It's difficult to see how they will mobilise these people to become consumers, when nothing suggests a disruption of Indian wealth becoming increasingly concentrated.
It's difficult to see how they will mobilise these people to become consumers, when nothing suggests a disruption of Indian wealth becoming increasingly concentrated.
Source: Am a Market researcher and analyst who segmented Indian market for a major corporate
Romanian HDI: 0.802, IHDI: 0.714.
Indian HDI: 0.624, IHDI: 0.454
I think India still has a long way to go. So does China, in my opinion.
Certainly as long as the Ganges is not safe for human bathing or anything because there's feces, animal carcasses and other waste openly floating around (e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/dadfae24-b23e-11e4-b380-00144feab...).
The problem with India seems to be that it's ultra polarized - you got the parts that have been launching rockets into space since 1975 (one even going to Mars), built nuclear weapons, use nuclear power... and you have the parts that have no roads, no sewage system, no nothing and which regularly make global headlines whenever a journalist goes off the big cities and travels into the deep rural areas and sees stuff that's unbelievable for him.
But what I took away from it is that communities that participate in the economic system do well for themselves and generate prosperity for themselves whereas those that don't (including most rural Indian villages) will continue to suffer from these issues.
In India the classes are just looking out for themselves and keep looting each other when they have the opportunity to do so.
Take Bangalore now. The congress government here, has been openly siphoning money from the treasury for election funds or whatever. Now the state elections are going to be held in a few months, they are repairing roads, paying municipal workers and doing things they should have been doing throughout their term.
Now people here take exception to some European/American saying, why the hell does India have a space program etc when you have so many basic problems to fix. I take offense to that as well. Mainly because saving a small amount of money on that isn't automatically going to uplift hundreds of millions of impoverished Indians. It's hardly a drop in the bucket. Also because so many young people here graduate with engineering degrees, and they need something to look forward to.
The problem is that the people in charge realize that organizations like ISRO have to be shielded from the very system they govern and nurtured. They are OK with the same system perpetuating itself and hamstringing everything else. And it's not in their list of priorities to stop and reform this.
https://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9...
[0] http://hdr.undp.org/en/data
[1] http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi
Hans Rosling has made some interesting talks on this. Worth watching.
There are a lot of articles published saying half of New Yorkers are a single paycheck away from homelessness, 60% of Americans are a single emergency expense from homelessness, etc., but every month lots of those people lose their jobs and have emergency expenses, and they aren't flooding onto the street or into emergency shelters. Those alarming-sounding numbers come with really important caveats like "without relying on family" and "without relying on friends" or even "without going into debt." Having access to those resources is a really important aspect of social class. Even the people shitting in the sidewalk in San Francisco, a lot of them have friends and family who have money and would love to help them if they could figure out how. The difference when you're homeless in India is that everybody you know is either in the same circumstances as you or knows so many people who are that it doesn't make sense to single you out for help.
Where the US system fails is with mentally unstable people and drug addicts. This is nowhere near the same thing as an entire lower class of 10s of millions willing to work that are still homeless.
If you don't believe this, I challenge you to drop yourself into 0-star in any place like India and see how it stretches you.
Almost every economics discussion at these very high levels suffer from sweeping all-encompassing generalizations (about an entire country) that happen to fit perfectly neatly into their political worldview.
Especially for India, which is notorious for having a government economic regulations that fluctuate wildly depending on what province/city you're in. Where you can drive a truck across the country and require 5 different licences/paperwork just to appease each local arrangement. Not a good country to generalize.
A great overview of the complexity of the economy of India: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVwIZzGHxwc
I read the article but the problem was identified near the beginning.
The top 1% of Indian adults, a rich enclave of 8m inhabitants making at least $20,000 a year...
(Honest question) do you have some citations where this has been studied, specifically in cases where the low-end of the inequality spectrum isn't poor? (i.e., to demonstrate the inequality and not the absolute state is the culprit)
The first problem is that wealth means control (e.g. from how VCs control opportunities to create businesses through their funding, to how the rich can buy politicians and laws).
So concentrated wealth = less democratic country (not in electing government, in actual control of what's to be done and opportunities).
Second problem is that concentrated wealth is not used in directly buying, so it sits out of circulation. A rich person can have 95% of its income sit in idle investments, land, etc, and still live like king with 5% of his earnings per year, while a middle class/working class person will spend most (say 70%-100%) of what they earn, thus keeping the economy going.
And when that 95% the rich keep is much much bigger than the aggregated 70% of what the majority of working people spend (e.g. because 1% of the people control 80% of the wealth), then you have a stifled economy and a dwindling middle class.
And lots of other issues, but those are quite major...
Plus, land rented to farmers is productive because of the farmers, not because of the land -- and would still be a sinkhole of money from the middle class (the farmers) to the rich person doing the renting, not entering circulation like the money a farmer would make (to buy animal food, seeds, whatever, and to live their family).
"rent seeking" seems to either be used by people who don't understand how trade/investment works or want something or subsidies'
or its a dog whistle that tends to go with gold bugs, cryptocurrency fantasists and then on to much less pleasant things
Not sure what you're going about re: gold bugs, and "less pleasant things"...
The natural end of that is generally going to be prosperity across the board, and hopefully a government financially solvent enough to actually pay for those in need and essential services, all of which should be lower as a result of a better market doing much of that naturally.
On the other hand I understand the principle that money makes more money (the principle of investment and ROI), and I don't see how "competitive market" tackles this.
It basically feels like the capitalism starts off from fairly-level playing field, but over time becomes more and more unstable, the gap ever-widening. We have already seen it fall (at the beginning of communist regimes), and I'm afraid we'll see it fall again.
That's a pessimist view, which I hope won't turn out to be true, but I'd be interested in exploring alternatives.
It doesn't address that because it doesn't make that argument, in that way. One of its starting axioms is that economy is a positive sum game. In the case of your statement, it might argue that (in the very general sense) money makes more money in a positive sum way -- more total wealth in the economy. Then to the latter it merely says that business that are better at making money (and generally, wealth) get to out compete those that don't. Its premise is it optimizes for wealth creation of the entire economy. I think that's the place to take the argument -- either that you fundamentally disagree with that premise or some outcome of it.
> It basically feels like the capitalism starts off from fairly-level playing field
Historically I don't think so. I"m not expert but read a lot and I'm currently under the impression that economies were historically locked down by government or tightly coupled government / mercantile entities.
WWII was a great leveling of the playing field. There are many times in history when Gini coefficients dropped precipitously. All the evidence points to the fact that wealth tends to accumulate in capitalist economies until crises or government intervention prevents it.
It's not a market problem. Even in a perfect market, a rich person would have most of its assets sitting or slowly moving, whereas a middle/working class person would spend their income.
So one gets the economy moving, while too much concentrated wealth stifles it.
Only if they're so inclined and even only part (they'll keep large parts in less risky form, including land etc -- also not sure how "investing" in "buildings in active use" is not rentierism and how it helps the economy. Whereas the middle/working class have no other option but to put the majority of their income directly in the economy again (buy things to live).
And that's not even taking into account the fact that the rich could very well invest elsewhere, or hide their money in tax havens, invest in foreign housing markets, and such, in which case the society they live in, and which they make their money, gets zilch of those money. Again, not the case for middle/working class people.
But assuming that the rich did invest most of their money, that would still have the problem of the rich calling the shots (through their investments and wealth), which is less of a problem in a less unequal society.
Edit: Love your name, love the reference.
(I think HN didn't like your very cynical comment :D)
"And we see the whole trickle-down through the economy, and that's good for the economy."
That's Gary Cohn, the chief economic advisor for Donald Trump.
To rephrase: You're saying that the "common" people are just not working hard enough and the rich need to take measures to make them work harder so that they can be better consumers.
It's the "common peoples" fault that there is no middle class because they don't work hard enough.
According to you...India has a half billion lazy people.