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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Furthermore, as a populace gets richer, its diet tends toward eating more animal-based products and obesity and cancer rates rise. I see a very large health-care problem in China's future that will certainly slow down their economy.

Is this going to be a competitive advantage for India, with its high population of vegetarians?

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The competitive advantage in India in the long term is that their population will be significantly younger than China.

> India has more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% hovers below the age of 35. It is expected that, in 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years, compared to 37 for China and 48 for Japan; and, by 2030, India's dependency ratio should be just over 0.4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India

In the other hand India is confronting other problems.

These countries have had centuries to progress. Why now?

India got independence only in 1947. All growth till then made the British richer. Till the 1990s india had a strange cross breed b/w socialism and capitalism where large govt factories and govt organization employed most people and had low productivity.

One major gain was a strong focus on education many of them learning English. However most of it is rote learning centric. It is only in recent years that India has been able to make a place for itself in the BRIC economies.

Everywhere in the world has had millenia to progress. Progress appears to be the exception, not the rule, and to be somewhat splotchy in general.

Here's a nice, and recent article, by Amartya Sen, comparing development in India and China:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/may/12/quality...

Sen wrote the book "Development as Freedom" after winning the 1998 Economics Nobel prize. He's known for the general observation that famines occur seldom in democratic societies because politicians are at a gross level accountable for outrageous mismanagement of resource allocation.

At least in the obesity case, the larger problem is sugar not animal fat.

An American-style diet will bring that as well. However, China's system is well positioned to avoid the subsidies which caused the American obesity disaster.

China also has farm subsidies -- and like the US not always for the most healthy of foods. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870371690457613...) However, your point still stands because I'm not sure (and doubt) they subsidize corn to the extent the US does.

He may be referring to the claim that greater consumption of animal proteins, not fat, leads to higher incidence of cancer, heart disease, etc. It's a controversial claim, of course.

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