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Comment by avocado4 | Hacker News Reader

I'm really hoping for India, the world's largest democracy, to overtake China as an industrial and tech powerhouse of Asia in the next 10-20 years.

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I'm no expert, but I'd imagine that India being the world's largest democracy is not guaranteed to be a good thing given that only 33% of Indian citizens get through high school (and 8% graduate college). Many politicians are themselves uneducated, and it's easy to sway the opinions of the masses using religion and hatred as leverage.

>Seems like HN has seriously gone downhill.

There has certainly been a reddit-like quality infecting the discussions these past couple of years.

Education is a bad indicator for the health of a democracy. Looks like the US isn't doing any better with democracy despite having higher education levels.

I don’t think a one variable comparison like that is at all useful.

Can you tell me exactly what you mean by this? It's a different thing to compare public sentiment (which seems to be vastly different between the two countries), and it's different to compare standard of living and economical factors (which are again vastly different between the two countries). It seems like you are picking one and comparing it to the other, is that correct?

Nice, good job - you downvoted me rather than having a good faith discussion. If the denizens of this site operate in bad faith, I'll go elsewhere.

Good point. Democracy works as its best when the masses are educated, otherwise it looks more like a dictatorship acting randomly.

I don't know about India as I haven't been there in years but that certainly rings true to me as I reached the same conclusion while staying in many other countries around the world.

8% of 1.3 billion is ~110 million people. That is a sufficient to build great companies. Total population of Israel is 9 million and takes in funding of ~7 billion dollars and has been churning out great companies.

That was true of most of western europe a few decades ago too, and countries managed to stay democratic (and in a few cases, become democratic) while growing on all "good" metrics, I don't see why that wouldn't work in India.

This is why: https://old.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3t59cr/india_vs_usa_...

Repeat ad nauseam, everywhere in the country. India is more corrupt than a neodymium floppy disk.

You’re also assuming the education is adequate which is true some of the time but not others. I’ve been told there are people with Master’s degrees from Indian universities in Economics who don’t know any (statistical) programming language or even the theory being ordinary least squares. A Bachelor’s degree that doesn’t cover that is worthless.

You forgot that you are talking about a nation with more than a billion people. Providing everyone quality education is definitely going to be tough (the Education sector has actually seen many startups in recent years). What matters is that the education coverage should increase every here.

I dont think is that much easy, because it will be a different kind of game, in a different world, and maybe in the meantime what we understand of the industry (serial production of goods) can change a lot in the future.

First theres human behavior into play, and consumerism. We have been changing a lot of our daily habits through time, because we now live much more in the digital realm, making a lot of phisical things less valuable. We are sharing more, using less goods made of plastic, wood, steel. Our relation to nature and the climate change will force us to rethink the way we behave, our consumerism, what we use and how we use it. The demand will probably drop also because we are making less babies..

For instance automation, AI, Solar, batteries, and 3d printing can make it cheaper to produce things in your home.

And if we still have the same industry in the future, China has a lot of people, and with the industrial park they have now, even with salaries getting higher, it would be not easy even for India to take that spot. This people are insanelly productive already.

Also, if they reach the next level, which is pure automation, it doesnt matter how cheap and productive other humans will be, it will never be enough.

The only way to take the spot from China now will be a industrial paradigm shift, and i gave some examples of how this may happen.

Predicting the future is really hard, and is hardly as linear as we are inclined to think. (For instance what would be of US without WWI & WWII or without the Russian revolution of 1917? Both are 'black swan' events no one can predict that changes everything we know)

(Please, pardon me for any broken english i have in this text)

China has five times the output. Unless they implode this won't happen on that timescale. 2:1 odds on GDP PPP.

Amen!!

You can probably keep hoping. India has some incredible human capital in the form of the upper castes, but China also has a ton of human capital, plus a monoculture (the Han Chinese are the largest single ethnic group on the planet) that makes coordinating societal and economic change way easier. India is a mishmash of dozens of different ethnic groups that have been further factionalized by 1700 years of the caste system.

The ease of mono-cultural (Han Chinese) coordinated societal and economic change - are you referring to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution ? You are right, unquestioned fealty to a President for Life would never work in a diverse, multicultural country like India.

Another way of looking at things is that the advantage of social coordination that comes from a huge monoculture is strong enough to vastly outperform the fractured diversity of India despite the incredible unforced errors you mentioned.

One cannot cherry pick the economic growth in last 35-40 years of Chinese history, completely ignore the decades before that, and then proclaim the advantage of mono-culture.

The "unforced errors" were the death of 18-56 million Chinese in the Great Leap Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward.

The Cultural Revolution [1] "Millions of people were persecuted or suffered public humiliation, imprisonment, torture, hard labor, seizure of property, and sometimes execution or harassment into suicide. Many urban intellectual youths were sent to the countryside in the Down to the Countryside Movement. Red Guards destroyed historical relics and artifacts or ransacked cultural and religious sites. " [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

A single party system led by a dictator for life was the cause of the errors in the past and is the situation in the present. There is a problem with mono-culture.

It's asinine to single out the "upper castes" as good human capital.

It is? They utterly dominate in the US. Indian Americans have far and away the highest median household income of any ethnic group in the US (and it’s close to 2x that of white Americans). My understanding is that almost all Indian immigration to the US is from the upper castes.

When my Muslim grandfather was growing up in the 1930s in Gulbarga, he used to make a game of touching the water pot of his caste Hindu neighbors just to see them curse him out and have to re ritually purify it. Some of us I guess have to remind people that there isn’t a monopoly on migration.

Indians that came from Punjab in the early 1930s were not upper caste members. A large percentage of engineers that arrived in the US and Canada since the late 90s do not belong to upper castes.

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