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Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

> You said India is backward today compared to ancient Greece

No, I didn't mean that. I said if Ancient Greece is your yardstick, India would be more than 1000 years behind today without external influence. Ancient Greece was 2000 years ago, not 1000.

> The US has the most people in modern slavery in the Western hemisphere: https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie....

Okay, but it's also a huge country the size of a continent, so of course it's got more than most of Western Europe. If Luxembourg had a million modern slaves there'd be nowhere to hide them. And it has much, much more sensitive systems for detecting this sort of thing than India does, so you can imagine that number is not lowballed.

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> India would be more than 1000 years behind today

Behind what? And what are you basing this on, other than vibes and your biases?

> without external influence

Of course it would be externally influenced, even without being colonized. It isn't an island. It couldn't shut itself away like Japan did pre-19th century. Japan is more modern than India because it wasn't colonized. They just took ideas from abroad - industrialization, capitalism, mass literacy, adult male suffrage, (some) democracy (pre-WW2) - and adopted them.

> Okay, but it's also a huge country the size of a continent

And India isn't?

> They just took ideas from abroad - industrialization, capitalism, mass literacy, adult male suffrage, (some) democracy (pre-WW2) - and adopted them.

Japan is more modern because it already had a very advanced, well-organised society. Japan is more like the UK in that it's a source of civilisation rather than a recipient. However it hugely calcified around religion, where the Emperor is basically god, and the utter decimation of that belief upon two nukes landing on Japanese soil meant that Japan had a huge reset, and took on - extremely well - the latest and greatest at the time, which was UK and US-based lower-case liberal capitalism.

> Japan is more modern than India because it wasn't colonized

This is backwards. Japan was organised, modern and hard-working enough to not be colonised throughout history.

> > Okay, but it's also a huge country the size of a continent

> And India isn't?

I think you need to bear in mind the conversation being had, rather than goldfishing through statements forgetting where they came from. This was: "The US has more slaves in it than anywhere else in Western Europe". Answer: "It's much larger than anywhere else in Western Europe." Nothing to do with India.

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