… are hungry. So notes a widely cited piece by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo in Foreign Policy.

But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India.

Despite rising incomes & cheaper than ever food, for some reason, too many poor folk are simply choosing NOT to expend their $$ on nutrition –

Despite the country’s rapid economic growth, per capita calorie consumption in India has declined; moreover, the consumption of all other nutrients except fat also appears to have gone down among all groups, even the poorest. …at all levels of income, the share of the budget devoted to food has declined and people consume fewer calories.

[Indians] and their children are certainly not well nourished by any objective standard. Anemia is rampant; body-mass indices are some of the lowest in the world; almost half of children under 5 are much too short for their age, and one-fifth are so skinny that they are considered to be “wasted.”

So what’s going on? And what should “we” do about it?

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…receive some sort of state assistance / welfare today. That surprisingly high number (well, to me anyway) is from a recently published report by the Center for Immigration Studies that’s sure to generate some interesting (and perhaps heated) discussion.

Households with children with the highest welfare use rates are those headed by immigrants from the Dominican Republic (82 percent), Mexico and Guatemala (75 percent), and Ecuador (70 percent). Those with the lowest use rates are from the United Kingdom (7 percent), India (19 percent), Canada (23 percent), and Korea (25 percent).

While 19% “feels” higher than I’d expect, it’s still a little less than half the rate of “native households with children” (39%). And, the Indian number is positive relative to those hordes of poor, illiterate, malnourished, Americans-of-Canadian-descent (23%) and is the lowest rate of use of any of the Asian communities identified. A model minority?

Interestingly, I’ve always generally assumed that immigration patterns from India vs. Pakistan into the US were basically the same. However, the Pakistani-household rate of assistance – 32.8% – is substantially higher than the Indian one and on par with the rate for Chinese families – 32.7%.

CIS’s intro to their study notes the issues being raised and points out that the data collected is primarily self-reported (with all the issues/concerns entailed) –

Concern that immigrants may become a burden on society has been a long-standing issue in the United States. As far back as colonial times there were restrictions on the arrival of people who might become a burden on the community. This report analyzes survey data collected by the Census Bureau from 2002 to 2009 to examine use of welfare programs by immigrant and native households, particularly those with children. The Current Population Survey (CPS) asks respondents about their use of welfare programs in the year prior to the survey,1 so we are examining self-reported welfare use rates from 2001 to 2009.

Any mutineers have insight into these differences?

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It’s an election year and it appears yet again that few things trigger the emotional tripwire faster than outsourcing. Out here in Cali, it’s apparently the ticket Barbara Boxer is banking on to preserve her Senate seat in the face of her challenger, former HP CEO, Carly Fiorina –

“I know precisely why those jobs go…Because Fiorina shipped them there….Bangalore instead of Burbank.”

Unfortunately, unlike Boxer, Fiorina has actually engaged in the difficult and often unpopular tradeoffs necessary to run a viable company and meet payroll. Boxer ought to instead put more effort into understanding why Fiorina and thousands of CEO’s like her consistently rate California the worst state in the country to do business. As a direct consequence, California jobs are far more at risk of being “outsourced” to other states than the comparatively few that are sent out of the country.

Of course, when you’re dealing with politics rather than economics, where a job was sent to matters far more than the sheer number lost – a fact Boxer’s ad exploits to the fullest.

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The WSJ has a sobering article on the state of the manufacturing & labor relations in India –

COIMBATORE, India — This ancient city has turned itself in recent years into a manufacturing dynamo emblematic of India’s economic rebirth. But a homicide case playing out in an auto-parts factory here is raising concerns about whether the Indian industrial miracle is hitting a wall of industrial unrest.

“We can’t be a capitalist country that has socialist labor laws“Pricol Ltd., which makes instrument panels for the likes of Toyota Motor Corp. and General Motors Co., was rocked in late September when workers burst into the office of Roy George, its 46-year-old human-resources boss. Angry over a wage freeze, they carried iron rods, witnesses say, and left Mr. George in a pool of blood. Police arrested 50 union members in connection with his death, their lawyer says. Charges haven’t been filed.

The underlying question raised by this story is the size, shape & importance of the manufacturing sector for India’s long term economic development…

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Historical “what-if’s” are notoriously difficult to prove but also notoriously delicious to discuss. Would WWII have happened if Hitler had been killed in the trenches of WWI? [W]ith earlier reform, 14.5 million more children would have survived, 261 million more Indians would have become literate, and 109 million more people would have risen above the poverty line.Would there have been a WWI if Franz Ferdinand survived the assassination attempt? What if Al Gore got his Florida recount? What would have become of Sonam Kapoor’s career if she skipped the flop that was Saawariya?

Arguably, while many of the most famous what-if’s focus on chance events in history, prominent Indian econ journalist Swaminathan Aiyar, writing for the Cato Institute, decided to take on a far more considered, deliberate economic policy “what-if”. He asks “what if India liberalized its economy 10 yrs earlier?” Put differently, what if 1970s India followed the economic path pursued by Korea, Japan, and Taiwan?

Until the 80s/90s rounds of liberalization, India followed a Soviet-inspired economic model resulting in stuff like this –

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