Why China got rich and India didn't

https://davidoks.blog/p/why-china-got-rich-and-india-didnt

by rochansinha • 2 months ago

82 78 2 months ago

davidoks.blog

avadodin2• 2 months ago

The article feels all over the place.

What should India do to beat China?

Invest in education?

Exterminate millions of its own (undereducated) population in meaningless wars and poorly–planned public works?

Make their women burn their bras?

Switch Communism in for Hinduism and end Democracy?

Other than the first, I think I'd rather bow down to China.

wqaatwt4• 2 months ago

Exterminate millions of its own (undereducated) population in meaningless wars and poorly–planned public works?

Well economic growth and development in China only began several years after they stopped doing all of these things.

They weren’t ahead of India in any meaningful way back when Mao was still in power and enacting his unhinged ideas.

avadodin2• 2 months ago

The author made it sound like it was a prerequisite

tecoholic2• 2 months ago

If the author is reading - China is a single party nation state, India is a union of states. Dive into the metrics of states, you will find everything from Sub-sharan Africa levels of HDI to the ones that compete with European countries.

iberator• 2 months ago

China has more political parties in parliament than the USA. Stop spreading FUD

lazide• 2 months ago

Lol, how is it FUD?

smlavine2• 2 months ago

And how often do they vote against each other?

Our_Benefactors• 2 months ago

It’s fairer to call them factions. Also a misuse of the term “FUD”. They also don’t have a parliament, they have the “National People’s Congress” which doesn’t function as a parliamentary body.

hollerith3• 2 months ago

A Chinese person cannot vote for any party except the CCP or if they can, the voting is performative cannot remove the CCP from its position of absolute control.

NagatoYuzuru2• 2 months ago

Their only role is to clap, cheer, and show approval. I can say with responsibility that there is no meaningful voting in China.

broken_clock• 2 months ago

How is China (or any other country) any different except the same thing shifted upward?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_administrative_divisio...

tecoholic2• 2 months ago

In case of China, the extend to which the central government can set laws and policies far exceeds what’s possible in India. India’s powers are split into Federal, State and “Concurrent” lists. Health and education for example is a state and concurrent list subject respectively, to which the “Indian Government” has only very limited say. So it’s apples to oranges when it comes to comparing investments in those domains.

rayiner9• 2 months ago

Getting to the bottom of this is one of the most important public policy issues in the world. When my family left Bangladesh in 1989, the country’s GDP per capita was similar to China’s and India’s. Today, India and Bangladesh are still poor countries while China has roared ahead. How can you replicate that?

abdelhousni• 2 months ago

So many responses to answer the title

api• 2 months ago

It’s been kind of obvious to me that China did it by copying what America was doing from the post Civil War era until we abandoned the formula in the 1970s.

China calls it “iron and salt” I think. The state makes very large investments in infrastructure and helps build huge globally competitive conglomerates in strategic and bedrock industries. The state builds the “iron.” Then it allows the free market to do the “salt,” because while big state enterprise is good at doing stuff like mass steel production or the three gorges dam it’s horrible at making consumer goods or filling small niches.

(The USSR tried to have the state do the iron and the salt.)

America started doing this in a big way with the railroads. Then came roads, aviation, petroleum, electrification of the entire country, bringing clean water and sanitation to the whole country, huge public works projects, the interstate highway system, the space program, DARPAnet, and so on.

Then we stopped doing this kind of bedrock investment, being sold on the idea that it’s not necessary. Then we lost our lead in all industries except… the ones we still do this in like aerospace.

hollerith3• 2 months ago

I doubt investment in railroads or aviation in the US was anything close to majority-government. I'd be shocked if the government's share of cumulative investment in petroleum production since 1859 (the start of commercial production when Edwin Drake's well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, struck oil) was above 2%.

nobodyandproud• 2 months ago

For railroads, just wrong.

Can’t speak for the rest, but we still subsidize airlines and the infrastructure to make it possible.

As we should.

All of the little industrialists and VCs here on HN wouldn’t have a prayer of striking it rich without the median income workers paying (hard-carrying) your little dreams.

cucumber3732842• 2 months ago

Then we stopped doing this kind of bedrock investment, being sold on the idea that it’s not necessary. Then we lost our lead in all industries except… the ones we still do this in like aerospace.

Where's environmentalism and financializationn in all this?

We didn't "just" stop. We didn't close all those steel plants and whatnot for fun.

rayiner9• 2 months ago

I agree. It’s worth remembering that the Lincoln GOP was an interventionist party. That history was retconned by the Reagan GOP.

arjie• 2 months ago

The comment under does make sense. We have to explain Taiwan, Korea, and Japan as well. If the difference is 1950s actions then Taiwan in particular is unexplained, having diverged in 1949.

Though the cotton mill productivity does challenge the idea that it’s genetics or something inherent. Interesting problem for sure.

rayiner9• 2 months ago

Orderly east asian culture versus disorderly south asian culture? Countries with cold weather and resource constraints that require long-term planning, versus countries that have three planting seasons annually?

mc322• 2 months ago

According to Lee Kwan Yew[1], apparently he identified two big factors:

India's diversity is not its strength -whereas China's relative homogeneity allows for easier governance(no contending non-pluralistic factions)

India's federation is not its strength either. India's central government, unlike the Chinese, cannot unilaterally execute national plans. [in his example, they can't modernize a single international hub without having a fight that engenders delay and even kills projects]

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaTNpw0-wAk

argee• 2 months ago

India's central government, unlike the Chinese, cannot unilaterally execute national plans.

They don’t have the appetite to be socially modern anyway. Every Indian passport still has the holder’s parents’ name within (in Indian bureaucracy your parents seem to essentially own you regardless of age), which as TFA contends ties them to a social unit in a way that hampers the fungibility needed for smooth industrialization. Is it possible to argue that the central government doesn’t control even the passport it issues itself? It’s obvious that the motivation is simply absent, same as it was nearly a hundred years ago.

hyruo• 2 months ago

The easiest issue to explain is the Taiwan question. In 1949, Taiwan stripped China of all its gold reserves and its entire elite class, leaving the Chinese mainland with nothing but a shambles. Furthermore, following the Korean War in 1950, the United States backed Taiwan in imposing a comprehensive blockade on China's coastline; this plunged China into a state of total hostility with the U.S.and, by extension, with the entire Western bloc. By the later stages of the Cold War, this situation had become even more dire: Khrushchev threatened to launch a "surgical" nuclear strike against China, while Eisenhower devised a strike plan involving 870 nuclear warheads. Here was an agrarian nation facing simultaneous nuclear threats from two major superpowers; under such circumstances, any discussion of economic development was nothing short of a luxury.

wqaatwt4• 2 months ago

Economic growth in Taiwan only began accelerating when it began transitioning from a brutal dictatorship to a democracy. Something like applies to China, of course liberalization there was primarily economic and only political to a much lesser extent.

any discussion of economic development

That’s not true at all though. They attempted some grandiose programs. It’s just that there are hardly any words to describe how absurdly incompetent Mao and his ilk where. So they just failed outright until they began liberalizing the economy in a controlled way.

wqaatwt4• 2 months ago

Taiwan and South Korea were ruled by quite brutal dictatorships until the 80s - 90s. Massive growth only started when they sorted that out. Of of course we must attribute China’s success to significant liberalization and the rejection of Maoism (at least in practice) even, though it’s still quite far from a real democracy.

China was extremely mismanaged until the 90s as well and wasn’t really ahead of India. If anything they missed out on 30-40 years of actual development until Mao and other exceptionally incompetent lunatics died out.

effnorwood• 2 months ago

more transistors

kylehotchkiss• 2 months ago

Babus

coolThingsFirst• 2 months ago

Beside the point, why is the US in decline?

jnaina• 2 months ago

China used an iron-fisted central authority to impose unity from above. China’s model created cohesion mostly through forced coercion and cultural flattening. “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend” provided, of course, that every flower grows in the approved direction and every school arrives at the correct answer.

On the other hand, India’s progress continues to be hobbled by deep-rooted social challenges, including religious extremism, caste-based inequality, utter breakdown of civic culture, social fragmentation, linguistic chauvinism and regional rivalries.

Forced order or complete chaos. Choose your pick.

newsicanuse• 2 months ago

Corruption, red-tapism and colonial-mindset had and still has more part to play than thr reasons you have stated.

aabdi• 2 months ago

+1, all the things that were said about India are true about Malaysia, Singapore, and to various degrees within Vietnam and Thailand. Yet these countries are all richer than India.

It is still true today as Lky said 50ish years ago. The bureaucracy of India is federalized yet overly centralized.

When the city governor must ask for permission to their own money from the federal when yet they are so far away, there is nothing efficient. The powers are yet so powerful yet blind at the same time.

dartharva2• 2 months ago

India never had that choice, because forced order in the magnitude of China is practically impossible for the country for a vast variety of reasons too many to list down. Suffice to say there can be no comparison between PRC's federal admin that holds absolute power over every inch of its territory, and India's that barely survives each year.

For India, the choice was either an endless cycle of balkanization, bloodshed and anarchy à la Sub-Saharan Africa with a mild possibility of some of the states eventually thriving economically, or an inherited weak but held-together nation-state with a bit more negotiating power in the world stage.

JojoFatsani• 2 months ago

It wasn’t all hugs and lollipops for India in the 70’s either. Read about Indira Ghandi and The Emergency.

nitwit005• 2 months ago

People seem to succeed in creating narratives around this sort of thing, but if we truly understood what was going on, we should be able to predict future economic growth rates.

guardiangod• 2 months ago

Because all the educated Indians moved to US and contributed to the American economy, versus the Chinese who get educated in America, then move back to China to work there.

English is a major reason- Indians are just better at speaking English than Chinese and thrives in corporate America. Whereas mainland Chinese couldn't climb the corporate ladder and have to seek better opportunities back in China.

Find me a tech executive in a Big Tech firm who is from mainland China. You can't find one. Both Lisa Su of AMD and Jensen Huang of Nvidia are Taiwanese immigrants who grew up in US in the 70s and thus speak fluent English.

0xpiguy• 2 months ago

The article didn’t mention what I think is the single most important reason: the ability to align local governments with the central government.

You can design the best policies in the world, but it’s local governments that actually implement them.

The Great Chinese Famine was a prime example of this. Mao became the scapegoat, but he wasn’t as detached from reality or as blindly idealistic as many people make him out to be. His mistake was treating local governments the way he treated the military - giving them significant autonomy, making them compete and trusting the information they reported back to him.

It turned out that politicians were far more corrupt than military generals. Local officials lied about food production and greatly exaggerated output figures to gain promotions. As a result, the country sold more grain than it actually had, contributing to widespread famine and millions of deaths.

When Deng returned to power and began reforming the country, he famously toured China city by city to ensure that local governments understood the message and stop fk around this time.

To outsiders, it may seem that China can move quickly simply because the central government holds a great deal of power. That is certainly true compared with many other systems of governance. However, what really enables rapid policy implementation is the alignment between the central and local governments. Without that alignment, you would see the central government issue one policy but local government adds lots of red tapes and nothing really gets done in the end

esjeon3• 2 months ago

the ability to align local governments

I think seeing it as an “align”-ment problem puts too much blame on the local side. Also, autonomy has nothing to do with the problem of misalignment.

In authoritarian systems like China, mis-alignment with authority can carry serious political and social risks, so people are easily pushed toward dishonesty. What happened under the Mao’s rule is simply this; local officials were too afraid of criticizing the very father of the revolution, which could be interpreted as attacking the legitimacy of the revolution itself. It was a side effect of over-concentration, and gaining more control over local would have not made any differences.

Deng was successful only because he was exactly aware of this problem. In his speeches on the government reform (the Open-Door policy), he explicitly pointed out over-concentration as a major issue. He not only eased the concentration of power, but also redesigned the incentive structure, so that officials can adopt objective measures and even try their own experiments.

mc322• 2 months ago

Lee Kwan Yew identified this shortcoming along with the issue of many factions in India. Due to its huge diversity there is little pan-national alignment -everyone wants their own thing and prioritizes accordingly.

Here's me Lee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaTNpw0-wAk

rayiner9• 2 months ago

The interesting thing about this is that China’s homogeneity is a result of ethnogenesis. 90% of the country is “Han Chinese,” but people in different parts of the country look very different and their dialects of “Chinese” aren’t mutually intelligible. It’s kind of like if you took everyone from AOC to Tim Walz and relabeled them all “British American.”

rawgabbit• 2 months ago

"Local officials lied about food production and greatly exaggerated output figures to gain promotions."

Were any of these officials who played fast and loose with truth ever punished and stripped of their ill-gotten promotions? The only person "punished" because of the Great Leap Forward, from my memory, was Peng De Huai who stood up to Mao and was eventually killed during the Cultural Revolution.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peng_Dehuai#Persecution_during...

"After Peng still refused to "confess," his jailers began routinely beating him and broke several ribs,[106] injured his back, and damaged his internal organs,[107] especially his lungs. Peng's violent "interrogations" lasted over ten hours a day, but his interrogators were replaced every two hours to keep them from developing any sympathy for Peng, a practice pioneered by the Stalinist secret police in the 1930s. Peng was "interrogated" that way over 130 times.[106]"

dartharva2• 2 months ago

There is no singular decisive answer. Sure, you can chalk all of it up to "wrong" policy, but peel the layers a bit and explore the causes behind them and you'll see an endless chain of cause-and-effect covering more factors than all schools of academia can feasibly cover.

h4kunamata• 2 months ago

OP sure didn't check the call center owners scamming the entire globe lmao

India is scamming everybody, and getting very rich at it.

ninjagoo• 2 months ago

This article seems to completely miss the significant compounding effect of real growth over 13 years.

China liberalized their economy in the 70s: 1976 Mao dies -> Cultural revolution ends -> 1978 Deng Xiaoping launches 'Reform & Opening Up'.

India liberalized their economy in the 90s: 1991 Rao and Singh come to power -> eliminate tariffs, dismantle the License Raj.

The difference is at least that of compounded growth over time. At 7% real growth, in 13 years an economy gains about 2.4x. In PPP terms, China's economy is about 2.4x India's [1].

Additional factors to consider are that China liberalized more aggressively through state directed experimentation, and India liberalized more gradually, and within a democratic legal system. Also, on the Chinese side there were periods of slowdown (1989, others), and on the Indian side the economy would have been about 20% larger but for the right-wing/fascist policies of the BJP government [2][3]. But policy failures on both sides are probably a wash, bringing us to today's gap.

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDP_RPCH@WEO/OEMDC/...

[2] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/cid/...

[3] https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/india/ill-conceived-demo...

keeda• 2 months ago

Hmm, despite the 13 years head start, turns out in terms of absolute and PPP GDP India and China seemed to have been neck-to-neck until ~1990, after which China really took off.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=2001...

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?end=2... (no data available before 1990 apparently)

jmclnx• 2 months ago

I have to say I think the author makes a good point.

It will be interesting to see how the current US War on education changes the country in 20 years. Will a similar but opposite article be written about the US in a few decades ?

samantp• 2 months ago

China invested in converting people to a skilled workforce planned top down. Smart workhorses, be it workers, doctors engineers, scientists, sportspersons. Freedom from traditional norms were replaced by bondage to standardisation/regimentation to communist party leadership’s planned rule sets to scale quickly. And which is fine.

India in 1947 invested in freedom of thought, democracy, and gradual donning away with archaic customs (only) wherever needed, with overall gentleness. Or should I say, this has been nothing new with India, happening since eternity. Without mega turbulence, maybe with intermediate evolution-revolutions as needed like the freedom movement till 1947. Business as usual.

This is clearly an unclosed chapter at this point. Many alternative futures could work out. Say, with machines doing more and more work including that of building machines, that part hopefully will get commoditised, along with the core science and infra behind that. And innovative controlled employment of those advances for societal benefits will become the need. Grassroot level, day-to-day creativity and innovation will be the mantra. Who could tell? All analysis is in hindsight anyways.

Even the current fear around India moving towards some authoritarian regimented society is nonsense. Society will not let it happen. They have tasted the blood of freedom. Often at the cost of discipline, progress, economy, basic survival.

They do seem to cling hard their religion, gods, spirituality though!

wqaatwt4• 2 months ago

India in 1947 invested in freedom of though

Almost nothing China did until the late 80s really helped economic development. If the CCP focused on doing the inverse of that through its brutal and exceptionally misguided policies.

China didn’t really overtake India until it began liberalizing.

vivzkestrel• 2 months ago

"why a dictatorship got rich while a flawed democracy didnt?" FTFY

esjeon3• 2 months ago

I think the caste system is what’s hampering social and economic progress in India (or at least partially).

It’s a sort of game theory stuff here. A structured class hierarchy makes it inherently more difficult for individuals to challenge the authority in power, even under the democratic government. The system imposes an additional risk of social backlash/punishment/retaliation for anyone who attempts to disrupt the established order, thus people have more reasons to stay back. This kind of risk is largely absent in more egalitarian/classless societies.

rayiner9• 2 months ago

But does it matter whether you can challenge authority or disrupt the established order? Because surely it’s even harder to do those things in China. And India’s people seems to me to be too little order, not too much.

esjeon3• 2 months ago

Yeah, you got a very good point there. Yes, it may seem very weird, but that’s because China was not playing the game.

The game that I suggested earlier assumes that (1) those in power seek to maximize their gains, (2) and such behavior is NOT aligned with social gains. So, basically, a never-ending arms race between the authority and the people. (check Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes if you’re interested)

However, China (and also South Korea) got a weird alignment in interests between the authoritarian government and the people — both of them somehow sought after national economic growth. Since their interests are already aligned, they didn’t play the game that I suggested above.

I think such alignment cannot be reproduced through games nor social interaction b/w powers — rather, it is more of a humane part of the history.

_DeadFred_• 2 months ago

Isn't China's hukou a class/caste system?

akssri• 2 months ago

The article has the "rough" idea correct - how could it not be- but is quite stupid in a sort of cliched Chrisitian-missionary / colonialism sort of way.

It talks about how Chinese society was completely destroyed and instantly "modernized" (read, liberal, secular-Christian etc.), and is one step removed from claiming that India too needs this "total destruction".

The article notes about "traditional evils like Dowry or Female Foeticide" like some cliched missionary in British India begging patrons for funding (also the tactic of many a NGOs) - but fails to mention that every one of these issues come from exactly this "societal smashing" created by the "Great" (TM) British civilizers, and their eugenics obsessed American counterparts [1][2]. The latter even talks about how obssesed with killing children the American elites were that they didn't even spare their allies China and South Korea (an unthinkable thing to today Yellow-Fevered zietgeist).

The article barely touches on how the colonial Indian state survived in nearly the same exact form, and pretty much implements the same old British policies to this day. Indeed, the constitution of India is a near facsimile of the 1935 Government of India Act. passed in the British Parliament to secure their vice-grip on the colony and choke it to death.

In India, education remains restricted to the 5-10% Anglophones, and everyone else is considered pretty much "not human". These policies come out from Indian-looking Anglo elites who hate the country to the very core, and don't face push back since even the counter-elites have to come from the same process of colonial education [3].

This is pretty much why India punches, in every field, as a country 1/10 the size. The Anglo-Americans don't complain, since they get slaves for cheap who willingly become part of the Anglo-American borg (like colonized Africa, Phillipines etc.), and it also satisfies their deep religio-cultural obsession with turning everything into be a mirror of themselves by "societal smashing".

This "societal-smashing" business and "lets turn everything American!" scheme of liberalism will die with the societies whom it exhausts into exhaustion and extinction. The breakdown of social-cohesion and drop of birth-rates, coupled without the necessary financial power to "marketize" society (Anglo-utilitarianism is obsessed with "marketizing" everything), this will "fix" itself in half-a-century.

The signs are quite obvious. I hope the Elephant remains a witness.

[1]. Oldenburg, Veena Talwar. Dowry murder: The imperial origins of a cultural crime. Oxford University Press, 2002.

[2]. Hvistendahl, Mara. Unnatural selection: Choosing boys over girls, and the consequences of a world full of men. Public Affairs, 2011.

[3]. Sanu, Sankrant. "The English class system." South Asian Language Review 17, no. 1 (2007): 69-85.

https://sankrant.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/The-English-...

brcmthrowaway• 2 months ago

Whatever it is, it is sad.

AbbeFaria• 2 months ago

Here’s my take as an Indian having lived in cities like Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru

1. No manufacturing expertise in India, we aren’t a manufacturing powerhouse despite having similar levels of population as China. We have always prioritised services. That has an inherent limit.

2. Local governments here are powerless. I don’t have the source for this but only about 3% of public spending is done by local governments at the municipal level. Even for “rich” cities, local governments although are wealthy they are always controlled by whoever has power at the state level. It’s why Indian cities have such decrepit infrastructure vis a vis China.

3. Caste based politics and more recently freebies based politics. Recently, state governments all over India have been all out bribing voters with cash transfers if voted to power. This won’t bode well for long term financial stability. This is also short term thinking at its finest. They have run out of ideas.

4. Weak rule of law. There’s a huge backlog of cases in our justice system right from Supreme Court to the local courts. Doing business in India can backfire in spectacular ways (inordinate tax demands by union government etc).

Entire studies can be done but these are top 4 things keeping India where it is.

JumpCrisscross• 2 months ago

No. 4 doesn’t really make sense as a disadvantage relative to China.

NagatoYuzuru2• 2 months ago

I don’t know much about the situation in India. But this article paints an overly rosy picture of China.

In my view, there are some people in China who don’t treat a significant portion of the population as human beings. Moreover, the Chinese are very keen on stepping on others to get ahead.

ifwinterco2• 2 months ago

This site is very US-centric so people don’t want to hear this, but “democracy” is not necessarily the best form of government for a nation.

Obviously in the case of India and China there are other factors at play, but for me this is the elephant in the room

yoavm2• 2 months ago

Can you elaborate? What's unique about the nations for which democracy isn't the best form of government? What's unique about their people?

And is it still relevant to call the view that democracy _is_ the best form of government a "US-centric" idea, considering that the current US seems to not be concerned about (and sometimes even embrace) non-democratic powers, in-land and around the world? If anything, it sounds to me like over the past few years it became a US-centric idea that it's totally fine to not have democracy.

gwerbret• 2 months ago

Can you elaborate? What's unique about the nations for which democracy isn't the best form of government? What's unique about their people?

Not the person you responded to, but functional democracies require either an already-established functioning government, which can be efficiently perpetuated and controlled by elected leaders (think the United Kingdom); or a non-functioning government which can be effectively reformed and then perpetuated by elected leaders (think Taiwan). In both cases, functional democracies also require an electorate who can be brought to work towards a nation's major development goals.

There are countries for which none of these criteria can be reasonably met in the context of a democracy. One reason is if the electoral processes are so corrupt that no one competent is actually elected or, if they are accidentally competent, are too busy working towards their own and their cronies' ends to be effective leaders. The second is if there is underlying social strife which prevents people from working collaboratively towards nation building.

India fails in both counts: the corruption at all levels of government is nothing short of legendary, and the country as a whole is comprised of very diverse peoples who, historically, have had little reason to work together. Many African countries, rather tragically, are in the same boat: during the colonial era, "countries" were almost randomly assembled out of groups of people who historically had almost nothing in common. When the colonial powers left, they typically left nothing behind -- no knowledgeable and experienced administrators, no established universal education, and little or no social infrastructure. The people were then left to reinvent government from scratch, and the "country" more often than not was actually five separate nations of people who hated each other.

In sum, democracy is sort of an advanced form of government which, when introduced, really does need a somewhat coherent nation to already exist (in more cases) for it to work well. An autocratic or authoritarian government is usually the on-ramp, so long as it's reasonably functional and stable for long enough. Wherever democracy has persistently failed to take off, it's invariably a place in which the underlying foundation didn't exist to begin with.

zozbot234• 2 months ago

The key notion here is liberal democracy, which establishes foundational principles such as the rule of law and allows an independent civil society to flourish without undue government interference. Electoral democracy is meaningless unless basic freedoms are protected. Many developing countries have severe challenges wrt. the establishment of these liberal principles.

ifwinterco2• 2 months ago

Other comment addressed which countries are suited to democracy much better than I would have, I agree with that.

On the US: while one could argue the US is becoming less democratic is some sense, Americans remain extremely wedded to the idea of democracy as an ideal or even a panacea. That’s what I mean when I called it a US-centric viewpoint, not all cultures share this idea or at least not to the same extreme extent.

For example I think a lot of Americans were genuinely surprised that “democracy” in Russia in the 1990s failed to produce good outcomes, whereas for others from different backgrounds this was less surprising

rayiner9• 2 months ago

What's unique about the nations for which democracy isn't the best form of government? What's unique about their people?

It’s the other way around. Countries that are well suited to democracy are the exception. You need to have a state, rule of law, etc., before you have democracy. Then you need generations of people socialized in the ideas that allow democratic societies to function. For example, in many places in the world, people are socialized to put their trust in leaders of extended kinship groups and clans rather than in neutral institutions. You can’t effectively have a democracy under those conditions.

On all those fronts, Americans were standing on the shoulders of giants. England has offices of civil government (like the Chancellor of the Exchequer) that have been in continuous operation for over 800 years. Many of the concepts of the constitution date back to the Magna Carta 800 years ago. There’s also the non-religious aspects of religion. Protestants were developing decentralized church governance 500 years ago. American democracy is the product of an 800-year long process where you’re slowly and incrementally molding the structure of society and the mindset of the people generation after generation.

Read De Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” where he describes the organic, bottom-up self governance that prevailed in America 150 years ago. That description bears no response to how an Indian or Iraqi village is governed. Those societies, like most, are structured and hierarchical. An individual owes obedience to the layers above (father, clan or tribe elders, all the way to the top). And those at the top have obligations flowing downward, to care and feed their subjects and maintain order. These societies are much better suited for benevolent dictatorships.

amai2• 2 months ago

A benevolent dictatorship is probably more effective. However most dictatorships are not benevolent. And once you have voted for a benevolent dictator you can't get rid of him anymore if he stops being benevolent. So a dictatorship is always a trap in the long term.

adjejmxbdjdn• 2 months ago

The history this article presents is complete nonsense.

India didn’t fight a “war of independence”, but India fought for its independence. Lots of Indians died in that fight for Independence.

This article also ignores the massive transfer of wealth, and resources from India to the UK during WW2 (and before).

And the author seems to forget entirely about the existence of Pakistan with which India fought multiple wars, engaged in a war to liberate Bangladesh, and also has been in a state of essentially a Cold War ever since.

History would have liked very different if the Indian government had not kicked out US companies and nationalized them while they were looking for cheaper manufacturing destinations. So they chose China instead, brought a tremendous amount of knowledge and expertise.

The differing geopolitical starting points of India and China is most evident by the fact that China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council while India isn’t.

In reality, someone who was actually in 1950 and not someone who was pretending to be in 1950, would not have expected India to survive another 75 years, never mind compete with China.

rayiner9• 2 months ago

You’re ignoring the most important point. India had a larger per capita GDP than China until the 1990s. As the article points out, China’s median income was lower than India’s until 2000. All those historical things you mention about India happened before that time period and were already baked into the numbers as of 1990-2000.

Those numbers also show why the “wealth transfer from India” is mostly fake. India and China were both at a subsistence level. There was no meaningful wealth to transfer.

oa335• 2 months ago

Those numbers also show why the “wealth transfer from India” is mostly fake. India and China were both at a subsistence level. There was no meaningful wealth to transfer.

Can you expand? What was the EIC doing in India?

maxglute• 2 months ago

Important to caveat, large cohorts of China got relatively rich... there's still 100s of millions predominantly old who got left behind by modernization. Because countries with pop size of PRC (and India) can specialize in EVERY sector category and still not have enough opportunities to uplift everyone. Where PRC dodged bullet is family planning, i.e. averting 100s of millions of births, but that's 100s of millions additional poor averted, and because poor bias overwhelmingly old and un/der educated, they will die and PRC per capita will converge towards urban high income, i.e. PRC entering high income is mechanically/mathematically determined. Obviously demographics may be issue later, but PRC figured out how to be rich, even if slightly after being old.

India (who also tried family planning) utterly fucked in this regard, i.e. trending towards 1.8B people, ignoring all the things PRC did that India didn't. PRC 1.4b trending towards 400m old/poor vs 1000m young/rich. Indian trending towards 1400m old/young poor, 400m young/rich. Can't craw out of per capital poverty with that composition, not within this century, and also very different configuration of constituents to govern, i.e. volatility is going to go way up when more than half of country is young and poor... worse if young educated and poor.

As for why. Democracy sucks at development.

Not a single >10m country has gone from developing to reasonably developed on democratic system. The few <10m countries basically have some resource or geopolitical favourable position where narrow specialization or limited sponsorship from hegemon = enough $$$ to uplift per capita. Political economy is as soft as and inexact as science can be, but democracy being the worst form of gov for developing countries (not except all others) is overwhelmingly clear.

If you're a poor country, hope you have competent authoritarian leadership, bandwagon with hegemons (or rather do not trigger ire of hegemons) or do not get on bad side of hegemon, do some land reforms, sort out your problematic minorities, break eggs before they become problems. It will be bloody but it may pay off, alternative is generations trapped in poverty that accumulates more averted deaths than if you just slapped country into shape in the first place. Don't fall for democratic promotion = aka political elite capture, that will also happen under incompetent autocrats but will 100% happen in democratic system.

amai2• 2 months ago

tldr; China has more educated slaves.

Why China got rich and India didn't

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