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.
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.
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.
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 :)