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India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN

economictimes.indiatimes.com

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Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN

#161

Post by odysseus »

scarmig wrote: post #76
mensetmanusman wrote: post #15

Such an awesome accomplishment. 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.

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…

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.

---

As for India, not only have they had problems with forced sterilization, they've also had problems with parents wanting a son at any cost: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/dec/27/f...

Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN

#162

Post by Dharmakirti »

as1mov wrote: post #52
aerovistae wrote: post #13

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 subsid…

> 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.

Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN

#163

Post by umeshunni »

joenot443 wrote: post #14

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 bei…

> 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.

I think you need to get more educated friends.

Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN

#164

Post by acchow »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN

#165

Post by jialutu »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #150
jimbokun wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is there a greater percentage of people in UK deprived along any of those dimensions?

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.…

> Uk .... now more food banks than macdonalds.

Holy cow! I just checked this fact and it's true! https://fullfact.org/electionlive/2019/dec/9/food-banks-more... That said, it shouldn't be a suprise since there are food bank donations everywhere these days. Truly depressing.

Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN

#166

Post by naravara »

adamc wrote: post #137
dirtyid wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are lots of reasons to think the PRC is about to hit a very rough patch as globalism shrinks.

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.

Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN

#167

Post by baybal2 »

wiredearp wrote: post #18
seibelj wrote: post #5

[flagged]

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. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/international-poverty-l... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2...

No post body was provided.

Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN

#168

Post by scarmig »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #139
endisneigh wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious to see a source that says the modern CCP states that democracy cannot succeed in general. The CCP stance is that democracy wouldn’t work for China. Whether that’s actually true or not is debatable of course. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-politics-xi-idUSBRE...

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…

> 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.

Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN

#169

Post by Dharmakirti »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #30
joenot443 wrote: post #14

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 bei…

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 c…

> 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.

Re: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN

#170

Post by feyman_r »

atentaten wrote: post #158

> 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 wi…

>> 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.

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