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0 pointsmaxglute2y ago0 comments

>this is what happens when people aren’t paid enough to care.

This is what happens when economic development selects quantity over quality. And IMO it's the right choice, especially for large countries. Nevermind not being able to pay for for quality in the first place (lack of qualified skill), when you're at the bottom of the ladder it's long term better to trade safety/lives for more/faster progress. The aggregate societal and human gains that can be afforded from growing income almost always trumps loss from chabuduo. Especially for large countries like India and PRC with so much (bluntly) disposable bodies, you want to throw everyone into the mixer because with that many bodies, it's important to seperate wheat from chaff in terms of human capita as soon as possible and harness them - otherwise potential gets squandered on massive scale. It's not just construction. It's important to manufacture lots of things because even if you make lots of shit, you'll also discover the great makers who makes things that are internationally competitive. Or spam lots of academic papers, because even if most of is hack fraud, it's also maximizing for gems that raise ceiling on top end. Countries grow by learning and improving via doing a lot, even if most of it is not good.

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mlrtime2y ago

I'm a US citizen and I've been to India ~ 10 times. Mostly always Mumbai/Pune. The first few times I was optimistically surprised at how less expensive services and food were "I could live like a king here". However I realized that while things were cheaper, the quality of the services were much much lower than the same service in the US. I started to search for the best services for things I needed (and cared about) and the cost ended up being the same or sometimes more than the equilvilant in the states.

This is just a small observation that I remember and I wonder if it what you are talking about.

maxgluteOP2y ago

My point is more on general development, if you want to speed run wealth, capital, expertise, skill accumulation, it's safety 10th, you throw as many bodies into as many industries as you can and start building industrial/talent base. The output of throwing the entire bellcurve will be a lot of garbage, especially if only top 1% is "adequate" quality by western standards, but if you're a large country with population scale, you can generate enough 1% to to significantly drive/snowball higher value development. India has a space program while smaller richer countries don't because they've got enough surplus talent to pursue one. In the the meantime, that other 99% of bad to medicore goods, the factory fires, the collapsed buildings will become a historic footnote even a generation later. Chinese citizens with 40x more income, all the meat they can eat, air conditioners, cars etc aren't thinking about Foxconn suicide nets from 10 years ago. The TLDR for me is chabuduo, or close enough quality / effort applied at scale (if one has it and India does) is very powerful.

But as expat who lived in PRC and been to India, I know what you mean. Every country, especially larger ones will have enough elites and market for high quality services. Sometimes there's even premium vs west, i.e. PRC in the 90s, you want best western stuff, chances are there's big tariff or extra transaction fees from smuggling. Services especially, experts/expats who offer their rare skills in developing countries will charge premium if anything. And somethings you simply can't get, i.e. wealthy South East Asians going to Singapore for top tier private medical treatment because they don't have enough rich elites to support a tier1 private hospital at home. I know Canadian (with universal coverage) diasphora who wanted to retire like king in SEA but realized they need a few 100k sitting around in case of medical crisis. Then more country develops the more market for high quality goods/services and price start coming down due to more competition addressing the market. Like there's tier3 Chinese cities where you can live like king and still have decent access to high quality goods and services.

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