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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

#231
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.

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

Accusing "what-about-ism" is itself a "what-about-ism".... You are using it to short-circuit valid thought-provoking criticism.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>disguised aid by offering preferential terms on work visas etc. How on earth is a policy encouraging brain-drain aid??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remittances_to_India

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#233

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?

One had a socialist revolution and the other didn’t. The only difference is that the working class rules China, while the capitalist class rules India.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think most Indians eat too many calories, not too little. It's just trash nutritionally speaking, and deficient in protein, which is a large determinant of height. It's cultural > It's a... different development trajectory. My two cents: the rest of the world is highly westernized. If you consider Islam a western religion (which you should, since it's a derivative of Judaism, and is a cousin to Christianit…

Interesting! I agree that India’s colonial history is unique in that it wasn’t settled by Europeans like North America. But Judaism isn’t a western religion, it’s a Middle Eastern religion with strong ethnic ties. Hence it hasn’t evolved and branched like all the major religions have. Christianity isn’t western religion either, but modern Protestantism and Roman Catholicism arguably are. Eastern Orthodox is actually…

Then let's just break it down between Jewish descended (Abrahamic) and not

China adopted communism which is ultimately a philosophy whose patrimony is European and all that entails.

> Eastern Orthodox is actually a great example of the diversity of all major religions— they have national churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox).

I mean... Sure and they still have common beliefs descended from Judaism and Christianity?

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Theory (I live half a world away though) It has nothing to do with totalitarianism. Anyone who has actually lived in India or China for more than a month, as I have, knows that cleanliness and poverty are cultural factors as well. People casually throw garbage around and don’t seem to care, it’s cultural. I saw countless scenes in different Indian cities where people sat around garbage and filth (not homeless indiv…

Culture is often orchestrated, not organic-

https://www.thechinastory.org/yearbooks/yearbook-2013/introd...

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna19197078

http://www.china.org.cn/english/Life/159407.htm

Cheating and queuing woes, you say?

https://time.com/4360968/china-gaokao-examination-university...

https://alanrefkin.com/2013/08/13/queuing-in-china/

https://theculturetrip.com/asia/china/articles/why-do-chines...

I am reminded of this excerpt from Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism:

> In his 1903 book, Evolution of the Japanese, the American missionary Sidney Gulick observed that many Japanese “give an impression…of being lazy and utterly indifferent to the passage of time.” Gulick was no casual observer. He lived in Japan for 25 years (1888-1913), fully mastered the Japanese language, and taught in Japanese university. After his return to the US, he was known for his campaign for racial equality on behalf of Asian Americans. Nevertheless, he saw ample confirmation of the cultural stereotype of the Japanese as an “easy-going” and “emotional” people who possessed qualities like “lightness of heart, freedom from all anxiety for the future, living chiefly for the present.” (...) > This was not just a western prejudice against eastern peoples. The British used to say similar things about the Germans. Before their economic take-off in the mid-19th century, the Germans were typically described by the British as “a dull and heavy people.” “Indolence” was a word that was frequently associated with the Germanic nature."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14885027

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting ice from in 1500s Italy? You get an arrow pulled out of your skull, but what are you doing with the resulting infection? People bring you food from far away, but there's no refrigeration and it's hauled at 15 kilometers a day. You can pay someone a lot of money to bring avocados from 1000 kilometers away by foot today. But you won't want to eat those avocados. Get bit by the wrong mosquito? You'…

You ignored my point that however you slice and dice it the royalty could afford ample leisure time that modern day people cannot, even the upper classes spend more time working than almost anyone from nobility.

There are massive numbers of people who simply don't work at all today. There are plenty of people with inherited wealth doing nothing, just like royalty before.

A child of a movie star today is living a much more exciting and relaxmaxxed life than a typical prince 500 years ago. And they don't have to march out to battlefields sometimes, get massacred by their cousins or constituents, or die of being inbred. Guarantee you that you could take any prince from centuries ago, show them first class on an airplane and beach resorts in French Polynesia and they'd 100% prefer "settling" for that over slow carriage rides between cities.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#237
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: anything relating to home cooking, exercise, self-care, relationships and caring for children and other relatives. Only "paid professional" services are counted which are often much worse quality than the organic untaxed real thing.

Interesting. So you would say, if someone has a talent for cooking, specializes himself, becomes a professional, paid by people who enjoy the food, you would be at least sceptical, when it comes to quality? I see paint jobs by people done by themselves. And compare it with paid professional servers. The pendulum always swings to professional. :)

There are definitely undermining effects in commercialized services. Cooking is one of most approachable skills to try and notice first hand.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ignored my point that however you slice and dice it the royalty could afford ample leisure time that modern day people cannot, even the upper classes spend more time working than almost anyone from nobility.

There are massive numbers of people who simply don't work at all today. There are plenty of people with inherited wealth doing nothing, just like royalty before. A child of a movie star today is living a much more exciting and relaxmaxxed life than a typical prince 500 years ago. And they don't have to march out to battlefields sometimes, get massacred by their cousins or constituents, or die of being inbred. Guarant…

The original statement was:

> We can look back on people who were royalty in their time, but by modern standards, they would've been living a poor life.

But now you have shifted the goalposts to say the modern day royalty lives better than hundreds of years ago royalty. That is obvious, and not what anyone was claiming otherwise.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I agree morale is something for the riches (slavery ban, woman right… happens more where there’s many wealthy than when they are the exceptions), a diet-especially in a poor country- may also consider the efficiency (which some wealthy don’t give a sh*t because « they pay so they can »). INMH the interesting questions is « what are the proteins options, considering the ressources of Indians/India? If your poult…

Cheap meat sources are either banned by law (beef in some areas) or quite thoroughly socially banned due to the two major religions being Hinduism and Islam ie beef and pork. Hinduism technically does not forbid beef but the current strain of Ram-ization does vehemently so.

Re: Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>moralizing over diet 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 indicat…

I honestly think most Indians eat too many calories, not too little. It's just trash nutritionally speaking, and deficient in protein, which is a large determinant of height. It's cultural > It's a... different development trajectory. My two cents: the rest of the world is highly westernized. If you consider Islam a western religion (which you should, since it's a derivative of Judaism, and is a cousin to Christianit…

> India actually stands out as never having undergone much of a western colonization.

I don't think I'm understanding the sense in which you're using 'colonized' here?

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