Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels
economist.com
economist.com
The one we're talking about today is "extreme poverty", which is the $2.15 purchasing-power-adjusted line. It's fantastic news that most Indians have surpassed this line, but it's also helpful to think of this line as just one rung in a ladder out of poverty. Life just above this line is still not great.
This chart, which shows how much of the population lives in different poverty lines for India, gives you a sense for the population as a whole. You can compare it to other countries to see their distribution, and China is probably a good comparison to make.
India: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
Despite progress on extreme poverty, you're right that there are still some 3 billion people in the world who cannot afford a nutritious diet, and likewise 3 billion people who live in energy poverty, meaning they have to cook indoors with solid fuels (wood, coal, dung) that damage their health and shorten their lives. It's important that we make progress on all these things in the coming decades. We absolutely have the power to.
The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better!
Agricultural employment has actually increased post covid [1][2]:
2018-2019: 42.5%
2022-2023: 45.8%
This isn't because the number of farms is growing, but because more people are working on the same farms due to lack of jobs elsewhere. This casts doubt on the overall poverty reduction narrative.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS?location...
https://dge.gov.in/dge/sites/default/files/2024-02/Employmen...
https://thewire.in/economy/share-of-agriculture-in-employmen...
Interesting. There's seems to be some fuckery with Indian hunger data, i.e. malnourishment, stuntness have stalled at a relatively high level 10 years ago and even occasionally gets worse. Which kind of makes sense if one realizes India added 400 million mouths in last 20 years, and distribution is an issue. I remember also news a few years ago Indian average height decreasing, all proxy indicators that hunger/nutrition was not improving (granted this was during covid). But cultural drama over diet also explains a lot of it. Cultural drama seems to explain a lot in India... one other stark stat is Indian female work participation rate declined as country got wealthier... culture seems to be women stop working out of neccessity if men can sustain household. It's a... different development trajectory.
> It's a... different development trajectory.
My two cents: the rest of the world is highly westernized. If you consider Islam a western religion (which you should, since it's a derivative of Judaism, and is a cousin to Christianity), then basically all of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa was westernized with the Islamic conquests. Sub Saharan Africa has adopted western norms wholesale after colonization (no written language, so very hard to keep old customs). Later, China adopted communism (a western ideology), which made its way into parts of Korea and Southeast Asia, and Japan / Philippines were colonized by force. India actually stands out as never having undergone much of a western colonization. Obviously, the entirety of the Americas are the result of Spanish/British/etc colonization.
India stands out as the only country to have never been properly colonized, with a long written record. A lot of economic theories we have are really not universal truths, but things that only hold true in the global monoculture. That's why India's development trajectory is so different, and why states like Kerala basically defy all expectations (even if it's 'communist', it's 'communist' in a non-'communist' federal framework).
Again... my highly controversial opinion. I don't really pay a whole lot of attention, but this is my take.
But Judaism isn’t a western religion, it’s a Middle Eastern religion with strong ethnic ties. Hence it hasn’t evolved and branched like all the major religions have. Christianity isn’t western religion either, but modern Protestantism and Roman Catholicism arguably are. Eastern Orthodox is actually a great example of the diversity of all major religions— they have national churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox).
Islam is multi ethnic of course and so there are branches that are western (Albania is an example) but calling Islam as a whole “western” is mostly incorrect.
China adopted communism which is ultimately a philosophy whose patrimony is European and all that entails.
> Eastern Orthodox is actually a great example of the diversity of all major religions— they have national churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox).
I mean... Sure and they still have common beliefs descended from Judaism and Christianity?
The Jews didn’t invent their beliefs out of whole cloth—this is true whether it’s Judaism or communism (Karl Marx, Lenin, and most Russian communists were Jewish though I think you know that already). They borrowed monotheism and a bunch of their religion from local religions at the time. Jewish communists learned a great deal from the French Revolution. They put a Jewish stamp on these beliefs so to speak, then handed off some of those beliefs to other people who, like the Jews before them, discarded what didn’t make sense to them and kept what did. China is barely communist now, by Russian standards, it’s more fascist to be honest.
Another good example is how in modern Protestantism they talk a lot of about “the biblical definition of marriage,” when what they really mean is one man and one woman—more of a northwest European definition. The biblical definition of marriage is one man and one or more wives. But you can’t get a modern Protestant to accept what the Bible says because everyone reads their own beliefs into these religions.
There is no discernible ultimate source to any religion—it’s more like a chain of beliefs, where people take their existing beliefs and project them onto their religion.
Having said that, Hinduism is is a chain of beliefs that has stayed within the same ethnic group for a very long time, which maybe is what you’re saying? And that is indeed something rare and very precious.
I don't think I'm understanding the sense in which you're using 'colonized' here?
INMH the interesting questions is « what are the proteins options, considering the ressources of Indians/India? If your poultry is fed with soy you’ll have many times more proteins and other nutrients eating directly the beans instead of transforming them the eggs. However if your poultry find their food by themselves on a field, you have free eggs without input waste.
I think your theoretical argument is - "what if instead of eggs we could feed hungry people with all the soy used to feed those chicken to produce those eggs?" You and I both know that's not going to happen.
Just completely and utterly false, and reflects the poor understanding of diet and nutrition that is pervasive throughout India and in Indian culture. There's a reason why Indians have the highest rates of metabolic syndrome. I've basically shirked all of it, and my blood numbers, weight, etc are substantially better than my parents and my brother.
Firstly, chickens eat more than soy, and chickens (and animals in general) can turn undigestible, useless biomatter into actual food (such as ruminants digesting grass, and then humans drinking milk or eating the flesh). Using animals, you are able to use much less bio-matter to get an equivalent amount of calories and nutrition, simply because humans are terrible at digesting.
That being said, on to eggs. Eggs are an excellent source for protein and orders of magnitude better than soy when looking at both the amino acid profile as well as the protein / calories.
One hard-boiled egg contains about 70 calories and 6 g protein.
Meanwhile, you'd need 50g boiled soybeans to get 6g protein. However, Soy is less bio-available (about 90%), so you'd actually need to eat about 6.6 g protein or 60 g soybean, containing about 70 calories. So far so good, right?
Wrong. Because soy beans are low in essential amino acids like methionine. For an average adult you need about 1.3g methionine / day. This is 3 eggs or 210 calories.
Meanwhile, you need about 480 g of soybean to meet your methionine requirement, which is 830 calories.
If you analyze the Indian diet, you'll realize it's replete with these sorts of insane substitutions, where a perfectly good source of nutrition, whose protein profile matches exactly the human requirement, is substituted for a sub-par product. Obviously, since these are requirements, you'll see Indians compensate by simply eating more to make up for the deficiency. But eating these vegetarian sources of protein in the right amount to get to the required intake leads to insanely high calorie numbers, which is why diabetes, stomach fat, heart problems, etc are so prevalent in India. And it's also why Indians in India are shorter than the Indians in the diaspora despite Indians in India actually eating more calories (hence the weight).
And that's just calories and basic metabolism, we're not even talking body composition, which again suffers within India simply because the best sources of protein are eschewed due to moralizing. There's a reason why Indians, despite constituting 25% of the planet, do not constitute a large portion of world-class athletes and have low average rates of grip strength. It's an insanely self-inflicted pathology.
I can't really comment on the situation in India specifically, but just for some global context around stunted development, look at a chart of men's height [1]. Not having half your population stunted by malnutrition is a recent phenomenon.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-height-of-men-by-...
There really is no argument that it hasn't. If we take a year between 1950 and 1970 as a baseline, there was a significant reduction in chronic malnutrition and the number and severity of famines -- both in absolute numbers as well as per capita.
> it has remained about the same for about a decade
If your time horizon is the last 10 years then the picture is more mixed, yea.
Malnourishment is also steadily diminishing. Effectively because food affordability improves as poverty diminishes. It's a good proxy.
Relying on North Korean statistics to make your point is... questionable
We were solidly middle class in india that never went hungry. All our kids in USA now are atleast 3-4 inches taller than us. They are often taller than their parents in their mid teens.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/11/children-height-gap-...
You never went hungry, but did you have a reliable supply of all the micronutrients, and an abundance of protein? At all periods from birth to the end of your teens when growth plates ossified?
Not being hungry is not the same as getting good nutrition. Middle class in India doesn't eat enough meat, fish, eggs, fruits, and vegetables.
Middle class meal in South India is mostly rice. With some fried potato side. In the North its Chapathi(Flat bread-Wheat), with friend potato sides and lentil(Dal).
Only thing that Middle class likely gets a good deal of is milk(through Chai).
Plus meat is taboo subject in India. A kind of sugar loaded vegetarianism is what most middle class in India gets to eat.
On the other hand, it's probably useful enough for now. Maybe there are 100x differences between prices for a sack of potatoes across different developing countries and therefore this index is at least that much inaccurate, but poverty problems and income gaps are a lot worse than that anyway, so there are ways this could make sense within reason.
I have dozens of jars of homemade preserves in my basement right now. I had no part in it, it was all my spouse’s doing. And we’re in a US urban area. But we’re affluent urban tech types with hippie tendencies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/business/worldbusiness/27... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/30/nicholaswatt.m...
> The revised GDP will include some money from illegal activities, such as money from cigarette and drinks smuggling, prostitution and money laundering.
(Greeks were highly motivate to have higher value by any means necessary as discussed in article, this is a quite extreme case)
I see paint jobs by people done by themselves. And compare it with paid professional servers. The pendulum always swings to professional. :)
Sugar is a preservative just like salt, and fruit jams were developed specifically as a way to preserve more of a fruit harvest.
Honey is an example of a sugary product that is extremely stable. There's honey that has been recovered from Egyptian tombs and is still considered edible.
Poverty levels are measured with PPP dollars, so that's already factored in.
India and China have similar regional differences.
People living in Alaska are a lot poorer than their income suggests because of shipping and heating costs.
By many reports, half of Indian homes do not have toilets.
Even if earning above some arbitrary dollar threshold, they sound uncomfortably "poor" to me.
The alternative is the silly measures of "poverty" we use in the first world which are mathematically unachieveable by design so they can always be used to justify measures politicians want to pass: "won't you think of the child poverty you heartless monster" etc.
I found this article interesting. Personally I think starvation is a very low bar to clear. What matters to the first world is whether or not India has a middle class that is able to buy stuff.
No, I disagree. The alternative, as the original comment said, is to measure access to calories, nutrition, or other metrics like prevalence of starvation, access to shelter, access to sanitation, prevalence of certain health issues, etc.
Measuring poverty via the international poverty line has often been criticized [1][2][3].
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337335330_A_critiqu...
[2]: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-i...
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/8/21/exposing-the-gr...
What-about-ism is an elitist way to pretend to care yet do nothing.
Imagine it was your country and your project which eliminated extreme poverty. No doubt you would be bending over backwards to listen to someone who “read an article” on the other side of the world
The WEF is a talk shop that has no power to impose any sort of restructuring. Are you talking about the IMF?
It's the "it's a big club, and you ain't in it" thing.
Modi made a start in 2014. I don't know why the momentum stopped. Some of the videos coming out of there (e.g. the recent video of the railway employee throwing a huge amount of used disposable plastic food trays off a moving train) are shocking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
https://innovateindia.mygov.in/toilet-campaign/
https://siwi.org/latest/the-clean-india-mission-worlds-large...
The "Swacch Bharat" campaign that was launched more than a decade ago only gave some short-lived upgrades to public places.
I was watching videos of some of the slums.
There were literal hills of rotting organic garbage inside the slums. With children living next to them.
I had visions of Paul Ehrlich freaking out at the sight of people defecating and bathing on the roadside in Delhi.
I saw photos of some of the "mohalla clinics" (free basic healthcare clinics) that the previous Delhi government had (admittedly admirably) set up. Some of them looked so dirty and structurally unsound that they wouldn't be allowed to function as holding pens for farm animals in the US.
In the US, we have companies like Waste Management handle our waste. Surprises me that India doesn't have a dozen Waste Managements by now. Billion dollar unicorns/startups/whatever, innovating in turning "waste to wealth" (as Nitin Gadkari calls it). Put capitalism to use where there's a failure of non-capitalism to solve the problem. But there might be deep cultural issues. I suspect the caste system plays a part. The forward castes believe that trash management is beneath them.
If people create many waste management companies and people tried to invest in them then some people would just create fake companies and simply steal the money. There’s no trust.
Or at least that’s the way it used to be decades prior. Your suggestion nowadays might actually work because the Indian government has now identification measures for every Indian citizen. And other new technologies and enforcement which make this type of corruption more easier to eliminate.
But the deep seated cultural perceptions of dishonesty and endemic corruption from the past will continue for many years unfortunately.
Hopefully one day India can become the kind of place you are suggesting.
Blame every thing on "Corruption". This is such cope.
All you have to do is ensure you do your part in keeping things around you clean. You can ghost walk streets in the poorest places in Mexico and they look affluent compared to even posh neighbourhoods in India.
Lets call it as it is, We Indians need to seriously address our cultural tendencies. Im not just talking about some immediate sense of urgency. But how we go about living our every day life. Unless you address this at a core level, and create a proactive sense of awareness about hygiene in people this isn't going to change.
Honestly, they should really make it a priority. The awareness of what India is like has severely hurt their international reputation.
But…I think what you said doesn’t really contradict what I said. I actually agree with what you are saying about cultural tendencies.
A video I watched of a brand spanking new metro station in Mumbai. Marble floors and all. And a commenter pointed out a timestamp where you can see paan/chewing tobacco spit in a corner of the floor.
Here's what baffles me. It is well established that Indians chew paan/chewing tobacco. It is well established that they then spit these out. Why don't they have spitoons installed inside the state assembly or metro stations? Treat it as a cultural opportunity: create beautiful spitoons with culturally relevant designs on them. The type kings used to have in their courts. And have them sponsored by businesses (i.e. let them post digital banner ads on them). Enlightened capitalism!
racism
/ˈreɪsɪz(ə)m/
noun
prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.Singapore is very clean. Malaysia is fairly clean. Cambodia sort of. India and Philippines very much not.
And Zoroastrians are absolutely meticulous about cleanliness, be they poor or rich.
India is extremely poor per-capita.
Job options are non existent. Farming and some local trade is all you have. There is also total absence of health care infrastructure. Most people have to travel to metros for healthcare. Last time I visited a small town in my weekend motorcycle rides to see my former manager, the biggest political issue in the town was wanting a kidney speciality hospital built. It turns out taking a day off(loss of earnings), traveling to Bangalore, spending money and time for dialysis was bankrupting entire family trees. Similar situations exist for bypass surgeries, and getting stent installed in heart. You will hear these stories for all kinds of major ailments.
Options for schooling and cram schools are absent. Your kids don't get a competitive peer group, or decent enough tuition/coaching to compete with students from metros, and once you lose your chance to study engineering/medicine its just one more generation of poverty your bloodline has to endure.
In the metros, if you have the money you get good hospital and schools. But owning a home is nearly impossible these days. By and large if you don't make it to FAANG in a few years, you just leave and move abroad.
Nearly every young person I know doesn't even try and default goal is either Gulf or Jobs in western countries.
In short, its a brutal Zero sum game, everybody grabs whatever they can, by any means they can, even if they have to burn down the whole thing in the process.
Anecdote alert: I travel to India at least once in a year and I have to take the train each time (sleeper class) and I can definitely attest that things have significantly improved since I was a kid. I have been taking these same trains for over 25 years now. For starters the toilets actually don't dump directly between the tracks. The railway employees seem to be quite happy and take pride in their job (they used to always have depressing faces when I was growing up).
Another anecdote : If 20 years ago you took a flight that goes to India, you would be frustrated with the condition of the toilets. It was so bad I used to avoid Indian carriers just because of that and intentionally take a layover in Europe so at least part of the flying experience would be cleaner. These days I don't feel that way, I find flights to India pretty much the same as any other flights.
That said, there is still a LOT to be done, but I think overall people do seem to care about hygiene more than they used to years ago. Also, assuming there is always a certain percentage of population that will never care about this (in any country) it is bound to look a bit worse in India due to the higher population density.
That's still there :)
You don't cross(on a two wheeler) below a bridge on which a train is passing for the obvious reasons(Golden shower).
There was no momentum. People never started, it was more of a marketing campaign.
Almost everyday I see people throw garbage around street corners, if you ask them not to, they gang up and go after you like its their birth right to be dirty and you are being evil by keeping clean.
You need to tear down the whole shebang and rebuild it from scratch, much of this also about income levels of the ordinary Indian, and being so poor, keeping clean isn't any where in the list of priorities.
Considering the lower wages it shouldn't be that expensive for an Indian city to hire some garbage collectors?
And women harassment. Maybe that should be the top1 priority.
The video in question seems to be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci-QQaP2fSM
It is pretty shocking, but at least not as shocking as garbage trucks dumping trash into the river (of which there are many online)
Great but that myth is and was of no real interest to anyone and isn't a very useful frame for the article. India still needs to move most of the population on to doing something more productive than inefficiently looking after plants. The goal is not 1 billion people living off slightly more than $1,000/year. The goal is living standards at least an order of magnitude higher if not several orders. That requires capital, not subsistence+ farming. Which, to their credit, is what the Indians seem to be focusing on.
Might be a better life than smelling exhaust gas and looking at screens for 3/4 of our existence. Then wake up and worry about AI eventually eating our jobs.
AI has as much chance of taking your job as combine harvesters have of taking everyone's job that currently has one in India working on farms: 99%, maybe, but also 0%.
Not sure that this should be the goal.
How come China today is so different from India today? In terms of cleanliness and poverty elimination specifically.
I know China liberalized in the 80’s and India in the 90’s. So you could say that’s a 10 year difference.
But China 10 years ago was still very different from India even today.
Does anyone have any ideas?
But of course it's got major downsides, as the Chinese government is also pushing hard to remove distinct cultural identities from the various regions of China. India is still much richer in terms of cultures than that, the government can't just come in and start erasing that.
And Vietnam isn't that much better than India (I travel to both 3-4 times a year because of family).
If you're in D1 or D3 of HCMC maybe, but that's not where the majority of Saigon residents live - they mostly live in D10, D8, or D4 which don't look much different from similar neighborhoods in most of Urban India.
And once you go to rural Vietnam, I've noticed the quality of life is worse than those in the villages my extended family lives in back in India, because most spending is basically given to a handful of cities.
My wife's ancestral village in VN has dirt roads, a single primary school, and no doctor, and social services such as direct welfare transfers are nonexistent. On the other hand, my ancestral village in North India has a wind turbine factory, an electric battery factory, and farmers and residents get around $50-150/mo in direct benefits transfer.
A "China" or "South Korea" model doesn't make sense for a democracy like India (or even Indonesia or Phillipines, which share similar issues). A "Turkiye" or "Israel" model makes more sense for these kinds of countries.
Was authoritarianism
>VNM/PRC/SIN
Is authoritarian
The TLDR is competent dictatorship and normalization (really cooperation) with hegemon (US) made rapid export led growth work. The dictator sets up the industries, the hegemon consumes the outputs. Need both, transition away from authoritarian is optional though (especially resource exporters that hegemon needs).
Democracies to my knowledge has been incapable of bootstrapping the 0-1 agrarian -> industrial development fast. I can't really think of one that didn't industrialize from exploitation/colonial phase prior to democratizing.
India hindered by being "real" democracy with universal sufferage at the outset while being very multicultural. It's... very helpful for development to culturally genocide society into relative monoculture. You want that migrant country girl from Z village to be fungible cog in factory Y, and you start that by making sure everyone can interact with language Z.
It has nothing to do with totalitarianism. Anyone who has actually lived in India or China for more than a month, as I have, knows that cleanliness and poverty are cultural factors as well. People casually throw garbage around and don’t seem to care, it’s cultural. I saw countless scenes in different Indian cities where people sat around garbage and filth (not homeless individuals), seemingly unbothered by it.
There’s also a culture of cheating on exams, which diminishes the value of education certifications. Attitudes in customer service can be striking too, like when I was at a pharmacy, and the clerk was engaged in a private phone conversation while a whole line of customers waited for him to finish. Or drivers who arrive hours late and then get annoyed if you find another ride etc
People who believe that India will catch up to China soon are living on a different planet.
https://www.thechinastory.org/yearbooks/yearbook-2013/introd...
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna19197078
http://www.china.org.cn/english/Life/159407.htm
Cheating and queuing woes, you say?
https://time.com/4360968/china-gaokao-examination-university...
https://alanrefkin.com/2013/08/13/queuing-in-china/
https://theculturetrip.com/asia/china/articles/why-do-chines...
I am reminded of this excerpt from Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism:
> In his 1903 book, Evolution of the Japanese, the American missionary Sidney Gulick observed that many Japanese “give an impression…of being lazy and utterly indifferent to the passage of time.” Gulick was no casual observer. He lived in Japan for 25 years (1888-1913), fully mastered the Japanese language, and taught in Japanese university. After his return to the US, he was known for his campaign for racial equality on behalf of Asian Americans. Nevertheless, he saw ample confirmation of the cultural stereotype of the Japanese as an “easy-going” and “emotional” people who possessed qualities like “lightness of heart, freedom from all anxiety for the future, living chiefly for the present.” (...) > This was not just a western prejudice against eastern peoples. The British used to say similar things about the Germans. Before their economic take-off in the mid-19th century, the Germans were typically described by the British as “a dull and heavy people.” “Indolence” was a word that was frequently associated with the Germanic nature."
With regards to China, the article I posted gives a concise history of the modernization of the Chinese economy. Essentially, they
a) chose to model their economy after South Korea and Japan as an export-economy.
b) normalized political relations with the US and the West and developed intensive trade.
c) invested heavily in manufacturing & technical skills that were lost.
Industrial accidents happen in the US too, although I don't know what rate vs China. I think the fact that their factories have surveillance at all shows they are taking action to improve safety. You've got to consider, the population is 1.4bn, so there is going to be more freak accidents caught on camera.
they are extremely good at suppressing such videos internally
they will sometimes allow something like the particular video you mention (I was living in China when that video went viral, this was about 10 years ago) because it directs anger at individuals' bad behavior, not at the government (in fact, in favors the government making and enforcing rules to disallow bad citizen behavior)
All such questions are easily answered once you take a look at the per-capita budget each country has for the required expenditures.
What they don't always do well is make the choice to change when conditions change. There's also usually a limited bandwidth for deciding and forcing change, so you tend to end up without economic diversity and without great results in areas outside of policy.
A democratic/distributed decision making process tends towards slower changes and less alignment, but more diversity.
If you decide to be the world's production line, economic diversity may be less important. But having diversity is usually a good thing when economic tides change.
However, central planning as proven to be bad once you reach a developed state. Lots of reasons for this which would be too long to get into here, but has a lot to do with people willing to follow a sacrifice when there is a crisis or the country is working together to get itself out of a bad situation.
So, it could be that central planning is good for some use cases and bad for others. Likewise, with liberalised economies.
There may even be some overlap between the two.
India never really liberalized. It was more like one trick pony with affluence and progress centered around IT industry.
You can drive 30 kms from Bangalore in any direction and apart from mobile phones and two wheelers, nothing much has changed since 50+ years.
Urban Goverment in China versus India is VERY different.
In China, cities are given significant autonomy and a bigger pot of cash compared to prefecture they are in. Furthermore, the Chinese cities that most foreigners visit (Beijing, Shanghai) are under direct control of the Central Government.
In India, urban government is subservient to state government - with zoning, planning, and budgets coming from the state bureaucracy, especially in cities that HNers tend to visit in India (Bangalore, Gurgaon, Hyderabad). Let's use Bangalore as an example. Bangalore is India's tech hub and the economic engine for Karnataka, but urban Bangalore only has around 20 seats in Karnataka's Legislative Assembly out of 224 total. This means that state governments have little to no incentive to care about providing urban services and goods, when they can better invest in other constituencies that actually can flip the tide in elections.
The other aspect is that slums residents can swing elections, so any attempt to demolish a slum can destroy the incumbent party's shot at local elections. Slums/encroached land have significantly monetary value - the first generation who lived in a slum and built the residence often tend to move out and rent out the original building to a new resident while also having the option to mortgage the building to a local lender. If you are an unskilled migrant laborer, you are making around $100-150/mo in Urban India, but if you have a slum residence, if litigation happens for redevelopment, you might end up with around $10-20k and a free apartment (which you can rent out). The same thing happened in China all the time until the mid-2010s, and it's just the general cycle of urbanization.
That said, Indian cities are getting better and cleaner, but funding for urban infrastructure only really began in the last 2-3 years. Indian cities today aren't that much different than their Chinese peers in the 2000s, and the exact same kinds of problems (toxic smog in Delhi like in Beijing in the 2000s) but also development are happening (the Delhi redevelopment for G20 similar to Beijing's redevelopment for the 2008 Olympics).
Also, one thing I noticed is the 2nd most populous of each state tends to be much cleaner than the 1st. So Mysore is miles cleaner than Bangalore, Coimbatore compared to Chennai, Panchkula to Gurgaon, and Pune to Mumbai, which I assume is because there are fewer outsiders, so the electoral impact is higher, as most migrants (both from the same state or outside) continue to use their home town/village as their primary constituency in order to continue to maintain rural/town landholdings.
That is because citizens themselves don't care.
Single biggest motivation of the Indian voter base is using the process of elections and then elected politician like attack dogs to hurt the people they hate(Often minorities). This is through and through. This manifests along the lines of religion and caste, mostly. But regionalism and language politics has played its part in the past. But in the past few decades its mostly religion.
Every time a political party does something good, anything good. Especially uniformly for the masses, they are voted out. This is because in a country like India, people don't want things to uniformly improve for everyone. The goal is always for your(community) to have an edge, while everybody else must be made to suffer. Any other arrangement and the masses feel their favorite politicians didn't hurt the people they hate enough.
>>That said, Indian cities are getting better and cleaner, but funding for urban infrastructure only really began in the last 2-3 years.
Quite the opposite, every city in Karnataka, has gotten significantly dirtier, garbage littered and both dusty and polluted in the past decades.
>>Also, one thing I noticed is the 2nd most populous of each state tends to be much cleaner than the 1st. So Mysore is miles cleaner than Bangalore
Thats mostly because fewer the people, lesser hands there are to throw garbage and pollute, its just that scale of grotesque is reduced not the phenomenon itself.
This isn't about citizens. Fundamentally, residents in a mega-city like Bangalore simply do not matter in a parliamentary democracy like Karnataka. Bangalore doesn't make you CM, so there's no incentive for Karnataka's politicians to invest in it.
> Every time a political party
Urban management is not about political party - it's about bureaucracy. INC, BJP, JDS, etc can win elections, but local government such as public works are apolitical. The issue is states in India do NOT devolve planning commissions to local government - just about every function that a city would have (Zoning, Permitting, Land Acquisition) are managed by state level planning commissions. India is unique in the level of centralization that state level governments have.
> Quite the opposite, every city in Karnataka
Karnataka is not the rest of India. Bangalore is notoriously bad at urban planning and management. The fact that much poorer Indore can outcompete Bangalore in cleanliness and urban management is a testament to the fact that it's about local government.
Also, ime, Delhi NCR (not just Delhi and Noida but also ancillary towns like Kurkushetra and Karnal), Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Coimbatore have all steadily gotten much better over the past 10 years. Bangalore on the other hand has remained underdeveloped due to land mafias.
> Thats mostly because fewer the people, lesser hands there are to throw garbage and pollute, its just that scale of grotesque is reduced not the phenomenon itself.
These are multi-million person cities with populations similar to Bangalore barely 10-15 years ago, yet they are still cleaner and better managed than Bangalore circa 2010.
While population does play a role, Karnataka is unique in that the JDS admin in the 1990s removed almost all urban governance responsibilities from Bangalore and moved it to either the State Commission (eg. zoning) or privatized (eg. garbage collection - but this was because of the World Bank).
Do you seriously stay in Bangalore man? Because you don't sound real. Nearly every major politician has real estate and small industries stake in Bangalore. Politicians are NOT the problem, people are. People are not interested in good things. Their sole life is spent hoping other people have a worse life than theirs.
>>Urban management is not about political party - it's about bureaucracy
Most garbage picking vechicles, big tippers et al belong to local MLA's. Again do you even stay in Bangalore?
>>Bangalore is notoriously bad at urban planning and management.
My family has been in Bangalore for like a century. It was the best city ever. But you can't exactly have "urban planning" if migrants start growing 20% yoy for 30 years straight.
>>Bangalore on the other hand has remained underdeveloped due to land mafias.
Again do you stay here? Ever applied for a KIADB or BDA plot, waited for decades? Literally IT industry exists because of private land owner investments.
The odd one out in this assessment is India, because it did some similar things (land reform) without success. A difference might be that India sheltered businesses from foreign competition and didn't encourage and invest as much. Another, is that you need caste connections to do business. Culturally I intuit that the upper-castes that controlled government were less interested in rapid nationwide progress, unlike the ideologues that led South Korea and China. They lived comfortable lives and hung their hats on that.
And the caste aspect doesn't make sense, as caste is hyperlocal and there isn't solidarity between caste groups of different ethnicities. Furthermore, caste ranking doesn't fully translate to business ownership, as traditionally, merchant and moneylending castes like Banias were towards the lower end.
The main difference between China and India is China makes it's urban centers de facto independent of rural hinterlands within the same prefecture, while in India, urban and rural are both under the same state government.
A prime example is the state of government schools in India, which are almost exclusively used by the very poor. State funded schools in east Asian countries are of significantly higher quality.
And India uses Caste Based Affirmative Action using a quota that makes around 60% of all government positions reserved for lower caste individuals [1]
> state of government schools in India, which are almost exclusively used by the very poor. State funded schools in east Asian countries are of significantly higher quality
These are broad terms. Education falls onto state and local government in India, and leads to massive variation (eg. Kerala, Punjab public schools doing fairly well versus Bihar, MP public schools doing badly).
It's the same in East Asia, though I would like to know what you define as "East Asia". The urban-rural education gap is well documented in China as well [2]
[0] - https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/how-caste-factor-p...
[1] - https://www.clearias.com/reservation-in-india/
[2] - https://fsi.stanford.edu/docs/research_projects__understandi...
Now, but the argument concerns development over the 20th century, not the current makeup.
China and India only began to diverge in the late 2000s to early 2010s, and much of that is due to China's investment in urban construction and real estate, while India's economy entered a lost decade due to a loan origination crisis.
There was total chaos through 1980s and 1990s, governments would come and go without outright majority without much progress on the economic front. Only exception was being at the right time and place for the outsourcing boom. But its effects were limited to a few cities and groups of people.
There was some correction in 2000s, but it does look like making a affluent industrial economy is neither the goal of the political class or the electoral section.
Hyperlocal corruption/nobility is the worst kind of corruption/nobility.
Non-local ones will at least create systems that work, supporting infrastructure, and will try to maintain some amount of material wealth that they can prey upon.
I don't see the significance of this.
China also didn't succeed due to "liberalization". How come the absolute majority of capitalist economies in the world (Latin/South America, Africa, Asia etc.) are still dirt poor then?
It's currently an "utter failure"? I only know how to read Wikipedia, and that tells me it's the 5th largest economy in the world and currently growing faster than China. Of course it's still very poor per-capita but "utter failure" paints a very different picture.
Just allowing the existence of private enterprise doesn't mean much when institutions are weak or corrupt. If you know everyone isn't playing by the rules, the most you can accomplish is rent-seeking while everyone tries to make each other suckers.
If all you have is a strong ML-style government and no liberalization, however, then there's not much of a point in finding opportunities to invest because everything you have is at the mercy of the Party.
China succeeded because investors gambled correctly that liberalization would be accompanied by credible governance, and it can all go away if and when the credibility for investors and entrepreneurs is replaced by Xi's neo-Maoism.
You mean US' various anti China sanctions and trade restrictions
In the post World War II era, Singapore was also deeply impoverished and wrecked by the legacy of war and colonialism. Hong Kong as well. Taiwan was poor too. Japan was decimated by the war.
All these countries ended up becoming wealthy and prosperous due to liberalization and capitalism. South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan. These places are all wealthy today.
Of course liberalization and capitalism was not the only factor. I don’t know much about the Latin American economies but I will take your word for them in terms of being poor. And India has many issues too.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about recently. It’s interesting to see what people say.
Also thank you for the book recommendation.
In % GDP terms S.Korea is a top spender on research, development and education.
To give you a contrast in the recent Delhi elections, the party that built quality schooling for the poor was voted out. These are deep undercurrents of the Indian society. Watching a poor persons child get schooling and eventually a shot at getting better than your kid, is something most of the Indian middle class can't bear to watch it happen.
The motivations of Indian electorate are always- Can this political party hurt the people I hate?
You can't help people whose life purpose is to sabotage good things out of envy that other people will have it good.
The party that got voted out was mired in corruption scams and their premise to power was fighting against corruption.
Politics in India can be a lot more nuanced than you claim it to be. What you are saying is one part of the equation.
Thats basically every single political party. And thats actually baked into core assumptions before even going to vote. Regardless of who you put in power will steal.
The edge comes from using you as a attack dog to aim against people they hate. Not honesty.
The other advantage China has was continuity of government economic policies because you had pretty much the same people in charge for a couple of decades which gave time for the policies to take root.
Of course China is a totalitarian police state, and not a place I'd want to be (I did live there for some years). But people put up with that because of the hyper economic growth in the 80s-00s; it's hard to think about freedoms and human rights if you can't even feed your family. Once people reach a state where they have their basic needs met then they begin to value other things (like individual freedoms).
I also worry that the major negative effects of AI in India will not be economic but will be social as the society is extremely low trust at the moment due to widespread corruption, criminals being lauded by the government, killings of journalists, communal tensions, huge pollution, and tons of other problems.
It is a strong reason why people praise the current Indian ruling government ive noticed both among poor masses, middle class and elite, so you’re correct.
But they and the opposition all win elections there primarily on freebies, whichever party promises freebies wins in most parts of India.
It’s just that people are more confident on freebies coming to them, if they vote the party in their province/state if the party is also ruling at the central level, since taxes are passed from centre to state, especially in the last 10 years with introduction of GST, etc.
So yea, it is much more mixed, that just that reason, not to mention, first past the post, and uneven population sizes across different states, also change matters a lot.
Truth.
We'll never get rid of poverty because people keep raising the bar no matter how wealthy they get.
Also to the point on raising the bar. I think that is not a bad thing.
This can happen with the best of intentions too.
We can look back on people who were royalty in their time, but by modern standards, they would've been living a poor life. No AC in the summer, no proper medical care and the possibility of dying from a mild tooth problem, only having access to food that's in-season, zero running water, needing to have your poop hauled away in buckets, needing to spend all day just to travel 15 km, being blamed for a random crime and executed days later with no real evidence.
Being a rich person in the renaissance period seems like it'd be nice if you only look at paintings glorifying the lifestyle. But when you sit down and think about the nitty gritty daily life, it would suck compared to an average modern lifestyle. Yet the rich back then were surely quite comfortable, just like the rich today are. And the rich centuries from now will look at the mega rich today and be amazed that they lived such quaint lives without food teleporters and instant cancer zappers and weekend trips to the balmy shores of Ganymede.
Saying the poor can't be dissatisfied with the inequality in society today because "things were worse in the past for the poor" can really be extended to anyone and anything. There's always something in the past that was worse than a typical bad experience today. But the past is full of horrors that we should learn from and not repeat.
Have you ever been in a castle? Thermal mass is highly underestimated from my experience. I suggest the likes of Foix in warm southern france in the peak of summer. Walking into one of the lower rooms where the doors are wide open and such is like walking into a fridge.
I think this is greatly exaggerated. Actual royalty had access to vast amounts of physical and mental labor that only the billionaires of modern society could rival.
No A/C? You can pay people to bring ice into your house and cool you. No medical care? You could have a surgeon invent an implement to pull an arrow out of your skull and save your life, just because you are important enough for that. Only food in season? You could pay people to bring you food from other places far away lands no one has ever seen in such seasons.
Modern world has conveniences, but so many people cannot afford any labor at all. Royalty had leisure time that most modern people can barely afford.
Labor was cheap in the ancient world. But the reality is that machines and technology do a lot of work better than a human hand. No matter how many people you hire, nobody is cooling and preserving your food as well as a typical $500 refrigerator. And nobody is cooling your house as well as a $500 AC either. Air conditioning revolutionized the world because it made lots of places that were borderline inhabitable habitable. It doesn't matter how rich you were, life in Saudi Arabia wasn't as comfortable as it is today. Vaccination, antibiotics, windows, and AC made tropical areas much more habitable for everyone.
The Romans had ice available even for common people. They harvested it from the mountains. Ice can be stored a surprisingly long time if kept out of sunlight and packed correctly. I know less about 1500s Italy specifically, but obviously the technology existed if people wanted to do it.
> You get an arrow pulled out of your skull, but what are you doing with the resulting infection?
An infection was bad news, but by no means guaranteed. Soldiers frequently suffered horrific wounds and survived, assuming they weren't on an interminable hell campaign with no chance to recover. It's actually quite surprising how resilient people are.
> People bring you food from far away, but there's no refrigeration and it's hauled at 15 kilometers a day.
Where are you getting the 15km number? Of course it depends on the topography, but also the mode of transportation.
> You can pay someone a lot of money to bring avocados from 1000 kilometers away by foot today. But you won't want to eat those avocados.
It really depends on what you are eating. Trade did bring all sorts of exotic food items hundreds or thousands of miles.
okay 15km is too short. Average walking speed is 5km/hr and you would expect to walk 10 hours a day. So movement would have been more like 50km per day.
A child of a movie star today is living a much more exciting and relaxmaxxed life than a typical prince 500 years ago. And they don't have to march out to battlefields sometimes, get massacred by their cousins or constituents, or die of being inbred. Guarantee you that you could take any prince from centuries ago, show them first class on an airplane and beach resorts in French Polynesia and they'd 100% prefer "settling" for that over slow carriage rides between cities.
> We can look back on people who were royalty in their time, but by modern standards, they would've been living a poor life.
But now you have shifted the goalposts to say the modern day royalty lives better than hundreds of years ago royalty. That is obvious, and not what anyone was claiming otherwise.
...and die 2 weeks later from an infection because antibiotics haven't been discovered yet
>Only food in season? You could pay people to bring you food from other places far away lands no one has ever seen in such seasons.
The lack of air freight means even if you can send some guy to get it, by the time it arrives it'll be rotten.
Free money, housing, and healthcare for everyone is also the law here in Germany, which is why we get flooded by illegal immigrants too..
..and that's why these Western European welfare states are collapsing. You can only afford something like this if your population overwhelmingly consists of educated, skilled people with a strong work ethic who would never voluntarily sign up for welfare. Once you allow millions of foreigners into the country who are neither educated nor skilled nor have a work ethic such systems start to collapse.
No, it's not. The weight of illegals on the welfare system is a rounding error compared to the effects of an aging population. And if you were familiar with people in this situation rather than spitting out far-right talking points you'd know that's it's not an enviable situation and not one they yearn to stay in.
Really, that is your position?!
And I don't think Sweden and Germany are giving free housing to individuals that overstayed their visas.
They get not only free housing, but also free food and even a janitor! That’s better than significant part of the population does. Do you think, that delivery driver or a nurse can afford more?
And when it comes to other attributes like quality of the road, speed of the construction or durability of the road.... It's far worst than the USA.
All the Indian govt programs only exists to support their corrupt contractors and not for helping people genuinely.
I know this is anecdotal, but I visited nine cities in India last year (including New Delhi), and the sidewalks were full of homeless people. At night, it was literally hard to walk through some areas because people were sleeping everywhere in the streets.
I've never seen anything like that in the US or Europe.
I might have a huge blindspot.
Now that the US seems intent on burning every international aid project we have, I hope other countries can help fill the gap and help lift other poor countries a little higher. It seems like a reasonable thing to do.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/indian-governme...
So maybe the myth has not been undermined.
They’ve been trying to revive and boost their declining consumption economy. India’s 10% population drives >50% of entire consumption, >80% of entire retail goods consumption outside of base essential commodities.
“According to the 2023 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 111th out of 125 countries, with a score of 28.7, indicating a “serious” level of hunger. Although this is a slight improvement from its 2015 score of 29.2, the progress has been slow compared to countries with similar economic growth rates. India also has the highest child wasting rate in the world at 18.7%. And 35.5% of children under five are medically listed as having their growth stunted, a condition that leads to long-term developmental complications.”
— https://outreach-international.org/blog/malnutrition-in-indi...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lgf2WHstBY
[2] [PDF] https://eacpm.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Reversing-Ga...
[3] https://www.businesstoday.in/india/story/sanjeev-sanyal-blas...
Actually both 28,7 and 29,2 = 30.
Social workers playing at science.
Diversity is not meant in the modern political interpretation.
As an less triggering exercise: try record in a single number the temperature - and change - of a large geographically diverse place like Australia - which has deserts and forests and is also subject to large periodic fluctuations like el Niño/la Niña.
I submit that you would be embarrassed to say it went from 28,7°C to 29,2°C and think it meant anything.
The misuse (and misunderstanding) of significant figures (let alone averages) is rampant in the social sciences. To the disadvantage of the folk we are all trying to help.
You don't gain accuracy by averaging a bunch of rough measurements, especially if the micro-climate has a lot of diversity.
Statistics is tough.
The specs are in attachment 2 of the BoM Observation Specification manual.
Spurious comments are easy, looking stuff up is tough.
In recent decades daily MODIS (satellite) polar orbit overpasses provide air column and ground temp data that infills station data (from 1900 onwards).
There's a science to ground truthing, error detection, and data correction.
Here's the gross single number continent wide average over a century: http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi
It's not hard to find raw data, finer grids, methodology, etc.
There is a lot of data, and the people who measure this (or at least some of them) are aware of the issues and so correct for them. However you cannot just blindly apply the central limit theorem.
That's a myth.
* MODIS sat readings are available under the precessing polar orbit path and are indifferent to urbanisation or not.
* National BoM networks have always included stations outside of cities and great care is taken to position stations and to normalise readings.
* Urban Heat Island Bias is a myth of long standing; asked and answered three decades ago, two decades ago, a decade ago.
Why is it _still_ being raised in 2025?
See: https://skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-island-effect-interm...
Apart from yourself, implying that happens as a matter of course?
We do measure Earth's average temperature for what it's worth and while different metrics might give different results, the absolute value is not really useful. What is useful is the change in that metric. And if our global temperatures change by 0.1C by any one metric, it is a very significant change given that the metric is well designed. And yes, it is possible to design a good metric.
Simple example: image you are asked to compute the mean diameter of all balls in each of two bags. You open the first bag, and it is all blue balls, and they all look very close in radius. So you measure a few and call it a day. You open the second bag, and there are balls of about 50 different colors, and it seems like all the colors have different radius. So, then to get a good result, you need to measure almost the diameter of most of the colors.