95 thoughts on “India is still not in the same league as China”

1. The most important , shocking and appaling number is “under 5 malnutrition” which stands at 45% for India. (1 in 2)

2. and literacy. the numbers are so overwhelming that the innumerate media’s fixation on india is rather ridiculous. but it is indian writers and journalists which occupy the mindshare of western scribblers, so it looms large.

3. This is very frustrating. India is not on the same level as China – NEWSFLASH! As if this is something we didn’t know. Sorry, was anyone under the impression India was up there with China? That’s a gross delusion. Shame on any media service that paints that picture. India and China are developing fast and have garnered many column inches, but are any non-Indians claiming India is neck-and-neck with China?

   I have a bit of an obsession with China and I believe that India should use China as a yardstick (as opposed to Pakistan for example) but I would never for a minute think that we’re competing equally with China in a vast number of fields.

   Acharya does, though, appear as though he’s out to shock and has a particular agenda he wants to hammer home. Perhaps he wants to rubbish claims of the current administration, seeing as he is no longer consulted by the government. He is loath to admit any positives about India.

   He says many question Chinese statistics. I do. Not because of any suspected dishonesty, but how are you going to tell me that estimates of malnutrition are anything more than guesswork in either country? One billion. That’s helluva lot foo. I would disregard most indices of QoL from both countries. Hence comparison doesn’t mean a lot.

   So in response to questioning Chinese stats, Acharya’s only defence is that external sector data is ratified by partner countries. But a true measure of countries of India and China’s size isn’t foreign trade – it is wealth distribution.

   I don’t understand the purpose of his article. Perhaps there has been the air of superiority towards China in the Indian press that he wants to dispel. But nothing he writes seems like anything new to me.

4. but in order to go from 60% to 0%(which should be the goal), you got to go thru 45%. This comparisons with china is bull****. China is a communist country which has a history of cooking up economic numbers. It has artificialy set its currency value rather than let the market control it.

5. can’t we just stipulate that china cooks its numbers? that being said, does anyone seriously think that india’s literacy or poverty rate is anywhere near china’s (in an unfavorable comparison). it would nice to hear from people who have gone to bangalore vs. shanghai. eyes can’t cook up numbers.

   and of course, i think another stipulation should be that india also cooks some of its numbers, though perhaps in a less haphazard and directed fashion (ergo, less distorted). have a cousin who is an economist who has done data collection in india and bangladesh, and he says you have to be really careful about numbers coming out of all these countries.

   BB, in the USA there is a lot of hype about india. there is some talk about the gutting of the america manufacturing sector via synergy of walmart and china, but a lot more chatter about wage depression of IT workers because of outsourcing. elite journalists are much more likely to have friends and relatives who work in information technology as opposed to being on the assembly line of a toy factory, so they write about india even if numerically its impact on the america economy (and worker) is minimal in comparison to china.

6. Of relevance to this discussion Sun Life’s insurance policy: The great Indian middle class – Reported by Sinclair Stewart for the Globe and Mail

   Some excerpts

   Today, a little more than four years after Birla Sun Life signed up its first customer, it is the second-ranked private player behind ICICI Prudential, selling about $200-million (Canadian) in new life policies each year. It has yet to turn a profit — it expects to break even in late 2006 — but the numbers are decent for an upstart: Its share of the individual life market is roughly 3 per cent, and it is selling nearly double the $130-million in new premiums annually racked up in Canada. The company’s current customer base is around 400,000, and should top the million mark some time next year.

   It’s still begs an obvious question: Why has Sun Life made its biggest expansion bet on India when China, a larger and more developed market, is just a stone’s throw away? “It’s trite, but accurate,” shrugs Mr. Prieur of the relatively greater push into India, “it’s not a communist dictatorship.” Not that Sun Life has turned a deaf ear to the China story. Mr. Prieur, who was in Mumbai for a Birla Sun Life board meeting, is in fact heading to Hong Kong to oversee Sun Life’s Asian operations. This includes Sun Life’s partnership with state-owned China Everbright Group Ltd. on the mainland, and the Hong Kong operations of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which it purchased this summer for $560-million (Canadian). But the China project has been painstakingly slow, largely because foreign insurers can only enter one city at a time. Each application must be approved by state, provincial, and industry regulators, none of which share a standard approach. In India, the playing field is fairly wide open. Once an insurance licence is granted, a company can do business in any part of the country, so long as it commits to selling a small percentage of policies — usually about 15 per cent — in rural areas. English is widely spoken and the court system is based on the British judiciary, which also gives foreign investors some comfort.

7. Isn’t the salient point that India and China are going to be the dominant regional and possibly global powers competing with another over the next few decades? Also, I agree with razib that a lot of these numbers are highly suspect (at least for INdia, and I’m willing to defer on China). Finaly, I think there are some qualitative aspects of development (the kind people like Sen focus on) that are totally or largely omitted in a chart–for example freedom of the press, development of civil society institutions, etc.

8. dhaavak’s post is illustrative of the problem i think that the media has. they focus on middle class college educated people, because such folk are people like them. if you have a college education and are in the knowledge industry and have disposable income india might be the better bet than china because you can take advantage of liberal democratic freedoms which loom large when fear from want is discarded from the equation. but as the statistics above note the vast majority of the india population is far from fear of want. the chinese peasantry isn’t living in luxury, but the malnutrition numbers should give on pause as to making an equivalence (my girlfriend went on a trip to central china, around xian, years ago, and i don’t recall her telling me about starving people). a comparison of the chinese vs. indian middle class ignores the fact that neither country is middle class.

   to repackage the thrust of my point, if you had 1 million dollars, and you were out for a profit, and a random collection of 100 chinese vs. 100 indians were going to be your work force* who would you pick? looking at the literacy and malnutrition numbers i don’t think there is any comparison in terms of the expectation of human capital.

   • assume they all speak the same language and have the same religion and the same caste, etc., but leave the vital statistics above as expectations.

9. Isn’t the salient point that India and China are going to be the dominant regional and possibly global powers competing with another over the next few decades?

   aren’t these points banal and self-evident as well as salient? for me, the key point is that such comparisons can be roughly quantitized, but instead a great of the glossy mass circulation america media focuses on anecdotally rich prose which

   1) sets india as a promising counterpoint to china. in terms of expectation of quality of life as measured on material axes, i’m skeptical, and the numbers above bear me out i think.

   2) tends to focus on indian economic growth and its ramifications (often implicitly negative) when china has been importing our manufacturing sector for more than a decade.

   another problem is that the american elite doesn’t know the typical indian humans. they know the IT workers, the journalists from india today the doctors and the motel owners, but the typical indian peasant is a romantic, or, abstract, entity. and the typical indian peasant is the typical indian! of course, the average elite journalist doesn’t know the chinese peasant, and does know the chinese entrepeneur, but the key here isn’t what the journalists know, it is who they don’t know, because who they don’t know is the preponderance of the contemporary experience.

10. if India and China are the leading economies in the world around 2050, world history will have made another turn

    think of Europe after the Moors left and the Ottoman empire waned in the 1500’s

    if the center of world affairs ran through East Asia think of the change

    i don’t see India being up to taking any kind of lead on China. particularly because the subcontinent is divided. if you look at most powerful countries, most are unified under some kind of principle. If England, Wales, Scotland did not form Great Britian, I wonder if anything much would have become of the British Isles

    geographically it does not make sense that South Asia is not unified economically and culturally more than it is

11. if the center of world affairs ran through East Asia think of the change

    think in centuries, not our lifetimes. from what i gather economic historians have concluded that china’s economic productivity and output surpassed europe’s until around 1800. remember, the 18th century was a time of expansion and prosperity for the chinese empire (which expanded aggressively into inner asia at this point). a chinese centrality in the world as regards economic and cultural prominence is a return for conventional form, not something new. consider….

    around 0, it was rome vs. han china around 800 it was the muslim caliphate vs. tang china around 1550 it was the ottoman empire vs. the habsburg empire vs. ming china (which china being the most populous) around 1750 it was europe (british empire?) vs. manchu china

    china has always been, more or less, in action. the 20th century was an anomoly from a historical view. and from a chinese perspective too!

12. razib,

    yes i agree, china has always seemed to be a powerful country culturally and economically. I would also agree that the period after the Opium Wars, roughly, seems to be a special time when China was not as influential.

    But I mean something slightly different in terms of the turning of history, that is more centered on the New World and its relation to the Old Worlds, of which Europe seems to be only one.

    what i mean is the change that brought europeans to South America and North America. by history, it was the spanish who invaded Peru and i’m reading that the first band of soldiers had only 200 men, but advanced technology, and along with disease, caused the majority of the population already there to die within decades.

    i think the reason Spain had this technology was because it had access to technology transfer from the Moorish period

    From the 1600’s, Spain rockets economically and socially, and South and North America are warped by Spanish colonialism, in a way i think is not precedented, but may be — in terms of the civilizations and people aleady in the area being displaced. maybe its similiar to what might have happened in India as dravidians were moved out

    and then from Spain, Great Britian takes over in Europe, North America and then India maybe most importantly. from there, the line to African colonialization, a particularly brutal period of racism in the 1800’s. During all this, Europe’s borders are shaped by the Ottoman’s in the East, who stopped at Vienna, in central europe

    During this time I am not sure what was happening in China

    the beginings of my thoughts is that Spainish colonialization came about by historical factors pushed by the Arab occuptation creating technology transfer. and then this transfer created the wherewithall for Spain to create their American colonies. As Britian and Spain competed and Britian became dominant, we get up to the period of african and Asian colonialization, bringing us to the 1800’s

    My arguement would be that China provided a center of economics through which competition in Eurasia became important, and that is why Arab countries became rich, and from them, Meditarrian countries, and from them Britian, and now we’re in a period where things are changning again, notiwthstanding China always been a center of ecomonic activity. this is possibly seen as China creates economic ties with South American and African countries. So therefore, China becoming the most important economy in the next few decades might mean something different than China’s previous dominance has meant. And all of that gives no coverage to China’s historically place in East Asia. It also doesn’t say anything about Chinese voyages to South America pre-Spanish

    where does India fit into this? Particularly since South Asia is not contigous right now

13. I have an entirely different take on China.

    I agree with Ennis analysis that China picked up the pace in 70s when India was languishing in license raj.

    I also agree with Razib that China has always been a dominant society all since the history.

    Also, with Bong Breaker that Chinese government likes to cook numbers. Their quality – science, engineering, and manufracturing is very hit and miss.

    However,

    China is emerging very fast and is reclaiming their old position in global affairs. But their lack of democracy and transparency is going to bite them hard sooner or later. Even though the number of patents and research labs are mushrooming in China like nobody’s business, I have very serious doubts about the creativity flourishing in a strictly, managed society. That is one of the greatest strength of America which thrives inspite of high overheads of doing anything here.

    Moreover, I do not think India should mimic China even though they should be the new yardstick, instead of Pakistan.

    One thing I must give it to China – they are big picture thinkers about their role, and the South Asian countries (India, Pakistan et al.) are not at all. Even if we are chaotic, we need to move ahead.

    Just use the example of energy business or defense or even locking US financial system in Chinese’s grip.

14. i don’t see India being up to taking any kind of lead on China. particularly because the subcontinent is divided. if you look at most powerful countries, most are unified under some kind of principle. If England, Wales, Scotland did not form Great Britian, I wonder if anything much would have become of the British Isles

    But India is already far larger than the UK was, and contains far more disparate sets of people.

    Do you think India would be more economically powerful if it was part of a confederation with Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan? I suspect that the larger unit would do worse.

    Would the USA be better off if it merged with Mexico? Spain if it merged with Morroco? South Korea if it merged with North Korea?

    Size isn’t anything, and India is more than plenty large already. Heck, it might be better (from an economic standpoint) if it split up into smaller units. It’s hard to govern something that large and that disparate effectively.

15. “if you had 1 million dollars, and you were out for a profit, and a random collection of 100 chinese vs. 100 indians were going to be your work force* who would you pick?”

    If it was a factory or an established business, then definitely Chinese. If it was a think-tank or research lab or startup, then Indians*.

    *Honestly, it would depend on their personal qualifications rather then race. This analysis does not include Chinese-Americans at all.

16. a few points

    1) i think the narrative of technology and scholarship transfer via the ummayyads to spain is a bit much. part of it is because al-andalus was a golden age for jews, and jewish scholars tend to focus on the transfer process since sephardic jews were central to it. but there was a lot of transfer by greek scholars who fled constantinople as it fell to the turks in 1453, and they helped stimulate and perpetuate the italian renaissance. so, i would advise caution on overreading the spanish interlude (americans also tend to focus on spain since columbus ‘discovered’ the new world).

    2) the ‘dravidians’ were never pushed out. the spanish-indigenous interface was one where culture and genes mixed profusely for several hundred years and mass die offs induced by pathogens resulted in a great deal of demographic shift. in some ways it is a sui generis that won’t be reproduced. the situation in south asia was far more gradual and amalgamation of various demographic strands from gradual admixture. in the new world some mestizo populations exhibit 90% european Y chromosomal lineages (paternal) and 90% indigenous mtDNA lineages (maternal). this is not the norm world-wide….

    3) until around 200 BCE china lagged behind the rest of eurasia. there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that central asians mediated technology and cultural transfer to the proto-chinese empire.

    4) during the 1600s and 1700s the chinese empire under the manchus entered into one of the longest periods of expansion that the han have known. they even defeated the russians and blocked their westward expansions into the amur river valley in the late 17th century.

17. if you look at South Asia on a map, to me it makes sense that people move from one place to another. i think it would help people economically and culturally. it makes a lot of sense

18. If it was a think-tank or research lab or startup, then Indians*.

    do you really think that the best indians outperform the best chinese so that that obviates the fact that the median indian is going to be far less likely to be functionally literate? remember, i said 100 people. the top 0.1% of the indian knowledge work force might outperform the 0.1% of the chinese knowledge work force, but you don’t have goods odds expectation wise that you’ll get one of those rare gems in your random sample of 100. my overall point is that focusing in the india elite as the major media does is missing the big picture, china is building human capital for the long haul by improving the social milieu to a far wider extent than in india. there might be a lot of inequality in china, but the malnutrition and literacy numbers are telling. nations do not necessarily swim as fast as their slowest team members, but if enormous variance persists the idea of a singular nation quickly becomes a de jure legal fiction.

    p.s. also, we don’t need to focus just on china as a model. look at south korea or taiwan, they are both democracies now (though they went through authoritarian phases until the late 1980s).

19. “Heck, it might be better (from an economic standpoint) if it split up into smaller units.”

    As land-locked countries, ultimate disaster. Also, with little or no energy (oil, natural gas, and minerals) to sustain with – a bigger disaster.

    Land-locked countries with no natural resources have real hard time – history will tell you. Some simple examples in the neighborhood – Nepal, Tibet, etc.

    This said, India is just the right size. No mergers, no breakups.

20. landlocked countries won’t have an issue if there is free trade. switzerland, austria, hungary, etc. haven’t done badly. if you have a trade consortium that would eliminate some of the issues. india is on the right track with federalism, it needs more decentralization for local experimentation and diversity.

21. [b] 46%[/b] malnutrition is appalling. How’s India going to compete with China when half of Indians aren’t even meeting nutritional requirements?

22. also, let me add that i don’t fear chinese economic growth. natural resources consideration aside i think it is a good thing. more consumers and more producers, and as for poor countries, wealthy countries can funnel more money into NGOs and what not. this isn’t a zero sum game. that being said, there will be losers (the less educated and skilled in the developed world for instance). i don’t think india is “competing” with china, they are in different universes right now. but, i think many people seem somewhat complacent about the situation in south asia because south asian elites are getting sucked into the transnational economy and prospering. it’s good to be an IIT graduate today, but most indians will never be IIT graduates, let alone university graduates. median happiness and wealth is as important as aggregate happiness and wealth.

23. “landlocked countries won’t have an issue if there is free trade. switzerland, austria, hungary, etc. haven’t done badly”

    I am a big believer in Federalism, and local government. Free trade helps a lot.

    Lot of the countries you put had something going for them – banking, intellectual creativity*, european union membership.

    They have had very rich share of natural resources – Switzerland, Austria – mining, and Hungary – mining and oil (more than hundred years).

    *Per capita, Hungary has the highest percentage of Nobel Prize and Olympic winners (if you include Hungarian borns)

24. REMOVED BY MUTINEER – No gross ethnic stereotypes please

25. the numbers are so overwhelming that the innumerate media’s fixation on india is rather ridiculous.

    The theory of free trade economists was that low-paying manufacturing jobs would be outsourced, but high-paying high tech jobs would always remain in the U.S. India is gaining media attention because it’s taking jobs that Americans always took for granted.

    I also think you’re correct that the typical elite media reporter is more likely to have a relative in IT/medicine/engineering than manufacturing. So India is perceived as more of a threat than China or Mexico.

    sets india as a promising counterpoint to china. in terms of expectation of quality of life as measured on material axes, i’m skeptical, and the numbers above bear me out i think.

    India’s numbers are bad, but they’re an astonishing improvement from 10 or 20 years ago. India is lagging behind China, but they are on a sharp upward trajectory and have yet to institute important economic/social reforms that are neccessary to make India economically competitive. India’s position relative to China in the coming decades will probably depend on a large extent on whether the government pushes forward the reforms. I think an Indian Den XiaoPing is neccessary for India to catch China.

    India was a major civilizational power when it was unified under the Maurya, Gupta, and Mughal dynasties. The rise of a united India in the 21st century isn’t an historical anomaly.

26. This is very frustrating. India is not on the same level as China – NEWSFLASH! As if this is something we didn’t know. Sorry, was anyone under the impression India was up there with China? That’s a gross delusion.

    BB, Its the western Media who has constantly beat the drums of this supposed comparison. Business Week had a HUGE story a couple of weeks on India and China.

    Also, there is a general agreement in the west that since India is democratic it will magically solve all its problems and come out ahead of China. IMHO, India pays price of democracy by delayed development (as infrastructure projects take decades more than they should in normal circumstances) and may be continued malnutrition. If 1 in 2 kids are malnourished upto the age of 5 that means that 1 in 2 kids will not develop into adults with full mental and physical capabilities. That makes me sad.

27. For all China’s faults and problems, what is shameful is that Indian democracy has failed so miserably in delivering primary education to the mass of people, whereas Communist China has done so. India has not just de-liberalized late, but it also WASTED the years of socialism by not educating the population. Compare Cuba, China, and (within India) states like Kerala: hardly economic wonder-performers (until China’s liberalization), but the Communist investment in human capital meant and means that when and if liberalization comes, the people are better positioned to atke advantage of it. In India, no more than 30% of the population is positioned at present to take advantage of it; and since big government has become a dirty word for the country’s elite (not surprisingly), one thing that is getting missed is that India will NEVER catch up with China absent massive investments in education– India’s higher education facilities are fantastic for a country of its economic level, but the spread of primary education is pathetic, and does not compare favorably to Sri Lanka, a few Arab countries, and several others. And my impression seems to be that this “gap” is not being plugged by private investment in primary education in rural areas (that’s just an impression, it’s not like I’ve read some survey), and with the government having delivered very very slowly for 45 years, and now cutting back over the last 10-15, I am not sure where the needed investment is going to come from.

28. it is somewhat disingenous to start comparisons from 1980, given that India didn’t seriously start on the liberalization path till 1991. I would be interested to see the figures from 1991-2005.

    vivek

29. What the statistics don’t show is how these factors are changing over time. Amartya Sen has argued that China’s life expectancy has long since leveled off, while India’s is increasing at a faster rate. The argument being that many of China’s gains came from an earlier period when they were still committed to investing back in the population (education, medicine, infrastructure, etc.) but that they have long since stopped investing back. Hence the thousands of riots we see every year in China. Meanwhile, India’s greater democracy means that it isn’t so easy to skip out on the social contract.

30. REMOVED BY MUTINEER – No gross ethnic stereotypes please

    well, i’ll just quote eszter hargitai of the unassailably liberal weblog crooked timber:

    “Hungarian” Nobel Prize winners

    Recently, it has been generally recognized that most of those who used to be counted as Hungarian Nobel laureates should be more subtly labelled as Nobel laureates of Hungarian origin….

    the fact is that many great scientists of hungarian nationality like john von neuman and paul erdos are of jewish origins (von neuman’s family converted to christianity, ergo the von). one of the israel winners of the nobel in chemistry was born in hungary.

31. Razib I am coming to the party too late to know what generalization you may have made earlier but on the topic of Hungarian origin I would like to point you to this source which I have been mentioning to friends for years.

32. oh, i just said “itz good to have jews” to kush’s statement that hungary has the highest per capita of nobel winners 🙂 did you “russian americans” (wink) have one of the highest per capita incomes of american ethinc groups? btw, the link was funny (though i think turks sound like insectoid aliens), but it forgets that basque is a non-indo-european language, there’s more than hungarian and finnish (and the language of the saami, estonian).

33. “kush’s statement that hungary has the highest per capita of nobel winners”

    Razib, I had already said:

    *Per capita, Hungary has the highest percentage of Nobel Prize and Olympic winners (if you include Hungarian borns)

    which included your observations too. My intention was to only point some thing positive about Hungary.

34. My intention was to only point some thing positive about Hungary.

    sure, my only point in pointing out the particular character of hungary’s intellectual productivity was that it likely has little relation to its geography (ie; landlocked vs. non-landlocked), as opposed to the relative liberalism of the austro-hungarian empire in regards to jews in the late 19th and early 20th century and the resultant settlement of a large ashkenazim population in budapest. ergo, i would bet that india’s nobel output might be higher if more ashkenazim had taken refuge in cochin during the pogroms of the 16th and 17th century. human capital matters as much as material capital.

35. let me elaborate for the sake of pedanticism on the issue of hungarian jews: as esther alludes to in her post there are generally confusions as to the ‘national question’ in central europe as relates to jews and the majority population. outsiders tend to quickly map nominal geopolitical affiliations onto to jews, ergo, ‘russian’ jews and ‘polish’ jews and what not. but the operative point is that by and large until the past few decades jews did not consider themselves ‘polish’ or ‘russian,’ and the peasantry and elite of these nations did not really consider jews of the russian or polish nation. most of the ‘russian’ jews lived in poland until poland was swallowed by russia. in fact jews generally spoke yiddish as their native tongue, not the slavonic language of the majority.

    the jews of hungary were not traditionally part of the magyar nation which is the root of hungarian nationalism. if you go back more than 150 years ago many of them were living in greater poland, and their surnames, if they had them, would not have been hungarian in form. in the late 19th century many of the hungarian jews hungarianized their surnames, i believe paul erdos’ original family name was engelmann for example.

    anyway, distinctions like this often matter to those who these labels are applied to. i have jewish friends whose grandparents and great-parents who emigrated from poland who would be very offended if you labelled them polish because of the history of anti-semitism of polish gentiles. i assume that south asians living in the USA might be sympathetic to this sort of identity confusion, as a person of muslim bengali origin i have had to dismiss the assumption that i am an expert on vegetarian cooking because of my brown skin. i’m sure hindus here have had to engage with some idiot who assumes they worship muhammad. etc. etc.

36. For all China’s faults and problems, what is shameful is that Indian democracy has failed so miserably in delivering primary education to the mass of people, whereas Communist China has done so. India has not just de-liberalized late, but it also WASTED the years of socialism by not educating the population.

    India’s socialists have traditionally focues on rural / farming growth and development.

    In a sense this was highly successful resulting in high crop yeilds and better farming methods.

    The problem was that the government also passed laws regarding land ownership to prevent concentration of land ownership. And the importance was placed on family farms, subistance farming etc.

    Example: You still need a license to buy farm land in India, it is almost impossible to obtain for the ordinary person, except through the power of nepotism by which I could still get a liscence even though I have lived in canada all my life.

    One side effect of this nepostistic socialism is that it kept populations rural and emphasis has been placed on continuation of traditional jobs, this has removed much of the inscentive that existed for education.

    Even poor kids born in India’s urban centres have been better eductated than realively well off kids in rural communities.

    The main issue now is that gains made from green revolution have plateaued.

    For example for the first quarter of 2005 agriculture grew only by 2% where as the economy as a whole grew by a higher than expected 8.1% percent, largly driven by a 11% growth in manufacturing.

    There is a large unskilled surplus of rural labour who can’t find jobs.

    I think the solution is not the rural employment bill which the government just passed and IT isn’t going to save the country by itself. India needs to provide half decent jobs to these people by opening up the manufacturing sector.

37. Yes, we all know that China is ahead of India economically TODAY. Indian bureaucrats and journalists should stop all fixations over such grandeur comparisons. India will continue to thrive, regardless. And it will form its own unique niche. China will also thrive. However, I do forsee some problems for China in the long road ahead. Unlike India its wealth is not evenly distributed (geographically). Historically, wealth for the public and communism have never gone well hand in hand. Beyond a point you can expect one of them to break down, after which there will have to be a rebuilding effort in the direction it so chooses. The trillion dollar question is can China handle democracy? And will this be its stumbling block?

38. Unlike India its wealth is not evenly distributed (geographically).

    per capita income of indian states map.

39. per capita income of indian states map.

    Somebody should teach them how to make color scales for map, etc. – the color scheme should be continual, red to blue (hot to cold) – something like that.

40. Within India, not many are under any illusions as to how much China has forged ahead of India. There is a great, almost obsessive, fixation on China’s economic growth and how or if India can match up, but again, much of this is warped media talk. The difference in one word is – manufacturing. Indian manufacturing was crushed under the socialistic, semi-autocratic regimes. China has had much more authoritarian regimes, but at least they were led by people (post-Mao, at least) who worked for China as much as they worked for themselves.

41. which included your observations too. My intention was to only point some thing positive about Hungary.

    You may not have intended this, but your point and Razib’s clarification are absolutely crucial to a clear understanding of the hype re: India and the remarks above re: elite Indians.

    The “Indians” in software engineering, in process chemistry, and in nuclear physics are not drawn from a representative cross section of the population. Research Abdul Kalam’s ancestry sometime. Or see this article in “The-Week” magazine, mirrored at GNXP — The Resilient Brahmin:

    The Brahmin roll call among top civil servants is even more impressive: National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, Cabinet Secretary Kamal Pande, Home Secretary N. Gopalaswamy, Finance Secretary S. Narayanan and Central Vigilance Commissioner P. Shanker are the leading lights among two dozen Brahmin secretaries at the Centre. The chiefs of the Army and the Air Force, Gen. S. Padmanabhan and Air Chief Marshal S. Krishnaswamy, are Brahmins. Brahmins proliferating in top corporate positions, or straddling the heights of the culture and entertainment worlds are too many to name. Why, four permanent fixtures in the Indian cricket team-Sourav Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble-are Brahmins! In south India, undoubtedly, lasting changes did occur, rendering Brahmins irrelevant in politics. In the bureaucracy, too, Brahmins have been reduced to a minority, but even that minority-as the list of top bureaucrats reveals-is not doing all that badly. Besides, south Indian Brahmins continue to thrive in the private sector, in the arts and related areas, in new fields of technology: the Indian contribution to software development, feted worldwide, is primarily the achievement of south Indian Brahmins. In the north, Brahmins have held their own even more successfully. In the Hindi belt they still matter in politics, they still dominate the bureaucracy, they still possess sizeable land and economic resources. Indeed, it is their opponents’ fire which has dimmed; the anti-Brahmin sloganeering of the nineties is no longer heard. Even Kanshi Ram and Mayawati now explicitly seek votes not just from the ‘bahujan samaj’ but from all sections of society, including the upper castes. Said sociologist Dhirubhai Sheth of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies: “Brahmins have shown an unexpected degree of resilience.”… Beyond politics, in the professional world, the Brahmin’s main survival weapon has been their legacy of education. “Earlier Brahmins had status power,” said Sheth. “Now that has gone. But the benefits they obtained on account of that status in the past-the education they received down several generations, in some cases vast amounts of land and money they came to possess-remain with them still.” From memorising mantras to memorising equations and formulae is, after all, not that large a leap. “Ingesting large amounts of data, doing well in exams, articulating a point of view cogently: these are all skills,” said Deshpande. “Brahmins, through centuries of practice, possess these skills. The recently empowered castes are finding that such skills are not easy to acquire.” A recent study on social mobility in the Economic and Political Review showed that “men from salaried backgrounds had far superior chances of reaching salaried destinations themselves than did men from any other background”. A good number of second generation employees do indeed owe their success to their hereditary academic ability; but not all.

    Brahmins aren’t the whole story, obviously. But caste differences in academic and technological achievement are the elephant in the living room and the reason India will probably never catch China. India just doesn’t have as deep a bench beyond its starting five.

42. PS — to preempt certain likely objections to the above line of argument, let’s stipulate knowledge of the following as a baseline:

    http://www.genome.org/cgi/content/abstract/11/6/994

    The origins and affinities of the ~1 billion people living on the subcontinent of India have long been contested. This is owing, in part, to the many different waves of immigrants that have influenced the genetic structure of India. In the most recent of these waves, Indo-European-speaking people from West Eurasia entered India from the Northwest and diffused throughout the subcontinent. They purportedly admixed with or displaced indigenous Dravidic-speaking populations. Subsequently they may have established the Hindu caste system and placed themselves primarily in castes of higher rank. To explore the impact of West Eurasians on contemporary Indian caste populations, we compared mtDNA (400 bp of hypervariable region 1 and 14 restriction site polymorphisms) and Y-chromosome (20 biallelic polymorphisms and 5 short tandem repeats) variation in ~265 males from eight castes of different rank to ~750 Africans, Asians, Europeans, and other Indians. For maternally inherited mtDNA, each caste is most similar to Asians. However, 20%-30% of Indian mtDNA haplotypes belong to West Eurasian haplogroups, and the frequency of these haplotypes is proportional to caste rank, the highest frequency of West Eurasian haplotypes being found in the upper castes. In contrast, for paternally inherited Y-chromosome variation each caste is more similar to Europeans than to Asians. Moreover, the affinity to Europeans is proportionate to caste rank, the upper castes being most similar to Europeans, particularly East Europeans. These findings are consistent with greater West Eurasian male admixture with castes of higher rank. Nevertheless, the mitochondrial genome and the Y chromosome each represents only a single haploid locus and is more susceptible to large stochastic variation, bottlenecks, and selective sweeps. Thus, to increase the power of our analysis, we assayed 40 independent, biparentally inherited autosomal loci (1 LINE-1 and 39 Alu elements) in all of the caste and continental populations (~600 individuals). Analysis of these data demonstrated that the upper castes have a higher affinity to Europeans than to Asians, and the upper castes are significantly more similar to Europeans than are the lower castes. Collectively, all five datasets show a trend toward upper castes being more similar to Europeans, whereas lower castes are more similar to Asians. We conclude that Indian castes are most likely to be of proto-Asian origin with West Eurasian admixture resulting in rank-related and sex-specific differences in the genetic affinities of castes to Asians and Europeans.

    The “Asians” they are referring to are proto-Asian inhabitants of the region and do not map directly to modern East Asians but to common ancestors. The take home message is primarily that there are in fact significant differences in genome content between castes, which means heritable variation in cognitive ability cannot be ruled out.

    More by Partha Majumder: http://www.genome.org/cgi/content/full/11/6/931

    The Aryan world comprised three classes (varnas): priests, nobles, and commoners. Aryans as the conquering people possibly placed their three classes on the indigenous Indian society. The varna organization is hierarchical. Initially, the system had names for two ranks, Brahma (Brahmin) and Kshatra (Kshatriya), Brahmin being of a socially higher rank than Kshatriya. The third rank was made up of Vis, that is, all the subjects. To this society, a fourth rank was added: Shudra, who had no rights to Aryan ritual. In southern India, the menial workers, the so-called “untouchables”, were placed in a new varna, Panchama (meaning fifth). It is conceivable that the Aryan speakers had greater contact, including genetic admixture, with the Brahmins, who were professionally the torchbearers and promoters of Aryan rituals. The Aryan contact should have been progressively less as one descended the varna ladder. The genetic expectation, therefore, is that the proportions of those genes (or genomic features, such as haplotypes or haplogroups) that “characterized” the Aryan speakers should progressively decline from the highest varna to the lowest and a reverse trend should be observed with respect to those genes that “characterized” the indigenous Indians. Although some previous studies have sought to test this expectation, the observed trends were equivocal. The primary reason was the lack of data on a large uniform set of markers from populations of India and central/west Asia (the region from which the Aryans speakers who entered India originated). The study by Bamshad et al. (2001), who have also sought to test the above expectation, is clearly a landmark. Using a very large battery of genomic markers and DNA sequences, spanning autosomal, mitochondrial, and Y-chromosomal genomic regions, they have shown that the observed trend of genetic admixture estimated from castes belonging to different varnas is congruent with expectations. This trend was observed in each of the three data subsets. The only exception was in respect of mtDNA restriction site haplotypes, which was also noted in a recent study conducted by us (Roychoudhury et al. 2000). However, after combining these haplotype data with DNA sequence data, Bamshad and colleagues were able to capture the expected trend. Thus, this study not only provides a wonderful genomic view of the castes and of their origins, but also underscores the need for careful statistical analysis of genomic data for drawing appropriate inferences.

    The results are not particularly PC, but they are important for understanding reality.

43. two points to follow up gc

    1) we’ve had this argument about kalam before, i don’t think his ancestry is brahmin because his biographies suggest his family were fishermen, which to my understanding is invariably a low status occuptation in the subcontinent.

    2) i think that though there are caste-correlated phylogenetic differences, that is, ancestry, selection is more important if there are functionally significant loci where there are differences group-to-group. to be precise, “aryan” ancestry is not necessarily a good predictor of other characters (i’ve had to get into this with multiple punjabis on my weblog). to give an example, in the supplemental data for this paper you can see that Y chromosomal ancestral lineages that are typically found in northern india are exhibited at very high frequencies among the souroushtrans of tamil nadu, who are historically transplants. at a far higher frequency than among most south indian brahmins. but if i were to bet i would assume that SIB would have higher instrinsic cognitive aptitudes no matter the ancestry because of recent selection (sidenote: it looks like there was a selective [social?] sweep for a particular Y chromosomal lineage through northern india 4-5 K BP).

44. re: kalam, I agree that reasonable people may disagree, but this is why I think he’s a Brahmin. From our earlier discussion:

    1) http://www.keralaiyers.com/csv_kalam.html

    “Look at the epithets: Kalam Iyer, Muslim Brahmin, Gandhian Missileman”

    2) http://www.countercurrents.org/dalit-anand080603.htm

    “Kalam’s conscious distancing himself from the Muslims – in food habits and cultural and spiritual moorings – was directly proportional to his proximity to brahminism.”

    3) http://www.muslimedia.com/archives/world04/ind-congresswin.htm

    “Her decision came after meeting the president, Abdul Kalam `Iyer’ (as he is known in Brahmin circles), on May 19.”

    4) From his autobiography: http://www.sulekha.com/expressions/column.asp?cid=305892

    I was born into a middle-class Tamil family in the island town of Rameswaram in the erstwhile Madras state…I had three close friends in my childhood—Ramanadha Sastry, Aravindan, and Sivaprakasan. All these boys were from orthodox Hindu Brahmin families.

    ---

    So: Tamil speaking, good at mathematics and science, from a middle class household, friends with tons of Brahmins, called “Iyer” by both his friends and enemies. Occam’s razor says he’s more likely of Brahmin ancestry than not, in my opinion.

45. I believe India is better positioned for global growth in the SERVICE industry because of India’s English capabilities and, as razib points out, the British based judicial system among other western heritages. However, China may continue to lead in the manufacturing industry.

    As a communist country, the Chinese are inclined towards unquestioning hard work. While the Indian cultural mindset embodies some of that, Indians also have a lot of laid back apathy with regard to quality of life and growth.

    It is true that quality of life has only a correlated measurement in these charts. Global and western exposure is great for India than for China despite the telecom infrastructure. I think language is a big part of that. Such an exposure sets India up for quicker global growth in creative and interpersonal spheres.

    Responding to the cultural divisions, I think that China has its own divisions between “Mainland” and the provinces, notably the Schezuan. While Cantones and Mandarin maintain their distinct identities, there are a host of dialects that cause similar cultural diversities that India faces.

    With regard to ancient history, we’re seeing governance in a whole new light now. In our post Westphalian world, smaller, autonomous countries have the potential to weild more power when grouped together than the larger monoliths. Mobilization of that power becomes the issue.

    Ref 1: Westphalia explained: http://www.islam21.net/pages/keyissues/key5-21.htm Ref 2: A take on global position due to Westphalian admins: http://www.ciaonet.org/olj/pa/pa_01hes01.html

    On education, I think where China has delivered literact, it has also delivered cultural values and mindsets to its students.

    P.S. It’s frustrating to not be able to thread conversations and stick to the topic. Mutineers…any solutions ?

46. “aryan” ancestry is not necessarily a good predictor of other characters

    Yeah, I was trying to make the point that the take home message is not the extent to which “Aryan” ancestry predicts other characteristics, but

    primarily that there are in fact significant differences in genome content between castes, which means heritable variation in cognitive ability cannot be ruled out.

    The main point I was making is that there are genetic differences between castes — a point which some here would probably have contested without citation of the Bamshad and Majumder papers. Of course, the existence of genetic difference is a prerequisite for any Lahn/Harpending-like analysis of genetic cognitive differences between populations.

    As you say, it’s not a question of “Aryanity” per se and that’s not worth getting sidetracked into. Rather it’s the issue of IQ and its likely inhomogeneous distribution within the subcontinent — and the consequences for Indian growth rates. The IIT reservations for scheduled castes & tribes — and the comparable lack of reservations at, say, Tsinghua — tells you a great deal about relative IQ inhomogeneity.

47. I believe India is better positioned for global growth in the SERVICE industry because of India’s English capabilities and, as razib points out, the British based judicial system among other western heritages. However, China may continue to lead in the manufacturing industry.

    As a communist country, the Chinese are inclined towards unquestioning hard work. While the Indian cultural mindset embodies some of that, Indians also have a lot of laid back apathy with regard to quality of life and growth. The result of a slow and corrupt democracy.

    It is true that quality of life has only a correlated measurement in these charts. Global and western exposure is greater for India than for China despite the telecom infrastructure. I think language is a big part of that. Such an exposure sets India up for quicker global growth in creative and interpersonal spheres.

    Responding to the cultural divisions, I think that China has its own divisions between “Mainland” and the provinces, notably the Schezuan. While Cantones and Mandarin maintain their distinct identities, there are a host of dialects that cause similar cultural diversities that India faces.

    With regard to ancient history, we’re seeing governance in a whole new light now. In our post Westphalian world, smaller, autonomous countries have the potential to weild more power when grouped together than the larger monoliths. Mobilization of that power becomes the issue.

    Ref 1: Westphalia explained: http://www.islam21.net/pages/keyissues/key5-21.htm Ref 2: A take on global position due to Westphalian admins: http://www.ciaonet.org/olj/pa/pa_01hes01.html

    On education, I think where China has delivered literacy, it has also delivered cultural values and mindsets to its students. India has a long way to go. Less distance on the patriarchal front than urban China, perhaps, but still miles away on the basics – literacy, hygeine, nutrition et al.

    P.S. It’s frustrating to not be able to thread conversations and stick to the topic. Mutineers…any solutions ?

48. Man, this thing degenrated into the standard stereotypical Brahmin bashing.

    The whole Brahmin v/s rest is only a south Indian thing. In north west Brahmins are just another class, competing with other classes. Ofcourse the so-called lower castes are descriminated and marginalized which is appaling, but the rest of the groups are more or less at the same level of influence.

    In Rajasthan, Rajputs are more “elite” than Brahmins. In Gujarat more power, both political and financial is with, what was once agrarian community of ‘Patels’ and business community of ‘Jains’ who are not Brahmins. Punjab politics and business also dominated by non-Brahmins. Haryana which along with Punjab has highest per capita income is not Brahmin dominated places.

    In a highly castiest state of Bihar the political power is with ‘yadavs’. So I dont understand this obsession with Brahmins.

49. hey guys. i just ran through the thread – you all are very smart – and may be much smarter than i because i can not see how a discussion on why india is better than china or te other way around, is leading to anythign productive
    how about a discussion on ‘this is what i pledge to do to improve india’s standing? visavis china’ – if you feel india’s lagging because of poor childcare- contribute to CRY or CARE or whatever your fav charity is – or if it is IT, then support your favorite IIT or whatever, but talk tactics. otherwise all this is puffery.
    me, i’m sending business to india – a fair bit – thru a partnership – some coin for me of course – but brother’s cant pledge on an empty stomach.

50. The featured article on WIkipedia today (10/2/05) is the “Economy of India” which has state-wise metrics for India like this,this and this.