Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

economictimes.indiatimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 544 posts

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

#491

Post by naravara »

powerapple wrote: post #404
naravara wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tr…

I would say one of the reason for globalism to retreat is the west (especially US) find itself in a awkward situation: developing world and developed world has to meet somewhere in the middle, which means, the living standard in developed world has to drop. For developing world to develop, you will have to go the extra miles, you are competing with big guys, trying to make a space for yourself in a crowded room. Ever…

> the living standard in developed world has to drop.

That depends on how you define "living standards." For example, the USA can probably afford to lose a LOT of consumer products spending while still raising HDI metrics by simply reallocating how resources are committed. We prioritize spending in a lot of places that don't really return much in the way of physical or spiritual well-being. Think car-dependent infrastructure which mostly just serves to raise need for spending on vehicles and infrastructure. Think fast fashion which mostly serves to accelerate trend cycles so people buy clothes more often than they did otherwise. There's a lot of consumer needs that are socially-pressured here.

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

#492

Post by mytailorisrich »

naravara wrote: post #490
mytailorisrich wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India's population is still growing and in pretty bad conditions. In Africa population is still booming. China would have hundreds of millions more people, with consequences for all of us, if it had not done what it did. Very little efforts are made globally to control population, which makes things like COP27 rather moot.

Your ideas about population control are antiquated. It is well known that demographic change follows women's rights and economic development, particularly in access to healthcare and education. Draconian laws just lead to wide-scale oppression. India's population (and Africa's) are only growing in the regions that schooling and healthcare infrastructure haven't penetrated yet. The only controls a government can insti…

You are not commenting on what I wrote and are using the usual emotional and defeatist rhetoric to oppose any population controls.

Yes, the Chinese approach has been draconian and even cruel. But it has also been effective and the point remains that we should thank them for having succeeded in controlling their population.

I also do think that too little is being done to stop population growth globally because that growth is actually the root cause to most of our environmental issues. Note that between "too little" and your over-the-top claim of "genocide" there a gigantic chasm.

This also applies to Western countries. Many of them have incentives to boost natality. We need to 'free ourselves' from the idea that population growth as a positive and necessary thing because it simply cannot continue and a decrease would even be a net positive for the environment and quality of life.

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

#493

Post by ClumsyPilot »

jojobas wrote: post #411
ausudhz wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or probably the first world was stealing their assets (natural resources) while exporting disgrace (weapons, drugs)? You should read a bit more so you'd know for example what the opium wars have done to China and what the colonialism has done to India (both perpetrated by the same first world country) Historically India and China were always the wealthiest (up to the second industrial revolution) regions out there (a…

Sure, let's justify a modern disaster by a past one. First world's wealth of the 20th century had nothing to do with India's or China's misfortunes of yesteryear, European/US de-industrialization and poverty is 100% globalization-inflicted.

Lets not blame other countries for our fucksups, half the income of western families goes to housing and thats noone's fault but ours

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

#494

Post by coopierez »

Dharmakirti wrote: post #169
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Markets can exist in non-capitalist societies. Markets exist to use money as a medium to convert one form of goods/labour into a different form of goods/labour. Capitalism meanwhile uses goods/labour as a medium to convert money into more money.

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

#495

Post by oblio »

34675904565 wrote: post #467
Zircom wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now India is in a transition period and wages for these kinds of jobs are keeping pace with gains in productivity and that's how you're seeing so many lifting themselves are their families out of poverty. However, if history is anything to go by that will stop pretty soon as the hyper upper class solidifies their hold on wealth, appreciating assets, and means of production, and will start to keep larger and lar…

America is not a "free market" capitalist country. I would say it's of the lack of a free market that enabled the wealthiest to capture that wealth that would otherwise have been more evenly distributed. There is an enormous amount of regulation in the US (and other countries) designed to make it nearly impossible to compete with the established actors in the market.

The free aka perfect market does not exist.

It's impossible to achieve in reality:

- fungible goods (i.e. stuff like toilet paper where you have 100s of vendors most people can't really differentiate much in terms of end result): good luck with that for any kind of complex good

- perfect information symmetry (i.e. the vendor and the buyer and seller know exactly the same about the product): can't happen when most buyers are individuals and most sellers are companies with full time people employed to work on their products

- low barriers to entry for vendor: good luck, in the real world you need time, capital, experience, etc to enter a market, and even when you're there, there's stuff like brands, marketing, reputation, etc

Etc.

Plus, even if this absurdly perfect model would be achieved, you still have to put stuff like social welfare somewhere in there. Why? Because some people are just plain bad at basic economics (president Truman was close to dying in poverty during his old age), and you can't just let them starve to death.

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

#496

Post by oblio »

Zircom wrote: post #427
soledades wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the first part of your point, but this in particular is an emergent phenomena that only happens with large-scale civilizations. So I think some kind of sociological argument makes more sense (I don't know what that would be though).

I've read that there is a certain number of people that we're basically optimized to coexist within a societal structure, and modern civilization passed that a long time ago, and human beings in general just aren't capable of empathy on the scale of modern civilization. And I mean, it makes sense when you think about it. On some abstract level you have to know that even meagre standards of living in western society r…

> I've read that there is a certain number of people that we're basically optimized to coexist within a societal structure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

> Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.

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

#497

Post by surement »

comte7092 wrote: post #304
surement wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does the US need to stick to a 2% inflation rate? Because high inflation means the money in your bank account becomes worthless at an exponential pace.

2% inflation and 10% inflation are both exponential. It’s a matter of degree, not of kind.

I'm also against a 2% inflation target.

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

#498

Post by tnel77 »

ninjanomnom wrote: post #359
jonas21 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what western country you live in, but I'm guessing you have a very different definition of poverty than the article is using. The UN has a list of criteria such as: - Lacking access to electricity - Lacking access to drinking water within a 30 minute round-trip walk - Lacking access to sanitation facilities - No household members have completed at least 6 years of schooling - Any child in the household h…

During my childhood I fulfilled the first three for about four years or so and knew many others in similar situations. This was in the US, any country with significant undeveloped land is going to have areas that have people who fulfill the first three pretty easily.

I’m not calling you a liar, but I am heavily skeptical. Where and when did this occur within the continental United States?

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

#500

Post by Matticus_Rex »

dan_mctree wrote: post #475
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what ways does poverty in the UK look worse than poverty in India?

Poverty in the west is often of a different kind than in India. Deep poverty in India can look living in self build house in a slum, with no or low and irregular income most of which goes straight into food and necessities. Deep poverty in the west often looks like having a stable income and roof, but being completely overwhelmed by high unavoidable static costs such as rent, health insurance, loan paybacks, etc. Of…

It's more depressing and suffocating than extremely high rates of malnutrition, less educational and institutional access, a stricter class system , having to cook with fuels like dung, poor sanitation, awful maternal health? Color me skeptical.
Post reply on HN