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Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

economist.com

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Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#171

Post by teitoklien »

uwagar wrote: post #78

i dont understand how the minimum non taxable income is 12 lakhs per annum (~10000 GBP) when a generous daily wage is like 1000 rupees (~10 GBP) a day.

India’s economy is based on Domestic consumption instead of exports. If you tax its middle class (which is people above that income). Then consumption tanks entirely, They used to tax from a much lower rate at 7lakhs per annum and it was actively crushing their domestic consumption markets.

They’ve been trying to revive and boost their declining consumption economy. India’s 10% population drives >50% of entire consumption, >80% of entire retail goods consumption outside of base essential commodities.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#172

Post by shermantanktop »

Pannoniae wrote: post #98
juujian wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always had to think of my grandparents when discussing GDP. Aside from being very much part of the regular economy, they were also quite self sufficient. When my grandmother died, we found rows and rows of bottled jam. Some decades old according to the labels. My aunt did the taste test, and according to that at least, they were still very much edible and yummy actually. To the GDP that whole side of life is invisi…

Nah it's not a WW2 thing. Not sure about Western Europe but in Central/Eastern Europe, especially in rural areas, people still have chambers and basements full of jam, compote and basically anything else which can be preserved. Not one or two jars but enough to last several years, that kind of stuff.

Valuing self-sufficiency over dollar efficiency or even time efficiency is not dead.

I have dozens of jars of homemade preserves in my basement right now. I had no part in it, it was all my spouse’s doing. And we’re in a US urban area. But we’re affluent urban tech types with hippie tendencies.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#173

Post by gadders »

teitoklien wrote: post #167
gadders wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather taxes were spent on people in the home nations, rather than ex-colonies or other 3rd world countries. I also don't think countries should be spending on a space programme if they are still accepting aid.

They are not accepting aid. Read this : https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/india-tells-uk-we-dont-need-your-f... It’s not Indian newspaper, its british newspaper. They’ve been asking UK to stop the aid since 2008, It’s being sent out of corruption deals between UK politicians and local special interest groups who are friends with those politicians. India never asked for any of these aids. The total aid India receives is small…

Makes sense. I hope we stop that and the disguised aid by offering preferential terms on work visas etc.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#174

Post by okucu »

ViktorRay wrote: post #143
okucu wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can read professor Vivek Chibbers book "locked in place". I highly recommend it (any book of his actually). It's an account of why India's economy was and still is an utter failure. China also didn't succeed due to "liberalization". How come the absolute majority of capitalist economies in the world (Latin/South America, Africa, Asia etc.) are still dirt poor then?

It’s hard to believe today but South Korea in the 1960’s was the poorest nation on Earth. Far poorer than even China. In the post World War II era, Singapore was also deeply impoverished and wrecked by the legacy of war and colonialism. Hong Kong as well. Taiwan was poor too. Japan was decimated by the war. All these countries ended up becoming wealthy and prosperous due to liberalization and capitalism. South Korea,…

You'll love the book then. Chibber compares India's path to South Korea and Taiwan, and why liberalization wasn't "the" key ingredient, but certainly one of the important ones

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#175

Post by marcosdumay »

alephnerd wrote: post #144
slothtrop wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check this out: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works The odd one out in this assessment is India, because it did some similar things (land reform) without success. A difference might be that India sheltered businesses from foreign competition and didn't encourage and invest as much. Another, is that you need caste connections to do business. Culturally I intuit that the upper-castes that contro…

India has similar barriers for foreign manufacturing businesses to enter as those that China has. And the caste aspect doesn't make sense, as caste is hyperlocal and there isn't solidarity between caste groups of different ethnicities. Furthermore, caste ranking doesn't fully translate to business ownership, as traditionally, merchant and moneylending castes like Banias were towards the lower end. The main difference…

> And the caste aspect doesn't make sense, as caste is hyperlocal and there isn't solidarity between caste groups of different ethnicities.

Hyperlocal corruption/nobility is the worst kind of corruption/nobility.

Non-local ones will at least create systems that work, supporting infrastructure, and will try to maintain some amount of material wealth that they can prey upon.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#176

Post by pwillia7 »

uwagar wrote: post #78

i dont understand how the minimum non taxable income is 12 lakhs per annum (~10000 GBP) when a generous daily wage is like 1000 rupees (~10 GBP) a day.

Trust is low corruption high and a lot of people just don't pay taxes -- historically https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-37530290

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#177

Post by patja »

nelblu wrote: post #131
profsummergig wrote: post #36

India really needs to work on consciousness-raising regarding sanitation/cleanliness. Modi made a start in 2014. I don't know why the momentum stopped. Some of the videos coming out of there (e.g. the recent video of the railway employee throwing a huge amount of used disposable plastic food trays off a moving train) are shocking.

I wouldn't say the momentum has stopped. Anecdote alert: I travel to India at least once in a year and I have to take the train each time (sleeper class) and I can definitely attest that things have significantly improved since I was a kid. I have been taking these same trains for over 25 years now. For starters the toilets actually don't dump directly between the tracks. The railway employees seem to be quite happy…

Do they still spray down the aircraft cabin and passengers with insecticide?

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#178

Post by kamaal »

alephnerd wrote: post #168
slothtrop wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most politicans in India are from the lowest castes - "Other Backward Caste" and "Scheduled Castes" [0]. Now, but the argument concerns development over the 20th century, not the current makeup.

The OBC/SC/ST plurality has been the norm in Indian politics since the 1980s. China and India only began to diverge in the late 2000s to early 2010s, and much of that is due to China's investment in urban construction and real estate, while India's economy entered a lost decade due to a loan origination crisis.

India did a fork in its flavor of politics in the 1980s. The goals went from making a industrial state, with a big middle class, with health care, housing, decent working hours and retirement -to- making politics whose goals were restoring cultural-religious pride and history revisionism.

There was total chaos through 1980s and 1990s, governments would come and go without outright majority without much progress on the economic front. Only exception was being at the right time and place for the outsourcing boom. But its effects were limited to a few cities and groups of people.

There was some correction in 2000s, but it does look like making a affluent industrial economy is neither the goal of the political class or the electoral section.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#179

Post by anon291 »

lars512 wrote: post #104
ksynwa wrote: post #5

I don't understand the significant of metrics like the international poverty line. Seems like the only point of its existence is to create a sense of progress or maybe exaggerate it. They never account for basic stuff like how many calories people get to eat, let alone the quality of nutrition. Last year I read an article saying like 30% of children in India are stunted.

You can check out a range of important development statistics on India here: https://lars.yencken.org/projects/country-explorer/india The one we're talking about today is "extreme poverty", which is the $2.15 purchasing-power-adjusted line. It's fantastic news that most Indians have surpassed this line, but it's also helpful to think of this line as just one rung in a ladder out of poverty. Life just above this line…

As someone of Indian descent, realistically speaking, Indian nutrition is going to be bad so long as the upper classes continue to moralize over it. Recently, there was a kerfuffle in Maharasthra because the state government wanted to remove eggs from the state lunch program and go lacto-vegan only. This is due to some people considering eggs unclean (like many other animal products). This sort of moralizing is extremely common in India, despite being a poor country. To put it bluntly, moralizing over diet is a past-time of the wealthy, not a way to run a country.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#180

Post by HPsquared »

ImJamal wrote: post #149
HPsquared wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that person makes a home-cooked meal for their family, no doubt adding value to the world, the value added is not counted towards GDP. Only the "money (or something else taxable) changing hands" transactions are counted.

Most people who make homecooked meals will buy food from a store so it will show up, just indirectly.

Only the inputs, not the value add.
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