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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27240 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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Being richer than 97.23% of our 100k gods, like Ambani, will buy you a sick skyscraper. It won't clean the streets outside.

But it will clean the streets outside, friend. Google says Ambani is worth 97 billion dollars. Street cleaning is no arcane secret, many nations have essentially perfected it. The machines are readily sold by all the usual manufacturers. Salaries for manual laborers are very low. Training the local population is only a matter of hiring traffic and street wardens for a few years until the people get used to it. Google suggests the average Mumbai taxi driver makes about $3000 a year, and I suppose we can assume that street cleaners are unlikely to be paid much more. If the city objects, India is a corrupt enough place that the country’s richest man can bribe them. A guy worth $97bn can clean the streets outside his skyscraper, he can hire 10,000 men to do it by hand if he wants to (that would amount to what, a paltry $50m a year?), it’s absurd to discuss this banal issue solved in every developed country and even many poorer countries for much less money as some impossibility!

Downtown Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, even Jakarta (!) are so much cleaner than the wealthier parts of Mumbai or New Delhi. So is Windhoek. So are parts of Accra and Addis, even. What holds India back? It’s not some kind of upstanding socialist government insisting that the rich can’t do this; as the Adani reports showed, the government is clearly in the pocket of the billionaires, who are largely high IQ and high caste. The only explanation is lack of will, not among the peasants but among the rich.

And why should they bother, when they can travel abroad to their mansions in London or their penthouse in Singapore? But again, the rich Malaysians have those too, and they still work to make Kuala Lumpur a better place to live. I’m often criticized for my own elitism, but I don’t blame all of society’s problems on the poor in whose nation I share.

I had much the same argument with my sister about cleaning up San Francisco and she simply refused to concede that any San Francisco elites actually care about stepping over human waste on their way to the office. Perhaps it's the same in India.

In San Francisco at least one can point to some kind of ‘war’ among the elite, with intense power struggles over the lax treatment of the homeless and some tech lords taking strong, opposing political stances, Alex Soros getting involved, the drama around the DA recall and school board stuff, national politicians using it as a key indicator, huge dissent within Silicon Valley etc. Yes, it’s still a dump, but also (a) the nice parts like Pac Heights where rich people live are mostly still ‘relatively’ clean and (b) it’s a major topic of conversation. In Mumbai there is no great public obstacle to cleaning the streets, people don’t worship garbage the way the left worships homeless vagrants in major progressive cities in the US. In India generally there is some religious sensitivity around curbing the rights of cows specifically, but they’re not the main issue and there are solutions acceptable to religious conservatives.

Deep insecurity. The best Indian doesn't want to improve India because he doesn't consider himself Indian, in a much deeper part of the lizard brain than Indians staring at any and all white people they see can convey. The most surefire way to get a desi supermodel's parents to force her to marry you is to have a British, Canadian, or US passport.

I asked almost this exact question to a (native) friend while living in Mumbai. We were driving past this dudes skyscraper and I asked him how people feel about the fact that this super rich guy has a skyscraper to live in but it’s surrounded by absolute filth and poverty. Isn’t he at least embarrassed?

He said it’s because of the Hindu belief in Karma and reincarnation. Basically: those people living outside of the skyscraper fucked up in a past life and this is their punishment. The rich did well and this is their reward.

Personally I would assume that cleaning the streets would be a karma earning thing to do. If I was rich and wanted to secure a good life next go around, cleaning the streets and helping the poor would be high on my list of priorities, but this could just be me assuming me own, Catholic, culture as the default. A little googling backs this up; among religions Christians are more charitable than Hindus (or Muslims): https://www.jstor.org/stable/41940751#:~:text=the%20relationship%20between%20religion%20and%20philanthropic%20behavior.,%2C%20Hinduism%2C%20and%20Buddhism).

He said it’s because of the Hindu belief in Karma and reincarnation. Basically: those people living outside of the skyscraper fucked up in a past life and this is their punishment. The rich did well and this is their reward.

Lol. Lmao. Maybe that's what your friend personally believes, but that's nowhere near representative of the actual reasons.

Rich people are usually tolerated by the poor pretty much everywhere (not that they have the power to change it).

Most Indians are firm believers in meritocracy, regardless of particular quibbles about corruption, nepotism and so on.

This explanation is just as daft as claiming that the reason why a struggling but pious redneck in the States doesn't burn down someone's McMansion is because he expects them to be equalized in Heaven.

Lol. Lmao. Maybe that's what your friend personally believes, but that's nowhere near representative of the actual reasons.

Yeah I'm not a Hindu and admittedly know nothing about the culture. Some googling does seem to suggest that Hindus aren't particularly charitable, though.

At first I thought it was that the rich don't use the public realm because of the oppressive climate, which makes being inside an air conditioned mall preferable to a walk outside. But again there are many countries with equatorial / tropical / hot-and-humid climates that don't have India's issues, so that can't be it. Even for entirely selfish reasons, wouldn't it be nice to occasionally be able to walk outside? Wouldn't it be nice to have a good view from your palace skyscraper instead of looking down at squalor? These considerations don't appear to be of great import.

Sure, Ambani can pull that off, if he made it a priority. That leaves about 99.999% of us. Certainly the few hundred million middle class who wish it were otherwise.

The only explanation is lack of will, not among the peasants but among the rich.

And why should they bother, when they can travel abroad to their mansions in London or their penthouse in Singapore? But again, the rich Malaysians have those too, and they still work to make Kuala Lumpur a better place to live. I’m often criticized for my own elitism, but I don’t blame all of society’s problems on the poor in whose nation

I am in agreement there's a lack of will. I disagree that emigration is the most suitable explanation for it. Like I said, this has been a problem well before UMC Indians could, with only a little bit of effort, flee to the West, if not the US.

Sure, Ambani can pull that off, if he made it a priority. That leaves about 99.999% of us. Certainly the few hundred million middle class who wish it were otherwise

There's clearly either a revealed preference here or some kind of skill issue. India is around 41% urbanised. Take away the rural classes and a "few hundred million" people represents like 30-50% of the urban population, which would be even higher in non-slum areas. If those people and a smattering of billionaires can't or won't clean up their cities then I'm not sure what would get them to. There doesn't appear to be that spirit of municipal capitalism that was prominent in, say, the late 19th century in England. Mumbai must have greater resource than 1870s Birmingham, and look at Chamberlain! And if not grand paternalistic mayors, then at least naked self interest to carve out a space for those few hundred million you mention.

I am claiming it's revealed preference, to the extent that applies when considering coordination problems.

I'm pretty sure I have an accurate idea of how dirty 1870s London is, let alone from the horse shit, and believe me most of the country is nowhere near that bad.

By the time most people become billionaires or at least multimillionaires, they're used to taking the overall grime for granted, and besides they're going from enclave to enclave in Audis with the windows rolled up, it's not like they have to walk.

What was the population density in 1800s coal country?

The more people around you, the higher chance one or more is going to engage in some commons-trampling. Maybe not even on purpose, given that sanitation and transport are not trivial problems.

Well England's population density was around 160/km² in 1870, 22m in total. Maharashtra has a population density of 365/km². Mumbai now must be 3 or 4x denser than the West Midlands of the time if the state as a whole is that dense. I don't think density is the key at all (look at the Ganges valley, UP and Bihar combined is ~USA worth of people!).

To be clear, I’m saying higher density makes things harder. Especially as automation, even steam power, cuts demand for labor.

That’s my answer to @2rafa and others who are asking why the Brahmins haven’t built a shining city on a hill: there are already people there! And on the next hill, and the next. A billionaire can surely buy some of them out, but how many? How long before you get one of those desperate holdouts like in China?

Or to put it another way—Central Park sits at the heart of one of the most expensive cities on the planet. Some of the leading US firms look out over its greenery. It’s also open to the public. The latter completely dominates public perception, because one big apple spoils the bunch. If all the wealth and power of New York can’t overcome the noise floor, why should India have a solution?

That's my mistake. But I still don't see how density is a reasonable cause- there's the classic Japan example, swathes of China, Singapore (any city state).

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