191–200 of 242 posts
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China has central planning.
But it only got richer as it liberalized?
So, it could be that central planning is good for some use cases and bad for others. Likewise, with liberalised economies.
There may even be some overlap between the two.
The article is interesting, the headline is baffling. It seems to be claiming that it is possible to pay Indians a medium-single-figure daily wage (ie, $1,000/year) despite having 40% of the country working in the agricultural industry. Great but that myth is and was of no real interest to anyone and isn't a very useful frame for the article. India still needs to move most of the population on to doing something more…
Not sure that this should be the goal.
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.
This shows you don’t know what extreme poverty is and how horrible it is. What-about-ism is an elitist way to pretend to care yet do nothing. Imagine it was your country and your project which eliminated extreme poverty. No doubt you would be bending over backwards to listen to someone who “read an article” on the other side of the world
China and India had similar levels of poverty 50 years ago. How come China today is so different from India today? In terms of cleanliness and poverty elimination specifically. I know China liberalized in the 80’s and India in the 90’s. So you could say that’s a 10 year difference. But China 10 years ago was still very different from India even today. Does anyone have any ideas?
With regards to China, the article I posted gives a concise history of the modernization of the Chinese economy. Essentially, they
a) chose to model their economy after South Korea and Japan as an export-economy.
b) normalized political relations with the US and the West and developed intensive trade.
c) invested heavily in manufacturing & technical skills that were lost.
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It is much harder to report on problems in China than in India for one.
There's no shortage of industrial and traffic accident videos coming out of China, very often showcasing horrendous working conditions and absolutely depraved levels of apathy from onlookers, which is to say that China isn't very good at suppressing videos that make them look bad. But in all of these videos, China looks 1000x more clean than India. Am I to believe that the Chinese government cares more about suppress…
Industrial accidents happen in the US too, although I don't know what rate vs China. I think the fact that their factories have surveillance at all shows they are taking action to improve safety. You've got to consider, the population is 1.4bn, so there is going to be more freak accidents caught on camera.
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>>One issue is the unfortunate deep level of corruption in Indian society. Blame every thing on "Corruption". This is such cope. All you have to do is ensure you do your part in keeping things around you clean. You can ghost walk streets in the poorest places in Mexico and they look affluent compared to even posh neighbourhoods in India. Lets call it as it is, We Indians need to seriously address our cultural tendenc…
You can't just personal responsibility your way out of deeply-ingrained societal issues.
Honestly, they should really make it a priority. The awareness of what India is like has severely hurt their international reputation.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/indian-governme...
So maybe the myth has not been undermined.
China and India had similar levels of poverty 50 years ago. How come China today is so different from India today? In terms of cleanliness and poverty elimination specifically. I know China liberalized in the 80’s and India in the 90’s. So you could say that’s a 10 year difference. But China 10 years ago was still very different from India even today. Does anyone have any ideas?
Theory (I live half a world away though): totalitarianism. China has a very strong and top-down government, where if the leadership decides for example that streets should be clean, millions of government officials make it happen. I don't know if that is just good organization or if it's backed by e.g. legal repercussions if it's not done right though. But of course it's got major downsides, as the Chinese government…
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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 was liberalization in addition to strong and relatively benevolent enforcement of the market. Just allowing the existence of private enterprise doesn't mean much when institutions are weak or corrupt. If you know everyone isn't playing by the rules, the most you can accomplish is rent-seeking while everyone tries to make each other suckers. If all you have is a strong ML-style government and no liberalization, how…
You mean US' various anti China sanctions and trade restrictions
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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 extre…
Interesting. There's seems to be some fuckery with Indian hunger data, i.e. malnourishment, stuntness have stalled at a relatively high level 10 years ago and even occasionally gets worse. Which kind of makes sense if one realizes India added 400 million mouths in last 20 years, and distribution is an issue. I remember also news a few years ago Indian average height decreasing, all proxy indicators that hunger/nutrition was not improving (granted this was during covid). But cultural drama over diet also explains a lot of it. Cultural drama seems to explain a lot in India... one other stark stat is Indian female work participation rate declined as country got wealthier... culture seems to be women stop working out of neccessity if men can sustain household. It's a... different development trajectory.