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Notes -
India is a lower-middle income country?
https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups
We might disagree on the criteria for being a "functional" one, but it matches my own standards in a way most of Africa doesn't.
Is it high-functioning? Hell no, but it's also not Sub-Saharan Africa, and better than Nigeria and the like (I happened to have a nice chat with a Nigerian doctor who joined my workplace)
I expect that in a decade or two, if AI didn't steal livelihoods, we'd reach Thai or Eastern European standards. Think of how the average middle-class American looks at how impoverished the middle-class Brit is (and the latter really isn't starving to death or has a absolute dearth of consumer goods) and perhaps that's how they'd look at the middle-class Indian.
There is an enormous chasm between Thai and Eastern Europe. The latter are catching up with the west very fast, the lag is only 10 years. In Poland, for example, the purchasing power today is similar to that of Brits in 2018. The purchasing power of Thais is more like Britain in the 90s.
Poland was always a more Western European country than Eastern European. The East Slavs have always been different and they are in much worse shape.
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