The Economist's global rip off
halcrawford.substack.com
halcrawford.substack.com
I mean... kinda? Switzerland has 9 million total people, and more millionaires than India and Pakistan combined.
But anyway this post is saying that Indians have the cheapest subscriptions, not taking purchasing power into account.
Well, based on official figures, perhaps. I am pretty sure, however, that India alone has more than 20 million dollar millionaires.
A large part of the Indian economy operates outside the tax net. Some of it is deliberate (income from farming is not taxed, even if you earn tens of millions of rupees from your acreage), the rest is due to garden variety tax fraud.
Basic apartments in the top 10 cities start at $200,000 (could be something like $500,000 in places like Mumbai). And plenty of people own 2-3-4 of these. You have to move to distant suburbs if you want cheaper housing.
Millions of Indian households hold large quantities of gold. Millions invest in the stock market.
An upper-middle-class life for a family of three in one of the major cities requires around $30,000 easy (double that if you are the splurging kind) which can buy you a LOT more than what the same sum can get you in LA/NY/London.
Once you add these up, my figure is completely within the realm of possibility.
India actually has about 320k USD millionaires, Pakistan 20k and Switzerland 370k, from a cursory Google search.
You forget the fact that most Indians don't live in the city in 1-2 Cr (roughly $120-250k) homes, and their gold jewelry usually amounts to $50k tops.
You only need about 5-10% of them to do so to start hitting the numbers from my claim.
> the number of Indians actually paying income tax alone is just around that number
The number of businessmen who avoid taxes is a significant minority.
> India actually has about 320k USD millionaires
Based on the number of people I know who own multiple properties (which makes them dollar millionaires even if you ignore everything else they own), I find it VERY difficult to believe this figure.
If 8% of the US population can be millionaires, I don't see why 1.5% of the Indian population cannot.
We may not agree upon a number, but I believe the figure is much, much larger than what the official figures state.
Dude, a bit more than 1% of Indians pay ANY form of income tax. Assuming that the number of corrupt politicians and people laundering black money is another 15 million (a very very far stretch), that's still 2% of the entire population.
> The number of businessmen who avoid taxes is a significant minority.
Thanks for proving my point.
> Based on the number of people I know who own multiple properties (which makes them dollar millionaires even if you ignore everything else they own), I find it VERY difficult to believe this figure.
Your anecdote means shit compared to statistical data that says otherwise.
> If 8% of the US population can be millionaires, I don't see why 1.5% of the Indian population cannot.
Because again, India is a highly unequal country, with very few opportunity for the brightest and most entrepreneurial. Why has India not manufactured even one hard tech startup yet? Why is it so hard to get even one manufacturing unit up without the blessings of some babus and Lalas? That's why India is poor and unequal. No surprise why people who move out of India tend to be more successful, especially those who migrate to the US.
> We may not agree upon a number, but I believe the figure is much, much larger than what the official figures state
By that respect, Switzerland would still have a lot more millionaires simply by virtue of the number of people parking their assets there. There are no official figures for that either.
In my claims, I do not. An asset is an asset.
> Dude, a bit more than 1% of Indians pay ANY form of income tax.
Wealth and income are not the same thing, though there may be some correlation. A person can have large parcels of land and still have income below the IT threshold ($30,000 pa for a couple according to the latest amendments).
Why do you think the IT department tracks random things like electricity bill payments over Rs. 100,000 pa? They want to know about people who have absurd spending power but who do not show corresponding income in their returns.
> without the blessings of some babus and Lalas
The bureaucracy and red tape is a problem and a huge drag on the GDP. We need serious bureaucratic reform. It is a wonder that so much wealth exists in spite of these problems.
[0] - https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2017/05/how-the-economis...
It’s equally as meek a counter-argument as, “trust me because I hold degrees in this topic.” Good. Then it should be easy for you to make a well-reasoned argument.
As someone who is a Yale educated leftist and believes that markets do not work Robinson is upset.
Meanwhile, when employers of his own magazine wanted it to become a worker owned socialist cooperative he got them to resign. Socialism for thee, not for me.
Imagine if someone says "I spent the last week reading about the history of the Levant and I know how to implement peace in that region".
I strongly disagree. Well reasoned means nothing if it is not based on anything real except own imagination. And it means nothing if it was not checked against reality.
Our tendency to favor "sounds plausible and logical" even when the person writing it never bothered to check reality is just yet another logical fallacy.
So what from the December issue proved horribly wrong?
I accept the article's assertion that their kneejerk free-market philosophy is, at the least, limiting. But to me, the tone has always suggested middle-age journalism grads, rather than the right-wing business-school types the article is suggesting.
They have a bias, but they don't seem stupid or inexperienced. So much of free-market thought in the US, and recently the UK, has been caught up in culture war, and the Economist is staunchly against that.
Which is to say, they don't read like twenty-somethings to me. So if I'm wrong about that, I need to take another look at the lens through which I view their writing.
Wikipedia seems to list their columnists as being closer to fifty-somethings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist#Columns
Then at one point changed it to a reflect the local price of the print edition in your country. I live in NZ so price was relatively high. To reduce my costs I changed my address to the US (my employer at the time).
Here is a post I did 10 years ago on their pricing:
https://blog.darkmere.gen.nz/2015/03/parallel-importing-vs-t...
They understand that the world is complicated, and that multiple world-views have to coexist despite disagreements on what facts mean. They make arguments based on their own world-view, but they'll be sound arguments on that basis. They reject bad arguments, even those whose conclusions nominally agree with them.
The general idea is based on charging people based on how much they can pay. There are reasonable ways to execute this (I’d argue localized pricing is among them, along with things like open source software and donations, and financial aid at colleges) and unreasonable ways (like Kroger’s bid to use facial recognition to do it in their stores)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
Bottom line is collect more money from those able and willing to pay you more, and collect less from those less able and willing to pay you, as long as it is above the cost of goods sold.
At some national parks or attractions in poorer countries, they will ask to see your passport and collect more money if you are from a richer country.
However, it irritated me to no end that despite paying a couple of hundred bucks that the website still showed excessive cheap web advertising. I canceled after that year because of that.