hundreds of thousands of families out of poverty trap.
> One of my first memories is waddling along to the ration shop (cheap subsidized government shops) with my mother to buy rice and kerosene for cooking.
Man you just rekindled those memories. I still remember the dusty ration card book (from PV Narsimha Rao's times, I guess).
> people here tend to look down on these cheap curry-consultancies
HN is very parochial when it comes to outsourcing and the vitriol some people here have for H1-Bs is sad. Our stories are the other side of the coin which shows that these curry-consultancies are making some real dent in the universe for the rest of us.
Thank you for sharing your journey.
As a fellow Indian with a similar trajectory, I can totally relate to this.
Although I do fall in the FAANG engineer earning 300k+ in New York, I do believe most of us are the same(desi engineers in TCS/Infosys or on site FAANG) for whom programming/CS/tech is a passion and ambitious/adventurous/lucky to be able to get out of poverty/lower middle class, we hustle and make the best of the hand we are dealt, not everyone gets lucky to crack the FAANG lottery and clear the leetcode hoops FAANG companies throw at you. Personally I feel you should change your attitude to think the peanuts they give you is enough, of-course while keeping your humility and remembering your humble upbringing to appreciate the pay/privilege many others dont have/wont ever get just due to dumb luck, unless some crazy innovation like miniature nuclear fission reactors that give humanity potentially infinite energy and makes everyones life luxurious , in a world of finite resources and potential over population its inevitable there will some overpaid, some underpaid engineers, yet both these sets are paid significantly higher than many many others from a non engineering disciplines.
Background: I come from a non-UC, rural yeoman farmers family. I grew up in rural India and used to spend my summer and winter vacations working on our family farm along with my cousins. I was the first Engineer in my family and studied in a Government college, and most of my batchmates were from a similar background, with over 50% of them being lower classes.
I have witnessed India's progress from the front row and it is something my parents or grandparents could never have imagined. Many of my friends went on to achieve great prosperity, some being C-level at Unicorns, others helping build Indias nuclear submarines etc. There is substantial wealth in the hands of my 4th tier town folks and I can see the signs of (relative) prosperity. Most households have people working in the private sectors and the wealth does trickle down.
I visited a Govt. hospital recently and I was surprised to see that it is not an ugly damp place it used to be. Granted, it is not on par with NHS or US hospitals but neither is it a god forsaken place.
The infrastructure is also much better than it was in the 90s. My grandfather would be shocked to see the Nagpur Metro and would think Aliens built it.
I am also proud of the fact that India does take special care of wild life and is actively working to preserve the amazing biodiversity it has. Of course there will always be pressure from humans, but the heart is at the right place.
> The infrastructure is also much better than it was in the 90s. My grandfather would be shocked to see the Nagpur Metro and would think Aliens built it.
I think this is underappreciated. Yes, infra in India is still not Switzerland, but eg. airports are now unimaginably better compared to just 20 years ago, when you needed a biohazard suit to venture into the bathrooms at DEL.
Firstly, thanks for posting this. Everything done to help alleviate poverty is wonderful, no matter how it is achieved.
I'm American, but of Indian origin. Our family visited many major cities in India when I was a child (early 90s) and it was heartbreaking. We just kept wondering -- how does anyone begin to fix poverty that is so vast? We gave a lot of charity (esp schooling support) over the years but it always seemed like just scratching the surface of a vast problem.
We havent been back since -- but i'd say every family helped is a positive step. Solutions do not need to be 100% comprehensive at the start. I look forward to more economic success for the people of India, and for people everywhere.
Purely anecdotal, please don’t ask me for data, sources etc.
It seems to me the government is doing a good job of supporting those at or below abject poverty. There are food security programs, free medical aid, education, and I guess even housing. Of course the poor have to wade through bureaucratic and corrupt system. But with digitization it’s getting fixed to an extent.
That said, the huge challenge I see is in the so called middle class segment. For a reasonably educated person the jobs just don’t exist any more. So the mullion of people who join the work force every year have to fight for a few thousand jobs. And they live their life precariously, just one or two jolt away from falling back into poverty. For a vacancy of 10 clerical posts tens of thousands jobless people turn up, some of them way over qualified. This cohort is really getting disillusioned and is easy to manipulate and radicalize.
India is a hugely complicated, vast, and diverse country, it can’t be comprehend by one person or even group. So you will come across all kinds of contradicting views all of which could well be true simultaneously.
This seems more like propaganda. I come from a small village. No one in the village is jobless, or hard pressed to meet basic necessities. In fact there is acute labor shortage in agriculture.
I have a cousin who probably failed in his 10th grade. He picked up some driving skill, and works in one of the road construction companies. He recently got fired because he wanted to work from a different place, and the company didn't have an opening in that place. He found a similar job at his preferred place within a week. He has his own car, and saved enough to start a side gig setting up a pharmacy where he employs couple of people.
There is no dearth of work for people willing to work, and are flexible. It's a different matter if someone wants to find a cushy government job.
I can tell my experience. Not just me but everyone I know moved from poverty to lower-middle or middle class in just 20 years. When I was 5 years old, we were living in a village with no electricity. Having 2 square meals was a luxury only some house holds had. Many farmers & daily wage workers had only enough to eat one meal a day. My family's biggest fear while I was growing up was what will happen if my father felt sick and couldn't work. I am thankful those days are behind us.
It has changed a lot this holds very dear to me as I come from very poor Indian village and have seen what people go through.
My village had mountain on one side and river on all three other side, so when my maternal grandfather died I had to cross a river with my little brother on top of me to see him.
My family was so poor that they sold goats to somehow manage my fees and used to skip mills on Monday to manage finances.
In few decades we have solar powered borewell in that remote village and I am earning very good earning.
Not only my family but everyone in village has been uplifted. My ancestors will lose their mind if they see us now.
I think this also has network effect for example before current era no one knew about opportunities present outside as information was no easily accessible in village.
One guy getting a job leads to ripple effect on other families perusing better job and education.
I live in India. Well definitely there is a change in last 15-20 years. People have money to buy phones, bikes, tv along with DTH connection, etc even in poor villages. Electricity situation is much better. Roads are much much better now. Access to baking is much more prevalent. Digital services has brought much needed access and corruption is lesser. We have many brands, malls, restaurants etc. Air travel which was elite in 2005s is now common place and accessible to many more (but not all). Rail travel has improved marginally, I would say. Water and sanitation has improved marginally.
Education has though largely remained where it was i.e. cities have very very good schools, colleges (but expensive) etc and higher eduction (colleges etc) is much more prevalent but primary education in rural areas is still a concern. Same with healthcare. It has improved drastically in cities but not in rural areas.
However there is still a 20% population which lives below the poverty line. This, in Indian context is still a very large number (250-280mn). Government cannot put their foot off peddle here. Education, nutrition, healthcare, roads, safe drinking water, santitation, electricity, social equality etc are the goals that they need to continue focusing on.
In my parents generation, very few people finished high school and college degrees were rare. If we go back to the village now (in southern India), pretty much all the people my age go to college, have professional degrees and have generally moved away from the villages or abroad. But they all send money back and most everyone is visibly comfortable at this point.
India did make progress in lifting poverty. The numbers wary according to context but yes in absolute numbers India did make significant progress. Most of it is done by IT and pharma industry.
If you want the reasoning, this IMF paper[1] goes into the detail. Generally gist is development rate (like GDP) is high in developing country, so is the inflation
7% inflation as opposed to a targeted high of 6% is very different from 7% (actually 8+%) inflation, from a targeted high of about 2-4% (the Fed doesn’t publish a range I believe…they only say they target 2%…in practice, historically, they’ve treated 2% as a high, but I believe thats changed since the Great Recession so I’ll generously assume a +-2% range).
What’s even more relevant to the Indian situation is that much of that inflation is being driven by the strength of the dollar which has made imports more expensive.
The U.S., of course, is on the other side of that problem. The ridiculously strong dollar means that solely currency effects should be making things cheaper for Americans.
It’s the reality. Money is an abstraction over value. You provide value to get money, you spend money receive value. Some value is provided by nature (clean air, wild berries, etc.) and is therefore priceless. However, most value is created by applying energy and human attention to base inputs. Money is not a battery for work in the physics sense, or for work in the labor sense. If you earn money through labor today, there is no guarantee that there will be someone tomorrow willing or able to do the same labor you did for the same money. Humans want to believe in stored value (see bitcoiers, goldbugs), but the reality is the majority of value in the world is delivered by systems that must be continually operated such as energy grids, water systems, retailers, internet infrastructure providers, farms, and factories. There is nothing that guarantees these systems will exist tomorrow except for the efforts or regular people like you and me, so there is nothing that guarantees that your money will be worth anything tomorrow except for the belief that everyone will keep showing up and trying.
Wherever you have "high" inflation you have bank fixed deposit rates to match. Do you know what the FD rate is for major banks in India say for a 1 year FD (CD)?
My great-grandfather was an indentured laborer in Malaya. My great-great-grandfather's family properties were seized by the British Raj, and many of his relatives and family imprisoned after a rebellion. Our family has not been able to recover from that up until my father's and uncles' generation, when many of them were able to go abroad (mostly the Middle East).
On the other hand, on my mother's side, many of her grandfather's businesses were forcefully nationalized in the few years after Indian independence.
Funnily enough, life has been good so far for our extended family. We have 4 dollar billionaires who have extensive properties in the UK today. And one of them owns a stake in the British EIC.
Don't see this attributed but one of the biggest "right to work" initiative called probably had lot to do with this "National Rural Employment Guarantee Act".
And how much carbon did it take to do it? That's the question we're not asking enough when considering lowering our carbon footprint. Which is why it's been a devilish problem to solve.
And then there is the hard part of moving up the GDP per capita. What do you think it would take to go from India current level of $2,277 to China level of $12,556 to a Singapore level of $72,794 (US is $69,287)?
Do millennial and gen-z Indians have a similarly skeptical view towards capitalism held by so many young people in NA and the EU?
I had a friend tell me the other day that I couldn't be anti-racist if I wasn't anti-capitalist, because capitalism is by inherently racist. Ever since 2018 or so it seems as if anti-capitalism has become part of the mainstream progressive Western viewpoint, while I don't remember that being the case in the 2000s. Are these views held around the world, or do I just have a very well-selected sample?
It’s easy to criticize capitalism if you’ve never lived under the alternatives I guess.
The entrepreneurial spirit is really impressive. You can call up some store and say “can you have someone bring the clothes to my home to try on?” and they’ll say “no problem”. They’re dynamic, resourceful and willing be flexible.
People start companies all the time. Of course the lack of paperwork and regulations (they exist, but mostly ignored) helps immensely.
South Asia was captured by the East India Company, and the wealth of its people systematically extracted over centuries. This is different from the many other local wars and invasions that happened in India before and during this time, where either the invaders left after stealing wealth once, or they stayed and generally tried to improve the area they captured. Systematic extraction of wealth was only a feature of capitalist firm made of people who said they were distinct from you, and superior (please note 'race' was invented by Europeans).
So, hate for capitalism is pretty old in certain parts of the world.
> hate for capitalism is pretty old in certain parts of the world.
I would like to have a different take. India has a strong merchant class since aeons and market economy was never a taboo culturally. You can see that in the entrepreneurs like Bansals, Agrawals, Shahs that are at the helm of Indian Unicorns. So yes, there is a skepticism about 'western' capitalism, but not for market economics.
This strong merchant class is also a strong minority. Ever since India became a nation it has staunchly stood against free-market policies and its popular vote overwhelmingly supports policies of regulation, subsidies and handouts as against privatization.
> Ever since India became a nation it has staunchly stood against free-market policies and its popular vote overwhelmingly supports policies of regulation, subsidies and handouts as against privatization.
I don't see how we disagree. I am aware that capitalism and market based economies are not one-to-one. The share-holder system is what results in massive exploitation in capitalism. Market economies can also exploit but not in the same dispassionate way that share-holders do.
Markets can exist in non-capitalist societies. Markets exist to use money as a medium to convert one form of goods/labour into a different form of goods/labour. Capitalism meanwhile uses goods/labour as a medium to convert money into more money.
Which is exactly the reason why communism could never rise the way it did in China and Soviet union. I mean most of the population accepted their 'fate' in the feudal systems.
No. Indians are very pro capitalism. Especially since the 90s reforms which are largely the precursor to Indias growth.
However, Indians don’t have an ideological attachment to capitalism. It’s looked upon as the best way to grow and improve things in most, but not all, avenues. So Indians are still in favor of socialist policies where they are working well. So, Indians probably would not be in favor of privatizing Indian Railways, or eliminating the many subsidies and free supplies given to the poorest, or eliminating the 50% foreign investment cap in many industries.
No. Liberalization of the economy is either what made all of this possible or in any case is what preceded this. An anti-capitalist viewpoint is associated with kids of rich parents who study what are generally viewed as non-productive subjects. The general view is that winning means getting your kids on the next step of the ladder in a profession that will move them upward in socioeconomic status.
Most young 'anti-capitalists' in the West are still generally capitalists who prefer socialization for certain essential industries like healthcare or are disillusioned by the gerontocracy trading the future of the young to further maximize their own comforts (see: housing, education, anything to do with green energy or big tech). The kinds of people you're talking about are fringe extremists.
I think India is already quite socialist to begin with so anti-capitalism isn't a very strong sentiment there. There's also a lot less centralization and fewer monopolies. I probably shopped at my local small business much more often than I went to a big box store in India whereas in the US, I can't remember the last time I was able to conveniently do business at a small business.
FWIW, she has a Masters in French Lit from one of our relatively well-respected schools, but obviously I completely disagree with her on most political topics. These kinds of stances are more common than you'd think in Canadian academic circles.
I think people have different definitions of what "educated" means. The average social studies grad has zero grasp of basic economic concepts, but a lot of them feel confident comparing economic philosophies.
Like I said, get educated friends, not friends who think reading some poetry is education. This isn't England in the middle ages where that would have been considered an education.
I think this is a kneejerk take -- the study of literature generally encompasses an intersection of the study of the society, culture, economy, history that produced that literature. In other words, if you study Medieval English Literature, you also study the historical context that surrounds that subject.
My opinion: I would consider his friend well-educated and curious enough about the world that she got a Masters degree in a specialized field.
PPl should stick to their fields of "professionalism" and and let people who know economics to deal with economic problem. Because her statement is factually incorrect.
I don’t think they had Masters degrees in the Middle Ages, but I somewhat understand the point you’re very awkwardly trying to make.
Yes I agree, a Masters in literature doesn’t teach you much about the ‘real world’, but if you don’t think there are plenty of CS and engineering students with the exact same type of perspective, you need to expand your social circles.
If you find yourself agreeing with everything your friends say, I’d actually say it’s you who needs to find friends with different educational backgrounds than your own.
Which part, specifically, confused you? Was it 'well-selected sample'? Was it the notion of anti-racism? Neither of these are terms I coined, but they're fairly well defined in my social groups. I'm happy to clarify any topics you're unfamiliar with.
If a subsistence farmer eating good he grows, becomes a subsistence worker who get paid to buy food, is he reported had "less poverty" because he has more cash flow, even if he ends up with the same daily food?
The move away from socialist economic policy has been a great boon for the Indian people. But a lot needs to be done still to root out the corruption and wastage of the socialist days
So they lifted almost twice my home country's population out of poverty in 15 years? That's impressive. Also, how did India got to have so many people?
India has always had so many people relative to the rest of the world. I don't think there is any point in history since the bronze age where India and China weren't the most populous places in the world.
It's sad to see how many people don't know this simple fact. India and China actually have a smaller share of the world population now (around 1/3). In most of human history it was bigger [1]
It would've been even smaller if it wasn't for the devastating consequences of European imperialism. These countries were left in a piss poor state, lack of education and healthcare etc, resulting in a long period of high birth rates with exponential growth.
Check the graph below [2] you can clearly where most damage happened, during the main occupation period (1850s to 1950s). Britain had falling birth rates (prosperity) but they were constantly high in India (poverty). Birth rates have been on a steep decline only after independence. Yet empire apologists somehow claim that it was a net good for India :)
It's an interesting question how Europe would look if all the white Americans and Australians and so on had stayed in Europe. But the answer is not obvious.
The average fertility rate in India is 2.2 now I think. It is below 2 in Southern states and still relatively high in BIMARU states which are the biggest problems.
Weather is an underrated reason. India perhaps has the best suited weather conditions for humans to thrive. 80% or more of the land have non-extreme weather
> India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN
At what costs?
I've heard this narrative before as it has happened in many Western countries and it is continuing to happen in China. I don't have the answer, but I always wonder about the costs of lifting so many people out of poverty, for example, there could be costs related to: environment, quality of life, traditions and values, mental health, etc.
Along with that thought experiment, I wonder how did they get into poverty in the first place. A lot of areas that are now declared as poverty zones today may have been poor in the past, but were self-sufficient and self sustaining.
>> there could be costs related to: environment, quality of life, traditions and values, mental health, etc.
quality of life, mental health: are you implying folks in poverty were perhaps happier before? If so, you're probably not familiar with life in poverty.
environment: while there are larger issues that could likely surface (more consumption of electricity, additional waste etc.), the environment in which they lived most likely improved (sanitation, medical help, gas instead of wood-burning stove, cow-dung as fuel, water-borne diseases); this comes from personal experience having lived close to one of the largest slums a long, long time ago.
> I wonder how did they get into poverty in the first place. A lot of areas that are now declared as poverty zones today may have been poor in the past, but were self-sufficient and self sustaining.
Well, when the British left in 1945, roughly 15% of the country was literate [0], now that is up to 77% [0]. From here [1], it seems that poverty was around 45% of the population (361 million). It also says the rate varied based on how the monsoon season went, which makes sense for a primarily agrarian society, especially one which had to import food to meet their needs till 1965 (roughly).
so, basically, the British didn't leave India in a good place. See [2]
>A lot of areas that are now declared as poverty zones today may have been poor in the past, but were self-sufficient and self sustaining.
everthing was on a razorthin margin, just a minor floods or droughts could kill double percentage of the population and they werent that uncommon, hence the monstrous birthrate. An analogy in animal realm is population of animals dependent on variable inputs of "food sources", their population graphs are always a rollercoaster
Also, it’s interestingly a huge black eye to the CCP: news of this Indian accomplishment will be censored in China, because it proves that nations can progress without forced-sterilization/-abortion/-1-child-policy/authoritarianism/ etc.
Why would it be a black eye to the ccp when they’ve lifted twice as many from poverty as India? And far higher growth, gdp per capita, etc. weird comment
Linked article is roughly double the time frame referenced for India. Its in the world's largest democracy. Benevolent dictatorships work for as long ad the dictator(s) remains Benevolent.
This is like intentionally shipping bugs into production so you can be the hero and fix them. Why did China have to lift 800M people out of poverty in the first place? Congratulations to the Chinese gov on decreasing the way they treat their populace like farm animals?
Because the CCP’s (more specifically Xi Jinping’s) entire thesis is that democracies are incapable of producing good outcomes.
A lot of the move towards authoritarianism that we’ve been seeing in the world has been driven by the success of the “China model”.
If India is successful to a similar degree as China, that shatters this belief, especially since there are very significant questions about the Chinese economy and how stable it is. A lot of the numbers appear to be made up in a way India simply cannot do.
And if Democracies can achieve success, Chinese citizens themselves may consider it as the better alternative as it might indicate that China’s economic success was less the result of the CCP and more because the Chinese government chose to move towards a Western capitalist economic system a couple of decades before India.
Their stance relies mostly on the same tired canards that India disproves; that an uneducated populace, rural areas, etc are hindrances. They are, but they're not ones that Communism/Authoritarianism solves - And India has some authoritarian properties, too.
The 2016 Indian banknote demonetisation is perfect example of how a somewhat democratic state can pull off large scale action that China refutes as a possibility. Was it pretty? Was it effective? Who knows. What matters in this argument is that it's the kind of corruption fighting mechanism that China likes to cite as the domain of their heavenly mandate and not possible for democracies.
Again, China can keep yelling that their way is the only way for China, but there does need to be a little more supporting basis than that.
> Again, China can keep yelling that their way is the only way for China, but there does need to be a little more supporting basis than that.
Says who?
Running a society is hard. You can't simply compare the reality against a hypothetical guaranteed better outcome that would happen under democracy, even ignoring the claim (at best contentious) that India has done better than China for the last couple decades.
An equally a propos comparison would be the Soviet Union and its attempt at a transition to democracy. Life spans and material wellbeing collapsed, and even their political system ultimately backslid, to something as bad as the USSR. You can say that they just did democracy wrong--which they certainly did--but that doesn't solve the core issue that getting democracy right is a really hard problem. If the CCP had committed to democratic reforms under Deng, maybe it would have worked out better; but it also might have created turmoil and mass death, as attempts at democracy did in the USSR. And if the latter happened, rubbernecking Westerners would just say "well China did democracy wrong"; democracy never fails, it can only be failed. It's easy to call for from afar, but when your society's well-being is on the line, it's a much scarier risk to take for abstract benefits.
… but India isn’t successful on the same scale as China. India’s middle class is not secure nor are successive generations guaranteed to remain middle class. That wealth is just not there.
India’s real middle class is just one financial disaster away from poverty. China on the other hand has been immensely successful at lifting millions out of poverty and securing them firmly in the middle class.
Also, if you think India cannot and does not make up numbers, you are completely wrong. See most recently their COVID numbers. See in the past their economic data that was treated at par with garbage by the global community.
You could say the same for any nation though. Right now, I would say that the Western middle class is not secure either, particularly in Europe, and just one disaster away from poverty. Young families are priced out of starter homes and there is increasing uncertainty.
We don't know what is the extent of the real estate bad loan crisis in China. But if the protests surrounding it are telling, then I would say that the Chinese middle class are already in a financial disaster. Couple that with the increasing anti-globalization from the West, and China's middle class certainly ends up being in a very bad position.
this is a flawed understanding and mischaracterises the situation. Europe’s middle class will be broke if they lose all their money. They still have institutional supports and community to fall back on. This is as true in the poorer european countries as it is in the richer ones. Not being able to afford a home is not in the same ballpark as not being able to eat.
India’s middle class will fall into poverty if they lose their money. the critical difference is that the indian middle class is without government or societal support to help them out of poverty.
And what if everyone in Europe is broke? The government can magically cook up money from thin air right? Those taxes will pay for themselves right?
In India, around 3% of the population pays income tax because the rest are under the tax bracket. Yet somehow the government manages to have public schools and hospitals. During covid, when students and children in the UK were starving, India was feeding 200 million people out of the government's pockets.
Its funny seeing people who have the faintest idea of Indian ground realities make sweeping generalizations about a country of 1.5b people.
1) At this point, the CCP internally considers the 1 child policy a mistake. I'm sure this news won't be widely published within China, but mentioning it is not going to get anyone into trouble. Plenty of people complain about the one child policy, and so long as you don't call for the downfall of the CCP because of it, you're fine.
2) India has its own sordid history with coercive sterilization. During the Emergency, millions of people were sterilized, under varying levels of compulsion.
Regarding 1), the documentary "One Child Nation" (currently included with Amazon Prime) goes into China's history with their one child policy in detail - from people who lived through it.
It is fascinating how they went from "One Child" to their current policy without admitting any mistake at all.
32 years ago, GDP per capita in China and India was $300.
Today, GDP per capita in India is $2,200.
It is $12,500 in China.
I'm not sure that 'Six times faster growth, and eight years of life expectancy, and seven times fewer people facing hunger and food insecurity' is as much of a black eye as you think.
I could think of quite a few Americans who would happily embrace a one-party state, if it meant that they wouldn't lose five sixths of their wealth and income, and eight years of their life, and have a one-in-seven chance of having to seriously face starvation. Most of them, actually.
This makes absolutely no sense given how everybody in China knows that western countries are richer. China is not North Korea, there is no information blackout. The average Chinese knows a lot more about, say, the US than the average American about China.
Chinese policies are meant to solve Chinese problems (whether they are successful is a different discussion). The government is in the business of producing results, ideology is secondary.
Wut, India started from a better state, took same amount of time, to progress 1/5th as much, while still having north korean tier food insecurity. Dooming generations and hundreds of millions of avoidable deaths due to being stuck in poverty for longer than need be. There's nothing to be envious about. Also eliminating rural poverty + building rural infra is the actual hard part that takes time and resources. We'll have to see if India has the resources to even get there, PRC didn't until $6000 gdp per capita. India and by extention relying on democracies to develop still a case of what not to do. Also India did their own sterilization / family planning campaign.
I just have an issue with the CCP and their apologists. That is primarily who people refer to when they say China. It is pretty common speech. Same when talking about America doing something, we refer to the US government primarily, not its people.
The heros in the story of Chinas amazing numbers of people lifted out of poverty is Deng Xiaoping and his successors. They've been basically thrown out with Xi. So modern China is unfortunately on the totally wrong trajectory.
It's ok to say "China was going the right direction between years X and Y" without being an "apologist".
The problem is that many people who say, "I just hate the CCP" go on to say things like,
* "China steals everything" (which essentially labels Chinese people as thieves).
* "Chinese scientists created CoVID-19 and then lied about it" (alleging that Chinese scientists have no integrity).
* "China only copies" (implying that Chinese people aren't creative).
* "Chinese numbers are all fake" (implying that millions of Chinese people are in on some conspiracy to fake everything).
In other words, in my experience, many people who say they just hate the CCP actually hold a huge number of negative stereotypes about Chinese people, and have a very conspiratorial view of the country.
One fact that everyone here should take into consideration is that the Communist Party has a very broad base of support in China, and is fairly popular. Most people actually approve of the central government, not in everything, but in general. If the Communist Party were as comically evil as people in the West tend to think, it wouldn't have this level of support, and it would lose power pretty quickly.
And one can't explain its popularity by claiming that Chinese people don't know what's going on - they tend to be far better informed about happenings in China than 99% of commenters in your average English-language internet forum. If you can't imagine why people in China would support the government, just consider the fundamental transformation that hundreds of millions of people have gone through in the last few decades. People who did not even have running hot water in their homes or reliable electricity are now wealthy enough to fly to Paris for a week.
I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture of the Chinese government or the Party, but I'm just pointing out that things are significantly more nuanced than most people here think.
The Chinese government has built work camps and committed genocide against Muslims in their northwestern provinces. With the CCP covering up things like that, I don't think it really matters how nuanced or rosy you are trying to be.
This is an incredible claim, given that nobody has even alleged that China is killing anyone in Xinjiang.
I recall when "genocide" used to mean "murder of a race" (as both the history of the term and its etymology make clear). It's now being devalued by obviously hyperbolic, rhetorical use.
I didn't consider it "genocide" when the US killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Iraq. If that's not genocide, there's no way it's genocide when China carries out political indoctrination in Xinjiang.
It’s the exact opposite. I don’t think anyone hates the Chinese people, just the CCP and primarily because it’s authoritarian and fast becoming the US’ main rival.
It's the double standards, you know. Not being able to vote, and so... While the US and its war machine has lost track of destroyed countries in this last decades in an Orwellian permanent conflict.
But the bad guys are the chinese, who hasn't been involved in a war in 40 years.
My relationship with Chinese people is great. I have a chinese ex, whose mom is hyper critical of the CCP and hates communism. They’re not Han chinese, they’re one of the less desirable ethnicities, and they didn’t feel well treated. Anyways.
Authoritarian regimes are bad. The fact that this authoritarian regime has mongoloid/asiatic facial features is irrelevant. I hated GWB’s expansion of the security state and two senseless middle eastern wars, I hated Obama killing American citizens without trial, and I hated Trump’s… everything, basically, but admittedly withdrawing from Afghanistan was p cool. Stopped clocks etc.
Anyways it’s totally consistent with wanting a just world to also hate the largest authoritarian regime in that world. This “but what if it’s because you’re racist?!?!” line is an absurdity
We literally elected people that are telling us our elections are rigged. Even if Russia and China orchestrated it, we're stupid enough to eat it up.
"Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens.
This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders." - George Carlin
That sucks, but the US lacks moral authority to point fingers as the US has such long history of manipulating elections all over the world, overthrowing democratic leaders. The US even actively spied on European citizens through PRISM at a scale never done by either China or Russia. When Snowden exposed the US, it just shrugged “everybody spies on everybody”.
Okay, if so, then why complain about Chinese spying? They are just doing what the US is even more guilty of.
As a westerner I would love to see the US stop embarrassing us in front of autocrats.
And the USA is doing the same to other countries. It is a given that this happens, and will continue to happen. You measure how strong a democracy is by how well they can resist such campaigns. If some random Russian bots can trigger a coup in the strongest and richest country in the world then, well, that's on us.
It’s still an act of aggression regardless of whether the US is equipped to deal with it. While I agree that the US does lots of shitty things, we have way more checks and balances than our key enemies. For one, it is the people who elect those who represent us.
John Bolton has been directly involved with foreign policy at least since he first worked at the State Department (the department responsible for the USAs foreign policy and relations) in 1989.
He has openly been a an advocate for military action and regime change by the US in several countries[1]. Recently he also openly mentioned his role in helping plan coups d'etat in an interview, when asked about the events on January 6th that followed the 2020 election:
"As somebody who has helped plan coups d'etat— not here but you know (in) other places— it takes a lot of work." [2]
Also, tragically enough, he in fact served as the 25th United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Just a reminder, when listing its principles, the first point of the UN's foundational charter reads: "The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members."
The USA counting a self-proclaimed "coup planner" as their ambassador to the UN can give us an idea of how fundamental interfering (ie, "hacking") other nation's affairs is to their foreign policy, and how little it respects the sovereignty of nations.
Sure they are, which countries aren't interested in the most powerful country that constantly exports their problems.(our debt is YOUR problem)
But the coverage is probably outsized to their actual impact compared to the hundreds of billions spent by the local monopolies trying to influence the elections themselves.
Trump ignoring his personal issues for a moment, has shown with his rise and fall, just how much of the media are just working together - I have never seen all of them including interestingly enough CNBC and Fox constantly dismissing the same candidate in unison for months towards to 2016 election.
Add the tech monopolies into the mix for 2020 and it was another eye opener.
Not being daft, but what fall? Sure the non-Right media wants to paint him as a has-been, but that's revisionist history, and wishful thinking.
Key fact: Trump in losing received more votes than Obama in either of BO's victory. Yet Obama is generally painted as popular and love, and Trump a nothing?
I'm not a fan of DT but a false hope in a false narrative is an opportunity for him to exploit.
I don’t like the CCP, but in practice the US conservative movement is probably the biggest threat to democracy in the West today. They are spreading the idea that elections need not be respected and spread conspiracy theories people are eating up all over the world.
For instance when we started getting problems with vaccination of people in Norway it was not due to China but fake news and conspiracies pushed by the radical conservative movement in the US.
The US holds a special position in advancing and protecting democracy, but is itself turning into a liability. China is a concern but first priority has to be to fix American democracy before it drags the whole West into the mud.
In absolute terms, yes we are seeing advancements in tech/medicine and the like and that will always help more and more people, but in more relative economic terms it's questionable whether the gap between poorer nations and richer ones is actually closing, because there is economic evidence that the gap is actually widening:
> Net Resource Transfers (NRT) for all developing countries have been mostly large and negative since the early 1980s, indicating sustained and significant outflows from the developing world (see graph below)
I think the relevant figures here would be how much of each countries' banks' balance sheets are de facto liabilities to the state. I can buy that Chinese banks incur more liability for their government than Indian banks do for theirs; I don't buy the idea that China is 100% liable for its banks' balance sheets while India is 0% liable for its banks' balance sheets.
AFAIK, ICBC is China's largest bank, and it's main purpose is to finance government construction and keep the debt off China's balance sheet.
Such a bank does not exist in the US or any major EU countries. They issue bonds and keep the debts on their balance sheets.
I'm skeptical India has any such equivalent.
The same is true for all the major banks in China. The main difference in China is that - since the bank is an extension of the state - the state directly decides who does and very importantly WHO DOES NOT get funding.
The companies that do get funding are often times GSEs. This is federal debt... Pretending otherwise is pedantic.
Sure, I'm with you - count Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's debts as the US Federal Government's debt.
India and almost every other country don't have any equivalents.
"That's a chain of office you are wearing; may I see it? Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales?"
Per my observation over the years, India immigrants are unique at hi-tech job market, when one India became a manager, over one or two years, all his team is pretty much filled up with people from India, this is unseen in other ethnic groups like Chinese, Japanese, or any other races. I can not stop thinking if they violated Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) laws in US.
That's very interesting because my boss is Indian and he hired only one other Indian person out of like ten new hires over the years. Then again, my company does have a lot of diversity and inclusion folks looking over the hiring process, so either D&I in my company is unusually effective or your anecdote is just an anecdote.
Maybe we shouldn't be painting millions of people with the same brush because of some patterns our brains happened to notice
Isn't it the same phenomenon as hiring alumni from your graduated school ?
I've anecdotally seen it happen again and again with the universities of the recruiting managers being overly represented in the candidate pool.
To note, Indians have a closer affinity to english putting them in an interesting position when moving to the US/UK (where I suppose you live). That affects wether the immigrant pool has a pretty normal social distribution or if the people getting out of their country are also used to getting out of their comfort zones. Japanese are specially affected by this, and workers that decided to go abroad will be less flocking into disporia communities.
People preferring to work with people from their own (sub)cultures, languages, and social networks (networks which often develop in schools) is pretty normal and I don't see it as inherently a bad thing.
In an ideal world you hire from a broad pool of people from the public but in reality hiring people you know tends to lower risk and a natural phenomenon.
But obviously it shouldn't be a hard rule, talent and applicable skills/personality should be what comes first every time.
If the company is entirely all Indian, over a long period of time, when they work in a diverse city then it's probably a sign they aren't looking broadly enough for talent and that is not just negatively biased socially, it's also bad for business.
Personal networks are a huge factor. My network? Pretty much tapped out of hiring leads soon after university. I got 2 applicants to apply over the last 15 years, and there was a decent hiring bonus. What sort of networks might these Indian managers and their subordinates have? Lots of eager, qualified applicants, especially from people still with family, friends or cultural connections in India. And these applicants have a sympathetic ear, who will not toss their application in the bin, who will in general be more familiar with visa and immigration rules regarding these applicants. And the manager gets first dibs in a tough yet still discriminatory market.
Technically, India did not do this. The people lifted themselves out of poverty because, finally, India‘s government had granted them enough freedom to pursue their happiness.
Economic freedom follows rule of law. And enforcing rule of law is not a passive activity. Free markets are only possible when governments take an active and benevolent role in society
Capitalism wins again! Better than trillions in government and UN dollars. Only productive enterprise and real business activity can lift hundreds of millions out of poverty - there is no substitute.
For Hayek's sake, would you please stop it with the generic ideological flamewar comments? I don't want to ban you and you're making it seriously hard. How many dozens of times have we asked you not to do this at this point?
Edit: actually your recent comment feed is so full of this that it seems you've stopped using HN for anything else. As that is not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, I've banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
China's unprecedented generational explosion into the middle class happened only after Deng Xiaoping instituted market reforms. Economically, China is certainly more socialist than the west, but far more capitalist than it was in the 1970's.
There was a massive drop in living standards in the former Soviet Union after the introduction of capitalism in the 90es. Average life expectancy dropped something like 10 years, corresponding to millions of dead.
Most communists and socialists will refer to both the USSR and China as capitalist projects on accelerated timelines. They were trying to speed-run from feudalism, through capitalism, to communism.
At least that's what comes up when you mention the problems that these countries have.
Instead of lifting poor class upwards, the west wants to pull everyone else down. Reducing quality of life and regressing in every metric of progress. The future is in Asia, places like Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Singapore. Socialism is so easily captivating to average IQ voter class in USA, it is a fight every generation has to go through. Countless examples of failures won't convince people.
Maybe I should have listed Milton’s books. Just because professor is part of Ayn Rand institute, you're not arguing about the points presented in the lecture, but instead discarding his credibility by association. There is a massive amount of 200+ years of history of Capitalism that's difficult to succintly address here.
Shellenberger's book review (first one that shows up on google search) is just following the same tropes of Climate catastrophization. The article doesn't steelman Shellenberger, but instead reduces it down to "… yet bad science, strawman arguments, cherry-picking facts, and ad hominem attacks on scientists, media, others"; ofcourse written by folks at Yale "Climate Connections" blog.
Climate arguments have no counter balance. The media routinely ignores the otherside of the equation and never provides a balanced view of how we can tackle it. Instead, the zeitgeist created by progressives for last 50 years is that we should depopulate, regress, and reduce quality of life and ultimately become state dependent. The same group of scientists and environmentalists that also ran the campaign against nuclear energy.
It has nothing to do with capitalism, it's all about strong government, strong institutions and the people who understand and pursue a common goal i.e: a synchronized society
Not OP, but I think what he's referring to is communism declining a generation ago:
> Following liberalizing economic reforms in the late 1980s and early 1990s, India is now one of the world's fastest growing economies, as well as the second most populous.
It's not hard, really, given that you will need to make only $1.90 per day to automatically become declassified as poor [1]. If anything, capitalism makes this harder to do achieve [2] which probably explains why the limit is set so low.
Is this your lived experience? I am finding it hard to believe when the Prime Minister of India comes under what is classified as a "Backward" caste there. The President of India, Droupadi Murmu comes from a historically disadvantaged tribal background.
The political parties and political commentariat in India heavily emphasize Caste and other identitarian aspects as the building blocks of building a coalition rather than policy.
Political parties field candidates who belong to a particular ethnic community and pander to their sentiments to secure their votes. And the historically disadvantaged communities achieve representation in this manner.
While I agree that Caste is a major issue in the Indian society (with a lot of variance between regions and across social strata), saying that "backward" castes are denied political representation and agency is extremely dishonest.
India's political system has all the forms but none of the substance of a democracy. Yes Modi is from a backward caste but his policies are biased towards the upper caste and he is beholden to the upper caste support. The proof in the pudding is how well off the lower caste compared to the upper caste in the last seventy year. And the answer is the lower caste is worst off compared to their upper caste counterpart after seventy years of upper caste rule.
That BJP only works for the upper caste is inaccurate. Like every political party in India they pander to communities for votes. Freebies and subsidies for disadvantaged groups like ration and gas is a card they have played in sufficient numbers. Recently they have increased reservations (affirmative action) for Scheduled Castes in Karnataka, I believe. This and their rhetoric are pretty much the building blocks of their campaigns.
You can say it doesn't work in the long term, but only working for upper castes is not what it is.
Our political system enables people of various backgrounds to rise in the ranks of politics regardless of their caste (I have given examples up the thread) or religion (we've had Presidents, Chief Ministers, Governors and Prime Ministers from Hindu, Christian, Sikh or Muslim backgrounds).
The medicine is working. If you are frustrated that it is not working fast enough or the way you expected it to, the reason is far simpler and what every Indian knows about.
When you have many "Backward" caste politicians and leaders with a predominantly "Backward" caste voting base who do not work to improve the status of their communities and instead just want to line their pockets, it should be obvious what the problem is. Rich people ultimately just want to make themselves richer, especially in a system that enables it with rampant corruption. That the Rich person is from a disadvantaged background does not matter. Whatever you may want to call it you cannot explain this away as Upper Caste Hegemony.
Note: I am _not_ saying that casteism, doesn't play a role in Indian society and politics, but it is not one and only explanation for our problems. Repeating this again due to the tendency of many people to explain away every problem in the Indian society with "Is this Casteism?",
More than 50% of Indian MPs are lower caste and minorities https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/only-39-mps-are-politi...
Indian PM and president are from backward caste. Reservation for lower caste in government educational institutes and jobs is more than 50% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India#States.
So much for upper caste having complete control of democracy and lower caste being "the most disenfranchised and marginalized communities". I'm not saying all problems are solved. It's a work in progress like any other democracy but progress is being made slowly and steadily.
This opinion is offensive. India is a functioning democracy. Your claim is that the people who vote are lower caste and upper caste won’t vote hence democracy is invalid. Are you suggesting democracy is only valid if upper caste people vote?
What I am saying is that upper caste don't need to vote because they have complete control of the country. Democracy confers power to the people because you would assume people who vote can affect policies to their favor but this is not the case for the people who vote in India. They are totally disenfranchised and marginalized.
the accurate statement is that a small slice of India’s upper castes have control. They dominate many sectors but you seem to assume that caste and economic class are interchangeable. they are not although there is a strong correlation due to generational wealth.
He’s claiming the votes are valid, but the votes do not translate to outcomes like they do in a democracy like the US because governmental power is still controlled by upper castes.
Can you explain this dichotomy then? You say people who vote are lower caste, and those who "don't vote" are upper caste, yet the upper castes control the government.
Are you saying then that the voting is fraudulent? Or that lower caste voters are voting against their interests? Or that there are restrictions on the candidates that are available so voters are only given the illusion of choice? E.g. for lunch we can choose between KFC, Taco Bell or Pizza Hut, but they're all actually the same company.
While the first sentence is correct, the rest is just nonsense based on misinterpretations. What evidence do you have that voting is largely lower caste?
If anything, the voting system in India is among the best, most transparent and most accessible in the world and that is really something amazing.
Beyond voting, India is largely an electoral autocracy and their idea of “democracy” is really stretching the definition so you are accurate there.
This literally reads like some misinformation campaign hit-piece. I would suggest reading up on actual news sources that function within India and speaking to Indians who live in India.
If they aren't in poverty you have more options for reducing pollution.
When someone is so poor that they can just barely feed themselves and their family, you can't realistically expect them to do much to reduce pollution. You can't really enforce pollution regulation because they can't pay fines and tossing them in prison only makes things worse.
When they're able to afford some luxuries they're capable of devoting more thought towards their environment and can afford to spend more for more environmentally friendly living.
That article was specifically about India’s capital. It’s also possible that problem can be fixed in the future, so people are lifted into a clean urban environment.
Also, last I recalled, London faced similar issues before and is in a much healthier state nowadays.
This line of reasoning needs to be stopped. If you haven't lived or grown up through India's pre-capitalist era you have no idea what you're talking about. Ask any Indian about it and I think they'll tell you that urban pollution is a small price to pay for the distance they've come in terms of overall quality of life and wealth.
Hmm. If you are saying we are all interconnected, relying on the diverse resources, products, and gifts from around this small planet to do the things we want to do, e.g. care for our sick, advance the common good, protect the vulnerable, provide stable sources of food _so that_ our global population can grow in a safe, equitable, sustainable manner toward lives full of fulfillment and wonder, away from subsistence living that steals time and health and hope from those stuck with no other choice, then, yes.
But if you mean the US should take credit, then, no.
The US has injected untold billions into the Indian market through off shoring phone support. India has made hundreds of millions of dollar scamming America's most vulnerable population.
US has not injected billions into India! Capitalist companies trying to find cheaper and disposable labour has done it. Of course the US Government police allows that but the policy is there because of these companies not other way around.
> scamming America’s most vulnerable population
Nothing from that goes to Government taxes or public benefits. These people are not out of poverty by scamming.
please try not to down punch some positive news from “Third world countries” if you don’t have any constructive criticism
Funny how this comment has not been flagged while the relatively harmless comment above has been flagged for driving tangential discussions (rather criticizing China's hard policies).
That's one way of looking at the West. One way to curtail illegal immigration to the states and Europe is to have a way for many people to get out of poverty. When people make a decent living, they won't uproot themselves to move to the US/Europe.
Globalization certainly, to the degree that the United States has pushed and opened borders, absolutely. To the degree that pseudo-communistic countries have reformed their legal systems to respect the rule of law and property, that has little to do with the United States.
The guy who can't get a lifetime job at a shirt factory, steelworks, or software job in the USA also "paid" for this.
Actually, multiple studies have shown that yes, while some did get richer in the USA, the cost of globalization - worldwide - was mainly born by the middle class. People in poverty received governmental assistance.
And as someone who is in India frequently, the idea that newfound wealth was shared as a deliberate policy mechanism with lower classes is somewhat ... discredited.
I believe in globalization - but the US government should have done a better job helping people with it's impacts, and the developed world should stop pretending that there was no cost to others to make it happen.
I think these statistics are all BS. If you took away all of the game playing involved in defining poverty and then measured the total number of people in the world living in poverty after our massive population growth over the last decades, you will find that the sum of human misery due to poverty is by far the highest it has ever been and is only increasing.
But this way a bunch of self righteous people like Gates and Pinkerton can play statistical games and say everything is great. No, it's great for them.
The population in 1950 was 2.5 billion, so 1.25 billion living in extreme poverty. Todays population is 7.6 billion, so 840 million living in extreme poverty.
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