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.
Its just amazing to watch - this woman’s mom, grandmom, aunts, uncles were all peasants or did odd trades. Now because of a single generation, the entire family could dream of middle class dignity.
If you didn't go into government jobs, where there was lots of bribe income potential. The next best paying jobs were in IT services namely three big IT giants Infosys, Wipro and TCS. It was also a huge social status symbol to get a job in these companies.
Of course many made it big, many didn't. Many realised the same corruption and Indian social practices applied to these companies too. While there was definitely a base upgrade in terms of a salary. The big opportunities, promotions, travel were subject to discrimination, bigotry and corrupt practices plaguing Indian society. And by early 2010's there was total disillusionment with these companies. Many MNCs set up their own shops in Bangalore, where the systems were relatively fair and HR practices, though not perfect did work to some extent. 2010s were all about working in MNCs directly.
Then came the start up era. While some made it really big, start ups in India like everywhere are subject to same lottery set up and also some Indian founders can be stingy with equity, and many turn up to be straight up frauds.
Software jobs did move the needle by a big margin in moving Indians from lower-middle/poor class to middle class.
P.s. We spend money in local shops because the stores like Walmart have still not penetrated the Indian market as they have outside India.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s in India and moved to US in 2000. Now I am a US Citizen but when I do go back to visit, I literally know people who were poor/lower middle class and they all are now living upper middle class lifestyles (have a nice car, eat outside a lot , have their own home etc).
Some factors:
- Globalization of economy opening up in the 90s
- Tech and other jobs (manufacturing etc) but more importantly, lot of global companies opening shop after the economy opened up in 90s. It is still not as friendly to outside companies as say China but things are changing even though slowly in a complex country like India
- Rise of Internet especially since the introduction of Jio Data by Reliance. It has changed the game significantly. An average Indian may not have a Computer necessarily BUT they all have data and internet on their phones and almost everyone can order almost anything on their phone including paying for bills (UPI is amazing)
- Mindset of young people is changing especially as more people are now exposed to other countries/culture through TV, youtube/internet, Movies, Travel. Capitalism is becoming more favorable compared to old school thinking of socialism and the whole "Raj" mentality that was left over by British and continued for decades by previous Govts.
There is still a lot of extreme poverty in pure numbers (population size) but I have no doubts that overall, millions have moved from extreme poverty to lower or middle income status in last 2 decades.
But generally speaking, yes, all it takes is one person from a family landing a white collar job. And life becomes (relatively) much better
Absurd that I can go a month in India without ever using cash or cards, order everything I want from anywhere and have it delivered within a day (or even minutes), yet it can sometimes take me 45 minutes to travel 3k and that my car’s suspension breaks down at 50k kilometers because there is no public transport and the roads are filled with sinkhole sized potholes.
Our economies and societies are still pretty fragile, any political shock can start a downwards spiral. Stay vigilant.
MNCs are essentially doing what colleges fail to do in India. Teaching people how to code, talk to clients and bring them into formal employment.
If the latter, I’d say education is helping pull these people out of poverty.
Is the school paying them? Its rich Western countries bringing India out of poverty.
couldn't agree more. In my previous comments, I've criticized bodyshops for their business model but this is so true. While I never worked for any of the WITCH company but I worked with few product based and service based companies, In my case, we do not had our own house, in my 10 years of Software Engineer career, I was able to bought house and also paid my whole housing loan. Own a second hand car. I could also buy a new car but I decided to go ahead with used car instead. For those who don't know, car is necessity in US but in India it is considered a semi-luxury.
Agreed, I would say, I am relatively good at what I do so it also translated in to comparatively higher salary (and still way less than what I could have made if I would have moved to Bengaluru - "Silicon Valley of India")
This is related to the Elephant Curve brought out by Globalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_Curve
That is more or less, middle classes from developing countries exploded in number. While for the developed countries, their middle class doesnt share the same fortune. The upper class however, reap heavy fortune.
Unfortunately it seems the developed countries' middle class appetite to sustain this is waning.
http://glineq.blogspot.com/2022/10/lets-go-back-to-mercantil...
The same goes for most "slavery" jobs. A lot of people's fortunes has turned all over the world by working under "inhumane" condition for American or European companies.
These are actually good jobs in respect to state of play in these countries. The harm comes from degrading the employment standard in the rich countries where it's impossible to compete with places like China when they work under these conditions and as a result the jobs with "humane" conditions disappear in the wealthy countries or get worse.
Overall though, the world becomes a better places as the people in the developed countries get their stuff for cheap and people in the developing world catch up.
Some of those stories about workers at Foxconn committing suicide also neglect to mention that the factory town has 1M workers who all live and work there, and that the suicide rate is actually lower than that for a city of equivalent size, or that 1M people living together might hurt themselves for any number of reasons (debts, unrequited love, adultery, etc), not just work.
At the cost of Americans dealing with poorer tech support, buggier software (sometimes critical software that leads to million dollar losses), and employment fraud (like lip syncing in interviews where someone else answers the questions connected to the mic).
As a human interest story. I'd like to know more if you're okay to share. How is he doing now?
I saw a poor woman go up to the window of the frequent flyer lounge kitchen, she placed with her hands out, and the staff returned and gave her a bundle of eggs. She was so grateful.
While stuck in a jam traveling between meetings, slums lined the side of the road, three kids under 5, no clothes, covered in filth, hitting a stone around with a stick with huge smiles... happiness.
And last night on the way home in Mumbai I see a father and son on a dark street intersection with almost nobody around. The father laid out a tarp and the under 5 year old son was hopping and dancing around taking shoes out of the sack and placing them neatly in pairs.
And then the little jobs to help people. The chaiwala and the lift attendant.
And well... the food! Thank you India.
The quickest and by far best way to do this is backpacking all around, taking slow public transport, sleeping cheap, eating cheap where locals eat etc. I've spent like 500$ per month there in 2010. Yes there may be unpleasant bowel issues but after weeks you will come back a slightly better human being, and memories and experiences will be part of your personality. Best parts are usually random interactions with anybody out there, asking for directions and ending up eating dinner with their family, haggling with rickshaws, seeing how untouchable caste lives, feeling the intense heat of burning bodies in front of me on Manikarnika ghat in Varanasi... I could go on and on for very long time.
I've done in my previous life 2x 3 months backpacking like that, just big fat lonely planet book and deciding what to do and where to go next on the spot. Everybody from west we met was doing exactly this, just time varied between few weeks to few years. Felt like being in completely different universe, friends and family back home just distant dream of a dream. Both times it also felt as spending few decades there. And oh boy did it change me for the better, even I could see it.
It's like talking to people opposed to GMO rice. They are fine with an ideological position that GMO foods should be eliminated until you point out the alternative is hundreds of millions dead of starvation.
Have evaluated alternative hypotheses? Maybe Education or Scientific Literacy or something else deserves this credit.
So far GMOs are practically irrelevant for feeding humans, assuming a vegan diet there is enough land to feed everyone to avoid starvation. If we assume a reasonable amount of meat consumption there is also enough land for that.
I don't know why GMO advocates throw the "but everyone will starve if you don't buy my proprietary products" slogan around as if that makes them look less manipulative. It is supposed to delude people and prevent them from thinking for themselves.
There's so much emphasis (from comments) on information technology services contributing to this. This is a recent phenomenon. Growth due to IT services was extremely concentrated in a few cities and most took their family there.
India was never a nation state before becoming a federal republic. Poverty was not widespread uniformly over the subcontinent. Over-reliance on agriculture and lack of trade meant factors like climate patterns disproportionately affected people in the lower social order.
Government definitely played a role in establishing energy infrastructure, educational institutions, introducing healthcare schemes and before that, smart people played an even bigger role with the constitution.
India's growth can be traced to a small list of landmark decisions which caused chain reactions.
- 1950 Constitution and enforcement by institutions
- 1954 Midday Meal Scheme
- 1956 Non-Aligned Movement
- 1961 Green Revolution
- 1970 Operation Flood
- 1991 Economic liberalisation
Looking back, just liberty guaranteed by Constitution wouldn't have worked because of the caste system.
I can add more if someone's interested.
- itspi
As for the being a nation state part, sometimes I think we would have been better off in an EU type situation rather than being one large entity.
I have the same idea. But I'm not very sure about it, specially because our divide has been the main cause of Britishers colonizing us. An united single state gives us much more resources to function properly and defend our interest against neighbors like Pakistan & China.
I could be wrong though, as EU seems to be a good example of governance
No other nation needed 'school meals' in order to generate wealth, it's a nice program but hard to fathom as a 'root cause' of something.
The Non-Aligned movement? India would have been much richer, much more quickly, if they were to have aligned themselves with the West.
The Green Revolution / Op. Flood - well obviously that's huge, but does having more food equate to prosperity? I mean, wherever populations are exploding, usually it's pretty poor. Though I'm inclined to agree with you.
Trade Liberalization was unequivocally a big deal and FYI Green Revolution was arguably part of that, or at least tech transfer was.
If you throw in the last item, with the vast surpluses available from technology and productivity from richer nations, it amplifies quite a bit.
"school meals" allowed families to be able to send kids to school for education instead of getting their help at work to feed families. That means, more people were inclined towards getting education and literacy. Which was a huge deal for our country at that time.
>The Non-Aligned movement? India would have been much richer, much more quickly, if they were to have aligned themselves with the West.
India "might" have been richer without NAM but did you not notice what our close relationship with west did to us? Also, that richness would have made us into a failed state like USA (yes, I know about US' homelessness, lack of social security, and the greedy capitalism). We needed to stand on our own feet before we could make alliances. Heck, the west is still opposed to India till now. As much as I dislike Russian politics, our partnership with Russia has actually helped us develop much quicker (and yes, it was a partnership in every sense)
Indian constitution was needed, specifically because our country is so much more diverse. Are you seriously comparing a tiny piece of land (HK) to a huge landmass like India, which has hundreds of different cultures, identities, religions, languages. We absolutely needed a code to unify our country. We are still very diverse, but our unified under a single identity of Indian.
And since you folks actually acknowledge the atrocities of Nazi Germany, you should definitely look into India's colonial history. You'll understand the storm we had to endure, and what we were left with once we kicked those colonizers out of our land.
India's poverty line doesn't gets redrawn every year to account for the inflation and increased cost of living.
The current definition of the poverty line is daily earnings 27 rs for rural areas and 33 for urban, which is a ludicrously low number. Even beggars earn more than that. Of course we will have very low poverty if we use stupid ways to measure it.
https://www.drishtiias.com/to-the-points/paper3/poverty-esti...
Added to this is the shenanigans that our politicians play, where they may just lower the poverty line to declare a victory over it
The global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) is a key international resource that measures acute multidimensional poverty across more than 100 developing countries. First launched in 2010 by the oxford Poverty and Human development Initiative at the university of oxford and the Human development report office of the united nations development Programme, the global MPI advances Sustainable development Goal 1, holding the world accountable to its resolution to end poverty in all its forms everywhere.It uses Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) not something you are referring to.
Edit: to put things in perspective, I'm a tourist
And, yes, it does feel less than a dollar if you choose the acceptable option.
- Absolute Poverty: If you have less than $X/day, you are poor. This measures living standards.
- Relative Poverty: If you're in the bottom x%, you are poor. This measures status.
Without knowing anything, it sounds like this measurement is more on the Relative Poverty side.
> This figure considers both the proportion of the population that is deemed poor, and the 'breadth' of poverty experienced by these 'poor' households, following the Alkire & Foster 'counting method'.[1] The method was developed following increased criticism of monetary and consumption based poverty measures, seeking to capture the deprivations in non-monetary factors that contribute towards well-being. While there is a standard set of indicators, dimensions, cutoffs and thresholds used for a 'Global MPI',[2] the method is flexible and there are many examples of poverty studies that modify it to best suit their environment. The methodology has been mainly, but not exclusively,[3] applied to developing countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Poverty_Index
You can use measures that are less country-specific like the Gini coefficient and UN R/P to measure domestic inequality between countries:
The UK has a Gini coefficient of 35.1, a UN R/P 10% of 13.8
India has a Gini coefficient of 35.7, a UN R/P 10% of 8.6
For reference, Norway has a Gini coefficient of 27.7, and a UN R/P 10% of 6.1
(higher = more inequality)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
Ultimately, the purpose of that statistic for the state to be able to tell whether its policies are working. The state, therefore, must construct measures that show progress when it makes progress and show regress when it makes errors. A measure that ultimately shows 0 progress even when real progress is made, is not that useful to the state.
A data nerd may want to normalize definitions (I certainly do and the MMR and IMR measurements are ones I find particularly annoying) but ultimately a state measures for its own purposes and not mine.
The severity of poverty in rich western nations is easy to underestimate. There are people in the UK who are underfed, can't afford heat, have to work multiple jobs etc. This kind of poverty does look different than poverty in India - better in some ways, but worse in others - but it is still poverty.
The data on relative poverty is hard to trust, but we also can't trust gut feelings about which countries "must" have more poverty. Perhaps it is true that UK does have a higher fraction of people in some kind of poverty.
An index that captures the percentage of households in a country deprived along three dimensions of well-being – monetary poverty, education, and basic infrastructure services – to provide a more complete picture of poverty.
There's also the Multidimensional Poverty Index which has an alternate definition
The international definition of extreme poverty means living on less than $1.90 a day. It is the basic ability to survive.
The domestic poverty threshold definition in the UK is whether or not you are able to maintain a fairly stable middle class standard of living.
https://income-inequality.info/
All incomes are in PPP (purchasing power parity) dollars, so you can see that living at the US poverty line of $11k/year places one at about 85th percentile (having more income than 85% of the world's population).
You can see the code for it on Github as well: https://github.com/whyboris/Global-Income-Distribution
It is a relative thing..
You need a significantly higher amount of money in the UK to have a lower middle class lifestyle.
In India (and most other third world countries), that is readily achievable because of low living costs.
It started with PV Narasimha Rao as PM and Manmohan Singh as his finance minister in the early 90s. Thankfully Singh himself had a fruitful tenure as PM later. All it took for India to take off was the shackles of govt control to come off.
Sad to see that the lesson hasn't been learned and even today there is a strong strain of socialist reasoning calling for more govt control on markets.
Concrete example: before deregulation one had to pull strings (e.g. have family or friends in the civil service) to get a phone to your house, then wait a few months after approval to actually get the wire to your house. That was also the era that there were two channels on TV, both state controlled (Doordarshan) that broadcast maybe 5-6 hrs per day.
We just had one channel DD1 It would start in the evening around 7 pm I think with this tune https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-7JmGB9BRA
I am not sure if these 2 reports are contradictory, or whether they are in agreement with each other (since the GHI score for India has been trending downwards). Does anyone who is more knowledgeable on this please explain?
(Any government will try to say the same thing, to save its face)
But right now, the welfare state is still working (free/discounted food for lower income class). Anecdotally speaking, there is no such 'hunger' observed even in beggar communities. All are pretty much well fed. Due to opening of the economy in 1991, people have become 'rich' and the welfare state has subsequently reduced.
If we are talking about nourishment or nutrient intake, it is also not observed to be lower to the scale the index paints. Even during lockdown and covid pandemic, 200 million or more people were given free/discounted food everyday. There might be more hunger during the lockdowns, covid deaths; but not to high extent the index says compared to other countries.
The index paints the 'hunger' levels on the scale of DPRK or Afghanistan which is just not possible (laughable), if anyone sees it from first hand perspective. I have always been suspicious of the index from the very beginning. Even the past decade reports are suspicious.
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/indias-wheat-exports-hit...
After PV Narsimrao's reforms, thanks to IT and service sectors, many people are able to get out of this dependency. In South India, every small village has many people working in Chennai, Hyd, Bangalore, Pune for many IT companies, etc.
In Late 90's and early 2000's, even if you were a M.Tech graduate from IITs in chemical engg/civil engg/mech engg, Companies like Infosys/TCS did not hire such people. Today, same companies go to a third rate private engineering colleges, hire a lot of people for jobs.
Now, you see a lot of migration from the North to the south--to work as carpenters, electricians, etc. Also, population growth is kind of slowed in the south--at most two kids per couple.
My family is one beneficiary being below poverty line, You had to entertain the worst of lot, the local corporator, the PDS contractor so you get your PDS every month. There was also no fixed date by when it would be present, Most of the times the contractors are cheaters who replace that rice for a worse quality of rice(Almost always the grain in small)
I can promise you, That the 2 rupees rice is not tasty. It's horrible, It was not 25 kilo per month, If I remember correctly it was around 4 kilo per person per month till bjp came to power.
BTW, It was started by late CM of AP, N.T.R.
Direct money transfer is a better option every single time.
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 subsidized government shops) with my mother to buy rice and kerosene for cooking.
Things were hard for quite a while (I was about 12 or 13), it didn't really change until my oldest sibling got a job at Infosys after finishing university. Now that I look back on it, what they were paying him wasn't much, but for us it was a life changer. We could afford daily essentials without any hassle. No longer we needed to buy things on credit from the grocery stores, no longer we were worried about not being able to pay the electricity bills at the end of the month.
It did change the trajectory of our life dramatically, as it allowed me and my other sibling to afford university. I did a bachelors in Computer Science and eventually managed to move to Europe for work after a few years. We are in a much better position than we were 15 years ago.
I know people here tend to look down on these cheap curry-consultancies for their dogshit services but at the other end of the line there are real humans too. Same dreams and ambitions as you do. It's true that these companies pay their actual employees peanuts and treat them like shit, but sometimes that's good enough when the baseline of what life gave you to begin with was wayyyy less.
This is just anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt, but this was a similar story for many of my friends from childhood.
It's a little funny that people here assume that everyone on this forum is some FAANG engineer earning $400k in SF, there's also a small section of us little people hanging out in the corners :)
The point you said about Infosys paying salary that is good enough to escape poverty trap can’t be emphasized enough. Infosys, TCS, and similar companies gave lifted hundreds of thousands of families out of poverty trap.
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.
Although I do fall in the FAANG engineer earning 300k+ in New York, I do believe most of us are the same(desi engineers in TCS/Infosys or on site FAANG) for whom programming/CS/tech is a passion and ambitious/adventurous/lucky to be able to get out of poverty/lower middle class, we hustle and make the best of the hand we are dealt, not everyone gets lucky to crack the FAANG lottery and clear the leetcode hoops FAANG companies throw at you. Personally I feel you should change your attitude to think the peanuts they give you is enough, of-course while keeping your humility and remembering your humble upbringing to appreciate the pay/privilege many others dont have/wont ever get just due to dumb luck, unless some crazy innovation like miniature nuclear fission reactors that give humanity potentially infinite energy and makes everyones life luxurious , in a world of finite resources and potential over population its inevitable there will some overpaid, some underpaid engineers, yet both these sets are paid significantly higher than many many others from a non engineering disciplines.
Background: I come from a non-UC, rural yeoman farmers family. I grew up in rural India and used to spend my summer and winter vacations working on our family farm along with my cousins. I was the first Engineer in my family and studied in a Government college, and most of my batchmates were from a similar background, with over 50% of them being lower classes.
I have witnessed India's progress from the front row and it is something my parents or grandparents could never have imagined. Many of my friends went on to achieve great prosperity, some being C-level at Unicorns, others helping build Indias nuclear submarines etc. There is substantial wealth in the hands of my 4th tier town folks and I can see the signs of (relative) prosperity. Most households have people working in the private sectors and the wealth does trickle down.
I visited a Govt. hospital recently and I was surprised to see that it is not an ugly damp place it used to be. Granted, it is not on par with NHS or US hospitals but neither is it a god forsaken place.
The infrastructure is also much better than it was in the 90s. My grandfather would be shocked to see the Nagpur Metro and would think Aliens built it.
I am also proud of the fact that India does take special care of wild life and is actively working to preserve the amazing biodiversity it has. Of course there will always be pressure from humans, but the heart is at the right place.
I think this is underappreciated. Yes, infra in India is still not Switzerland, but eg. airports are now unimaginably better compared to just 20 years ago, when you needed a biohazard suit to venture into the bathrooms at DEL.
I'm American, but of Indian origin. Our family visited many major cities in India when I was a child (early 90s) and it was heartbreaking. We just kept wondering -- how does anyone begin to fix poverty that is so vast? We gave a lot of charity (esp schooling support) over the years but it always seemed like just scratching the surface of a vast problem.
We havent been back since -- but i'd say every family helped is a positive step. Solutions do not need to be 100% comprehensive at the start. I look forward to more economic success for the people of India, and for people everywhere.
It seems to me the government is doing a good job of supporting those at or below abject poverty. There are food security programs, free medical aid, education, and I guess even housing. Of course the poor have to wade through bureaucratic and corrupt system. But with digitization it’s getting fixed to an extent.
That said, the huge challenge I see is in the so called middle class segment. For a reasonably educated person the jobs just don’t exist any more. So the mullion of people who join the work force every year have to fight for a few thousand jobs. And they live their life precariously, just one or two jolt away from falling back into poverty. For a vacancy of 10 clerical posts tens of thousands jobless people turn up, some of them way over qualified. This cohort is really getting disillusioned and is easy to manipulate and radicalize.
India is a hugely complicated, vast, and diverse country, it can’t be comprehend by one person or even group. So you will come across all kinds of contradicting views all of which could well be true simultaneously.
This seems more like propaganda. I come from a small village. No one in the village is jobless, or hard pressed to meet basic necessities. In fact there is acute labor shortage in agriculture. I have a cousin who probably failed in his 10th grade. He picked up some driving skill, and works in one of the road construction companies. He recently got fired because he wanted to work from a different place, and the company didn't have an opening in that place. He found a similar job at his preferred place within a week. He has his own car, and saved enough to start a side gig setting up a pharmacy where he employs couple of people.
There is no dearth of work for people willing to work, and are flexible. It's a different matter if someone wants to find a cushy government job.
My village had mountain on one side and river on all three other side, so when my maternal grandfather died I had to cross a river with my little brother on top of me to see him.
My family was so poor that they sold goats to somehow manage my fees and used to skip mills on Monday to manage finances.
In few decades we have solar powered borewell in that remote village and I am earning very good earning.
Not only my family but everyone in village has been uplifted. My ancestors will lose their mind if they see us now.
I think this also has network effect for example before current era no one knew about opportunities present outside as information was no easily accessible in village.
One guy getting a job leads to ripple effect on other families perusing better job and education.
It is only when you think back that you realise how bad the situation was back then and how much had changed.
Education has though largely remained where it was i.e. cities have very very good schools, colleges (but expensive) etc and higher eduction (colleges etc) is much more prevalent but primary education in rural areas is still a concern. Same with healthcare. It has improved drastically in cities but not in rural areas.
However there is still a 20% population which lives below the poverty line. This, in Indian context is still a very large number (250-280mn). Government cannot put their foot off peddle here. Education, nutrition, healthcare, roads, safe drinking water, santitation, electricity, social equality etc are the goals that they need to continue focusing on.
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[1: Inflation Targeting as a Framework for Monetary Policy]: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/issues/issues15/
Because high inflation means the money in your bank account becomes worthless at an exponential pace.
5% inflation falsifies economic statistics at a greater rate than 2%
Congratulations, India!
My great-grandfather was an indentured laborer in Malaya. My great-great-grandfather's family properties were seized by the British Raj, and many of his relatives and family imprisoned after a rebellion. Our family has not been able to recover from that up until my father's and uncles' generation, when many of them were able to go abroad (mostly the Middle East).
On the other hand, on my mother's side, many of her grandfather's businesses were forcefully nationalized in the few years after Indian independence.
Funnily enough, life has been good so far for our extended family. We have 4 dollar billionaires who have extensive properties in the UK today. And one of them owns a stake in the British EIC.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rural_Employment_Guar...
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 being the case in the 2000s. Are these views held around the world, or do I just have a very well-selected sample?
Not surprising considering the terrible conditions under the communist economic policy and then the shift to capitalism in the 80’s.
”No less than 95 percent of Vietnamese respondents said most people were better off under free market capitalism.“
https://thediplomat.com/2014/10/capitalisms-biggest-fan-is-a...
It’s easy to criticize capitalism if you’ve never lived under the alternatives I guess.
The entrepreneurial spirit is really impressive. You can call up some store and say “can you have someone bring the clothes to my home to try on?” and they’ll say “no problem”. They’re dynamic, resourceful and willing be flexible.
People start companies all the time. Of course the lack of paperwork and regulations (they exist, but mostly ignored) helps immensely.
So, 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.
Funny, they chose to call the company "East India company", instead of "South Asian company" :)
However, Indians don’t have an ideological attachment to capitalism. It’s looked upon as the best way to grow and improve things in most, but not all, avenues. So Indians are still in favor of socialist policies where they are working well. So, Indians probably would not be in favor of privatizing Indian Railways, or eliminating the many subsidies and free supplies given to the poorest, or eliminating the 50% foreign investment cap in many industries.
I think you need to get more educated friends.
It would've been even smaller if it wasn't for the devastating consequences of European imperialism. These countries were left in a piss poor state, lack of education and healthcare etc, resulting in a long period of high birth rates with exponential growth.
Check the graph below [2] you can clearly where most damage happened, during the main occupation period (1850s to 1950s). Britain had falling birth rates (prosperity) but they were constantly high in India (poverty). Birth rates have been on a steep decline only after independence. Yet empire apologists somehow claim that it was a net good for India :)
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-by-country
[2] https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$fi...
Europeans talking about high population, human rights and global warming is a joke
In 1960s villages didn't have access to medicine or doctors. So people used to produce 5-7 children so atleast 1-2 went into adulthood.
But as medicine became more easily accessible all 5-7 children ended up in adulthood leading to population increase.
Nowadays I see max 2 children in villages.
Because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Gangetic_Plain
An exaggerated relief map showing its sheer size and flatness: https://i.redd.it/5qv0bvyrd9h01.png
Extremely high fertility rates.
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 with that thought experiment, I wonder how did they get into poverty in the first place. A lot of areas that are now declared as poverty zones today may have been poor in the past, but were self-sufficient and self sustaining.
Human history is basically nothing but suffering and starvation. 80% of the population was living in extreme poverty before the industrial revolution. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
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.
Humanity has always, by current standards, been dirt poor and living near starvation levels.
The last 250 years of industrialism has changed that enormously.
To answer your question, they got into poverty because they had always lived in poverty, since the dawn of time.
Well, when the British left in 1945, roughly 15% of the country was literate [0], now that is up to 77% [0]. From here [1], it seems that poverty was around 45% of the population (361 million). It also says the rate varied based on how the monsoon season went, which makes sense for a primarily agrarian society, especially one which had to import food to meet their needs till 1965 (roughly).
so, basically, the British didn't leave India in a good place. See [2]
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India#/media/File:...
everthing was on a razorthin margin, just a minor floods or droughts could kill double percentage of the population and they werent that uncommon, hence the monstrous birthrate. An analogy in animal realm is population of animals dependent on variable inputs of "food sources", their population graphs are always a rollercoaster
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.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
Is there a reason to trust them if so, considering they would be coming from a brutal, authoritarian dictator?
2) India has its own sordid history with coercive sterilization. During the Emergency, millions of people were sterilized, under varying levels of compulsion.
Today, GDP per capita in India is $2,200.
It is $12,500 in China.
I'm not sure that 'Six times faster growth, and eight years of life expectancy, and seven times fewer people facing hunger and food insecurity' is as much of a black eye as you think.
I could think of quite a few Americans who would happily embrace a one-party state, if it meant that they wouldn't lose five sixths of their wealth and income, and eight years of their life, and have a one-in-seven chance of having to seriously face starvation. Most of them, actually.
Also, re: "without forced-sterilization" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30040790
Chinese policies are meant to solve Chinese problems (whether they are successful is a different discussion). The government is in the business of producing results, ideology is secondary.
Some countries progressing faster though, (China being one of them).
just nation level apathy on child mortality in lower class citizens.
Maybe we shouldn't be painting millions of people with the same brush because of some patterns our brains happened to notice
I've anecdotally seen it happen again and again with the universities of the recruiting managers being overly represented in the candidate pool.
To note, Indians have a closer affinity to english putting them in an interesting position when moving to the US/UK (where I suppose you live). That affects wether the immigrant pool has a pretty normal social distribution or if the people getting out of their country are also used to getting out of their comfort zones. Japanese are specially affected by this, and workers that decided to go abroad will be less flocking into disporia communities.
In an ideal world you hire from a broad pool of people from the public but in reality hiring people you know tends to lower risk and a natural phenomenon.
But obviously it shouldn't be a hard rule, talent and applicable skills/personality should be what comes first every time.
If the company is entirely all Indian, over a long period of time, when they work in a diverse city then it's probably a sign they aren't looking broadly enough for talent and that is not just negatively biased socially, it's also bad for business.
The talent pool is generally over represented by Indians. I have been rejected a few times by HR (western) for not being a cultural fit.
Indian managers do not generally have the same problem, network can be a better explanation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: actually your recent comment feed is so full of this that it seems you've stopped using HN for anything else. As that is not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, I've banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Inequality is a feature, the pie grows larger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtJwAYJ9B08
Instead of lifting poor class upwards, the west wants to pull everyone else down. Reducing quality of life and regressing in every metric of progress. The future is in Asia, places like Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Singapore. Socialism is so easily captivating to average IQ voter class in USA, it is a fight every generation has to go through. Countless examples of failures won't convince people.
The likes of Greta Thunburg have changed their tune from climate alarmicism to just destroy Capitalism all together: https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/15885879870379786...
Capitalism branding has been damaged by equating it with crony-capitalism which is what most people think it is.
If anything, capitalism wins at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-11/india-s-d...
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/international-poverty-l...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2...
What good is lifting people out of poverty, if they are lifted out of poverty and placed in a toxic urban environment?
Also, last I recalled, London faced similar issues before and is in a much healthier state nowadays.
But if you mean the US should take credit, then, no.
The guy who can't get a lifetime job at a shirt factory, steelworks, or software job in the USA also "paid" for this.
But this way a bunch of self righteous people like Gates and Pinkerton can play statistical games and say everything is great. No, it's great for them.
70 years ago 50% of the world lived in extreme poverty, today it’s 11%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin...
The population in 1950 was 2.5 billion, so 1.25 billion living in extreme poverty. Todays population is 7.6 billion, so 840 million living in extreme poverty.
Undernourishment has the sametrend, data once 1991: https://images.fastcompany.net/image/upload/w_596,c_limit,q_...
