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How Kerala got rich

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Re: How Kerala got rich

#321

Post by xhkkffbf »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #312
xhkkffbf wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They hire foreigners largely because they're much cheaper than Americans. The schools have little trouble getting visas for foreign professors so, of course, they maximize their profits by hiring the cheapest they can get.

I don't think thats the case at all At least in STEM, its all about the ability to get grants. A professor who consistently gets grants is worth their weight in gold in "indirect" costs. Foreigner or otherwise

Look at any department. It's rare for all of the professors to get big grants. Usually a substantial fraction are essentially paid by either undergraduate or graduate tuition. In these cases of the non-constellation professors, it's better to get someone who is both good enough and cheap.

Re: How Kerala got rich

#322

Post by xhkkffbf »

human_person wrote: post #311
panick21_ wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also had really good maths and other useful things. They actually did what many in the West many wanted. Their education wasn't bad, learning wrong history isn't really that economically relevant. But yeah, if the economy can't use those people its just not effective.

Learning wrong history can be economically relevant. So much of history is about learning patterns of human behavior. Patterns that often repeat. If you learn wrong or untrue history your understanding of and expectations for human behavior will be incorrect which will certainly cause economic issues.

No one does fake history better than the CCCP.

Re: How Kerala got rich

#323

Post by anon291 »

Lio wrote: post #320
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christianity (esp. Catholicism) and socialism have a long connection, especially in South America, which did not have the economic miracle Kerala did. Kerala did not become wealthy from socialism, it became literate and land reform lifted many out of poverty. The actual wealth started accumulating when Keralites took advantage of opportunities to work abroad and send remittances home. That has been a major economic d…

Socialism maybe the but the Roman Catholic church has a strong history of opposition to communism. I would suggest God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican as for a pop-culture introduction of how the Catholic church aligned itself with fascist states including Mussolini's PNF, the Nazis and the Ustaše. The Ustaše were particularly closely associated with the Catholic church.

> Roman Catholic church has a strong history of opposition to communism

India is so far removed from Europe that things work a bit differently.

The keralites were not communist the way European countries were

Re: How Kerala got rich

#324

Post by psd1 »

psd1 wrote: post #317
panick21_ wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Crony Capitalism" is just a term socialists came up with to shit on capitalism. The reality is every society is going to have some amount of corruption and cronyism. But "Crony Capitalism" isn't an actual coherent concepts, it doesn't have 'principles', its just highlighting something negative that happens in countries, including capitalist ones. Socialists love to add some negative word 'X' to capitalism to highlig…

Can you smell straw? Let me give you a tool for your mental toolkit. When you find yourself saying this: > loves to ...it's a smell. What follows may be perfectly reasonable, but in my experience it's more commonly unexamined twaddle. If you happen to be American, see where you get with these: - many Americans fetishise America - J Edgar Hoover spent 20 years programming Americans to consider socialism to be "un-Amer…

I wish I could delete that comment. Time to log off.

Re: How Kerala got rich

#325

Post by achierius »

Ray20 wrote: post #106
mempko wrote: post #82

Turns out investing in your own people returns dividends. Unfortunately, the current administration is divesting from the American people. DOGE, and it's cutting of federal grants is a direct example of this divestment. What's happening now in the US reminds me a lot of a mixture of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, where the Chicago economists came in and their shock therapy and large divestment decimated the wealth and health…

>Turns out investing in your own people returns dividends. Unfortunately, the current administration is divesting from the American people. As we see, in the case of America, these dividends are much larger. So much larger that they are not even comparable to what is described in the article. >mixture of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, where the Chicago economists came in and their shock therapy and large divestment But that'…

Interesting that you suggest they had "almost zero support" when

1. A referendum with the wording

""" Do you consider it necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, in which the rights and freedoms of a person of any nationality will be fully guaranteed? """

Got 77.85% of the vote, and the union only collapsed after internal political struggles led to the individual republics pulling out of their own accord.

2. Just five years later, the honest-to-god Communist Party candidate won %40.73 of the votes in an election against the incumbent Yeltsin -- despite such allegations of voter fraud that "At a meeting with opposition leaders in 2012, then-president Dmitry Medvedev was reported to have said, 'There is hardly any doubt who won [the 1996 election]. It was not Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin.'"

So clearly your statement

> And since it is impossible to have near-zero support without totalitarian oppression

can't be correct, unless you're alleging that Yeltsin was secretly using totalitarian measures to support his opposition in the 1996 election.

> the tops of the Communist Party (led by Yeltsin)

Yeltsin was an anti-Communist, he opposed the leadership of the Communist party. The actual "tops of the Communist Party" were divided between the Gorbachev-led liberalizing faction and the hardline faction, both of whom wanted to preserve the USSR -- but in the wake of the coup attempt by the latter faction, both were discredited and it was Yeltsin and the other regional leaders, not the heads of the central CPUSSR, who came out on top.

> It's just that before Gorbachev and Yeltsin all the statistics were fake, and people were repressed for contradicting it.

This is just conspiratorial thinking. Here, I found the most aggressively western-capitalist source I could think of: https://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/CF124.chap4.html -- even Rand Corp. describes a drop of population growth rates from 6-7% to net negative over the course of the liberalization of prices.

Re: How Kerala got rich

#326

Post by moomin »

YouAreRONGS wrote: post #238
srean wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put this in context, during Covid, hundreds of bodies were being dumped in the Ganges river, buried in shallow graves on the sandbars in states like Uttar Pradesh. The state govt took an active role to remove the grave markers so that an accurate estimate of the numbers could not be ascertained. These were covered by local bloggers, vloggers and news channels. Kerala is one of the few states that managed medical s…

Is that because of the communist government, or simply because the state has a lot of money from the Middle East?

Spending money to remove grave markers is a choice. It's not about how much money you have, it's whether or not you care about the people in question.

Re: How Kerala got rich

#327

Post by moomin »

zozbot234 wrote: post #111
moomin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, reading this article, it's not making Kerala-style communism sound bad. What's more, they appear to have pivoted when they'd achieved their aims into making people richer. It's a classic "invest, then profit" story, only for an entire state.

Socialism with Kerala characteristics? I'm a bit skeptical of that, people often point to the Scandinavian model as especially successful but when you look into the data, that actually combines redistribution (funded by higher taxes) with a lot of economic freedom and a light-touch attitude from government that are all ideologically counter to "communism" or "socialism" of any kind.

This is a no true Scotsman argument. If you define socialism as purely being policies that don't work, of course socialism doesn't work. If you accept that you can stick to your principles whilst being flexible about the implementation strategy, socialism seems to work out pretty well in some places.

Re: How Kerala got rich

#328

Post by panick21_ »

psd1 wrote: post #317
panick21_ wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Crony Capitalism" is just a term socialists came up with to shit on capitalism. The reality is every society is going to have some amount of corruption and cronyism. But "Crony Capitalism" isn't an actual coherent concepts, it doesn't have 'principles', its just highlighting something negative that happens in countries, including capitalist ones. Socialists love to add some negative word 'X' to capitalism to highlig…

Can you smell straw? Let me give you a tool for your mental toolkit. When you find yourself saying this: > loves to ...it's a smell. What follows may be perfectly reasonable, but in my experience it's more commonly unexamined twaddle. If you happen to be American, see where you get with these: - many Americans fetishise America - J Edgar Hoover spent 20 years programming Americans to consider socialism to be "un-Amer…

> ...it's a smell.

Just like anything else that can't be back up with solid empirical research in a discussion forum. With is 99% of what we are dissing. (And most books written by intellectuals of both the socialist and capitalist variety).

Communism is originally a utopian social movement, and there is a strong tendency and a very well document intellectual history of communism that asserts that pretty much most problems at its root are an issue with capitalism and that they can only be solved in the absence of capitalism. So much so that it was pretty normal for communist to oppose working with social democrats on any reform of existing systems.

> Americans to consider socialism to be "un-American"

I'm not american and I couldn't care less if something is 'American' or not. And I have no idea what 'americanness' has to do with our discussion. So far as I can tell, nothing what so ever. And I don't hate 'socialism' either.

> But hating socialism isn't a core value, it's _at best_ a reaction. Which is to say, if you're from, ooh, Bulgaria or Cuba, then I can indulge you. You may not be logical but you do have cause.

So unless you are the victim of rape, being against rapist isn't a 'core value'? That's a outright crazy line of argument.

P.S: I really think you are waste overestimate the importance of Hoover.

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