While on the topic of why India didn’t liberalize sooner, an article posted to the SM’s News column points at one important factor. In his “Letter from India” column in the NYT, Akash Kapur reflects on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall the impact it had on India –
Most of the media coverage has, quite understandably, focused on Europe. But the tremors from Communism’s collapse were felt far beyond the immediate battlegrounds of the Cold War. The breakup of the Soviet Union had a profound impact on India. In many ways, it paved the way for a reinvention of the country
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Akash Kapur |
While an important socio-political milestone, Kapur notes the equally important intellectual milestone – an event Francis Fukuyama memorably christened The End of History. History in this sense didn’t mean an “end to events” but rather, the (potential) end of a type of dialectical debate about political systems.
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p>It’s tough to remember now, BUT, prior to the fall of the wall, there were many serious scholars who seriously argued that not only would communist / socialist systems deliver greater equality than capitalism but also greater wealth . Their economic promise went a l’il sumthin like this – under capitalism the steel industry, for ex., might currently consist of 10 small, competing companies which are constantly hunting for cheaper labor to exploit, can’t all run their plants at max efficiency b/c of inter-firm supply/demand flux, and ignore other, more important social goals.
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p>“I remember, from my childhood, the Soviet engineers and scientists who filled the bars in Pondicherry, seeking respite from the rigors of the power plant they were building up the road. I remember the dusty bookstores that stocked cheap Russian classics and the bottles of sparkling Russian wine my father used to buy from visiting sailors.”Instead, why not gather some scholars & start with a top-down, national plan for how much steel “we” need? Then, build 1 big steel factory, have some PhDs calc how to run it at maximum efficient scale, eliminate “wasteful” expenditures like marketing budgets, commissions for sales forces and particularly those evil profits & exec-bonuses. And “we” can achieve important Social Ends like hitting female/minority employment targets, insulating employees from the vagaries of the employment market, sourcing coal from underserved regions of the country and making sure no one makes more than 2x the lowest paid employee’s salary. Lather, rinse, repeat for all other parts of the economy and poof! we’d all theoretically be better off.*
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p>Of course, the fact that we (well, most of us) now get a hardy laugh out of the idea that the Soviet system could somehow lead to greater wealth is indicative of the degree to which History, in Fukuyama’s dialectical sense, has ended. We instead generally accept that the troika of Liberalism, Democracy, and Capitalism (LD & C) are the right big picture features of a socio-politico-economic system and most debate is instead about comparatively fine grained variations of the theme. Simply put, workers in the first and developing worlds aren’t quite circling the capitol in tractors with raised pitchforks like they did back in the day.
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p>Meanwhile, in India, Nehru/Gandhi did OK on L+D but were pretty actively opposed to C…Kapur’s piece provides some great examples – big & small – of how, despite official pronouncements of non-alignment, India truly was on the wrong side of this History –
India was never a Communist country. But it was far closer to the Soviet Union than to the United States throughout the Cold War, buying weapons on concessional terms, doing barter trade with the Eastern Bloc and receiving financial and technical aid for industrial and infrastructure projects.
I remember, from my childhood, the Soviet engineers and scientists who filled the bars in Pondicherry, seeking respite from the rigors of the power plant they were building up the road. I remember the dusty bookstores that stocked cheap Russian classics and the bottles of sparkling Russian wine my father used to buy from visiting sailors.
There were many reasons for the closeness between India and the Soviet Union, not least of which was a U.S. foreign policy that tilted decisively toward Pakistan. But the closeness was born, too, of genuine ideological affinity.
It Brought Down Mental Walls Too…
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p>At about the same time the balance of payments crisis was prompting India’s 1991 economic reforms, the Soviet Union was collapsing. While many of the reforms were arguably inevitable (the Indian state was truly running out of other people’s money), the fall of the Wall provided the important intellectual “cover” for enthusiastically pursuing reforms –
It’s possible that all of this would have happened anyway, with or without the dissolution of the Soviet Union…Most important, the death of Communism had a psychological and intellectual impact that paved the way for India’s transformation. As the economist T.N. Srinivasan (among others) has argued, it provided an opening for would-be reformers, who had already recognized the need for some form of liberalization but who had run up against ideological resistance.
The collapse of the Soviet Union wasn’t just the collapse of a political and military behemoth. It was the collapse of an idea, too, and with the discrediting of Communist ideology, Indian socialism, long the guiding philosophy of statecraft and economic policy making, confronted a crisis of confidence. Ideas that had until then been anathema to the nation’s governing class — ideas about markets, about profits, about entrepreneurship — suddenly seemed, amidst the detritus of Communism, to be incontestable.
It’s hard to remember now, after the spectacular market failures of the last few years, but policy makers in 1991 were operating at “the end of history.” Capitalism wasn’t just a superior model; it was the only viable one.
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p>And so, perhaps the biggest reason India couldn’t have liberalized sooner was plain old ideological inertia. Unfortunately, the cost of waiting to abandon those socialist ideas now appears to be 14M infant deaths, 260M literate individuals, and 100M folks who missed the opportunity to rise above poverty…..
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*alas, the same sort of “the top-down plan = efficiency, lower costs + cut out middleman profits = we’re all better off” thinking underlies many of the proposals in the US healthcare reform debate… so I suppose there’s still a lot of room to debate just how closed the verdict is on History….
Good Point
Well, China’s got the Capitalism, but not the Liberalism or the Democracy, and they seem to be doing better than most places (economically–not that I’d want to live there).
what is past is gone. i’d be keen on your and others’ extrapolation on the above thought. why ‘alas’? are you suggesting the move in the united states is towards the same nehruvian / socialist vision? can you please elaborate the parallels, the pitfalls and/or the checks and balances that have been instituted?
…and mountains of trash, pollution, loss of ground water, rising crime rates….read the Malayalam papers to see where liberalisation is going to take us. As canny EMS famously said, Kerala is India’s laboratory — what is happening there now will happen all over India tomorrow.
do you know what the situation was in 1950? What was the attitude of western powers such as Britain and others towards india and its industrial potential?
Are you aware of any real history, other than some regurgitated gibberish from Mr. Fukuyama?
Its unfortunate that this important topic is being debated by illiterate people like Vinod and this silly NYTimes Gupta. I guess if you are born in the US you dont need no history, nor geography.
I encourage others to actually read about the hostility and open racism that accompanied the creation of independent india, how the western powers assumed it would collapse and be destroyed within a few years. Or how they believed that indians capacity for intellectual work and engineering was equal to that of monkeys. Ramachandra Guha’s India after Gandhi would be a good starting point.
5,
Thats a cheap, childish personal attack on the blogger. Make arguments if you disagree, why personal attacks ??
How does that even matter? The gora thinks we smell and wouldn’t know democracy if it bit us in our ass, so we’re supposed to disintegrate?! Gayatri Spivak could write another dense, unreadable book on this new twist to the post-colonial complex…
not that I’d want to live there
kind of a who, whom question, right? the median indian has way fewer options than the median chinese. the top 10% of indians probably has more options than the top 10% of chinese because these groups are they’re further up maslow’s hierarchy and look to more than bread & water (though one could argue that china’s near-term economic upside is so impressive that that india’s more diverse quality of life portfolio which includes more political and personal rights is still trumped for the affluent).
I kind of think people find it neat and tidy to equate communism and/or socialism with the USSR or Maoist China and then discuss how it failed and it sucked and hence communism and socialism are a failed experiment and wrap it all up in a tidy package and send it down the river.
But really, if you study ideology regarding either communism or socialism… there is not hint that it should be run by dictators who ruin people’s lives while living lavish lifestyles, and repressing everybody. I mean please, someone point out a state that truly followed the theories and system set up for either communism or socialism and show me how it failed. I don’t think there is a good example. The USSR, China, and Cuba are examples of how dictators can take over and run a state under the guise of socialism or communism.
Calling something socialism or communism doesn’t make it so. I can call myself an elephant, but last I checked, I’m just a human. alas.
This is not true, it is a lot more complex than that. An analogy would be the use of waste plastic to make roads, a proven technology developed by a Bangalore-based company, among others. But it is not resisted by the Indian roads department, because the award of road contracts is a big source of bribes, and the chain goes all the way down to bitumen procuring, which would be affected by the plastic technology, as less bitumen would be needed.
Liberalisation could not happen because of a similar nesting of interests within the establishment, which understood the inefficiencies of the command economy, but could do nothing about it, because it would’ve upset many apple carts, including their own, as they benefited handsomely from the licence-raj.
So there was was inertia, yes, but there was nothing ideological about it.
I think of capitalism as one element that “could” contribute to better living conditions, it is not the only solution, and it is certainly not always the best, as the plastic road example shows. My ideal economy, and country, is Sweden. Going about their business quietly and efficiently, with no ideological hangups, and helping others, and the planet, as much as they can.
BTW, your enthusiasm for capitalism reminds me of that famous line from Breakfast at Tiffany’s: “The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there.” Of course, now we know that that is not true.
(I should also say that sometimes I get the sense that this blog is run by a bunch of Holly Golightlys, who think of America the way she did Tiffany’s.)
Sorry, I meant to say “resisted by the Indian roads department”.
Under the Britisn empire, ‘capitalism’ was every bit as brutal as gulag-Stalinism – check out Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts! So Gandhi and Nehru had every reason to be suspicious.
Yes intertia had a lot to do with resistance to reforms – Manmohan, Bhagwati and others had been making the case for reforms since the seventies. But it was more the resistance of an entrenched bureacracy not willing to devolve their powers – the scholarly literature doesn’t really dicuss the shadow-of-communism angle. This latter argument doesn’t make much sense given the continued influence of communism and Maoism in India even after the fall of the Wall and the level of influence of the CPI (M) at the centre in the previous government coalition.
The problem with the caricature-posing-as-analysis posting by Vinod and the vacuous output of NYT’s Kapur is its ignorance of history and the many different challenges faced by india post-1947. Modern Indian history is not the adjunct of european history or some kind of supporting minor role in US history, it has its own logic, successes and weaknesses.
1) Basic capacity building – creation of the educated technical class – creation of an autonomous economy – are all successes of the nehru period. And, please, when comparing with China lets also factor in the “great leap forward” with its 10 million dead. It is always strange to me that the same folk who are always lecturing us on the inadequacies of the indian state are OK with the continuing violence and mass murder perpetuated silently and secretly within closed societies.
2) Indian economy did not take advantage of this increased capacity because of lack of reforms especially creation of a more open economic system in the 70s. Some of the more nuanced discussion above does reference this – I have also pointed out the impact of cold war rivalry during the 70s. This also has to do with increasingly entrenched and abusive control by the govt of the economy as some interactors have pointed out.
Standard BS argument about technical class !!! Having 5 colleges graduating few hundred elite engineers is not creating a technical class. In a billion people there are going to be a select few smart individuals. That has very little to do with the state’s policy. Its laughable to call IITs creating a technical class. More like technical elite. All failed states have a elite class.
Besides IITs did not result into any meaningful engineering innovation within India that had any meaningful impact on the society.
Socialists are supposed to invest in Human capital. That clearly did not occur in India. China on the other hand did invest in Human capital and also jettisoned failed economic policy and embraced liberalization early and now has upwards of 90% literacy rate and 3 times per capita GDP than India.
India’s policy until 1990 was a disaster and I completely agree with Vinod’s observation that it may be partly due to ideological inertia.
RC
No surprises, again the admiration for China – and do you include the 10 million dead from the great leap forward as part of your admiration? Do you admire that as well – would you or your family have enjoyed being part of this great leap!!
Do you have any idea of the level of violence and trauma inflicted by the chinese state on its people? Till recently, the chinese were officially executing over 10,000 of their own citizens every year ! We have almost no information on these matters, almost complete ignorance.
The whole thing is reminiscent of the fascination for “efficient” nazi germany in the 30s or the romanticization of the progress made by stalinist USSR. So this kind of blindness and worship of violent but poorly understood societies has a long history….
Nobody is praising the Chinese experiment in social engineering (aka the Great Leap Forward), instead that’s what is being criticized as the unrealistic and top-down approach to re-engineer whole societies on some fanciful notions of equality and progress (Nehru’s vision of progress was similar, borne out by his fascination with the Chinese, which was later cruelly shattered by the war with the Chinese in 1962). These are the very hallmarks of socialist/communist systems that Deng realized as inimical to the development of his society and which started the process of slow liberalization in the 70s in China. The main contention of us, the anti-1950-thru-70s economic policy folk, is that we did not realize this for almost a whole generation which resulted in the figures as deduced by Aiyar, and expounded by Vinod above, of the losses in human life and increase in misery that could have been somewhat prevented if we weren’t so blinkered with ideology and enthralled by the small section of the ruling elite of the time.
I will raise another stat to your stat. In India every day 5000 children under the age of 5 die… EVERY DAY from preventable diseases. India has worse malnourishment rate in children under the age of 3 than anywhere in the world.
That is one in every two children malnourished !!! Yet the elite ignore this grave situation by selective amnesia. This is the legacy of socialism …. stunted mental and physical growth of two generations. (The highly stratified social structure in India makes sure than these horrible malnutrition rates are not applicable to the elite)
RC, no doubt the debate on what India needs to do to drastically improve its malnourishment rate needs to be discussed and the Indian state should be criticized. But don’t misstate facts:
India has worse malnourishment rate in children under the age of 3 than anywhere in the world
Umm no; you take stats and get the wrong conclusion:
Here’s the 2003 for undernourishment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Percentage_population_undernourished_world_map.PNG
There’s more recent stats and no India isn’t the worst. It’s horrible what ranking we have and something needs to be done about it, but don’t use facts to support your false assertion. China is second in number of people in malnourishment, it is much better in rate of malnourishment, but China is no example – not just in the Great Leap but other parts of their plan(s), within the cultural revolution, etc where millions upon millions died. Let’s look to another model beside China, which is a country that is no leader in anything imo.
Oh yes, and I’m sure you realize that in ur assertion that you cite, that India is the worst, that India (1 country) is being compared to a region (SubSaharan AFrica). Country by country India’s stats are horrible but it is removed from the bottom. Countries like Ethiopia not only have a higher malnourishment rate, but many of these “failed states” and please look up the definition of a failed state – also skip the malnourishment/undernourshment part and just have famines where people die.
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I hold the hope that someday, Congress will hire multiple LEAN Six Sigma master black belts, actually review current policy and its impact on health care cost via a project using cause and effect diagrams, review constraints, and understand how waste can be avoided through the use of various LSS tools.. .MAYBE then we actually get a set of solutions (for private industry, federal, and state) in a comprehensive strategy to guide public health in the 21st century.
Decision by consensus and putting forth immediate solutions because everyone and their mothers see exactly what is wrong can lead to the wrong tools being used on the incorrect portions of a value stream (as complicated as this one is), along with setting incentives for behaviors driven by the wrong metrics people decided were important.
So, what I would like to see: 1) What is the comprehensive strategy to guide public health in the 21st century. I’m not talking a set of solutions, or even some set of ideals. Not having a strategy/charter is a big blunder. Think of the Iraq campaign – no real strategy associated with occupation resulted in a 3 year setback. 2) In line with said strategy, what are short, medium, and long term goals to improve cost, quality, and availability of health services. 3) Where can the maximum ROI be generated by Federal, State, and Private industry in the various value streams to achieve the above goals. We’re still a “shotgun” blast culture, but each group brings advantages and disadvantages to the table. Strengths and weaknesses need to be indentified to ensure risk can be mitigated appropriately.
The above being laid out in legislation that is not 2000 pages long should also be necessary. As someone that has to enforce federal requirements on a daily basis, for every “Shall” or requirement in the legislation, it will need to be enforced consistently. With the scope of the current legislation, it will require a massive federal workforce, along with fraud/waste/abuse auditors, legal staff, watching the processes and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Like any good organization, the top levels need to define these requirements clearly and consistently, allowing for lower echelons in the power structure some tolerance in interpreting those requirements to ensure needs of a diverse population are met.
Rate of undernourshment by country in 2003:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_suffering_from_undernourishment
in 2003 we have Eritrea first at 73%,…Tajikistan 61%….Yemen is some 33% undernourished….N korea….Cambodia 33%…., Mongolia, Sudan….Pakistan, Bolivia, after Thailand at 21% comes India at 20%.I’m not sure what 2008 stats show but I remember seeing them and India hadn’t all of a sudden fallen to Eritrea’s level.
PS @#18, Way to split hairs. The data you point out is from 2003 and based on that you are extrapolating to prove my assertion wrong. From the reuters articleI linked
As the above says, the situation since the data you point to has gotten worse in one case and marginally better in another. So technically my statement could be wrong but the purpose of my comment was to point to the horrific nature of the problem and not make some kind of new sensational claim.
BTW, There is only 1 country in the world that India can be compared to that is China. Micronesia is a country too, yet one cant compare it to India !!! There has to be an apples to apples comparison. Another valid comparison is Europe (In fact that is more closer than China as far comparisons go)
PS, I hope you know the difference between data provided by REUTERs and UNICEF v/s “data” seen on Wikipedia.
Malnutrition is very unique in Indian context. All malnourished kids need not be poor, I guess the predominant vegetarian diet is also one of the cause for malnourishment (with not much emphasis on proteins). Most of my cousins(kids) in India are so skinny even though they are in upper middle class.
Let us concentrate on present & future. I have been to china and lived there for sometime & freedom means different things for different people. In china, a girl can walk alone in mid night after partying but is that possible in India? even in the so called progressive cities? (the recent attacks on girls going to pub in daylight, that to in one of the progressive southern city) So how can we even claim that our democracy is better than Chinese authoritarian regime.
What do we mean by economic liberalization? If I make shoes and want to sell it down the street, should I be “allowed” to? If I make transmission belts for vehicles and want to sell it to companies should I be “allowed” to? Should we as a society allow people to work however they fancy. How could this possibly lead to a better life for all. I’m with Linzi, please before telling me communism is bad first show me a country where people were not allowed to work on what they wanted without being forced into not being allowed, and then tell me its bad.
I hate it when people quote from either newspapers or wikipedia when the actual source data is readily available and not subject to the usual (mis)interpretation.
http://www.who.int/nutgrowthdb/database/countries/ind/en/
Razib being a stat junkie would probably get a kick out of this if he isn’t already familiar with it.
The primary indicators of note are in the first four columns after the sample size column, listing the percentage of children greater than 3 and greater than 2 standard deviations below median weights and heights. Under a gaussian distribution which hold true for the developed world where almost all children have equal access to a baseline nutritional standard conducive to child development the percentage of children less than three standard deviations should be only 0.1% and less than two standard deviations 2.1%.
Based on the largest sample size taken in the 2005-2006 year of children under the age of 5 (49233 individuals), one can see that 17.4% of children in India are 3 standard deviations below the mean in weight (remember it should be 0.1%) and 43.5% are at least 2 standard deviations below the mean (should be 2.1%). Quite significant. Also interesting is the data broken down by individual Indian states which reveals which regions have been doing better or worse relatively for India. The best performing Indian states in this measure are Manipur, Kerala, Mizoram, Goa, and Sikkim. The worst are Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Meghalaya which appears to be some kind of hell hole at least where hungry children are concerned. Some of the sample sizes for the individual states are admittedly a bit small, but if the sample were carefully selected, it wouldn’t be too much of an issue.
Oh and before anyone asks or mentions it. I believe the medians in the WHO data are already calibrated for their respective sample populations. I cross referenced the data for Japan which is nearly 30 years old but pretty much right before they reached fully industrialized status and their respective figures for populations below 3 and below 2 standard deviations are 0.2% and 3.7%. My pet theory for Indian malnutrition is that unsanitary conditions and bad water are causing a lot of nutrients to be not fully absorbed. It doesn’t matter how good you eat if you have regular Delhi Belly. I worked a few years in the water management industry mainly with pumps involved in municipal projects and it never ceases to amaze me just how few people realize how critical water treatment and processing are. You will likely never see a huge 2+ meter diameter pump that you can walk through, but they are the arteries and veins of cities and critical. People in America just take it for granted that they can go to their bathrooms and kitchens and flip a switch to get a never ending stream of clean water and never really appreciate just how much of a miracle that is.
Oh by the way people, stop flushing rocks and metal objects down your toilets. Cavitation is bad enough without people adding more objects that abrade the impellers.
thanks for the statistical data Koschei. Interesting, but sad…
@akash: ” horrible malnutrition rates are not applicable to the elite
Malnutrition is very unique in Indian context. All malnourished kids need not be poor, I guess the predominant vegetarian diet is also one of the cause for malnourishment (with not much emphasis on proteins). Most of my cousins(kids) in India are so skinny even though they are in upper middle class.”
I think this is also something true to point out…
I don’t know if it has to do with the vegetarian diet, but many of my Indian friends, most of whom are University or Post grad educated either think caring about a balanced diet is boring/unimportant or they just assume that as long as they eat normal Indian food then they are getting a balanced diet. Yet many of my friends don’t really eat any fruit at all, and eat a lot of food cooked in heavy oil. Many also don’t know what has protein in it and what doesn’t… Now one thing I think many middle and upper-class Indians are got at is eating a variety of vegetables, something I should take example from! (And of course, the fact that so many more Indians buy fresh vegetables and make the food themselves rather than eating prepared food or eating out, something Americans in general should take example from.)
But overall, I find middle class people’s attitudes about eating a balanced diet is that they don’t really care/and or they trust in just eating “Indian food”. Also, vitamins are seen as “medicine” rather than something to help you keep a balanced diet, so many people I know have told me they don’t need to take ‘medicine’.. they aren’t sick. Honestly though, a guy I know who is middle-class is most likely considered malnourished. Yet his doctor in India told him he just has a “skinny constitution”. (He is 5’7″ and weighs about 100 lbs)
From my experience there, I think this attitude and lack of interest also goes hand in hand with the culture of lack of preventative medicine… It is nearly impossible to convince my friends there that regular dental cleanings, etc are better in the long run— even my friends with free health care on their university campus!
@23 Akash
Thanks for noting that the malnutrition isn’t necessarily tied up with the economic status. Vegetarians in the West are also warned about the problems with anemia, and B12 deficiency.
Violet in the Twilight:”@23 Akash
Thanks for noting that the malnutrition isn’t necessarily tied up with the economic status. Vegetarians in the West are also warned about the problems with anemia, and B12 deficiency. “
That’s true… vegetarians really need to make sure they are getting a balanced diet, and it is much easier for vegetarians to become malnourished.. I was a vegetarian for 16 years and I recently started eating chicken… not because I wanted to, but because I was having all sorts of crazy problems with my stomach that I couldn’t find any other solution to… so I tried eating chicken and felt better right away… I wasn’t technically malnourished (as far as I know, re: b 12 or iron) but I don’t think my body was very happy with my diet.
I would hazard a guess though that since so many Indians have been vegetarians for so many generations, that their bodies might be better adapted to a vegetarian diet… anyone? IS this totally wrong? I bet someone has studied this out there.. (Just a random thought, since the many Indian vegetarians I know don’t seem to have the same problems I did.. i.e. feeling starving all the time, body not processing the food correctly, getting hypoglycemic regularly, etc
But still people really need to watch what they eat and I don’t think most vegetarians get enough protein in their diet either.. It’s too bad for me, I would really prefer to be a vegetarian but when it is causing problems for you everyday, I guess it is better to listen to my body.
If this was the reason communism collapsed, then we are in serious trouble. Our banks, oil companies, car manufacturers, phone companies, insurance companies… pretty much every business larger than a few hundred, rely heavily on top-down plans to deliver ahem… efficiency and low costs. That is what the business schools teach their students, and that is what shareholders want their corporations to do. That is what we pay our CEOs billions of dollars to do.
Imho, communism failed because giving few individuals a lot of power makes your system susceptible to mistakes. Bad decisions get taken, and in the absence of Liberalism and Democracy, are not pointed out or corrected, i.e. no checks and balances.
Capitalism has the big advantage that several approaches get tried in parallel, making the system more error-resistant. But left to its own devices, Capitalism results in Enron, S&Ls, Blackwaters, huge meltdowns, and people being denied insurance coverage when they fall sick. Some people in the society consider it unacceptable that we live in a society that spends the most on healthcare in the world, and we still have poor healthcare quality, and 2 million people going bankrupt every year because they fell sick. Some find it strange that a significant fraction of our health care spending goes into the overhead of weeding out people and denying coverage. We need checks and balances here as well. I think regulation is what we call those.
Opponents of these regulations are quick to proclaim them socialism, since it is the government doing something. It is regrettable that people as intelligent as you fall for such propoganda.
I believe what is being proposed here is something like the following: we collect data on how effective a treatment statistically is and make it available to the doctors. The doctor and the patient can decide which treatment is best for them, but now have the added benefit of this data. I fail to see what exactly is socialistic about this “top-down planning”.
And if the America-centered thinking of some of us would permit it, one could look at systems in other capitalistic countries, or even at systems such as Veterans medical care and medicare, which are much more top-down and “socialistic” than anything in the healthcare bill. Of course that would construe looking at evidence, which goes against the moral fiber of the ideology-driven crowd.
@25, 26, Koschei,
The median is obtained from an aggregate of US, Norway, Ghana, Oman, and India. Perhaps the low-performance of Meghalaya (or any North-Eastern states) is due to natural genetic variation?
All I can gather from the link is that ~43% are 2SD below the median established from the aggregate growth charts. Not necessarily “calibrated” to India. If that is the case, then by definition, only ~0.1% will be below 3SD from the median of the Indian data.
Are they skinny because they are vegetarian and lack protein or are they skinny because they are communist. We have to be careful about confusing causality and correlation. Many of university hippie/communists are also vegan, and skinny for instance. Perhaps there is some WHO dataset preferably linked by Wikipedia and with four columns which covers this?
If you study the ideology, its totalitarian leanings are quite obvious. Marx’s “dicatorship of the proletariat” is a case in point. Now, marx may not have intended Stalin to use the concept to supress the likes of trotsky, but the concept is so inherently dangerous that any cirtical reader of marx could see it would eventually be abused.
In contrast, democratic liberal thinkers and capitalists were profoundly aware of the limits of humans, setting up barriers to tyranny like separation of powers unalienable natural rights, and free markets that prevent excessive central planning. hayek long argued that the hubristic belief that a bureaucrat can consistently know things better that the market would doom socialism. he was correct. a system that relies on a benevolent dictator, as communism does, is inherently flawed because its out of touch with human nature… as is often argued.
the lack of respect ofr classical freedoms in the ideology probably the best explains why self-identified communist societies would with almost bizarre consistency dissolve into Orwellian police states. marxist philosopher, herbert marcuse for example introduced the concept of “repressive tolerance” which means tolerance only for beliefs systems that are tolerant. the structural flaw in the argument is glaring: who decides? he may very well not have intended a communist to use the concept to suppress all dissent, but once you empower someone to censor in your name, you can’t abusive yourself of responsibility because he didn’t do it the way you intended. communists and socialists need to own their failure.
RC wrote:
RC wrote:
RC wrote:
RC, dude, you’re starting to sound like Prema… Is everything OK?
I dont think that vegetarian diet causes people to be some how unhealthy and less nourished. The Sardinian Diet as shown by health experts on ABC news, is pretty much bread cheese and wine with occasional meat. Doctors and dietitians are saying that Sardinian diet is causing Sardinia to have unusually high number of people living beyond the age of 100 and generally very healthy lives. Sardinian diet is also heavy on use of pulses. So, a diet based on bread, pulses, cheese …. that sounds like a Vegetarian diet in several parts of India.
All this discussion about malnutrition makes me wonder: why hasn’t the the magic wand of liberalization (waving proudly since 1991) made it disappear?
Also, Kerala has had those good nutrition (and literacy) numbers from the 70s, even as it was opposing liberalization. So the link between starving children and command economy doesn’t hold up. Vinod should know this, of all people.
BTW, isn’t much of sub-Saharan Africa is “liberalized”? Or are those countries run by Communist regimes?
it is sad that we have to argue stats to state that people shouldn’t be chained to posts and made to work as planners see fit. Vinod might say that there is a gap in economic education, but is that not a gap in moral education?
@Manju
I was never saying that socialism or communism don’t have weaknesses that would obviously have to be improved upon… but seriously, dictatorship does not equal “dictatorship of the proletariat”. I mean dictatorship= one person running the show. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” = the majority of the population making choices… oh… sounds a lot like American ‘democracy’ (Actually, America is not a democracy, it’s a republic with “democratic” leanings. The system was set up to have representatives, because the founding fathers were too afraid to allow regular people to have the actual choice in electing the President (And, they didn’t want women to vote at all.). So they made a system were we vote for people, and they vote for the actual bills, president, etc. That way the common man won’t mess things up) … of course.. if you talk to any modern Marxists/socialists/communists/anarchists, they are often much more into using consensus voting rather than majority rules voting.
“In contrast, democratic liberal thinkers and capitalists were profoundly aware of the limits of humans, setting up barriers to tyranny like separation of powers unalienable natural rights, and free markets that prevent excessive central planning. hayek long argued that the hubristic belief that a bureaucrat can consistently know things better that the market would doom socialism. he was correct. a system that relies on a benevolent dictator, as communism does, is inherently flawed because its out of touch with human nature… as is often argued.”
I think you are wrongly conflating “democratic liberal thinkers” with capitalists…. A democracy is a system to run a government, like a dictatorship, a republic, a monarchy, etc. Capitalism, Anarchy, Socialism, etc on the other hand, would be ideologies which are used to run the government. Hence you can have a “social democracy” like Sweden, which is both democratic, and socialist, though of course they have chosen (through democracy) exactly how they want to do that.
And if you think the capitalist system sets up barriers to tyranny, I think you are absolutely wrong… they work for the tyranny of big business… the more freedom big business has and the less regulations, the happier capitalism is…capitalism doesn’t have any built in mechanism to keep big business from exploiting workers/the earth etc unless there is some other system to keep it in check.
The funniest part of the most discussion in SM nowadays is the ones to scream the loudest are the ones to have never done anything to help change the current status. There are multiple ways to make a difference than trying to one up each other by showing who screams the loudest.
@ 39 shame
How do you know who has ‘done anything’ to change anything or not? I’m not trying to be snarky, but honestly, I don’t think most of us know much of anything about each other, let alone what people done or not done.
yes but a lot of noise here is just that noise, it is the same pattern on each thread and you can kind of sense. I will be happy to be wrong, as somehow not a lot of people here seem like the discreet kind
Violet in twilight, I doubt it is natural genetic variation. If you take a closer look at the data, you’ll see that quite a number of Northeastern states are among the best performing. See Manipur, Mizoram, and Sikkim.
I also checked comparable data for China from 2002 (somewhat closer genetically speaking to the Northeast than India is). Although it’s a few years older than the Indian data, it is an order of magnitude better. Only 1.5% and 6.8% are 3SD and 2SD below their age weight ratio. What’s interesting is that the height age ratio is not as good as the weight issue and this may be genetic. Even comparing weight to height instead of age, Indian children still appear to be suffering from malnourishment to a considerable degree. What I found really interesting in the Chinese data is that Chinese women seem to be giving birth to chubby babies! Fat babies are considered a sign of good luck and a blessing in China. Compared to the norm, Chinese children aged from 0 to 6 months are actually significantly higher weight than their heights would imply. This trend still somewhat holds even up to the age of 5 years. I am not sure if the explanation for this is genetic or cultural.
You have it ass-backwards Vinod. The joke is on intellectually dishonest, ideologically brainwashed people like you who despite the recent global crisis brought on by neo-liberal market fundamentalism still cling to the delusion that it is triumphant! As for Democracy one only has to look at the abysmal failure that is Indian Democracy compared to non-democratic China. It says a lot about you that you still find Fukuyama’s asinine conclusion that history has ended and the anglo-saxon model has triumphed, to be true beyond doubt. Clearly you do not have the ability to think for yourself…..like all fundamentalists and ideologues.
Note that when the crisis hit no one, not even conservative Republican President Bush, had any faith that the market could resolve the crisis if left alone by the governement. As Bush quaintly put it “This sucker is going down” without govt intervention. It took massive govt interventions aka socialism by America, China and the EU to prevent the world economy from going over the cliff.
The Washington Consensus is passe. The europeans and the chinese are now lecturing americans on what to do with their economy and their budget. The Beijing Consensus is looking better by comparison.
Very true. It is obscene how these brainwashed drones keep blaming nehruvian “socialism” for India’s failures. The Nehruvian License Raj was a corrupt, incompetent, unaccountable, blood-sucking nexus of babus and banias. It was not socialism. India has been paying, and will continue to pay, the price for not investing in its human capital as East Asia and the West have done.
Kabir, be careful with the India China democracy comparisons. I think too many people fundamentally misunderstand the purpose and utility of democratic forms of government. Democracy is in and of itself a positive thing, as it is a tool to make governments more accountable to their constituents. It can be used to leverage the power of the people to make genuine needed reforms and to remove the incompetent and the corrupt and act as a check to rent seeking policies favored by certain elites. That said, it is only a tool and a tool is only as useful as how well it’s made. Bush and Co had certainly made a massive mistake in trumpeting Democracy as the end all be all of social-civic arrangements when it is more of a continual process that needs to be maintained. Which is why we have technically democratic governments in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Pakistan that are extremely lacking in legitimacy. The case of India is not a failure of democracy persay but rather a failure of the democratic process within India. The truth I have come to realize in speaking with many English literate and educated Indians is that they fail to realize democracy doesn’t magically make things better. Too many Indians do not realize the utility of a democracy and instead it seem to view it not as path to improvement but use it to rationalize one failure after another.
Court system is decrepit and riddled with delays, bribery, and farcical rulings. We have British legal system Yar! Corrupt politicians and extremely autocratic and nepotistic party system more focused on buying votes than delivering promises. We are a democracy Onlee! Anarchic civic arrangements riddled with massive socio-economic cleavages that make collective action and mutually acceptable compromise difficult if not impossible. We are Free Sahib!
I don’t point this out to imply that India is incompatible with democracy, but that all too many Indians have been far too complacent and become satisfied with the existence superficial trappings of democracy (elections) and completely nonchalant as to it’s actual functioning. I think this is the reason why so many of the Indian commentariat have been so in love with the Bush doctrine of the past is because Bush too did not really care about the functioning a democracy and merely it’s appearance. An ideological paradigm which naturally showed India in the most positive light and gave it the Western legitimacy it so desperately craves.
I guess to use a more homely analogy is that democracy in India is like a motorcycle, but one with flat tires, broken mirrors, and a leaky gas tank. Yes it can go faster than a bicycle, but not if it is so dysfunctional that the only way to get it anywhere is to push. That said, just because the democratic system in India is suffering from systemic and fatal weaknesses doesn’t mean it’s ok to throw out the bay with the bath water. It simply means its time to stop pretending that everything will magically be better in the end just because some poor man can cast a vote he likely has no idea will affect and actively seek to rectify where India has gone astray.
Whoops, that above post by Kabir was actually written by me, Koschei. Butterfingers
Kabir, I get your points about weaknesses in capitalism, but do you really believe that China is the answer?
I think that right there is the reason why communism hasn’t worked in the past.. huge blind spots and total lack of compassion for people.
What happened in China was devastating, and the Chinese government has and continues to make serious human rights violations all over.
The problem with any ideology or political method is that you can’t FORCE it on people… be in democracy, communism, you name, anything with force results in unequal balances of power and leaves power vacuums for crazy dictators to make their way into power. The only way for a country to truly make change is by its own volition. Just think about the countries in the world that changed government/ideology through uprisings of the people vs. countries where outsiders or a few people took power and forced something on the population.
China has gotten better with Human rights in the recent years, but really, do you prefer to live somewhere where you would have no freedom of speech even, not even to make this analysis about your own government in a public space like this?
If something like socialism or communism were to work, it would have to be a mass movement by the people in that direction (nonviolent would be ideal)… if you look around the world, many countries are slowly starting to adopt some socialistic ideals into their system now, with the support of those people. Nobody is talking about those places because people are making the choices and hence content.
But, as I stated earlier, I don’t really see any of the countries with dictators, lack of freedom of speech, religion, etc to be true socialist or communist nations– they are facist countries with pseudo-communist leanings… it is not “by the people for the people” it is “by the rules for the rulers”.
Off the top of my head, I can think of a few simple ways to improve democratic government in India.
Introduce intra-party choice by having party members vote for their own to fill election candidacies instead of being guided by the likes of Gandhi or Advani. A more meritocratic and professional party school system which allows politicians to earn experience can serve as a minimal guarantee of competancy.
Experiment with trial by jury in India. Witness the recent fiasco where a British aid worker in India was sexually assaulted by a plumber only to have her case end in a complete farce with prosecutor, perpetrator, judge laughing at and humiliating her in court. Let them try laughing when half of the individuals sitting in judgment are Indian women.
Introduce educational reforms beginning with a simple roll call to make sure teachers actually show up! Institute an incentivized pay structure with part of a teacher’s salary a base and part a performance bonus based on year end parent evaluations. India being India, something will have to be figured out to prevent Indian parents (or the teachers themselves) from demanding/offering inflated grades for their children in return for higher evaluations. But I’m sure someone can think of something.
Land reform in India needs to go much further. There are simply too many landless and tenant farmers scraping by on the thinnest of margins to effectively climb up the economic ladder.
Birth rates need to be reduced in particular states with low human index. Much has been made of India’s so-called demographic advantage. This is a bold faced self-serving shit into chocolate lie if ever there was one. The big population bulges are coming from demographic sectors with the lowest human capital and prospects. India is not looking forward to a young and productive work force, it is looking at a massive near unemployable population hundreds of millions strong with absolutely no skills whatsoever. This is going to worsen the socio-economic schisms in Indian society and delay the rise of wages so critical in dragging a country into a higher economic echelon. The most effective answer to this (short of forced sterilization) is greater mandatory female education and more political and social pressure brought to bear against youth marriages. Every piece of statistical evidence points to the fact that the longer women are in school, the latter their first child birth, the fewer children they have, and the better economic prospects for both themselves and their offspring.
what marx described was not a democracy, though marxists used the word in an Orwellian way (their dictatorship was a democracy to them, because it represented the will of the people.) the dictatorship would be of a small elite, the intellectual vanguard, who represented the interests of a particular social class. again, the structural flaw is who gets to decide if the elite actually represent the interests of the working class? there are no democratic institutions set up to decide this since, fist of all, the bourgeoisie is supposed to be prevented from having access to power, and secondly, the actual working class don’t have a say either, because in the marxist system they too are likely to act against their interests (false consciousness). so what you have here is a predictable recipe for tyranny, and that is why virtually every communist regime has descended into police states, despite the fact that men like lenin and Mao were clearly great intellectuals who genuinely wanted to improve society.
the idea that real communism was never tried is a ruse, partially because a true communist society is impossible– the world doesn’t work the way marx described it. so what we were left with is a consequence of marx’s error. since communism can’t exist we’re left with a permanent transitional phase, the dictatorship, which is simply a police state (justifed by clas interests) without liberal freedoms, like free speech and economic freedom. Marxists were blind to this sometimes because they themselves became corrupt, and worked to simply maintain the power strucutre that benefited them, or because they were ideologues blinded to the facts in favor of their theory…and they were often enabled by fellow travellers like Nehru, the nation mag (which denied the Ukrainian famine), and great intellectuals like Sartre et all who pushed communist propaganda, often genuinely believing it thmselves since the system is a perfect example of a closed ideology immune to criticism.
no, the original liberal thinkers advicated the greatest amont of freedom psossible in the economic sphere. they were not ideologues about it though, as they allowed for govt intervention.
you’re trying to detach cpaitalism system from liberal democracy. liberal thinks like locke and smith and jefferson contextualized mlassez faire within a liberal democracy. the barrier to tyrany are the self-correcting nature of the market, the guranteed liberl freedoms, and ultimeately the possibility of govt interference, as thats allowed for in the liberal system.