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.
In western world it is currently family but that's because family ties are much more likely to be preserved over time than ties to your village.
In other places in the world people are so immobile that they are expected to be born, grow up, work and die in the same village. And so ties to your local community are much more likely to be preserved over time just like ties to your family. It is not that the village replaces your family, it is just another group of people where it makes sense to invest to get something back in the future. Imagine you had tight knit group of friends where you left school but somehow are still able to stick together. If you trusted that this will continue for a long time it would be much easier to invest within the group knowing somebody might help you out later.
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.
I think that is the point they were making.
- Lacking access to electricity
- Lacking access to drinking water within a 30 minute round-trip walk
- Lacking access to sanitation facilities
- No household members have completed at least 6 years of schooling
- Any child in the household has stunted growth due to malnutrition
You need at least a third of the criteria to be true in order for a household to be considered in poverty.
It's likely that practically no one in your country meets this definition.
In the United States (where it is not only possible, but common for two people with education to lift a family out of poverty into the middle class), most people below the poverty have a drastically superior standard of living to anyone below the poverty line in India. The type of "poor" where two people are working full time jobs in the US would not be considered poor in India.
However, if history is anything to go by that will stop pretty soon as the hyper upper class solidifies their hold on wealth, appreciating assets, and means of production, and will start to keep larger and larger shares of profit while workers' wages stagnate, and then inflation will start to decrease the purchasing power of those stagnating wages, and the middle class will start to shrink and disappear as it is in America and other "free market" capitalist countries.
It's just human behavior to be selfish.
So I think some kind of sociological argument makes more sense (I don't know what that would be though).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
> Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.
Is it? If you have N participants in a market and a bunch of investment opportunities that are on average net negative, the person with the most money will take the most opportunities resulting in their relative worth increasing the most. The endgame for this is one person with all the money. Works for N=2 and N≃infinity.
It doesn't happen in (some? most?) small communities because of specific things that aren't present in big communities.
Of course, said -isms require either an unbroken chain of morally righteous people with absolute power being in charge of said means of production fairly for the equal enrichment of everyone, or some kind of system of checks and balances to keep those in power from abusing it and preventing corruption from outside the political power structures, the exact formula of which we've yet to figure out.
Personally I'm of the opinion we should just throw the baby out with the bathwater and chalk this whole civilization experiment up as a mistake and go back to tribal societies of yestermillennia. Of course, the vast majority of the current human population disagrees with me in that regard and I will admit there are some good things about it, so until that changes I'll be here plugging along like the rest and hoping for better days.
And, of course, capitalism and socialism work best together.
It's impossible to achieve in reality:
- fungible goods (i.e. stuff like toilet paper where you have 100s of vendors most people can't really differentiate much in terms of end result): good luck with that for any kind of complex good
- perfect information symmetry (i.e. the vendor and the buyer and seller know exactly the same about the product): can't happen when most buyers are individuals and most sellers are companies with full time people employed to work on their products
- low barriers to entry for vendor: good luck, in the real world you need time, capital, experience, etc to enter a market, and even when you're there, there's stuff like brands, marketing, reputation, etc
Etc.
Plus, even if this absurdly perfect model would be achieved, you still have to put stuff like social welfare somewhere in there. Why? Because some people are just plain bad at basic economics (president Truman was close to dying in poverty during his old age), and you can't just let them starve to death.
Says you, basically.
All current markets have state intervention, and the best ones have good state intervention.
For example, in Mumbai average people barely find more than few sq ft to live in whereas families like Godrej control land worth approx 10 b $ in the city itself. Moreover the Godrej family do not want the entire land to be used for development per se and are unwilling to part with some of it for developmental infrastructure projects. The moral of the story is that it is the same (if not worse) as any other country.
The rental yield on houses in India can be as low as 2% (source: Personal) which should in theory lead to crash in housing prices, but that is not happening as population in city will constantly increase with rural to urban migration.
[1]: https://superr.in/economy/i-tried-starting-a-manufacturing-u...
It is just depends place there is still places where nimbyism does not run rampart. We we paid like 200k€ from our new house.
In which country is a new house 200k Euros?
I feel like the insane housing prices here are not just related to nimbyism that restricts supply, but mostly to speculation driven by banking, political greed, realtors, investors, basically any and all large piles of money that have housing constantly going up fast so that their piles of money get even bigger.
Which area of France is that?
Because nobody wants to live outside Helsinki these days. So there's a lot of supply and low demand everywhere else.
Apropos, I've always wondered where the terms gf and bf, for girlfriend and boyfriend, came from, i.e. the West, or India. Wonder, because many such short forms come from or are unique to Indian English.
It is strange to parse given that it means "person that I'm non-platonically involved with" (i.e. not simply friends).
Anyway, thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt. :)
>Is what you're talking about a bit different? Can you dive in a bit?
Sure I can. Thanks for asking.
Yes, I was talking about something different. But I seem to have been misunderstood by a few people in this subthread.
No worries, it happens. Human languages are not perfect, nor are they always unambiguous. Nor are humans perfect, in writing or interpretation. :)
I wrote the comment casually, so did not think to check how it might be understood differently by others.
When I said
>many such short forms come from or are unique to Indian English.
, I meant, first of all, just "some", because "many" does not necessarily mean "most", let alone "all". It just means "many", for some value of "many". It does not necessarily imply a comparison or relative valuation, such as, "many" relative to the total number of acronyms.
(5000 is a big number on its own, but not compared to 5 million.)
And secondly, I had first come across usage such as gf and bf in emails between Westerners and Indians known to me, some 15-odd years ago, and Indian (techie) English has many :) possibly unique acronyms such as o/p for output, i/p for input, so I thought at the time, that gf and bf might be Indian English acronyms, having not come across them in general Western English usage, at least before that.
[1] An arcane reference to an Asterix comic issue, maybe Asterix in Rome (or Italy), where they talk about learning modern languages such as Latin :)
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.
To answer your question, yes Walmart can happen but it has to be ready for some serious competition because other than D-mart other big player JioMart backed by Reliance has entered this space recently.
No American big box retailer will ever be built. Indian government doesn’t allow foreign companies to come in and set up shop very easily (at best they can get in with 49% ownership like Starbucks/Tata). Additionally the logistics situation is very different. Less ports, roads between cities built differently than USA, traffic across states is not a right like USA and various restrictions/inspections/fees can occur. It’s worth keeping an eye on IKEA’s expansion specifically in India. They really want to grow the marketshare, they have the right price points, and people seem to genuinely like and want them around. But lots of artificial hurdles which i suspect are caused by local traders/shops knowing how much business IKEA will take from them.
Indian Amazon is approaching the utility of American Amazon and are pretty good about taking advantage of the existing couriers and air cargo which takes care of some of the interstate logistics I mentioned. The funniest part to me is that every individual item you order comes with it’s own delivery person, there isn’t yet much work to consolidate packages. The current generation is growing up with Amazon though and I anticipate many future improvements.
I also see a dead comment in this thread saying India doesn't have malls... I've never seen more malls in an area than I have in big Indian cities. A lot of them are pretty good!
Source: many extended visits to india
I'm impressed how much Aliexpress currently does this: consolidates purchases from different sellers, ship 3rd party to Canada, and then use local postal service for last mile delivery.
Ebay could learn a lot from them.
Driving out 45 minutes just to buy groceries seems futile since every neighbourhood will have dozens of grocery stores that will deliver right at your doorstep (and now, half a dozen quick delivery apps too).
But really, their demographic precipice is what's going to stall them out. I hope their political system is functional enough to let it transition into something that can continue functioning after the end of a turbo-growth economy without collapsing into a Putin-esque kleptocracy or go the way of 20th century Argentina with constant coups and general political chaos.
We need to thank China as the developing country that has made massive efforts on that issue over the past 45 years.
China would have hundreds of millions more people, with consequences for all of us, if it had not done what it did.
Very little efforts are made globally to control population, which makes things like COP27 rather moot.
Yes, the Chinese approach has been draconian and even cruel. But it has also been effective and the point remains that we should thank them for having succeeded in controlling their population.
I also do think that too little is being done to stop population growth globally because that growth is actually the root cause to most of our environmental issues. Note that between "too little" and your over-the-top claim of "genocide" there a gigantic chasm.
This also applies to Western countries. Many of them have incentives to boost natality. We need to 'free ourselves' from the idea that population growth as a positive and necessary thing because it simply cannot continue and a decrease would even be a net positive for the environment and quality of life.
For developing world to develop, you will have to go the extra miles, you are competing with big guys, trying to make a space for yourself in a crowded room. Every country does currency manipulation, imaging you make your good cheaper to get some papers, only because the paper can be used to buy energy.
That depends on how you define "living standards." For example, the USA can probably afford to lose a LOT of consumer products spending while still raising HDI metrics by simply reallocating how resources are committed. We prioritize spending in a lot of places that don't really return much in the way of physical or spiritual well-being. Think car-dependent infrastructure which mostly just serves to raise need for spending on vehicles and infrastructure. Think fast fashion which mostly serves to accelerate trend cycles so people buy clothes more often than they did otherwise. There's a lot of consumer needs that are socially-pressured here.
The US has been doing this for a long time, but it's gotten to the point where it isn't clear that it is in our interests, e.g., to enable China to be a major trading power.
IMO, US's colonization of the world has been through finance, which has been ok for the world. Globalization is a good business for the US, de-globalization will actually accelerate the empires' declining.
To stay on topic of India (but applies to many countries), PRC / Asian Tiger model of export driven growth model via light industries to generate surplus to upgrade capital is going to be increasingly difficult and expensive. Era of high western consumption (low interest, debt driven etc) and cheap commodities is being tapped out for short/medium term. The TLDR is PRC extracted as much benefit as it can from globalism under relatively ideal conditions while those that did not are going to have a much harder time trying to replicate similar feat. Especially India, because let's be real, west is not going to repeat the PRC "mistake" with India again, especially when India is difficult to geographically contain.
Most "first world" economies are dominated by services, so I would be surprised if India has topped out in services. Do more of the high-level stuff, like design and independent, research and development. "Grunt" work, like churning out code generates, a certain level of wealth. The high-level stuff generates even more. As a crude measure, until India is winning 1.4/7.8 = 18% of Nobel prizes it has untapped potential. (This is not intended as disparagement of India's track record but to highlight the potential for India.)
In my mind the real value of a strong manufacturing industry is that it drives the development of high-level services associated with manufacturing (robotics, materials, science, ...). I'd rather have small highly developed manufacturing sector than a large "low-tech" manufacturing sector.
By the government's own admission, 800M people are still being given free food because they can't afford it on their own. That's more than the population of western Europe and USA combined.
Services simply don't employ people in large enough numbers. It's not rocket science - basic maths.
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
It is good that we are elevating people from poverty. All I am saying is it creates a different set of problems. But yeah, overall it is good that we are able to pull more people up from poverty.
I have friends who earn in dollars. They can easily afford to buy a couple of apartments every year. They do this and let those apartments sit vacant for a few years, waiting for them to appreciate. When many people start doing this, it artificially inflates the prices.
India is also expanding vertically in cities so new housing is often built in different area and older infrastructure is not maintained in the long run.
A significant portion of real estate is built on under the table money. You often pay 30-50% of the value in black money.
So, real estate is a very illiquid investment unless commercial in India.
There are also cultural reasons for artificially inflating real estate and Indian property developers are under huge loans similar to China. It won't be sustainable.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Everybody_works_bu...
I’m actively hunting for an apartment in NCR and get painfully reminded of how poor I actually am.
After leaving Delhi we would , after an hour or so, make our first stopover in a little village called .... Gurgaon! There we would have chai, samosas, etc. In those days Gurgaon was separated from Delhi and a sleepy little village.
When the capital expanded, those villagers became instant millionaires.
A lot of comments in this thread are crediting TCS, Infosys, etc for lifting people out of poverty, but another factor was the skyrocketing realestate prices. Small-time farmers who could barely make ends meet suddenly were sitting on million-dollar land holdings.
(Though I suppose an urban software developer is a good credit risk)
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.
The Bangalore metro project started in 2011. In over a decade, they've managed a paltry 56km of active rail lines - an average of 5km/year. Meanwhile, the city hasn't even had a master plan since 2016 and every government department works on its own without any collaboration whatsoever (resulting in disasters such as railway stations without any proper bus connectivity).
India's bureaucracy and polity will keep holding our infrastructure hostage.
Our economies and societies are still pretty fragile, any political shock can start a downwards spiral. Stay vigilant.
https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/india-now-2nd-larg...
A “purple patch” is a period of exceptional performance. Like an athlete being “in the zone”.
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).