A strong business environment, or strong investment opportunities, or a large consumer base is very much needed to have attractive jobs. A strongly educated workforce does little to enable such an environment. Intuitively, it is just very hard to make money off of a small, low income population, and it is even harder to export services built for a local market to a non local market. So the ambitious talent just find opportunities elsewhere.
It also depends how hard it is to migrate out of the region. If there are strong family ties and good standard of living, you'd be surprised at how much talent is willing to stay.
Interestingly enough, Taiwan in 2024/2025 has seen huge growth in wages, for many reasons, but the biggest IMO being the highly educated workforce.
The reality is that in all places the most ambitious people are likely going to move, as such talents usually depend on specific environments.
And with things like TSMC in Taiwan, claiming anything close to 'no opportunities' is a bit ridiculous.
Just sharing my perspective, Taiwan's Software Devs were paid 1/3 of what devs in SG or HK are paid, the biggest reason being there aren't any software companies headquartered in Taiwan that are big/growing fast enough to offer competitive salaries to SG / HK. In SG/HK you have banks, hedgefunds and tech companies all competing for talent—Grab, Amazon, Google, Shopee, DBS, HSBC, etc, pushing up prices to be competitive globally. Taiwan's local companies have to make enough money to pay global salaries for strong talent, or they just get their best talent poached by SG/HK or China (which has plenty of strong tech giants of their own).
But... a tiny 23 million population island where the average wage is low and people are generally happy and content... is not a great business environment for startups. I think some local startups saturated the Taiwan market with like 70% of the island's population in their database... and like $2-5m US revenue/yr? Great achievement but not a large base for continued rev growth.
As a Taiwanese company, you are not winning against bigger tech companies in China. Neither are you building for english speaking audiences of SEA because Taiwan's english is not native... in short, the local market conditions is just unable to pay for global level talent, who leave.
This is a software dev focused view of Taiwan, but it applies to all or most other industries not named TSMC.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokku_kooli
For instance, the richest Keralite, Yussufali MA, made his fortune in the Middle East. His sons-in-law, both billionaires, as well as KP Basheer, Ravi Pillai, PMC Menon and Mohammed Ali of Gulfar made their fortune in the Middle East, all of whom are silent billionaires even most Indians barely know of. Vivek Ramaswamy's parents were from Kerala too, as is Thomas Kurian (head of GCP).
If you look at the West, Keralites are increasingly taking spots in the medical and healthcare sectors, especially nursing, and now even the education sector. There are Keralite teachers in the oilfields of Midland, Texas, because most people are otherwise not ready to work there. Some of my neighbours relatives from back home were even working in Afghanistan for the USG, making bank for working in a warzone. The only groups that are more or equally as prominent as Keralites worldwide might be the Gujaratis (the Patel motel guys and diamond merchants) and the Jews.
Also, the Communist party in power has not stopped themselves from adapting to the new times and dumping older views.
The most recent Econ Nobel showed how institutions create wealthy nations, and Kerala is building those.
Perhaps the statement “not a place to be ambitious” can be seen in a narrower sense, while seeing that it leaves much more space for the median individual.
Ambition doesn't imply exploitation. I think you mean "predatory".
What's the basis for this claim? What is a "mismanaged government" but one that is controlled by narrow private interests? Or is this coming from a "all tax is exploitation" angle?
I never really got why the west is so proud of not establishing basic rights of access to food, shelter, healthcare, and education. I don't quite understand the point of them otherwise.
Without deep knowledge, I'd suggest Switzerland, simply because of the directness of its democracy
You can look at other sources to see how good kerala is doing wrt other states but I do agree the article over emphasised the good parts without any hint to it's bad parts
Kerala is one of the few states that managed medical supplies of Oxygen pretty well. In many other states many died because hospitals ran out of it.
Now, as for Kerala's handling of Covid, that was funded by state govt coffers. So Middle East money had a negligible contribution. What made a difference though is a history of preference for investing in social safety nets and basic infrastructure for people, such as schools, nutrition, hospitals.
It's the same story in east Asian countries where they had the SARS outbreak in early 2000s and so they were prepared for new outbreaks.
India has a lot of other issues, I grant you that the socialist ideology probably had a positive influence in some ways other than economics, particularly socially. But no offense, if you've ever walked the streets Trivandrum and other cities you know there are much more pressing issues.
Btw, for some historic context this part of India used to be extremely rich in the past by global standards, centuries ago. They became rich with international trade. Modern India is nowhere close to its wealthy past, the subcontinent as a whole produced the largest percentage of the world's GDP during Late Antiquity, surpassing China and all others!
A capitalist dictatorship will be every bit as horrible as a communist dictatorship.
Socialists love to add some negative word 'X' to capitalism to highlight that all bad things in the world are connected to capitalism, and if they could finally defeat capitalism, then the world would be perfect. Instead of actually trying to fix 'X' they will tell you that what we really need to change is 'capitalism'. Surveillance Capitalism, Crony Capitalism, Disaster Capitalism and so on.
Trying to fix corruption, to hard, lets just destroy property rights and money instead. Great idea!
Let me give you a tool for your mental toolkit. When you find yourself saying this:
> <some group> loves to
...it's a smell. What follows may be perfectly reasonable, but in my experience it's more commonly unexamined twaddle.
If you happen to be American, see where you get with these:
- many Americans fetishise America - J Edgar Hoover spent 20 years programming Americans to consider socialism to be "un-American"
In this case, I think a little reflection would reveal a J Edgar Hoover homonculus in your head, pulling your levers.
I'm all for emotional arguments. Ultimately, we all have core values, and I like to lead an argument by stating mine.
But hating socialism isn't a core value, it's _at best_ a reaction. Which is to say, if you're from, ooh, Bulgaria or Cuba, then I can indulge you. You may not be logical but you do have cause.
If you merely have a little J Edgar Hoover homonculus in your head, pulling your levers, then refrain from posting, because a J Edgar Hoover homonculus is not an interesting conversationalist.
Just like anything else that can't be back up with solid empirical research in a discussion forum. With is 99% of what we are dissing. (And most books written by intellectuals of both the socialist and capitalist variety).
Communism is originally a utopian social movement, and there is a strong tendency and a very well document intellectual history of communism that asserts that pretty much most problems at its root are an issue with capitalism and that they can only be solved in the absence of capitalism. So much so that it was pretty normal for communist to oppose working with social democrats on any reform of existing systems.
> Americans to consider socialism to be "un-American"
I'm not american and I couldn't care less if something is 'American' or not. And I have no idea what 'americanness' has to do with our discussion. So far as I can tell, nothing what so ever. And I don't hate 'socialism' either.
> But hating socialism isn't a core value, it's _at best_ a reaction. Which is to say, if you're from, ooh, Bulgaria or Cuba, then I can indulge you. You may not be logical but you do have cause.
So unless you are the victim of rape, being against rapist isn't a 'core value'? That's a outright crazy line of argument.
P.S: I really think you are waste overestimate the importance of Hoover.
They know exactly what it is, but they don't wanna say it out loud.
If it makes him feel good not to call that 'capitalism' then that's fine. I guess it wouldn't have played well with the base back then.
But in reality and operations, its is how capitalism has worked in practice.
That's not actually what happened, you should look up some history.
The USSR didn't throw away, communism, the member states just simply left.
And many of those states were then free of the communist party actually did quite well. Russia didn't, Ukraine didn't, but that's the reality when a country splits apart, some parts do well others don't.
> Any China scholar could tell you that China was already implementing market reforms before Deng
Part of it wasn't even voluntary on the party front, they simply accepted what was already happening instead of reversing it again.
> China is still a country operated on the basis of five-year plans.
hose plans are mostly projects of what they hope they can encourage private business to do and some public investment. Guess what many countries do, planning and public investment.
Lots of things they plan don't happen, lots of things that happen aren't planned. The planning is constantly adjust to what actually happens in the economy, including the global context.
> China is still a country where the state owns all land.
Legally maybe, but if you hand out control for 100 years the relevance of that isn't all that great. And that land can be freely traded between people. So in practical terms it works far more like private land ownership then anything the socialist thinkers of the late 19 and early 20th century.
> China is still a country where capital is not allowed to usurp the public interest.
That is just factually false, large companies in China regularly do things that hurt public interest. Unless you mean 'interest of the party leadership' and even then its only mostly true.
> In this, the reforms of Deng and the continued path of Xi are simply the highest synthesis of communism
Lol, they literally copied other East Asian economic models almost 1 to 1. They are just a log bigger and have more people. But I guess copying other successful clearly capitalist countries can be resold as 'highest synthesis of communism' to people who have irrational hate for capitalism.
And China economic growth or wealth isn't all that magically, its simply that China is much bigger then most others who have done it.
> They are the most faithful to Marxism, which has never preached any kind of static dogma, especially as it relates to economic policy.
I love Marxism, since he didn't actually define any outcome beyond maybe 'stateless and moneyless' you can just make up whatever the fuck you want as long as you are claiming to 'get there'. And China doesn't seem to go into a stateless moneyless direction.
Marx's "Historical materialism" is wrong for Western Europe and laudably false for China.
His critic of capitalism seems to be mostly ignored in China. As is his theory of class struggle as in China there is an ever growing Bourgeoisie.
But I guess copying what Taiwan and friends did and calling it 'Marxism' is one way to go.