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There's a lot of hype surrounding India. The US clearly wants to boost the country to provide a Western-oriented alternative to China. No other country has the scale comparable to China and India's demographics are much better (26 million births compared to China's 10). The Indian diaspora is very successful in the US and largely pro-American and anti-China. So what's not to like here?
To India boosters like Noah Smith, there's pretty much nothing to be skeptical of. He sees the emergence of an Indo-US alliance in all but name as a necessity.
For this alignment to make sense, India must actually become a real alternative to China. Is this plausible?
First, India's economic structure is dominated by services and elite services at that (IT exports). Its manufacturing sector has been very weak. Modi tried to change this with his 2014 "Make in India" campaign. We've now gone almost a full decade since then and there's basically been zero movement on this issue. India boosters will claim that this is simply because decoupling never really got serious until now. But the problem with this line of argument is that the rhetoric is changing. Even Raytheon's CEO is claiming decoupling is impossible; the new watchword is "de-risking" which is a tacit admission that China's integration into the world's supply chains is far greater than the Former Soviet Union ever was, which is why the analogies to the Cold War are often misleading at best.
Second, a key part of China'a ascent was built on skilled, but cheap labour. Economists often overstate the importance of labour costs. What matters is productivity. Labour costs can increase as long as productivity increases faster: this is what drives long-term growth.
Nobody is denying that India has cheap labour, but is it skilled? Moving past the rarefied IT, pharma and finance sectors that dominate India's services, we find a much bleaker landscape.
50% of Indian kids are functionally illiterate. Female literacy has actually worsened over time. Though this is partly a function of the school system taking in far more kids than before. Yet Vietnam and Indonesia did the same yet did not notice such a fall. Finally, there's no improvement over the past decade.
We can argue over whether education matters much for simple manufacturing. Economists like the heterodox Ha-Joon Chang of South Korean descent has argued that it really doesn't. Perhaps this was true when SK, JP, TW and other East Asian "tigers" took off in the 1960s. Today, everything is far more digital, even relatively simple manufacturing. Workers need to read basic instructions and should at least be able to operate basic machinery, which in turn requires them to read and operate screens. Being unable to read a simple sentence immediately disqualified half the Indian workforce.
If India were to really become a fully fledged alternative to China, then it means that it would need to scale the value-added ladder the way China has. It can't just produce toys or textiles. It would have to create a fully industrial ecosystem covering the greatest sophistication. Simply put, does India has the human capital base to pull that off? The data seems to draw us to a stark conclusion: not really.
Poverty cannot be an explanation either. Vietnam had a similar per capita GDP to what India has now in the mid-2010s. Yet it did very well in international tests and it has continued to draw in a great number of manufacturing projects in a way that India has been unable to. Some of this may be related to government: Vietnam is a one-party dictatorship like China and can bulldoze through various projects of importance. But a more important explanation is simply that Vietnam has the same combination that China had a generation ago: skilled labour but at cheap rates.
In short, if American elites are now betting big on India supplanting China - or at least becoming a real viable alternative - for manufacturing then it is very likely that they will become disappointed. By the same logic, any talk of decoupling (or "de-risking") is likely to run into the hard wall that the alternatives are either too small (Vietnam) or not up to par (India).
On a sociological note, we should acknowledge that discussions on India are colored by their diaspora in the West, primarily in Anglo countries. This group are an incredibly elite selection, particularly in the US. They come from highly privileged homes with house maids and a cultural aversion to manual labour, and by extension manufacturing. It can hardly be surprising that India was ground zero for fantasies that developing countries can "leap frog" manufacturing into prosperity, despite there being virtually no examples of this in world history (barring petrostates, financial êntrepots like Singapore etc).
I've hoped to convince you of becoming more realistic about India's prospects, even if I support a move to diversify away from China for obvious geopolitical reasons. India's own potential can be hotly debated. Certainly their smart fraction is highly capable and we know that smart fractions are important for driving prosperity. The question before us is if India's much less capable "middle" will prevent it from rapid convergence once the easy gains from growth are gone. East Asia managed to educate the broad masses to fairly decent levels whereas India clearly has not. Should we really expect them to emulate East Asia given these sharp differences? As things stand, the West's current policy completely ignores this question.
My Canadian city has been flooded with Indian immigrants in the last few years, and as far as I can tell, most of them work minimum wage jobs in the food service industry. This leads me to wonder if our immigration system which is designed to select educated and skilled immigrants, is working as intended.
I'd guess you've got a lot more visibility of food service workers doing their jobs than you do of white collar workers doing their jobs. I do agree that there's a significant level of wandering away from the point with the visas, but I'd imagine the majority of food service workers you're seeing are in the country on educational visas (even if there are a lot of shambolic nothing institutions springing up as glorified visa mills) and supporting themselves that way.
Indeed, higher education abroad is prohibitively difficult for many Indians, and I know that many from even UMC backgrounds do their best to work their way through to subsidize the expense.
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There’s a dissident right talking point that China essentially brute-forced development by having a highly above-average IQ population. This is quite self-serving, I think @DaseindustriesLtd has commented on it before, but it goes something like this:
It is a little questionable for Indian rightists to believe with minimal evidence that they are great cognitive elites unfairly shackled to 900 million dumdums. They might still be right, of course.
One other thought I’ve had, based solely on personal experiences:
Stagnant developing countries often have elites who are, broadly speaking, satisfied with their lot. Brazilians and Mexicans, Indians, Russians, even South Africans. The 99th percentile are usually relatively happy and comfortable and, in my limited experience, don’t really want much more than they have. Often inequality is so high in these places that the 99th percentile live as well as the 99th percentile in most of the West (if not better due to cheaper labor). They have that European tendency to be quite satisfied. By contrast, Vietnamese, Indonesians and Malaysians, Chinese and Central Asians, remind me more of Americans. They always want more than they have, no matter how much that is. Perhaps elite greed is underestimated. Indians may be personally ambitious (see their success in Silicon Valley), but in India proper, as long as life seems good, they’re often quite relaxed about things. I will always recall the wife of a Chinese centimillionaire crying and screaming in front of me because her daughter, my friend, was rejected from a moderately prestigious (charity!) internship (she got several others). My Indian friends all wanted to go to Harvard or Stanford, sure, but as long as they did something that could lead to a decently-paid job their parents didn’t freak out if they didn’t get in.
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The US is stuck in a cold war mindset and can't stop thinking in a two-polar world. The world isn't split in pro America/anti Soviet and pro Soviet/anti America. The world now consists of multiple poles with their own interests and that can cooperate and have their own conflicts. India is the largest country in terms of population, has nuclear weapons, is a major economy and their borders mainly consists of ocean and impenetrable mountains. They aren't Norway in 1955 trying to avoid being conquered by the Soviets in some ideological struggle. The US elites seem to swing between India doing business with the US and thinking they have almost joined NATO and India buying Russian military hardware and thinking they have almost joined a neo-Warsaw pact. India isn't going to be a junior member of someone else's pole, they are going to be their own pole. India is going to do tech deals with the west, buy manufactured products from China, buy natural resources with Russia and buy oil from Arabs.
Until the US realizes that the rest of the world in many ways has caught up, they are going to be frustrating much of the world by treating them like children.
This is because US elites tend to disagree with each other. And both are able to pursue what they want.
Have they? If someone wants to be treated like an adult, the first step would be to stop acting like an entitled child.
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Must it?
What, exactly, is India supposed to achieve in this alliance?
I posit that geopolitical aims of the US are already misaligned with economic ones, at least for the foreseeable future; it wouldn't make much of a difference to sacrifice a bit more growth for geopolitical aims. In fact I believe, based on the unquestionable consensus regarding irredeemability of China* and widespread comments about small businesses withdrawing from China for basically ideological reasons, that Americans could be convinced to starve for collective greatness in prevailing over other civilizations. But there's no need for such extremes here.
What Americans take much harder than economic hits is dying for their collective greatness. While any conventional war between China and the US would probably be light on personnel, Americans would still much rather not participate directly, and certainly not be aggressors. What to do, then, if PRC never decides to initiate the Taiwan operation, and neither does it implode on its own thanks to demographics or debt or some other pedestrian reason? How will the future of the light cone be secured for freedom and justice, if there is no pretext to eliminate the Chinese state?
It could be convenient to befriend and prop up another immense, increasingly nationalist regional nuclear power that has a bone to pick with them, to the point that any eventual large-scale conflict would go as poorly for China as the current war is going for Russia. This suggests they must be subsidized. It's doable, and it's not even clear if the elite human capital moving in from both prospective parties wouldn't entirely offset the cost of doing so. It is also eminently doable to pretend that this propping-up has RoI above 1 for the necessary duration.
American economy is accelerating, capex is growing quarter by quarter (I won't cite anything, it's easy to find sources); and American innovation, in AI and robotics, promises the possibility of running industry on friendly shores with very limited high-skill labor, maybe only with Western expats, maybe with a few natives – which are trivial to recruit from that upper crust of India, 100-250 million strong.
If bullishness on AI is warranted, and furthermore AI is primarily compute-bound (with compute wholly monopolized by the US), then human capital is rapidly becoming obsolete, except in its capacity as warm bodies and tokens for political computation. The Chinese can keep priding themselves on their futile industriousness, like they've been doing throughout every historical humiliation: Indians will let robots do robotic jobs, and wisely play to their strength – in numbers.
To me this is the key point in geopolitical considerations that is largely being ignored by most pundits. If America and the West generally can actually develop and leverage seriously useful AI systems a la ChatGPT, the economic gains will be literally unfathomable.
Now I don't think it will happen immediately, but even in the next 5-10 years as the current transformer models get developed into more narrow domains, I see the US being the major adopter. If they can do it right, correct implementation of AI technology will give a massive boost to geopolitical/economic power, and should quell fears about the fertility crisis, lowering IQ, etc etc.
A while back I saw someone tell an AI optimist they're repeating verbatim the promises of the internet, and while all the tech around it made life quite a bit more convenient I have not seen any massive boosts to geopolitical or economic power.
Unless your fears about the fertility crisis are "how do I cause a fertility crisis without triggering an economic collapse" this just plainly is not going to happen.
And if this is what you're aiming for, you're still in for a surprise. AI is a lot more likely to replace upper class managers and paper pushers than it is middle class grunts, and it's the latter you'll be running out of due to fertility.
The Web is eating the world and it being produced in California contributes massively to continued American growth on the backdrop of European stagnation, for instance.
But it can't run robots.
I don't buy it. If the web never happened, do you think we wouldn't have continued American growth on the backdrop of European stagnation?
Computers had the power to automate countless manhours of tedious unproductive work, and all that happened is that we invented even more tedious unproductive work. Even if we get AI-controlled robots, I doubt things are going to be much different.
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With every paper like this, I grow more AI-pilled. (or specifically LLM-pilled)
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It's times like this I read one of your posts, see two possible readings from connotation/insinuation, and then wonder which of them was intended as both can make sense with what follows. In this case it's 'what is India supposed to achieve (for the US interest)' or 'what is India supposed to achieve (for its own interest)', either of which would fit fine in what follows.
(This isn't a critique, just a note that it's something that causes me to regularly re-read your posts to try and understand your intent.)
In this case, I don't disagree with your general thrust. I doubt the Americans pushing for Indian ties think of it in those terms / to those exact effects- I'm not sure the American establishment is as bullish on the economics of computing as much as the military-competition sense- but the point of 'what if China doesn't invade Taiwan?' is valid. More than valid, even, as the question can also be framed outside of the context of Taiwain entirely. Win Taiwan, lose Taiwan, the American logic for wanting to leverage India against China exists regardless.
And, of course, the desire to leverage the US against China can equally exist from their perspective. Never do for free what someone else is willing to pay you, so to speak. If India believes itself already in competition with China, why not seek to profit from the Americans?
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While India alone is not likely enough to provide an alternative to China for the reasons you and other posters have described, I think that collectively the ASEAN nations, India, and Bangladesh can. With a combined population of over 2.2 billion, this block of more or less pro-American nations (China may invest heavily in some of them, but it's not my impression that they have enough leverage to force Cambodia or Bangladesh to issue a wholesale trade embargo against the US and its allies, since ultimately those countries mostly just care about getting rich) would be sufficient even if we assumed their citizens had on average only half the human capital of China's. That assumption seems a bit harsh even for India, and is certainly not true for places like Vietnam and Malaysia.
It's true that coordinating trade relations with a dozen countries is a lot more complicated than managing a single relationship, but it also spreads out the risk, and the supranational organizations (i.e. ASEAN) that can facilitate this already exist. Looking at the tags on clothing and cheap manufactured goods in recent years, it seems to me that this shift is well underway for economic reasons irrespective of US foreign policy decisions, but there are a few moves that could perhaps help secure its future, such as negotiating a formal alliance with Vietnam.
With so many Muslims in India and the zeitgeist being against them - a block consisting of India and 90%+ majority Muslim countries is somewhat unstable.
It's my impression that even people who hate Muslims often tend to forget about or ignore Indonesians. I may be wrong, but Hindus and Muslims in South Asia just feel viscerally different to me in a way that Southeast Asians, whether they be Catholic Filipinos, Muslim Indonesians, Buddhist Cambodians, or Hindu Balinese, just don't. It seems like Islam is a less salient aspect of Indonesian political identity when compared to say Pakistan.
Certainly. Headscarf and shorts from which the ass will fall out is combo most often seen in Jakarta and KL.
But it looks to me that the country as a whole is moving to more radical version of islam in the last years - mostly due to gulf money and their influence. Not sure if they can nudge the foreign policy yet but it is not out of the question.
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Only if you include Pakistan in there.
Relationships between India and Bangladesh have had their ups and downs, but overall they remain quite warm. And I'd hope so too, given that we bailed them out of being genocided and the people who we saved are of the age group currently running the country!
The only minor sticking point is Bangladesh occasionally cozying up to China, but even then nobody expected them to join a war against them, or join them in a war against India.
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The percentage of Muslims in the ASEAN countries is about 40% not 90%+.
But they are not equally distributed. You have 90-ish percent in Indonesia and Bangladesh. And Malasia is a majority Muslim country. And Indonesia is a heavy hitter there.
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What's most remarkable about India for me is that despite the pronounced Indian presence in Western IT, there's basically nothing interesting happening in Indian IT. 90% of India's tech sector is just labor arbitrage for Western tech companies, and most of the remaining 10% is just local knockoffs of apps like Uber, Grubhub and so on. There was this recent tempest-in-a-teacup when Sam Altman was speaking at a college in India, and a partner at Sequoia's Indian branch asked him if there was a viable route for an Indian ChatGPT competitor on a $10 million budget, friendlier to Indian material conditions. Altman correctly replied that there was no point even trying to compete with OpenAI with those resource constraints, and a lot of Indian nationalists added that to the chip on their shoulder, but he was right - the fact that the question was even asked is something of a testament to how absurd Indian expectations are regarding what research and development looks like, because of course you can't do anything like ChatGPT on a $10 million budget. You wouldn't even get off the ground. There's a large, affluent, tech-savvy, internationally-mobile Indian diaspora, and still virtually no serious tech investments in India. China competes on this stuff and India doesn't even know where the venue is. You would think something would have happened by now.
Though I would admit in proportion to the talent the amount of truly game changing companies is fewer, I would argue that there is much happening in Indian It. The reason why there is an impression that there is not much happening is due to not much mainstream attention being paid to it.
Food delivery companies are thriving here despite the Indian market not being mature enough for that segment(Indians prefer home cooked food more). Swiggy and Zomato both have order volumes comparable to Doordash despite being limited to Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities. A lot of people in Tier 1 cities prefer ordering food online, all 3 times rather than cooking food or going out. The delivery time and price is also reasonable. The effect has been so massive that many brands have been created focusing on catering to online food delivery market, with entire buildings dedicated to cloud kitchens coming up. Both of them also made forays into the grocery delivery business promising delivery in 10-15 minutes. The reason why it is not on radar in the US is compared to doordash the revenue is significantly smaller(average order price is $5 here since food is cheaper here).
On the other side in the telecom, Jio's massive disruption of Indian market resulted in 90% decrease in price of mobile data in a year. In addition to that the number of Telecom providers from 10 to 3, which as things seems like while become a duopoly of Jio and Bharati Airtel. The reason why that is not in mainstream media may be because the story isn't sexy or appealing enough. Jio instead of being a scrappy startup was instead a pet project of the richest man in Asia, Mukesh Ambani.
But by far the biggest innovation in the Indian market is the Unified Payment Interface or UPI. UPI is a payment system which enables easy transaction directly to and from the bank account. Almost all banks support it, payment is as simple as just adding the amount and inputting a 4-6 digit code and bam its done. And oh boy has this has been adopted. From rural to urban, the rich, the poor, the startups or street hawkers, millennial, boomers you name it. Adoptions has been in every single strata. The ease of use, wide acceptance from merchants and integrations it has become defacto mode of payment. Hell, I don't even carry a wallet nowadays. Created by a government funded organization called NPCI that lended it a lot of credibility and has a lot of apps dedicated to implementing the system, though the most dominant are Google Pay and PhonePe.
There are a lot of other companies that I can go on and on about like Myntra dominating the fashion segment that has even Amazon stumped, Zerodha a robinhood like app which thrived using despite no advertising or VC funding, CRED's unique business model of targeting just the top 1% for credit.
India has its own challenges, VCs are more risk averse so getting funding for an unproved idea is significantly harder, once invested the growth at all costs mindset kills a lot of interesting startups in its infancy, even talented Indians aspire for stable jobs rather than entrepreneurship(courtesy a millennia of turbulence) though all of it is slowly changing.
UPI is a lifesaver, and I dearly missed it when I was abroad.
Frictionless transfer of money is such a glaringly obvious public good that I can only imagine the power wielded by US payment processors that keep it down.
It's about the only good thing that came out of the Modi government in my eyes.
However, I don't see most of your comment as conflicting with the parent's claims since most of the startups you mentioned are clearly copying Western innovation.
I would disagree, for an idea to be considered an innovation it has to be novel enough to be not be thought of independently by different people. For example, the idea of having to selling your goods online and getting it delivered is a clear logical conclusion of the thought process of how to make money online. It doesn't take a counter-intuitive thought process to arrive at the conclusion that the convenience of ordering at the comfort of your home is something people would find valuable and sure enough there were multiple competing companies in 90s striving to be that company. The innovation was how to pull it off, only Amazon and EBay were the only ones who could and that too with drastically different approach. In hindsight we now know that the Amazon's strategy of being the seller rather than auctioning products of ebay was the one that made a robust ecosystem of online marketplace. Even with that approach there were plenty of companies that were using the same approach yet amazon won. Amazon's bet that focusing solely on books in the start since they were non-perishable and easy to ship, was the core insight that helped it outperform the competition. This innovation was in turn copied by Flipkart in its own quest for growth in India, and that I believe is a clear example of copying Western Innovation.
The idea of food delivery is similarly not novel enough to be called an innovation. The idea that aggregating restaurants and then providing them logistical support to get their food delivered to customers willing to pay for it is not an innovation in itself. Infact all the different food delivery companies were founded in 1-2 years of each others with an unproven market model. Its the execution and the companies solutions to problems that arise with a complex logistical network to ensure speedy delivery of food is the innovation here. Doordash and Swiggy/Zomato operate in radically different environments, and at the same time their solutions to their own market specific problems are so divergent that you cannot say that Swiggy copied Doordash and vice versa. So I disagree with the proposition that these are not innovation in their own right but copying western ones.
Another good example would be Myntra. Though selling clothes online has been around since 2 decades, Myntra's approach to the complex problem of sizing issue, search-ability, options etc is an innovation that is entirely unique to it, and the fact that Amazon despite its dominance in the online retail market hasn't been able to crack the fashion segment is a testament of how innovative Myntra's value chain is. Innovation here isn't the idea that we can order clothes online but the how easy Myntra makes it for us to buy clothes by providing good estimate of the fit of any product, simple return procedure, the ability to search for clothes that someone was wearing just by uploading their pics. You cannot juyt equate an idea as innovation.
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There are plenty of serious tech investments in India. But sometimes western VC's - such as "Indian ChatGPT competitor on a $10 million" - are simply idiots.
But it's also worth recognizing - as every engineer in India does - the distinction between product and service companies. The vast majority of Indian software employment is at service companies like Infosys. These engineers are paid a lot less and are not very good. If you live in the west they are probably your only interaction with Indian software engineers. The idea of the service companies building a ChatGPT competitor is laughable, but they can certainly help migrate from one HR software provider to another. The price difference between them and a western engineer is where this dumb VC got the idea of ChatGPT for $10M from.
But in reality, OpenAI spent $8M on cloud compute alone in 2017. Indian engineers capable of building Indian ChatGPT might cost 30-40% less in BLR than in SF. So if you want to start Indian OpenAI on a budget, the budget is upwards of $600M compared to OpenAI's initial budget of $1B. That's a discount but not much of one.
There is serious tech investment in India, but it's mostly by western companies or inside big Indian companies (e.g. Ola). Salaries for comparable engineers are higher than in Europe, a bit less than in the US. But there's plenty of important and technically difficult internal projects being executed.
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This is an example of Indian elites being more closely connected to Anglo-American elites than their own population and its needs. This is true across most domains, not just IT but also economics and even politics.
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You've blocked me, although I'm not sure why since we haven't had any particular conversations I recall.
In any case, this article has been making the rounds recently that presents a more pessimistic look at the US-India alliance. India has historically been a friend of Russia, and while that friendship has been slowly melting as Russia kamikazes itself in revanchist furor, there are still several downstream ramifications. First, India has refused to join Western sanctions regimes against Russia and is actually probably the second-largest economic lifeline to Russia after China. Second, there's a significant amount of anti-US sentiment in India, often portraying the '03 Iraq war as just as bad, or even far worse than what's going on in Ukraine.
India is a curiously isolationist country. There hasn't been a single invasion going out from India in recorded history, and its generally tried to eschew formal alliances if at all possible. The USA wants to do to India what the UK did to the USA, i.e. use a nation with a bigger population to secure a favorable future. But thus far it looks like India has no real appetite to be a global actor. It's refused to join any agreement to help defend Taiwan and instead looks only to counter Chinese influence within its own subcontinent. It's kind of bizarre that a nation with the third largest GDP (by PPP) has minimalistic international aims, but it might be just something about the Indian character. In any case, it'll most likely take decades before any larger India-US alliance happens, by which point the world will look far different.
Feels like pretty obvious geographic barriers unless they'd like to invade... Sri Lanka? It's either desert, the Himalayas or deepest darkest jungles.
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It’s probably part of it that India has a relatively limited ability to project power in comparison to its theoretical capabilities due to having a large land border with its biggest rival.
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I'd like to start by saying this isn't intended to be a nit-pick, but rather that you combine a lot of points in a few lines, points I think are worth bringing up separately.
I'd disagree that the article is pessimistic. While the title is pessimistic ('America's Bad Bet on India'), the article is much more measured in a 'don't have unrealistic expectations,' and the author- Ashley J. Tellis- was allegedly one of the key actors in Washington in the Bush years who helped facilitate the nuclear normalization agreement that fundamentally changed the trajectory of US-India relations. I don't think it's fair to say Tellis is pessimistic, or even that the article actually says the US wrongly (badly) invested into the relationship with India, as much as telling people not to be unreasonably euphoric... and I think there's a
This is a Eurocentric viewpoint on the Western sanctions regime against Russia. Most of the world hasn't joined the Westerns sanctions regime against Russia in the sense the Europeans did. This is one of those times where 'Europe' does not mean 'the international system.' There is no expectation of participation by most of the world, because for most of the world this is a European problem, not their own problem, and their policies tend to be for reasons other than Russia or Europe itself. This goes for the US far eastern allies as well, where there are some substantial parallel interests in play with support to Ukraine- such as the South Koreans getting paid a lot of money for ammo, and the Japanese having a view for shaping the precedents for a Taiwan scenario.
India isn't joining the Western sanctions regime... but India IS aligning with one of the most critical points of the regime, which is the structured energy sanctions to depress the cost- and profits to Russia- of Russian energy exports. India likes this because that means they get to buy below-cost energy. India buying great volumes of Russian is the sanctions working as intended. What India isn't doing is aggressively trying to screen dual-purpose technologies- of which they are a drop in the bucket.
There's a significant amount of anti-US sentiment in Europe, who before Ukraine portrayed the '03 Iraq war as reason not to support the US in a Taiwan scenario. There's a significant amount of anti-US sentiment in South Korea, where the Americans are in some circles tied to the rightwing dictatorship and preventing national reunification. There's a significant amount of anti-US sentiment pretty much anywhere in the world, even in the US, where self-flagellation is practically a political sport.
This isn't the sort of thing parties base their pragmatic balance-of-power interests off of either. This would be an obstacle if there were no other topics to consider.
There also hasn't been a polity known as India for most of recorded history, which makes this a bit of a just-so narrative. India as a unified polity is a consequence of the the British Empire, before which no one had a major maritime empire and the geographic region of India being divided was precisely what enabled the East India Company's divide-and-conquer strategy to work.
In the brief historical span of India being a unified and independent power, much of it was spent not only trying to maintain internal coherency and getting over the legacies of colonialism, in the international context of the Cold War (where it was not a superpower) and the American hyperpolar period. The next period of multipolarity will be the literal first historical opportunity for India to both be a polity to act with agency and have the means to.
And why should it, when not even the US has done so?
The number of treaty allies Taiwan has is 0. The number of international agreements to help defend Taiwain is 0. There's no agreement to join.
This comes off as selective standards no one else is held to... but also no one has proposed. If your standard for India is vocal intent to defend Taiwan, you'll be disappointed by everyone, which says less about everyone and more about the standard.
What major international aims does it need to have? The American-led world order was very conducive to allowing India to develop in peace under its own terms. The security threats are not particularly existential. India doesn't need a navy to go secure vital imports, it doesn't need an empire to provide raw materials, it's primary ideological project of Hindu nationalism is internal rather than missionary, and it's people and politicians can make very real cases that spending attention and resources abroad detracts from very real domestic concerns. India doesn't have a primary international problem that can be 'solved' by being more active- nukes in Pakistan see to that- so why not, beyond appeals to ambition?
India's not, say, the United States, whose international system will be taken apart or changed if it doesn't actively compete. India is generally content with the system for the time being, and changes/attempts by others to change the system now have a good chance of either being in its favor, or offering it a good position to solicit concessions from courting powers.
Here's I'll conclude by agreeing whole heartedly... and say that's probably the expectation. The US attempts to court India haven't been about immediate-term things like Taiwan, but with a view for long-term balancing, which will exist regardless of what happens with Taiwan.
This is a sentiment I hear often, but it's a cop-out to some degree. During the early days of the war, there were many who wanted the sanctions to entail full isolation of Russia, and India's refusal to sign on caused a few minor diplomatic incidents. Eventually the West decided that the oil price cap was all they could reasonably achieve, but that in turn has meant that Russia's economic situation is far more stable than it otherwise would have been. Saying after-the-fact that "we never actually wanted a FULL oil embargo" is Western cope more than anything.
I meant that no Indian power has tried to conquer outside of the subcontinent. I wasn't referring specifically referring to the modern state of India. For the most part it's true for the thousands of years of recorded history, apart from brief incursions trying to control Himalayan passes like Kabul, and notably the Chola empire which I had never heard of until this thread.
I wasn't specifically referring to binding treaties here, but rather future intent. The US clearly signaled an intent to defend Taiwan IF Taiwan actually chooses to resist (which is still an open question at this point, admittedly). Japan has also indicated that its open to the idea. There's near-zero interest from anyone else though, including Europe and India.
You could ask a similar question to basically any geopolitically active country. For India it could be countering the BRI, countering Chinese influence in SE Asia, building a Middle Eastern network to isolate Pakistan, forging diplomatic and economic links around the rim of the Indian Ocean to turn it into an Indian lake, etc.
Fortunately, I am not many people, and I never said that, nor did the people who were proposing the oil price mechanism, who were separate from the people who wanted a full embarge (or, good heavens, a blockade).
The people who wanted the sanctions to entail full isolation of Russia were never realistically going to get that, and I noted at the time that sanctions were crafted from the start to leave critical parts of the Russian-European trade, including significant parts of the energy relationship, untouched. That the oil price cap was all that they could reasonably achieve does not change the point that the oil price cap is not nothing, and that it is having the intended impact by the people who won the push for that instead of an embargo.
More most of the thousands of years of recorded history, there was no technological ability to meaningfully conquer outside of or into the subcontinent. The two primary historical actors that conquered into the subcontinent at all (Alexander the Great and the Mongols) fractured from their outside polities almost immediately, and even the Mongols were promptly stuck in the functional non-unity of the system which was so busy locally competing there was no meaningful point in trying to conquer outside of the continent, far away and technologically unsustainable, when there were still immediate neighbors who weren't conquered.
This has nothing to do with cultural character, and everything to do with a lack of means and opportunity. The hindu kush is big and expensive to move armies through. Armies that hadn't even dominated the much richer neighbors. Even the Romans prioritized their conquests.
And yet, you're still not explaining why they should, which was the point of the question.
This is, again, a selectively claimed standard based on, well, not even a notional obligation. If only two countries maybe- conditionally- without any binding obligation to- might involve themselves, where is the obligation of expectation for future intent coming from. That Europe- formal treaty allies, openly aligned- are not interested in such a position only weakens any basis of expecting India to take a higher position than them.
You're claiming India fails some nebulous standard... but why should anyone care about this standard in the first place that they never pretended to agree to?
I... am. India is a geopolitically active country. You may be unaware of its activities, but this just sets up the point that your understanding of India's priorities and interests and the Indian government's are not aligned.
These are nice for you to want India to seek, but that's not what I asked ('needs'), or a position of what India believes its needs are.
This is a pushback against a sort of typical minding of 'India makes no sense for not pursuing its interests as I see them,' without actually identifying if those interests are what India agrees are goals ('countering' BRI means what?), practical (how is a Middle Eastern network going to practically isolate Pakistan rather than the same Arabs maintaining relations with both), or not already in the process (forging diplomatic and economic links around the Indian Ocean).
Hogwash. The Himalayas form a powerful shield but they're really only an extreme barrier to the northeast. To the east is SE Asia which Indian states rarely bothered with, which stands in contrast to China's centuries of bashing on Vietnam. Invasions from the northwest happened several times (Alexander, Mongols, Ghurids, Timurids, Mughals) while invasions from Indian nations rarely happened in the reverse direction, and when they did they didn't go far. Finally, in the south was the rich trade of the Indian Ocean. If the Greeks and the Vikings could send colonists and military expeditions hundreds or thousands of miles from their original homeland, then the technology certainly existed for India to do something similar, at least more than just Chola.
Because an emboldened China would presumably be bad news for India. One could ask why Poland and the Baltics are sending every gun and tank they can spare to Ukraine, but I'd say the reasoning is pretty obvious. Yet those countries have Article 5 to fall back on if Ukraine collapses, while India has nothing similar. China still claims hundreds of square miles of Indian land in the Northeast, and border disputes flare up pretty frequently these days. India has a vested interest in seeing Chinese revanchism flame out in Taiwan rather than on its own territory, either in the Northeast or by a China-Pakistan alliance doing something in Kashmir.
This is a non-answer.
"Why isn't India more geopolitically active?"
"Because it's government doesn't want to be. "
"Why not?"
"Because it doesn't think it would gain much"
"Why not?"
If the response is that India is perfectly content to free-ride on Pax Americana, that explanation goes out the window when China seeks to explicitly overthrow that order and bring about a Chinese Century.
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There is surprisingly little of this in Korea, considering how much we could and probably should be judged for. There are people who don't like drunk American expats and soldiers but overall the population continues to have one of the most positive views of the US of any country in the world (89% favorable here). The current government is also extremely pro-American, waves American flags at rallies, etc.
It should also be said the population is far from unified in hating their dictators either; they have plenty of vocal, mainstream supporters to this day, kind of like Pinochet in Chile:
Oh, I fully agree with 'surprisingly little', and absolutely acknowledge the political divide on the views of the dictatorship. It certainly helps the later that they (a) actually did improve living standards more than North Korean socialism, and (b) actually did give way to democracy. There was definitely a time in the early post-dictatorship period and even into the early 2000s where there was a much rawer nerve of anti-Americanism / 'we are not a colony and will seek reunification our way.'
North Korea squandered that, of course, and I think it's a consequence of American patience at the time that allowed the mainstream South Korean left to accept that the US wasn't so much pro-rightwing-dictator / wasn't trying to treat Korea as a colony.
I say 'significant' because- aside from University backrooms and such- some of that American skepticism does find itself into ROK national politics/policy from time to time. It was much stronger in the sunshine policy period, but recent President Moon who did his efforts with Trump and KJU was himself from the sunshine era, and some of the influences could still shine through in what was considered a priority in the relationship and such. (Like the often-stalled United Nations Command OPCON transfer from the US to the ROK, which goes back and forth be party.)
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India's influence on the world has been mostly cultural rather than military e.g. the spread of Buddhism to hundreds of millions of followers from Mongolia to Indonesia, the use of Indianized scripts and loanwords from Sanskrit and Pali in a half-dozen Southeast Asian languages, the construction of enormous Hindu temple complexes in Angkor Wat and Prambanan, the transmission of mathematical concepts through the Arab world into the west, etc.
In terms of the Indian state itself flexing its muscles around the world, I think it's too early to tell given its youth and current lack of development. China didn't become a major player on the world stage until this century when it got within striking distance of first world status. Of course, if we conclude that India will never get to that point for whatever reason then we may have to count them out or otherwise reduce our ambitions, but that remains to be seen.
I think this requires a massive qualifier on “major player on the world stage”, or at least some sort of time limit. Same for India as well, to be fair.
I was using the sense of "ability to project power on the other side of the world" by which no one really qualified until the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires in the 16th century.
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The Chola Empire invaded many countries In Southeast Asia. The Mauryan Empire extended its borders far west beyond the Indus and the Mughals attempted, unsuccessfully, to retake their Central Asian homeland from their power base in India. Britain attempted to invade Afghanistan, unsuccessfully, from India. Indian soldiers conquered Iraq and fought the Japanese in Southeast Asia during WW2.
India's isolationism in pre-modern times is more due to geography and the fact that they cannot breed horses effectively there. So, they were completely at the mercy of Central and Western Asian powers who could field cavalry forces.
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Indian views of the US seem to be more positive than is the norm, according to Pew.
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I would expect that if push came to shove, India would sacrifice its relationship with Russia (already a white albatross apart from the cheap oil, since all the military equipment they sold us is now looking extremely suspect), if they had an opportunity to really kick China in the balls with the assurance of US support.
Such sentiment is not common among the people that matter, in the upper echelon of the government, who still have an inferiority complex that is greatly pleased by validation from the States.
To see that phenomenon in action, albeit not at the state level, look at the popularity of the genre of YouTube videos that involve a random white person praising any aspect of India.
Does this matter when there's a reasonable expectation that in the case of a shooting war, the Indian navy would turn the Strait of Malacca into a graveyard for any vessel that had red in its flag?
China certainly fears opportunistic attacks, even if India itself doesn't particularly care about Taiwan (and we ought to care more, if only for the sake of the supply of semiconductors).
We have no real reason to beef with our neighbors with the notable and glaring exception of Pakistan and China, both nuclear powers. That takes a lot of the oxygen out of the air when it comes to an appetite for other interventions, since there's always the chance that the former clown will attempt to take advantage of it. Pakistan at this point is a shambling zombie mostly motivated by a desire to stick it to India.
I'm sure that in an alternate universe where the US shared a land border with hostile great powers like Russia and China, expeditionary sentiments would be dampened by a need to conserve force where it counts.
Only to propagandised idiots of the 'everything Russia bad school of t hought'.
Nobody with even a small amount of sense who's been paying attention to Ukraine was is saying Russia is losing due to 'bad equipment'.
I don't think "everything Russia bad". Ukraine itself uses a lot of Soviet equipment, the same as Russia does.
What I'm getting at is that getting locked in to the Russian equipment is a bad idea for the same reason that you don't just buy a weapons platform, you also need to buy support, both logistical and technical. Russian equipment seems significantly worse than Western equivalents when it comes to complicated electronics and avionics, and it's a dead-end platform as the West shoots further ahead.
You can see how poorly the AK-12, T-14 and Su-57 do compared to their western counterparts, if Russia had enough confidence in the latter two to field them.
West is superior in radards and avionics, however, that's a very small % of overall military equipment.
Overall the western MIC doesn't seem to be in a good shape. It produces very little, and given the levels of dysfunction in its leadership I doubt it can learn from the war and develop useful things needed for a future war. E.g. they're still building aircraft carriers despite it being fairly obvious carriers won't survive modern missiles, whether hypersonic cruise or guide ballistic.
It's really quite something that e.g. in Ukraine, Russia apparently has better recon and more drone capabilities than the west, somehow.
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In fact, I’m sure that in an alternate universe where Brazil was aligned against the US and willing to put money behind that position, we would not have been invading random middle eastern countries or expanding NATO(if it existed in the first place). The US owns the hemisphere, after all.
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But we... have... red... in our flag...?
I implore the US Navy not to staff its ships with citizens of Chinese descent in that case. We might shoot them just for fun.
Well, if you want the Strait of Malacca to be de facto occupied, anyway.
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Let’s look at this thru a lens of being a consultant if say I was advising the WH on the viability of the plan.
Are Indians actually smart? I honestly don’t know. We get higher caste Indians here and heavily filtered from a giant population. If they are then one can probably make an assumption India could replace China. I have some doubts here because India has always been the “next big thing” for perhaps even centuries and it never happens. Sort of feels like a better Africa. They were never the leader or a great power of civilization like China has often been.
The de-risking from China is likely accurate. It’s too smart of a country not to make many economic and technological gains. I’ve bought into a lot of Galeevs rhetoric but it does appear Russia has never been a real great power and all of their Soviet tech was mostly imported from the west. They existed as a feudal state for military protection thru their entire history. Perhaps the Russians could have been a great power but the military threat was always too much which kept them limited to resource extraction and military. China is obviously pass that stage.
Probably a good ally. But I would never expect them to take the next step and be more because it’s never worked before.
I've had... bizarre experience with Indian's professionally. Every Indian coder, support staff, offshore worker, project manager, etc I've ever worked with over 20 years, had this peculiar mode of communications failure. It's hard to even describe. On my end it looked like some part of their cognition was just broken. Like they'd make all the right mouth sounds that they understood certain questions, comments and directives, and then proceed to perform tasks or give answers that were totally detached from any context we were operating under. It's how I imagine p-zombies would behave. It actually reminds me of trying to get ChatGPT to understand my point, and it just failing to over and over again. Because ChatGPT doesn't think, or really comprehend anything at all. It's just a statistical model of what words come after what other words.
Like, one time I was having a conversation with the Indian project manager we were subcontracted to. There were three requirements on the project, that when taken all together, only a subset of 2 could be satisfied. And trying to have this conversation with the PM just went round and round in circles. I explained that I implement requirement 1 and 2, then requirement 3 cannot be satisfied. They'd come back to just do 3. I'd return that if I implement requirement 3, requirement 1 cannot be satisfied. They'd come back and insist I implement requirement 1. I'd explain if I implemented requirement 1 and 3, requirement 2 could not be satisfied. We went round and round and round like this, with me giving detailed technical and logical reasons why these requirements in aggregate created a paradox, or a double bind. After two weeks of beating my head against a wall, they handed me off to a non-Indian and we had the issue sorted in 5 minutes as he immediately understood what I was pointing out.
This person was a project manager.
I've had far worse experiences with lower level Indians I've had to work with. Simple instructions like "DO NOT RESTART THE SERVER" just get flatly ignored routinely. Like, I tell the guy, to his face, looking directly into his lazy eye not to do it. He proceeds to do exactly that 5 minutes later.
So, I just donno. I hate to generalize. Generally I'm not a fan of "different forms of intelligence" discussions. But my every professional interaction with an Indian, at all levels of an organization, have been frustrated by them seeming to just not ever grok anything I tried to explain to them. Conversational knowledge just refused to penetrate their skull in any meaningful way. I simply cannot account for it. I've had people tell me it has to do with their culture, and never ever under any circumstances admitting they don't understand, or don't know something. I guess I can't rule it out.
That matches pretty well with my experience. At my current job ~90% of my coworkers are Indian, most of them offshore. The ones good enough to get to the US are noticably better, but not by much. I look like a miracle worker to them with some really simple, CS101 tier crap.
Real (but slightly simplified) conversation a few weeks ago:
Them: "The API client library you wrote only takes a single instance of this object, could you change it to take an array/list/whatever?"
Me: "Well the third party API only takes a single instance at a time so I can't change it directly, but I can add a method to the library that takes a list and loops over it while sending it to the API."
Them: "That would be great, how long would it take you to implement that change? We have a project that's going to use your library starting in a month and need it reasy by then."
Me: "I can have it done in... 5 minutes?"
Them: "Really? That's amazing, how can you do it so quick?"
Maybe ChatGPT will replace more jobs than I thought.
I've long though ChatGPT would replace offshore work. Or at least executives would give it a try. They'd probably still discover that everything it ever does is wrong, just like offshore workers. But they'll give it the old college try for a decade or two.
And the poor bastard who has to oversee the quality of work it produces will be driven just as mad by ChatGPT pretending it understands the request and returning nonsense, as he was by the offshore workers who did the same. If anything it will be worse, since ChatGPT will return results instantly, and the Indians take a week or two. He will have zero reprieve from the stupidity. Just complete idiocy, in his face, all the time, that he must fruitlessly attempt to wring productivity out of.
Maybe with instant results he could iterate over the stupidity faster and figure out what approach works, so,...
Anyway - apart from the weird hype, I saw a lot of reasonable coders saying chatGPT increased their efficiency at making stuff that works by a factor of 3-5x over doing things the old fashioned way (reading a lot of stackexchange).
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>making the right facial expressions and mouth sounds to get coworkers to go away
>half or quarter-assing a task until it solves itself or becomes someone else's problem
Indians be just like me, fr fr.
(I wish, it sounds like I'm far more virgin and less Chad when it comes to work than your [former?] Indian co-workers).
Part of it might be that Indians are disproportionately and stereotypically in functions like IT or IT-adjacent, where both the perceived upside (bonuses, promotions) and downside (getting fired) could be limited, and there is high perceived ease of finding a similar role if fired (hence the meme of IT-workers working multiple remote roles simultaneously). As opposed to roles such as investment banking, where it's relatively easy to get let go or "subtly" pushed out, bonuses are a large chunk of your compensation, and finding a replacement role can be difficult (even at a lesser firm, or a "lesser" job function like corporate strategy/finance/development where you would even need to mingle with normie corporate plebeians).
It's like perpetual quiet quitting. Such effort efficient Indians could even view their counterpart Americans (or Westerners in general) as naive try-hards who feel intrinsically motivated to kindly revert and do the needful without any external incentive to do so.
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At Facebook I once wrote a diagnostic for a piece of hardware that was causing trouble for my team. The folks who qualify hardware wanted to integrate it into their qualification process to guard against hardware with this particular fault from getting deployed again. It was a Python script with well defined args discoverable via
--help.This is was my first and only interaction with a contractor. The guy was Indian, and it was mind-blowing. After three meetings of explaining that he just needs to run the script and collect output via whatever mechanism qualification already uses, I gave up. I couldn't have simplified the task anymore without just doing it for him.
At one point he just copied and pasted my script, with no modifications and nothing to invoke it, and put me on as a reviewer.
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I think these are just ordinarily low-intelligence (or maybe even average intelligence, when the task requires more) people who have learned how to smile and nod well enough at things they don't understand that it's not obvious immediately that they have not a clue in the world. Indian, because Americans of that intelligence level usually don't get into IT in the first place (although I have run into a few) and Chinese of that intelligence level aren't good enough at the faking it part (at least not in English).
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I've seen average IQ figures as low as the 70s for India. Of course, there are some smaller ethnicities that are akin to Jews in being oasis of higher IQ for one reason or another, but largely due to consistent endogamy.
The really smart ones are rightly fond of fleeing or have already fled. They know they'll do much better in an economy that doesn't seek to redistribute most of the wealth they create after taxing it away from them.
Trying to make a "national IQ" for a fairly homogeneous population like Han Chinese or ethnic Germans makes sense. You get a pretty even distribution.
But India is made up of thousands of separate castes, divided by millennia of endogamous marriage. That is why even if the India average is low-80s, you will have far more people at the high-end of the distribution than you'd expect from a clean bell curve, precisely because of this heterogeneity.
That makes sense to me, and fits with the observations of the caste makeup of Indians abroad to a degree.
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It would seem to me then that india either has higher standard deviations of IQ or have cloistered high IQ populations. A 70-80 high IQ country just isn’t go to throw off the amount of US tech executives that India has accomplished even with massive population. As an American it seems very odd to view India as a low IQ country because of how many Doctors and first-world quality engineers they throw off. As an American it feels like India has Einsteins hiding in subsistence farming. Perhaps the caste system led to this.
I'm not upper caste, but I do live in a very filtered bubble of successful professionals since birth. I do know that my dad was by far the smartest one in his family.
I am, unfortunately, not as well acquainted with HBD arguments pertaining to my home nation as I am to the US (you can see how my priorities lie), but even I grudgingly admit that it's likely that millennia of strict endogamy can produce results, analogous to the Jews in Europe.
If I leave abroad, I'll be contributing to the same impression as you have, but keep in mind you're categorically not seeing all the people who don't have the talent or drive to make it across two oceans.
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India still has childhood malnutrition problems.
Some of them exacerbated by ideological reasons- the Hindu opposition to meat eating is likely a contributing factor.
I was under the impression that the upper castes (and the wealthier castes) were more likely to practice strict vegetarianism than the lower castes. Obviously meat is still going to be harder to afford for the poor in lower castes, bit I don't think it would be as much of an issue.
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Plus, competing with China is very difficult. They've got a gigantic, insanely large industrial base. China has 30% of global manufacturing value-added, equal to the EU and US combined: https://policytensor.substack.com/p/is-the-us-stronger-than-china?
It will be very hard for other countries to compete with such huge economies of scale, such massive amounts of infrastructure. Chinese labour might not be so cheap anymore, yet they've got all the steel, railways, ports, engineers who built 1000 factories before and are getting really good at it. Who can work more cheaply than a robot? Who is more pro-industrial/economic efficiency than China? Not the US, that's for certain. The US doesn't even have the best ports in North America, they refuse to automate like China is doing. China has roughly as many industrial robots per worker as the US (probably more by now), despite the US having a rather large head start.
https://www.therobotreport.com/10-most-automated-countries-wordlwide-in-2020/
I agree that if China manages to wholeheartedly automate the majority of their industry, they'll be nigh unstoppable unless the US wakes up and does the same.
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Somewhere on the "reasons to be pessimistic about India list" there must be mentioned affirmative action, which destroys everything it touches and of which India has a more oppressive and thoroughgoing system than just about anywhere outside of South Africa. Yeah, China has affirmative action, too, but they're 90% Han Chinese, while in India up to 75% of the population gets affirmative action in some jurisdictions. It is one of the main reasons the South Asians in your life are here instead of there.
A hundred times this. India unnecessarily handicaps itself by subverting its otherwise reasonably robust commitment to meritocracy.
I agree it's a major reason for skilled professionals to flee the country, such as yours truly, because even after finishing med school I still face massive barriers to further career progression gated by exams with insane levels of hard quotas for "underprivileged" groups. And even were I to grit my teeth and force myself through, I don't want to raise children in such an environment.
Of course, Indian culture does endorse meritocracy as a whole, unlike the West where it increasingly needs to be fought for, but the AA activists here operate under the figleaf that the system is still meritocratic and the people who avail it aren't worse at everything, even if anyone who isn't legally blind can see the qualitative difference between AA candidates and those who got there the old-fashioned way.
I'd run from a doctor if I learned they got through based on quotas, assuming I had a choice. Unfortunately, having grown up a naive caste-blind kid, I lack the keen ability to distinguish them by their surnames this truly requires.
In fact, my girlfriend, who while very smart still has SocJus sympathies, is fervently blackpilled on the matter because as someone who fought their way into medicine while coming from a significantly less well off background compared to me (she was raised by a single mom), even she's seen how the rotten sausage is made. Most doctors from the General Category are, regardless of whether it's viable to say so in public.
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Rare is the day I don't get tagged in a post that references India indeed.
That being said, I broadly agree with you, the prospects of fully decoupling from China are daunting, but I wouldn't say that it's an effort guaranteed to not pay some dividends.
Quantity has a quality all of its own, even if 50% of Indian kids are functionally illiterate, that leaves maybe anywhere around a hundred million more who are.
Now, I'm personally bearish on the country's midterm prospects, and while I can't claim to be able to entirely decouple my opinion of the country from my hatred of Modi and his ilk, I see great risk of the country imploding under pressure, likely from automation induced unemployment shocks that potentially stoke sectarian strife; which is why I'm departing post-haste.
As long as you have a massive pool, you can still dredge out a great number of qualified candidates, and even outstanding ones.
When I became familiar with HBD, I had to grapple with the fact that my previous implicit assumption that India was high up in the totem pole when it came to the quality of its people was skewed because the large number of successful Indians dominating foreign lands are a heavily filtered set, and not representative of how Indians in India perform.
After all, isn't the best counter-argument to claims that HBD is motivated reasoning and just a way to dunk on your outgroup to outright admit that the ethnicity you belong to isn't the best per capita?
The HBD framework suggests that India will never achieve the same kind of growth and success as East Asian nations, at least not without something fundamental changing. That's not to say that it's not an important player, just that the numbers are bloated, but not to the degree that they don't convey some advantage.
I'm not going to speculate on how well we can onshore manufacturing, because I consider myself insufficiently informed on the matter. But it looks to me that an India that successfully achieves even 30% of China's manufacturing clout would be a major buffer against blackmail through their manufacturing dominance, and even with my jaundiced view of the country I suspect it can achieve that.
You'd think so, but I've seen leftists make the argument "White supremacists' willingness to rate the intelligence of Asians higher than that of whites is just because they hate blacks so much that they're willing to do anything to insult their intelligence."
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What’s India’s average IQ? Mexico has an average IQ in the 80s and has achieved significant economic growth and large high skill manufacturing sector.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country says 76.
I'm certain that the total number of Indians with an IQ above that of Mexico is probably double or triple the total population of Mexico, if there was plausible mechanism to find them, they should be able to do the same. I know education acts as a filter, but if you mean technical manufacturing labor that doesn't need a degree, I don't know.
We certainly have no shortage of engineers, quite the opposite in fact.
Damn that’s depressingly low. I really expected India to have an average IQ that’s at least way out of range for sub Saharan Africa even if it’s not particularly high.
Is it possible that there’s massive regional variations that allow an Indian manufacturing belt somewhere in the country even as, say, the Ganges is still a bunch of subsistence farmers?
I know there are large regions of India that to me almost certainly have dirt low IQs, at least as implied from standardized testing scores. Bihar, for one. The South is also likely a bit smarter than the average.
But from my limited understanding, it's more productive to go by caste instead, at least within Hinduism or recent converts away from it. Tamil Brahmins are notoriously intelligent, and massively overrepresented in maths.
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I don’t actually think you need high IQ to have a manufacturing belt. You need a long tail of talent to design and implement the process, followed by a bunch of “good enough” labor that won’t burn down the building. With careful enough design, that bar can get pretty low.
But yes, I am under the impression that India does have enormous regional imbalance.
I mean there’s a reason that even stable with good infra parts of subsaharan Africa don’t have lots of manufacturing.
Obviously Latin America shows you don’t need an average IQ around a hundred, but lots of manufacturing is in fact skilled work that requires access to the sorts of people who can learn to do skilled tasks.
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Is it likely that various flavors of Hindus are going to fight over religion in an economically stressed situation ?
I think the most likely flashpoint would be Hindus versus Muslims, at least at the very beginning, but depending on how bad it gets we might get regional violence where it's one state against the other.
I don't think it's right to frame the latter as a conflict between "various flavors of Hindus", because as far as I can personally tell, most Hindus don't nitpick and form sects like Christians do, there's no massive turf war between Protestant and Catholic analogues, and most people just broadly identify as Hindu and leave it there.
It would look more like ethnic strife at that point instead of something explicitly religious. Perhaps North India versus the South, or the far more fractal breakdowns where neighboring states find themselves pitted in negative sum conflict for resources.
But my model, not that I have much hard data to base it off, suggests more like a widespread failure of law and order as the state simply runs out of money, can't automate in time to reap the dividends, and then while everything collapses the religious fighting begins.
I don't claim very strong confidence in this, but I do still think the country has a rather high risk of volatility overall.
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